Terrible tsarinas

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Another Catherine! remedy. Moreover, she was becoming prone to hemorrhages and crises of hysteria, which left her dazed for hours. Now, she would receive her ministers sitting up in bed, her hair capped with a lace bonnet. Sometimes, to cheer herself up, she would call in the mimes from an Italian troupe that she had invited to St. Petersburg; she would watch their pranks and think back to the time when such buffoons us ed to make her laugh.

As soon as she felt a little more puckish, she asked to have some of her most beautiful dresses brought in and, after pondering a bit, chose one; at the risk of splitting the seams, she had her chambermaids dress her, entrusted her coiffure to the hairdresser with instructions to give her the latest Parisian fashion, and announced her intention to appear at the next court ball. Then, planted in front of a mirror, she lost heart at the sight of her wrinkles, her sagging eyelids, her triple chin and the blotches on her cheeks; she had herself undressed, went back to bed, and resigned herself to ending her life in solitude, lethargy and memories.

Greeting the rare courtiers who came to visit her, she read in their eyes a suspicious curiosity, the cold impatience of the lookout on a watchtower. They may have had an affectionate look on their faces, but they weren’t coming to wish her well - they wanted to see how long she had left to live. Only Alexis Razumovsky seemed to really care. But what was he thinking about, as he looked at her? Of the loving and demanding woman whom he had held so often in his arms, or of the corpse that he would soon be strewing with flowers?

To the disastrous obsession with death, Elizabeth soon added a fear of fire. The old Winter Palace where the tsarina had lived in St. Petersburg since the beginning of her reign was an immense wooden construction that, at the least spark, would go up like a torch. If fire broke out in some recess of her apartments, she would lose all her furniture, all her holy images, all her dresses.