While passing through Courland (now in Latvia), Sophia watched the giant comet of 1744 blaze across the dark night sky. “I had never seen anything so grand,” she wrote in her Memoirs. “It seemed very close to earth.” During one part of the journey, she made herself sick. “In these last days I had a little indigestion because I had drunk all the beer I could find,” she wrote her father. “Dear mama has put a stop to that and I am well again.”
