Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

22

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF GRIGORY ALEXANDROVICH

Tis you, the bravest of all mortals!

Mind fertile with a host of schemes!

You did not tread the usual paths

But did extend them – and the roar

You left behind to your descendants.

Tis you, Potemkin, wondrous leader!

Gavrili Derzhavin, The Waterfall

Morning

The Prince woke late when he resided at the ‘Shepilev house’, linked by its covered passageway to the Empress’s apartments in the Winter Palace. The anterooms were already crowded with dignitaries. He received favoured ones lying in bed in his dressing gown. When he arose, he liked to have a cool bath followed by a short morning prayer. His breakfast was usually hot chocolate and a glass of liqueur.

If he decided to hold a large audience, he reclined in his reception room, studiously ignoring the keenest sycophants. But they were in trouble if they ignored him. One young secretary, educated at both Cambridge and Oxford, was waiting to see the Prince with a briefcase of papers among all the generals and ambassadors. They sat in sepulchral silence because everyone knew the Prince was still asleep. ‘Suddenly the door of the bedroom…was loudly opened and the huge Potemkin appeared on his own in a dressing gown, calling for his valet. Before he even had time to call, in a sudden moment, everyone in the hall – generals and noblemen – competing in their speed, rushed headlong out of the room to find the Prince’s valet…’. Since everyone else had scampered off, the secretary remained frozen there in Potemkin’s presence, ‘not even daring to blink’.

Serenissimus gave him a menacing glance and strode off. When he reappeared in full uniform. Potemkin called him over: ‘Tell me, Alekseev, do you know how many nut-trees there are in my Taurida Palace garden?’ Alekseev did not know. ‘Go to my garden, count them and report to me,’ ordered the Prince. By nightfall, the youngster returned and gave the Prince the number. ‘Good. You fulfilled my order quickly and well. Do you know why you were given such an order? To teach you to be more prompt because I noted this morning, when I cried for my valet and generals and noblemen rushed to find him, you didn’t move, you greenhorn…Come tomorrow with your papers because today I am not disposed to examine them. Goodbye!’¹

—

The petitioners were puzzled by the looks and character of this Prince – he was unpredictable, fascinating, alarming. He exuded both menace and welcome: he could be ‘frightening’,² crushingly arrogant, wittily mischievous, warm and kind, manic and morose. When Alexander Ribeaupierre was eight, he was taken to see Potemkin and never forgot his animalistic power and affectionate gentleness: ‘I was terrified when he lifted me up in his mighty hands. He was immensely tall. I can see him now in my mind’s eye wearing his loose dressing gown with his hairy chest naked.’³ Ligne said he was ‘tall, erect, proud, handsome, noble, majestic or fascinating’, while others described him as a hideous Cyclops. Yet Catherine constantly talked of his handsomeness and he was amply endowed with ‘sex appeal’, to judge by the female letters that fill his archive.⁴ He was undeniably vain about his fame, but shy about his appearance, particularly his one eye. When someone sent him a courier with one eye, Serenissimus immediately suspected that they were trying to make fun of him and was deeply hurt by this ‘ill-judged wit’ – this when he was the most powerful man east of Vienna.⁵ That is the reason there are so few portraits of him.

‘Prince Potemkin has never consented to be painted,’ Catherine explained to Grimm, ‘and if there exists any portrait or silhouette of him, it is against his wish.’⁶ She persuaded him around 1784 and again in 1791 to sit for Giambattista Lampi, the only artist he trusted.⁷ But Serenissimus, ever shy of his eye, would only sit three-quarter face – even though his useless, half-closed eye was not particularly repulsive.^*1 Foreigners thought his eyes represented Russia, ‘the one open and the other closed, [which] reminded us of the Euxine [Black Sea] always open and the Northern Ocean so long shut up with ice’. Lampi’s portrait of him as Grand Admiral, bestriding the Black Sea, is the dynamic Potemkin that history has ignored. Lampi’s later paintings show the fuller, older face.⁸ But the best is the unfinished portrait of the Prince in his mid-forties – the long, artistic face, full lips, dimpled chin, thick auburn hair. By the late 1780s, his immense girth matched his giant stature.

