Catherine the Great

27

Saltykov

IN SEPTEMBER 1751, the empress assigned three young noblemen as gentlemen-in-waiting to Grand Duke Peter. One, Lev Naryshkin, came from the family that had produced Natalya Naryshkina, the mother of Peter the Great. Lev himself was an amiable, quick-witted wag whom everybody liked and no one took seriously; Catherine described him as someone who made her laugh more than anyone else in her life.

He was a born clown and if not of noble birth, he could have made a fortune as a comic actor. He was witty and had heard all the gossip. He had a wide superficial knowledge of almost everything and was able to talk continuously in technical terms on any given art or science for a quarter of an hour. At the end, neither he nor anyone could make any sense of the stream of words flowing from his mouth and everyone simply burst out laughing.

The other two were the Saltykov brothers, sons of one of the oldest and noblest families in Russia. Their father was an aide-de-camp to the empress; their mother was cherished by the empress for her devotion during Elizabeth’s seizure of the throne in 1740. Peter, the older of the brothers, was a lout whom Catherine describes as “a fool in every sense of the word. He had the stupidest face I have ever seen: a pair of big, staring eyes, a flat nose, and a gaping mouth, always half open. He was a notorious gossip and, as such, on excellent terms with the Choglokovs.”

The second Saltykov brother, Sergei, was entirely different. Sergei was handsome and ruthless; a man who was making the seduction of women his life’s purpose. He was dark-complexioned, with black eyes, of medium height, and muscular yet graceful. Constantly on the lookout for a new triumph, he always went straight to work, employing charm, promises, and persistence, in whatever combination worked. Obstacles only increased his determination. When he first noticed Catherine, he was twenty-six years old and had been married for two years to one of the empress’s ladies-in-waiting, Matriona Balk. This marriage had resulted from impulse: he had seen her on a high-flying swing at Tsarskoe Selo and her skirt, flared by the breeze, had exposed her ankles; he had proposed the following day. Now he was tired of Matriona and ready for something new. He observed how blatantly Catherine was ignored by her husband, and how obviously bored she was by the company around her. The fact that the grand duchess was closely guarded added allure; her marriage to the grand duke made the prize more glittering; and the pervasive rumor that Catherine was still a virgin made the challenge irresistible.

Catherine noticed that the young man quickly made himself an intimate of the Choglokovs. She thought this strange: “As these people were neither clever nor amiable, Saltykov must have had some secret purpose in these attentions. Certainly no man with any common sense would have been able to listen to these two arrogant, egotistical fools talking nonsense all day without having some ulterior motive.” Maria Choglokova was pregnant again and kept mostly to her room. She asked the grand duchess to visit. Catherine went and usually found Sergei Saltykov, Lev Naryshkin, and others present, along with Nicholas Choglokov. During these afternoons and evenings, Saltykov devised an ingenious way to keep Monsieur Choglokov occupied. He had discovered that this stolid, unimaginative man had a talent for writing simple poetic lyrics. Saltykov praised these lines extravagantly and asked to hear more. Thereafter, whenever the group wanted to rid itself of Choglokov’s attention, Saltykov suggested a theme and begged the flattered versifier to compose. Choglokov then would hurry to a corner of the room, sit down by the stove, and begin to write. Once started, he became so absorbed in his work that he would not rise from his seat the entire evening. His lyrics were pronounced wonderful and charming, and he kept writing new ones. Lev Naryshkin set these lyrics to music on the clavichord and sang them with him. Nobody listened and everyone else in the room was free to carry on uninterrupted conversation.

It was in this atmosphere of camaraderie and jolly skullduggery that Sergei Saltykov began his campaign. One evening, he began whispering to Catherine about love. She listened with a mixture of alarm and delight. She did not reply but did not discourage him. He persisted, and the next time she asked him tentatively what he wanted from her. He described the state of bliss he wanted to share with her. She interrupted: “And your wife, whom you married for love only two years ago? What will she say?” With a shrug, Saltykov tossed Matriona overboard. “All that glitters is not gold,” he replied, saying that he was paying a high price now for a moment of infatuation. His feelings for Catherine, he assured her, were deeper, more permanent, cast in a more precious metal.

Later, Catherine described the path along which she was being led:

He was twenty-six years old and, by birth and many other qualities, a distinguished gentleman. He knew how to conceal his faults, the greatest of which were a love of intrigue and lack of principles. These failings were not clear to me at the time. I saw him almost every day, always in the presence of the court and I made no change in my behavior. I treated him as I treated everyone else.

At first, she fended him off. She told herself that the emotion she was feeling was pity. How sad it was that this handsome young man, caught up in a bad marriage, now was offering to risk everything for her, knowing that she was inaccessible, that she was a grand duchess and the wife of the heir to the throne.

Unfortunately, I could not help listening to him. He was handsome as the dawn and certainly had no equal on this score at the Imperial Court, and still less at ours. Nor was he lacking in that polish of knowledge, manners, and style which are the qualities of society, especially of the court.

She saw him every day. She suggested that he was wasting his time. “How do you know that my heart does not belong to someone else?” she asked. She was a poor actress, and Saltykov, knowing the dialogue of lovemaking, took none of her objections seriously. Later, all Catherine could say was, “I held out all of the spring and part of the summer.”

On a summer day in 1752, Choglokov invited Catherine, Peter, and their young court to a hunting party on his island in the Neva River. On arriving, most of the party mounted horses and rode off after the dogs in pursuit of hares. Saltykov waited until the others were out of sight and then rode up alongside Catherine, and, as she put it, “began again on his favorite subject.” Here, now without having to lower his voice, he described the pleasures of a secret love affair. Catherine remained silent. He begged her to allow him at least to hope that he had a chance. She managed to retort that he could hope whatever he pleased; she could not control his thoughts. He compared himself to other young men at court and asked whether he was not the one she preferred. Or, if not, who was it? She shook her head wordlessly but said later, “I had to admit that he pleased me.” After an hour and a half of this minuet, an old routine for Saltykov, Catherine told him to leave because such a lengthy private conversation would arouse suspicions. Saltykov said he would not go until she consented. “Yes, yes, but go away,” she replied. “It is settled, then. I have your word,” he said and spurred his horse. She called after him, “No, no!” “Yes, yes!” he shouted and galloped away.

That evening, the hunting party returned to Choglokov’s house on the island for supper. During the meal, a strong westerly gale pushed the sea from the Gulf of Finland into the Neva River delta and soon the entire, low-lying island was covered by several feet of water. Choglokov’s guests were marooned in his house until three in the morning. Saltykov used this time to repeat to Catherine that heaven itself was favoring his suit because the storm was permitting him to go on seeing her for a longer time. “He already believed himself triumphant,” she wrote later. “But it was not at all the same for me. A thousand worries troubled me. I had thought that I would be able to govern both his passion and mine, but now I realized that this was going to be difficult and perhaps impossible.” It was impossible. Soon after—sometime in August or September 1752—Sergei Saltykov achieved his goal.

No one knew of their affair, but Peter made an accurate guess. “Sergei Saltykov and my wife are deceiving Choglokov,” he told the lady-in-waiting he was pursuing at the moment. “They make him believe anything they want and laugh behind his back.” Peter himself did not mind being cuckolded; he saw it as a joke on the foolish Choglokov. More important, neither the empress nor Madame Choglokova was aware of Catherine’s new relationship. That summer at Peterhof and Oranienbaum, Catherine went riding every day. Now worrying less about appearances, she had stopped trying to deceive the empress and always rode astride like a man. Watching her one day, Elizabeth had said to Madame Choglokova that it was riding this way that prevented the grand duchess from conceiving children. Boldly, Madame Choglokova replied that riding had nothing to do with the fact that Catherine had no children; that children, after all, could not appear “without something happening first,” and that although the grand ducal couple had been married for seven years, “nothing had happened yet.” Confronted by this statement—which she still refused entirely to believe—Elizabeth burst out angrily at Madame Choglokova for not persuading the couple to do their duty.

Alarmed, Madame Choglokova began a determined effort to see that the empress’s wishes were obeyed. First, the governess conferred with one of the grand duke’s valets, a Frenchman named Bressan. Bressan recommended that Peter be placed in the intimate company of an attractive, sexually experienced woman who was also his social inferior. Madame Choglokova agreed, and Bressan located a young widow, Madame Groot, whose late husband, a Stuttgart painter named L. F. Groot, was one of the Western artists brought to Russia by Elizabeth. It took time to explain to Madame Groot what was desired of her and to persuade her to comply. Once the teacher had accepted this assignment, Bressan introduced her to her pupil. And thereafter, in an atmosphere of music, wine, pleasantries—and, on her part, perseverance—Peter’s sexual initiation was managed.

Peter’s success with Madame Groot meant that the widow had managed to overcome any inhibitions he might have felt regarding his own appearance. If, in fact, he had also been afflicted by phimosis, this problem, too, must have been resolved by the passage of time. Or there is another story, told by the French diplomat Jean-Henri Castéra, who first presented the phimosis theory in his biography of Catherine. According to Castéra, once Saltykov had succeeded in his seduction of Catherine, he became uneasy about the potential danger of being the lover of a woman known to be a virgin and whose husband was the heir to the throne. Suppose the wife became pregnant; where would that put him? He decided to protect himself. During an all-male dinner at which the grand duke was the guest of honor, Saltykov steered the conversation around to the pleasures of sex. Peter, thoroughly drunk, admitted that he had never enjoyed these sensations. Whereupon—the story goes—Saltykov, Lev Naryshkin, and others present begged the grand duke to submit, then and there, to corrective surgery. His head spinning, Peter stammered consent. A doctor and a surgeon, already standing by, were brought in, and the operation was performed immediately. Once the incisions had healed, and after Madame Groot had finished her private lessons, the grand duke was ready to become a complete husband. And thereafter, if Peter’s wife became pregnant, who could say that Sergei Saltykov was responsible?

As it happened, Saltykov’s worries were unnecessary. Madame Choglokova, having carried out the empress’s command with respect to Peter, was already turning to the problem of Catherine, whom the governess supposed still to be a virgin. There was no certainty that Peter’s success in embracing Madame Groot would ensure the same success with Catherine. And even if he managed the physical act, there was no guarantee that this would result in a conception. More certainty was required. Perhaps, even, a more reliable male.

Understanding the wide latitude of the imperial command she had been given, Madame Choglokova took Catherine aside one day and said, “I must speak to you very seriously.” The conversation that followed astonished Catherine.

Madame Choglokova began in her usual way with a long preamble about her attachment to her husband, her own virtue and prudence, and what was necessary and not necessary for ensuring mutual love and facilitating conjugal relations. But then, in midstream, she reversed course and said that there were sometimes situations in which a higher interest demanded an exception to these rules; where one’s patriotic duty to one’s country took precedence over duty to one’s husband. I let her talk without interruption, having no idea what she was driving at, and uncertain whether she was setting a trap for me. While I was deliberating, she said, “I do not doubt that in your heart you have a preference for one man over another. I leave you to choose between Sergei Saltykov and Lev Naryshkin. If I am not mistaken, it is the latter.” To this, I cried out, “No, no, not at all.” “Well, then,” Madame Choglokova said, “if it is not Naryshkin, it can only be Saltykov.”

Catherine remained silent, and the governess continued, “You will see that I shall not put difficulties in your way.” Madame Choglokova was as good as her word. Thereafter she and her husband stood aside when Sergei Saltykov entered Catherine’s bedroom.

The three principals—Catherine, Peter, and Sergei—found themselves in a complicated situation. She loved a man who had sworn he loved her, and who, thrusting aside seven years of virginal marriage, was teaching her about physical love. She had a husband who had not touched her since their marriage, who still did not desire her, who was aware of her lover, and thought it was all a titillating joke. Sergei considered Peter’s inclusion a necessary alibi.

Catherine should have been happy, but something in Sergei Saltykov’s attitude was changing. In the autumn, when the court moved back to the Winter Palace, he seemed restless; his passion seemed to be waning. When she reproached him, he emphasized the need for caution, explaining that, if she gave it more thought, she would understand the wisdom and prudence of his behavior.

Catherine and Peter departed from St. Petersburg in December 1752 and followed the empress and the court to Moscow. Catherine was already feeling signs of pregnancy. The sleigh traveled night and day, and at the last relay station before Moscow, Catherine suffered violent contractions and heavy bleeding. It was a miscarriage. Soon after, Sergei Saltykov arrived in Moscow, but his attitude remained distant. Nevertheless, he repeated the reasons for his behavior: the need to be discreet and avoid arousing suspicion. She still believed him. “As soon as I had seen and spoken to him,” she said, “my worries vanished.”

Reassured and hoping to please, Catherine agreed to a political proposal from Saltykov. He asked that she reach out on his behalf and request Chancellor Bestuzhev to help him advance his career. It was not easy for Catherine to agree. For seven years, she had considered the chancellor her most powerful enemy in Russia. He had subjected her to provocation and humiliation; he was behind the campaign against her mother; it was he who had assigned the watchdog Choglokovs; he was the author of the ban on her writing or receiving personal letters. Catherine had never publicly protested; she had carefully avoided alignment with any faction at court; she believed that her own uncertain position dictated that her best course was to cultivate friendships in all directions; she had not seemed interested in political maneuvering. Her priority had been to erase her Prussian identity by enthusiastically adopting every characteristically Russian trait. Now, influenced by her love for the man who had made her pregnant, and frightened by her fear of losing him, she put these considerations aside and did what he asked.

Her first step was to send Count Bestuzhev “a few words that would allow him to believe that I was less hostile to him than before.” She was surprised by the chancellor’s reaction. He was delighted by her overture and declared that he was at the grand duchess’s disposal. He asked that she indicate a safe channel by which they might communicate. On hearing this news, Saltykov, impatient, decided to visit the chancellor immediately under the pretext of a social call. The old man received him warmly, took him aside, and spoke to him of the inner world of the court, stressing particularly the stupidity of the Choglokovs. “I know that you can see through them as well as I do because you are a sensible young man,” Bestuzhev said. Then he spoke of Catherine: “In gratitude for the good will that the grand duchess has shown me, I am going to do her a little service for which I think she will thank me. I will make Madame Vladislavova as gentle as a lamb for her and the grand duchess will be able to do as she pleases. She will see that I am not the ogre she thinks I am.” At a stroke, Catherine had transformed the enemy she had feared for many years. This powerful man was now offering to support her and, in the bargain, Saltykov. “He gave him [Saltykov] a good deal of advice which was as useful as it was wise,” she said. “All this made him very intimate with us, without any living soul being the wiser.”

The new alliance offered advantages to both sides. Despite the humiliations Bestuzhev had heaped on her and her family, Catherine recognized the chancellor’s intelligence and administrative skill. This could be useful to her as well as to Saltykov. From Bestuzhev’s perspective, Catherine’s offer of reconciliation came at an unusually opportune time. The rise of Elizabeth’s new favorite, Ivan Shuvalov, was undermining the chancellor’s position. The new favorite was not simply amiable and indolent, as Razumovsky had been. Shuvalov was intelligent, ambitious, and strongly pro-French, and he was actively securing influential positions in government for his uncles and cousins. In addition, Bestuzhev worried about Elizabeth’s health. Her illnesses had become more frequent and required ever-lengthening periods of recovery. If—or rather, when—the empress died, Peter would inherit the throne. This was Peter who worshipped Frederick of Prussia; Peter who hated the Austrian alliance, the bedrock of the chancellor’s diplomacy; and Peter who was quite prepared to sacrifice the interests of the Russian empire to those of tiny, insignificant Holstein. Bestuzhev had long realized that Catherine was far more intelligent than her husband and that she was as sympathetic to Russian interests as Peter was indifferent or hostile. To have Catherine as an ally would mean buttressing his position at the moment and perhaps adding greater strength for the future. When Catherine suggested that they work together, he was quick to agree.

In May 1753, five months after her miscarriage, Catherine was pregnant again. She spent several weeks at a country estate near Moscow, where she restricted herself to walks and gentle carriage rides. By the time she returned to Moscow, she was so overcome by drowsiness that she slept until noon and it was difficult to wake her for midday dinner. On June 28, she felt pain in her lower back. The midwife was summoned, shook her head, and predicted another miscarriage. The following night, the prediction came true. “I must have been pregnant two or three months,” she conjectured. “For thirteen days, my life was in danger and it was suspected that part of the after-birth had not been expelled. Finally, on the thirteenth day, it came out without pain or effort.”

Peter spent most of this time in his own room, where his servants kept him supplied not only with military toys but with alcohol. During these days, the grand duke often found himself ignored and even flagrantly disobeyed by his servants, they being as drunk as he. Angry, Peter would strike about him with his stick or the flat of his sword, but his entourage dodged and laughed. After Catherine’s recovery, Peter asked her to make them behave. “When this happened,” she said, “I would go to his rooms and scold them, reminding them of their place and their duties. They always resumed their proper places. This made the grand duke say to me that he did not understand how I managed his servants; he flogged them, but could not make himself obeyed, while I obtained what I wanted with a single word.”

Moscow, the largest city of eighteenth-century Russia, was built primarily of wood. Palaces, mansions, houses, and hovels were constructed of logs and planks, sometimes carved and painted to give the appearance of stone, with windows, porches, and gables of many shapes and bright colors. Nevertheless, because they were built in haste, they were often uncomfortable; doors and windows did not shut, stairs wobbled, sometimes whole buildings swayed.

Worst of all was the scourge of fire. Through the icy Russian winters, palaces and houses alike were heated by tall tile stoves standing in the corners of the rooms, rising from floor to ceiling. Often the stoves were old, the tiles had cracked, rooms filled with smoke, the air became unbreathable, and headaches and swollen red eyes afflicted everyone. Sometimes sparks popped through the cracks and alighted on the wooden walls behind. In winter, which lasted for many months, with primitive stoves blazing in every house, a spark could create an inferno. Caught by the wind, flames from one burning house leaped from the roof to the next, reducing entire streets to ashes. To Muscovites the sight of a burning house with firemen struggling to localize the fire by hastily tearing down other buildings in its path was part of daily life. “No one had ever seen more fires in Moscow than in 1753 and 1754,” Catherine wrote. “More than once from the windows of my apartment, I saw two, three, four and five fires at a time burning in different parts of the city.”

On a November afternoon in 1753, Catherine and Madame Choglokova were together in the Golovin Palace when they heard shouting. The building, constructed entirely of wood, was on fire. It was already too late to save the huge structure. Catherine, hurrying to her room, saw that the stairway in the corner of the grand reception hall was already in flames. In her own apartment, she found a crowd of soldiers and servants carrying and dragging away furniture. She and Madame Choglokova could not help. Retreating to the street, deep in mud from heavy rain, they found the carriage of the choirmaster, who was coming to attend one of Peter’s concerts. Both women scrambled into his carriage. They sat and watched the fire until the heat became too great and the carriage was forced to move. Before leaving, however, Catherine saw an extraordinary sight: “An astonishing number of rats and mice were coming down the staircase in a single, orderly line without even appearing to hurry.” Eventually, Choglokov arrived and told them that the empress had ordered the young couple to move into his house. It was “a terrible place.” Catherine said, “There was no furniture, the wind blew through it on all sides, the windows and doors were half rotten, the floor was split open with cracks, and there were vermin everywhere. Even so, we were better off than the Choglokov children and servants who were living there when we arrived and were expelled to make room for us.”

The following day, their clothes and other belongings, collected from the mud where they had been sitting in front of the smoldering ruin of the palace, were brought to them. Catherine was overjoyed to find most of her small library delivered to her undamaged. What had affected Catherine most in the disaster was the thought of losing her books; she had just finished the fourth volume of Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique, and these volumes were returned to her. It was the empress who suffered the heaviest personal loss in the fire. All of that part of Elizabeth’s enormous wardrobe that she had brought with her to Moscow went up in flames. She told Catherine that four thousand dresses had been destroyed and that, of them all, she most regretted losing the one made from the Parisian fabric that Catherine had received from her mother and had given to her.

Peter also suffered a heavy—and embarrassing—loss in the fire. The grand duke’s apartment had been furnished with an abnormal number of large chests of drawers. As these were being carried out of the building, some of the drawers, unlocked or badly closed, had slid open and dumped their contents onto the floor. The chests contained nothing but bottles of wine and liquor. The cupboards had served as Peter’s private wine cellar.

When Catherine and Peter were moved to another of the empress’s palaces, Madame Choglokova, offering various excuses, remained with her children in her own house. The truth was that this mother of seven, famously virtuous and supposedly devoted to her husband, had fallen in love with Prince Peter Repnin. Her meetings with the prince were secret, but, feeling that she needed a discreet confidante, and that Catherine was the only person she could trust, she showed the grand duchess the letters she had received from her lover. When Nicholas Choglokov became suspicious and questioned Catherine, she pretended ignorance.

By February 1754, Catherine was pregnant for the third time. Not long after, on Easter Day, Nicholas Choglokov began suffering severe stomach pains. Nothing seemed to help. That week, Peter went riding, but Catherine remained at home, unwilling to risk the pregnancy. She was alone in her room when Choglokov sent for her and asked her to come see him. Stretched on his bed, he greeted her by unleashing a torrent of complaints against his wife. He said that she was involved in adultery with Prince Repnin, who, during Carnival, had tried to sneak into their house dressed as a clown. As he was about to provide more details, Maria Choglokova entered the room. Then, in Catherine’s presence, the husband heaped more blame on his wife, accusing her of adultery and of deserting him in his sickness. Maria Choglokova was anything but repentant. She told her husband that for years she had loved him too much; that she had suffered when he was unfaithful to her; that now neither he nor anyone else could reproach her. She concluded that he was not the spouse who should be complaining; it was she. In this argument, both husband and wife continually appealed to Catherine as a witness and judge. Catherine remained silent.

Choglokov’s illness grew worse. On April 21, the doctors declared him beyond hope of recovery. The empress had the sick man carried to his own house for fear he would die in the palace, which she considered bad luck. Catherine found herself surprisingly upset by Nicholas Choglokov’s condition. “He was dying just at a time when, after many years of trouble and pain, we had succeeded in making him not only less unkind and malicious, but even tractable. As for his wife, she was now sincerely attached to me, and she had changed from a harsh and spiteful guardian into a loyal friend.”

Choglokov died on the afternoon of April 25. During the last days of her husband’s illness, Maria Choglokova was also ill and confined to bed in another part of the house. Sergei Saltykov and Lev Naryshkin happened to be in her room at the moment of Choglokov’s death. The windows were open and a bird flew in and perched on a cornice opposite Madame Choglokova’s bed. She saw it and said, “I am certain that my husband has just died. Please send someone to find out.” Told that he was indeed dead, she declared that the bird had been her husband’s soul. People told her that it was an ordinary bird and that it had flown away. She remained convinced that her husband’s soul had come to find her.

28

The Birth of the Heir

ONCE HER HUSBAND was buried, Maria Choglokova wanted to resume her duties with Catherine. But the empress relieved her cousin of this assignment, telling her that it was improper for a new widow to appear so soon in public. Elizabeth then appointed Count Alexander Shuvalov, the uncle of her favorite, Ivan Shuvalov, to perform Nicholas Choglokov’s former role at the young court. At that time, Alexander Shuvalov was widely feared because of his position as chief of the tribunal for crimes against the state. It was this grim work, according to rumor, that had given him the convulsive movement that seized the entire right side of his face from the eye to the jaw whenever he was anxious or angry.

This was only the first planned change. Catherine heard that the empress planned to appoint Countess Rumyantseva to replace Maria Choglokova. Knowing that this woman disliked Sergei Saltykov, Catherine went to Alexander Shuvalov, the new watchdog, and told him that she did not want Countess Rumyantseva near her. In the past, she said, the countess had harmed her mother by criticizing Johanna to the empress; now she feared she would do the same to her. Shuvalov, not wishing to be responsible for any potential harm to the child Catherine was carrying, said that he would do what he could. He went to the empress and returned to say that Countess Rumyantseva would not become the new governess. Instead, the post was to be given to his own wife, Countess Shuvalova.

Neither Shuvalov was popular with the young court. Catherine described them as “ignorant, ignoble people.” Although the Shuvalovs were wealthy, their taste ran to the miserly; the countess was thin, short, and stiff; Catherine called her “a pillar of salt.” Catherine also stood back from the countess because of a discovery she had made after the palace fire of November 1753 in Moscow. Some of Countess Shuvalova’s belongings, saved from the fire, had been mistakenly delivered to the grand duchess. Examining them, Catherine discovered that “Countess Shuvalova’s petticoats were lined with leather because she was incontinent. As a result, the odor of urine permeated all her under-clothing. I sent them back to her as quickly as possible.”

In May, when the court left Moscow to return to St. Petersburg, to protect her pregnancy, Catherine traveled slowly. Her carriage was drawn at a walk, moving each day only from one relay station to the next and taking a total of twenty-nine days on the road. In the carriage were Countess Shuvalova, Madame Vladislavova, and a midwife, assigned to be always nearby. Catherine arrived in St. Petersburg suffering from “a depression I could no longer control. At every minute, and on every occasion, I was ready to cry. A thousand preoccupations filled my mind. The worst was that I could not get it out of my head that everything pointed to the removal of Sergei Saltykov.” She went to Peterhof and took long walks, “but my troubles followed me relentlessly.” In August, she returned to St. Petersburg, where she was dismayed to learn that the two rooms in the Summer Palace being prepared for her labor and delivery were actually inside the empress’s own suite. When Count Shuvalova took her to see the rooms, she realized that because they were so close to Elizabeth’s, Saltykov would be unable to visit her. She would be “isolated, with no company.”

Her installation in this apartment was planned for a Wednesday. At two o’clock that morning she was awakened by labor pains. The midwife confirmed that Catherine was going into labor. She was placed on a traditional labor bed: a hard mattress on the floor. The grand duke was awakened; Count Alexander Shuvalov was notified, and he informed the empress. Elizabeth swept in and settled down to wait. A difficult labor lasted until noon the following day. On September 20, 1754, Catherine gave birth to a son.

Elizabeth, who had waited so long, was exultant. As soon as the infant had been bathed and swaddled, she called in her confessor, who gave the baby a name, Paul, which had been the name of the first child born to her mother, Catherine I, and her father, Peter the Great. Then the empress departed, commanding the midwife to pick up the new baby and follow. Peter also walked out of the room, and Catherine was left on the floor, with only Madame Vladislavova as company. She was bathed in sweat, and she begged Madame Vladislavova to change her linen and put her back in her own bed, which was two steps away but “to which I had not the strength to crawl.” Madame Vladislavova declared that, without the midwife’s permission, she did not dare. Catherine asked for water to drink and received the same response. Madame Vladislavova sent several times for the midwife to come and authorize these requests, but the woman did not come. Three hours later, Countess Shuvalova arrived. When she saw Catherine still lying in the labor bed, she said that this neglect could kill a new mother. She left immediately to find the midwife; the woman arrived half an hour later, explaining that the empress had been so preoccupied with the child that she would not allow her leave to attend to Catherine. Finally, Catherine was placed in her own bed.

She did not see the baby for almost a week. She could get news of him only furtively because to ask about him would have been interpreted as doubting the empress’s ability to care for him. The infant had been installed in Elizabeth’s bedroom, and whenever he cried, the monarch rushed to him herself. What Catherine heard—and later saw for herself—was that

through excess of care, they were literally stifling and smothering him. He was kept in an extremely warm room, wrapped up in flannel and laid in a cradle lined with black fox fur. Over him was a coverlet of quilted satin, lined with cotton wadding. Above this was another counterpane of rose-colored velvet lined with black fox fur. Afterward, I often saw him lying like this, perspiration pouring from his face and whole body, the result being that when he was older, the least breath of air chilled him and made him ill.

On the sixth day of his life, Paul was baptized. That morning, the empress came into Catherine’s bedroom, bringing with her a gold plate on which lay an order directing the imperial treasury to send the new mother one hundred thousand rubles. To this Elizabeth added a little jewel case, which Catherine did not open until the empress had left. The money was very welcome: “I did not have a kopeck and was heavily in debt. But when I opened the box, it did not much improve my mood. It contained only a poor little necklace with earrings and two miserable rings which I would have been ashamed to give my maids. In the whole box there was not one jewel worth a hundred rubles.” Catherine said nothing, but the meanness of the gift may have troubled Count Alexander Shuvalov, because eventually he asked whether she liked the jewelry. Catherine replied that “whatever came from the empress was always priceless.” Later, when Shuvalov saw that she never wore this necklace and the earrings, he suggested that she put them on. Catherine replied that “for the empress’s parties, I was accustomed to wearing my most beautiful jewelry and that the necklace and earrings did not fall within that category.”

Four days after Catherine received the gift of money from the empress, the cabinet secretary came to her and begged her to lend this money back to the treasury; the empress needed money for another purpose and no funds were available. Catherine sent the money back and it was returned to her in January. Eventually, she learned that Peter, having heard about the empress’s gift to his wife, had become angry and had complained vehemently because nothing had been given to him. Alexander Shuvalov had reported this to the empress, who immediately sent the grand duke an order for a sum equal to what she had given Catherine—which is why the money had to be borrowed back from the original recipient.

While cannonades, balls, illuminations, and fireworks celebrated her son’s birth, Catherine remained in bed. On the seventeenth day after the delivery, she learned that the empress had assigned Sergei Saltykov to a special diplomatic mission: he was to deliver the formal announcement of her son’s birth to the royal court of Sweden. “This meant,” Catherine wrote, “that I was immediately going to be separated from the one person I cared about most. I buried myself in my bed where I did nothing but grieve. In order to stay there, I pretended to have continual pain in my leg which prevented me from getting up. But the truth was that I could not and would not see anybody in my sorrow.”

Forty days after Catherine gave birth, the empress came back to her bedroom for a ceremony to mark the end of her confinement. Catherine had dutifully risen from her bed to receive the sovereign, but when Elizabeth saw her so weak and exhausted, she made her remain sitting in bed while prayers were read. The infant Paul was present, and Catherine was permitted to look at him from a distance. “I thought him beautiful and the sight of him raised my spirits a little,” Catherine said, “but the moment the prayers were finished, the empress had him carried away and she also left.” On November 1, Catherine received the formal congratulations of the court and the foreign ambassadors. For this purpose, a room was richly furnished overnight, and there, on a couch of rose-colored velvet embroidered with silver, the new mother sat and extended her hand to be kissed. Immediately after the ceremony, the elegant furniture was removed and Catherine was returned to the isolation of her room.

From the moment of Paul’s birth, the empress behaved as if the child were her own; Catherine had been simply a vehicle for bringing him into the world. Elizabeth had many reasons for holding this point of view. She had brought the two adolescents to Russia in order to create a child. For ten years, she had been keeping them both at the expense of the state. Thus, the child, required for reasons of state, created by her command, was now, in effect, the property of the state—that is, of the empress.

There were other reasons, beyond political and dynastic, for the love and care Elizabeth lavished on Paul. It was not for reasons of state that she took physical possession of the baby. It was also a matter of love welling up from an emotional, sentimental nature; of bottled-up maternal impulses and a desire for family. Now, forty-four years old and in declining health, Elizabeth meant to be the child’s mother, even if the motherhood was make-believe. It was as a part of her effort to make this role real to herself that she excluded Catherine from the baby’s life. Elizabeth’s extreme possessiveness was more than an expression of thwarted maternal need; it was a form of jealousy. In effect, she simply kidnapped the baby.

What Elizabeth took, Catherine was denied. She was not allowed to care for her infant; indeed, she was scarcely allowed to see him. She missed his first smile and his early growth and development. Even in the middle of the eighteenth century, when aristocratic and upper-class women performed little actual child care, leaving most of this work to wet nurses and servants, most mothers still held and fondled their newborn infants. Catherine never forgot the emotional misery attending the birth of her first child. Her son and her lover, the two humans she was closest to, were absent. She was desperate to see them both, but neither of them missed her; one did not know, the other did not care. In those weeks, she was made to understand that, having physically produced the baby, her role in creating an heir to the throne was concluded. Her son, a future emperor, now belonged to the empress and to Russia. The result of these months of separation and suffering was that Catherine’s feelings for Paul were never normal. Through the next forty-two years of their shared existence, she was never able to feel or display toward him the warmth of a mother’s affection.

Catherine refused to rise from her bed or leave her room “until I felt strong enough to overcome my depression.” She remained the entire winter of 1754–55 in this narrow, little room with its ill-fitting windows through which freezing drafts blew in from the icebound Neva River. To shield herself and to make life bearable, she turned again to books. That winter she read the Annals of Tacitus, Montesquieu’s L’Esprit des Lois (The Spirit of Laws), and Voltaire’s Essai sur les Moeurs et l’Esprit des Nations (Essay on the Manners and Spirit of Nations).

The Annals, a history of the Roman Empire from the death of the emperor Augustus in A.D. 14, through the reigns of Tiberius, Caligula, and Claudius, to the death of Nero in A.D. 68, offered Catherine one of the most powerful works of history of the ancient world. Tacitus’s theme is the suppression of liberty by tyrannical despotism. Convinced that strong personalities, good and evil, rather than deep underlying processes, make history, Tacitus painted brilliant character portraits in a spare but telling style. Catherine was struck by his descriptions of people, power, intrigue, and corruption in the early Roman Empire; she saw parallels in people and events surrounding her own life sixteen centuries later. His work, she said, “caused a singular revolution in my brain, to which, perhaps, the melancholy cast of my thoughts at this time contributed. I began to take a gloomier view of things and to look for deeper and more basic causes that really underlay and shaped the different events around me.”

Montesquieu exposed Catherine to an early Enlightenment political philosophy that analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of despotic rule. She studied his thesis that there could be contradictions between a general condemnation of despotism and the conduct of a specific despot. Thereafter, for a number of years, she attributed to herself a “republican soul” of the kind advocated by Montesquieu. Even after she reached the Russian throne—where the autocrat was, by any definition, a despot—she tried to avoid excesses of personal power, and to create a government in which efficiency was guided by intelligence; in short, a benevolent despotism. Later, she declared that L’Esprit des Lois “ought to be the Breviary of every sovereign of common sense.”

Voltaire added clarity, wit, and succinct advice to her reading. He had worked on his Essai sur les Moeurs for twenty years (the full text was published as Essai sur l’Histoire Generale) and included not only manners and morals, but customs, ideas, beliefs, and laws; he was attempting a history of civilization. He saw history as the slow advance of man by collective human effort from ignorance to knowledge. He could not see the role of God in this sequence. Reason, not religion, Voltaire declared, should govern the world. But certain human beings must act as reason’s representatives on earth. This led him to the role of despotism and to conclude that a despotic government may actually be the best sort of government possible—if it were reasonable. But to be reasonable, it must be enlightened; if enlightened, it may be both efficient and benevolent.

Understanding this philosophy required effort from a vulnerable young woman in St. Petersburg recovering from childbirth, but Voltaire made it easier by making her laugh. Catherine, like many of her contemporaries, was charmed by Voltaire. She admired the humanitarian ideas that made him the apostle of religious tolerance, but she also loved his irreligious, irreverent thrusts at the pomposity and stupidity he saw everywhere. Here was a philosopher who could teach her how to survive and laugh. And how to rule.

Catherine gathered her physical strength and attended Mass on Christmas morning, but, while in church, she began to shiver and ache throughout her body. The next day, she had a high fever, became delirious, and returned to her small, temporary room with its freezing drafts. She remained in this nook, avoiding her own apartment and formal bedchamber, because these rooms were close to Peter’s apartment, from which, she said, “all day and part of the night, there issued a racket similar to that of a military guard house.” In addition, he and his entourage “constantly smoked and there were always clouds of smoke and the foul smell of tobacco.”

Toward the end of Lent, Sergei Saltykov returned from Sweden after an absence of five months. Even before his return, Catherine had learned that, once back, he was to be sent away again, this time to Hamburg as resident Russian minister; this meant that their next separation would be permanent. Clearly, Saltykov himself considered the affair to be over and himself lucky to be out of it. He preferred the temporary dalliances of court society to this now increasingly dangerous liaison with a passionate—and annoyingly possessive—grand duchess.

His own ardor had already taken new directions. There had been an irony in his mission to Stockholm; all foreign courts were aware of his liaison with Catherine, and Saltykov could hardly help feeling ridiculous in his role of herald of Paul’s birth. But when he reached the Swedish capital, he was quickly relieved of any embarrassment on this account. He found himself a celebrity. He was recognized by everyone as Catherine’s lover and the presumed father of a future heir to the Russian throne. He found that men were curious and women fascinated; soon he had his choice of casual affairs. Rumors that he had been “indiscreet and frivolous with all the women he met” reached Catherine. “At the beginning I did not want to believe this,” she said, but Bestuzhev, receiving information from the Russian ambassador to Sweden, Nikita Panin, advised her that the rumors seemed to be true. Even so, when Saltykov returned to Russia, she wanted to see him.

Lev Naryshkin arranged a meeting. Saltykov was to come to her apartment in the evening; Catherine waited until three o’clock in the morning. He did not come. “I underwent agonies wondering what could have prevented him,” she said later. The next day, she learned that he had been invited to a meeting of Freemasons from which, he claimed, he could not escape. Catherine pointedly questioned Lev Naryshkin:

I saw as clear as day that he had failed to come because he was no longer eager to see me. Lev Naryshkin himself, although his friend, found no excuse for him. I wrote him a letter bitterly reproaching him. He came to see me and had little difficulty appeasing me for I was only too disposed to accept his apologies.

Catherine may have been appeased, but she was not deceived. When he departed again, this time for Hamburg, Sergei Saltykov was leaving Catherine’s private life forever. Their affair had lasted three years and had caused her much anguish, but the worst she could bring herself to say of him later was, “He knew how to conceal his faults, the greatest of which were a love of intrigue and lack of principles. These failings were not clear to me at the time.” When she became empress, she made him ambassador to Paris, where he continued to pursue women. A few years later, when a diplomat proposed that he be transferred to a post in Dresden, Catherine wrote to the proposer, “Has he not committed enough follies as it is? If you will vouch for him, send him to Dresden, but he will never be anything but a fifth wheel to the carriage.”

29

Retaliation

DURING THIS SOLITARY WINTER when Paul was born, Catherine decided to change her behavior. She had met her obligation in coming to Russia; she had given the nation an heir. And now, as a reward, she found herself abandoned in a little room without her child. She resolved to defend herself. Examining her situation, she saw it from a new perspective. She had lost the physical presence of her baby, but, by his birth, her own position in Russia had been secured. This realization prompted her decision “to make those who had caused me so much suffering understand that I could not be offended and mistreated with impunity.”

She made her public reappearance on February 10 at a ball in honor of Peter’s birthday. “I had a superb dress made for the occasion, of blue velvet embroidered with gold,” she said. That evening, she made the Shuvalovs her target. This family, believing itself secure in Ivan Shuvalov’s liaison with the empress, was so powerful at court, so conspicuous, and so much feared that her attack on them was certain to cause a sensation. She neglected no opportunity to display her feelings.

I treated them with profound contempt. I pointed out their stupidity and malice. Wherever I went, I ridiculed them and always had some sarcastic barb ready to fling at them, which afterwards would race through the city. Because many people hated them, I found many allies.

Uncertain how Catherine’s change in behavior would affect their future, the Shuvalovs looked for support from Peter. A Holstein bureaucrat named Christian Brockdorff had just arrived in Russia to serve as chamberlain to Peter in his capacity as Duke of Holstein. Brockdorff heard the Shuvalovs complaining to the grand duke about Catherine, and he urged the husband to discipline the wife. When Peter tried, Catherine was ready for him:

One day, His Imperial Highness came into my room and told me that I was becoming intolerably proud and that he knew how to bring me back to my senses. When I asked him in what my pride consisted, he answered that I held myself very erect. I asked him whether to please him, I must stoop like a slave. He flew into a rage and repeated that he knew how to bring me to reason. I asked how this would be done. Thereupon, he placed his back against the wall, drew his sword half out of its scabbard and showed it to me. I asked what he meant by this; if he meant to challenge me to a duel, I ought to have a sword, too. He put his half-drawn sword back into its scabbard and told me that I was dreadfully spiteful. “In what way?” I asked him. “Well, towards the Shuvalovs,” he stammered. To this, I replied that I only retaliated for what they did to me and that he had better not meddle in matters about which he knew nothing and could not understand even if he did know. He said, “This is what happens when one does not trust one’s true friends—everything goes wrong. If you had confided in me, all would have been well.” “But what should I have confided in you?” I asked. Then he began talking in a manner so extravagant and devoid of common sense that I let him go on without interruption and did not attempt to reply. Finally, I suggested he go to bed because he was clearly drunk. He took my advice. I was pleased because, not only were his words garbled, but also because, he was beginning to give off a perpetual sour odor of wine mingled with tobacco which was insufferable for those near him.

This encounter left Peter confused and alarmed. Never before had his wife confronted him so forcefully; she had always humored him, listened to his schemes and complaints, and tried to keep his friendship. This new woman—self-possessed, unyielding, scornful, dismissive—was a stranger. Thereafter, his attempts at intimidation became more tentative and less frequent. They led increasingly separate lives. Peter continued his relationships with other women; he even continued, from long habit, to describe them to Catherine. She remained useful to him, helping him with duties he found complicated or burdensome. Peter, as heir to the throne, still offered her the likelihood that, when he became emperor, she would become empress. But, as she had come to realize, her destiny no longer depended solely on her husband. She was the mother of a future emperor.

Later in the evening she had confronted Peter, Catherine was playing cards in a drawing room when Alexander Shuvalov approached. He reminded her that the empress had forbidden women to wear the kind of ornamental ribbon and lace on their gowns that Catherine was wearing. Catherine told him “that he could have saved himself the trouble of notifying me because I never wore anything that displeased Her Majesty. I told him that merit was not a matter of beauty, clothes, or ornament; for when one has faded, the others become ridiculous, and only character endures. He listened, his face twitching, and then he left.”

A few days later, Peter reverted from bully to supplicant. He told Catherine that Brockdorff had advised him to ask the empress for money to pay his Holstein expenses. Catherine asked whether there was any other remedy and Peter said that he would show her the papers. She looked at them and told him that it seemed to her that he could manage without begging money from his aunt, which she was likely to refuse since, not six months before, she had given him one hundred thousand rubles. Peter ignored her advice and asked anyway. The result, Catherine noted, was that “he got nothing.”

Despite the fact that he had been told that he must cut down the Holstein budget deficit, Peter decided to bring a detachment of Holstein troops to Russia. Brockdorff, eager to please his master, had approved. The size of the contingent was concealed from the empress, who loathed Holstein. She was told that it was a trifle not worth discussing, and that oversight by Alexander Shuvalov would keep the project from becoming an embarrassment. On Brockdorff’s advice, Peter also tried to keep the impending arrival of these Holstein soldiers hidden from his wife. When she learned of it, Catherine “shuddered to think of the disastrous effect it would have on Russian public opinion, as well as on the empress.” When the battalion arrived from Kiel, Catherine stood next to Alexander Shuvalov at the Oranienbaum Palace and watched the blue-uniformed Holstein infantry march past. Shuvalov’s face was twitching.

Soon enough, there was trouble. The Oranienbaum estate was guarded by the Russian Ingerman and Astrakhan Regiments. Catherine was told that when these men saw the Holstein soldiers, they said, “Those accursed Germans are all puppets of the King of Prussia.” In St. Petersburg, some people considered the Holstein presence scandalous, others laughable. Catherine herself considered the enterprise “a freakish prank, but a dangerous one.” Peter, who in Choglokov’s time had worn his Holstein uniform only in secret in his room, now wore nothing else except when he appeared before Elizabeth. Elated by the presence of his soldiers, he joined them in their camp and devoted his days to drilling them. They had to be fed, however. At first, the Marshal of the Imperial Court refused to accept responsibility. Finally, he yielded and ordered court servants and soldiers from the Ingerman Regiment to carry food from the palace kitchen to the Holsteiners. Their camp was some distance from the household, and the Russian soldiers received no compensation for this extra work. They reacted by saying, “We have become the servants of these accursed Germans.” Court servants assigned this duty said, “We are employed to serve a set of clowns.” Catherine resolved to keep herself “as far away as I could from this ridiculous game. None of the ladies and gentlemen of our court would have anything to do with the Holstein camp, which the grand duke never left. I used to go for long walks with people from the court and we always walked in the opposite direction from the Holstein camp.”

30

The English Ambassador

ONE NIGHT at the end of June in 1755, when the White Nights were at a peak of milky brightness and the sun still remained on the horizon at 11 p.m., Catherine was hostess at a supper and ball in the gardens of the Oranienbaum estate. Among those stepping down from a long line of arriving carriages was the newly appointed English ambassador, Sir Charles Hanbury-Williams. At supper, the Englishman found himself sitting next to Catherine and, as the evening progressed, each was charmed by the other’s company. “It was not difficult to talk to Sir Charles for he was extremely witty and had a great knowledge of the world, having visited most of the European capitals,” Catherine said. Later, she was told that he had enjoyed the evening as much as she.

Before the supper, Hanbury-Williams had introduced Catherine to a young Polish nobleman, Count Stanislaus Poniatowski, who had come to Russia to act as his secretary. As she and Sir Charles talked at supper, her eyes strayed to this second visitor, whose elegance and grace made him stand out among the dancers. “The English ambassador spoke very favorably of the count,” she remembered in her Memoirs, “and told me that his mother’s family, the Czartoryskis, were a pillar of the pro-Russian party in Poland.” They had sent their son to Russia in the ambassador’s care in order to enrich his understanding of Poland’s large eastern neighbor. Because the subject of foreigners succeeding in Russia applied to Catherine personally, she volunteered an opinion. She said that, in general, Russia was “a stumbling block for foreigners,” a yardstick for measuring ability, and that anyone who succeeded in Russia could count on succeeding anywhere in Europe. She considered this rule infallible, she continued, “for nowhere are people quicker to notice weakness, absurdity, or defects in a foreigner than in Russia. One can be assured that nothing will be overlooked because, fundamentally, no Russian really likes a foreigner.”

While Catherine was watching Poniatowski, the young man was taking careful note of her. On the journey back from Oranienbaum later that night, he had no difficulty drawing the ambassador into a long, enthusiastic discussion about the grand duchess, and the two men, one forty-seven, the other twenty-three, passed flattering impressions back and forth.

That summer night was the beginning of a close personal and political relationship among the three. Poniatowski became Catherine’s lover, and Hanbury-Williams became her friend. For the next two and a half years, the English diplomat helped to assist her financially and then attempted to enlist her influence in the great diplomatic crisis that marked the beginning of the global Seven Years’ War.

Sir Charles Hanbury-Williams was born to a wealthy Monmouthshire family. His youth was set in an eighteenth-century English landscape of splendid mansions, formal gardens, clipped green lawns, and portraits by Gainsborough. After Eton, he married, fathered two daughters, and entered Parliament as a Whig under the leadership of Sir Robert Walpole. He became a fixture in fashionable London drawing rooms as an elegant, witty conversationalist and a minor satirical poet. In his late thirties, Sir Charles left his wife and abandoned politics for diplomacy. In his first two posts, Berlin and Dresden, wit, charm, and elegant English manners were not enough. At the court of Frederick II, he was not to the taste of that intellectual monarch. In Dresden, wit and satire were even less in demand. Political influence at home then saw him appointed to St. Petersburg, where he was warmly welcomed because he was rumored to be bringing a large amount of gold to be used in opening doors and making friends. At Elizabeth’s court, however, the elegant Englishman found himself again in an atmosphere where his talents seemed to have little value. He discovered a single exception: a young woman on whom the arrival of a polished diplomat, coming from a world of culture and brilliant repartee, made a strong impression.

Sir Charles had come to St. Petersburg on an important mission. A treaty, originally made in 1742, which traded English payments in gold for the promise of Russian support in any continental war involving England, was on the point of expiring. Simultaneously, fear of Frederick of Prussia’s belligerent reputation had stirred King George II’s concern for his own small, almost defenseless, north German electorate of Hanover. Hanbury-Williams’s mission was to renew the subsidies treaty, which would guarantee Russian intervention if Prussia invaded Hanover. Specifically, the British government wanted Russia to concentrate fifty-five thousand men at Riga with the threat that they would march west into Frederick’s province of East Prussia if the Prussians moved against Hanover.

The previous British ambassador, who had attempted to renew this treaty, had found himself at a loss at Elizabeth’s court, where diplomatic matters were often settled in a quick conversation at a ball or a masquerade. At his own request, this flustered diplomat withdrew, and a new man, considered better equipped to cope with the nuances of the post, was sought. Charles Hanbury-Williams, who never willingly missed a ball or a masquerade, was considered a good choice. He had proved himself a man of the world, young enough to be attractive to women, but sufficiently mature to remain faithful to his duties. He was not long in St. Petersburg, however, before finding that he could do little better than his predecessor. “The empress’s health is very bad,” he reported in his first dispatch. “She suffers from a cough and from breathlessness; she has water on the knee and dropsy—but she danced a minuet with me.” Hanbury-Williams continued to try, but he had misjudged his quarry. However much it may have amused Elizabeth to listen to the talk of this sophisticated Englishman, the moment he attempted to speak to her of serious matters, she smiled and walked away. As a woman, she was responsive to any compliment; as empress she was deaf. Since his arrival, Sir Charles had not advanced a step.

He looked elsewhere. When he turned to Peter, the future ruler, he was rebuffed again. In their first conversation, he discovered the heir to the throne’s obsessive admiration of the king of Prussia. Nothing could be done; he saw that he would be wasting time with the nephew as he had with the aunt. He had come to supper at Oranienbaum that summer evening believing that his mission had failed. Then he found himself seated next to the grand duchess. He discovered a natural ally, a cultured European able to appreciate intelligent conversation, who took a keen interest in books, and who also nourished a dislike of the king of Prussia.

When Sir Charles first saw Catherine, he was as captivated by her appearance as he was impressed by her erudition. Catherine’s affair with Sergei Saltykov was well known and had marked her as a susceptible young woman. A cavalier himself in his earlier years, he might briefly have thought of following a romantic path. He quickly confronted reality, however, and recognized that, as a middle-aged widower in less than perfect health, this was no longer open to him. “A man at my age would make a poor lover,” he advised a minister in London who had suggested that approach. “Alas, my scepter governs no more.” He cast himself, instead, as an avuncular, even paternal, figure to whom Catherine could turn for personal or political advice. He left the other path open for his young secretary, Stanislaus Poniatowski.

Catherine found Hanbury-Williams stimulating and sophisticated; when she learned he had come to renegotiate the alliance between Russia and England aimed at Prussia, her admiration increased. For his part, the ambassador knew Catherine to be a friend of Bestuzhev and therefore a potentially valuable ally. The friendship ripened. When, at a ball, Sir Charles admired her dress, she had a copy made for his daughter, Lady Essex. Catherine began writing letters to him, telling him about her life. This contact with an older man whose intelligence and sophistication she respected was in a sense a reprise of her adolescent relationship with Count Gyllenborg, for whom she had written her “Portrait of a Fifteen-Year-Old Philosopher.” In these lengthy epistolary exchanges, she was ignoring the fact that it was indiscreet for a Russian grand duchess to be involved in private correspondence with a foreign ambassador.

Exchanging letters was not the only means Hanbury-Williams employed in his attempt to influence Catherine. He discovered the financial difficulties in which she was mired. New debts had been added to those left behind by her mother. She spent money freely—on clothes, on entertainment, and on her friends. She had learned the power of money to persuade and buy allegiance. She was never guilty of outright bribery; instead, her largesse was driven by her desire to please and be surrounded by smiling faces. When Hanbury-Williams offered financial assistance, using funds from the British treasury, she accepted. The amount Catherine borrowed or took from him is unknown, but it was considerable. Hanbury-Williams had been given carte blanche by his government and had opened a credit account for her with the English consul in St. Petersburg, the banker Baron Wolff. Two receipts signed by the grand duchess bear the dates July 21 and November 11, 1756; the sums totaled fifty thousand rubles. The loan of July 21 was not the first; in asking for it, Catherine wrote to Wolff, “I have some hesitation in coming to you again.”

