e.

a

and hoarse, begged with voice and gestures that they would not suffocate him, the collecting of the poll-tickets began at a quarter to five. The first that was opened and read by the secretary bore the name of Cesare Corimbo, which was received with a murmur of disapproval. But the second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth were all for Leonforte, and provoked a round of applause. "Silence silence!" said the president. The eighth ticket was nothing, because the elector, either absent-minded or facetious, had voted for both candidates, confusing the names, Cesare Leonforte and Paolo Corimbo. Then another ticket for Corimbo, which was followed by another, the tenth, for Leonforte. And in these proportions they continued, seven or eight votes out of ten were for Leonforte. The contests, if any arose, always resulted to the disadvantage of the failing candidate. For Count Paolo they passed as valid tickets that were torn and almost illegible; they refused for Corimbo some that were evidently for him, and which lacked but a letter or the dot over an i or the loop of an Bortolo Dogna, the schoolmaster, weighed down the scale with his caligraphic authority. In the square curious crowd waited for news. Italo Merizzi was not there to excite them,Italo Merizzi had gone that afternoon to San Basilio; but the crowd, as usual, excited itself. The number of votes verified, stated by one or other of the electors who issued from the Communal house, was on all lips. Leonforte 95; Corimbo 26. Later on, Leonforte 147; Corimbo 39. Here loud acclamations and derisive laughter. By degrees the ferment increased. The numbers alone were announced without the names being given. There was no need: 203 and 54; 238 and 68; 281 and 96. It was like a lottery won by every one present. "Now Gigia also will get married," said Bortolo Schiavi the bell-ringer, nudging with his elbow an ugly and lame old woman. And the chance remark, spoken without conviction but also without irony, reflected to a certain degree the singular state of mind of a population which believed the Golden Age had arrived. The partisans of Corimbo, if there were any amongst the people gathered in the square. took good care not to throw a discordant note into the general joy; the carabineers. who had dismounted from their horses, walked about quietly between the groups, shedding benevolent smiles around them. After all, so long as there was no dis

turbance, what did Corimbo or Leonforte matter to them? They would have sent the whole Parliament to the devil if they could only have whispered two words in the ears of the pretty girls they ogled with their wicked eyes.

after the elections, is to be ascribed Corimbo's death, which follows soon greatly to his defeat and to all he suffered in consequence. His is a welldrawn character, and happily for Italy there have been many such, though they are nearly all gone now. Perhaps those men erred for want of perspicacity, were blind to the signs of the times and what those times required of them; but they were real patriots, who put principles before party, a thing too rarely seen since in the Italian Parliament, made up of too many Paolo Leonfortes. On his death-bed Corimbo reviews his whole political life for his niece's benefit, speaking with enthusiasm of the men of his own day. "Do things for money, those men! Ah no, no bad act for the sake of money then; but those were other times, those were epic times; a people cannot continue in that state, and when a period of calm and reflection supervenes, it is needful to change tactics. The means by which a nation shakes off the yoke which presses it are not the same with which it preserves itself and progresses." Meantime Leonforte passes from triumph to triumph; he has even the unexpected happiness that a son is born to him, an event which he promptly utilizes to further still more his ambitious ends. The christening is made the occasion of bringing over the Church to his side; he has already, thanks to his clever steering, conciliated the Radicals and the Moderates. The bishop is asked to perform the ceremony and to stay at the villa, which is filled with guests of high degree. For the occasion the whole interior is dressed with evergreens, the portraits of Victor Emmanuel, Humbert, and especially Garibaldi, being cleverly hidden beneath their foliage, thus conciliating both parties. manœuvre hides the obnoxious pictures from the priest, and the need of

This

Leonforte, coming to her side and patting her shoulder, "is the great motive power. I said it aloud in the Chamber. And they hung upon my lips, they of the Right, of the Left, of the Centre, as though they

heard the clink of coin and the rustle of

banknotes. There was a moment when I held them all in my hand. What a triumph was in preparation!"

