Читать книгу Peter and Alexis. The Romance of Peter the Great онлайн

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Peter Tolstoi, yielding to the entreaties of the ladies, declaimed some verses dedicated to Cupid, taken from Anacreon’s ancient hymn to Eros.

Cupid once upon a bed

Of roses laid his weary head;

Luckless archer, not to see

Within the leaves a slumbering bee!

The bee awak’d—with anger wild

The bee awak’d, and stung the child.

Loud and piteous are his cries;

To Venus quick he runs, he flies!

“Oh, mother!—I am wounded though—

I die with pain—in sooth I do,

Stung by some little angry thing,

Some serpent on a tiny wing—

A bee it was—for once I know

I heard a rustic call it so.”

Thus he spoke, and she the while

Heard him with a soothing smile;

Then said, “My infant, if so much

Thou feel the little wild bee’s touch,

How must the heart, ah Cupid! be,

The hapless heart that’s stung by thee!”

The ladies, who had never heard any poetry except sacred chants and psalms, were charmed.

It came very appropriately, for the next moment Peter himself, as the signal to begin the fireworks, lit and started a flying machine in the shape of Cupid bearing a burning torch. Along an invisible wire Cupid glided down from the gallery to a raft on the Neva, where screens had been erected for “fire diversions” in wicker work designs, and with his torch he set the first allegory on fire—two flaring red hearts on an altar of dazzling light. On one of them was traced in green light a Latin P, on the other a C—Petrus, Caterina. The two hearts merged into one, the inscription appeared: “Out of two I create one.” Venus and Cupid blessed the wedlock of Peter and Catherine.