FORE:Peter of Holstein-Gottorp was seventeen; and [127] was no attractive husband for a young girl with an impetuous nature, strong passions, and an enthusiastic love of pleasure and magnificence. He was sullen, tyrannical, violent-tempered, brutal, often intoxicated, and besides terribly disfigured by the small-pox.The poet Le Brun-Pindare, dressed in a long purple cloak, represented Anacreon. The other guests were M. and Mme. Vige, her brother, M. de Rivire, Mme. Chalgrin, daughter of Joseph and sister of Charles Vernet, Mme. de Bonneuil and her pretty child, afterwards Mme. Regnault de Saint-Jean dAngely, the Marquis de Cubires, the Comte de Vaudreuil, M. Boutin, M. Gingun, and the famous sculptor Chaudet.
THREE:Eh! Mon Dieu! Yes, it is I who have to decide this important affair. It is an old custom established there in barbarous times. It is astonishing that, in a century so enlightened as ours, they should not have done away with a folly that gives me a journey of ten or twelve leagues every summer, through abominable cross-lanes, for I have to make two journeys for that absurdity.
THREE:The hot weather she used to spend at some house [137] she took or had lent to her in the country near St. Petersburg.