Catherine was not jealous of these young women because they were sleeping with Potemkin. What she envied them was their youth. Her own youth had been wasted. She had been sixteen when she married a wretched boy. She was a mature woman of twenty-five before she had her first sexual encounter, and this was with a heartless rake. Now approaching fifty, she still saw in Potemkin’s nieces the ardent young girl she could have been. She hated growing old. Her birthday, so publicly celebrated, was for her a day of mourning. In a letter to Grimm, she wrote, “Would it not be charming if an empress could
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