Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

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HIS NIECES

There was a man, if that he was a man,

Not that his manhood could be called in question

Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto VII: 36

When the five Engelhardt sisters arrived at Court in 1775, these motherless, barely educated but beautiful provincial girls were instantly transformed by their uncle into sophisticates and treated as if they were members of the imperial family – ‘almost as Grand Duchesses’.¹ When Potemkin ended his relationship with the Empress of Russia, he almost at once became very close to his striking teenage niece Varvara Engelhardt. It was not long before Court gossip claimed that the degenerate Prince had seduced all five of these girls.

Now he was a semi-single man again, Potemkin immediately plunged into an imbroglio of secret affairs and public liaisons with adventuresses and aristocrats that were so intertwined that they fascinated his own times and are still difficult to unravel. ‘Like Catherine, he was an Epicurean,’ wrote Count Alexander Ribeaupierre, son of one of Potemkin’s adjutants, who married his great-niece. ‘Sensual pleasures had an important part in his life – he loved women passionately and nothing could stand in the way of his passions.’² Now he could return to the way he preferred to live. Rising late, visiting Catherine through the covered passageway, he swung constantly between frenetic work and febrile hedonism, between bouts of political paperwork and strategic creativity, and then love affairs, theological debates, and nocturnal wassails, until dawn, at the green baize tables.

Nothing so shocked his contemporaries as the legend of the five nieces. All the diplomats wrote about it to their captivated monarchs with ill-concealed relish: ‘You will get an idea of Russian morality’, Corberon told Versailles under its prim new King Louis XVI, ‘in the manner in which Prince Potemkin protects his nieces.’ In order to underline the horror of this immoral destiny, he added with a shiver, ‘There is one who is only twelve years old and who will no doubt suffer the same fate.’ Simon Vorontsov was also disgusted: ‘We saw Prince Potemkin make a harem of his own family in the imperial palace of which he occupied a part.’ What ‘scandalous impudence!’ The scandal of the nieces was accepted by contemporaries as true – but did he really seduce all five, even the youngest?³

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The ‘almost-Grand-Duchesses’ became the gilded graces of Catherine’s Court, the richest heiresses in Russia and the matriarchs of many of the aristocratic dynasties of the Empire. None of them ever forgot who they were and who their uncle was: their lives were illuminated and mythologized by their semi-royal status and the prestige of Serenissimus.

Only five of the Engelhardt sisters mattered at Court because the eldest, Anna, left home and married Mikhail Zhukov before Potemkin’s rise, though he looked after the couple and promoted the husband to govern Astrakhan. The next eldest, the formidable Alexandra Vasilievna, twenty-two in 1776, became Potemkin’s favourite niece, his dearest friend apart from the Empress. She was already a woman when she arrived, so it was hardest for her to adapt to Court sophistication. But she was as haughty as Potemkin had been, and ‘clever and strong-willed’. She used her ‘kind of grandeur’ to conceal ‘her lack of education’.⁴ She had a head for business and politics and a talent for friendship. Her portraits show a slim brunette, hair brushed back, with high cheekbones, bright intelligent blue eyes, a broad sensual mouth, small nose and alabaster skin, graced by a lithe body and the grandness of a woman who was an honorary member of the imperial family and the confidante of its greatest statesman.

The third sister was Varvara, twenty, who charmed her way through life. ‘Plenira aux chevaux d’or’ – ‘the fascinatress with the golden hair’ – was what the poet Derzhavin called her; she was celebrated for her radiant blondeness. Even in middle age, she kept her slender figure, and her features were described by the memoirist Wiegel as ‘perfect…with the freshness of a twenty-year-old girl’. No statesman liked her sister Alexandra, she was excitable, flirtatious, capricious, hot-tempered and incessantly demanding. No one could criticize her ill-temper and bad manners when the Prince was alive, but on one occasion she pulled a friend by the hair; on another she whipped one of her estate managers. She was harsh to the pompous or corrupt but very kind to her servants⁵ – though not necessarily to her serfs. Years later, force was required to suppress a peasant revolt on her estates.

