A few weeks later they were at Svir.<br><br>Svir was one of the grandest summer palaces of the many palaces of the Princes Zouroff. It had been built by a French architect in the time of the great Catherine's love of French art, and its appanages were less an estate than a province or principality that stretched far away to the horizon on every side save one, where the Baltic spread its ice-plains in the winter, and its blue waters to the brief summer sunshine.