Catherine knew that accepting money from the English ambassador entailed risks, but she also knew that this game was played by everyone at the Russian court. If she allowed herself to be bribed in order to please others, she was only part of a universal corruptibility that was a feature of politics and government in every state in Europe. Money bought friendships, loyalties, and treaties. Everyone in St. Petersburg was corruptible, including the empress herself. When Hanbury-Williams was beginning his effort to persuade the empress to agree to a new Anglo-Russian treaty, he had informed London that Elizabeth had begun to build two palaces but lacked enough money to finish them. The treaty would guarantee Russia an annual payment of one hundred thousand pounds, but Sir Charles thought that an additional contribution to Elizabeth’s private purse would bind her even more securely to England. “In a word, all that has been given so far has served to buy Russian troops,” he said. “Whatever may be further given will serve to buy the empress.” London approved the additional sum, and Sir Charles was able to report that the treaty negotiations were progressing smoothly. He believed that the same approach would confirm the goodwill and anti-Prussian sentiments of the charming grand duchess.

31

A Diplomatic Earthquake

THE REASON FOR Sir Charles Hanbury-Williams’s mission to Russia in 1755 was the political requirement that England defend the electorate of Hanover. In the middle of the eighteenth century, two constant factors dictated British diplomacy and military strategy: one was the permanent hostility of France, whether the two countries were actually at war or passing through an interlude of peace; the other was the need to defend the small, landlocked, north German electoral state. This obligation arose from the fact that the king of England was also the elector of Hanover. In 1714, the fifty-four-year-old elector, George Lewis, had been persuaded by Parliament to accept the British throne, thereby ensuring the supremacy of the Protestant religion in the British Isles. George had become King George I of Great Britain while keeping his German electorate and title. This personal union of the island kingdom and the continental electorate in the figure of the monarch continued until 1837, when, on the coronation of Queen Victoria, it was quietly laid aside.

It was never an easy fit. George I and later his son, George II, greatly preferred their little electorate with its smiling, obedient population of three-quarters of a million people, and no outspoken, interfering Parliament. George I never learned to speak English, and both he and his son frequently went home to Hanover and remained for long periods.

The electorate was always an easy prey for its continental neighbors. Defending Hanover from aggressive neighbors was almost impossible for England, a maritime power lacking a large army. Most Englishmen were convinced that Hanover was a millstone around England’s neck and that Great Britain’s larger interests were regularly sacrificed to those of the electorate. There was no escape, however; Hanover had to be protected. Since only the army of a continental ally could do this, England had entered into long-term alliances with Austria and Russia. For many decades, this arrangement had worked.

In 1755, fear of rising Prussian belligerence stirred King George II to worry that his brother-in-law, Frederick II of Prussia (Frederick’s wife, Sophia, was George’s sister), might be tempted to invade Hanover as he had already invaded Silesia. It was to deter such a Prussian adventure that England had proposed renewal of the treaty with Russia which Sir Charles Hanbury-Williams had come to St. Petersburg to negotiate. When Count Bestuzhev signed the treaty for Russia in September 1755, Sir Charles was exuberant.

Hanbury-Williams’s self-congratulation was premature. News that England and Russia were about to sign a new treaty had alarmed the king of Prussia, who, it was said, feared Russia more than he feared God. Appalled by the prospect of fifty-five thousand Russians poised to march against him from the north, he instructed his diplomats to come to terms immediately with Great Britain. They did so by reviving an agreement presumed defunct. Before negotiating with Russia, England had first attempted to ensure the integrity of Hanover by negotiating directly with Prussia. Frederick had rejected this proposal, but now he hastily resurrected and accepted it. On January 16, 1756, Great Britain and Prussia mutually pledged that neither would invade or threaten the other’s territories. Instead, should any aggressor disturb “the tranquillity of Germany”—a phrase vague enough to cover both Hanover and Prussia—they would unite to oppose the invader. The potential “invaders” were France and Russia.

This treaty led to a diplomatic earthquake. Allying herself with Prussia cost England her alliance with Austria, as well as implementation of her new treaty with Russia. And when word of the Anglo-Prussian treaty reached Versailles in February 1756, France repudiated her own alliance with Prussia, clearing the way for a French rapprochement with her historic antagonist, Austria. On May 1, Austrian and French diplomats signed the Convention of Versailles, by which France agreed to come to Austria’s aid should Austria be attacked.

Six months earlier, these reversals would have been unthinkable; now they were reality. Frederick had overturned his own alliances, forcing other powers to realign theirs; when they did, a new diplomatic structure rose up in Europe. Once these arrangements were made, Frederick was ready to act. On August 30, 1756, his superbly trained, well-equipped Prussian army marched into Saxony. The Prussians quickly overwhelmed their neighbor, and then incorporated the entire Saxon army into their own ranks. Saxony was an Austrian satellite, and the Franco-Austrian treaty, the ink scarcely dry on its pages, now inexorably brought Louis XV to Maria Theresa’s aid. And once Russia’s longtime ally Austria was involved, Empress Elizabeth joined Austria and France against Prussia. This maneuvering had not improved Hanover’s security, however. Freed from the threat of seizure by Prussia, the electorate now stood exposed to danger from both France and Austria.

When Count Bestuzhev sent a note to the British embassy informing Hanbury-Williams of Russia’s adherence to the new anti-Prussian alliance between France and Austria, the ambassador was stunned. The newly signed treaty with England, which he had just negotiated with Bestuzhev, had to be set aside, although it was never formally repudiated.^* Hanbury-Williams found himself in the topsy-turvy position of being expected by London to further the interests of Britain’s new ally, Frederick of Prussia, whom he had originally been sent to Russia to undermine. In this way, the grand reversal of alliances among the European powers was mirrored in miniature by the reversal Hanbury-Williams was forced to make in his own objectives and efforts in St. Petersburg.

The Englishman did his best. He became a diplomatic acrobat. Frederick had no envoy in St. Petersburg; Hanbury-Williams secretly offered to take on the role himself. By using the diplomatic pouch destined for his colleague the British ambassador in Berlin, he would endeavor to keep the Prussian king informed of what was happening in the Russian capital. He would also attempt, through his St. Petersburg connections, to ensure that no serious Russian military effort would be made in the coming war. The most important of these connections, now that Bestuzhev was lost to him, was Catherine. He and the grand duchess had shared an intimate correspondence and many sparkling conversations; he had given her thousands of pounds; he boasted to the Prussians that she was his “dear friend”; he suggested that he could use her to delay any Russian advance.

The ambassador was betraying his confidante. Catherine knew that the Anglo-Russian treaty was moribund, but she did not know that her friend was secretly assisting Russia’s enemy, and that he had used her name as a potential ally in this intrigue. He was deluding everyone, including himself. In January 1757, Catherine expressed her true feelings in a letter to Bestuzhev: “I have heard with pleasure that our army will soon … [march]. I beg you to urge our mutual friend [Stepan Apraksin] when he has beaten the King of Prussia, to force him back to his old frontiers so that we may not have to be perpetually on guard.”

The truth was that, before his departure, Apraksin had frequently visited the grand duchess and had explained to her that the poor state of the Russian army made a winter campaign against Prussia inadvisable and that it would be better to delay his campaign. These conversations were not the stuff of treason; Apraksin had had similar conversations with the empress, with Bestuzhev, and even with foreign ambassadors. The difference was that Catherine had been commanded by the empress to avoid involvement in political and diplomatic affairs. Perhaps the grand duchess had ignored this command and discussed the matter with Hanbury-Williams, but, if so, she did it unaware that she was speaking not just to her intimate English friend but to someone who would pass along her words to the king of Prussia.

32

Poniatowski

STANISLAUS PONIATOWSKI, the young Polish nobleman to whom Catherine had been introduced on the night she met Sir Charles Hanbury-Williams, was one of the adornments of the European aristocracy. His mother was a daughter of the Czartoryskis, one of Poland’s great families. She had married a Poniatowski, and Stanislaus was her youngest son. The young man was adored by his mother and patronized by her brothers, his uncles, two of the most powerful men in Poland. Politically, the family hoped, with Russian support, to end the rule of the elected king, Augustus III, a Saxon, and establish a native Polish dynasty.^*

At eighteen, Stanislaus had begun touring the capitals of Europe, accompanied by a retinue of servants. He carryied with him an impressive portfolio of introductions. In Paris, he was presented to Louis XV and Madame de Pompadour; in London to George II. He had already met Charles Hanbury-Williams, and when the diplomat was appointed English ambassador to Russia, he invited Stanislaus to accompany him as his secretary. The young man’s mother and uncles were pleased; the offer provided the Czartoryskis a means of strengthening their own diplomatic footing in St. Petersburg, and simultaneously gave Stanislaus a chance to begin his public career. Once in the Russian capital, Hanbury-Williams gave his young secretary complete confidence: “He let me read the most secret despatches and code and decode them,” said Stanislaus. Sir Charles rented a mansion on the bank of the Neva River to use as an embassy, and the two men lived together, sharing a view across the water of the Peter and Paul Fortress and its golden four-hundred-foot cathedral spire.

Stanislaus Poniatowski, three years younger than Catherine, could not compete in male beauty with Sergei Saltykov. He was short, his face heart-shaped, his eyes shortsighted and hazel. He had prominent eyebrows and a tapering chin, but he spoke six languages, his charm and conversation made him welcome everywhere, and, at twenty-three, he was a model of the young, sophisticated European aristocrat. He was the first of this type to stand before Catherine, and he represented in person the brilliant world for which the writings of Madame de Sévigné and Voltaire had stimulated her taste. He spoke in the language of the Enlightenment, could talk playfully on abstract questions, be dreamily romantic one day and childishly frivolous the next. Catherine was intrigued. Two qualities, however, Stanislaus lacked. There was little originality and no real gravitas in this young Pole, deficiencies that Catherine came to recognize and accept. In fact, no one recognized these limitations better than Stanislaus himself. In his memoirs he confessed:

An excellent education enables me to conceal my mental defects, so that many people expect more from me than I am able to give. I have sufficient wit to take part in any conversation, but not enough to converse long and in detail on any one subject. I have a natural penchant for the arts. My indolence, however, prevents me from going as far as I should like to go, either in the arts or sciences. I work either overmuch or not at all. I can judge very well of affairs. I can see at once the faults of a plan or the faults of those who propose it, but I am much in need of good counsel in order to carry out any plans of my own.

For a man of his sophistication, he was, in many respects, extraordinarily innocent. He had promised his mother not to drink wine or spirits, not to gamble, and not to marry before the age of thirty. Further, by his own account, Stanislaus had another singularity, odd enough in a young man just come from social triumph in Paris and other European capitals:

A severe education had kept me out of all vulgar debauchery. An ambition of winning and holding a place in high life had stood by me in my travels and a concourse of singular circumstances in the liaisons that I had barely entered upon, had seemed expressly to reserve me for her who has disposed of all my destiny.

In a word, he came to Catherine a virgin.

Poniatowski had other qualities appealing to a proud woman who had been rejected and discarded. His devotion showed her that she could inspire more than simple lust. He expressed admiration not merely for her title and beauty but also for Catherine’s mind and temperament, which both he and she recognized as superior to his own. He was affectionate, attentive, discreet, and faithful. He taught Catherine to know contentment and security as well as passion in love. He became a part of her process of healing.

At the beginning of this love affair, Catherine had three allies. One was Hanbury-Williams; the others were Bestuzhev and Lev Naryshkin. The chancellor made clear that he was willing to befriend Poniatowski on Catherine’s behalf. Naryshkin quickly stepped into the same role of friend, sponsor, and guide for the new favorite that he had performed during Catherine’s affair with Saltykov. When Lev was in bed with fever, he sent Catherine several elegantly written letters. The subjects were trivial—pleas for fruit and preserves—but they were written with a style that quickly told Catherine that Lev himself was not the author. Later, Lev admitted that the letters were written by his new friend Count Poniatowski. Catherine realized that, for all his travels and apparent sophistication, Stanislaus was still a shy, sentimental young man. But he was Polish and romantic, and here was a young woman isolated and trapped in a miserable marriage. It was enough to capture him.

This is how Catherine appeared in his eyes :

She was twenty-five, that perfect moment when a woman who has any claim to beauty is at her loveliest. She had black hair, a complexion of dazzling whiteness, large, round, blue, expressive eyes, long, dark eyelashes, a Grecian nose, a mouth that seemed to ask for kisses, perfect shoulders, arms, and hands, a tall, slim figure, and a bearing which was graceful, supple, and yet of the most dignified nobility, a soft and agreeable voice, and a laugh as merry as her temperament. One moment she would be reveling in the wildest and most childish of games; a little later she would be seated at her desk, coping with the most complicated affairs of finance and politics.

Several months were to pass before the unpracticed lover gathered sufficient courage to act. Even then, but for the persistence of his new friend Lev, the reluctant suitor might have been content to worship from a distance. Eventually, however, Lev deliberately placed Stanislaus in a situation from which the Pole could not retreat without risking embarrassment to the grand duchess. Unaware of what had been arranged, he was led to the door to her private apartment. The door was ajar. Catherine was waiting inside. Years later, Poniatowski remembered, “I cannot deny myself the pleasure of recalling the clothes I found her in that day: a little gown of white satin with a light trimming of lace, threaded with a pink ribbon for its only ornament.” From that moment, Poniatowski later wrote, “my whole life was devoted to her.”

Catherine’s new lover proved to be free of the smiling self-confidence that had led her to capitulate to Saltykov. In this matter, Catherine was dealing with a boy—charming, well traveled, and well spoken, but still a boy. She knew what needed to be done, and, once his hesitation was overcome, she guided the handsome, virginal Pole into manhood.

33

A Dead Rat, an Absent Lover, and a Risky Proposal

REMARKABLE DIPLOMATIC CHANGES were occurring in Europe, but within the small, closed world of Catherine and Peter’s marriage, the arrangements and antagonisms that had marked their lives for ten years continued. Catherine had found a new, supportive lover in Stanislaus Poniatowski; Peter ricocheted among Catherine’s maids of honor, making first one and then another the object of his attention. The married couple had extravagantly different tastes and enthusiasms: Peter’s were soldiers, dogs, and drink; Catherine’s were reading, conversation, dancing, and riding.

In the winter of 1755, most of Peter’s Holstein soldiers had been sent home, and Catherine and Peter returned from Oranienbaum to St. Petersburg to resume their separate lives. With the city deep in snow and the Neva River locked under a sheet of ice, Peter’s military obsession moved indoors. His soldiers now were toys, made of wood, lead, papier-mâché, and wax. He lined up these figures on so many narrow tables that he could scarcely squeeze between them. Strips of brass with strings attached were nailed to the tables, and when the strings were pulled, the brass strips vibrated and made a noise that, Peter informed Catherine, resembled the rolling fire of musketry. In this room, Peter presided over a daily changing of the guard ceremony in which a fresh detachment of toy soldiers, assigned to mount guard, replaced those who were relieved of duty and removed from the tables. Peter always appeared at this ceremony in full Holstein dress uniform, with top boots, spurs, high collar, and scarf. The servants participating in this exercise were also required to wear Holstein uniforms.

One day when Catherine entered this room, she saw a large dead rat hanging from a model gallows. Appalled, she asked why it was there. Peter explained that the rat had been convicted of a crime that, according to the laws of war, merited the ultimate punishment; therefore, it had been executed by hanging. The rat’s crime was to have climbed over the ramparts of a cardboard fortress standing on a table and eaten two papier-mâché sentries standing watch. One of Peter’s dogs had caught the rat; the culprit had been court-martialed and immediately hanged. Now, Peter declared, it would remain exposed to public gaze for three days as an example. Catherine listened and burst out laughing. Then she apologized and pleaded ignorance of military law. Nevertheless, he was stung by her facetious attitude and began to sulk. Her last word on the matter was that it could be argued on behalf of the rat that it had been hanged without having been heard in its own defense.

During this winter of 1755–56, Catherine become attached to Anna Naryshkina, Lev Naryshkin’s sister-in-law, the wife of his elder brother. Lev was a part of this friendship. “There was no end to his nonsense,” Catherine noted. He acquired the habit of running back and forth between Peter’s rooms and Catherine’s. In order to enter her room, he would meow like a cat at her door. One evening in December, between six and seven, she heard him meowing. He came in, told her that his sister-in-law was ill, and declared, “You ought to go and see her.”

“When?” Catherine asked.

“Tonight,” he said.

“You know that I cannot go out without permission and they would never give me permission to go to her house,” she said.

“I will take you there,” he said.

“Are you mad?” Catherine said. “You would be sent to the fortress and heaven knows what trouble I would be in.”

“But no one will know about it,” Lev said. “I will come for you in an hour or so. The grand duke will be at supper. He will remain at the table for most of the night, and will not get up until he is drunk and ready for bed. To be on the safe side, dress as a man.”

Tired of being alone in her room, Catherine agreed. Lev departed, and, pleading a headache, she went to bed early. Once Madame Vladislavova had retired, Catherine got up, clothed herself as a man, and arranged her hair as best she could. At the appointed time, Lev meowed at her door. They left the palace unnoticed, stepping into his carriage and giggling at their escapade. When they arrived at the house where Lev was living with his brother and sister-in-law, she found—unsurprisingly—that Poniatowski was there. “The evening passed,” Catherine wrote, “in the wildest gaiety. After staying for an hour and a half, I left and returned to the palace without meeting a soul. The next day, at the morning court and the evening ball, we could not look each other in the face without laughing at the folly of the night before.”

