Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

10

HEARTBREAK AND UNDERSTANDING

My soul, I’m doing everything for you so at least encourage me a little with affectionate and calm behaviour…my little dear lord, lovable husband.

Catherine II to Count Potemkin

But in such matters Russia’s mighty Empress

Behaved no better than a common sempstress

Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto IX: 77

‘My husband just said to me “Where should I go, what should I do?” ’, Catherine wrote to Count Potemkin around this time. ‘My darling and well-loved husband, come to my place and you will be received with open arms!’¹ On 2 January 1776, Catherine appointed Peter Zavadovsky as adjutant-general. This ménage-à-trois puzzled the Court.

The diplomats realized that something was happening in the Empress’s private life and presumed that Potemkin’s career was over: ‘The Empress begins to see the liberties of her favourite [Potemkin] in a different light…It is already whispered that a person placed about her by Mr Rumiantsev bids fair to gain her entire confidence.’² There were rumours that Potemkin would lose the College of War, either to Alexei Orlov-Chesmensky or to Panin’s nephew Prince Repnin. But an English diplomat, Richard Oakes, noticed that Potemkin was expanding his interests, not reducing them, and ‘seems to interest himself more in foreign affairs than he at first affected to do.’³ While the Anglo-Saxons could not quite grasp what might be happening, the waspish French envoy, Chevalier Marie Daniel Bourrée de Corberon, who kept an invaluable diary of his life at Court, suspected that it would take more than Zavadovsky to destroy him. ‘Better in face than Potemkin,’ he observed. ‘But his favour not yet decided.’ Then in the sarcastic tone that diplomats habitually adopted when discussing the imperial sex life: ‘His talents have been put to the test in Moscow. But Potemkin…still has the air of credit…so Zavadovsky is probably only an amusement.’⁴

Between January and March 1776, the Empress avoided large gatherings as she struggled to work out her relationship with Count Potemkin. That January, Prince Orlov reappeared after his travels and this muddied the waters even further because there were now three present or former favourites at Court. Grigory Orlov was back in his hearty old form, but he was no longer the man he had been: overweight and struck by attacks of ‘palsy’, he was in love with his cousin Ekaterina Zinovieva, aged fifteen, one of the Empress’s maids-of-honour, whom some accounts claim he had raped. The ruthless competition at Court is reflected in the rumours that Potemkin was poisoning Orlov – something completely against his nature. Orlov’s paralysis sounds like the later stages of syphilis, the sickly fruit of his well-known lack of discernment.

Catherine appeared only at small dinners. Peter Zavadovsky was frequently present; Potemkin was there less than before – but still too much for the former’s liking. Zavadovsky must have felt inadequate between two of the most dynamic conversationalists of their time. Potemkin was still Catherine’s lover, while the earnest Zavadovsky was increasingly in love with her. We do not know when (or if) she withdrew from Potemkin and took Zavadovsky as a lover – it was some time during that winter. Indeed, it was most likely that she never completely ceased to sleep with the man she called ‘my husband’. Was she playing off one against the other, encouraging both? Naturally. Since by her own account she was one of those who could not contemplate a day without somebody to love her, it would have been only human for her to cast her eyes at her secretary when Potemkin was parading his lack of interest.

In some ways, their relationship is at its most moving in this tense six months because they still loved one another, regarding each other as husband and wife, drifting apart yet trying to find a way to stay together for ever. Count Potemkin sometimes wept in the arms of his Empress.

—

‘Why do you want to cry?’, she sweetly asked her ‘Lord and Darling Husband’ in the letter that reminded him of the ‘sacred ties’ of their marriage. ‘How can I change my attitude towards you? Is it possible not to love you? Have confidence in my words…I love you.’⁵

Potemkin had watched the closeness develop between Catherine and Zavadovsky and at least tolerated it. He continued to be as difficult as usual, but he clearly did not mean to kill Zavadovsky as he had once threatened to do to his successor. The letters reveal a crisis in their relationship and a certain amount of jealousy towards Zavadovsky, but Potemkin appears to be so dominant that the other man does not really threaten him. It seems most likely that Potemkin approved of the new relationship – up to a point. It was simply a question of finding it.

‘Your life is precious to me and I don’t want to remove you,’⁶ the Empress told him specifically. They liked to settle rows with their dialogue letters: the second that has survived reads like the climax of a discussion, the calm reconciliation after a frantic storm of insecurities. This is much more specific than the earlier epistolary duet. The Empress is lovingly patient with her impossible eccentric, Potemkin is tender and gentle with her – incongruous qualities in such a man:

Potemkin

Catherine

Let me my love say this

I allow it

which will, I hope, end our argument

The sooner the better

Don’t be surprised if I am

Disturbed by our love.

Don’t be disturbed

Not only have you showered

Me with good deeds,

So have you on me

You have placed me in your

You are there firmly

heart. I want to be

and

There alone, and above everyone

strongly and will

else,

Remain there

Because no one has ever loved

I see it and believe it

you so much; and

As I have been made by your

In my heart, I shall be

hands, I want my peace

To be the work of your hands,

Happy to do so

that you should be

Happy in being good to me;

It will be my greatest

pleasure

That you should find rest from

the great

Labours arising from your high

station

In thinking of my comfort.

Of course

Amen

Give rest to our

Thoughts and let

Our feelings act freely

They are most tender

and

Will find the best way.

End of quarrel.

Amen.⁷

He was not always so kind. Potemkin, feeling vulnerable, lashed out at her cruelly. ‘I ask God to forgive you your vain despair and violence but also your injustice to me,’ she replied. ‘I believe that you love me in spite of the fact that often there is no trace of love in your words.’ Both suffered bitterly. ‘I am not evil and not angry with you,’ she tells him after one of their discussions. ‘It depends on your will, how you treat me.’ But she suggested that they could not sustain this tumultuous tension indefinitely: ‘I want to see you calm and be in the same state too.’⁸

The Court searched for signs of Potemkin’s fall or Zavadovsky’s rise, while the couple debated what to do. Potemkin wanted to remain in power, so he had to keep his apartments in the Winter Palace. When he became upset, she told him what so many ordinary lovers have told their agonized partners – ‘it’s not difficult to decide: stay with me’. Then she typically added this reminder of their amorous–political partnership: ‘All your political proposals are very reasonable.’⁹ But Catherine finally lost her cool too.

The way you sometimes talk, one might say I am a monster which has all the faults and especially that of stupidity…this mind knows no other way of loving than making happy whoever it loves and for this reason it finds it impossible to bear even a moment’s breach with him whom it loves without – to its despair – being loved in return…My mind is busy trying to find virtues, some merits, in the object of its love. I like to see in you all the marvels…

After this expression of her hurt, as Potemkin fell out of love with her, she defined the heart of their problem: ‘The essence of our disagreement is always the question of power and never that of love.’¹⁰

This has always been taken at face value, but it is a tidy feminine rewriting of their history. Their love was as stormy as their political collaboration. If power was the subject of their quarrels, then removing the love but keeping the power would also perpetuate their rows. Perhaps it was truer to say that the essence of their disagreement was the end of the intensely physical phase of their relationship and Potemkin’s increasing maturity and need for freedom. Maybe Catherine could not bring herself to admit that he no longer wanted her as a woman – but they would always argue about power.

None of this satisfied him. Potemkin appears to have been in a permanent rage. ‘You are angry,’ she wrote in French. ‘You keep away from me, you say you are offended…What satisfaction can you want more? Even when the Church burns a heretic, it doesn’t claim any more…You’re destroying all my happiness for the time that is left to me. Peace, my friend. I offer you my hand – will you take it, love?’¹¹

—

On her return to Petersburg from Moscow, Catherine wrote to Prince Dmitri Golitsyn, her envoy in Vienna, that she wished to ‘get His Majesty [Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II] to raise General Count Grigory Potemkin, who has served myself and the State so well, to the dignity of Prince of the Holy Roman Empire, for which I will be most indebted to him’. Joseph II reluctantly agreed on 16/27 February, despite the distaste of his prim mother, the Empress–Queen Maria Theresa. ‘It’s fairly droll’, smirked Corberon, ‘that the pious Empress–Queen recompenses the lovers of the non-believing sovereign of Russia.’

