"Catherine II" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... (Indre) on the 7th of March 1730. He was only twenty-eight when he was appointed by Louis XV. ambassador to the elector of Cologne, and two years later he was sent to St Petersburg. He arranged to be temporarily absent from his post at the time of the palace revolution by which Catherine II. was placed on the throne. In 1769 he was sent to Stockholm, and subsequently represented his government at Vienna, Naples, and again at Vienna until 1783, when he was recalled to become minister of the king's household. In this capacity ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... The reign of Catherine II. fills one of the darkest pages of Russian history. This lustful and ambitious empress waded to the throne through her husband's blood—bloodshed was necessary to establish her rule; infamous cruelties characterised her whole reign, ...
— Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur Orton • Anonymous
... rise to the high standard of his verse, yet they are of no inconsiderable merit. "The Captain's Daughter, a Russian Romance," was written about 1831, and published under the nom de plume of Ivan Byelkin. It is a story of the times of Catherine II., and is not only told with interest and charm, but with great simplicity and reality, and with a due sense of drama. Others of his novels are "The Pistol Shot," "The Queen of Spades," and "The Undertaker," the last-named a grim story ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various
... politics, literature, nor anything modern ever penetrates there. The little house is such a squat one, such as one rarely sees nowadays; the very smell in it is antique; the people antique, the air antique...whatever you touch is antique, Catherine II. powder, crinolines, eighteenth century! And the host and hostess... imagine a husband and wife both very old, of the same age, without a wrinkle, chubby, round, neat little people, just like two poll-parrots; and kind to stupidity, to saintliness, there is no end ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... were about to be occupied by stronger and more expanded minds, whilst France was passing slowly from the hands of a more than octogenarian minister into those of a voluptuous monarch, governed by his courtiers and his favorites. Frederick II., Maria Theresa, Lord Chatham, Catherine II., were about to appear upon the scene; the French had none to oppose them but Cardinal Fleury with one foot in the grave, and, after him, King Louis XV. ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... finally to Cadiz, where he was locked in a fortress called la Carraca. There he died on July 14, 1816, his remains being thrown with the corpses of common criminals. Such was the end of the noble man who had been the guest of Catherine II of Russia, a soldier of Washington and a general of the French Republic. He spent his last days in a dungeon, chained to the wall like a dog. Venezuela has erected in the Pantheon of Caracas a beautiful ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... other countries. The Grand Duke of Russia, who had indeed been its rightful emperor ever since the murder of his father twenty years before, but who had been compelled to postpone his claims to those of his ambitious and unscrupulous mother, Catherine II., had conceived a desire so far to imitate the example of his great ancestor, the founder of the Russian empire, Peter the Great, as to make a personal investigation of the manners of other people besides his own. To use the ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... the deposing of Peter III., and the accession of Catherine II. produced peace. On the receipt of this intelligence I tried to provide for all contingencies. The worthy Captain K—- had opened me a correspondence with Vienna: I was assured of support; but was assured ...
— The Life and Adventures of Baron Trenck - Vol. 2 (of 2) • Baron Trenck
... for Christianity, during the last century. For it is worthy of notice that nowhere is religion so much publicly talked about, as in the place where least of it remains, among the higher classes in St. Petersburgh. Religion there is inter instrumenta regni. When Catherine II. permitted her husband Peter III. to be imprisoned, in order to rob him of his throne and life, the cause of this was communicated to the Russian people on July 9, 1762, as follows:—'First of all, the foundation of your orthodox Greek religion has been shaken and its principles ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 238, May 20, 1854 • Various
... national sympathy with the Prince of Wales's illness: "We are represented as all members of the royal family, and all in family hysterics." Dizzy's orientalization of Queen Victoria into an Empress angered him, as it angered many more. The last Empress Regnant, he said, was Catherine II. and it seems to be thought that by advising the Queen to take that great monarch's title, we shall exercise a wholesome influence on the morals of our women. He would ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... demand emancipation, not to beg for it, this attitude lends a charm of its own to Orshanski's writings. His brilliant analysis of "Russian Legislation concerning the Jews" [2] offers a complete anatomy of Jewish disfranchisement in Russia, beginning with Catherine II. and ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow |
