Catherine the Great

14

The Zhukova Affair

RETURNING TO St. Petersburg after saying goodbye to her mother, Catherine immediately asked for Maria Zhukova. Before her marriage, the empress had added to Catherine’s small court a group of young Russian ladies-in-waiting to help the German-speaking bride-to-be improve her Russian. Catherine was delighted to have them. The girls were all young; the oldest was twenty. “From that moment on,” Catherine recalled, “I did nothing but sing, dance, and frolic in my room from the moment I awoke until I fell asleep.” These were the playmates with whom Catherine played blindman’s buff, used the lid of a harpsichord as a toboggan, and spent a night on mattresses on the floor wondering what men’s bodies looked like. The liveliest and most intelligent of these young women, a seventeen-year-old named Maria Zhukova, had become Catherine’s favorite.

When she asked for Maria, she was told that the girl had gone to visit her mother. The following morning, Catherine asked again and the answer was the same. At noon that day, when she called on the empress in her bedroom, Elizabeth began to talk about Johanna’s departure and said she hoped Catherine would not be too much affected by it. Then, almost in passing, she said something that struck Catherine dumb—“I thought I would faint,” Catherine wrote later. In a loud voice and in the presence of thirty people, the empress announced that, in response to Johanna’s parting request, she had dismissed Maria Zhukova from court. Johanna, Elizabeth told Catherine, “feared that I had grown too attached to the girl and that a close friendship between two young women the same age was undesirable.” Then, on her own, Elizabeth added a stream of insults directed at Maria.

Catherine wondered whether Elizabeth was telling the truth; whether, in fact, her mother had actually asked the empress to send the girl away. Had Johanna felt this much hostility for Maria, Catherine was certain that her mother would have spoken to her before departing; Johanna had never been reticent with criticism. It was true that Johanna had always ignored Maria, but Catherine explained this to herself as stemming from Johanna’s inability to speak to the girl: “My mother did not know Russian and Maria spoke no other language.” If, on the other hand, Johanna was not to blame and the idea was solely Elizabeth’s, perhaps Madame Krause had told the empress about the close friendship between the young women. And perhaps Elizabeth had considered this information relevant to the reports that nothing productive was happening at night in the marital bedchamber. This might explain why, behind the cover of its being Johanna’s wish, Elizabeth had summarily removed Catherine’s closest friend. If any of this conjectured sequence was true, Catherine never learned.

In any case, Catherine knew that Maria Zhukova was innocent of wrongdoing. Upset, she told Peter that she did not intend to abandon her friend; Peter showed no interest. Catherine then attempted to send money to Maria, but was informed that the girl had already left St. Petersburg for Moscow with her mother and sister. Catherine next asked that the money she wanted to send to Maria be sent instead to Maria’s brother, a sergeant in the Guards. She was told that the brother and his wife had also disappeared; the brother had suddenly been posted to a distant regiment. Refusing to give up, Catherine tried to arrange a marriage. “Through my servants and others, I looked for a suitable husband for Mlle Zhukova. A man was located who seemed eligible, a junior officer in the Guards, who was a gentleman of property. This man traveled to Moscow to offer to marry Maria if she liked him. She accepted his proposal.” But when word of this arrangement reached the empress, she intervened again. The new husband was assigned (essentially, banished) to a regiment in Astrakhan. “It is difficult,” Catherine wrote later, “to find an explanation for this further persecution. Later on, I gathered that the only crime ever attributed to this girl was my affection for her and the attachment she was supposed to have for me. Even now, I find it difficult to find any plausible explanation for all this. It seems to me that people were being gratuitously ruined out of mere caprice, with no shadow of reason.”

This was a warning of what lay ahead. Indeed, Catherine soon realized that the harsh treatment of Maria Zhukova was a clear signal to everyone in the young court that those who were suspected of closeness to either Catherine or Peter were liable to find themselves, on one pretext or another, transferred, dismissed, disgraced, or even imprisoned. Responsibility for this policy lay with the chancellor, Alexis Bestuzhev, and, above him, the empress. Bestuzhev hated Prussia and had always opposed the bringing of the two German adolescents to Russia. Now that they were married despite his wishes, he was determined that they should not be in a position to undermine his administration of Russian diplomacy. This meant strict surveillance of the married couple, the curbing of all independent friendships and contacts of any kind, and, eventually, an attempt to isolate them completely. Behind Bestuzhev, of course, stood Elizabeth, whose concerns and fears were personal: she feared for the security of her person, her throne, and the future of her branch of the dynasty. In her plans, of course, Catherine, Peter, and their future child were of supreme importance. For this reason, over the years ahead, Elizabeth’s attitudes toward both the young husband and the young wife oscillated dramatically between affection, concern, disappointment, impatience, frustration, and rage.

Not only in appearance but in character, Elizabeth was her parents’ child. She was the daughter of Russia’s greatest tsar and his peasant wife, who became Empress Catherine I. Elizabeth was tall, like her father, and she resembled him in her energy, ardent temper, and sudden, impulsive behavior. Like her mother, she was quickly moved to sympathy and to lavish, spontaneous generosity. But her gratitude, like her other qualities, lacked moderation and permanence. The moment her mistrust was aroused, her dignity or vanity affronted, or her jealousy incurred, she would become a different person. Because it was difficult to guess the empress’s moods, no one could predict her public actions. A woman of extreme, sometimes violent, contradictions, Elizabeth could be easy—or impossible—to get along with.

In the fall of 1745, when Johanna returned to Germany and Elizabeth became the dominant influence in Catherine’s life, the empress was nearing her thirty-sixth birthday. She remained handsome and statuesque, but she was tending to heaviness. She continued to move and dance with grace, her large blue eyes remained brilliant, and she still possessed a rosebud mouth. Her hair was blond, but for some reason, she dyed it black, along with her eyebrows and sometimes her eyelashes. Her skin remained so pink and clear that she needed few cosmetics. She cared immensely about what she wore and refused to put on a gown more than once; on her death, fifteen thousand robes and dresses were supposedly discovered in her closets and wardrobes. On formal occasions, she layered herself with jewels. Appearing with her hair flecked with diamonds and pearls, and her neck and bosom covered with sapphires, emeralds, and rubies, she created an overwhelming impression. She intended this always to be so.

Nevertheless, she indulged her appetites without restraint. She ate and drank as much as she pleased. She often stayed up all night. The result—although no one dared to say so—was that her celebrated beauty was fading. Although Elizabeth herself knew this, she continued to live by her own rules. Her daily schedule was a constantly changing mixture of time-honored formality and imperial impromptu. She observed and enforced rigid court protocol when it served her purpose; more often, like her father, she ignored routine and behaved according to impulse. Instead of regularly dining at noon and supping at six, she arose and began the day whenever she felt like it. Often, she postponed the midday meal until five or six in the afternoon, had supper at two or three in the morning, and finally went to bed at sunrise. Until she became too heavy, she went riding or hunting in the morning and then drove out in her carriage in the afternoon. Several times a week there was a ball or an opera in the evening, followed by an elaborate supper and a display of fireworks. For these occasions, she kept changing her gowns and having her elaborate coiffure constantly reshaped. Court dinners offered fifty to sixty different dishes, but sometimes—to the despair of her French chef—the empress herself ate Russian peasant fare: cabbage soup, blini (buckwheat cakes), pickled pork, and onions.

To maintain her dazzling preeminence at court, Elizabeth made certain that no other woman present could shine as brightly. Sometimes, this required draconian coercive measures. During the winter of 1747, the empress decreed that all of her ladies-in-waiting must shave their heads and wear black wigs until their hair grew in again. The women wept but obeyed. Catherine assumed that her own turn would come, but to her surprise, she was spared; Elizabeth explained that Catherine’s hair was just growing back after an illness. Soon, the reason for the general pruning became known: after a previous festive occasion, Elizabeth and her maids had been unable to brush a heavy powder out of her hair, which became gray, coagulated, and gummy. The only remedy was to have her head shaved. And because she refused to be the only bald woman at court, bushels of hair were cropped.

On St. Alexander’s Day in the winter of 1747, Elizabeth’s jealous eye fell specifically on Catherine. The grand duchess appeared at court in a white dress trimmed with Spanish lace. When she returned to her room, a lady-in-waiting appeared to tell her that the empress commanded her to take off the dress. Catherine apologized and put on a different gown, also white but decorated with silver braid and a fiery red jacket and cuffs. Catherine commented:

As for the previous dress, it is possible that the empress found my dress more effective than her own and that this was the real reason she had ordered me to take mine off. My dear aunt was very prone to such petty jealousies, not only in relation to me, but to all the other ladies also. She had an eye particularly on those younger than herself, who were continually exposed to her outbursts. She carried this jealousy so far that once she called up Anna Naryshkina, sister-in-law of Lev Naryshkin, who, because of her beauty, her glorious figure, superb carriage, and exquisite taste in dress, had become the empress’s pet aversion. In the presence of the whole court, the empress took a pair of scissors and cut off a trimming of lovely ribbons under Madame Naryshkina’s neck. Another time, she cut off half of the front curls of two of her ladies-in-waiting on the pretext that she did not like their style of hair dressing. Afterwards, these young ladies said privately that, perhaps in her haste, or perhaps in her fierce determination to display the depth of her feelings, Her Imperial Majesty had cut off, along with their curls, some of their skin.

Elizabeth went to bed reluctantly and late. When the festivities and official receptions were over and the crowd of courtiers and guests had retired, she would sit in her private apartment with a small group of friends. Even when these people had left her and she was exhausted, she allowed herself only to be undressed; she still refused to sleep. As long as it was dark—and in winter in St. Petersburg, dark could last until eight or nine o’clock in the morning—she continued to talk to a few of her women, who took turns rubbing and tickling the soles of her feet to keep her awake. Meanwhile, not far away behind the brocaded curtains of the royal alcove, a fully clothed man lay on a thin mattress. This was Chulkov, the empress’s faithful bodyguard, who had the strange ability to do without sleep and who for twenty years had not slept in a proper bed. At last, as the pale light of dawn came creeping through the windows, the women would leave, and Razumovsky, or whoever happened to be the favorite of the moment, would appear, and in his arms Elizabeth would finally fall asleep. Chulkov, the man behind the curtain, remained at his post as long as the empress slept, sometimes into the afternoon.

The explanation for these unconventional hours was that Elizabeth feared the night; most of all she feared to sleep at night. The regent Anna Leopoldovna had been asleep when she was overthrown, and Elizabeth was afraid that a similar fate might overtake her. Her fears were exaggerated; she was popular with the public and only a palace coup, organized to elevate some new pretender, could mean loss of the throne. Only the dethroned boy tsar Ivan VI, a helpless child locked in a fortress, was a threat to Elizabeth. But it was the specter of this child that haunted Elizabeth and robbed her of her sleep. Potentially, of course, there was a remedy. Another child, a new baby heir, an offspring of Peter and Catherine, was what was needed. When such a child was born, and was surrounded, guarded, and loved by all of Elizabeth’s power, then Elizabeth could sleep.

15

Peepholes

ELIZABETH’S INTERVENTIONS in the daily life of the young married couple were often trivial. One night, when Catherine and Peter were having supper with friends, Mme Krause appeared at midnight and announced, “on the empress’s behalf,” that they were to go to bed; the monarch considered it wrong “to stay up so late.” The party broke up, but Catherine said, “It seemed strange to us as we knew the irregular hours kept by our dear aunt … it seemed to us more ill-humor than reason.” On the other hand, Elizabeth was unusually friendly to Catherine when the younger woman was in difficulty and the empress could play the role of supportive mother. One morning, Peter had a high fever and severe headache and could not get out of bed. He remained in bed for a week and was bled repeatedly. Elizabeth came to visit him several times a day and, observing tears in Catherine’s eyes, “was satisfied and pleased with me.” Soon afterward, when Catherine was saying her evening prayers in a palace chapel, one of Elizabeth’s ladies-in-waiting came in to tell her that the empress, knowing that the grand duchess was upset by the grand duke’s illness, had sent her to say that Catherine should have faith in God and should not worry, because under no circumstances would the empress abandon her.

Similarly, in the early months of Catherine’s marriage, the people leaving the young court were not always forced to do so by Elizabeth. Catherine’s chamberlain, Count Zakhar Chernyshev, suddenly disappeared. He had been one of the young courtiers invited by Catherine and Peter to join them in the large, pillowed cart in which they traveled to Kiev before their marriage. But Count Zakhar’s departure in the form of a diplomatic assignment had nothing to do with the empress. Instead, the initiative came from the young man’s mother, who had begged Elizabeth to send her son away. “I fear he may fall in love with the grand duchess,” the mother had said. “He never takes his eyes off her and when I see that, I tremble for fear that he might do something rash.” In fact, her intuitions were sound: Zakhar Chernyshev was indeed attracted to Catherine, as he would make clear a few years later.