Nadezhda, fifteen, contrived to be both ginger and swarthy and must have suffered from being the ugly duckling in a family of swans, but Potemkin made her a maid-of-honour like the others. She was headstrong and irritating: Nadezhda means ‘hope’ in Russian so Potemkin, who coined nicknames for everyone, cruelly called her ‘bez-nadezhnaya’ – or Hopeless. The fifth sister was the placid and passive Ekaterina, who was already the physical paragon of the family: her portrait by Vigée Lebrun, painted in 1790, shows her seraphic face surrounded by bright auburn-blonde curls, looking into a mirror. Ekaterina, wrote Ségur, the French envoy, might ‘have served as a model for an artist to paint the head of Venus’. Lastly, Tatiana was the youngest – aged seven in 1776 – but she grew up as good-looking and intelligent as Alexandra. After Potemkin withdrew from Catherine’s alcove, he fell in love with Varvara.⁶

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‘Little Mother, Varenka, my soul, my life,’ wrote Potemkin to Varvara. ‘You slept, little fool, and didn’t remember anything. I, leaving you, kissed you and covered you with the quilt and with a gown and crossed you.’ It is just possible to claim that this was the letter of an uncle who has simply kissed his niece good night and tucked her in, though it really reads as if he is leaving in the morning after spending the night with her.

‘My angel, your caress is so pleasurable so lovable, count my love to you and you’ll see you are my life, my joy, my angel; I’m kissing you innumerable times and I think about you even more…’. Even in the age of sensibilité and written by an emotional and uninhibited Prince, these sentiments were not those of a conventional uncle. Often he called her ‘my honey’ or ‘my treasure’, ‘my soul, my tender lover’, ‘my sweetheart goddess’ and ‘lovable lips’ and frequently signed off. ‘I am kissing you from head to foot.’ The letters are shamelessly sensual – and yet familial too: ‘My honey, Varenka, my soul…Goodbye, sweet lips, come over to dinner. I have invited your sisters…’. In one letter, he told her: ‘Tomorrow I’m going to the banya.’ Recalling his rendezvous in the Winter Palace banya with Catherine, was he arranging to meet his niece there too?

The Prince was now thirty-seven, seventeen years older than Varvara, so, in age at least, there was nothing remarkable in their love affair. The sisters and their hulking brother, Vasily, were now at Court every day and in Potemkin’s homes – the Shepilev house, the Anichkov – every evening. They attended his dinners and watched him playing cards with the Empress in her Little Hermitage. They were his most precious ornaments as well as his friends, family, entourage. As far as we know, he had no children: they were his heirs too. It was no coincidence that it was Varvara who became his mistress, for she was the family flirt, he the family hero.

The letters are clearly those of an older man and a younger woman; for example, when Potemkin told her that the Empress had invited her to a dinner, he added, ‘My dear, dress yourself very well and try to be kind and beautiful,’ telling to watch her ‘ps and qs’. From outside town, possibly Tsarskoe Selo, he asked: ‘I’m planning to come into town tomorrow…Write to me where you plan to visit me – at the Anichkov or the Palace?’ Varenka frequently saw the Empress and Serenissimus together. ‘The Empress was bled today so there’s no need to bother her,’ he told her. ‘I’m off to the Empress and then I’ll come and see you.’

Varenka was in love with him too – she often called him ‘my life’ and worried, like all his women, about his illnesses while basking in his luxury: ‘Father, my life, thank you so much for the present and the letter…I’m kissing you a million times in my mind.’ However, she began to suffer and make trouble. ‘It’s useless caressing me,’ she said. ‘Listen, I’m telling you seriously now…if you loved me once, I ask you to forget me for ever, I’ve decided to leave you. I wish you to be loved by another…though no one will love you as I’ve loved you…’. Was this minx of the Engelhardt sisters jealous of another woman, for there were indeed others, or simply pretending to be?

