When wearied of this diversion Peter would summon a troop of favorites, both men and women, and with them he would drink deep of beer and vodka, since from his early childhood he had been both a drunkard and a debauchee.  The whoops and howls and vile songs of his creatures could be heard by Catharine; and sometimes he would stagger into her rooms, accompanied by his drunken minions.  With a sort of psychopathic perversity he would insist on giving Catharine the most minute and repulsive narratives of his amours, until she shrank from him with horror at his depravity and came to loathe the sight of his bloated face, with its little, twinkling, porcine eyes, his upturned nose and distended nostrils, and his loose-hung, lascivious mouth.  She was scarcely less repelled when a wholly different mood would seize upon him and he would declare himself her slave, attending her at court functions in the garb of a servant and professing an unbounded devotion for his bride.

Catharine’s early training and her womanly nature led her for a long time to submit to the caprices of her husband.  In his saner moments she would plead with him and strive to interest him in something better than his dogs and rats and venal mistresses; but Peter was incorrigible.  Though he had moments of sense and even of good feeling, these never lasted, and after them he would plunge headlong into the most frantic excesses that his half-crazed imagination could devise.

It is not strange that in course of time Catharine’s strong good sense showed her that she could do nothing with this creature.  She therefore gradually became estranged from him and set herself to the task of doing those things which Peter was incapable of carrying out.

She saw that ever since the first awakening of Russia under Peter the Great none of its rulers had been genuinely Russian, but had tried to force upon the Russian people various forms of western civilization which were alien to the national spirit.  Peter the Great had striven to make his people Dutch.  Elizabeth had tried to make them French.  Catharine, with a sure instinct, resolved that they should remain Russian, borrowing what they needed from other peoples, but stirred always by the Slavic spirit and swayed by a patriotism that was their own.  To this end she set herself to become Russian.  She acquired the Russian language patiently and accurately.  She adopted the Russian costume, appearing, except on state occasions, in a simple gown of green, covering her fair hair, however, with a cap powdered with diamonds.  Furthermore, she made friends of such native Russians as were gifted with talent, winning their favor, and, through them, the favor of the common people.

It would have been strange, however, had Catharine, the woman, escaped the tainting influences that surrounded her on every side.  The infidelities of Peter gradually made her feel that she owed him nothing as his wife.  Among the nobles there were men whose force of character and of mind attracted her inevitably.  Chastity was a thing of which the average Russian had no conception; and therefore it is not strange that Catharine, with her intense and sensitive nature, should have turned to some of these for the love which she had sought in vain from the half imbecile to whom she had been married.