The next to go, lamented by no one, was Peter’s longtime tormentor, Otto Brümmer. In the spring before his marriage, seventeen-year-old Peter had been formally declared to be of age and had become, in title at least, the reigning Duke of Holstein. In matters concerning his duchy, he now was entitled to make certain decisions. The decision he most wanted to make was to get rid of Brümmer. After reading the document confirming his title, Peter turned to his nemesis and said, “At last my wish is fulfilled. You have dominated me long enough. I shall take steps to have you sent back to Holstein as soon as possible.” Brümmer struggled to save himself. To Catherine’s surprise, he turned to her, asking her to make more frequent visits to Elizabeth’s dressing room and speak to the empress. “I told Brümmer that his suggestion could not help him as the empress almost never appeared when I was there. He begged that I should persevere.” Catherine, understanding that “this might serve his purposes but could do me no good,” told Count Brümmer that she was reluctant. Desperate, he continued to try to persuade her—“without success.” In the spring of 1746, the empress sent Brümmer back to Germany with an annual pension of three thousand rubles.

Living under the eye of Empress Elizabeth was difficult for Catherine, but with the early exception of her vigorous, and ultimately failed, attempt to help Maria Zhukova, the young grand duchess tried to accept her situation. Peter was less pliable. He had little desire to please his aunt; Instead, a belligerent rebelliousness often led him to do foolish things.

The episode of the peepholes was an example: Around Easter in 1746, Peter created a puppet theater in his apartment and insisted that everyone in the young court attend performances. On one side of the room in which he had erected his theater, a door had been walled up because it led into the dining room of the empress’s private apartment. One day while working with his puppets, Peter heard voices through the blocked door. Curious to see what was happening in the next room, he took a carpenter’s bore and drilled peepholes through the door. To his delight, he found himself witnessing a private, mid-day dinner party with the empress surrounded by a dozen of her friends. Next to his aunt sat Count Razumovsky, who, recovering from an illness, was dressed informally in a brocaded dressing gown.

Then, having already trespassed beyond the limits of discretion, Peter went further. Excited by his discovery, he summoned everyone to come and peek through the holes. Servants placed chairs, footstools, and benches before the perforated door to form an impromptu amphitheater so all could enjoy the spectacle. When Peter and his entourage had finished staring, he invited Catherine and her ladies-in-waiting to come and see this remarkable sight.

He did not tell us what it was, apparently to give us a pleasant surprise. I did not hurry quickly enough, so he carried off Madame Krause and my women. I arrived last and found them all sitting in front of the door. I asked what was going on. When he told me, I was horrified and frightened by his rashness and said that I wished neither to look nor to take part in this scandalous behavior which would surely upset his aunt if she learned about it. Which she could scarcely fail to do since he had shared his secret with at least twenty people.

When the group that had been peeking through the door saw that Catherine refused to do so, they all began, one by one, to walk away. Peter himself became apprehensive and went back to arranging his puppets.

Elizabeth soon learned what had happened, and on a Sunday morning after Mass, she suddenly burst into Catherine’s room and ordered that her nephew be summoned. Peter arrived wearing a dressing gown and carrying his nightcap in his hand. He appeared carefree and rushed to kiss his aunt’s hand. She accepted the gesture and then asked how he dared to behave as he had. She said that she had found the door riddled with holes, all of them immediately facing the spot where she sat. She could only suppose that he had forgotten what he owed her. She reminded him that her own father, Peter the Great, had had an ungrateful son whom he had punished by disinheriting. She said that the empress Anne had locked up in the fortress anyone who showed her disrespect. Her nephew, Elizabeth told him, was “no better than a disrespectful little boy who needed to be taught how to behave.”

Peter stammered a few words of defense, but Elizabeth ordered him to be silent. Her temper rose; she “let fly at him with the most shocking insults and abuse, displaying as much contempt as anger,” Catherine reported. “We were dumbfounded, stupefied and speechless, both of us, and, though this scene had nothing to do with me, it brought tears to my eyes.” Elizabeth noticed this and said to Catherine, “What I am saying is not directed at you. I know that you took no part in what he did and that you neither looked nor wanted to look through that door.” Then the empress calmed down, stopped talking, and left the room. The couple stared at each other. Then Peter, mingling contrition and sarcasm, said, “She was like a Fury. She did not know what she was saying.”

Later, when Peter had left, Madame Krause came in and said to Catherine, “One must admit that the empress behaved today like a real mother.” Unsure of her meaning, Catherine was silent. Madame Krause explained: “A mother gets angry and scolds her children and then it all blows over. You ought, both of you, to have said to her, ‘Vinovaty, Matushka’—‘We beg your pardon, Little Mother’—and she would have been disarmed.” Catherine replied that she had been so shaken by the empress’s anger that she could do nothing but keep silent. But she learned from the episode. Afterward, she wrote, “the phrase, ‘We beg your pardon, Mama,’ remained fixed in my memory as a way to disarm the empress’s wrath. Later, I used it successfully.”

When Catherine first arrived, unmarried, in Russia, Peter’s intimate circle included three young noblemen—two brothers and a cousin—named Chernyshev. Peter was immensely fond of all three. It was the eldest of the brothers, Zakhar, who had so worried his own mother with his obvious affection for Catherine that she had arranged to have him sent away from court, out of reach. The cousin and the younger brother remained, however, and the cousin, Andrei, also harbored feelings for Catherine. He began by making himself useful. Catherine had discovered that Madame Krause “had a great liking for the bottle. Often my entourage managed to make her drunk, after which she went to bed, leaving the young court to frolic without being scolded.” Her “entourage” in this case was Andrei Chernyshev, who could persuade Madame Krause to drink as much as he chose.

Before Catherine’s marriage to Peter, Andrei had fallen into a pattern of lighthearted flirtation with the bride-to-be. Far from opposing or feeling uncomfortable with this intimate but still innocent banter, Peter enjoyed and even encouraged it. For months, he talked to his wife of Chernyshev’s good looks and devotion. Several times a day, he would send Andrei to Catherine with trivial messages. Eventually, however, Andrei himself became uncomfortable with the situation. One day, he said to Peter, “Your Imperial Highness should bear in mind that the grand duchess is not Madame Chernyshev”—and, more bluntly—“She is not my fiancée, she’s yours.” Peter laughed and passed these remarks along to Catherine. To put an end to this uncomfortable joke after the couple was married, Andrei proposed to Peter that he redefine his relationship with Catherine by calling her Matushka (Little Mother) and that she call him synok (son). But as both Catherine and Peter continued to show great affection for the “son” and talked about him constantly, some of their servants became concerned.

One day, Catherine’s valet, Timothy Evreinov, took her aside and warned her that the whole household was gossiping about her relationship with Andrei. Frankly, he said, he was frightened by the danger into which she was heading. Catherine asked what he meant. “You talk and think of nothing but Andrei Chernyshev,” he said.

“What harm is there in that?” Catherine asked. “He is my son. My husband is fonder of him than I am and he is a loyal friend to both of us.”

“That is true,” Evreinov replied, “and the grand duke can do as he wishes, but it is not the same with you. What you call loyalty and affection because this young man is faithful to you, your entourage believes is love.”

When he spoke this word, “which I had not even imagined,” Catherine says, she was struck “as if by a thunderbolt.” Evreinov told her that, in order to avoid further gossip, he had already advised Chernyshev to plead illness and take a leave of absence from court. And, indeed, Andrei Chernyshev had already departed. Peter, who had been told nothing of this, was concerned about his friend’s “illness” and spoke of it worriedly to Catherine.

Eventually, when Andrei Chernyshev reappeared at court a month later, he caused a moment of danger for Catherine. During one of Peter’s concerts in which he himself played the violin, Catherine, who hated music in general and her husband’s efforts in particular, retreated to her room just off the Great Hall of the Summer Palace. The ceiling of this hall was being repaired, and the space was filled with scaffolding and workmen. Opening the door of her apartment into the hall, she was surprised to see Andrei Chernyshev standing not far away. She beckoned to him. Apprehensively, he came to her door. She said something meaningless. He replied, “I cannot speak to you like this. There is too much noise in the hall. Let me come into your room.”

“No,” Catherine said, “that is something I cannot do.” Nevertheless, she continued talking to him for five minutes through the half-opened door. Then, a premonition made her turn her head and she saw, standing and watching from inside her own room, Peter’s chamberlain, Count Devier.

“The grand duke is asking for you, Madame,” Devier said. Catherine closed the door on Chernyshev and walked with Devier back to the concert. The following day, the two remaining Chernyshevs vanished from court. Catherine and Peter were told that they had been posted to distant regiments; subsequently they learned that, in fact, they had been placed under house arrest.

The Chernyshev affair had two immediate consequences for the young couple. The lesser was that the empress commanded Father Todorsky to question husband and wife separately about their relationship with the young men. Todorsky asked Catherine whether she had ever kissed one of the Chernyshevs.

“No, my father,” she replied.

“Then why has the empress been informed to the contrary?” he asked. “The empress has been told that you gave a kiss to Andrei Chernyshev.”

“That is slander, my father. It is not true,” said Catherine. Her sincerity apparently convinced Todorsky, who muttered to himself, “What wicked people!” He reported this conversation to the empress, and Catherine heard no more about it.

But the Andrei Chernyshev affair, although lacking in substance, had lodged in the empress’s mind, and it played a part in what happened next, something more significant and long-lasting. On the afternoon the Chernyshevs disappeared, a new chief governess, senior to Madame Krause, appeared. The arrival of this woman to rule over Catherine and her daily life marked the beginning of seven years of harassment, oppression, and misery.

16

A Watchdog

ELIZABETH STILL NEEDED an heir, and she was perplexed, resentful, and angry that no child was on the way. By May 1746, eight months had passed since the marriage, and there were no signs of a pregnancy. Elizabeth suspected disrespect, unwillingness, even faithlessness. She blamed Catherine.

For the chancellor, Bestuzhev, the problem was different. At issue was not only the matter of an unsuccessful marriage that had produced no child but also Russia’s diplomatic future. This was Bestuzhev’s sphere, and to keep and use the power he needed, he encouraged Elizabeth’s suspicion and whipped up her resentments. Personally, he, too, was concerned about the young couple: he was alarmed by Peter’s opinions and behavior, and he mistrusted Johanna’s daughter, whom he suspected of conspiring secretly with Frederick of Prussia. Because Peter openly admired Frederick, Bestuzhev could scarcely help fearing the accession of such a sovereign to the Russian throne. As for Catherine, the chancellor had always opposed the German grand duke’s marriage to a German princess. Accordingly, the young couple and the young court must not be permitted to become an alternative power center, an independent political body made up of faithful friends and loyal partisans; this happened often enough in kingdoms with independent-thinking heirs to thrones. To prevent it, Bestuzhev employed two tactics: first, the isolation of the young couple from the outside world, and, second, the placement of a powerful, vigilant watchdog inside the young court to watch every move and overhear every word.

As the empress’s first minister, he had, of course, to address her first concern: her need for an heir. Bestuzhev’s approach was to recommend that a strong woman loyal to him be appointed as senior governess to Catherine, to act as the young wife’s constant companion and chaperone. This woman’s duty be would to superintend the marital intimacies and ensure the fidelity of Catherine and Peter. She was to watch the grand duchess and prevent any familiarity with the cavaliers, pages, and servants of the court. Further, she was to see that her charge wrote no letters and had no private conversations with anyone. This prohibition neatly combined Elizabeth’s worries about infidelity with Bestuzhev’s insistence on political isolation; it was critically important to the chancellor that Catherine’s correspondence and her conversations with foreign diplomats be kept under strict surveillance. Thus, Bestuzhev imposed a new entourage on Catherine, charged to enforce a new set of rules dictated by the chancellor, supposedly aimed at consolidating the mutual affection of the married couple, but also intended to render them politically harmless.

Only the first half of this agenda was made explicit to Catherine. In a decree signed by Elizabeth, the young wife was reminded that:

Her Imperial Highness has been selected for the high honor of being the noble wife of our dear nephew, His Imperial Highness, the Grand Duke, heir to the empire.… [She] has been elevated to her present dignity of Imperial Highness with none other but the following aims and objects: that her Imperial Highness might by her sensible behavior, her wit and virtue, inspire a sincere love in His Imperial Highness and win his heart, and that by so doing may bring forth the heir so much desired for the empire and a fresh sprig of our illustrious house.

The woman carefully selected by Bestuzhev to oversee and administer these tasks was twenty-four-year-old Maria Semenovna Choglokova, Elizabeth’s first cousin on her mother’s side. She was one of Elizabeth’s favorites, and both she and her husband, one of the empress’s chamberlains, were also devoted servants of the chancellor. Further, Madame Choglokova had a remarkable reputation for virtue and fertility. She idolized her husband and produced a child with almost annual regularity, a domestic accomplishment meant to set an example for Catherine.

