It was a jovial and brilliant evening, and, in dismissing her friends,
Elizabeth promised them many repetitions of it.
And she kept her word. Frenzied merry-makings, pleasures and festivals
of the roughest sorts were now the principal occupation of the new
empress. The amusement of her court, the providing it with new festivals
and pleasures, she considered as the first and most important of her
imperial duties; and these alone she endeavored to fulfil.
But who composed her court, and of what elements did it consist?
Elizabeth found the presence of her serious official councillors very
tiresome, as they knew not how to make themselves agreeable; she found
the surrounding of herself with the respectable ladies of her court to
be very incommodious, as there might some day be found among them one
with a handsomer or more tasteful toilet than herself, or, indeed, one
who might dare to be of a finer type of beauty than she! She therefore
gladly avoided inviting the distinguished men of her court with
their wives, or the higher class of state officials. It was far more
convenient, far more agreeable, to surround herself with frivolous and
handsome young men. They knew how to laugh and be cheerful, and she was
thus sure that no other lady would be there to dispute with her the palm
of beauty.
Elizabeth was not proud. She cared not whether noble blood flowed in the
veins of those who were invited to her festivals. The youth, beauty, and
agreeable qualities which the empress found in any person, alone decided
the question of their admittance to the court.
Peasants, grooms, soldiers, servants, abandoned reprobates, who by their
beauty had won the favor of the empress, were seen to attain to the
highest stations.
On them were lavished the treasures of the state; they were adorned with
orders and titles, and the magnates bowed to the ground before these
potent favorites of the all-powerful empress, and the people shouted
with transport when their beloved czarina, with her magnificent train
of newly-created noblemen, made her appearance in the streets, and with
gracious smiles returned the humble salutations of her kneeling slaves.
That was the ruler in perfect accordance with Russian ideas; they
sympathized with her inclinations and pleasures--she was blood of their
blood and flesh of their flesh! The strangers were at length banished,
and a real Russian sat upon the throne of the czars!
And yet Elizabeth trembled upon her imperial throne, surrounded by the
band of magnates and nobles of whom she could truly say, "I am their
creator--they are my work!" She trembled before those secret daggers,
those lingering poisons, which always surround the imperial Russian
throne as its truest satellites, and lay low many a high-born head; she
trembled before Anna Leopoldowna, who was sighing away her days in the
closed citadel of Riga, and before Anna's son, the infant Ivan, whom the
Empress Anna in her testament had named as Emperor of all the Russias!
She, indeed, would not work and trouble herself for her country and
her people, this good empress by the grace of God, but yet she would
be empress, that she might be enabled to enjoy life, and no cloud must
obscure the heaven of her earthly glory!