Life
Ekaterina was born at Tsarskoye Selo. She had a happy childhood and her education was carefully supervised by her mother. She received the best education and constantly furthered her education through reading new literary publications and personal contacts with various outstanding persons. She was very close to her siblings particularly with her eldest brother Tsar Alexander I. Throughout her life she would maintain a close relationship with him. It was said that she was Alexander's favorite sister and one of the few persons he loved unconditionally. His letters to her are expressed in phrases like "I am yours, heart and soul, for life", "I think that I love you more with each day that passes", and "to love you more than I do is impossible". Ekaterina was reportedly also her mother's favorite daughter.
After Napoléon I's divorce from Empress Joséphine during the course of the Napoleonic Wars, the French Emperor hinted to Alexander I his wish to marry Ekaterina - a desire mainly to draw the Russians to his side. These plans had actually been hinted as early as 1808, in Erfurt, on suggestion by Talleyrand. Ekaterina's family was horrified, and so the Dowager Empress immediately arranged a marriage for her daughter to Duke George of Oldenburg.
Read more about this topic: Catherine Pavlovna Of Russia
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“... when you make it a moral necessity for the young to dabble in all the subjects that the books on the top shelf are written about, you kill two very large birds with one stone: you satisfy precious curiosities, and you make them believe that they know as much about life as people who really know something. If college boys are solemnly advised to listen to lectures on prostitution, they will listen; and who is to blame if some time, in a less moral moment, they profit by their information?”
—Katharine Fullerton Gerould (1879–1944)
“There is no calm philosophy of life here, such as you might put at the end of the Almanac, to hang over the farmer’s hearth,—how men shall live in these winter, in these summer days. No philosophy, properly speaking, of love, or friendship, or religion, or politics, or education, or nature, or spirit; perhaps a nearer approach to a philosophy of kingship, and of the place of the literary man, than of anything else.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)