‘Varenka, you are a fool and an ungrateful rascal,’ Potemkin wrote, perhaps at that moment. ‘Can I say – Varenka feels bad and Grishenka feels nothing? When I come, I’ll tear your ears off for it!’ Was it when he arrived in a temper after this that she told him: ‘Good my friend, then if it is me who has angered you, then go!’ But then she said she had slept too much and perhaps that was why she was in a bad mood. So Varenka sulked and postured while Potemkin suffered the tortures of every older man who falls in love with a spoilt girl. The Empress, who invited Varvara to everything and knew of their relationship, did not mind when Potemkin was happy. Indeed she did everything she could to make sure that the niece was close to both of them. When one of the courtiers moved out of the palace, Potemkin asked the Empress to ‘order Madame Maltiz [Mistress of the Empress’s maids-of-honour] to give Princess Ekaterina’s apartments to my Varvara Vasilievna’. Catherine replied: ‘I’ll order it…’.⁷

News of the scandalous affair reached Daria Potemkina in Moscow. The Prince’s appalled mother tried to stop it. A furious Serenissimus tossed her unread letters into the fireplace. Daria also wrote to Varvara to reprimand her. ‘I’ve received grandmother’s letters,’ Varvara told Potemkin, ‘which made me very angry. Was this the reason for you going?’ Then the girl offered herself again: ‘My darling little méchant, my angel, don’t you want me, my adored treasure?’

When Potemkin started to spend more time in his southern provinces, Varvara sulked at Court. Catherine decided to intervene. Harris got wind of this: ‘Her Majesty reproached Prince XXX with the irregularity of his conduct with his niece and the dishonour it brought…’. Harris was projecting English priggishness on to a relationship he did not understand. Catherine’s indulgent teasing of Potemkin about his niece–mistress revealed their open relationship: ‘Listen, my little Varenka is not well at all; it’s your departure that is the cause. It’s very wrong of you. It will kill her and I am getting very fond of her. They want to bleed her.’⁸

Was Varenka wasting away out of love for her uncle? Or was there another reason? The wily girl may have been playing a double game with the Prince. At the beginning, love pervaded her letters to him. Later, their tone changed. Potemkin was still in love with her – but he knew she would soon have to marry: ‘Your victory over me is strong and eternal. If you love me, I’m happy, if you know how I love, you would never wish for anything else.’ Now she was a woman, she did wish for more. She had already met Prince Sergei Fyodorovich Golitsyn, another of that populous and powerful family, and had fallen in love with him.

We do not know if Potemkin was heartbroken for long, but he had resolved that the girls should make magnificent marriages, settling fortunes on them to ease the way. The end of the affair was required by family duty. ‘Now all is finished,’ she wrote to him. ‘I waited for it every moment for a month when I began to notice your changes towards me. What have I done now when I’m so unhappy? I’m returning all your letters to you.’ So it was a two-way street. ‘If I behaved badly,’ she wrote, ‘you have to remember who was the cause of it.’

Potemkin behaved generously. In September 1778, ‘he prevailed on a Prince XXX to marry her’. Prince XXX – Sergei Golitsyn – agreed. ‘They were betrothed with great pomp at the Palace the day before yesterday,’ observed Harris. In January 1779 as with all the Engelhardt marriages, the Empress was present when Varvara married. Varvara and Potemkin remained close for the rest of his life, and she continued to write him affectionate, flirtatious letters: ‘I’m kissing your hands and asking you to remember me, father. I don’t know why but it seems to me that you forget me…’, and then, like everyone else who knew him, she wrote: ‘Come, my friend, as soon as possible, it’s so dull without you.’ She still signed herself ‘Grishenkin’s pussycat’.⁹

Varvara and Sergei Golitsyn were happily married and had ten children. The Empress and Serenissimus stood as godparents to the eldest, named Grigory and born that year: contemporaries suggested he was Potemkin’s son. This was certainly possible. Child and man, Grigory Golitsyn bore an uncanny resemblance to his great-uncle – another mystery of consanguinity.

