Word: empress
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...When Empress Catherine II of Russia ordered a set of cream-colored Queen's Ware like the one that Josiah Wedgwood had made for Queen Charlotte (cost: £52), he wanted her to have something better. So he had the 952-piece set decorated with 1,244 hand-painted views of English landscapes (cost...
...himself - or herself - an extraordinary person. Dressed as a beautiful woman, he won the confidence of Russia's Empress Catherine in 1755 and was instrumental in forging an alliance between France and Russia. Dressed as a man, he won the friendship of England's King George III and sent him back useful information to Paris. To and this no one certain whether he is indeed male or female, but Louis XVI has promised to let him return to France if he henceforth sticks to the nonpolitical role of a woman...
When the British first began searching for mercenary forces to put down the American Rebellion, they turned not to the German princelings of Hesse and Brunswick but to mighty Empress Catherine II of Russia. They even made a formal offer of £1 per man for 20,000 of her infantrymen, to set sail this spring. Catherine rejected the plan as "undignified." Besides, said she, "I am just beginning to enjoy peace...
...absolute mistress of everything from Kiev to Kamchatka has found a new specimen of what the Russians call a vremenshchik (man of the moment). He is Pyotr Zavadovsky, 37, her private secretary, who has moved into the traditional consort's suite just below the Empress's own chambers (and connected to them by a green-carpeted circular stairway). Where does that leave His Serene Highness General Grigori Alexandrovich Potemkin, 36, Prince of the Holy Roman Empire, Count of the Russian Empire, recipient of Prussia's Black Eagle decoration, Denmark's White Elephant and Sweden's Holy Seraphim? It apparently leaves...
...last scene, the "consummation of love", according to program notes, brings together a rabble of Hell's Angels on bikes (had Tomaszewski seen "Easy Rider?") with the empress's ladies--and gentlemen-in-waiting. A robot sputters on stage: can a machine be even more black than the preceding parade of frenetic suitors? At the end Phylissa stares with one eye down an inverted clarion; with the other becoming a wild, monstrous orb she eclipses the entire stage. The stage blacks out. The image of that disembodied eye stays with you, as does the memory of men cut from themselves...