‘Prince Grigory Alexandrovich!’ Catherine acclaimed her Potemkin. ‘We graciously permit you to accept the title of Prince of the Holy Roman Empire.’¹² Potemkin was henceforth known as ‘Most Serene Highness’, or in Russian, ‘Svetleyshiy Kniaz’. There were many princes in Russia but from now Potemkin was ‘The Prince’ – or just ‘Serenissimus’. The diplomats presumed that this was Potemkin’s golden adieu because Orlov had been granted use of his title only on his dismissal. Catherine also gave Potemkin ‘a present of 16,000 peasants who can make annually five roubles a head’, and then Denmark sent him the Order of the White Elephant. Was Potemkin being dismissed or confirmed in office? ‘I dined at Count Potemkin’s,’ said Corberon on 24 March, ‘It’s said his credit falls, that Zavadovsky is still in intimate favour and that the Orlovs have a lot of credit to protect him.’¹³

Serenissimus desired to be a monarch as well as a prince: he already feared that Catherine would die and leave him at the mercy of the bitter Paul, from whom ‘he can expect only Siberia.’¹⁴ The solution was to establish himself independently, outside Russian borders. The Empress Anna had made her favourite, Ernst Biron, Duke of Courland, a Baltic principality, dominated by Russia but technically subject to Poland. The ruling Duke was now Biron’s son Peter. Potemkin decided that he wanted Courland for himself.

On 2 May, Catherine informed her ambassador to Poland, Count Otto-Magnus Stackelberg, that ‘wishing to thank Prince Potemkin for his services to the country, I intend to give him the Duchy of Courland’ and then suggested how he should manoeuvre. Frederick the Great ordered his envoy in Petersburg to offer help to Potemkin in this project and, on 18/29 May, he wrote warmly to him from Potsdam. Yet Catherine never pulled out the stops: Potemkin had not yet proved himself a statesman and she had to tread carefully, in Courland as well as Russia. This quest for a safe throne abroad was a leitmotif of Potemkin’s career. But Catherine always did her best to keep his mind on Russia – where she needed it.¹⁵

At the beginning of April 1776, Prince Henry of Prussia arrived to consolidate his brother Frederick’s alliance with Russia. The Russo-Prussian relationship had lost its glow when Frederick had undermined Russian gains during the Russo-Turkish War. Frederick’s younger brother was a secret homosexual, energetic general and clever diplomat who had helped to initiate the Partition of Poland in 1772. He was a caricature of Frederick, but fourteen years younger and bitterly jealous of him – the fate of younger brothers in the age of kings. Henry had been among the first to cultivate Potemkin. It was a mark of Potemkin’s new and increasing interest in foreign affairs that he now arranged Henry’s trip. ‘My happiness’, Prince Henry wrote to Potemkin, ‘will be great if during my stay in St Petersburg, I get the chance to prove my esteem and friendship.’ The moment he arrived on 9 April he demonstrated this wish by presenting Potemkin with the Black Eagle of Prussia to add to his growing collection of foreign orders: this gave Frederick II and Potemkin the excuse to exchange flattering letters. No doubt, Prince Henry also encouraged the Courland project.¹⁶

Just as the foreigners thought Potemkin had lost his credit, the unpredictable lovers seemed to be enjoying a little Indian summer. In perhaps the best and simplest declaration of love that anyone could give, she wrote: ‘My dear Prince! God nominated you to be my friend before I was even born because he created you to be for me. Thank you for the present and for the hug…’.¹⁷ It sounds as though they were having a secret reunion – but the painful negotiations between them continued. Potemkin’s eclipse and Zavadovsky’s rise were widely expected. Neither Catherine nor Potemkin could take much more of this agonizing limbo. The morning after Prince Henry arrived, tragedy intervened.

—

At four o’clock in the morning on 10 April 1776, Grand Duchess Natalia Alexeevna, Paul’s pregnant wife, went into labour. The Empress put on an apron and rushed to Natalia’s apartments. She stayed with her and Paul until eight in the morning.¹⁸

The timing was inconvenient because Prince Henry had to be entertained. That night, the Empress and Prince Henry attended a violin concert by Lioli in ‘the apartment of His Excellency Prince Grigory Alexandrovich Potemkin’, recorded the Court Journal. Prince Henry and Potemkin discussed the alliance, as Catherine had suggested: on Frederick’s instructions, Prince Henry made sure he got on well with the favourite.¹⁹ That night, it looked as if the Grand Duchess was about to deliver an heir for the Empire.

Grand Duchess Natalia had already proved a disappointment to Catherine. Though Paul appeared to love her, she was an intriguer who had not even bothered to learn Russian. Catherine and Potemkin suspected she had been having an affair with Andrei Razumovsky, Paul’s closest friend and a suave womanizer. Nonetheless, on the 11th, Catherine donned her apron again and rushed to do her duty, spending six hours at the bedside, then dined in her apartments with her two Princes, Orlov and Potemkin. She spent all the next day with the Grand Duchess.

The foreign diplomats felt rather cheated that ‘the accouchement’ had suspended ‘the fall of Potemkin’, as Corberon put it. The Grand Duchess was crying out in agony. The Empress was worried. ‘A meal was laid inside Her Majesty’s apartments but she didn’t want to eat,’ records the Court Journal. ‘Prince…Potemkin ate.’ When he was hungry, there was not much that could put him off his food.

The doctors did what they could according to the science of solicitous butchery that then passed for medicine. Forceps were already in use in the mid-eighteenth century^*1 Caesareans, though desperately dangerous, had been successfully completed since Caesar’s time: the mother virtually always perished of infection, shock and loss of blood, but the child could be saved. Now, nothing was tried and it was too late. The baby had perished and the foetus infected the mother. ‘Things are very bad,’ Catherine wrote, possibly the next day, in a letter marked 5 a.m., already thinking about how to cope with Paul afterwards. ‘I think the mother will go the same way as the child. Keep silent about it…’. She ordered the commandant of Tsarskoe Selo to prepare Paul’s apartments. ‘When things are clear, I’ll bring my son there.’²⁰ Gangrene set in. The stink was intolerable.

Prince Potemkin was playing cards while they awaited the inevitable denouement. ‘I’m assured’, said Corberon, ‘that Potemkin lost…3,000 roubles at whist when all the world were crying.’ This was unfair. The Empress and her consort had much to arrange. Catherine compiled a list of her six candidates for Paul’s new wife, which she sent to Potemkin. Princess Sophia Dorothea of Württemberg, whom she had always wanted Paul to marry, was first of the six.²¹

At 5 p.m. on 15 April, the Grand Duchess died. Paul was half mad with grief, ranting that the doctors had lied: she must be alive still, he wanted to be with her, he would not let her be buried – and all the other fantasies that people use to deny mortal reality. The doctors bled him. Twenty minutes later, Catherine accompanied her stricken son to Tsarskoe Selo. Potemkin travelled down with his old friend, Countess Bruce. ‘Sic transit gloria mundi,’ Catherine commented briskly to Grimm. She had not liked Natalia, but now diplomats criticized her for the conduct of the Grand Duchess’s accouchement: had she allowed her daughter-in-law to perish? The post-mortem revealed that there was an abnormality which meant Natalia could never have given birth – thus she could not have been saved by the medicine of the day. But since this was Russia, where emperors died of ‘piles’, Corberon reported that no one believed the official story.^*2

‘For two days, the Grand Duke has been in inexpressible distraction,’ wrote Oakes, ‘Prince Henry of Prussia has scarcely quitted him.’ Prince Henry, Catherine and Potemkin united to promoted Paul’s immediate remarriage to the Princess of Württemberg. ‘The choice of a Princess will not be long delayed,’ reported Oakes a few days later. Amid the mourning, Catherine, Potemkin and Prince Henry appreciated the harsh reality that the Empire needed an heir, so Paul urgently needed a wife.

Paul was understandably reluctant to marry again. Such personal scruples were removed when Catherine, so loving to her adopted families, so cruel to her own, showed him Natalia’s letters to Andrei Razumovsky which were found among her effects. Catherine and Potemkin arranged to send Paul on a trip to Berlin to approve the bride. The Hohenzollern brothers were delighted to have the chance to influence the Russian Heir – Princess Sophia was their niece. Paul’s placidity was probably aided by his Prussophilia and worship of Frederick the Great, like his father before him. The Court reverted to its favourite sport – plotting the fall of Potemkin.²²

—

Grand Duchess Natalia and her still-born child lay in state at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery. She wore white satin. The foetus, which turned out in the autopsy to be perfectly formed, lay gruesomely at her feet in the open coffin.²³ Serenissimus remained at Tsarskoe Selo with Catherine, Prince Henry and Paul, who was grieving not only for his wife but also for the broken illusion of his marriage. Corberon could not comprehend how both Zavadovsky and Potemkin were with the Empress: ‘the reign of the latter is at its end,’ he crowed, ‘his position as Minister of War already given to Count Alexei Orlov,’ but he worried that Potemkin seemed to be putting a very good face on matters.²⁴ Both Corberon and the British reckoned that Prince Henry was backing Potemkin against the Orlovs, contributing ‘much to the retarding of the removal of Prince Potemkin whom the ribbon [the Black Eagle] has bound to his interests’.

