The Coronation gown, which cost four thousand roubles, was made at Paris; and from Paris, too, came the gorgeous coach with its blaze of gold and heraldry, in which the Tsarina made her triumphal progress through the streets of the capital from the Winter Palace.

She was, in fact, the child of Elizabeth, Tsarina of Russia, and her peasant husband, Razoum; and in proof of her exalted birth she actually had in her possession the will in which the late Empress bequeathed to her the throne of Russia.

As for the Princess, she accepted her new dignities with the complaisance to be expected from the daughter of a Tsarina.

A few days later a hackney coach drove up to the palace doors; the unhappy Tsarina was bundled unceremoniously into it, and she was carried away to the nunnery of the "Intercession of the Blessed Virgin," whose doors were closed on her for a score of years.

Pitiful years they were for the young Empress, consigned by her husband to a life that was worse than deathrobbed of her rank, her splendours, and luxuries, her very nameshe was now only Helen, the nun, faring worse than the meanest of her sister-nuns; for while they at least had plenty to eat, the Tsarina seems many a time to have known the pangs of hunger.

The evidence of the nuns and servants aloneevidence of frequent and long meetings by day and night, of embraces exchangedwas sufficiently conclusive, without the incriminating letters which were discovered in the Major's bureau, labelled "Letters from the Tsarina," or Eudoxia's confession which was extorted from her.

Such was Mary's infatuation for the worthless Count that, under his influence, she stooped to various kinds of crime, from stealing the Tsarina's jewels to fill her lover's purse, to infanticide.