A few days later, Lev arranged a reciprocal visit to Catherine’s rooms and escorted his friends into her apartment so skillfully that no suspicion was aroused. The group delighted in these secret gatherings. Through the winter of 1755–56, there were two or three of these every week, first in one house, then in another. “Sometimes at the theater,” Catherine said, “even if in different boxes or in the orchestra, each of us knew without speaking, by certain private signs, where to go. And no one ever made a mistake. But twice I had to return home to the palace on foot.” The happiness of these evenings, Poniatowski’s love, and Bestuzhev’s political support bolstered Catherine’s self-confidence.

Among her own maids of honor, she found occasional opposition, encouraged by Peter’s sometimes flagrant belittling of his wife’s status and qualities. Now officially recognized as Paul’s father, he delighted in playing the untethered male. Singers and dancers, considered by society to be “loose women,” appeared at his private suppers. The woman in whom he showed the most interest was one of Catherine’s maids of honor, Elizabeth Vorontsova, a niece of Bestuzhev’s rival, the vice-chancellor Michael Vorontsov. Placed in Catherine’s entourage at the age of eleven, she was neither particularly intelligent nor pretty. Slightly hunchbacked, with a face scarred by smallpox, she had a fiery temperament and was always ready to laugh, drink, sing, and shout. Although she belonged to one of the oldest families in Russia, it was said that she spat when she spoke, and otherwise behaved “like a servant girl in a house of ill-fame.” Peter’s attachment to her may have grown out of his own sense of inferiority; the grand duke may have concluded that she loved him for himself. At first, Elizabeth Vorontsova was one among many. She had rivals and occasionally she quarreled with Peter, but it was always to Elizabeth that he returned.

At Oranienbaum in the summer of 1756, Catherine’s relationship with some of her maids of honor led to a fierce argument. Feeling that these young women had become openly disrespectful, she went to their apartment and told them that unless they changed their behavior, she would complain to the empress. Some were frightened and wept; others were angry. As soon as Catherine left, they rushed to tell the grand duke. Peter, furious, charged into Catherine’s room. He told his wife that she had become impossible to live with; that every day she became more insufferable; that they were all young women of rank whom she treated as servants; and that if she complained about them to the empress, he would complain to his aunt about her pride, her arrogance, and her bad temper.

Catherine listened. Then she said that he could say whatever he liked about her but if the matter were placed before his aunt, the empress would probably decide that the best solution would be to dismiss from Catherine’s service whichever young women were causing dissension between her nephew and his wife. She said that she was certain that, in order to reestablish peace between the two of them, and to avoid having their quarrels repeatedly dinned into her ears, the empress would take this course. This argument surprised Peter. Imagining that Catherine knew more than he about Elizabeth’s attitude regarding these maids of honor, and that she really might dismiss them over this matter, he softened his tone and said, “Tell me how much you know. Has anyone spoken to her about them?” Catherine replied that if the matter went far enough to reach the empress, she had no doubt that Her Majesty would deal with it in her usual decisive way. Peter paced back and forth, worried. That evening, to warn the women to stop making complaints about her, Catherine told the more sensible of them about the scene with the grand duke and what might happen next.

Catherine cared for Stanislaus Poniatowski—how deeply, she learned, when he was forced, temporarily, to leave her. Poniatowski brought this involuntary departure on himself. He disliked his nominal king, Augustus of Saxony, whose German electorate Frederick of Prussia had invaded, and he constantly belittled Augustus. Some took his attacks as expressions of sympathy for Frederick; they were interpreted this way by Peter. But it was not just Peter who mistakenly saw Poniatowski as an admirer of Prussia. It was also the Saxon-Polish court, which now implored Elizabeth to send the young man home. Poniatowski had no choice, and in July 1756 he was obliged to depart. Catherine let him go, determined to bring him back.

Two days before Poniatowski left, he came to Oranienbaum, accompanied by Count Horn of Sweden, to say goodbye. The two counts were at Oranienbaum for two days; on the first, Peter was gracious, but on the second, because he had planned a day of drinking at the wedding of one of his huntsmen, he simply walked away, leaving Catherine to entertain the visitors. After dinner, she showed Horn through the palace. When they reached her private apartment, her little Italian greyhound began to bark furiously at Horn, but when it saw Poniatowski, it greeted him with a frantically wagging tail. Horn noticed and took Poniatowski aside. “My friend,” he said, “there is no worse traitor than a small lapdog. The first thing I always do when I am in love with a woman is to give her one of these little dogs. This way, I can always discover whether there is someone more favored than myself. The test is infallible. As you saw just now, the dog wanted to bite me because I am a stranger, but when it saw you, it went mad with joy.” Two days after this visit, Poniatowski left Russia.

When Stanislaus Poniatowski departed in July 1756, he assumed that he would return in a matter of weeks. When he failed to come back at the expected time, Catherine began a campaign to bring him back. For the first time, Bestuzhev felt the strong will of the future empress. Through the autumn of 1756, he struggled to do what she asked and persuade the Polish cabinet to return Poniatowski to St. Peterburg. He wrote to Count Heinrich Brühl, the Polish foreign minister: “In the present critical and delicate state of affairs, I find it all the more necessary that an envoy extraordinary should be sent here without delay from the kingdom of Poland whose presence would draw closer the ties of friendship between the two courts. As I have found no one more pleasing to my court than Count Poniatowski, I suggest him to you.” Eventually, Brühl agreed.

The way now seemed clear for Poniatowski to return, but, to Catherine’s surprise, he remained in Poland. What was the obstacle? In a letter to Catherine, Poniatowski explained that it was his mother:

I pressed her strongly to consent to my return. She said to me with tears in her eyes that this affair was going to cause her to lose my affection on which she depended for all the happiness of her life; that it was hard to refuse some things, but this time she was determined not to consent. I was beside myself; I threw myself at her feet and begged her to change her mind.

She said, again in tears, “This is what I expected.” She went away, pressing my hand, and left me with the most horrible dilemma I have ever experienced in my life.

Aided by his powerful Czartoryski uncles, Poniatowski finally escaped from his mother in December 1756 and returned to Russia as the official representative and minister of the king of Poland. Once back in St. Petersburg, he resumed his role as Catherine’s lover. He was to remain in Russia for another year and a half, during which time he fathered her second child.

Empress Elizabeth was frequently ill. No one understood the exact nature of her trouble, but some attributed it to complications with her menstrual periods. Others whispered that her indispositions were caused by apoplexy or epilepsy. In the summer of 1756, her condition became so alarming that her doctors feared for her life.

This crisis of health continued through the autumn of 1756. The Shuvalovs, frantically worried, showered attention on the grand duke. Bestuzhev took a different path. Like everyone else in St. Petersburg, he worried about the future, and he worried most about himself. He was well aware of the prejudices and limited political capacities of Peter, the heir to the throne, and also of the hostility that had been stirred up in Peter’s mind against him as chancellor. He could no longer be openly friendly with Hanbury-Williams, since England was now an ally of Prussia. There were other, more general, reasons for him to worry. He was growing old, the years had exhausted him, and, even when she was well, Elizabeth was a difficult mistress. Now, the empress’s failing health and the grand duke’s hostility left him with only one figure in the imperial family to whom he might turn for support. His relationship with Catherine had strengthened, and the approach of war speeded their rapprochement. By the autumn of 1756, both Catherine and Bestuzhev were deeply concerned about the transition of power that would follow Elizabeth’s death.

Bestuzhev began to plan. He had introduced Catherine to his friend General Stepan Apraksin, whom he had appointed commander in chief of the Russian forces mobilizing against Prussia. Next, he sent Catherine a draft of a secret ukase, an imperial decree, to be issued at the moment of Elizabeth’s death. This document set forth a restructuring of the administration of the Russian government. It proposed that Peter immediately be declared emperor, while, at the same time, Catherine be formally installed as co-ruler. Bestuzhev’s intention was that Catherine would actually administer the affairs of Russia as she had managed those of Holstein on her husband’s behalf. Naturally, Bestuzhev did not forget himself in this new arrangement; indeed, he intended that Catherine’s oversight of the empire should be guided by his advice, and he reserved for himself nearly all the real power in the country. The posts he already held would remain his, and others would be added. He would continue as chancellor; he would also become president of three key ministries—foreign affairs, war, and the navy—and he would be appointed colonel of all four regiments of the Imperial Guard. It was a risky, even potentially suicidal, document. He was reaching out to make decisions related to the succession, a prerogative reserved exclusively for the monarch. If Elizabeth were to read this paper, Bestuzhev could pay with his head.

When Catherine received the draft of the proposed document, she reacted cautiously. She did not directly contradict Bestuzhev or discourage his effort, but she did express reservations. If, later, she professed to find its pretensions excessive and its timing inopportune, she could only have been flattered at the central role awarded her. She thanked Bestuzhev verbally for his good intentions but told him that she regarded his plan as premature. Bestuzhev continued writing and revising, making additions and alterations.

Catherine understood that this enterprise was hazardous. On one hand, Bestuzhev was offering her a path that could lead to rule of the empire. On the other, she understood that discovery of this incriminating document could result in mortal danger for herself as well as for the chancellor. Elizabeth’s fury, if she read this document, would be a dreadful thing.

34

Catherine Challenges Brockdorff; She Gives a Party

IN THE SPRING OF 1757, Catherine watched Brockdorff’s influence over her husband increasing. The clearest example of this was evident when Peter told her that he must send an order to Holstein to arrest one of the duchy’s leading citizens, a man named Elendsheim, who had risen to the top through education and ability. Catherine asked why Elendsheim must be arrested. “They tell me he is suspected of embezzlement,” Peter replied. Catherine asked who was accusing him. “Oh, nobody is accusing him because everyone in the country fears and respects him and that is exactly why I must have him arrested,” Peter explained. “As soon as that is done, I am assured that there will be a great many accusers.”

Catherine shuddered. “If such things are done,” she said, “there will not be an innocent man left in the world. Any jealous person will be able to spread a rumor on the strength of which his victim will be arrested. Who is giving you such bad advice?”

“You always want to know more than other people,” Peter complained. Catherine replied that she asked because she did not believe that, on his own, the grand duke would commit such an injustice. Peter paced the room and then abruptly left. He soon returned and said, “Come to my apartment. Brockdorff will explain this Elendsheim affair to you. You will be convinced why I must have him arrested.”

Brockdorff was waiting. “Speak to the grand duchess,” Peter said. Brockdorff bowed. “As Your Imperial Highness orders me, I will speak to Her Imperial Highness.” He turned to Catherine “This is an affair that must be handled with great secrecy and prudence,” he said. “Holstein is filled with rumors about Elendsheim’s embezzlement and misappropriations. He has no accusers because he is feared, but when he is arrested, then there will be as many as one could wish.” Catherine asked for details. It turned out that Elendsheim, as head of the Justice Department, had been accused of extortion because after every trial, the loser complained that the other party had won only because the judges were bribed. Catherine told Brockdorff that he was trying to push her husband to commit a flagrant injustice. Using his logic, she said, the grand duke could have him, Brockdorff, locked up, and declare that the accusations would come later. As for litigation, she said, it was easy to understand why those who lost always claimed that they had lost because the judges were bribed.

Both men remained silent and Catherine left the room. Brockdorff then told the grand duke that everything she had said had sprung from her need to dominate; that she disapproved of everything that she, herself, had not proposed; that she knew nothing of the world or of political affairs; that women always liked to meddle in everything, and always spoiled whatever they meddled in; and that any serious measure was beyond their ability. In the end, Brockdorff managed to overrule Catherine’s advice, and Peter sent an order to Holstein to arrest Elendsheim.

Catherine, disgusted, struck back, recruiting Lev Naryshkin and others to assist her. When Brockdorff walked past, they shouted, “Baba Ptitsa!”—pelican—because they considered the bird’s appearance to be hideous and Brockdorff’s equally hideous. In her Memoirs, Catherine wrote, “He took money from everyone, and he persuaded the grand duke, who always needed money, to do the same thing by selling Holstein orders and titles to anyone who would pay for them.”

Despite her efforts, Catherine was unable to weaken Brockdorff’s hold on Peter. She approached Alexander Shuvalov and told him that she considered Brockdorff dangerous company for a young prince, the heir to an empire. She advised the count to warn the empress. He asked whether he could mention Catherine’s name. She said yes, and added that if the empress wanted to hear it from her personally, she would speak with candor. Shuvalov agreed. Catherine waited, and eventually the count told her that the empress would find a moment to speak to her.

While she waited, Catherine became involved in Peter’s affairs in a positive way. One morning, Peter walked into Catherine’s room, closely followed by his secretary, Zeitz, who carried a document in his hand. “Look at this devil of a fellow!” Peter said. “I drank too much yesterday and today I am still in a haze, but here he is bringing me papers he wants me to deal with. He even follows me into your room!” To Catherine, Zeitz explained, “Everything I have here only requires a simple ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’ It will not take a quarter of an hour.”

“Let’s see,” Catherine said. “Perhaps we can get through them more quickly than you think.”

Zeitz began to read aloud and as he spoke, Catherine said yes or no. Peter was pleased by this procedure, and Zeitz said to him, “You see, my lord, if you consented to do this twice a week, your affairs would not fall into arrears. These things are only trifles, but they must be attended to, and the grand duchess has just disposed of all of them with six Yes’s and six No’s.” From that day on, Peter sent Zeitz to Catherine whenever a simple yes or no was required of him. Eventually, she asked Peter to give her a signed order listing the matters she could decide without his permission. Peter obliged.

After this, Catherine mentioned to Peter that if he found decisions regarding Holstein burdensome, he should realize that they were only a small fraction of the work he would have when he was responsible for the Russian empire. Peter reiterated that he had not been born for Russia, that he did not suit the Russians any more than they suited him. She suggested that he ask the empress to acquaint him with the administration of government affairs. Specifically, she urged him to ask to attend meetings of the empress’s council. Peter spoke to Alexander Shuvalov, who advised the empress to admit him to these meetings whenever she went herself. Elizabeth agreed, but in the end this turned out to be meaningless, because the empress went with him only once. Neither of them went again.

Looking back on these years, Catherine wrote, “The great problem lay in the fact that I tried to stick as close as possible to the truth, while he left it farther and farther behind.” Peter’s most outlandish fabrications were personal and petty; often, she says, they originated in a desire to impress a young woman. Relying on this person’s innocence, he would tell her that when he was a boy, living with his father in Holstein, he was often placed in command of a detachment of soldiers and sent to round up a band of marauding Gypsies in the countryside near Kiel. Always emphasizing his own skill and valor, Peter described the brilliant tactics he had used to pursue, surround, engage, and capture these opponents, At first, he was careful to tell these stories only to people who knew nothing about him. Then, growing bolder, he told the tales in front of people who knew better, but on whose discretion he relied not to contradict him. When he began to create these fictions in Catherine’s company, she asked him how long before his father’s death these events had occurred. As she remembered the conversation, Peter replied that it had been three or four years. “Well,” she said, “you began very young, because three or four years before your father’s death, you were only six or seven years old. You were eleven when your father died and you were left in the guardianship of my uncle, the crown prince of Sweden. What also astonishes me,” Catherine continued, “is that your father, whose only son you were—you were a very delicate child at that age—should have sent you, his heir, at the age of six or seven, to fight brigands.” It was not she, Catherine concluded, but the calendar that discredited his story.

Still, Peter continued to come to Catherine for help. Because her future was tied to his, she did what she could. She treated him more like a younger brother than a husband: she advised and scolded, listened to his confidences about his love affairs, and continued to assist in the affairs of Holstein. “Whenever he found himself at a loss,” Catherine said, “he would come running to me to get my advice, and then, having gotten it, be off again as fast as his legs could carry him.”

Eventually, Catherine realized that the empress did not approve of her efforts to help her husband. On the evening Elizabeth finally summoned Catherine for the interview that Catherine had asked for eight months earlier, the empress was alone. The first subject was Brockdorff. Catherine explained the details of the Elendsheim affair and gave the empress her opinion of Brockdorff’s harmful influence on her husband. Elizabeth listened without commenting. She asked for details of the grand duke’s private life. Catherine told her everything she knew. She started to speak again about Holstein, and Elizabeth interrupted her. “You seem to be well-informed about that country,” she said coldly. Catherine understood that her narrative was producing a bad impression. She explained that she was well informed because her husband had ordered her to help him with the administration of his small country. Elizabeth frowned, remained silent, and then abruptly dismissed Catherine. The grand duchess was uncertain what would happen next.

In midsummer 1757, Catherine tried a different approach to appeasing her husband: she gave a party in his honor. For her garden at Oranienbaum, the Italian architect Antonio Rinaldi designed and built a huge wooden cart capable of holding an orchestra of sixty musicians and singers. Catherine had poetic verses written and set to music. She had lamps placed along the grand avenue of the garden, and then she screened off the avenue with an immense curtain behind which tables were set for supper.

At dusk, Peter and dozens of guests entered the garden and sat down. After the first course, the curtain concealing the illuminated grand avenue was raised. Approaching in the distance came the rolling orchestra on its giant cart, pulled by twenty oxen decorated with garlands. Dancers, male and female, performed beside the moving cart. “The weather was superb,” Catherine wrote, “and when the cart stopped, it happened by chance that the moon hung directly over it, a circumstance which produced a wonderful effect and astonished the whole company.” The diners jumped up from the table to see. Then the curtain dropped, and the guests returned to their seats for another course. A flourish of trumpets and cymbals announced an elaborate free lottery. On either side of the large curtain, a small curtain was raised, revealing brightly lit booths, with porcelain objects, flowers, ribbons, fans, combs, purses, gloves, sword knots, and other finery available. Once all of these items had been taken, dessert was served, and the company danced until six in the morning.