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Following Varvara’s marriage, Harris saw that ‘Alexandra Engelhardt seems to have still greater power over’ Potemkin. It seemed that the Prince had moved on to the niece with whom he had most in common. We do not have their love letters and no one knows what happens behind bedroom doors, but contemporaries were convinced they were lovers (though that does not mean they were). Alexandra, or ‘Sashenka’, ‘is a young lady of a very pleasing person, of good parts and a very superior aptitude in conducting a Court intrigue’, added Harris with admiration tinged with envy, for he was an avid if unsuccessful intriguer himself. He was sure Alexandra had nudged Catherine towards the room where she found Countess Bruce and Korsakov together.

Sashenka became inseparable from Empress and Serenissimus. ‘If her uncle does not change his sentiments for her,’ noted Harris, ‘she is likely to become [Catherine’s] female confidante.’ So close did this relationship become that a silly legend was passed down and apparently believed among some Polish families that Alexandra was Catherine’s daughter. Grand Duke Paul and Alexandria were born in 1754, so when, the story goes, Catherine gave birth to a girl instead of the expected male heir, she hid the child and replaced her with the son of a Kalmuk peasant-woman who grew up to be Emperor Paul I.¹⁰ The simpler explanation is that she was Potemkin’s niece and a fascinating woman in her own right. Sashenka’s position as an unofficial member of the imperial family was still recognized forty years later.

Now she became Potemkin’s hostess. A dinner given by her was a sign of his favour. Alexandra, Harris delicately told London, ‘has a very notion of the value of presents’. She accepted gifts and money from the British envoy – and he recommended her to Alleyne Fitzherbert, his successor, as an intelligence source. She was an able businesswoman who made millions by selling grain and timber – yet she was celebrated for her generosity to her serfs.¹¹ In late 1779, Potemkin’s intense relationship with Sashenka ended, but they remained the closest friends.

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The Prince now embarked on a long relationship with the fifth sister – Ekaterina – though again there are no love letters to prove it. ‘They even talk of the marriage between Potemkin and his little niece with whom he is more in love than ever.’¹² Ekaterina – ‘Katinka’, ‘Katish’ or the ‘kitten’, as the Empress and Potemkin called her – was the Venus in a family of them. ‘Graced with her ravishing face,’ wrote Vigée Lebrun, ‘and her angelic softness, she had an invincible charm.’ Potemkin called her his ‘angel incarnate’ – ‘and never had anyone ever been more justly named’, the Prince de Nassau-Siegen later told his wife.¹³

She was uneducated and incurious, but thoroughly seductive. Her temperament was like that of a blonde mulatto – eternal languor and nonchalant sexuality. ‘Her happiness’, recalled Vigée Lebrun, ‘was to live stretched out on a canapé, enveloped in a big black fur without a corset.’ When visitors asked why she never wore the ‘enormous diamonds…the most sumptuous you can imagine’ which ‘the famous Potemkin’ gave her, she lazily replied: ‘To what good, for whom, for what?’ She was ‘the kindest of the three’ niece–mistresses and ‘believed in Potemkin’s love so as not pain him’. She was too dreamy and passive for Potemkin, who only fell in love with passionate or shrewd women. So, while Potemkin loved her least of the three, she lasted the longest. Serenissimus declared that to be her lover was to taste the quintessential delights of the flesh, an ungallant compliment from an undoubted connoisseur.¹⁴

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Late in 1780, the diplomats claimed that Potemkin’s ‘family harem’ caused a ‘diabolical row’ at Court. The headstrong Varvara Golitsyna, defiantly respectable now that she was married, expressed her views on the Empress’s life. This blundering tactlessness irritated Catherine. Varvara compounded her pigheaded folly by loudly proclaiming that one could hardly be knouted for telling the truth. Potemkin was furious too and sent her off to Golitsyn’s estates. At this embarrassing moment, the ‘angel-incarnate’ Ekaterina allegedly became pregnant by her uncle. Dr Rogerson prescribed taking the waters at a spa. Serenissimus persuaded Varvara to take her sister. Corberon admired Potemkin’s typical manipulation of what could have been a disaster by giving the impression that Varvara was just accompanying her sister on a medical mission instead of being exiled, and that Ekaterina was not being sent away to conceal her belly, merely going on a jaunt with the Golitsyns. By the time Ekaterina left, she was supposedly six months gone.