The Prince dominated every scene he graced. ‘Potemkin created, destroyed or confused, yet animated, everything,’ wrote Masson. ‘The nobles who detested him seemed at his glance to sink into nothing.’⁹ Virtually everyone who ever met him used the words ‘extraordinary’, ‘astonishing’, ‘colossus’, ‘original’ and ‘genius’ – but even those who knew him well found it hard to describe him. There was and is no way to categorize Potemkin except as one of history’s most exhilarating originals. That was, after all, how Catherine saw him. Yet the best observers are agreed only that he was ‘remarkable’ – simply a phenomenon of nature. ‘One of the most extraordinary men, as difficult to define as rare to encounter,’ thought the Duc de Richelieu. He remains, as Lewis Littlepage of Virginia wrote, ‘that indescribable man’.¹⁰

Everything about the Prince was a study of the wildest contrasts: he was a living chiaroscuro – ‘an inconceivable mixture of grandeur and pettiness, laziness and activity, bravery and timidity, ambition and insouciance’, wrote Ségur. Sometimes he showed the ‘genius of an eagle’, sometimes ‘the fickleness of a child’. He was ‘colossal like Russia’. In his mind, ‘there were cultivated districts and deserts, the roughness of the eleventh century and the corruption of the eighteenth, the glitter of the arts and the ignorance of the cloisters’.¹¹ On the one hand he was ‘bored with what he possessed’, on the other, he was ‘envious of what he could not obtain’. Potemkin ‘wanted everything but was disgusted by everything.’ His lust for power, wanton extravagance and towering arrogance were always made bearable by his exuberant brilliance, Puckish humour, caressing kindness, generous humanity and absence of malice. Richelieu saw that ‘his nature always carried him more towards Good than Bad’.¹² The fame of the Empire was increased by his conquests – but he knew, as Ségur predicted, that ‘the admiration they excited’ was for Catherine and ‘the hatred they raised’ was for him.¹³

Everything had to be complicated with Potemkin.¹⁴ His eccentricities may have irritated the Empress, but overall, Ségur noticed, they made him far more interesting to her. Richelieu thought him a man of ‘superiority’ but ‘an astonishing confection of absurdity and genius’.¹⁵ ‘At times,’ observed Littlepage, ‘he appeared worthy of ruling the Empire of Russia, at times scarcely worthy of being an office clerk in the Empire of Lilliput.’¹⁶ But the most striking feature of all his eccentricities – and the one we must never forget – is that he somehow found the time and energy to conduct colossal amounts of work and almost achieve the impossible.

—

The petitioners waiting his attention were accustomed to hearing the Prince’s orchestra. He liked to begin the day with music, so he would order his ever present musicians and one of his collection of choirs to perform for him. They also played during dinner at 1 p.m. and had to be ready at 6 p.m. to play wherever the Prince appeared – and they travelled with him whether he was in the Crimea or at war. Music was intensely important to him – he wrote it himself and it soothed him. Potemkin had to have music wherever he went and he often sang to himself.

He managed the musical entertainment at Court because the Empress happily admitted to being tone-deaf. ‘Sarti, Marchese the singer and Madame Todi were the delight not of the Empress whose ear was insensible to harmony,’ Ségur remembered of one concert, ‘but of Prince Potemkin and a few enlightened music lovers…’.¹⁷ He paid 40,000 roubles for the Razumovskys’ orchestra. But his musical passion really took off when he hired the celebrated Italian composer–conductor Giuseppe Sarti in 1784. The orchestra itself, between sixty and a hundred musicians, played ‘that extraordinary music’, recalled Lady Craven, ‘performed by men and boys, each blowing a straight horn, adapted to his size. 65 of these musicians produce a very harmonious melody, something like an immense organ.’¹⁸ Potemkin made Sarti his first director of music at the unbuilt Ekaterinoslav University. His expenses show him importing horns and paying for carriages to take ‘Italian musicians Conti and Dophin’ to the south. There Potemkin gave Sarti and three of his musicians 15,000 desyatins of land: ‘I grant the village…for the four musicians…Be happy and tranquil in our country.’ Thus Potemkin settled what was surely history’s first musical colony.¹⁹