Catherine hated her from the beginning. In her Memoirs, she directed a barrage of unflattering adjectives at this woman who was to rule her existence for many years: “simple-minded … uneducated … cruel … malicious … capricious … self-serving.” The afternoon following Madame Choglokova’s appointment, Peter took Catherine aside and told her that he had learned that the new governess had been assigned to watch over her because she, his wife, did not love him. Catherine replied that it was impossible that anybody could believe that this particular woman could make her feel more tenderness for him. To act as a watchdog was a different matter, she said, but for that purpose they should have chosen someone more intelligent.

The war between the new governess and her charge began immediately. Madame Choglokova’s first act was to inform Catherine that she was to be kept at a greater distance from the sovereign. In the future, she said, if the grand duchess had anything to say to the empress, it must be passed along through her, Madame Choglokova. Hearing this, Catherine’s eyes filled with tears. Madame Choglokova ran to report the lack of enthusiasm with which she had been received, and Catherine’s eyes still were red when Elizabeth appeared. She led Catherine to a room where they were completely alone. “In the two years I had been in Russia,” Catherine said, “this was the first time she had ever spoken to me privately, without witnesses.” The empress then unleashed a torrent of complaint and accusation. She asked “whether it was my mother who had given me instructions to betray her to the King of Prussia. She said that she was well aware of my wiles and deceitfulness and, in a word, knew everything. She said that she knew it was my fault that the marriage had not been consummated.” When Catherine again began to weep, Elizabeth declared that young women who did not love their husbands always wept. Yet no one had forced Catherine to marry the grand duke; it had been her own wish; she had no right to weep over it now. She said that if Catherine did not love Peter, she, Elizabeth, was not to blame; Catherine’s mother had assured her that her daughter was marrying Peter for love; certainly, she had not forced the girl into marriage against her will. “Now, as I was married,” Catherine reported Elizabeth saying, “I must not cry anymore. Then she added that, of course, she knew very well that I was in love with another man, but she never mentioned the name of the man I was supposed to love.” Finally, she added, “I know quite well that you alone are to blame if you have no children.”

Catherine could think of nothing to say. She believed that at any moment Elizabeth was going to strike her; the empress, she knew, regularly slapped the women of her household and even the men when she was angry.

I could not save myself by flight because I had my back against a door and she was directly in front of me. Then I remembered Madame Krause’s advice and I said to her, “I beg your pardon, Little Mother,” and she was appeased. I went to my bedroom, still crying and thinking that death was preferable to such a persecuted life. I took a large knife and lay down on a sofa, intending to plunge it into my heart. Just then, one of my maids came in, threw herself on the knife, and stopped me. Actually, the knife was not very sharp and would not have penetrated my corset.

Unaware of the degree to which Bestuzhev had agitated Elizabeth on the subject of Prussia, Catherine assumed that there was only one reason for Elizabeth’s outburst. None of the empress’s criticisms was valid. She was obedient and submissive; she was not indiscreet; she was not betraying Russia to Prussia, she never bored holes through doors, and she did not love another man. Her failure was that she had not produced a child.

A few days later, when Peter and Catherine accompanied the empress on a visit to Reval (today Tallinn, capital of Estonia), Mme Choglokova rode in their carriage. Her behavior, Catherine said, was “a torment.” To the simplest remark, however innocent or trivial, she responded by saying, “such talk would displease the empress” or “such things would not be approved by the empress.” Catherine’s reaction was to close her eyes and sleep through the journey.

Madame Choglokova kept her position for the next seven years. She possessed none of the qualities necessary to assist an inexperienced young wife. She was neither wise nor sympathetic; on the contrary, she had a reputation as one of the most ignorant and arrogant women at court. Not even remotely did it occur to her to win Catherine’s friendship or, as a wife and the mother of a large family, to discuss the underlying problem she had been called in to solve. In fact, she had no success in the area about which Elizabeth cared most; her oversight of the marriage bed was fruitless. Nevertheless, her power was real. Functioning as Bestuzhev’s jailor and spy, Madame Choglokova made Catherine a royal prisoner.

In August 1746, in the first full summer following their marriage, Elizabeth allowed Peter and Catherine to go to Oranienbaum (Orange Tree), an estate on the Gulf of Finland that Elizabeth had given to her nephew. There in the courtyard and terraced gardens, Peter established a simulated military camp. He and his chamberlains, gentlemen-in-waiting, servants, gamekeepers, even gardeners, walked around with muskets on their shoulders, doing daytime parade ground drill and taking turns standing guard at night. Catherine was left with nothing to do except sit and listen to the Choglokovs grumble. She tried to lose herself in reading. “In those days,” she said, “I read romances only.” Her favorite that summer was an exaggerated French romance titled Tiran the Fair, the story of a French knight-errant who travels to England, where he triumphs in tournaments and battles and becomes a favorite of the daughter of the king. Catherine particularly loved the description of the princess, “whose skin was so transparent that when she drank red wine, you could see it pass down her throat.” Peter read too, but his taste lay in tales of “highwaymen eventually hanged for their crimes or broken on the wheel.” Of that summer, Catherine wrote:

Never did two minds resemble each other less. We had nothing in common in our tastes or ways of thinking. Our opinions were so different that we would never have agreed on anything had I not often given in to him so as not to affront him too noticeably. I was already restless enough and this restlessness was increased by the horrible life I had to lead. I was constantly left to myself and suspicion surrounded me on all sides. There was no amusement, no conversation, no kindness or attention to help alleviate this boredom for me. My life became unbearable.

Catherine began to suffer from severe headaches and insomnia. When Madame Krause insisted that these symptoms would disappear if the grand duchess would drink a glass of Hungarian wine in bed at night, Catherine refused. Whereupon Madame Krause always raised the glass to Catherine’s health—and then emptied it herself.

17

“He Was Not a King”

IN ZERBST on March 16, 1747, Catherine’s father, Prince Christian Augustus, suffered a second stoke and died. He was fifty-six; Catherine was seventeen. He had not been allowed to come to her betrothal or to her wedding, and she had not seen him since leaving home three years before. In the last year of his life, she had had little contact with him. This was the work of Empress Elizabeth, Count Bestuzhev, and their agent, Madame Choglokova. Relations between Prussia and Russia were worsening, and Bestuzhev insisted to the empress that all private correspondence between Russia and anyone in Germany be stopped. Catherine, therefore, was strictly forbidden to write personal letters to her parents. Her monthly letters to her mother and father were drafted by the Foreign Office; she was allowed only to copy her message from this draft and then to sign her name at the bottom. She was forbidden to slip any personal news or even a single word of affection into the text. And now her father, who in his quiet, undemonstrative way had given her the only disinterested affection she had ever known, was gone, without a final word of tenderness from her.

Catherine’s grief was profound. Shutting herself up in her apartment, she sobbed for a week. Then Elizabeth sent Madame Choglokova to tell her that a grand duchess of Russia was not permitted to mourn for more than a week “because, after all, your father was not a king.” Catherine replied that “it was true that he was not a reigning sovereign, but he was my father.” Elizabeth and Choglokova prevailed, and after seven days Catherine was forced to reappear in public. As a concession, she was allowed to wear black silk in mourning, but only for six weeks.

The first time she left her room, she encountered and spoke a few casual words to Count Santi, the Italian-born Court Master of Ceremonies. A few days later, Madame Choglokova came to tell her that the empress had learned from Count Bestuzhev—to whom Count Santi had reported it in writing—that Catherine had said she found it strange that ambassadors had not offered her condolences on her father’s death. Madame Choglokova said that the empress considered her remarks to Santi highly improper; that Catherine was too proud, and, once again, that she ought to remember that her father had not been a king; for that reason no expressions of sympathy from foreign ambassadors should be expected.

Catherine could hardly believe what Madame Choglokova was saying. Forgetting her fear of the governess, she said that if Count Santi had written or said that she had spoken a single word to him on this subject, he was a monstrous liar; that nothing of the kind had entered her head; that she had never said a word to him or to anyone else on the subject. “Apparently, my words carried conviction,” Catherine wrote in her Memoirs, “for Madame Choglokova conveyed my words to the empress who then directed her rage at Count Santi.”

Several days later, Count Santi sent a messenger to Catherine to tell her that Count Bestuzhev had forced him to tell this lie and that he was very ashamed of himself. Catherine told this messenger that a liar was a liar, whatever his reasons for lying, and that in order that Count Santi should not further entangle her in his lies, she would never speak to him again.

If Catherine imagined that the petty tyranny of Madame Choglokova and her sorrow at the death of her father had brought her to the nadir of her early years in Russia, she was in error. In that same spring of 1747, even as she was mourning her father, her situation—and Peter’s—became decidedly worse when Madame Choglokova’s husband was promoted to become Peter’s governor. “This was a dreadful blow for us,” Catherine said. “He was an arrogant, brutal fool; a stupid, conceited, malicious, pompous, secretive and silent man who never smiled; a man to be despised as well as feared.” Even Madame Krause, whose sister was the principal ladies’ maid to the empress and one of Elizabeth’s favorites, trembled when she heard about this choice.

The decision had been made by Bestuzhev. The chancellor, distrusting everyone who might come in contact with the grand ducal couple, wanted another implacable watchdog. “Within a few days of Monsieur Choglokov taking over, three or four young servants of whom the grand duke was very fond were arrested,” Catherine said. Then Choglokov forced Peter to dismiss his chamberlain, Count Devier. Soon after, a master chef who was a good friend of Madame Krause’s and whose dishes Peter particularly liked was sent away.

In the autumn of 1747, the Choglokovs imposed more restrictions. All of Peter’s gentlemen-in waiting were forbidden access to the grand duke’s room. Peter was left alone with only a few lesser servants. As soon as it was noticed that he showed a preference for one of these, that person was removed. Next, Choglokov forced Peter to dismiss the head of his domestic staff, “a gentle, reasonable man who had been attached to the grand duke since birth, and who gave him much good advice.” Peter’s valet, the rough old Swedish retainer Romburg, who had given him brusque advice on how to treat a new wife, was dismissed.

The restrictions tightened again. An order from the Choglokovs prohibited anyone, on pain of dismissal, from entering either Peter’s or Catherine’s private rooms without the express permission of Monsieur or Madame Choglokov. The ladies and gentleman of the young court were to remain in the antechamber, where they were never to speak to Peter or Catherine except in a loud voice that everyone in the room could hear. “The grand duke and I,” Catherine noted, “were now forced to remain inseparable.”

Elizabeth had her own reason for isolating the young couple: she believed that if they were reduced to each other’s company they would produce an heir. The calculation was not entirely irrational:

In his distress, the grand duke, deprived of everyone suspected of being attached to him, and being unable to open his heart to anyone else, turned to me. He often came to my room. He felt that I was the only person with whom he could talk without every word being turned into a crime. I realized his position and was sorry for him and tried to offer all the consolation in my power. Actually, I would often be exhausted by these visits which lasted several hours because he never sat down and I had to walk up and down the room with him all the time. He walked fast and took great strides so that it was difficult to keep up with him and at the same time to continue a conversation about very specialized military details about which he spoke interminably. [But] I knew that it was the only amusement he had.

Catherine could not talk about her own interests; Peter was usually indifferent:

There were moments when he would listen to me, but it was always when he was unhappy. He was constantly afraid of some plot or intrigue which might mean that he would end his days in the fortress. He had, it is true, a certain perspicacity but no judgment. He was incapable of disguising his thoughts and feelings and was so extraordinarily indiscreet that, after he had undertaken not to reveal himself in words, he would then turn around and betray himself through gesture, expression, and behavior. I believe it was these indiscretions that caused his servants to be removed as often as they were.

18

In the Bedroom

PETER NOW SPENT most of the day with his wife. Sometimes he played his violin for her; Catherine listened, hiding her hatred of his “noise.” Often, he talked about himself for hours. Sometimes, he was permitted to hold small evening parties at which he ordered his and her servants to wear masks and dance while he played the violin. Bored by this primitive shuffling, so different from the graceful movement at the great court balls she loved, Catherine, pleading a headache, lay on a couch, still wearing her mask, and closed her eyes. And then at night when they went to bed—during the first nine years of their marriage, Peter never slept elsewhere than in Catherine’s bed—he would ask Madame Krause to bring his toys.

Because everyone in the young court detested and feared the Choglokovs, everyone united against them. Madame Krause had suffered from her supplanter’s arrogance and so despised Madame Choglokova that she had swung her allegiance entirely to Peter and Catherine. She delighted in outwitting the principal duenna and regularly broke the new restrictions, mostly on behalf of Peter, whom she wanted to please because she, like the grand duke, was a native of Holstein. She rebelled most dramatically by procuring for him as many toy soldiers, miniature cannon, and model fortresses as he wanted. He could not play with them during the day, because Monsieur and Madame Choglokov would have demanded to know from where and whom they came. The toys were hidden in and under the bed and Peter played with them only at night. After supper, Peter undressed and went to bed; Catherine followed. As soon as both were in bed, Madame Krause, who slept in the next room, came in, locked their door, and brought out so many toy soldiers dressed in blue Holstein uniforms that the bed was covered with them. Whereupon Madame Krause, then in her fifties, joined Peter in moving them around as he commanded.

