Soon after Catharine’s arrival, the grand duke was taken with the small-pox, and his natural ugliness was rendered still more revolting by the disfigurement it caused.  On the 10th of February, 1745, when Catharine had been one year at Moscow, the grand duke celebrated his seventeenth birthday.  In her journal Catharine writes that Peter seldom saw her, and was always glad of any excuse by which he could avoid paying her any attention.  Though Catharine cared as little for him, still, with girlish ambition, she was eager to marry him, as she very frankly records, in consideration of the crown which he would place upon her brow, and her womanly nature was stung by his neglect.

“I fully perceived,” she writes, “his want of interest, and how little I was cared for.  My self-esteem and vanity grieved in silence; but I was too proud to complain.  I should have thought myself degraded had any one shown me a friendship which I could have taken for pity.  Nevertheless I shed tears when alone, then quietly dried them up, and went to romp with my maids.

“I labored, however,” writes Catharine, “to gain the affection of every one.  Great or small I neglected no one, but laid it down to myself as a rule to believe that I stood in need of every one, and so to act, in consequence, as to obtain the good will of all, and I succeeded in doing so.”

The 21st of August of this year was fixed for the nuptial day.  Catharine looked forward to it with extreme repugnance.  Peter was revolting in his aspect, disgusting in manners, a drunkard, and licentious to such a degree that he took no pains to conceal his amours.  But the crown of Russia was in the eyes of Catharine so glittering a prize, though then she had not entered her sixteenth year, that she was willing to purchase it even at the price of marrying Peter, the only price at which it could be obtained.  She was fully persuaded that Peter, with a feeble constitution and wallowing in debauchery, could not live long, and that, at his death, she would be undisputed empress.

“As the day of our nuptials approached,” she writes, “I became more and more melancholy.  My heart predicted but little happiness; ambition alone sustained me.  In my inmost soul there was something which led me never to doubt, for a single moment, that sooner or later I should become sovereign empress of Russia in my own right.”

The marriage was celebrated with much pomp; but a more cold and heartless union was perhaps never solemnized.  Catharine very distinctly intimates that her husband, who was as low in his tastes and companionship as he was degraded in his vices, left her at the altar, to return to his more congenial harem.

“My beloved spouse,” she writes, “did not trouble himself in the slightest degree about me; but was constantly with his valets, playing at soldiers, exercising them in his room, or changing his uniform twenty times a day.  I yawned and grew weary, having no one to speak to.”