Word: empresse
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...exiled Russian princess, supposedly shot in the Revolution, who suddenly appears in Berlin nine years later. Discovered on the brink of suicide by a White Russian general, Anastasia at first refuses to admit her identity, then suddenly decides to fight for recognition from her grandmother, the Dowager Empress...
Susceptible Skin. In the 16 years of waiting for the aging Empress Elizabeth to die. Catherine had ample time for self-study. Isolated by sycophants and informers, the young Duchess had no friends to turn to in the Russian court, which, for all its Frenchified airs, was a bear pit of intrigue and malevolence. "One could lay a wager that half the court could hardly read, and I would be surprised if more than a third could write," noted Catherine, who was soon wading through the classics of courtcraft (Tacitus, Plutarch, Montesquieu) and such French philosophers as Voltaire...
...first to concede her womanly charms, admitted - in a passage expurgated from the 1907 Russian edition - that these were "the halfway house to temptation." But she intimates strongly that Peter never consummated their marriage, and that her first affairs during the years of waiting were instigated, apparently by the Empress, to perpetuate the dynasty...
...first lover. Courtier Serge Saltikov, was "handsome as the dawn; there was no one to compete with him in that." But as soon as the required heir, the future Tsar Paul II, was born, Saltikov was snatched away by Empress Elizabeth and discreetly dispatched to Sweden...
...Memoirs come to an end before Catherine's years of waiting. Thus, she does not defend herself against history's presumption that she was responsible for Peter's murder, ten days after the army made Catherine Empress of Russia. The narrative is nevertheless a disarmingly intimate conversation, across cultures and continents, by a woman of sense and sensibility who lived more than 50 years in Russia in the awareness that "fundamentally no Russian really likes a foreigner...