The party was a triumph. Peter and his entourage, including the Holsteiners, praised Catherine. In her Memoirs, she basked in her achievement. “The Grand Duchess is kindness itself,” she records people as saying. “She gave presents to everyone; she is charming; she smiled and took pleasure in making us all dance, eat, and make merry.”

“In short,” Catherine purred, “I was found to possess qualities which had not been recognized before, and I thereby disarmed my enemies. This had been my goal.”

In June 1757, a new French ambassador, the Marquis de l’Hôpital, had arrived in St. Petersburg. Versailles was well informed about Elizabeth’s illnesses and Catherine’s growing influence, and the marquis was advised to “please the empress, but at the same time to ingratiate himself at the young court.” When l’Hôpital paid his first ceremonial visit to the Summer Palace, it was Catherine who received him. She and her guest waited as long as possible for the empress to appear, but finally sat down together to supper and began the ball without her. It was during the White Nights, and the room had to be artificially darkened for guests to enjoy the full effect of the hundreds of candles. Finally, in the gentler light, Elizabeth appeared. Her face was still handsome, but her swollen legs did not permit her to dance. After a few words of greeting, she retired to the gallery and from there sadly watched the brilliant scene.

L’Hôpital then set about his mission of strengthening France’s ties with Russia. He began by pressing for Hanbury-Williams’s recall to England and Poniatowski’s return to Poland. He was warmly received by the Shuvalovs, but he was rebuffed at the young court. Peter had no sympathy for an enemy of Prussia, and Catherine remained linked to Bestuzhev, Hanbury-Williams, and Poniatowski. Unable to counteract the influence of these three, l’Hôpital reported to his government that attempts to influence the young court were useless. “The grand duke is as completely a Prussian as the grand duchess is an incorrigible Englishwoman,” he said.

Nevertheless, the French ambassador did manage to achieve a major goal: he succeeded in getting rid of his English diplomatic rival, Hanbury-Williams. He and his government pressed Elizabeth to force the recall of an envoy whose king, they pointed out, was now an ally of their mutual enemy, Frederick of Prussia. Elizabeth accepted this logic, and, in the summer of 1757, King George II was informed that his ambassador’s presence was no longer desired in St. Petersburg. Sir Charles was willing to leave; his liver was failing. But when the moment arrived, he was reluctant. In October 1757 he called on Catherine for the last time. “I love you as my father,” she told him. “I count myself happy to have been enabled to acquire your affection.” His health worsened. After a stormy passage down the Baltic, he arrived, debilitated, in Hamburg and was hurried by doctors to England. There the elegant, witty ambassador degenerated into an embittered invalid, and, a year later, he ended his life by suicide. King George II, perhaps feeling responsibility for scuttling the alliance that Sir Charles had worked to negotiate, ordered that he be buried in Westminster Abbey.

35

Apraksin’s Retreat

RUSSIA, bound by her alliance with Austria, had been nominally at war with Prussia since September 1756, when Frederick invaded Saxony. By late spring of 1757, however, not a single Russian soldier had marched. It was the first war of Elizabeth’s reign, and the victories of her father, Peter the Great, almost four decades earlier, had faded from Russian memory. No money had been spent on the army, and the troops were badly trained and poorly equipped. Morale was low, not only because Elizabeth had promised to send this army against Frederick, the foremost general of the age, but also because the empress’s declining health meant that the Russian crown might soon be placed on the head of a young man who was King Frederick of Prussia’s fervent admirer.

In the months before the war, Bestuzhev had promoted a friendship between Catherine and his own friend General Stepan Apraksin. A descendant of Peter the Great’s most succesful admiral, Apraksin was described by Hanbury-Williams as “a very corpulent man, lazy, and good-natured.” His friendship with the chancellor, rather than his military skill, had earned him command of the army being assembled to invade East Prussia. Once appointed, Apraksin had refused to embark on a winter campaign. He had political as well as military reasons for his caution. The empress’s uncertain health and the grand duke’s pro-Prussian sentiments made it obvious that the war would end as soon as Peter came to the throne. In these circumstances, even an aggressive general might be forgiven for not risking his own future by plunging ahead. Apraksin might also be excused for uneasiness about Catherine. She was born a German; Frederick had helped arrange her marriage; and her mother had been widely suspected of being a Prussian agent. In this reasoning, he was wrong. Catherine, now caught up in the politics of the Russian court, hoped for a Russian victory that would restore Bestuzhev’s prestige and prevent the final triumph of his and her mutual enemies, the Shuvalovs. Before Apraksin left to invade East Prussia, Catherine tried to make certain that he knew her views. When the general’s wife came to see her, Catherine spoke of her own worries about the empress’s health and said that she greatly regretted the departure of Apraksin at a time when she thought little reliance could be placed on the Shuvalovs. Apraksin’s wife repeated this to her husband, who was pleased and passed the grand duchess’s words along to Bestuzhev.

In mid-May 1757, the portly, red-faced field soldier, physically unable to mount a horse, climbed into his carriage and set out for East Prussia at the head of eighty thousand men. At the end of June, the army seized the fortress town of Memel, on the Baltic coast. On August 17, Apraksin defeated a part of the Prussian army in a battle at Grossjägersdorf, in East Prussia. It was not a brilliant victory; Frederick was not present and the Russians outnumbered their enemies by three to one. Even so, Russian national pride and expectations soared. Then, a strange thing happened. Instead of following up his victory by advancing into East Prussia and capturing Königsberg, the provincial capital, Apraksin remained motionless for two weeks, after which he turned around and retreated by forced marches so precipitous that his withdrawal appeared to be a rout. He burned his wagons and ammunition, destroyed his stores and powder, spiked and abandoned his cannon, and burned villages behind him so they could provide no shelter for a pursuing enemy. He halted only when he reached the safety of the fortress of Memel.

In St. Petersburg, elation turned to shock. The public could not understand what had happened, and Apraksin’s friends could find no way to justify his behavior. Catherine could not explain the marshal’s chaotic retreat, but she speculated that he may have been receiving alarming news about the empress’s health. If this were true and Elizabeth were to die, her death would signal an immediate end to the war. He would be needed in Russia, and, rather than advancing farther into Prussia, his duty would be to fall back to the Russian frontier.

Apraksin’s retreat provoked angry complaints from the Austrian and French ambassadors. Bestuzhev was alarmed. Because Apraksin was his friend and had received command of the army from him, the chancellor knew that he would bear a share of blame. Faced with the political necessity of a renewed offensive, which would restore Russia’s prestige among her allies and his own with the empress, he asked Catherine to write to the general. Catherine did so, warning Apraksin of the harmful rumors circulating in Petersburg and of the difficulty his friends were having in explaining his retreat. She begged him to retrace his steps, resume his advance, and carry out his orders from the government. Ultimately, she wrote three letters, all harmless, although later they were to be produced as evidence that the grand duchess was interfering in matters beyond her concern. Bestuzhev forwarded these letters to Apraksin. The letters were never answered.

Meanwhile, St. Petersburg was a cauldron of recrimination. Elizabeth, pressed by the Shuvalovs and the French ambassador, relieved Apraksin of his command, and sent him to one of his estates to await investigation. General Wilhelm Fermor took over the army, and, despite bad weather, moved forward and seized Königsberg on January 18, 1758. Fermor also tried to clear his predecessor by pointing out that, through no fault of Apraksin’s, the Russian soldiers had not been paid, that they were short of ammunition, weapons, and clothing, and that the men were desperately hungry. With endurance and courage, they had defeated the Prussians at Grossjägersdorf, but the effort had proved too much, and Apraksin, unable to supply his troops in enemy territory, had been compelled to retreat.

Fermor’s account was only partially accurate. The decision to retreat had not been made by Apraksin. After the victory at Grossjägersdorf, the general had informed the war council in St. Petersburg of the problems he and the army faced. The council had met three times—on August 27, September 13, and September 28, 1757—and had ordered Apraksin to withdraw. These facts had been withheld from Vienna, Paris, and the people of St. Petersburg. Elizabeth had concurred in this withdrawal but never admitted it. Catherine had not known.

On September 8, at Tsarskoe Selo, Elizabeth went on foot from the palace to attend Mass at the parish church near the palace gate. Scarcely had the service begun when, feeling unwell, she left the church, descended a short flight of steps, staggered, and collapsed unconscious on the grass. The empress’s attendants, following behind, found her surrounded by a crowd of people who had come from nearby villages to hear Mass. At first, no one knew what was wrong. The attendants covered her with a white cloth, and members of the court went to look for a doctor and a surgeon. The first to arrive was a surgeon, a French refugee, who bled her while she lay unconscious on the ground in the middle of the crowd. The treatment failed to revive her. The doctor, a Greek, took longer to arrive; being himself unable to walk, he had to be carried to her in an armchair. Screens and a couch were brought from the palace. Placed on the couch behind the screens, Elizabeth stirred and opened her eyes but did not recognize anyone and spoke unintelligibly. After two hours, she was carried on the couch into the palace. The consternation of the court, already immense, was increased by the fact that the collapse had occurred in public. Until then, the state of the empress’s health had been a tightly kept secret. Suddenly, it was public knowledge.

Catherine learned of the incident the following morning at Oranienbaum from a note sent by Poniatowski. She hurried to tell Peter. A messenger, sent to ask for more news, returned with the information that Elizabeth was able to speak only with difficulty. Everyone realized that something more serious than a fainting spell had happened; today we might realize that Elizabeth had suffered a stroke.

After Elizabeth’s collapse, everyone in St. Petersburg linked Elizabeth’s health and Apraksin’s retreat with concerns about the succession to the throne. “If the empress should die,” the Marquis de l’Hôpital wrote to Versailles on November 1, “we shall see a sudden palace revolution, for the grand duke will never be allowed to reign.” Some believed that the empress would disinherit her nephew in favor of three-year-old Paul. A rumor suggested that with Paul on the throne under the control of the Shuvalovs, his parents, Peter and Catherine, would both be sent back to Holstein.

In mid-January 1758, Alexander Shuvalov interrogated Apraksin. The general’s testimony included his sworn denial that he had received any political or military directions from Catherine. Apraksin did admit to receiving correspondence from the grand duchess, and he handed over to Shuvalov all of his personal papers, including the three letters Catherine had written to him. Catherine was to see these letters again.

A year after his dismissal, Apraksin was brought before a judge to receive his sentence: “And there now remains no course but—” Apraksin, overweight and apoplectic, never heard the end of the judge’s sentence. Expecting the words “torture” and “death,” he fell dead on the floor. The judge’s last words were to have been “to set him free.”

36

Catherine’s Daughter

IN THE SPRING OF 1757, Catherine realized that she was pregnant with Poniatowski’s child. By the end of September, she stopped appearing in public. Her absence annoyed Peter, because when his wife was willing to appear at ceremonial functions, he was able to remain in his apartment. Empress Elizabeth, still unwell, made no public appearances, and with Catherine unavailable, the whole burden of representing the imperial family now fell on him. Irritated, the grand duke said to Lev Naryshkin, in the hearing of others, “God knows where my wife gets her pregnancies. I have no idea whether this child is mine and whether I ought to take responsibility for it.”

Lev, true to character, ran to carry this remark to Catherine. Alarmed, she turned to Naryshkin and said, “You fool! Go back and ask the grand duke to swear that he has not slept with his wife. Tell him that if he is ready to swear such an oath, you will go immediately and inform Alexander Shuvalov so that appropriate action may be taken.”

Lev raced back to Peter and asked him to swear the oath. Peter, too frightened of his aunt to make such a statement, refused. “Go to the devil!” he shouted. “And don’t ever speak to me about this matter again!”

At midnight on December 9, 1757, Catherine began having contractions. Madame Vladislavova summoned Peter, and Alexander Shuvalov went to inform the empress. Peter arrived in Catherine’s room wearing his formal Holstein uniform, with top boots, spurs, a sash around his waist, and an enormous sword hanging at his side. Surprised, Catherine asked the reason for this costume. Peter replied that in this uniform he was ready to fulfill his duty as an officer of Holstein (not a grand duke of Russia) to defend the ducal house (not the Russian empire). Catherine’s first thought was that he was joking; then she realized that he was drunk. She told him to leave quickly so that his aunt would not have the double annoyance of seeing him reeling and also dressed head to foot in his Germanic Holstein uniform, which Elizabeth loathed. With the help of the midwife, who assured him that his wife would not give birth for some time, she convinced him and he departed.

Elizabeth arrived. When she asked where her nephew was, she was told that he had just left and would soon be back. Catherine’s labor pains began to subside, and the midwife said that this respite could last some hours. The empress returned to her apartment, and Catherine lay back and slept until morning. She awoke feeling occasional contractions but was free of them for most of the day. In the evening, she was hungry and ordered supper. She ate and, rising from the table, was seized by sharp pains. The grand duke and the empress returned; both were just entering the room when Catherine gave birth to a daughter. The new mother immediately asked the empress to allow the child to be named Elizabeth. The empress declared that the infant should be named Anna, after her own older sister, Peter’s mother, Anna Petrovna. The baby was immediately taken away to the nursery in the empress’s apartment, where her three-year-old brother, Paul, awaited her. Six days later, the empress, as godmother, held little Anna over the baptismal font and brought Catherine a gift of sixty thousand rubles. This time, simultaneously, she gave an equal amount to her nephew.

“It is said that the public celebrations were magnificent,” Catherine said, “but I did not see any. I remained in my bed alone without company except Madame Vladislavova. No one set foot in my apartment or sent to ask how I was.” This was untrue: Catherine’s loneliness lasted only a single day. It was true that her newborn was snatched away as Paul had been, but Catherine had expected that this would happen, and she suffered less. Otherwise, she was prepared. Having suffered isolation and neglect after Paul’s birth, she had made different arrangements this time. Her bedroom was not subject to drafts from poorly fitted windows. Knowing that only in secrecy would her friends dare to visit her, she had a large screen placed beside her bed, concealing an alcove containing tables, chairs, and a comfortable settee. When the curtain on that side of her bed was drawn, nothing could be observed. When the curtain was opened and the screen drawn aside, Catherine could see the smiling faces of her friends in the alcove. If anyone else who entered the room asked what was behind the closed barrier, they were told that it was the commode. This little fortress, constructed with forethought and guile, remained secure.

On New Year’s Day 1758, the court celebrations were to end with another display of fireworks, and Count Peter Shuvalov, Grand Master of the Artillery, came to explain to Catherine what was planned. In the anteroom, Madame Vladislavova told Shuvalov that she thought that the grand duchess was sleeping, but that she would go and see whether he could be received. In fact, Catherine was far from asleep. She was in her bed, and in the alcove was a little group including Poniatowski, still resisting his recall and visiting Catherine every day.

When Madame Vladislavova knocked on her door. Catherine closed the curtain on the screen side of her bed, received Vladislavova, and told her to bring in the visitor. Catherine’s friends behind the screen and curtain smothered their laughter. When Peter Shuvalov entered, Catherine apologized for keeping him waiting, having “only just awakened,” reinforcing this fib by rubbing her eyes. Their conversation was lengthy and continued until the count said that he had to leave in order not to keep the empress waiting for the fireworks to begin.

Once Shuvalov had gone, Catherine pulled aside the curtain. The screen was pushed back and she found her friends exhausted, hungry, and thirsty. “You should not die of hunger or thirst while keeping me company,” she told them. She closed her curtain again and rang her bell. When Madame Vladislavova appeared, Catherine asked for supper—at least six good dishes, she specified. When the supper arrived and the servants were gone, her friends came out and threw themselves on the food. “This evening was one of the merriest in my life,” Catherine said. “When the bewildered servants came back to clear away the dishes, I think they were surprised at my appetite.” Her guests departed in high spirits. Poniatowski put on the blond wig and cloak he used on all of his nocturnal visits to the palace. In this disguise, when the sentries asked, “Who goes there?” he replied, “One of the grand duke’s musicians.” The ruse always worked.

Six weeks after the birth, the churching ceremony for Catherine’s new daughter was held in the small palace chapel. But little Anna’s ceremony was sadly different from the one celebrated for her long-awaited brother, Paul. Indeed, Catherine said that for Anna, the chapel’s size was sufficient because “except for Alexander Shuvalov, no one attended.” Peter and Poniatowski were absent. Indeed, no one appeared to care much about this daughter, who, frail from birth, survived only fifteen months. When she died, she was buried in the Alexander Nevsky Monastery with Catherine and Elizabeth, but neither Peter nor Poniatowski, present. At the ceremony, both women bent over the open casket and, following the rites of the Orthodox Church, kissed the small figure on her pale, white forehead. Soon, Anna was forgotten. In her Memoirs, Catherine never mentions her daughter’s death.

37

The Fall of Bestuzhev

CHANCELLOR BESTUZHEV’S INFLUENCE was waning. The animosity of the Shuvalovs and Vice-Chancellor Michael Vorontsov was stoked by the French ambassador, who blamed him for the retreat of Bestuzhev’s friend General Apraksin. The crisis reached a decisive moment when Vorontsov received a visit from the Marquis de l’Hôpital. Waving a paper, the French ambassador said, “Count, I have just received a message from my government. I am told that if, within fifteen days, Chancellor Bestuzhev has not been removed and replaced by you, it is with him that I must deal henceforth.” Alarmed, Vorontsov hurried to Ivan Shuvalov. They went together to the empress and warned that Count Bestuzhev’s shadow was dimming her own prestige in Europe.