Catherine now made a suggestion that upset Potemkin and caused yet another row. When Ekaterina was appointed maid-of-honour in the summer of 1777, she immediately attracted the attention of Catherine and Prince Orlov’s son, Bobrinsky, much to the amusement of the Empress, who joked about it in her letters to Potemkin.¹⁵ Bobrinsky fell in love with the girl. The Empress, according to Corberon, had even promised that he could marry her. Bobrinsky was an insubstantial playboy who was a victim of the birth that made him everything yet nothing. Plenty of royal bastards found brilliant careers in those days – none greater than Louis XV’s Marshal Maurice de Saxe, son of Augustus the Strong of Poland and Saxony – but Bobrinsky did not and was a notorious wastrel. Did he now refuse to marry a girl pregnant by her uncle? Or did Potemkin object because he considered Bobrinsky a fool – and, worse, an Orlov? This moral, sexual and familial maze presents a little kaleidoscope of Court morals.¹⁶

Alexei Orlov-Chesmensky, who had retired to Moscow and hated Potemkin, scented blood in the water and arrived in town in September 1778 hoping to overthrow the Prince. Serenissimus displayed the ‘highest good humour and indifference’ as the two giant opponents, Cyclops and Scarface, publicly served at the Empress’s table. ‘It is beyond the description of my pen’, observed Harris, ‘to describe…a scene, in which every passion that can affect the human mind, bore a part which, by all the actors, was concealed by the most masterly hypocrisy.’ Orlov-Chesmensky was determined to make one last attempt to overthrow Serenissimus, whom, he told Catherine, had ‘ruined your army’: ‘his only superior talent is cunning’ and his only aim to ‘invest himself with sovereign power’. Catherine was displeased by this but she tried to conciliate. ‘Be friends with Potemkin,’ she begged Orlov-Chesmensky. ‘Prevail on that extraordinary man to be more circumspect in his conduct…[and] pay more attention to the duties of the great offices he fills…’.

‘You know Madam,’ Scarface said, ‘I am your slave…if Potemkin disturbs your peace of mind, give me your orders. He shall disappear immediately…’. The offer to kill Potemkin may be merely diplomatic gossip, but everyone knew that Orlov-Chesmensky was quite capable of delivering. Catherine was unimpressed and this marked the last gasp of Orlov power.¹⁷

Despite the rows, Potemkin and the Empress were so involved at that time in recasting foreign policy that his political position was entirely stable. When the row got hottest, Potemkin simply absented himself in a diplomatic sulk until the Empress had calmed down. Ekaterina returned with no sign of a baby, so far as we know.

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The youngest niece, Tatiana, was already ‘full of spirit’ when, aged twelve in 1781, she was appointed a maid-of-honour. When her uncle was in the south, she wrote him letters, in big girlish handwriting, which provide clues to the nature of Catherine and Potemkin’s ‘family’. She usually signed off as she did on 3 June 1785: ‘I want your return with the most lively impatience.’ Like everyone else, Tatiana was bored without Serenissimus: ‘I don’t know, my dear Uncle, when I will have the happiness to see you but those I ask tell me they know nothing and say you’ll stay all winter. Ah! How long that time seems to me if it’s true but I don’t believe these clowns.’ He gave her generous presents: ‘My dear Uncle, a thousand, thousand and million thanks for your gracious present, I will never forget your kindness and beg you to continue for ever. I will do everything possible to deserve them.’ She never became his mistress.¹⁸