Natalia’s funeral was held on 26 April at the Nevsky Monastery. Potemkin, Zavadovsky and Prince Orlov escorted Catherine – but Paul was too distraught to attend. The diplomats scanned every mannerism of the leading players for political nuance, just as Kremlinologists would later dissect the etiquette and hierarchy at the funerals of Soviet General Secretaries. Then as now, Kremlinologists were frequently wrong. Here, Corberon noticed a telling sign of Potemkin’s falling credit – Ivan Chernyshev, President of the Navy College, gave ‘three big bows’ to Prince Orlov but only ‘a light one to Potemkin who bowed at him incessantly’.

Serenissimus could play the game with secret confidence. He was still in power on 14 June when Prince Henry of Prussia and Grand Duke Paul set off on their uxorious voyage to Berlin. The mission was successful. Paul returned with Sophia of Württemberg – soon, as Grand Duchess Maria Fyodorovna, to be his wife, and mother of two emperors.^*3

Meanwhile Prince Orlov and his brother, scenting blood, were said to be tormenting Potemkin with jokes about his imminent fall. Potemkin did not rise. He knew that, if things went according to plan, their jokes would soon not matter.²⁵ ‘Rumours reach us from Moscow’, Kirill Razumovsky wrote to one of Potemkin’s secretaries, ‘that your chief is beginning to ruin himself by drinking. I don’t believe it and reject it because I think his spirit is stronger than that.’²⁶ Corberon reported Potemkin sinking into ‘decadence’. It was true that Potemkin shamelessly pursued pleasure at times of personal strain – debauch was his way of letting off steam.²⁷ Catherine and Potemkin discussed the future in an exchange of insults and endearments. The doomsayers were right in that these were the days when the foundations of the rest of his career were laid.

—

‘Even now,’ the Empress assured him, ‘Catherine is attached to you with her heart and soul.’ A few days later: ‘You cut me all yesterday without any reason…’. Catherine challenged the truth of his feelings for her: ‘Which of us is really sincerely and eternally attached to the other; which of us is indulgent and which of us knows how to forget all offences, insults and oppressions?’ Potemkin was happy one day and then exploded the next – out of jealousy, over-sensitivity or sheer bloody-mindedness. His jealousy, like everything else about him, was inconsistent but he was not the only one who experienced it. Catherine must have asked about another woman and Potemkin rubbed her nose in it. ‘That hurt me,’ she said. ‘I didn’t expect, and even now I don’t know why, my curiosity is insulting to you.’²⁸

She demanded his good behaviour in public: ‘The opinion of the silly public depends on your attitude to this affair.’ It is often claimed that Potemkin was now faking his jealousy in order to make his deal while protecting Catherine’s pride as a woman. He suddenly demanded Zavadovsky’s removal. ‘You ask me to remove Zavadovsky,’ she wrote. ‘My glory suffers very much from this request…Don’t ask for injustices, close your ears to gossip, respect my words. Our peace will be restored.’²⁹ They were getting closer to an understanding, yet they must have decided to be apart like a couple who know they must not prolong the agony by constant proximity. Between 21 May and 3 June, Potemkin was not registered at Court.

On 20 May, Zavadovsky emerged as Catherine’s official favourite, according to Oakes, and received a present of 3,000 souls. On the anniversary of the accession, he was promoted to major-general, receiving another 20,000 roubles and 1,000 souls. But now Potemkin did not mind. The storm was over: Potemkin was letting her settle down to her relationship with Zavadovsky because husband and wife had finally settled each other’s fears and demands. ‘Matushka,’ he thanked her, ‘this is the real fruit of your kind treatment of me during the last few days. I see your inclination to treat me well…’.

However, an apologetic Potemkin could not keep away: he reappeared at Tsarskoe Selo on 3 June: ‘I came here wanting to see you because I am bored without you. I saw my arrival embarrassed you…Merciful Lady, I would go through fire for you…If at last I’m determined to be banished from you, it would be better if it did not happen in public. I won’t delay leaving even though it’s like death to me.’ Beneath this passionate declaration, Catherine replied, ‘My friend, your imagination tricks you. I’m glad to see you and not embarrassed by you. But I was irritated by something else which I will tell you another time.’³⁰

Serenissimus lingered at Court. Poor Zavadovsky, now in love with Catherine, and her official companion, disappeared from the Court Journal on the day Potemkin returned: had he fled before the ebullient giant? The diplomats did not notice: as far as they were concerned, it was only a matter of time before Potemkin resigned all his offices. Their expectations appeared to be confirmed when Catherine presented the Prince with a palace of his own: the ‘Anichkov house’, a massive, broken-down palace in St Petersburg that had belonged to Elisabeth’s favourite Alexei Razumovsky. It stood (and still stands) on the Neva, beside the Anichkov Bridge. This suggested that Potemkin was about to vacate his rooms in the imperial places and go ‘travelling’ to the spas of Europe.

