CHAPTER I
A COMEDY QUEEN
"It was to a noise like thunder, and close clasped in a soldier's embrace, that Catherine I. made her first appearance in Russian history."
History, indeed, contains few chapters more strange, more seemingly impossible, than this which tells the story of the maid-of-all-work—the red-armed, illiterate peasant-girl who, without any dower of beauty or charm, won the idolatry of an Emperor and succeeded him on the...
more...