It could well be, however, that, looking at it from his far-off Ferney, Voltaire may have believed Catherine’s tales a la Miinchhausen, to wit, that there was no villager in Russia who would not eat chicken meat, which he would prefer to that of turkey. Catherine deemed it superfluous to invite Voltaire to see for himself the veracity of her intimations to him, all the more so as she had already had the experience of communicating with another observant French philosophe. This was Denis Diderot. The latter, on arriving at St. Petersburg in 1775, showed himself to be a rhapsodic, garrulous, and credulous man. The empress sensed her superiority over … Continue reading Екатерина II (Catherine the Great)