The absurdity of what they were doing, often until two in the morning, sometimes made Catherine laugh, but usually she simply endured. She could not move in bed, the whole surface being covered with toys, some of which were heavy. In addition, she worried that Madame Choglokova would hear of these nocturnal games. Sure enough, one evening toward midnight, she knocked at the bedroom door. It had a double lock, and those inside did not open it immediately because Peter, Catherine, and Madame Krause were scrambling to collect the toys from the top of the bed and cram them under the blankets. When Madame Krause eventually opened the door, Madame Choglokova entered, furious at having been kept waiting. Madame Krause explained that it had been necessary for her to go and get her key. Then Madame Choglokova asked why Catherine and Peter were not asleep. Peter replied curtly that he was not ready to sleep. Madame Choglokova lashed back that the empress would be furious to learn that the couple was not asleep at this late hour. Eventually, she left, grumbling. Peter began playing again and continued until he fell asleep.

The situation was farcical: a newly married couple constantly on guard lest they be caught playing with toys. Behind this farce lay the greater absurdity of a young husband playing with toys in the marital bed, leaving his young wife with nothing to do but to watch. (In her Memoirs, an older, more sophisticated Catherine commented wryly, “It seems to me that I was good for something else.”) Yet the real context in which these games were played was as dangerous as it was bizarre. Elizabeth was a woman accustomed to having her way. These two impudent grand ducal children were thwarting her. She had done everything for them: she had reached out and brought them to Russia; she had loaded them with gifts, titles, and kindness; she had given them a magnificent wedding; all in the hope of a speedy fulfillment of her wish for an heir.

When, as the months passed, Elizabeth found her hope still frustrated, she was determined to know which of the pair was responsible. Was it conceivable that Catherine, at seventeen, with her freshness, her intelligence and charm, should leave her eighteen-year-old husband entirely cold? Was it not far more likely that Peter’s ugliness and disagreeable nature had repelled his wife, and that she was expressing her revulsion in the privacy of their bedroom by repulsing his advances? If this were not so, what other reason could there be?

Peter was not completely indifferent to women. Proof of this was his constant infatuation with one or another of the ladies of the court. His remark on his wedding night, “How it would amuse my servants …,” is proof of his awareness of the role of intimacy in sex, although by mocking it, he was turning intimacy into a vulgar joke.

It may be that the doctors were right and that Peter, in spite of his eighteen years, had not yet fully arrived at physical manhood. This was more or less Madame Krause’s opinion as she fruitlessly interrogated the young wife every morning. We do not know why he did not or would not or could not reach over and touch his wife. In her Memoirs, Catherine gives no answer. Peter left no records. But two possible explanations, one psychological, the other physical, have been suggested.

The psychological inhibitions brought forward from youth may have prevented Peter from exposing his fragile ego to the physical intimacy of lovemaking. Peter’s childhood and youth had been horrendous. He had grown up an orphan in the unloving care of martinet tutors. He had been barred from having companions and playmates his own age. He had known people who gave him orders and people who obeyed him, but never anyone with whom he could share common interests and develop friendship and trust. Catherine, during her first year in Russia, had offered him companionship, but she had unintentionally failed him at the moment in the dimly lit hall when he stood before her bearing the hideous scars of smallpox. In that instant, his new friend had struck his self-confidence a blow. To forgive her, to trust her again, to recommit his shaky self-image to her; these were steps he could not bring himself to take. Peter had some idea of what he was supposed to do with Catherine in bed, but her intelligence and charm, even her close female presence, aroused no initiative in him. Instead, they stimulated his sense of inadequacy, failure, and humiliation.

Another possibility has been offered to explain Peter’s apparent indifference. The Marquis de Castéra, a French diplomat who wrote a three-volume Life of Catherine II published a year after her death, suggested: “The least rabbi of Petersburg or the least surgeon would have been able to correct his little imperfection.” He was talking about a physiological condition called phimosis, a medical term for a tightness of the foreskin that prevents it from easily and comfortably sliding down over the tip of the penis. This problem is normal in a newborn or an infant and sometimes cannot be detected in an uncircumcised boy before the age of four or five because some foreskins remain tight until then. Usually, the problem naturally resolves itself before puberty, when the foreskin loosens and becomes flexible. If this does not happen, however, and the condition continues into adolescence, it can become acutely painful. Sometimes, the foreskin is so tight that the boy cannot have an erection without pain. This, of course, would make sexual intercourse unappealing. If this was true in Peter’s case, his reluctance to reach arousal—and to attempt to explain this problem to an uninformed young woman—can be understood.^*

If Peter suffered from phimosis when he and Catherine were betrothed, this may have been the reason Elizabeth’s doctors recommended that the marriage be delayed. In another context in her Memoirs, Catherine says that Dr. Lestocq recommended waiting until the grand duke reached twenty-one; this advice may have stemmed from Lestocq’s awareness that the condition should certainly have resolved itself by then. But if Lestocq did discuss this matter with the empress, Elizabeth simply overrode his opinion. She was in a hurry for an heir.

Neither explanation for Peter’s persistent coldness in the marriage bed can be proved or disproved. In any case, whether the problem was psychological or physical—or perhaps involved elements of both—Peter was guilty of no wrong. Still, it was inevitable that, just as Catherine’s rejection of him when she first saw his ravaged face had affected him, so his physical rejection of her produced a reaction in her. Approaching marriage, she had not been in love with Peter, but she had made up her mind to live with him and to fulfill the expectations of her husband and the empress. Catherine, who knew little about sex, about erections and foreskins, and, certainly, nothing about phimosis, knew well what was expected of wives in a royal marriage. It was not Catherine who said no.

But Peter made it impossible for her. He scorned her physically and acted moonstruck over other women. He encouraged her to flirt with other men. The whole court witnessed her humiliation. Every foreign ambassador observed that she could not attract her husband’s interest; every servant knew the name of whatever young woman the grand duke happened to be pursuing at the moment. And since no one understood why Peter was ignoring his young wife, everyone, including the empress, laid the blame on her. Peter and Catherine continued to live together; they had no choice. But they were estranged by a thousand mutual misunderstandings and mortifications, and a desert of unspoken animosity stretched between them.

19

A House Collapses

NEAR THE END of May 1748, the empress Elizabeth and the court visited Count Razumovsky’s country estate outside St. Petersburg. Catherine and Peter were assigned to a small three-story wooden house built on a hill. Their apartment, in the upper story, had three rooms; they slept in one, Peter dressed in another, and Madame Krause slept in the third. The floor below lodged the Choglokovs and Catherine’s ladies-in-waiting. The first night, the party lasted until six in the morning, when everyone went to bed. Around eight, while all were asleep, a sergeant of the guards posted outside heard strange creaking noises. Looking around the base of the house, he saw that the large blocks of stone supporting the building were moving on the damp, slippery earth, detaching themselves and sliding downhill from the bottom timbers of the house. He hurried to awaken Choglokov, telling him that the foundation was giving way and that everyone had to get out. Choglokov rushed upstairs and burst open the bedroom door where Catherine and Peter were sleeping. Tearing aside the curtain around their bed, he shouted, “Get up and get out as fast as you can! The foundation of the house is crumbling!” Peter, who had been fast asleep, made one leap from the bed to the door and disappeared. Catherine told Choglokov that she would follow. While dressing, she remembered that Madame Krause was sleeping in the next room and went in to awaken her. The floorboards began to rock—“like the waves of the sea,” said Catherine—and there was a tremendous crash. The house was settling and disintegrating, and Catherine and Madame Krause fell to the floor. At that moment, the sergeant entered, picked up Catherine, and carried her back to the staircase—which was no longer there. Amid the rubble, the sergeant handed Catherine down to the nearest person below, who handed her down to the next, and the next, from one set of hands to another, until she reached the bottom, from where she was carried into a field. There she found Peter and other people who had walked or been carried from the house. Soon, Madame Krause, rescued by another soldier, appeared. Catherine escaped with bruises and a severe shock, but, on a lower floor, three servants sleeping in the kitchen had been killed when the fireplace collapsed. Next to the foundation, sixteen sleeping workers had been crushed and buried in the rubble.

The house collapsed because it had been hurriedly built in early winter on half-frozen earth. Four limestone blocks had served as the foundation, with the bottom timbers resting on them. With the coming of the spring thaw, the four stone blocks began to slide in different directions and the house was pulled apart. Later that day, when the empress sent for her and Peter, Catherine asked Elizabeth to grant a favor to the sergeant who had carried her from her room. Elizabeth stared at her and, at first, did not reply.

Immediately afterward, she asked if I was very much frightened. I said, “Yes, very much.” This displeased her still more. She and Madame Choglokova were angry with me the whole day. I suppose I did not notice that they wished to look upon the whole occurrence as a mere trifle. But the shock was so great, that this was impossible. As she wanted to make light of the accident, everyone tried to pretend that the danger had been minimal and some even said there had been no danger at all. My terror displeased her greatly and she hardly spoke to me. Meanwhile, our host, Count Razumovsky, was in despair. One moment, he seized his pistol and talked of blowing out his brains. He sobbed and wept throughout the day; then, at dinner, he emptied his glass, over and over. The empress could not conceal her distress over her favorite’s condition and burst into tears. She had him closely watched; this man, at other times so gentle, was unmanageable and raving when intoxicated. He was prevented from doing himself harm. The following day, everyone returned to St. Petersburg.

After the episode of the collapsing house, Catherine noticed that the empress seemed constantly displeased with her. One day, Catherine walked into a room where one of the empress’s chamberlains was standing. The Choglokovs had not yet arrived, and the chamberlain whispered to Catherine that she was being vilified to the empress. At dinner a few days before, he said, Elizabeth had accused her of getting deeper and deeper into debt; declared that everything she did was marked by stupidity; and noted that while she might imagine herself very clever, no one else shared that opinion because her stupidity was obvious to everyone.

Catherine was unwilling to accept this appraisal, and, putting aside her usual deference, flared back:

That, as to my stupidity, I could not be blamed because everyone is just as God has made him; that my debts were not surprising because, with an allowance of thirty thousand rubles, I had to pay off sixty thousand rubles of debt left me by my mother; and that he should tell whoever had sent him that I was extremely sorry to hear that I was being blackened in the eyes of Her Imperial Majesty to whom I had never failed to show respect, obedience and deference and that the more closely my conduct was observed, the more she would be convinced of this.

The prohibition against any unapproved communication between the married couple and the outside world remained, but it was porous. “To show how useless this kind of order is,” Catherine wrote later, “we found many people willing and eager to undermine it. Even the Choglokovs’ closest relatives sought to reduce the harshness of this policy.” Indeed, Madame Choglokova’s own brother, Count Hendrikov, who was also the empress’s first cousin, “often slipped me useful and necessary information. He was a kind and outspoken man who ridiculed the stupidities and brutalities of his sister and brother-in-law.”

Similarly, there were cracks in the wall Bestuzhev had erected to block Catherine’s correspondence. Catherine was forbidden to write personal letters; the Ministry of Foreign Affairs wrote them for her. This injunction was underscored when Catherine learned that an official at the ministry had almost been charged with a crime because she had sent him a few lines, begging him to insert them into a letter he was writing over her signature to Johanna. But there were people who tried to help. In the summer of 1748, the Chevalier di Sacrosomo, a Knight of Malta, arrived in Russia and was warmly greeted at court. When he was presented to Catherine, he kissed her hand, and, as he did so, he slipped a tiny note into her palm. “This is from your mother,” he whispered. Catherine was frightened, dreading that someone, especially the Choglokovs, who were standing nearby, might have seen him. She managed to slip the note inside her glove. In her room, she found a letter from her mother rolled up inside a note from Sacrosomo. Johanna wrote that she was anxious about Catherine’s silence, wanted to know the reason for it, and what her daughter’s situation was. Catherine wrote back that she was forbidden to write to her or to anyone, but that she was well.

In his own note, Sacrosomo had informed Catherine that she was to send her reply through an Italian musician who would be present at Peter’s next concert. Accordingly, the grand duchess rolled up her response in the same way as the one sent to her and waited for the moment when she could pass it along. At the concert, she made a tour of the orchestra and stopped behind the chair of a cellist, the man described to her. When he saw the grand duchess behind his chair, the cellist opened his coat pocket wide and pretended to take out his handkerchief. Catherine quickly slipped her note into the open pocket and walked away. No one saw. During his stay in Petersburg, Sacromoso passed her three other notes and her replies went back the same way. No one knew.

20

Summer Pleasures

THE CHOGLOKOVS had been appointed to enforce Bestuzhev’s desire to isolate Catherine and Peter from the outside world and also to provide the young couple with a shining example of virtue, marital happiness, and productive fertility. In the first of these assignments, they partially succeeded; in the second, they failed spectacularly.