This is their last conversation; an hour later he had left the house, bound whither he either knew not or would not tell, and Norina is left alone with her child, with a sufficient income forced on her, which she regards as unlawfully acquired, and with which she will deem it her duty to make all the reparation in her power. Thus ends this sad but able novel.

con

As readers must perceive, temporary Italian views of their own political men and methods, as depicted by their own writers, are neither hopeful nor noble, and furnish no worthy outcome of the efforts and sacrifices made but so recently on Italy's behalf by the men of a generation that has not even yet died. And already their traditions and aims seem dead! There appears to be a moral abyss between fathers and sons. Certainly neither the present situation nor the outlook is cheerful. We have purposely refrained from much comment, and have allowed the Italians to speak for themselves; the dark picture therefore proceeds from no foreign bias or misconception of men and events. Here is undoubtedly food for mournful consideration. Still, nations resemble individuals. Italy's successes were too sudden and vast, her head was turned, she grew conceited, and overestimated strength. She is now reaping the results of precipitation. With the consequent suffering has come reflection-these novels prove it-and reflection must ultimately reawaken her innate good sense, and she will return to the right path, so unfortunately abandoned. The present phase must be a passing one; so all Europe hopes and believes. The hour ere dawn is darkest. May this be Italy's pre-daylight moment.

her

From The Fortnightly Review. THE EMPRESS CATHARINE II. Except Joan of Arc, perhaps, no woman in modern history has attained true greatness. Yet there have been grandiose women, like Elizabeth and Maria Theresa, who, by their heroic temper or virile conduct of large policies, have won the kind of praise which Mirabeau in an extravagant moment bestowed on the daughter of Maria Theresa, when he wrote that the queen of France was the greatest man in the court of Louis XVI. Russia celebrates the centenary of the last of these women who have so imposed themselves on the imagination of Europe. Her story is romantic, her character of curious interest. In the Russia which she entered, in her own words, "a penniless girl," she was for a generation the "cynosure of nations," and the idol of the most renowned, if not the greatest intellects of her time. Tried, certainly, by the test of achievement so dear to history, "the Semiramis of the North," as Voltaire delighted to call her, deserved her title of "the Great." If her memory recalls more than one dark and infamous tragedy, she had but entered, as Machiavelli recommended, the school of her age. The line of Romanof awaits its Eschylus: Europe, which has seen her Borgias and her Baglionis, has not seen since the Claudian Cæsars a house so impiously stained with its own blood as that which gave autocrats to the Russias during the 17th and 18th centuries. How hard it is for the crimes about a throne to cover themselves with silence and the creeping forgetfulness of time!

I.

"MADAME LA RESSOURCE."

It is January, 1744, and the Commandant of Stettin, Prince of AnhaltZerbst zu Dornburg, is keeping New Year festivities at his castle of Zerbst, when suddenly couriers from Berlin, couriers from St. Petersburg. throw every one into wild commotion. For the Czarina Elizabeth, casting about for a wife for her nephew, the young Grand Duke Peter of Holstein, nomi

nated heir-presumptive to all the Russias, has accepted advice from Frederick, soon to become "the Great." She is formally desirous of a visit from the Princess of Zerbst and her daughter, Sophie-Frederika, now fifteen years of age, and already noticeable for her good looks and good sense. Not a moment is to be lost. So eastward, northward, the sleighs hurry them through the white leagues of snow, to arrive within six weeks at the Russian court, now established in Moscow. With little state or ceremony, nevertheless, for the princely house of Zerbst is poor as it is ancient, Sophie's wardrobe, she informs us her self, consists just of three, or it may be four dresses, with twelve chemises. For here begins that singular autobiography; an unauthenticated fragment, it is true, but a self-portraiture convincing as any in literature. At Moscow they made the best of impressions; the czarina was graciousness itself; and within eighteen months the young princess had been received into the Greek Church as Catharine, and married to the grand duke, himself only seventeen years old. But already she had learned not to expect happiness. He was, if we believe the accounts of him, senseless and boorish in the extreme. Certainly he did not pretend to the least affection for Catharine. A few days after her arrival, he had confided to her, "as his cousin," that he was "ardently in love with one of the maids of honor; since, however, the empress desired it, he had resigned him self, and was willing to marry her instead!" She was forced, according to her assertion, to listen to confidences of a like nature during many years. His puerilities and eccentricities, we are told, amounted almost to madness. He was fond of drilling dogs and tin soldiers, together with his disgusted suite. But, like every one else about the court, he lived in terror of the strong-willed, strong-drinking czarina. His kennel must be kept a secret, and was accordingly located in his wife's bedroom. He would spend hours indoors, cracking whips or emitting weird sounds on musical instruments.