Potemkin and his circle were continually sending each other opera scores, as music lovers today give each other new CDs. Catherine enjoyed Potemkin sending music to her friend Grimm, who called him ‘my benefactor in music’.²⁰ Music was a way to curry favour. Prince Lubomirski, a Polish magnate whose estates provided Potemkin’s timber, frequently sent him horn music: ‘If this genre of music is to the taste of Your Highness, I will take the liberty of following it with another.’²¹ The Austrians used music as a diplomatic weapon. When Cobenzl, himself an opera fanatic, was at home in Vienna, he reported to Potemkin: ‘We’ve heard the details of the charming show’ of Sarti and Marchesini in Petersburg. The opera in Vienna could not equal it, the envoy claimed tactfully. Later, when the war began, Kaiser Joseph thought it worth while to send Cobenzl ‘two choral pieces for Prince Potemkin’s orchestra’.²² Just as Russian ambassadors found his art deals and did his shopping, so they also were always looking for new musicians for him.²³

Serenissimus took a personal pride in Sarti’s work, especially since he wrote parts of it himself. He had always written love songs, like the one to Catherine, and religious music, like the ‘Cannon to our Saviour’, published by his own printing press. It is hard to judge the quality of Potemkin’s composition but, since his critics did not mock his music, he was probably talented, as Frederick the Great was with his flute. Indeed, Miranda, Potemkin’s cynical travelling guest and a just witness, was impressed by his musical talents. He met Sarti in the south and watched Potemkin ‘writing scores here and there, then gave them back to Sarti indicating the tone, rhythm and melody of the two points composition written on the spur of the moment, which gives some idea of his fecundity and great skill’. Sarti presumably then took Potemkin’s ideas and arranged them for the orchestra.²⁴

Certainly Catherine was proud of his musical abilities. ‘I can send you the tune of Sarti,’ she wrote to Grimm, ‘composed on the notes put together haphazardly by Prince Potemkin.’ The Prince, who always wanted an immediate reaction, ‘is very impatient to know if all the music has been delivered to you’.²⁵ Sarti and his itinerant hornblowers were with Potemkin to the end, but later he was also offered the greatest musical genius of his time – Mozart.

—

At about 11 a.m., the ritual moment arrived that defined Potemkin’s mysterious power. The Prince was ‘receiving all the great nobles at his lever, wearing their decorations’, recalled the Comte de Damas, ‘while he sat in the middle of the circle with his hair unbound and a great dressing gown around him with no britches underneath.’ In the midst of this Asiatic scene, the Empress’s valet de chambre appeared and whispered in the Prince’s ear: ‘he quickly wrapped his dressing gown more closely round him, dismissed everyone with a bow of farewell, and, disappearing through the door that led to the privy apartments, presented himself to the Empress’.²⁶ She had already been awake for about five hours.

He might then decide to get dressed – or not. Potemkin adored shocking everyone, thought Ligne, so he affected ‘the most attractive or the most repulsive manners’. He enjoyed dressing up and down. On formal occasions, no one was more richly clothed than Potemkin, who adopted ‘the style and manners of a grand seigneur at Louis XIV’s court’. When he died, the clothes in his palace were listed: there were epaulettes set with rubies worth 40,000 roubles and diamond buttons worth 62,000 roubles, and he always wore his diamond-set portrait of the Empress worth 31,000 roubles. He had a hat so heavy with jewels that only an adjutant could bear it, worth 40,000 roubles. Even the garters for his stockings were worth 5,000 roubles. His full-dress wardrobe was worth 276,000–283,000 roubles. Yet he was often seen ‘hair loose, in dressing gown and pantaloons, lying on a sofa’. He also favoured furs – the Prince was ‘unable to exist without furs; always without drawers in his shirt – or in rich regimentals embroidered on all the seams’.²⁷ Foreigners implied that a man in a dressing gown was obviously not working, but this was not so: wearing wraps or regimentals, Potemkin usually worked extremely hard.

