Lovers were vouchsafed her, of a kind (her small stars, as we may call them); and, at length, through perilous intricacies, the big star, Autocracy of All the Russias,--through what horrors of intricacy, that last! She had hoped always it would be by Husband Peter that she, with the deeper steady head, would be Autocrat: but the intricacies kept increasing, grew at last to the strangling pitch; and it came to be, between Peter and her, 'Either you to Siberia (perhaps FARTHER), or else I!' And it was Peter that had to go;--in what hideous way is well enough known; no Siberia, no Holstein thought to be far enough for Peter:--and Catharine, merely weeping a little for him, mounted to the Autocracy herself.

And then, the big star of stars being once hers, she had, not in the lover kind alone, but in all uncelestial kinds, whole nebulae and milky-ways of small stars.

A very Semiramis, the Louis-Quatorze of those Northern Parts.

'Second Creatress of Russia,' second Peter the Great in a sense.

To me none of the loveliest objects; yet there are uglier, how infinitely uglier: object grandiose, if not great."-- We return to Friedrich and the Death of Catin.
Colonel Hordt, I believe, was the first who credibly apprised Friedrich of the great Russian Event.