Another medal was also struck in honor of Potemkin, with his profile and a map of the provinces he established. Moreover, Potemkin received 100 thousand rubles. awards, and the name of Tauride. Bezborodko received a house in Moscow that previously belonged to Bestuzhev; Many awards were also given to other persons who contributed to the success of the grand enterprise.
In a letter written hastily to Potemkin,
Segur promised, upon returning to France, to tell there about everything that he saw on the trip: “I will describe with delight all the wonderful pictures that you presented to our eyes; the merchants lured to Kherson, despite envy and the swamps; the fleet, built in just 2 years by some miracle in Sevastopol, your Bakhchisarai, reminiscent of 1001 nights, your Tempey valley (Baydar); your celebrations, almost fabulous, in Karasubazar; your Ekaterinoslav, where you collected more monuments in 9 years than other capitals in 3 centuries; escaprons (maneuvers), to the critics with whom ignorance and envy slandered our administration and the experience of your army. If they don’t believe me, it’s your fault: why did you create so many miracles in such a short time, and were not proud of them in front of everyone, until they suddenly showed them all to us...”
Prince de Ligne, still from Tula, wrote to Paris to the Marquis K. about his travel impressions, and in a playful form expressed several bitter truths for the Russian Empress: “I know,” he wrote, “that to believe travelers, courtiers, and also everything good that is told about Rosby is now out of fashion; that those very Russians who did not manage to travel with us will to assume that they are deceiving us, and we are being deceived. They have already managed to weave a fable that they put cardboard houses, guns and ships painted on paper on our roads, but no cavalry.
“Horses, and similar nonsense.” But then he himself continues: “Now I have learned what skillful deceptions mean: for example, the empress, not being able to get out of the carriage and see everything the way we do, must believe that some of the cities to which she gave significant sums to build are already completely finished; meanwhile, we often found these same cities without streets, streets without houses, houses without roofs, windows and doors. The empresses were shown only stone rows, beautifully built, one colonnades of the governor's chambers, of which she gave many a silver service, a hundred cutlery.
“Isn’t it true,” the Empress said to me, pointing to the fields cultivated no worse than those in England, and to the almost same crowd of people in the provinces of Kharkov and Kursk, “isn’t it true that the Abbot de Chappie, who saw nothing through the windows of his carriage frozen from the cold, unfairly said that there is only one steppe in Russia. I don’t argue that, maybe, “Some landowners, using their power for evil (which, incidentally, happens everywhere), sometimes cruelly turned a cry of joy into a cry of poverty. However, as soon as the governor accuses such landowners, they are severely punished, and indeed the cheers that were heard everywhere, wherever we profzed, were exclaimed with cheerful faces and from a pure heart.” But the reality was different.
In those places where the empress walked, rich decorations, specially built for her, fell immediately after her passage. Construction of co-
The forest laid in Ekaterinoslav was stopped, and the huge foundation, which cost 70 thousand rubles, turned into a fence for a small, really built church. The palaces built everywhere for the prime empress and her brilliant retinue disappeared. Dr. Weikart, who retired from this retinue back in Kherson, wrote from there: "After the Empress left for Tauris, we were left like sheep without a shepherd, or like orphans without a father and without a mother. There is nothing to eat, nothing to drink, nothing to buy, and we don’t know who to ask about it."
The journey, which resembled a brilliant fairy tale of 1001 nights, had not yet ended, as it had already begun to awaken from sweet dreams, from an intoxicating dream; sober and sad action