When Ségur arrived in Petersburg, Serenissimus appalled the French Ambassador by receiving him in his fur wrap. So Ségur invited Potemkin to dinner and Ségur greeted him in the same garb, which the Prince enjoyed immensely – though only a friend of Marie-Antoinette could have got away with it. There was political method in this sartorial madness: at a time when the ritual of Catherine’s Court was getting richer, more stratified, the courtiers competed to follow etiquette while dressing as ostentatiously as possible. Catherine’s favourites were always keenest to display their prosperity and power in lace, feathers and diamonds. Favourites used dress to symbolize their affluence and influence.²⁸ Potemkin’s shaggy furs announced that he was no mere favourite. It emphasized his superiority: he was above the Court. He was the imperial consort.

—

The Prince had now been up for a few hours, reviewing papers with Popov, receiving petitioners and meeting the Empress. But there were days when he was too depressed to get out of bed at all. Once he summoned Ségur to his bedroom, explaining that ‘depression had prevented him from getting up or dressing…’. Harris believed that his illnesses arose solely from ‘his singular manner of living’.²⁹ Serenissimus certainly lived on his nerves. The life of a favourite, let alone a secret consort, was extremely stressful, for he was the man to destroy and he had to defend himself against all comers.^*2 The work of a chief minister, in an era when states were expanding so fast, but the bureaucracies had not caught up, was debilitating – no wonder leaders like Pitt and Potemkin died at the ages of forty-six and fifty-two.³⁰

Potemkin had to be doing something with his hands and mouth, so he was either ‘gnawing his nails or apples and turnips’. He even bit his nails in the company of monarchs, a winning trait.³¹ But he overdid it and often suffered from infected hangnail. Catherine saw it as just another part of his unique charm.³² When Grand Duke Alexander was born, the Empress joked that ‘he chewed his nails just like Prince Potemkin’.³³

His moods were ever changing – from ‘distrust, to confidence, to jealousy or to gratitude, to ill-humour or pleasantness’, recalled Ligne. Crises or bursts of work were usually followed by bouts of illness, which afflicted other politicians such as Sir Robert Walpole, whose feverish attacks always struck after anxiety was eased by success. These were partly the result of the malarial fevers he contracted in 1772 and 1783. The exhaustion of travelling vast distances at high speed, along with tireless inspections, political tension, heat and cold, and bad water, was enough to make anyone ill: indeed the other most widely and swiftly travelled Russian leader, Peter the Great, whom Potemkin in some ways resembled, was constantly ill with fevers on his journeys. The Prince’s need to bestride Russia made his life much harder because he almost literally had to be in two places at once.

His temperament was abnormally turbulent, swinging from wild exuberance to the depths of depression in moments. ‘On some occasions, he was insouciant to the point of immobility and on others capable of putting forth incredible exertions.’ When he was depressed, he brooded silently and often felt desperate, even frantic. Twenty adjutants were summoned, then he would not speak to them. Sometimes he did not speak for hours. ‘I sat next to Prince Potemkin at dinner,’ wrote Lady Craven, ‘but except for asking me to eat and drink, I cannot say I heard the sound of his voice.’³⁴

He may have been cyclothymic, even manic–depressive, swerving between lows of depression, inactivity and despair on one hand, and hypomania, a whirl of energy, elation and activity, on the other. He was frequently described as manic, and his euphoria, intense loquacity, insomnia, wild spending of money and hypersexuality were all characteristics of cyclothymic behaviour. But so was ‘the intense creativity’ that enabled him to do several things at once and, during his periods of activity, to do much more than a normal person could. His excessive optimism was often self-fulfilling. It also contributed to the aura of seductiveness and sexual enjoyment that made him so attractive. Such characters are difficult to live with – but are often talented.^*3 They sometimes possess outstanding powers of leadership, precisely because they suffer from this manic condition.³⁵

People who knew Potemkin admired his ‘agile imagination’ but attacked his fickleness. ‘Nobody thought out a plan more swiftly, carried it out more slowly and abandoned it more easily,’³⁶ said Ségur, an attitude that is disproved by the scale of his actual achievements. But that was certainly the impression Potemkin gave. Ligne was nearer than truth when he said Serenissimus ‘looks idle and is always busy’.

