most eligible suitors in Europe for a sharer of her throne; for there
were many who would gladly have played consort to the good-looking
autocrat of Russia.

Such a husband, especially if he were a strong man, might seriously
imperil the Chancellor's position; might even dispense with him
altogether. On the other hand, he was high in the favour of the
shepherd's son, who had such a contempt for power, and who thus would be
a puppet in his hands. Why not make him husband in name as well as in
fact? It was, after all, an easy task the Chancellor thus set himself.
Elizabeth was by no means unwilling to wear a wedding-ring for the man
who had loved her so loyally and so long; and any difficulties she might
raise were quickly disposed of by her father-confessor, who was
Bestyouzhev's tool. Thus it came to pass that one day Elizabeth and
Alexis stood side by side before the village altar of Perovo; and the
words were spoken which made the shepherd's son husband of the Empress.
The secrecy with which the ceremony was performed was but a fiction. All
the world knew that Alexis Gregorovitch was Emperor by right of wedlock,
and flocked to pay homage to him in his new and exalted character.

He now had sumptuous apartments next to those of his wife; he sat at her
right hand on all State occasions; he was her shadow everywhere; and
during his frequent attacks of gout the Empress ministered to him night
and day in his own rooms with the tender devotion of a mother to a
child. Two children were born to them, a son and a daughter, the latter
of whom, after a life of strange romance and vicissitude, ended her
days in a loathsome dungeon of the fortress of Saints Peter and Paul,
the victim of Catherine II.'s vengeance--miserably drowned, so one story
goes, by an inundation of her cell.