Elizabeth had never particularly liked her chancellor, but he was a legacy from the father she had idolized, and over the years she had grown to rely on him to manage most of the everyday business of government. The Shuvalovs had never been able to persuade the empress to make a change, but now she wavered. She was told that it was common knowledge in Vienna and Versailles that Bestuzhev had been paid a substantial English pension for many years. She was told that letters from Catherine to Apraksin had been passed through the chancellor’s hands. She learned that Russia’s allies felt they had been betrayed by the corruptibility of her generals and ministers and by the machinations of the young court. If a few unimportant letters had been found, why should not others of a more dangerous nature have been written and then destroyed or hidden? Why was Catherine interfering in matters concerning the crown? It was pointed out that the young court had been going its own way for a long time, flouting her wishes. Was not Poniatowski staying on in St. Petersburg simply because Catherine wanted him and because Bestuzhev preferred to obey the grand duchess rather than the monarch? Was not everybody running to the young court to flatter the rulers of tomorrow? Elizabeth was assured that she had only to arrest Bestuzhev and have his papers examined to find documents that would prove the chancellor’s complicity with the grand duchess on matters verging on treason.

Elizabeth ordered a meeting of the war council for the evening of February 14, 1758. The chancellor was summoned. Bestuzhev sent word that he was ill. His excuse was rejected, and he was ordered to come immediately. He obeyed, and, upon arrival, he was arrested. His offices, titles, and orders were stripped from him, and he was sent back to his house a prisoner—without anyone troubling to tell him of what crimes he was accused. To make certain that the overthrow of the leading statesman of the empire would not be challenged, a company of the Imperial Guard was ordered out. As the guardsmen were marching along the Moika Canal, where Counts Alexander and Peter Shuvalov lived, the soldiers were cheerful, telling one another, “Thank God, we are going to arrest those cursed Shuvalovs!” When the men realized that it was not the Shuvalovs but Bestuzhev who was to be arrested, they grumbled, “It is not this man. It is the others who trample on the people.”

Catherine learned about the arrest the following morning in a note from Poniatowski. The note added that three other men—the Venetian jeweler Bernardi; her former Russian language teacher Adadurov; and Elagin, a former adjutant of Count Razumovsky’s who had become a friend of Poniatowski’s—had also been arrested. Reading this note, Catherine understood that she might be implicated. She was a friend and ally of Bestuzhev’s. Bernardi, the jeweler, was a man whose profession gave him entrée to all of the leading houses in St. Petersburg. Everyone trusted him, and Catherine had used him to send and receive messages from Bestuzhev and Poniatowski. Adadurov, her teacher, had remained devoted to her, and she had recommended him to Count Bestuzhev. Elagin, she said, was, “a loyal, honest man; once one gained his affection, one did not lose it. He had always shown marked zeal and devotion for me.”

Upon reading Poniatowski’s note, she was alarmed, but steeled herself not to display weakness. “With a dagger in my heart, so to speak,” she said, “I dressed and went to Mass where it seemed to me that most of the faces were as long as my own. No one said anything to me.” In the evening, she went to a ball. There, she marched up to Prince Nikita Trubetskoy, one of the commissioners appointed to assist Alexander Shuvalov in examining the arrested men.

“What do all these wonderful things mean?” she whispered to him. “Have you found more crimes than criminals or more criminals than crimes?”

“We have done what we were ordered to do,” Trubetskoy replied stolidly. “But as for crimes, we are still searching for them. Up to now, we have not found any.” His response encouraged Catherine, who also noted that the empress, having just ordered the arrest of her senior minister, failed to appear that night.

The next day, Gottlieb von Stambke, the Holstein administrator who was close to Bestuzhev, brought Catherine good news. He said that he had just received a clandestine note from Count Bestuzhev asking him to tell the grand duchess that she should not worry because he had had time to burn all his papers. These included, most significantly, the drafts of his proposal that the grand duchess share power with Peter after Elizabeth’s death. Further, the former chancellor had said that he would keep Stambke informed of what happened to him during his interrogation and would pass along the questions put to him. Catherine asked Stambke through what channel he had received Bestuzhev’s note. Stambke said that Bestuzhev’s horn player had passed it to him, and that, in future, all communications were to be placed in a pile of bricks near Bestuzhev’s house.

A few days later, Stambke came back to Catherine’s room, frightened and pale, to tell her that his correspondence and that of Count Bestuzhev with Count Poniatowski had been intercepted. The horn player had been arrested. Stambke himself expected to be dismissed, if not arrested, at any moment, and he had come to say goodbye. Catherine was certain that she had done nothing wrong, and she knew that, aside from Michael Vorontsov, Ivan Shuvalov, and the French ambassador, everyone in St. Petersburg was convinced that Count Bestuzhev was innocent of any crime.

Already, the commission charged with prosecuting the former chancellor was struggling. It became known that the day after Count Bestuzhev’s arrest, a manifesto had been drafted secretly in Ivan Shuvalov’s house, intended to inform the public why the empress had been obliged to arrest her old servant. Unable to find and state any specific offense, the accusers had decided that the crime was to be lèse-majesté: offending the empress by “attempting to sow discord between Her Imperial Majesty and Their Imperial Highnesses.” On February 27, 1758, the manifesto was published, announcing the arrest, the charges, the fact that Bestuzhev had been stripped of his offices and decorations and that he would be examined by a special commission. The flimsy document convinced no one in St. Petersburg, and the public found it ludicrous to threaten the former statesman with exile, confiscation of property, and other punishments, with no evidence of a crime, no trial, and no judgment.

The first step taken by the commissioners was equally absurd. They ordered all Russian ambassadors, envoys, and officials at foreign courts to send copies of all dispatches Count Bestuzhev had written to them during the twenty years he had administered Russia’s foreign affairs. It was alleged that the chancellor had written whatever he pleased, often in opposition to the wishes of the empress. But because Elizabeth never wrote or signed anything, it was impossible to prove that the chancellor had acted contrary to her orders. As for verbal orders, the empress could hardly have given any significant number of these to the chancellor, who sometimes waited for months without being admitted to see her. Nothing came of this. None of the personnel in embassies bothered to examine archives ranging back over many years in order to search for crimes committed by the man whose instructions these same subordinates had loyally obeyed. Who knew but that this might lead to finding themselves implicated? Besides, once these documents arrived in St. Petersburg, it would take years of research to locate and interpret whatever nuggets, favorable or unfavorable, they might contain. The order was ignored. The inquiry lumbered along for a year. No evidence was produced, but the former chancellor was exiled to one of his own estates where he remained until, three years later, Catherine became empress.

With Stambke’s departure for Holstein, Catherine’s handling of the affairs of Peter’s duchy ended. The empress told her nephew that she disapproved of his wife’s involvement in the ruling of his hereditary duchy. Peter, who had enthusiastically encouraged Catherine’s participation in that work, now declared that he agreed with his aunt. The empress then formally asked the king of Poland to recall Count Poniatowski.

When she heard of Stambke’s dismissal and that Poniatowski was to be sent home, Catherine reacted quickly. She ordered Vasily Shkurin, her valet, to gather all of her papers and account books and bring them to her. Once everything was in her room, she sent him away, and then threw everything—every document, and every paper and letter she had ever received—into the fire; this was how the manuscript of her “Portrait of a Fifteen-Year-Old Philosopher,” written in 1744 for Count Gyllenborg, disappeared. When these materials had been reduced to ashes, she called Shkurin back: “You are a witness to the fact that all my papers and accounts are burned. If you are ever asked where they are, you will be able to swear that you saw me burn them.” Shkurin was grateful that she had spared him involvement.

38

A Gamble

ON THE DAY before Lent, the last day of Carnival, 1758, Catherine decided that she had had enough of discretion and timidity. In the weeks that had followed her confinement, she had not appeared in public. Now, she decided to attend a Russian play scheduled for performance at the court theater. Catherine knew that Peter did not like the Russian theater and that even talk of it upset him. This time, Peter would have another, more personal reason for not wishing her to go: he would not want to be deprived of the company of Elizabeth Vorontsova. If Catherine went to the theater, her maids of honor, including Elizabeth Vorontsova, would be obliged to accompany her. Aware of this, Catherine sent word to Count Alexander Shuvalov to order a carriage. Shuvalov promptly appeared to tell her that the grand duke opposed her plan to go to the theater. Catherine replied that, as she was excluded from her husband’s society, it could not matter to him whether she was alone in her room or sitting in her box at the theater. Shuvalov bowed and departed.

Moments later, Peter burst into Catherine’s room “in a fearful passion, screaming, accusing me of taking pleasure in enraging him, and saying that I had chosen to go to the theater because I knew he did not like this kind of play.” He shouted that he would forbid her having a carriage. She told him that if he did this, she would walk. Peter stamped out. As the hour of the performance approached, she sent to ask Count Shuvalov whether her carriage was ready. He came and repeated that the grand duke had forbidden any carriage being provided. Catherine replied that she would go on foot and that if her ladies and gentlemen were forbidden to accompany her, she would go alone. Furthermore, she said, she would write and complain to the empress.

“What will you say to her?” Shuvalov asked.

“I will tell her,” Catherine said, “that in order to arrange for my husband a rendezvous with my maids of honor, you have encouraged him to prevent me from going to the theater where I might have the pleasure of seeing Her Imperial Majesty. Moreover, I will beg her to send me home because I am weary of and disgusted by the role I am made to play here, alone and neglected in my room, hated by the grand duke and disliked by the empress. I do not want to be a burden to anyone any longer or to bring misfortune to whomever approaches me, especially my poor servants, many of whom have already been exiled because I have been good to them. I am going to write to Her Majesty this moment. And I will see whether you can avoid taking this letter to her.” It was a masterpiece of manipulative rhetoric.

Shuvalov left the room and Catherine began writing her letter. She began by thanking Elizabeth for all the kindnesses shown her since her arrival in Russia. She said that, unfortunately, events had proved that she had not deserved these favors because she had called down on herself not only the grand duke’s hatred but the displeasure of Her Imperial Majesty. Considering these failures, she begged the empress to put a quick end to her misery by sending her home to her family in whatever manner she judged appropriate. As for her children, she said that she never saw them, although they lived in the same building only a few yards away; therefore, it made little difference to her whether she was in the same place or hundreds of miles distant. She knew that the empress gave them better care than anything she could provide. She begged Elizabeth to continue this care, and, confident that the empress would do so, she said she would spend the rest of her life praying for the empress, the grand duke, her children, and all those who had done her both good and evil. Now, however, sorrow had so damaged her that she must concentrate on preserving her own life. For this reason, she begged Elizabeth for permission to go, first to take the waters somewhere so that she could recover her health, and then to go home to her family in Germany.

The letter written, Catherine summoned Count Shuvalov. He arrived and announced that her carriage was ready. She handed him her letter, and told him that he could tell the maids of honor who did not wish to accompany her to the theater that they were excused. Leaving her, Shuvalov told Peter that the grand duchess had said that he should decide which women should go with his wife and which should stay with him. As Catherine passed through the antechamber, she found Peter seated with Elizabeth Vorontsova, playing cards. Seeing his wife, Peter rose—something he had never done before—and Countess Vorontsova rose with him. Catherine responded with a curtsy and went to her carriage. That evening, the empress did not appear at the theater, but when Catherine returned home, Count Shuvalov told her that Elizabeth had agreed to grant her another interview.

Catherine’s behavior and her letter to the empress were a gamble. She did not want to leave Russia. She had invested sixteen years, more than half her life, all of her young womanhood, in her ambition to become “a queen.” She knew that her tactics were risky, but she believed they would succeed. She was convinced that if the Shuvalovs had any idea of actually sending her home, or of intimidating her by threatening banishment, her plea that she be allowed to leave was the best method of undermining their plan. Catherine knew that, for Elizabeth, the succession was all-important, and that with the young, deposed tsar Ivan VI still alive, the empress would not wish to see this issue reignited. Catherine also realized that the primary complaint against her was that her marriage had not been a success. She also knew that the empress fully shared her views of Peter. When talking or writing about her nephew privately, Elizabeth either burst into tears at the misfortune of having such an heir or showered him with contempt. After Elizabeth’s death, Catherine discovered among her papers two such comments in the empress’s hand; one addressed to Ivan Shuvalov, the other to Alexis Razumovsky. To the first, she had written, “Today, my damned nephew has greatly irritated me,” and to the other, “My nephew is a fool; the devil take him.”

In constructing her account of this tense, intricate situation, Catherine, as a much older woman, suspended her narrative of events to look at herself, her life, and her character. Whatever happened, she wrote, “I felt myself possessed of sufficient courage either to rise or fall without being carried away by undue pride on the one hand, or being humbled and dispirited on the other.” Her intentions, she told herself, had always been honest. Although she had understood from the beginning that to love a husband who was not lovable and who made no effort to become so was a difficult and probably impossible task, she believed that she had made a sincere effort to devote herself to him and his interests. Her advice had always been the best she could give. If, when she first came to Russia, Peter had been affectionate, she would have opened her heart to him. Now she saw that, among his whole entourage, she was the woman to whom he paid the least attention. She rejected this state of affairs:

My natural pride made the idea of being miserable intolerable to me. I used to say to myself that happiness and misery depend on ourselves. If you feel unhappy, rise above it and act so that your happiness may be independent of all outside events. I had been born with this disposition, and a face that was, at the very least, interesting, and which pleased at first sight without art or pretense. My disposition was naturally so conciliatory that no one ever spent a quarter of an hour with me without feeling perfectly at ease and talking to me as though they had known me for a long time. I easily won the confidence of those who had anything to do with me because everyone felt that I displayed honesty and goodwill. If I may be allowed to be frank, I would say about myself that I was a true gentleman with a mind more male than female, but, together with this, I was anything but masculine and, combined with the mind and character of a man, I possessed the attractions of a loveable woman. May I be pardoned for offering this candid expression of my feelings instead of trying to cover them a veil of false modesty.

This evaluation of her qualities—self-laudatory and self-justifying—led to a general commentary on the conflict between emotion and morality in the lives of human beings. It is a passionate statement—a personal confession, almost—and it brings to Catherine a sympathy and understanding that she is sometimes not given:

I have just said that I was attractive; consequently, half the road of temptation was already traveled, and it is only human in such situations that one should not stop half way. For to tempt and to be tempted are closely allied and, in spite of all the finest maxims of morality, whenever emotion has anything to do with the matter, one is already much further involved than one realizes. And I have still not learned how to prevent emotion being excited. Flight, perhaps, is the only remedy. But there are cases and circumstances, in which flight is impossible. For how can one escape, fly, or turn one’s back, in the middle of a court? Such an act itself would give rise to gossip. And if you do not run away, nothing is more difficult, in my opinion, than to escape from something that essentially attracts you. All statements made to the contrary will appear only a prudishness quite out of harmony with the natural instincts of the human heart. Besides, one cannot hold one’s heart in one’s hand, tightening or relaxing one’s grasp at will.

The day after going to the theater, Catherine began a long wait for the empress’s reply to her letter. She was still waiting several weeks later when Count Shuvalov announced one morning that the empress had just dismissed Madame Vladislavova. After a burst of tears, Catherine gathered herself and replied that, of course, Her Majesty had the right to appoint or dismiss whomever she pleased, but that she was grieved to find, more and more, that all who came near her were doomed to become victims of Her Majesty’s disfavor. In order that there be fewer victims, she asked Shuvalov to appeal to the empress to put a quick end to this situation in which she only made other people miserable. She begged to be sent back to her family immediately.

That evening, after a day of refusing to eat, Catherine was alone in her room when one of her younger maids of honor came in. In tears, the young woman said, “We all are afraid that you will sink under these afflictions. Let me to go to my uncle—he is your confessor as well as the empress’s. I will speak to him and tell him everything you wish, and I promise that he will speak to the empress in a way that will please you.” Trusting her, Catherine described what she had written to the empress. The young woman saw her uncle, Father Theodore Dubyansky, and returned to tell Catherine that the priest advised the grand duchess to announce during the middle of the night that she was seriously ill and wanted to confess, and to ask that he, her father confessor, be sent to her. This way, he would be able to tell the empress what he had heard from Catherine’s own lips. Catherine approved this plan, and between two and three in the morning, she rang her bell. A maid entered and Catherine said that she was dangerously ill and wished to make her confession. Instead of her confessor, Count Alexander Shuvalov hurried into the room. Catherine repeated her request for the priest. Shuvalov sent for doctors. When they arrived, she told them that she needed spiritual, not medical, assistance. One of the doctors felt her pulse and reported that it was weak. Catherine whispered that it was her soul that was in danger; that her body no longer needed doctors.

Eventually, Father Dubyansky arrived, and he and Catherine were left alone. The black-robed priest with a long white beard sat by her bed and they talked for an hour and a half. She described to him the past and present state of her affairs, the grand duke’s behavior toward her, the Shuvalovs’ hostility, how they were poisoning the empress’s view of her, and the constant dismissal of her servants, particularly those who were most devoted to her. For these reasons, she said, she had written to the empress and begged to be sent home. She asked the priest to help her. He said he would do his best. He advised her that she should continue asking to be sent home, and he said that she would certainly not be sent away because they could not justify this dismissal in the eyes of the public. He agreed that the empress, having chosen her at a tender age, had largely abandoned her to her enemies; and said that Elizabeth would do far better to dismiss Elizabeth Vorontsova and the Shuvalovs. Moreover, he said, everyone was crying out at the Shuvalovs’ injustice in the affair of Count Bestuzhev, of whose innocence everyone was convinced. He concluded by telling Catherine that he would go immediately to the empress’s apartment, where he would sit and wait until Her Majesty awakened in order to speak to her and urge her to speed up the interview with Catherine she had promised. Meanwhile, he added, Catherine should remain in bed, which would reinforce his argument that the affliction and grief to which she was being subjected might cause her grave harm unless some remedy was found.