He was quite capable of doing many things at once: when Ségur visited him to help the French merchant Antoine in Kherson, he told the diplomat to read his memorandum aloud. But Ségur was ‘greatly surprised to see the Prince beckon into the room one after another, and give orders to a priest, an embroiderer, a secretary and a milliner’. The Frenchman was annoyed. Potemkin ‘smiled and said he had heard everything quite well’. Ségur was not convinced, until three weeks later Antoine wrote from Kherson to say that every request had been fulfilled by the Prince. Ségur went round to Potemkin’s to apologize: ‘As soon as he caught sight of me he flung his arms open and came towards me saying, “Well batushka did I not listen to you?…Do you still think I can’t do several things simultaneously and are you still going to be put out with me?’ ”³⁷ But he worked when he wanted and if he wanted.

If he was in a state of depressive collapse or just relaxing, no papers were signed and part of Russian government came to a halt. The secretaries in his Chancellery were frustrated, so one bright spark, who was nicknamed ‘the Hen’, probably for his busy-body bustle, boasted he could get them signed. Finding the Prince, the Hen explained how necessary it was to sign the papers. ‘Ah! You’ve come to the point. I have free time’ – and Potemkin tenderly took the boy to his study and signed everything. The secretary boasted of his achievement back in the Chancellery. But when the office began to process the papers, the unfortunate official discovered that Potemkin had signed every one, ‘Cock, Cockerel, Hen.’³⁸ He could be shamelessly childish.

—

Every day, he studiously ignored and disdained the many of the princes, generals and ambassadors who crowded his anterooms to win his favour. Lying half naked and fur-wrapped on his divan, he might summon one of them with his finger.³⁹ Diplomats so feared being made to look silly that they hid in their carriages outside the Palace and sent in their underlings to wait until Potemkin deigned to receive them.⁴⁰

Serenissimus would not tolerate sycophancy and devised appropriate punishments to tease those who practised it, but he respected and rewarded courage. ‘I’m bored with these nasty people,’ he grumbled one day. The witty but sycophantic writer Denis von Vizin saw his opportunity: ‘Why do you let such scoundrels in? You should order them barred.’

‘Really?’ said the Prince. ‘I’ll do it tomorrow.’ The next day, von Vizin arrived at the Palace, satisfied at having expelled his rivals from the Prince’s circle. The Guards would not admit him.

‘There must be some mistake,’ said von Vizin.

‘No,’ replied the doorman. ‘I know you, and His Highness ordered me not to admit you, thanks to your own advice yesterday.’⁴¹

A general, kept waiting for hours in the antechamber, shouted that he would not be treated ‘like a corporal’ and demanded to be received, whatever the Prince was doing. Potemkin had him shown into his office. When the general came in, the Prince got up, an unheard-of honour. ‘Your Highness, please!’, said the general.

‘I’m on my way to the lavatory,’ laughed the Prince.^*4

When an impoverished old colonel burst into his office to ask for a pension, Potemkin snapped, ‘Get him out of here.’ An adjutant approached the Colonel, who punched him and went on hitting him even on the floor. Potemkin ran over, pulled them apart and led the veteran into his apartments. The Colonel received a new job, travel expenses and a bonus.⁴²

Serenissimus feared no one and felt that, like a tsar, he was on a different level from the aristocracy: indeed, he identified much more with the Russian peasant or the European cosmopolitan than the Russian nobleman. At Mogilev, when he caught a provincial governor cheating at faro, he grabbed him by the collar and cuffed him. He once struck a grand seigneur, a Volkonsky, because he clapped at one of Potemkin’s jokes. ‘What, you applaud me as if I was a jester.’ Slap! ‘There…that’s the way to treat this sort of scoundrel.’ The chastized nobleman kept away from the Prince’s table for a week but was soon back.⁴³

Midday

Once the audiences were over, Popov reappeared with piles of papers to sign. Potemkin shared with Kaunitz the distinction of being Europe’s most flamboyant hypochondriac: he always saw his doctors while going over state papers. ‘A torrent of correspondence fell on Prince Potemkin and I don’t know how he could be so patient with all the idiots who attack him everywhere,’ observed Miranda.⁴⁴ These varied from German princes and Russian widows to Greek pirates and Italian cardinals. All used the word ‘importune’ in their requests, which were often requesting lands in the south or the opportunity to serve in the army. One has the impression that Potemkin was in correspondence with virtually every prince in the Holy Roman Empire, which he called ‘the archipelago of princes’. Even kings apologized if their letters were too long. ‘I know by experience’, wrote King Stanislas-Augustus of Poland, ‘how one doesn’t like long letters when one is busy…’.