During a stay at the Peterhof estate on the Gulf of Finland in the summer of 1748, Catherine and Peter, looking out their windows across the garden, frequently saw Monsieur and Madame Choglokov walking back and forth from the main palace on the hill to Monplaisir, Peter the Great’s small redbrick Dutch-style house at the edge of the water, where the empress had chosen to stay. They quickly discovered that these recurring trips were all related to a secret affair Monsieur Choglokov had been having with one of Catherine’s maids of honor, Maria Kosheleva, and that the young woman was pregnant. The Choglokovs now faced ruin, a possiblity for which the watchers from the upper palace windows fervently prayed.

Carrying out the constant surveillance demanded by Bestuzhev required Monsieur Choglokov, as Peter’s principal watchdog, to sleep in a room in the grand duke’s apartment. Madame Choglokova, who was also pregnant, and lonely without her husband, asked Maria Kosheleva to sleep near her; she took the girl into her own bed or obliged her to sleep in a small bed next to her own. Kosheleva, according to Catherine, was, “a large, stupid, clumsy girl, but with beautiful blond hair and very white skin.” In the mornings, Monsieur Choglokov would come to awaken his wife and find Maria lying next to her in deshabille, her blond hair spread out on the pillows, her white skin bare to inspection. The wife, never doubting her husband’s love, noticed nothing.

When Catherine contracted measles, the door of opportunity opened for Monsieur Choglokov. He persuaded his wife that it was her duty to remain day and night at Catherine’s bedside, nursing her and making sure that no doctor, lady-in-waiting, or anyone else brought the grand duchess a forbidden message. This gave him ample time with Mlle Kosheleva. A few months later, Madame Choglokova gave birth to her sixth child and Maria Kosheleva’s pregnancy became apparent. Once Elizabeth was informed, she summoned the still-unknowing wife and confronted her with the fact that she had been deceived. If Madame Choglokova wished to separate from her husband, she, Elizabeth, would be pleased; from the beginning, she had never really approved of her cousin’s choice. In any case, the empress decreed that Monsieur Choglokov could not remain in Peter and Catherine’s household. He would be dismissed and Madame Choglokova placed in absolute control.

At first, Madame Choglokova, who still loved her husband, heatedly denied his involvement in any affair and declared the story a slander. As she was speaking, Maria Kosheleva was being questioned. The young woman admitted everything. Informed of this, Madame Choglokova returned to her husband, choking with rage. Choglokov fell on his knees, imploring forgiveness. Madame Choglokova went back to the empress, fell on her own knees, and said that she had forgiven her husband and wished to stay with him because of her children. She pleaded with the empress not to dismiss her husband from court, as this would dishonor her as well as him; her sorrow was so pitiable that Elizabeth’s anger subsided. Madame Choglokova was permitted to bring in her husband and, kneeling together before the empress, they begged her to pardon the husband for the sake of the wife and children. Thereafter, although they had appeased the empress, the warmth of their feeling for each other never returned; his deception and her public humiliation left her with an unconquerable repugnance for him and they remained united only by a common interest in survival.

These scenes took place over a span of five or six days, with the young court learning almost hour by hour what was occurring. Everyone, of course, hoped to see the watchdogs dismissed, but, in the end, only the pregnant young Maria Kosheleva was sent away. Both Choglokovs remained, their powers undiminished, although, Catherine commented, “there was no more talk of an exemplary marriage.”

The rest of that summer was peaceful. After leaving Peterhof, Catherine and Peter moved to the Oranienbaum estate, nearby on the gulf coast. The Choglokovs, still recovering from their marital disgrace, did not attempt to impose the usual rigid restrictions on movement and conversation. Catherine was able to do what she liked:

I had the greatest freedom imaginable. I rose before dawn at three in the morning and dressed myself alone from head to foot in a man’s clothing. An old huntsman was already waiting for me with guns. We crossed the garden on foot, rifles on our shoulders, and walked to a fishing skiff close to the shore. He, I, a pointer dog, and the fisherman who guided us, got in a skiff and I went to shoot ducks in the reeds that grew along both sides of the Oranienbaum canal which stretches over a mile out into the gulf. We often went out beyond the canal and consequently were sometimes caught in rough weather in the open sea. The grand duke would join us an hour or two later because he always had to have his breakfast before coming. At ten o’clock, I came home and dressed for dinner; after dinner we rested and in the afternoon the grand duke had a concert or we went horseback riding.

That summer, riding became Catherine’s “dominant passion.” She was forbidden to ride astride, since Elizabeth believed this produced barrenness in women, but Catherine designed her own saddle on which she could sit as she pleased. This was an English sidesaddle with a movable pommel that made it possible for the grand duchess to set off under the eyes of Madame Choglokova seated demurely, and, once she was out of sight, switch the pommel, swing her leg over the horse’s back, and, trusting to the discretion of her groom, ride like a man. If the grooms were asked how the grand duchess rode, they could truthfully say, “On a woman’s saddle,” as the empress had commanded Catherine to ride. Because Catherine slipped her leg over only when she was sure she was not observed, and because she never boasted or even spoke about her invention, Elizabeth never knew. The grooms were happy to keep her secret; indeed, they found less risk in her riding astride than on an English sidesaddle, which they feared might lead to an accident for which they would be blamed. “To tell the truth,” Catherine said, “although I continually galloped with the hunt, the sport of hunting did not interest me, but I was passionately fond of riding. The more violent this exercise, the better I liked it, so that if a horse happened to break loose and gallop away, I was the one who chased it and brought it back.”

The empress, who as a young woman had been an expert rider, still loved the sport, although she had become too heavy to ride herself. On one occasion, she sent word to Catherine to invite the wife of the Saxon ambassador, Madame d’Arnim, to accompany her when she rode. This woman had boasted about her passion for riding and her excellence as a horsewoman; Elizabeth wanted to see how much of this was true. Catherine invited Madame d’Arnim to join her.

She was tall, between twenty-five and twenty-six, and she appeared to all of us rather awkward and clumsy; she did not seem to know what to do with her hat or her hands. I knew that the empress did not like me to ride astride like a man, so I used an English lady’s side-saddle. Just at the moment I was about to mount my horse, the empress arrived to watch us depart. As I was very nimble and accustomed to this exercise, I leaped easily into my saddle and let my skirt, which was split, fall to either side. The empress, seeing me mount with such agility, cried out in astonishment that it was impossible to mount more skillfully. She asked what kind of saddle I was using and, hearing that it was a woman’s saddle, she said, “One would swear that it is a man’s saddle.”

When it was Madame d’Arnim’s turn to mount, her skill was not conspicuous. She had brought her own horse, a large, heavy, ugly, black nag, which our servants claimed was one of her carriage horses. She needed a ladder to mount, this process being managed only with considerable fuss and the aid of several people. Once she was on top, her nag broke into a rough trot that bounced her considerably since she was neither firm in her seat nor in her stirrups and was forced to hold on to her saddle with her hand. I was told that the empress laughed heartily.

Once Madame d’Arnim had mounted, Catherine took the lead, overtaking Peter, who had started before, while their guest and her horse were left behind. Finally, Catherine said, “at some distance from the court, Madame Choglokova, following behind in a carriage, collected the lady who kept losing her hat and then her stirrups.”

The adventure was not over. It had rained that morning and the steps and porch of the stable house were covered with puddles of water. Dismounting, Catherine walked up the steps and across the exposed porch. Madame d’Arnim followed, but because Catherine was walking fast, she had to run. She lost her footing in a puddle, slipped, and fell flat. People burst out laughing. Madame d’Arnim rose to her feet in great embarrassment, blaming her fall on her new boots, worn that day for the first time, she said. The party returned from this excursion in a carriage and on the way Madame d’Arnim insisted on talking about the exceptional quality of her horse. “We bit our lips to keep from laughing,” Catherine said.

21

Dismissals at Court

DURING THE TURMOIL over the Kosheleva affair, Madame Krause, who despised both Choglokovs but especially the wife, had celebrated prematurely what she assumed was the impending fall of her rival. When the Choglokovs did not fall, retribution became inevitable. Madame Choglokova announced to Catherine that Madame Krause wished to retire and that the empress had found a replacement. Catherine had come to trust Madame Krause, and Peter was dependent on her for the toys she brought him at night. Nevertheless, Madame Krause departed, and the next day, Madame Praskovia Vladislavova, a tall woman of fifty, arrived to take her place. Catherine consulted Timothy Evreinov, who told her that the newcomer was an intelligent, spirited, well-mannered woman but was also said to be crafty, and that Catherine should not place too much confidence in her until she saw how Vladislavova behaved.

Vladislavova got off to a good start, doing everything possible to please Catherine. She was sociable, loved to talk, told stories with intelligence, and knew innumerable anecdotes of the past, including the histories of all the great Russian families since Peter the Great. “She was a living archive, that woman,” Catherine wrote later. “From her, I learned more about what had happened in Russia over the past hundred years than anywhere else. When I was bored, I got her talking which she was always ready to do. I discovered that she often disapproved of the Choglokovs, both their words and deeds. On the other hand, because Madame Vladislavova often went to the empress’s apartments and nobody knew why, everyone remained wary.”

Along with Madame Krause, Armand Lestocq, a court figure familiar to Catherine, disappeared. He had been Elizabeth’s personal physician since her adolescence, one of her trusted friends, a man who had advised her in seizing the throne, and who, some believed, was one of her former lovers. Catherine had first met Count Lestocq on the night she arrived in Moscow as a fourteen-year-old girl, when he had welcomed her and her mother at the the Golovin Palace. In the late summer of 1748, Lestocq was still in the highest favor when he married one of the empress’s maids of honor; Elizabeth and the entire court attended the wedding. Two months later, the newly married couple’s fortunes plunged.

The background lay in the constant efforts of Frederick of Prussia to undermine Bestuzhev’s pro-Austria policy by attempting to bribe people in the Russian court and government. Catherine’s first awareness that something was wrong came one evening when the court was assembled to play cards in the empress’s apartment. Suspecting nothing, Catherine went up to speak to Lestocq. In a low voice, he said, “Do not come near me! I am under suspicion.” Thinking he was joking, she asked what he meant. He replied, “I am not joking. I repeat to you very seriously that you must keep away from me, because I am a man under suspicion.” Catherine, seeing that he was abnormally flushed, assumed that he was drunk and walked away. This happened on a Friday. On Sunday morning, Timothy Evreinov said to her, “Last night, Count Lestocq and his wife were arrested and taken to the fortress as state criminals!” Subsequently, she learned that Lestocq had been interrogated by Count Bestuzhev and others; that he had been accused of sending coded letters to the Prussian ambassador, of taking a ten-thousand-ruble bribe from the king of Prussia, and of poisoning a man who might have testified against him. Catherine was also told that he had tried to take his own life in the fortress by starving himself to death. After eleven days, he had been forced to eat. He had confessed nothing and no incriminating evidence was found. Even so, all of his property was confiscated and he was exiled to Siberia. Lestocq’s disgrace was a triumph for Bestuzhev and a warning to anyone in Russia who showed any sign of favoring Prussia. Catherine, herself under Bestuzhev’s suspicious eye because she was German, never believed that Lestocq was guilty. Later, she wrote, “The empress did not have the courage to render justice to an innocent man; she feared the revenge such a person might take, and that is why, in her reign, no one, innocent or guilty, left the fortress except to go into exile.”

Catherine’s greatest concern was Peter. Although the couple stood together in resisting the Choglokovs, and he came to her regularly when he needed help, Catherine found him difficult to live with. Sometimes, it was a small thing. When they played cards, Peter liked to win. If Catherine won, Peter raged, and sometimes sulked for days. When she lost, he demanded payment immediately. Often, she said, “I would deliberately lose to avoid his tantrums.”

There were times when Peter made such a fool of himself that Catherine was deeply embarrassed. On occasion, the empress permitted the gentlemen of her court to have dinner with Peter and Catherine in their apartment. The young couple enjoyed these gatherings until Peter began to spoil them by his reckless behavior. One day, when General Buturlin was dining, he made Peter laugh so hard that, throwing himself back in his chair, the heir to the throne burst out in Russian, “This son of a bitch will make me die of laughter.” Catherine blushed, knowing that this expression would offend Buturlin. The general was silent. Subsequently, Buturlin reported the words to Elizabeth, who ordered her courtiers not to return to the company of such ill-mannered people. Buturlin never forgot Peter’s words. In 1767, when Catherine was on the throne, he asked her, “Do you remember the time at Tsarskoe Selo when the grand duke publicly called me a ‘son of a bitch’?” “This,” Catherine wrote later, “is the effect that can be produced by a stupid, carelessly spoken word—it is never forgotten.”