In an absolutist monarchy, proximity to the throne was imperative, the sine qua non of power. Potemkin was known to mutter that, if he lost his bed at the Palace, he would lose everything. Catherine constantly reassured her highly strung friend: ‘Batinka, God is my witness, I am not going to drive you out of the Palace. Please live in it and be calm!’³¹ He later moved out of the favourite’s apartment but never left the Winter Palace and never lost his access to Catherine’s boudoir.

They arranged a new residence that perfectly suited their situation. For the rest of his life, his real home was the so-called ‘Shepilev house’, a separate little building, formerly stables, facing on to Millionaya Street, which was linked to the Winter Palace by a gallery over the archway. The Empress and Prince could walk to each other’s rooms along a covered passageway from beside the Palace’s chapel, in privacy and, in Potemkin’s case, without dressing.

Everything was settled. On 23 June, Potemkin set off on an inspection tour of Novgorod. A British diplomat noticed some furniture being removed from his apartments in the Winter Palace. He had fallen and was off to a monastery. But the shrewder courtiers, like Countess Rumiantseva, noticed that his journey was paid for, and serviced, by the Court. He was greeted everywhere with triumphal arches like a member of the imperial family, and that could only be the result of an imperial order.³² They did not know that Catherine sent him a present for his departure, begged him to say goodbye and then wrote a series of affectionate notes to him: ‘We grant you eternal and hereditary possession of the Anichkov house,’ she told Potemkin, plus 100,000 roubles to decorate it. In his two years of favour, the financial figures are impossible to calculate because so often the Empress presented him with cash or presents that are unrecorded – or directly paid off his debts. But he now inhabited an unreal and opulent world in which the Croesian scale of riches was shared only by monarchs: he often received 100,000 roubles from Catherine when a colonel lived on 1,000 roubles a year. The Prince is estimated to have received as many as 37,000 souls, vast estates around Petersburg and Moscow and in Belorussia (the Krichev estate, for example, boasted 14,000 souls), diamonds, dinner services, silver plate and as much as nine million roubles. All this was never enough.³³

—

The Prince returned a few weeks later. Catherine welcomed him with a warm note. He moved straight back into his Winter Palace apartments. This confounded his critics: Serenissimus ‘arrived here on Saturday evening and appeared at Court the next day. His returning to the apartments he before occupied in the Palace made many apprehensive of the possibilities of his regaining the favour he had lost.’³⁴ They would have been even more surprised to learn that he was soon correcting Catherine’s letters to Tsarevich Paul in Berlin.

There is little doubt that they were playing one of their prearranged games, like celebrities today who delight in tricking the press. Having started the year afraid of losing their love and friendship in a frenzy of jealousy and regret, they had now managed to arrange their unique marriage in their own manner. Each could find his own happiness while keeping the services – personal and political, affectionate and practical – of the other. This had not been easy. Affairs of the heart cannot be drilled like regiments, or negotiated like treaties – especially those of two such emotional people. Only trust, time, nature, trial and error, and intelligence had achieved it. Potemkin now made the difficult transformation from an influential lover to ‘minister–favourite’ who ruled with his Empress.³⁵ They had managed to gull everyone.

The day Serenissimus returned to Court, the couple knew they would be watched for any hint of his fall or recovery. So the Prince strolled into her apartments ‘with the utmost composure’ and found the Empress playing whist. He sat down right opposite her. She played him a card as if nothing had changed – and told him he always played luckily.³⁶

Skip Notes

*1 Until 1733, forceps had been the secret weapon, as it were, of a surgical dynasty, the Chamberlens. In that time, even the doctors were hereditary.

*2 Potemkin was said to have arranged this death and mysteriously visited the midwife. Medical murder is a recurring theme in Russian political paranoia – Stalin’s Doctor’s Plot of 1952/3 played on the spectre of ‘murderers in white coats’. Prince Orlov, Grand Duchess Natalia, Catherine’s lover Alexander Lanskoy and Potemkin himself were all rumoured to have been murdered by the doctors caring for them. Potemkin was said to have been involved in the first three deaths.

*3 Paul and Maria Fyodorovna were married in Petersburg on 26 September 1776. The two emperors were Alexander I and Nicholas I, who ruled until 1855. Their second son Constantine almost succeeded but his refusal of the throne sparked off the Decembrist Revolt in 1825.