At

night, after Madame Tchoglokof, who was charged with the surveillance of the grand ducal ménage, had retired, under the impression that she had locked every one up safely, he would call for lights again, like a schoolboy, and make Catharine and her attendants play with marionettes on the counterpane till one, two, three o'clock in the morning. He had been more or less drunk, to credit his enemies, since the age of ten; and Catharine declares he had a mortal aversion to the bath, which it seems was then a Russian, not a German observance. When ordered by the empress to take one as penance during Lent, he replied that it was repugnant to his moral nature and unsuited to his physical constitution, nothing, he said, but the most vital considerations could induce him to risk the empress's displeasure, but he was not prepared to die; and life was dearer to him than her Majesty's approbation. Both were obstinate, and the dispute led to the most terrific outburst of rage on the part of the czarina that Catharine had yet witnessed. On another occasion his wife discovered him presiding over a court-marshal in full regimentals, with a large rat in the centre of the room, which had just been suspended with all the formalities of a military execution. It appeared that the unfortunate beast had transgressed the laws of war; it had climbed the ramparts of a cardboard fortress, and had actually eaten two pith sentries on duty at the bastions. It was to be exposed to the public view as an example during three days following! Catharine, unluckily, was so lost to the fitness of things as to betray open merriment. The grand duke was furious; and she had to retire, excusing herself with difficulty on account of her ignorance of military discipline. The affair sensibly aggravated the estrangement between them.

Of Elizabeth, who led an eccentric life with her own peculiar intimates, Catharine knew little; but she was the victim of an unrelenting if petty tyranny, which kept jealous watch over every word and movement, deprived

her of any attendant of whom she made a friend, and dictated every minute circumstance of her life. It was like nothing so much as a dame-school, even to the various tutors and governesses ordered her by the czarina. When her father died, she was allowed a week's mourning; at the end of that time the empress sent a command to leave off, "she was a grand-duchess, and her father was not a king." But Catharine was not of the stuff from which are modelled the monuments of docility. Little by little, as her character develops, she acquires a proud and lonely self-dependence. She awakens to intellectual interests; from the first, indeed, she had flung herself with ardor into the study of Russian history and language. During these early years books are her great distraction; "dix-huit années d'ennui et de solitude," we read in an epitaph written by herself, "lui firent lire bien des livres." After a trial in the wilderness of third-rate contemporary fiction, Voltaire stirs her intellect. And he leads her, too, spell-bound by that incomparable verve and intellectual agility of his; she surrenders herself to the illusion of his brilliant assurance, dancing like some triumphant will-o'the-wisp over the obscure deeps and perplexities of taings. In a hundred ways, evil and good, she will remain the pupil of Voltaire. He has his part in her social test of philosophical speculations; he has his part also, be sure of it, in her long devotion to ideals of monarchy expressed for her in Henri Quatre and Louis Quatorze. After Voltaire and Mme. de Sévigné, Montesquieu, Baro nius, Tacitus, Bayle, Brantôme, and the early volumes of the "Encyclopædia." But her gay, expansive nature was not capable for long of purely intellectual or stoic consolation. In a moral environment such as that of Elizabeth's court it was too easy for the reader of Brantôme to seek elsewhere the "love" romances had spoken of but marriage had denied her. She was remarked by all in her day for her gift of fascination. To outward observers she seemed at this time a radiant and happy presence, as Burke saw Marie-Antoinette, the

morning star of a pleasure-loving society, "full of life, and splendor, and joy." She says that she never considered herself extremely beautiful, but "she was able to please, et cela était mon fort." All contemporary testimony bears out this singular faculty of attracting others, rarest of natural gifts, but to a woman such as Catharine a very perilous one. Not even those set to spy upon her could resist her personal magnetism. She could be beautiful o terrible, playful or majestic at pleasure. At St. Petersburg there were few wits, and her intellectual superiority to those about her was sufficient to gain her the nickname among her husband's friends of Madame la Ressource. Despite Peter's difficult relations with her, he would refer to her in most of his perplexities, especially when political, connected with his duchy of Holstein. "I don't understand things very well myself," he would explain to strangers, "but my wife understands everything." We observe in the autobiography a fixed idea to "gain over" as many people as possible, to attach them to her interests; partly because of the opposition to the czarina's circle, which gradually came to characterize the "Jeune Cour," but specially in the service of those vague, ambitious foreshadowings which from her first years in Russia had possessed her mind. Clear-sighted, with a keen sense of her husband's inadequacy to his position, warned by the implacable hostility of his mistress Elizabeth Vorontsof and her relations, above all with a passionate thirst to realize her presentiment of greatness, she was instinctively preparing for some emergency, she knew not exactly what. As for the more precise premonitions of the "Memoirs," they are what would naturally appear to her after the fait accompli. Ambition, calculation looking before and after, patience in adversity, quickness to note and use the weaknesses of those about her, a steady indifference to unessentials, a political intelligence unhampered by the keener sensibilities-these are the master traits of the Catharine of the autobiography.