Sometimes, Peter’s behavior could not be excused. During the summer of 1748, Peter collected a pack of dogs in the country and began to train them himself. That autumn, he brought six of these dogs into the Winter Palace and installed them behind a wooden partition that separated the bedroom he shared with Catherine from a vestibule in the rear of the apartment. As the partition consisted only of a few boards to fence in the dogs, the stench of the makeshift kennel suffused their bedroom, forcing them to sleep in a fog of putrid air. When Catherine complained, Peter said he had no choice; the kennels had to be kept a secret and this was the only possible place. “So, in order not to spoil his pleasure, I had to put up with it,” she said.

Thereafter, she continued, Peter “had only two occupations, both of which tortured my eardrums from morning to night. One was to scrape his violin; the other was his effort to train his hunting dogs.” Violently cracking a whip and yelling huntsmen’s cries, Peter made the dogs run from one end of his two rooms to the other. Any dog that tired and fell behind was rigorously whipped, making it howl still more. “From seven in the morning until late at night,” Catherine complained, “I had to listen to either the ear-shattering sounds he drew from his violin or the horrible barking and howling of the dogs whom he cudgeled and thrashed.”

Sometimes, Peter’s cruelty seemed purely sadistic:

One day, hearing a poor dog cry out piteously for a long time, I opened the door. I saw the grand duke holding a dog by its collar, suspended in the air, while a servant held the same dog up by its tail. It was a poor little English King Charles Spaniel and the grand duke was beating it with all his strength with the heavy handle of a whip. I tried to intercede for the poor animal, but this only made him redouble his blows. I returned to my room in tears. After the dog, I was the most miserable creature in the world.

22

Moscow and the Country

IN DECEMBER 1748, Empress Elizabeth and her court traveled to Moscow, where she would remain for a year. There, before Lent in 1749, the empress was stricken by a mysterious stomach illness. It quickly worsened. Madame Vladislavova, who had connections in Elizabeth’s immediate entourage, whispered this information to Catherine, begging her not to reveal that she had told her. Without naming her informant, Catherine told Peter about his aunt’s illness. He was simultaneously pleased and frightened; he hated his aunt, but if she were to die, his own future seemed terrifying to him. What made it worse was that neither he nor Catherine dared to ask for more information. They decided to say nothing to anyone until the Choglokovs spoke to them about the illness. But the Choglokovs said nothing.

One night, Bestuzhev and his assistant, General Stepan Apraksin, came to the palace and spent many hours talking in the Choglokovs’ apartment. This seemed to imply that the empress’s illness was grave. Catherine begged Peter to remain calm. She told him that, although they were forbidden to leave their apartment, if Elizabeth were to die, she would arrange for Peter to escape from their rooms; she pointed out that their ground-floor windows were low enough to enable them to jump down into the street. She also told him that Count Zakhar Chernyshev, on whom she knew she could rely, was with his regiment in the city. Peter was reassured, and several days later, the empress’s health began to improve.

During this stressful time, Choglokov and his wife remained silent. The young couple did not speak of it either; had they dared to ask whether the empress was better, the Choglokovs would immediately have demanded to know who had told them that she was ill—and those named would immediately have been dismissed.

While Elizabeth was still in bed recovering, one of her maids of honor married. At the wedding banquet, Catherine sat next to Elizabeth’s close friend Countess Shuvalova. The countess unhesitatingly told Catherine that the empress was still so weak that she had not been able to appear at the wedding ceremony, but that, sitting up in bed, she had performed her traditional function of crowning the bride. As Countess Shuvalova was the first to speak openly about the illness, Catherine told her of her worry about the empress’s condition. Countess Shuvalova said that Her Majesty would be pleased to learn of this sympathy. Two mornings later, Madame Choglokova stormed into Catherine’s room and announced that the empress was angry with Peter and Catherine because of the lack of concern they had shown during her illness.

Catherine furiously told Madame Choglokova that the governess knew very well what the situation had been; that neither she nor her husband had spoken a word about the empress’s illness, and that, having been left in complete ignorance, she and her husband had been unable to show concern.

“How can you say you knew nothing about it?” Madame Choglokova asked. “Countess Shuvalova told the empress that you spoke to her at dinner about Her Majesty’s illness.”

Catherine retorted, “It is true that I spoke to her about it, because she told me that Her Majesty was still weak and could not appear in public. It was then that I asked her for details about the illness.”

Later, Catherine found the courage to tell Elizabeth that neither Choglokov nor his wife had informed her or her husband of the illness, which was why it had not been in their power to express concern. Elizabeth seemed to appreciate this and said, “I know that. We will not speak of it any further.” In retrospect, Catherine commented, “It seemed to me that the prestige and credibility of the Choglokovs had diminished.”

In the spring, the empress began visiting the countryside around Moscow with Catherine and Peter. At Perova, an estate belonging to Alexis Razumovsky, Catherine was seized by a violent headache. “It was the worst I have ever had in my life,” she said later. “The extreme pain gave me violent nausea. I vomited repeatedly, and every movement, even the sound of footsteps in my room, increased my pain. I remained in this state for twenty-four hours and then fell asleep. The following day, it was gone.”

From Perova, the imperial party went to a hunting ground belonging to Elizabeth forty miles from Moscow. Because there was no house, the imperial party camped in tents. The morning after their arrival, Catherine went to the empress’s tent and found her shouting at the man who administered the estate. She had come to hunt hares, she was saying, and there were no hares. She accused him of accepting bribes to permit neighboring noblemen to hunt on her estate; if there had been no such hunting, there would certainly be many hares. The man was silent, pale, and trembling. When Peter and Catherine approached to kiss her hand, she embraced them, and then quickly turned back to continue her diatribe. From her youth in the country, she said, she perfectly understood the administering of country estates; this enabled her to see every detail of the administrator’s incompetence. Her tirade lasted three-quarters of an hour. Finally, a servant approached, bringing a baby porcupine, which he presented to her in his hat. She went over to look at it, but the instant she saw the little animal, she screamed. She said that it looked like a mouse and fled to her tent. “She was mortally afraid of mice.” Catherine observed. “We saw no more of her that day.”

That summer, Catherine’s principal pleasure was riding:

I rode constantly all day; no one stopped me and I could break my neck if I wished. But because I had spent the spring and part of the summer constantly outdoors, I had become very tanned. The empress, seeing me, was shocked by my cracked, red face and told me that she would send me a rinse to get rid of my sunburn and make my face soft again. She sent me a bottle with a liquid composed of lemon juice, egg white and French brandy. In a few days my sunburn disappeared and since then I have always used this mixture.

One day, Catherine and Peter dined with Elizabeth in the empress’s tent. The empress sat at the end of a long table, Peter was on her right, Catherine was on her left, next to Catherine was Countess Shuvalova, and next to Peter was General Buturlin. Peter, with the help of General Buturlin—“himself no enemy of wine,” Catherine said—drank so much that he became completely drunk:

He did not know what he was saying or doing, slurred his words, made horrible grimaces, and cut ridiculous capers. He became such a disagreeable sight that my eyes filled with tears for in those days I always tried to conceal or disguise what was reprehensible in my husband. The empress was sensitive and grateful for my reaction and she got up and left the table.

Meanwhile, Catherine unknowingly attracted another admirer. Kyril Razumovsky, the younger brother of Elizabeth’s favorite, Alexis Razumovsky, was living on the other side of Moscow, but he came to visit Catherine and Peter every day.

He was very cheerful and we liked him very much. Since he was the brother of the favorite, the Choglokovs were glad to receive him. All summer long, his visits continued. He would spend the whole day with us, dine and sup with us, and after supper always returned to his estate; consequently, he traveled twenty-five or thirty miles every day. Twenty years later [in 1769, when Catherine was on the throne], I happened to ask him what could have made him come to share the boredom of our stay. He replied unhesitatingly, “Love.” “But my God,” I said, “who on earth could you have found to love at our place?” “Who?” he asked. “You, of course.” I burst out laughing because I had never suspected it. Truly, he was a fine man, very pleasant and far more intelligent than his brother, who nevertheless equaled him in beauty, and surpassed him in generosity and kindness.

In mid-September, as the weather grew colder, Catherine suffered a severe toothache. She developed a high fever, slipped into delirium, and was moved from the country back to Moscow. She remained in bed for ten days; every afternoon at the same time, the pain in her tooth returned. A few weeks later, Catherine was ill again, this time with a sore throat and another fever. Madame Vladislavova did what she could to distract her: “She sat by my bed and told me stories. One concerned a Princess Dolgoruky, a woman who used to get up often at night and go to the bedside of her sleeping daughter whom she idolized. She wanted to make sure that the daughter was asleep and had not died. Sometimes, to be absolutely certain, she shook the young woman hard and woke her up just to convince herself that slumber was not death.”

23

Choglokov Makes an Enemy and Peter Survives a Plot

IN MOSCOW at the beginning of 1749, it appeared to Catherine that Monsieur Choglokov remained intimate with the chancellor, Count Bestuzhev. They were constantly together, and, to hear Choglokov talk, “one would have thought that he was Bestuzhev’s closest adviser.” For Catherine, this was hard to believe, because “Count Bestuzhev had too much intelligence to allow himself to be guided by an arrogant fool like Choglokov.” In August, whatever intimacy existed abruptly ceased.

Catherine was certain that something Peter had said was responsible. After the affair of Maria Kosheleva’s pregnancy, Choglokov had become less flagrantly offensive to the young court. He knew that the empress continued to bear him a grudge; his relationship with his wife had deteriorated; and he sank into depression. One day, Peter, drunk, met Count Bestuzhev, himself tipsy. In this encounter, Peter complained to Bestuzhev that Choglokov was always rude to him. Bestuzhev replied, “Choglokov is a conceited fool with a swollen head, but leave it in my hands. I will see to it.” When Peter told Catherine about this conversation, she warned him that if Choglokov heard what Bestuzhev had said, he would never forgive the chancellor. Nevertheless, Peter decided that he could win over Choglokov by confiding in him how he had been described by Bestuzhev. The opportunity soon presented itself.

Soon after, Bestuzhev invited Choglokov to dinner. Choglokov grimly accepted, but remained silent during the meal. Bestuzhev, himself half-drunk after dinner, tried to talk to his guest, but found him unapproachable. Bestuzhev lost his temper and the conversation became heated. Choglokov reproached Bestuzhev for having criticized him to Peter. Bestuzhev rebuked Choglokov for his adventure with Maria Kosheleva and reminded his guest of the support he, Bestuzhev, had given him in surviving this scandal. Choglokov, the last person to listen to anything critical about himself, flew into another rage and decided that he had been unforgivably insulted. General Stepan Apraksin, Bestuzhev’s lieutenant, who was present, tried to make peace, but Choglokov became even more belligerent. Feeling that his services were uniquely valuable; that, whatever he did, everyone would run after him, he swore that he would never again set foot in Bestuzhev’s house. From that day on, Choglokov and Bestuzhev were bitter enemies.

With his jailors quarreling, Peter should have been cheerful. Instead, during the autumn of 1749, Catherine found him in a state of intense anxiety. He had stopped training his hunting dogs and he came into her room many times a day with a distracted, even frightened, look. “As he could never keep what was bothering him to himself for long, and had no one to confide in but me, I waited patiently for him to tell what the problem was. At last, he told me and I found the matter more serious than I had supposed.”

Through the summer in and around Moscow, Peter had spent most of his time hunting. Choglokov had acquired two packs of dogs, one of Russian dogs, the other of foreign dogs. Choglokov managed the Russian pack and Peter assumed responsibility for the foreign pack. He took charge in minute detail, going frequently to his pack’s kennel or having his huntsmen come to talk to him about the pack’s condition and needs. Peter became intimate with these men, eating and drinking as well as hunting with them.

At this time, the Butirsky Regiment was stationed in Moscow. In this regiment there was a headstrong lieutenant named Yakov Baturin, a gambler, deeply in debt. Peter’s huntsmen lived near the regimental camp. One day, one of the huntsmen told Peter that he had met an officer who expressed great devotion for the grand duke and who had said that, with the exception of the senior officers, his entire regiment agreed with him. Peter, flattered, wanted more details. Eventually, Baturin asked the huntsman to arrange a meeting between himself and the grand duke during a hunt. Unwilling at first, Peter eventually agreed. On the day arranged, Baturin waited in an isolated spot in the forest. When Peter appeared on horseback, Baturin fell to his knees, swearing to recognize no other master and to do whatever the grand duke commanded. Peter later told Catherine that on hearing this oath, he was alarmed and, fearing connection to any sort of plot, had spurred his horse, leaving the other man on his knees in the woods. He also said that none of the huntsmen had heard what Baturin had said. Since then, Peter claimed, he and his huntsmen had had no contact with Baturin. Peter had since learned that Baturin had been arrested for interrogation. Peter feared that his huntsman or even he himself might have been compromised. His fear increased when a number of the huntsmen were, in fact, arrested.

