"The conversations gave way to cheerful jokes and laughter; there was no time to be bored. Despite all the monotony of the path, boredom was banished by the presence of the kind empress... Sometimes in the evenings we amused ourselves with games, writing charades, riddles, poems for given rhymes (burime). Once Fitz Herbers suggested many subsequent rhymes: atoig, NoTse, tashBoig, po.
I wrote the following verses on them:
[fragment illegible in the scan of the first edition]
That is: “Catherine is the object of love of 20 peoples: Do not attack her: disaster will come to him who touches her.”
No. Its glory is a drummer, and its history is a memorial book." This trinket was liked and deserved more praise than any other ode. At court, and at that on the road, one can get away with anything.*"
In the cities through which they traveled, it was necessary to “make receptions and exits, inspect establishments, give advice and incentive awards”; The empire had little time left for rest (she was 58 years old). But the empress seemed to be tireless. “Even sitting in her carriage and leaving the worries of the government, she used her leisure time to entertain us, and was inexhaustibly smart, kind and cheerful.”
In Smolensk we had to rest longer than expected: everyone was tired, Mamonov was ill, and many of the eyes hurt from the wind blowing in their faces. Here, as everywhere else, there was a large crowd of people. Khrapovishay, in conversations with the empress, mentioned this; Catherine responded with a joke: “They gather to see bears in heaps.”
When everyone recovered, we set off again. A solemn meeting was held in Mstislav; the famous preacher, George of Konissky, who was already very old, greeted the empress with “youthful childish ruff,” for which he received a thousand rubles as a reward; he compared Catherine with the sun: "Let us leave it to the astronomers to judge whether the sun walks near us, or whether we and the earth revolve around it. Our sun walks near us. Come forth, wise monarch, like a groom departing from his palace, from the edge of the Baltic Sea to the edge of the Euxine Sea, your estate,
Yes, not a single one will take refuge in your beneficial warmth. Tetsy, oh, the sun is porridge, it’s too bad! Fathers with gigantic feet, to the west only your life hastened, otherwise we will cling to you and demand, like Joshua: stand still, sun, and do not move, until you conquer everything contrary to your intentions.”
Catherine wrote letters from the road to her son and daughter-in-law, to Potemkin in Crimea, to Grimm. In letters to Grimm, she wrote: "I arrived here (to Novgorod Sversyu) in good health and today I gave a ball here, just like in Smolensk: this is how we travel. Tomorrow I will dine on behalf of Field Marshal Rumyantsev... Iz Chernigova among other things wrote about foreign ambassadors: “My pocket ministers are cheerful and healthy.” Marie Fedorovna from Nezhin talked about the purchases: “They just brought me two pieces of a Circassian mother, which seemed very beautiful to me; I am sending the blue one with silver to you and your granddaughters, I hope that her bouquet is enough; the purple one with silver is to the Grand Duke and my grandchildren, and then all seven will receive new clothes for Easter, The toys bought in Nzhin5 cannot be found.”
U\MSH. IN KEV. “I arrived here on January 29, at 20° below zero,” pisa*
la Ekaterina Grimm from YuMeva, - despite the fact that there were no frostbitten noses or ears We spent
“all these days there were robes, celebrations, masquerades (it was Shrovetide), and today, on Monday, thank God, fasting began and put an end to all this noise.”