The entire Potemkin clan was treated as a member of the extended Catherinian family that included Lanskoy, her lover. The Empress made a fuss not just of the Engelhardt sisters but also of Potemkin’s other family – his cousin Pavel Potemkin, after serving against Pugachev, became viceroy of the Caucasus, and his brother Mikhail Chief Inspector of the College of War and one of Catherine’s inner circle. The Prince’s stalwart nephew Alexander Samoilov, son of his sister Maria, became secretary to the State Council and a general – ‘brave but useless’. Other nephews, such as Vasily Engelhardt and Nikolai Vysotsky, son of his sister Pelageya, served as Catherine’s aides-decamp, being treated almost as family.

The Empress’s favourite Sasha Lanskoy was very kind to Potemkin’s nieces, as we know from Tatiana’s letters, which have not been cited before this. ‘Monsieur Lanskoy has had all sorts of attention,’ she reported innocently. In one letter, Tatiana told her uncle how the Grand Duke and Duchess ‘met me in the garden – they found me very grown up and spoke to me with a lot of kindness’.¹⁹ When, a couple of years later, Ekaterina was married and pregnant, it was Lanskoy who sent Potemkin reports on the birth. ‘Father,’ he wrote, ‘the Sovereign has kindly ordered a bow to you and to baptize the baby…here I’m sending a letter from Ekaterina Vasilievna…’. A few days later he told him that the Empress had a fever but the niece was feeling better each day.

There is a sense that, away from the harsh political struggles, the Empress, to some extent, succeeded in creating a patchwork family out of her – or, as she put it, ‘our’ – Potemkin ‘relatives’ and her beloved Lanskoy. She chose her family as others choose their friends. There was a symmetry between Catherine’s favourites and Potemkin’s nieces. When the politics allowed some serenity, she treated the nieces like daughters and he the favourites like sons. Together, they were almost the children of that unconventional, childless marriage.²⁰

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Potemkin’s relationships with his nieces were irregular and idiosyncratic but not unusual for his time, and certainly Catherine did not seem shocked by them. She tells in her Memoirs how, during her own childhood before leaving for Russia, she had flirted (and possibly more) with her uncle, Prince Georg-Ludwig of Holstein, who wanted to marry her.^*1 Such behaviour – and worse – was not uncommon among royal families. The Habsburgs regularly married their nieces. Earlier in the century, the Regent of France, Philippe, Duc d’Orléans, was supposed to have had affairs with his daughter, the Duchesse de Berry.^*2

Augustus the Strong, the King of Poland, Elector of Saxony and duplicitous ally of Peter the Great, set an unbeatable incestuous precedent for vigorous degeneracy that not even Potemkin could equal. Augustus, an art-loving, inpecunious and politically slippery bon vivant whom Carlyle called that ‘cheerful Man of Sin, gay eupeptic Son of Belial’, had, according to legend, not only fathered an heir and 354 bastards through a legion of mistresses but also supposedly made his daughter Countess Orczelska his mistress. To add insult to incest, the daughter–mistress in turn was in love with Count Rudorfski, her half-brother, another of his natural children. It was different for commoners, though in seventeenth-century France Cardinal Mazarin had made his nieces – the Mazarinettes – into the richest heiresses in France and there were rumours about his relationship with them. Meanwhile, Voltaire was having the last affair of his long life with his promiscuous, greedy niece, Madame Denis, but he kept it secret – only their correspondence revealed all. In the generation after Potemkin, Lord Byron flaunted his affair with his half-sister, and Prince Talleyrand set up house with his nephew’s wife, the Duchesse de Dino.