Catherine attempted to calm her husband, telling him that if he had not entered into any discussion beyond what he had told her, then guilty as Baturin might be, she did not believe that anyone could find much to criticize in what he, Peter, had done except the imprudence of speaking to an unknown man in the woods. She could not say whether her husband was telling the truth; in fact, she believed that he was playing down the extent of the discussions. Sometime later, Peter came to tell her that some of his huntsmen had been released and that they had told him that no one had mentioned his name. This reassured him, and there was no more discussion of the matter. Baturin was put on the rack and found guilty. Catherine learned later that he had admitted to planning to kill the empress, set fire to the palace, and, amid this confusion, place the grand duke on the throne. He was sentenced to spend the rest of his life in the Schlüsselburg Fortress. In 1770, during Catherine’s reign, he tried to escape, was recaptured, and was sent to the Kamchatka Peninsula, on the Pacific. He escaped again and eventually was killed in a petty fracas on the island of Formosa.

That autumn, Catherine developed another severe toothache accompanied by another high fever. Her bedroom adjoined Peter’s apartment, and she suffered from the racket made by his violin and his dogs. “He would not have sacrificed these amusements even if he had known they were killing me.” she said. “I therefore succeeded in getting Madame Choglokova’s consent to having my bed moved out of reach of the dreadful sounds. The [new] room had windows on three sides and there were fierce drafts but they were preferable to my husband’s noise.”

On December 15, 1749, the court’s year in Moscow came to an end and Catherine and Peter left for St. Petersburg, traveling in an open sleigh. During the journey, Catherine’s toothache returned. Despite her pain, Peter would not agree to have the sleigh closed. Instead, grudgingly, he allowed her to draw a little curtain of green taffeta to protect herself from the icy wind blowing directly into her face. When they finally reached Tsarskoe Selo, on the outskirts of St. Petersburg, she was in agony. As soon as she arrived, Catherine sent for the empress’s chief physician, Dr. Boerhave, and begged him to extract the tooth that had been tormenting her for five months. With extreme reluctance, Boerhave consented. He sent for the French surgeon Monsieur Guyon to do the extraction. Catherine sat on the floor with Boerhave on her right and Choglokov on her left, holding her hands. Then, Guyon came from behind, reached around, and twisted the tooth with his pliers. As he wrenched and pulled, Catherine felt that her jawbone was breaking. “I have never in my life felt anything like the pain of that moment,” she said. Instantly, Boerhave shouted at Guyon, “Clumsy fool!” and having been handed the tooth, he said, “It is just as I feared. This is why I did not want this tooth to be pulled.” Guyon, in pulling the tooth, “had pulled out a piece of my lower jaw, to which the tooth had been attached. At this moment, the empress came into the room and, seeing me suffer so terribly, she wept. I was put to bed and was in great pain for four weeks, not leaving my room until the middle of January. Even then, on the lower part of my cheek, I still had in the form of blue and yellow bruises, the imprint of Guyon’s five fingers.”

24

A Bath Before Easter and a Coachman’s Whip

THE TRANSFER OF THE COURT to Moscow for a year left St. Petersburg socially and culturally as well as politically deserted. Because there were so few horses and almost no carriages in the city, grass grew in the streets. The truth was that most residents of Peter the Great’s new capital on the Baltic lived there by necessity, not choice. Once back in Moscow during one of Peter’s daughter’s yearlong visits, the old families of the nobility were reluctant to leave. Moscow was the place their ancestors had lived for generations, and they cherished their palaces and homes in the old capital. When the time came to return to the new city rising from a northern marsh, many courtiers rushed to ask for leaves of absence from court—for a year, six months, or even a few weeks—in order to remain behind. Government officials did the same, and when they feared they were not succeeding, there came a torrent of illnesses, pretended or real, followed by a stream of lawsuits and other business affairs, all supposedly indispensable, which could be settled only in Moscow. The return to St. Petersburg, therefore, was gradual, and it took months for the entire court to drag itself back.

Elizabeth, Peter, and Catherine were among the first to return. They found the city practically empty and those who were there lonely and bored. In this dreary setting, the Choglokovs invited Catherine and Peter every afternoon to play cards. They included the Princess of Courland, the daughter of the Protestant Duke Ernst Johann Biron, the former lover and minister of Empress Anne. On taking the throne, Empress Elizabeth had recalled Biron from Siberia, where he had been exiled during the regency of Anna, the mother of the child tsar Ivan VI. Elizabeth did not want Biron completely reinstated, however; she preferred not to see him. Rather than bring him back to St. Petersburg or Moscow, Elizabeth had ordered him and his family to live in the city of Yaroslavl on the Volga.

The Princess of Courland was twenty-five years old. She was not handsome—indeed, she was short and hunchbacked—but she had, according to Catherine, “very beautiful eyes, fine chestnut brown hair, and great intelligence.” Her father and mother were not fond of her, and the princess complained that she was mistreated at home. One day in Yaroslavl, she ran away to the household of Madame Pushkina, wife of the governor of Yaroslavl, explaining that her parents had refused her to permit her to embrace the Orthodox faith. Madame Pushkina brought the princess to Moscow and introduced her to the empress. Elizabeth encouraged the young woman, stood as godmother at her conversion to Orthodoxy, and gave her an apartment among her maids of honor. Monsieur Choglokov cultivated the princess because in his youth, when her father was in power, her older brother had boosted his career by promoting him into the Horse Guards.

Having made her way into the company of the young court and playing cards for hours every day with Peter and Catherine, the Princess of Courland conducted herself with discretion. She spoke to each person in a manner carefully designed to please that person, and, Catherine said, “her wit made one forget the disagreeable nature of her figure.” In Peter’s eyes, she had the additional merit of being German, not Russian. She preferred speaking German, and she and Peter spoke only that language together, excluding the people around them. This made her even more attractive to him, and he began to pay her special attention. When she dined alone, he sent her wine from his table; when he acquired some new grenadier’s hat or military shoulder belt, he sent them for her to admire. None of this was done in secret. “The Princess of Courland cultivated a faultless attitude towards me and never for one moment forgot herself,” said Catherine. “Therefore, this relationship continued.”

The spring of 1750 was unusually mild. When Peter, Catherine, and their young court—now including the Princess of Courland—went to Tsarskoe Selo on March 17, it was so warm that the snow had melted and the carriages stirred up clouds of dust from the road. In this rural setting, the group amused itself by riding and hunting during the day and playing cards in the evenings. Peter openly displayed his interest in the Princess of Courland; he was never more than a step away from her. Eventually, with this relationship blossoming before her eyes, Catherine’s vanity was stung. Despite her previous dismissal of jealousy as undignified and unproductive, she admitted that she did not like “seeing myself slighted for the sake of this deformed little figure who was preferred over me.” One evening, she could no longer control her feelings. Pleading a headache, she rose and left the room. In her bedroom, Madame Vladislavova, who had witnessed Peter’s behavior, told her that “everyone was shocked and disgusted that this little hunchback was preferred over me. With tears in my eyes, I replied, ‘What can I do?’ ” Madame Vladislavova criticized Peter for his bad taste in women and his treatment of Catherine. Her tirade, although uttered for Catherine’s benefit, made Catherine weep. She went to bed and had just fallen asleep when Peter arrived, drunk. He woke her and began to pour out a description of the qualities of his new favorite. Catherine, hoping to escape this slurred monologue, pretended to fall back asleep. Peter began to shout. When she gave no sign of listening, he clenched his fist and hit her hard, twice. Then he lay down beside her, turned his back to her, and fell asleep. In the morning, Peter had either forgotten or was ashamed of what he had done; he did not mention it. To avoid further trouble, Catherine pretended that nothing had happened.

As Lent approached, Peter and Madame Choglokova collided over taking a bath. Russian religious tradition required that in the first week of Lent, religious believers bathe in preparation for communion; for most of the population, public baths were communal and men and women bathed naked together. Catherine was prepared to bathe at the house of the Choglokovs, and the evening before she was to do so, Madame Choglokova came and told Peter that it would please the empress if he, too, would go to the baths. Peter, who disliked all Russian customs, especially bathing, refused. He had never been to a communal bath before, he said; further, the bath was a laughable ceremony to which he attached no importance. Madame Choglokova told him that he would be disobeying a command of Her Imperial Majesty. Peter declared that whether he went to the bath or not had nothing to do with the respect he owed the empress, and that he wondered how she, Madame Choglokova, dared say that kind of thing to him; he ought not be required to do what was repugnant to his nature and would be dangerous to his health. Madame Choglokova retorted that the empress would punish his disobedience. At this, Peter became angrier and said, “I would like to see what she can do to me. I am not a child any more.” Madame Choglokova threatened that the empress would send him to the fortress. Peter asked whether the governess was saying this on her own or in the name of the empress. Then, striding up and down the room, he said that he would never have believed that he, a Duke of Holstein, a sovereign prince, would be exposed to such shameful treatment; if the empress were not satisfied with him, she needed only to release him to go back to his own country. Madame Choglokova continued to shout, the two hurled insults back and forth, and, said Catherine, “both took leave of their senses.” Finally, Madame Choglokova departed, announcing that she was on her way to report this conversation to the empress, word for word.

The married couple did not know what happened next, but when Madame Choglokova returned, the subject of conversation had entirely changed. The governess now informed them that the empress, reverting to her primary grievance against them as a couple, was furious that they had produced no children and demanded to know who was to blame. To determine this, she was sending a midwife to examine Catherine and a doctor to examine Peter. Later, hearing this, Madame Vladislavova asked, “How can you be at fault for having no children when you are still a virgin? Her Majesty should hold her nephew responsible.”

In 1750, during the last week of Lent, Peter was in his room one afternoon, cracking an enormous coachman’s whip. He snapped it right and left with sweeping strokes, gleefully making his servants run from one corner of the room to another. Then, somehow, he managed to slash himself severely on the cheek. The cut extended down the left side of his face and was bleeding profusely. Peter was frightened, fearing that his bloody cheek would make it impossible for him to appear in public on Easter and that if the empress learned the cause, he would be punished. He rushed to Catherine for help.

Seeing his cheek, she gasped, “My God, what happened?” He told her. She thought for a moment and then said, “I’ll try to help you. First, go back to your room and try not let anyone see your cheek. I will come as soon as I have what I need. I hope no one will notice what has happened.” She remembered that a few years before, when she had fallen in the garden at Peterhof and badly scratched her cheek, Monsieur Guyon had covered the scratch with an ointment of white lead used for burns. It had worked effectively and she had continued appearing in public without anyone ever noticing. She sent for this salve and took it to her husband, where she treated his cheek so well that in the mirror he himself could see nothing.

The following day, as they took communion with the empress in the court chapel, a ray of sunlight happened to fall on Peter’s cheek. Monsieur Choglokov noticed and came up, saying to the grand duke, “Wipe your cheek. There is some ointment on it.” Quickly, as if in jest, Catherine said to Peter, “And I, who am your wife, forbid you to wipe it.” Then Peter turned to Choglokov and said, “You see how these women treat us. We dare not even wipe our faces when they do not like it.” Choglokov laughed, nodded, and walked away. Peter was grateful to Catherine for supplying the ointment and for her presence of mind in fending off Choglokov, who never learned what had happened.

25

Oysters and an Actor

ON EASTER SATURDAY, 1750, Catherine went to bed at five in the afternoon in order to be up for the traditional Orthodox service, which began later that night. Before she could fall asleep, Peter came running in and told her to get up and come to eat some fresh oysters that had just arrived from Holstein. It was a double pleasure for him: he loved oysters, and these had been sent to him from his native land. Catherine knew that if she did not get up, he would be offended and a quarrel would follow; she rose and went with him. She ate a dozen oysters and then was permitted to go back to bed while he remained, eating more oysters. Indeed, Catherine noted, Peter was pleased that she did not eat too many because this left more for him. Before midnight, she rose again, dressed, and went to the Easter Mass, but in the middle of the long choral service, she was seized with violent stomach cramps. She went back to bed and spent the first two days of Easter suffering from diarrhea, which was finally subdued with doses of rhubarb. Peter had not been affected.

The empress had also left the Easter Mass with a stomach ailment. Gossip ascribed her indisposition not to something she ate but to anxiety over having to maneuver among four different men: one was Alexis Razumovsky, another was Ivan Shuvalov, the third was a chorister named Kachenevski, and the fourth a newly promoted cadet named Beketov.

While the empress and court were away, Prince Yusupov, a senator and the chief of the Cadet Corps, had arranged that his cadets perform Russian and French plays. The lines were pronounced as badly as the scenes were acted and the plays were mangled. Nevertheless, on her return to St. Petersburg, the empress ordered these young men to perform at court. Costumes were made for them in her own favorite colors and then decorated with her own jewels. It was noticed that the leading man, a handsome youth of nineteen, was the best dressed and most adorned. Outside the theater, he was seen wearing diamond buckles, rings, watches, and elegant lace. This was Nikita Beketov.

