Terrible tsarinas

«218»

Another Catherine! had been announced, Alexis Bestuzhev was exiled - not to Siberia, but to his own lands, where he would not want for anything.

The principal winner at the end of this legal struggle was Mikhail Vorontsov, who was offered the title of chancellor, replacing the disgraced Bestuzhev. Behind his back, the duke of Choiseul, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in France, savored his personal success. He knew that Vorontsov’s Francophile tendencies would lead him quite naturally to win over Catherine, and probably even Elizabeth, to side with Louis XV.

With regard to Catherine, he was not mistaken: anything that went against the tastes of her husband seemed salutary to her; with Elizabeth, things were less clear. She sought savagely to keep her free will, to obey only her own instinct. Moreover, the early military successes bolstered her hopes. Showing more resolve than Apraxin, General Fermor seized Konigsberg, besieged Kustrin, and was making progress in Pomerania. However, he was stopped outside of Zorndorf, in a battle that was so indecisive that both camps proclaimed victory. Certainly, the French victory in Crefeld, on the Rhine, by the count of Clermont, briefly dampened the Empress’s optimism. But experience had taught her that this kind of risk is inevitable in war and that it would be disastrous for Russia to lay down its weapons at the first sign of failure. Suspecting her allies of being less adamant than she in their bellicose intentions, she even declared to the ambassador of Austria, Count Esterhazy, that she would fight until the end, even if she had to “sell all her diamonds and half her dresses.”

According to the reports that Elizabeth received from the theater of operations, this patriotic disposition was shared by all the soldiers, of high rank or low. In the palaces, on the other hand, opinions were less certain. It was considered proper, in some Russian circles associated with the embassies, to show a certain independence of mind in this respect; this was considered