For To Tempt And To Be

This observation appears in Catherine the Great's Memoirs, written in French and composed retrospectively in the 1790s. It reflects her hard-won understanding that proximity to power — especially for a foreign-born princess navigating the Russian court — required constant vigilance against one's own impulses. Catherine arrived in Russia at age 14, converted from Lutheranism to Russian Orthodoxy, and spent years managing treacherous court politics before seizing the throne in 1762; her memoirs are saturated with lessons learned from that experience.