He received many ludicrous letters of over-the-top flattery such as the Samgrass-like Professor Bataille who sent an ode to Catherine adding: ‘Could I, Monseigneur, write without a mention of Your Highness? Deign you, Monseigneur, to cast a glance on my work.’⁴⁵ Potemkin’s fifty-strong perambulant Chancellery answered many of these, but he was also notorious for forgetting to reply to eminent people like the King of Sweden: Field-Marshal Loudon, an Austrianized Scotsman, complained to Joseph II that ‘Prince Potemkin had had the politeness not to reply to two letters he had sent him.’

There were also tragic requests for help from unfortunates of all ranks which give a glimpse of life in that time: a male protégé of Potemkin’s thanked him for his help in marrying one of the Naryshkin girls, who suddenly revealed that she had 20,000 roubles of debts, obviously from playing cards, probably faro, the heroin addiction of its day. Some were from aristocrats in trouble like the Princess Bariatinskaya, who wrote from Turin, ‘I struggle against the horrors of misery,’ but ‘you alone my Prince can make a woman happy who has been unhappy all her life’. Another German count, dismissed by the Empress, wrote, ‘I can no longer have the means to sustain a wife always ill, a girl of 14, sons…’. An ordinary man wrote: ‘I beg you to have pity on us…’.⁴⁶ But, being Potemkin, there was always some exotica: one mysterious correspondent was Elias Abaise, soi-disant Prince of Palestina, who confessed, ‘I am forced by misery lacking so greatly money, credit and all the basic necessities, to implore the high protection and benevolence of Your Highness…and to aid my departure…winter is coming.’ It was signed in Arabic. Was this a Wandering Jew or Arab from the Ottoman province of Palestine? If so, what was he doing in St Petersburg in August 1780? And would Potemkin help him? ‘Your Highness’, reads the next letter, ‘has had the favour to give me gracious help.’⁴⁷

The Prince wrote many replies himself, in his scratchy, slanted hand, in Russian or French, but Popov was so trusted that the Prince told him his wishes and the secretary sent them out in his own name. Potemkin was extremely tolerant towards his subordinates⁴⁸ – even when they were making a mess of things. First he gave them their orders again. If tolerance did not work, he tried biting, if droll, sarcasm. When Admiral Voinovich made excuses after a ship ran aground, the Prince replied: ‘I am very pleased to learn the ship Alexander is wedged off a sandbar but it would’ve been better not to have run into it…I like your view that this accident will make officers more diligent but I wish and demand diligence without accidents…And if Captain Baronov is such an experienced seaman I would be more convinced…if he ran Turkish ships on to sandbars and not his own.’⁴⁹

Before dinner, the Prince liked to be alone for an hour. It was then that he came up with the richness of political ideas that distinguished him from Catherine’s other advisers. Popov and his secretaries seldom interrupted him. This was a golden rule: one secretary who did not get the message was actually sacked for speaking. Potemkin would call for his jewels.

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Jewels calmed the Prince as much as music. He sat there with a little saw, some silver and a box of diamonds.⁵⁰ Sometimes visitors noticed him sitting alone like a giant child, playing with them, pouring them from hand to hand, making them into patterns and drawings until he had worked out the problem.⁵¹