Beketov’s career as an actor and in the Cadet Corps ended quickly. Count Razumovksy made him his adjutant, which gave the former cadet the army rank of captain. At this, the court concluded that if Razumovsky had taken Beketov under his protection, it was to counter the imperial interest being shown Ivan Shuvalov. No one at court was more disturbed by Beketov’s rise, however, than Catherine’s maid of honor, Princess Anna Gagarina, who was no longer young and was eager to marry. Although she was not beautiful, she was intelligent and possessed her own large property. Unfortunately, this was the second time her choice had fallen on a man who would subsequently be drawn into the close orbit of the empress. The first had been Ivan Shuvalov, who reportedly had been ready to marry Princess Gagarina when the empress intervened. Now the same thing appeared to be happening with Beketov.

The court waited to see whether Shuvalov or Beketov would triumph. Beketov was gaining, when, on impulse, he decided to invite the empress’s choir boys, whose voices he admired, to come to his house. He developed an affection for the boys, invited them often, and composed songs for them to sing. Some courtiers, knowing the empress’s strong dislike for affection between males, gave these proceedings a sexual interpretation. Beketov, walking with the boys in his garden, was unaware that he was incriminating himself. He went down with a severe fever and, in his delirium, raved about his love for Elizabeth. No one knew what to think. When Beketov recovered his health, he found himself in disgrace and withdrew from court.

Despite her personal troubles with Peter, Catherine’s position in Russia was based on her marriage; therefore, when he was in difficulty, she usually tried to help him. One constant concern to Peter was Holstein, the hereditary duchy of which he was the reigning duke. Catherine found his feelings about his native land exaggerated, even foolish, but she never doubted their strength. In her Memoirs, she wrote:

The grand duke had an extraordinary passion for the little corner of the earth where he was born. It constantly occupied his mind though he had left it behind at the age of thirteen; his imagination became heated whenever he spoke of it, and, as none of the people around him had ever set foot in what was, by his account, a marvelous paradise, day after day he told us fantastical stories about it which almost put us to sleep.

Peter’s attachment to his little duchy became a diplomatic issue involving Catherine in the fall of 1750 when a Danish diplomat, Count Lynar, arrived in St. Petersburg to negotiate the exchange of Holstein for the principality of Oldenburg, a territory under Danish control on the North Sea coast. Count Bestuzhev urgently desired this exchange in order to remove an obstacle to the alliance he was seeking between Russia and Denmark. To Bestuzhev, Peter’s feelings about his duchy counted for nothing.

Once Count Lynar announced his mission, Bestuzhev summoned Baron Johan Pechlin, Peter’s minister for Holstein. Pechlin, short, fat, shrewd, and possessing Bestuzhev’s confidence, was empowered to open negotiations with Lynar. To reassure his nominal master, Grand Duke Peter, Pechlin told him that to listen was not to negotiate, that negotiation was far from acceptance, and that Peter would always retain the power to break off the discussions whenever he wished. Peter allowed Pechlin to begin, but he counted on Catherine for advice.

I listened to talk of these negotiations with great anxiety and I tried to thwart them as best I could. He had been advised to keep it a close secret, especially around women. That remark, of course, was directed at me, but they were deceived because my husband was always eager to tell me everything he knew. The further negotiations advanced, the more they tried to present everything to the grand duke in a favorable light. I often found him delighted by the prospect of what he would acquire, only to find him later bitterly regretting what he was going to have to give up. When he was seen to be hesitating, the conferences were slowed; they were renewed only after some new temptation had been devised to make things appear more appealing to him. But my husband did not know what to do.

The Austrian minister to Russia at this time was Count de Bernis, an intelligent, amiable man of fifty, respected by both Catherine and Peter. “If this man or someone like him had been placed in the grand duke’s service, it would have resulted in great good,” she wrote. Peter agreed and decided to consult Bernis about the negotiations. Unwilling to speak to the ambassador himself, he asked Catherine to do it for him. She was willing and, at the next masked ball, she approached the count. She spoke frankly, admitting her youth, lack of experience, and poor understanding of affairs of state. Nevertheless, she declared, it appeared to her that the affairs of Holstein were not as desperate as people were saying. Moreover, concerning the exchange itself, this appeared to be far more profitable for Russia than for the grand duke personally. Certainly, she admitted, as heir to the Russian throne, he must concern himself with the interests of the Russian empire. And, at some point, if these interests made it absolutely necessary to abandon Holstein in order to terminate the endless disputes with Denmark, the grand duke would consent. At present, however, the whole affair had such an air of intrigue about it that if it succeeded, it would make the grand duke appear so weak that he might never recover in the public eye. He loved Holstein, yet, despite this, the negotiators persisted in trying to persuade him to exchange it, without him really knowing why.

Count de Bernis listened and replied, “As ambassador, I have no instructions on this matter, but as Count de Bernis, I think you are right.” Peter told her later that the ambassador had said to him, “All I can say to you is that I believe your wife is right and that you will do well to listen to her.” As a result, Peter cooled toward these negotiations, and eventually the proposal for an exchange of territories was dropped. And in her first venture into international diplomacy, Catherine had succeeded in besting Count Bestuzhev

26

Reading, Dancing, and a Betrayal

PETER’S BEHAVIOR was always unpredictable. For an entire winter, he immersed himself in plans to build a country house near Oranienbaum in the style of a Capuchin monastery. There, he, Catherine, and their court would dress in brown robes as Capuchin friars; each person would have a personal donkey and take turns leading the animal to carry water and bring provisions to the “monastery.” The more details he produced, the more excited he became over his creation. To please him, Catherine made pencil sketches of the building and changed architectural features every day. These conversations left her exhausted. His talk was “of a dullness,” she said, “that I have never seen equaled. When he left me, the most boring book seemed delightful.”

Books were her refuge. Having set herself to learn the Russian language, she read every Russian book she could find. But French was the language she preferred, and she read French books indiscriminately, picking up whatever her ladies-in-waiting happened to be reading. She always kept a book in her room and carried another in her pocket. She discovered the letters of Madame de Sévigné describing life at the court of Louis XIV. When a General History of Germany by Father Barre, recently published in France in ten volumes, arrived in Russia, Catherine read a volume every week. She acquired the Dictionnaire Historique et Critique by the French philosopher Pierre Bayle, a seventeenth-century philosophical freethinker and precursor of Montesquieu and Voltaire; Catherine read it from beginning to end. Gradually, guided by her own curiosity, she was acquiring a superior education.

As she grew intellectually, Catherine was also becoming perceived as more physically attractive. “I had a slender waist; all I lacked was a little flesh for I was very thin. I liked to go without powder, for my hair was of an exceedingly fine brown, very thick and strong.” She had admirers. For a while, the most persistent of these was none other than Nicholas Choglokov, who, after his adventure with Mlle Kosheleva, became infatuated with the grand duchess. Catherine noticed him smiling and nodding foolishly at her. His attention was abhorrent to her. “He was blond and foppish, very fat, and as thick in mind as in body. He was universally hated; everyone considered him a disagreeable toad. I managed to evade all of his attentions, without ever failing to be polite to him. This was perfectly clear to his wife who was grateful to me.”

Catherine’s charms were most on display when she danced. She chose what she wore carefully. If a gown attracted everyone’s praise, she never wore it again; her rule was that if it made a striking impression the first time, it could only make a lesser one thereafter. At private court balls, she dressed as simply as possible. This pleased the empress, who did not like women to appear overdressed on these occasions. When women were ordered to come costumed as men, Catherine appeared in magnificent, richly embroidered outfits. This, too, seemed to please Elizabeth.

Dressing for a particular one of these masked balls at which the court women would be competing in splendor and elegance, Catherine decided to wear only a bodice of rough white cloth and a skirt of the same material over a small hoop. Her long, thick hair was curled and tied in a simple ponytail with a white ribbon. She wore a single rose in her hair and put a ruff of white gauze around her neck, with cuffs and a little apron of the same material. When she entered the hall, she walked up to the empress. “Good God, what modesty!” Elizabeth said approvingly. In high spirits when she left the empress, she danced every dance. “In my life,” she wrote later, “I never remember being so highly praised by everyone as on that night. To tell the truth, I have never believed myself to be beautiful, but I had charm and I knew how to please and I think this was my strength.”

It was during the masquerades and balls of that winter, 1750–51, that the former gentleman-of-the-bedchamber Count Zakhar Chernyshev, now a colonel in the army, returned to St. Petersburg after a five-year absence. When he had departed, Catherine was an adolescent of sixteen; now she was a woman of twenty-one.

I was very glad to see him. For his part, he did not miss a single opportunity to give me signs of his affectionate feelings. I had to decide what interpretation to give to his attentions. He started by telling me that he found me much more beautiful. This was the first time in my life that anyone had said anything like this to me and I found it pleasing. I was simple enough to believe him.

At every ball, Chernyshev made this kind of remark. One day, Princess Gagarina, a lady-in-waiting, brought Catherine a printed billet-doux, a little slip of paper containing sentimental verses. It was from Chernyshev. The following day, Catherine received another envelope from Chernyshev, but this time she found inside a note with lines written in his own hand. At the next masquerade, while dancing with her, he said that he had a thousand things to say to her that he could not put on paper. He begged her to give him a brief audience in her room. She told him that this was impossible, that her chambers were inaccessible. He told her that he would disguise himself as a servant if necessary. She refused. “And so,” Catherine wrote later, “things went no further than these notes stuffed into envelopes.” At the end of the monthlong Carnival, Count Chernyshev returned to his regiment.

During these years when she was in her early twenties, Catherine was living the life of a royal Cinderella. On summer days, she galloped over the meadowlands and shot ducks in the marshes along the Gulf of Finland. Winter nights, she danced as the belle of court balls, exchanging whispered confidences and receiving romantic notes from attentive young men. These moments were elements of her dream world. The reality of her daily life was different: it was filled with frustration, rebuff, and denial.

One shock occurred on the day Madame Choglokova told her that the empress had just dismissed Timothy Evreinov, her chamber valet and friend. There had been a quarrel involving Evreinov and a man who served coffee to Catherine and Peter. During this argument, Peter had walked in unexpectedly and overheard the insults the two men were shouting at each other. Evreinov’s antagonist then had gone and complained to Monsieur Choglokov that, without consideration for the presence of the heir to the throne, Evreinov had covered him with abuse. Choglokov rushed to report the incident to the empress, who instantly dismissed both men from court. “The truth,” Catherine reported, “is that both Evreinov and the other man were deeply devoted to us.” In Evreinov’s place, the empress placed a man named Vasily Shkurin.

Soon afterward, Catherine and Madame Choglokova clashed over a matter in which Shkurin played a critical role. From Paris, Princess Johanna, Catherine’s mother, had sent her daughter two pieces of beautiful cloth. Catherine was admiring these fabrics in her dressing room in the presence of Shkurin when she let slip that they were so beautiful that she was tempted to present them as a gift to the empress. She waited for an opportunity to speak to the monarch; she wanted the fabric to be a personal present and she wanted to hand it to Elizabeth herself. She specifically forbade Shkurin to repeat to anyone what she had said in his hearing. He immediately ran to Madame Choglokova to report what he had heard. A few days later, the governess came to Catherine and said that the empress thanked her for the fabrics; that Elizabeth was keeping one and sending the other back to the grand duchess to keep. Catherine was dumbfounded. “How is this, Madame Choglokova?” she asked. Madame Choglokova replied that she had been told that Catherine meant the fabrics to go to the empress and so she had brought them to her. Catherine, stammering so badly that she could hardly speak, managed to tell Madame Choglokova that she had looked forward to presenting the empress with these fabrics herself. She reminded Madame Choglokova that the governess could not possibly have known her intentions because she had not spoken of them to her, and said that if Madame Choglokova was aware of what she planned, it was only from the mouth of a treacherous servant. Madame Choglokova replied that Catherine knew that she was not permitted to speak directly to the empress and that she also knew that her servants had orders to report to her, Madame Choglokova, everything Catherine said in their presence. Consequently, her servant had only done his duty, and she hers by bringing the fabrics to the empress. In short, Madame Choglokova declared, everything had been done according to the rules. Catherine was unable to reply; her fury left her speechless.

When Madame Choglokova departed, Catherine rushed to the little antechamber where Shkurin spent his mornings. Finding him there, she slapped him with all her strength and told him that he was an ungrateful traitor for having dared to report to Madame Choglokova what she had forbidden him to speak about. She reminded him that she had showered him with gifts; still he had betrayed her. Shkurin fell to his knees, begging forgiveness. Catherine was touched by his remorse and told him that his future conduct would determine her treatment of him. In the days that followed, Catherine complained loudly to everyone about Madame Choglokova’s behavior, intending that the matter reach the empress’s ears. Apparently it did and, eventually, when Elizabeth saw the grand duchess, the empress thanked her for her present.

*Curiously, a similar “little imperfection” afflicted the sixteen-year-old French dauphin, the future King Louis XVI, at the time of his marriage in 1770 to the fifteen-year-old Austrian archduchess Marie Antoinette. This continued to be the case for the next seven years. Finally, in 1777, Louis was circumcised and a son was conceived.