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

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“I would rather be dead than see all this!” thought she. The Tsarevitch also humbly kissed the hand of Venus. Avrámoff tried to hide himself, but he was soon found out and brought back by force; although he quaked, and paled, and shuddered, and sweated, and almost swooned, when, kissing Satan’s image, he felt his lips touch the cold marble, yet he accurately performed the ceremony, watched by the keen eye of the Tsar whom he feared even more than the “white devils.”

The goddess seemed to look down upon these desecrations of the gods, this play of the barbarians, without the least wrath. They adored her involuntarily, even in this scoffing; the burlesque tripod became a real altar on which in the flickering bluish flame, thin as the serpent’s sting, burnt the soul of Dionysus, her brother god. And illumined by this flame the goddess smiled her subtle smile.

The banquet began. At the top end of the table, under a canopy made of hop foliage and whortleberries, which grew on the hillocks of the native marshes and took the place of the classic myrtle, sat Bacchus astride a barrel from which the Kniaz-Pope filled the glasses with wine.