He showered his nieces with diamonds. Vigée Lebrun said that Skavronskaya’s jewellery box in Naples was the richest she had ever seen. Ligne marvelled that he had a 100,000 rouble fleece of diamonds in his collection.⁵² Jewels were another good way to win favour. ‘I send you a little red ruby and bigger blue ruby,’⁵³ wrote Sashenka’s husband, Branicki, in one of his shockingly obsequious letters. Potemkin’s correspondence with his jewellers showed his impatient enthusiasm. ‘I’m sending Your Highness the ruby of St Catherine,’ wrote Alexis Deuza, probably a Greek craftsman working in Potemkin’s stone-cutting fabrick at Ozerki, ‘It’s not as fine as I’d like, to perfect this sort of work, one needs a cylinder and the one Your Highness ordered won’t be ready for ten…days and I did not think I should wait. It seems Your Highness wants it urgently.’⁵⁴ His spending reveals his passionate pursuit of brilliants: he owed a procession of merchants money for ‘diamonds, gems, amethyst, topaz and aquamarine, pearls’.⁵⁵ Everything had to be exquisite and beautiful. Here is a typical bill from Duval, a French jeweller, in February 1784:

A big sapphire of 18.3/4 carats – 1500 Roubles

Two diamonds of 5.3/8 carats – 600 R

10 diamonds of 20 carats – 2200 R

15 diamonds of 14.5 carats – 912 R

78 diamonds of 14.5 carats – 725 R…⁵⁶

It was not just jewels: a bill from his bankers Tepper in Warsaw lists two gold snuff-boxes engraved with diamonds, a gold watch, a golden repeater clock engraved with diamonds, a ‘souvenir-à-brilliants’, some music, eighteen pens, customs for paintings imported from Vienna, payments to a Polish agent of influence, 15,000 roubles payed to ‘the Jew Hosias’ for unnamed work, all totalling almost 30,000 roubles.⁵⁷

Potemkin’s payment for all this was so hit-and-miss that it too has gone into legend. There were virtually always unpaid jewellers and craftsmen among the petitioners crowding his apartments. It was said that when a creditor arrived Potemkin used to signal to Popov: if the sign was an open hand, the merchant was paid. If it was a closed fist, he was sent away. None of them dared confront him directly at Court. But the Swiss court jeweller Fasi was said to have slipped his bill under Potemkin’s plate at the Empress’s table. Serenissimus thought it was a billet-doux and was furious when he read it. Catherine laughed and Potemkin always admired courage so he paid the bill. But, to teach the jeweller for his insolence, he delivered it in copper coins, enough to fill two rooms.⁵⁸

Dinner

At about 1 p.m., the jewels were put away and the Prince’s guests arrived for dinner, the main meal in the eighteenth century, at a table set for eighteen, usually officers, visitors and his best friends of the moment, from Ségur or Ligne to Lady Craven or Samuel Bentham. Potemkin’s friendships, as we saw with Harris, were as intense as love affairs – and tended to end in disillusionment. ‘The true secret of winning his friendship’, said Ségur, ‘was not fearing him.’ When he arrived in Petersburg and called on Potemkin, Ségur was kept waiting so long that he stormed out. Next day, the Prince sent him an apology, invited him back and greeted him a gorgeous suit in which every seam was embroidered with diamonds. When Potemkin was lying in bed, depressed, he said to Ségur: ‘My dear Comte, let us lay aside all ceremony…and live like two friends.’ Once he had befriended someone, he favoured his companion above all the highest imperial grandees, as Sam Bentham discovered.⁵⁹ Potemkin was a loyal friend: in private, he was caressing and warm but in public he seemed ‘haughty and arrogant’. This was probably due to that surprising shyness.⁶⁰ Miranda actually saw him blush bashfully at the obsequious attention he received.⁶¹

The Prince was a master of conversation in an era when wit was especially prized. ‘Sometimes serious, sometime hilarious,’ recalled Ségur, ‘always keen to discuss some ecclesiastical question, always switching from gravity to laughter, wearing his knowledge lightly.’ Ligne said that if he wanted to charm someone, he possessed ‘the art of conquering every heart’. He was an immensely rewarding, enjoyable and impossible companion, ‘scolding or laughing, mimicking or swearing, engaged in wantonness or prayers, singing or meditating’. He could be ‘uncommonly affable or extremely savage’. But, when ‘savage’, his harshness often concealed ‘the greatest benevolence of heart’. Bentham had never known such ‘merriment’ as he did travelling in Potemkin’s carriage. The poet Derzhavin remembered Potemkin for ‘his kind heart and great generosity’.⁶² He was also deeply kind: ‘The more I see of his Character,’ Sam Bentham told Pole Carew, ‘the more reason I have to esteem and admire it.’⁶³