In Russia, uncle–niece incest was much more common. The Orthodox Church turned a blind eye. Nikita Panin was rumoured to have had an affair with his niece (by marriage) Princess Dashkova – though she denied it. Kirill Razumovsky kept house at Baturin with the daughter of his sister Anna, Countess S. Apraxina, with whom he lived as man and wife. Yet the incestuous relationship of this prominent, much admired magnate was barely mentioned because it was done quietly in the country; no one ‘frightened the horses’. Potemkin’s sin was the openness with which he loved them. This shocked contemporaries just as it was Catherine’s openness with her favourites that made her so notorious: they were the parallel lines of the same arrangement. Serenissimus regarded himself as semi-royal, so he would do what he wished and everyone could see him enjoying it.²¹

Wicked uncle Potemkin has been crucified by historians for his behaviour, but his nieces themselves were willing partners – Varvara was in love with him – and adored him throughout their lives. Far from being abused and damaged, Alexandra and Varvara enjoyed unusually happy marriages, while continuing to be close to their uncle. Ekaterina, occasional mistress for the rest of his life, was said to have merely ‘tolerated’ his embraces but she was a sleepy girl who ‘tolerated’ her husband, diamonds and everything else: that was her nature. They would surely have worshipped the protector of the family. In their letters, they always wanted to see him. Like Catherine, they found life was dull without him. No abuse is required to explain this peccadillo: in that place and time, it must have seemed natural.

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The nieces were not his only mistresses after his withdrawal from Catherine’s boudoir: Potemkin’s archives are heavy with literally hundreds of unsigned love letters from unknown women who were obviously wildly in love with the one-eyed giant. There are two sorts of womanizer – the mechanical fornicator who despises his conquests, and the genuine lover of women for whom seduction is a foundation for love and friendship. Potemkin was very much the latter – he adored the companionship of women. Later, his Court was so crowded with foreigners that it was impossible to miss the identity of his paramours. But in the 1770s all we have left are yearning letters in curling feminine hands asking: ‘How have you spent the night, my darling: better than me. I haven’t slept for a second.’ They were never satisfied with the time he gave them. ‘I am not happy with you,’ this one wrote. ‘You have such a distracted air. There must be something on your mind…’. His mistresses had to wait in their husband’s palaces, hearing from their friends and servants exactly what Potemkin was doing: ‘I know you were at the Empress’s in the evening and you fell ill. Tell me how you are, it worries me and I don’t know your news. Adieu, my angel, I can’t tell you more, everything prevents it…’. It ends abruptly – the lady’s husband had surely arrived, so she sent off the unfinished letter with her trusted maid.

These women fussed about his health, travelling, gambling, eating. His ability to attract such attention was perhaps the result of growing up surrounded by so many loving sisters: ‘My dear Prince, can you make me this sacrifice and not give so much time to gaming? It can only destroy your health.’ The mistresses ached to see him properly: ‘Tomorrow there’s a ball at the Grand Duke’s: I hope to have the pleasure of seeing you there.’ Around the same time, another woman was writing:

It’s such a pity that I only saw you at a distance when I wanted so much to kiss you, my dear friend…My God, it’s a shame and I can’t endure it! Tell me at least if you love me, my dear. It’s the only thing that can reconcile me to myself…I’d kiss you all the time but you’d get bored of me soon; I write to you before a mirror and it seems as if I’m chatting with you and I tell you everything that comes into my head…

In the billets-doux of these unknown women sitting in front of mirrors and pots of rouge, rolls of silk, puffs of powder, with a quill in their hands 200 years ago, we see Potemkin alive and reflected: ‘I kiss you a million times before you go…You work too much…I kiss you thirty million times and with a tenderness that grows all the time…Kiss me in your thoughts. Adieu, my life.’²²

Yet they masked a poignant dilemma in Potemkin’s unique position. No one else could ever really possess him. His affairs with his nieces made sense because he could never marry and have a normal family life. If he was unable to have children, this made it doubly suitable. He loved many – but he was married to Empress and Empire.

Skip Notes

*1 This Georg-Ludwig was also the uncle of her husband Peter III, who brought him to Petersburg during his short reign. Ironically, his orderly was young Potemkin.

*2 On her death, Orléans’ enemies sang: ‘La pleures-tu comme mari / Comme ta fille ou ta maîtresse?’ – Do you weep for her as a husband, for your daughter or your mistress?