But when the Empress Elizabeth asked the Princess Sophia of Anhalt-Zerbst to marry the heir to the Russian throne the young girl willingly accepted, the more so as her mother practically commanded it.  This mother of hers was a grim, harsh German woman who had reared her daughter in the strictest fashion, depriving her of all pleasure with a truly puritanical severity.  In the case of a different sort of girl this training would have crushed her spirit; but the Princess Sophia, though gentle and refined in manner, had a power of endurance which was toughened and strengthened by the discipline she underwent.

And so in 1744, when she was but sixteen years of age, she was taken by her mother to St. Petersburg.  There she renounced the Lutheran faith and was received into the Greek Church, changing her name to Catharine.  Soon after, with great magnificence, she was married to Prince Peter, and from that moment began a career which was to make her the most powerful woman in the world.

At this time a lady of the Russian court wrote down a description of Catharine’s appearance.  She was fair-haired, with dark-blue eyes; and her face, though never beautiful, was made piquant and striking by the fact that her brows were very dark in contrast with her golden hair.  Her complexion was not clear, yet her look was a very pleasing one.  She had a certain diffidence of manner at first; but later she bore herself with such instinctive dignity as to make her seem majestic, though in fact she was beneath the middle size.  At the time of her marriage her figure was slight and graceful; only in after years did she become stout.  Altogether, she came to St. Petersburg an attractive, pure-minded German maiden, with a character well disciplined, and possessing reserves of power which had not yet been drawn upon.

Frederick the Great’s forebodings, which had led him to withhold his sister’s hand, were almost immediately justified in the case of Catharine.  Her Russian husband revealed to her a mode of life which must have tried her very soul.  This youth was only seventeen—­a mere boy in age, and yet a full-grown man in the rank luxuriance of his vices.  Moreover, he had eccentricities which sometimes verged upon insanity.  Too young to be admitted to the councils of his imperial aunt, he occupied his time in ways that were either ridiculous or vile.

Next to the sleeping-room of his wife he kept a set of kennels, with a number of dogs, which he spent hours in drilling as if they had been soldiers.  He had a troop of rats which he also drilled.  It was his delight to summon a court martial of his dogs to try the rats for various military offenses, and then to have the culprits executed, leaving their bleeding carcasses upon the floor.  At any hour of the day or night Catharine, hidden in her chamber, could hear the yapping of the curs, the squeak of rats, and the word of command given by her half-idiot husband.