On June 20, 1st we arrived in Tula for lunch. “On the way to Moscow,” says Segur, “we didn’t come across anything more wonderful than the city of Tula, which could be considered one of Catherine’s creations, that’s how she decorated it. Most of the wooden houses have already given way to a hundred stone buildings.
"Tula has long been famous for the production of weapons, with which it supplies the entire Russian army. Steel things are also produced here, and this branch of industry, with the encouragement of the Empress, has been brought to such a degree of perfection that it can easily compete with English factories. She distributed to us the products of Tula factories, very skillfully issued."
“The rest of the way,” says de Ligne, “seemed like a short walk to us... All our carriages were onbits with peaches and oranges; The servants are drunk on champagne, and, - observe the venerable gastronomer, - I’m dying of hunger, because the empress’s food is very tasteless, consists of only cold dishes, and besides, she is always very hasty in getting out of it, and sits down so slowly for it that everything gets cold.”
[fragment illegible in the scan of the first edition]
"For two months already," the Marquis K. de Ligne wrote in Paris, "how I have been wasting money in vain; this has happened to me before, but in a completely different way. Perhaps I have already spent whole millions... Beside me in the carriages lies a large green bag filled with gold imperials. All the inhabitants of the neighboring villages, and even the rest of the versts, 10, 15 and 20, in order to see the Empress, gather at our passage, and a quarter of an hour or more before she passes them, they fall on their faces and rise no earlier than a quarter of an hour after our departure, and I shower the prostrate host with gold, which sometimes happens to me ten a day."