The confessor kept his promise and described Catherine’s condition so vividly to Elizabeth that she summoned Alexander Shuvalov and ordered him to inquire whether the grand duchess’s health would allow her to come and talk to her the following night. Catherine told Count Shuvalov that for such a purpose she would summon all her remaining strength.

39

Confrontation

ON THE EVENING of the following day—it was April 13, 1758, a week before Catherine’s twenty-ninth birthday—Alexander Shuvalov told Catherine that after midnight he would come to escort her to the empress’s apartment. At half past one, he arrived and said that the empress was ready. Catherine followed him through the halls, which seemed empty. Suddenly, she caught a glimpse of Peter ahead of her, also on his way, it seemed, toward his aunt’s apartment. Catherine had not seen him since the night she had gone to the theater by herself.

In the empress’s apartment, Catherine found her husband already present. Approaching Elizabeth, she fell on her knees and begged to be sent home to Germany. The empress tried to make her get up, but Catherine remained on her knees. Elizabeth, appearing to Catherine to be more sad than angry, said, “Why do you wish me to send you home? Remember that you have children.” Catherine’s answer was prepared: “My children are in your hands and could not be better placed. I hope you will not abandon them.” Elizabeth asked, “How shall I explain such a step to the people?” Again, Catherine was ready: “Your Imperial Majesty will tell them, if you see fit, all the reasons that have brought upon me your displeasure, and the hatred of the grand duke.” “But how will you manage to live at your family’s home?” the empress continued. “I will do as well as I did before you did me the honor of choosing me and taking me away,” Catherine replied.

The empress again insisted that Catherine rise; this time, Catherine obeyed. Elizabeth paced back and forth. The long room where they were meeting had three windows, between which stood two dressing tables holding the empress’s gold toilet service. Large screens had been placed in front of the windows. From the moment she entered, Catherine suspected that Ivan Shuvalov and perhaps others were hidden behind these screens; later, she learned that Ivan Shuvalov had, indeed, been there. Catherine also noticed that one of the basins on the dressing tables contained folded letters. The empress approached her and said, “God is my witness to how I wept when you were so dangerously ill on your arrival in Russia. If I had not loved you, I would not have kept you here.” Catherine thanked the empress for her kindness. She said that she would never forget these things and would always consider it the greatest of personal misfortunes that she had incurred Her Majesty’s displeasure.

Elizabeth’s mood suddenly changed; she seemed to revert to a mental list of grievances drawn up in preparing for the interview. “You are dreadfully haughty,” she said. “You imagine that there is no one so clever as you.” Again, Catherine was ready: “If I ever had such a conceit, Madame, nothing would be more likely to destroy it than my present situation and this very conversation.”

As the two women were talking, Catherine noticed that Peter was whispering to Alexander Shuvalov. Elizabeth saw this too and walked over to them. Catherine could not hear what the three of them were saying until her husband raised his voice and cried out, “She is dreadfully spiteful and very obstinate.” Catherine, realizing that she was the subject, said to Peter, “If you are speaking of me, I am glad to tell you in the presence of Her Imperial Majesty that I am indeed spiteful to people who advise you to inflict injustice, and that I have become obstinate because I have seen that, by yielding, I have gained nothing but your hostility.” Peter appealed to his aunt: “Your Majesty can see how malicious she is by what she is saying.” But Catherine’s words were making a different impression on the empress. Catherine saw as the conversation progressed that, although Elizabeth had been advised—or had resolved—to be severe with her, the empress’s attitude was wavering.

For a while, Elizabeth continued to criticize. “You meddle in many things that do not concern you. How could you, for instance, presume to send orders to General Apraksin?” Catherine replied, “I, Madame? Send orders? Never has such an idea entered my head.”

“How can you deny it?” Elizabeth said. “Your letters are there in the basin.” She pointed to them. “You know that you were forbidden to write.”

Catherine knew that she must admit to something. “It is true that I transgressed in this respect and I beg Your Majesty’s forgiveness. But as my letters are there, these three letters will prove to Your Majesty that I never sent him any orders. In one of them, I told him what was being said of his behavior.”

Elizabeth interrupted, “And why did you write this to him?”

Catherine replied, “Because I took an interest in the general, whom I liked very much. I begged him to follow your orders. The two other letters contain only congratulations on the birth of his son and New Year’s greetings.”

“Bestuzhev says there were many others,” Elizabeth said.

“If Bestuzhev says this, he lies,” Catherine responded.

“Well, then,” the empress said, “since he is lying about you, I will have him put to torture.” Catherine replied that, as sovereign, she could do what she liked, but that she, Catherine, had never written more than those three letters to Apraksin.

Elizabeth walked up and down the room, sometimes silent, sometimes addressing herself to Catherine, sometimes to her nephew or Count Shuvalov. “The grand duke showed much bitterness towards me, seeking to anger the empress against me,” Catherine wrote in her Memoirs. “But because he went about this stupidly and displayed more passion than justice, he failed. She listened with a kind of involuntary approval to my responses to my husband’s remarks. His behavior became so objectionable that the empress came up to me and said in a low voice, ‘I have many more things to say to you, but I do not want to make things worse between the two of you than they are already.’ ” Seeing this sign of goodwill, Catherine whispered back, “And I, too, find it difficult to speak, in spite of my great desire to tell you all that is in my mind and heart.” Elizabeth nodded and dismissed everyone, saying that it was very late. It was three o’clock in the morning.

Peter left first, then Catherine, followed by Shuvalov. Just as the count reached the door, the empress called him back. Catherine returned to her rooms and had started to undress when there was a knock on her door. It was Alexander Shuvalov. “He told me that the empress had spoken to him for some time, and had instructed him to tell me not to worry too much, and that she would have another conversation with me, alone and soon.” She curtsied to Count Shuvalov and asked him to thank Her Imperial Majesty, and to hurry the moment of the second conversation. He told her not to speak of this to anyone, especially the grand duke.

Catherine was certain now that she would not be sent away. While waiting for the promised second interview, she kept mostly to her room. From time to time, she reminded Count Shuvalov that she was anxious to have her fate decided. On April 21, 1758, her twenty-ninth birthday, she was having dinner alone in her room when the empress sent word that she was drinking to Catherine’s health. Catherine sent back her gratitude. When Peter learned of the empress’s message, he sent a similar greeting. Poniatowski reported that the French ambassador, the Marquis de l’Hôpital, had spoken admiringly of her determination, and said that her resolution not to leave her apartment could only turn to her advantage. Catherine, taking l’Hôpital’s remark as the treacherous praise of an enemy, decided to do the opposite. One Sunday, when no one was expecting it, she dressed and left her apartment. When she entered the anterooms where the ladies- and gentlemen-in-waiting of the young court were assembled, she saw their astonishment at seeing her. When Peter arrived, he was equally surprised. He came up and spoke to her briefly.

On May 23, 1758, almost six weeks after the meeting with Elizabeth, Alexander Shuvalov told Catherine that she should ask the empress, through him, for permission to see her children that afternoon. Afterward, Shuvalov said, she would have her second, long-promised private audience with the monarch. Catherine did as she was told and formally asked permission to see her two children. Shuvalov said that she could visit them at three o’clock. Catherine was punctual and remained with her children until Shuvalov arrived to tell her that the empress was ready. Catherine found Elizabeth alone; this time there were no screens. Catherine expressed her gratitude, and Elizabeth said, “I expect you to answer truthfully all the questions I shall ask you.” Catherine promised that Elizabeth would hear nothing but the exact truth and that there was nothing she wanted more than to open her heart without reservation. Elizabeth asked if there really had been no more than three letters written to Apraksin. Catherine swore that there were only three. “Then,” Catherine wrote, “she asked for details about the grand duke’s mode of life.”

At this climactic moment, Catherine’s memoirs suddenly and inexplicably conclude. Her life continued for another thirty-eight years, and the rest of her story is told by her letters, political writings, official documents, and by other people—friends, enemies, and a multitude of observers, But no part of this story is more remarkable than Stanislaus Poniatowski’s description of the episodes involving Catherine and himself that followed in the summer of 1758.

40

A Ménage à Quatre

STANISLAUS PONIATOWSKI did not leave Russia and Catherine. He resisted departure by feigning illness, sometimes spending the entire day in bed. In the summer of 1758, when the young court moved to Oranienbaum, Poniatowski was with Elizabeth’s court at Peterhof, a few miles away. At night, disguised in his blond wig, he visited Catherine at Oranienbaum, where she received him in her separate, private pavilion.

Peter, absorbed with Elizabeth Vorontsova, never interfered in Poniatowski’s affair with his wife. An intervention was always a possibility, but when this happened, it was by chance. In July 1758, as Poniatowski told the story in his memoirs, the Shuvalovs and the French ambassador were pressing the empress to send him home, and the Polish government was insisting that he return. He knew that soon he would have to comply.

The knowledge that I would have to leave made my frequent nocturnal visits to Oranienbaum even more frequent. The good luck that always accompanied me during these visits made me lose all sense of danger. On July 6, I took a small closed carriage whose driver did not know me. That night—although there is no real night in northern Russia during the period of the White Nights—we unfortunately met the grand duke and his entourage, all of them half-drunk, on a road in the woods near Oranienbaum. My driver was halted and asked who was in the carriage. He replied, “a tailor” and we were allowed to proceed. But Elizabeth Vorontsova, who was with him, began making sarcastic remarks about “the tailor” which put the grand duke in a bad humor. The result was that as I was leaving, after spending a few hours with the grand duchess, I was assaulted by three men holding drawn sabers. They seized me by the collar like a thief and dragged me to the grand duke who, recognizing me, simply ordered my escorts to follow him and bring me along. They led me down a path to the sea and I thought my last hour had come. But we turned into a pavilion where the grand duke asked me bluntly whether I had slept with his wife. I said, “No.”

“Tell me the truth,” Peter said to Poniatowski, “because, if you do, then everything will be arranged. If not, you will go through some bad moments.”

“I cannot say that I have done something I have not done,” Poniatowski lied.

Peter went into another room to consult with Brockdorff. Returning, he said, “Since you refuse to talk, you will stay here until further orders.” He left and stationed a guard at the door. After two hours, Alexander Shuvalov appeared. Shuvalov, his face twitching, asked for an explanation. Instead of responding directly, Poniatowski took another approach: “I am sure you will understand, Count, that it is important to the honor of your court, as well as of myself, that all this should end as quickly as possible, and that you should get me out of here promptly.”

Realizing that a scandal of unknown dimensions was looming, Shuvalov agreed and said he would arrange it. He came back an hour later and told Poniatowski that a carriage was ready to take him back to Peterhof. The carriage was so shabby that, at six in the morning, and at a short distance from Peterhof, Poniatowski got out and walked to the palace, wrapped in his cloak, with the brim of his hat pulled down over his eyes and ears; he thought this would arouse less suspicion than if he arrived in the disreputable vehicle in which he had just traveled. Reaching the building where his room was on the ground floor, he decided not to enter by the door; there was a chance of meeting someone. The windows were open to the summer night and Poniatowski climbed through the one he thought was his. He found myself in the room of his neighbor, General Roniker, who was shaving. The two stared at each other, then both burst out laughing. “Do not ask where I come from or why I arrive by the window,” Poniatowski said, “but, as a good compatriot, swear you will never mention it.” Roniker swore.

The next two days were uncomfortable for Catherine’s lover. Within twenty-four hours, his adventure was known to the whole court. Everyone expected that Poniatowski would be required to leave the country immediately. Catherine’s only hope of postponing her lover’s departure was to placate her husband. Setting aside her pride, she approached Elizabeth Vorontsova, who was delighted to have the proud grand duchess before her as a supplicant. Soon, Catherine managed to send Poniatowski a note saying that she had succeeded in conciliating her husband’s mistress, who would, in turn, appease the grand duke. This suggested to Poniatowski an approach that might make it possible for him to stay in Russia a little longer. At a court ball at Peterhof, he danced with Elizabeth Vorontsova, and while they performed a minuet, he whispered to her, “You know that you have it in your power to make several people very happy.” Vorontsova, seeing a further opportunity to place the grand duchess under obligation, smiled and said, “Come to the Mon Plaisir villa tonight an hour after midnight.”

At the appointed hour and place, Poniatowski met his new benefactress, who invited him in. “And there was the grand duke, very gay, welcoming me in a friendly and familiar way,” Poniatowski wrote later. “Are you not a great fool not to have been frank with me from the beginning?” Peter said. “If you had, none of this mess would have happened.”

Poniatowski accepted Peter’s reproof, and, changing the subject, expressed his admiration for the perfect discipline of the grand duke’s Holstein soldiers, guarding the palace. Peter was so pleased by this compliment that, after a quarter of an hour, he said, “Well, now that we are such good friends, I find there is someone missing here.” He went to his wife’s room, pulled her out of bed, leaving her only time to put a loose robe over her nightgown and a pair of slippers on her bare feet. Then he brought her in, pointed at Poniatowski, and said, “Well, here he is! Now I hope everyone will be pleased with me.” Catherine, imperturbable, responded by saying to her husband, “The only thing missing is that you should write to the vice chancellor, Count Vorontsov, to arrange the prompt return of our friend to Russia.” Peter, enormously pleased with himself and his role in this scene, sat down and wrote the note. Then, he handed it to Elizabeth Vorontsova to countersign.

“Afterwards,” Poniatowski wrote, “we all sat down, laughing and chattering and frolicking around a small fountain in the room as though we had not a care in the world. We did not separate until four in the morning. Mad as it may seem, I swear that this is the exact truth. Next day, everyone’s attitude towards me was much nicer. Ivan Shuvalov spoke to me pleasantly. So did Vice Chancellor Vorontsov.”

Not only did this amiability continue; it was enhanced by Peter himself. “The grand duke made me repeat my visit to Oranienbaum four times,” Poniatowski said. “I arrived in the evening, walked up an unused staircase to the grand duchess’s room, where I found the grand duchess, the grand duke and his mistress. We had supper together, after which he took his mistress away, saying to us, ‘Well, my children, you do not need me any more, I think.’ And I was able to stay as long as I liked.”

No one seemed happier with this situation than Peter. It was his moment of triumph over Catherine. For many years, he had felt himself inferior to his wife. He had tried to humiliate her privately and in public. He had ignored her, shouted at her, ridiculed her, and betrayed her with other women. He had made condescending, usually inaccurate, remarks about her intrigues with other men. Now the moment had come when, with his mistress on his arm, he could smile across a table at Catherine and her lover on an equal basis. He was not embarrassed by being made a cuckold. Rather, for the first time in his life, he felt himself master of a situation. His complaisance was genuine; with nothing to hide, he exposed, and even gleefully helped spread, the scandal. Poniatowski no longer needed to wear a blond wig; there was nothing now to fear from Peter’s sentries. Why bother? Why worry? Everyone knew.

For Catherine, however, the situation was different. She had been ready to engage in escapades like slipping out of the palace at night in male clothing. But she did not enjoy sitting down to supper with her gossip-loving husband and his saucy, malicious mistress, listening to their flighty conversation. It was not pleasant to see how much Elizabeth Vorontsova was enjoying the situation. Catherine was not cynical; she believed in love. The degrading of love, which pleased Peter, offended her. And she could not bear that Peter should consider Poniatowski as merely the male equivalent of Elizabeth Vorontsova. She regarded Poniatowski as a gentleman; Vorontsova she considered a trollop. Soon, a warning signal flashed in her mind. This nocturnal camaraderie was based on agreed, mutual adultery, and she realized that these episodes could spell a greater danger to her future than the hostility of the Shuvalovs. Even at the permissive court of Elizabeth, this arrangement between herself and Peter might be a barrier to her ambition. As Catherine feared, awareness of the ménage à quatre began to create a political scandal. L’Hôpital mentioned it when renewing his demands that Poniatowski be dismissed. Elizabeth understood that the reputation of her nephew and heir was being undermined. Poniatowski knew that he must go.

Saying goodbye, Catherine wept. With Poniatowski she had experienced the courtship of a gentle, cultured European. Afterward, her letters and his were filled with hope for a speedy reunion. Many years later, as empress of Russia, Catherine wrote to Gregory Potemkin, in whom she confided almost every detail about her previous life: “Poniatowski was loving and beloved from 1755 to 1758 and the liaison would have lasted forever if he himself had not got bored by it. On the day of his departure, I was more distressed than I can tell you. I don’t think I ever cried so much in my life.” In fact, Catherine’s blaming of boredom on his part was unfair. They both had recognized that the situation had become impossible.

Many years later, as king of Poland, placed on this throne by his former lover Empress Catherine II of Russia, Poniatowski included in his memoirs a brief sketch of Peter. It is a damning portrait, but it also has elements of understanding, even sympathy:

Nature made him a mere poltroon, a guzzler, an individual comic in all things. In one of the outpourings of his heart to me, he observed, “See how unhappy I am. If I had only entered into the service of the King of Prussia I would have served him to the best of my ability. By this present time, I should, I am confident, have had a regiment and the rank of major general and perhaps even of lieutenant general. But far from it. Instead, they brought me here and made me a grand duke of this damned country.” And then he railed against the Russian nation in his familiar, low, burlesque style, yet at times really very agreeably, for he did not lack a certain kind of spirit. He was not stupid, but mad, and as he loved to drink, this helped scramble his poor brains even further.

*Throughout the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) that followed, Russia and England were never at war, despite each being allied with the enemies of the other.

*For centuries, elevation to the Polish throne had been by election, with most of the Polish nobility preferring to submit to the weak rule of a foreign king than to sacrifice any of their own privileges by giving preference to one of their own blood. The result was permanent near anarchy.