“Field marshal, it was you, then, who wanted to fight me?”

“Yes, madam,” Munich answered, in a manly tone; “could I do less for the prince who delivered me from captivity?  But it is henceforth my duty to fight for you, and you will find in me a fidelity equal to that with which I had devoted my services to him."[19]

[Footnote 19:  Marshal Munich was eighty-two years of age.  Elizabeth had sent him to Siberian exile.  Peter liberated him.  Upon his return to Moscow, after twenty years of exile, he found one son living, and twenty-two grandchildren and great grandchildren whom he had never seen.  When the heroic old man presented himself before the tzar dressed in the sheep-skin coat he had worn in Siberia, Peter said,

“I hope, notwithstanding your age, you may still serve me.”

Munich replied, “Since your majesty has brought me from darkness to light, and called me from the depths of a cavern, to admit me to the foot of the throne, you will find me ever ready to expose my life in your service.  Neither a tedious exile nor the severity of a Siberian climate have been able to extinguish, or even to damp, the ardor I have formerly shown for the interests of Russia and the glory of its monarch.”]

In the afternoon, the empress returned to St. Petersburg.  She entered the city on horseback, accompanied by a brilliant retinue of nobles, and followed by her large army of fifteen thousand troops.  All the soldiers wore garlands of oak leaves.  The immense crowds in the city formed lines for the passage of the empress, scattered flowers in her path, and greeted her with constant bursts of acclaim.  All the streets through which she passed were garlanded and spanned with triumphal arches, the bells rang their merriest peals, and military salutes bellowed from all the ramparts.  As the high ecclesiastics crowded to meet her, they kissed her hand, while she, in accordance with Russian courtesy, kissed their cheeks.

Catharine summoned the senate, and presided over its deliberations with wonderful dignity and grace.  The foreign ministers, confident in the stability of her reign, hastened to present their congratulations.  Peter found even a few hours in the solitude of the palace of Ropscha exceedingly oppressive; he accordingly sent to the empress, soliciting the presence of a negro servant to whom he was much attached, and asking also for his dog, his violin, a Bible and a few novels.

“I am disgusted,” he wrote, “with the wickedness of mankind, and am resolved henceforth to devote myself to a philosophical life.”