His geniality was combined with a heartfelt humanity and care for ordinary people, especially soldiers, that was rare in the age of cannon-fodder. Ligne noticed he was ‘never vengeful, asking pardon for a pain he has inflicted, quickly repairing an injustice’. When Potemkin bought Prince Lubomirski’s estates in Poland, he ordered that ‘all the gallows…must be destroyed as soon as possible without trace’, wishing that the peasants obey him ‘through respect for their duty and not from fear of punishment’.⁶⁴ His military reforms were designed to give more comfort to his troops, quite a new notion in that century, though he was also increasing their effectiveness. But his constant orders to be more lenient in punishments were unique in the Russian army: again and again, he ordered that beatings should be reduced. ‘All compulsion…must be eradicated,’ he wrote in one order. ‘Lazy ones can be forced by the stick but not more than six lashes. Every kind of compulsion…has to be eradicated.’⁶⁵ His repeated orders to feed the troops with warm nourishing food, regarded by Russian generals as mollycoddling, sound absolutely modern.⁶⁶

‘He was neither vindictive nor rancorous yet everybody was afraid of him,’⁶⁷ recalled the memoirist Wiegel, who believed that this explained the ambiguous attitude to Potemkin. His very tolerance and good nature confused the Russians. ‘The way he looked at people, his movements, it seemed, said to all those around him “You’re not worth my anger.” His lack of severity and indulgence clearly originated from his unlimited disdain.’⁶⁸

—

Dinner was served at about 1.30 p.m. and even if there were only a total of sixteen guests, as when Lady Craven attended such an event at the Taurida, the sixty-strong horn orchestra played during the meal.⁶⁹ The Prince was a notorious Epicurean and trencherman – Shcherbatov called him ‘the omnipotent glutton’.⁷⁰ As political tensions rose, he must have eaten for comfort or as a locomotive consumes coal. He never lost his taste for simple peasant food, yet he also served caviar from the Caspian, smoked goose from Hamburg, cucumbers from Nizhny Novgorod, pastries from Kaluga, oysters from the Baltic, melons and oranges from Astrakhan and China, figs from Provence. He loved pain doux de Savoie⁷¹ for dessert and expected to eat his favourite dish, sterlet soup from the Caspian, made with the young sturgeon fish, wherever he was. Soon after his arrival in St Petersburg in 1780, Reginald Pole Carew attended ‘an ordinary’ dinner at Potemkin’s and listed the ‘exquisite and rare dishes’: ‘remarkable, fine white veal from Archangel, a joint of delicious mutton from Little Bokhara, a suckling pig from Poland, conserves from Persia, caviar from the Caspian’.⁷² All was cooked by Ballez,^*5 his French chef de cuisine.⁷³

Serenissimus also appreciated wine, not just his own from Soudak in the Crimea, but, as Carew Pole recorded,⁷⁴ from all the ‘Ports of Europe and the Grecian isles, the Cape and the borders of the Don’. No toast was complete without champagne.⁷⁵ If a Russian ambassador in southern Europe, like Skavronsky in Naples, wanted to win favour, he sent a Classical column – and some barrels of wine.⁷⁶

—

One day, at the height of his fortunes, Serenissimus sat down to dinner. He was very cheerful, playing the fool until towards the end of the meal when he became quiet. He started biting his nails. Guests and servants waited to see what he would say. Finally, he asked:

Can any man be more happy than I am? Everything I have ever wanted, I have; all my whims have been fulfilled as if by magic. I wanted high rank, I have it; I wanted medals, I have them; I loved gambling, I have lost vast sums; I liked giving parties, I’ve given magnificent ones; I enjoy building houses, I’ve raised palaces; I liked buying estates, I have many; I adore diamonds and beautiful things – no individual in Europe owns rarer or more exquisite stones. In a word, all my passions have been sated. I am entirely happy!

At this, the Prince swept the priceless china plates on to the floor, smashed them all, stormed off to his bedroom and locked himself inside.

Potemkin suffered from his own surfeit of everything: he regarded himself as ‘fortune’s child’; indeed he often used the phrase. But sometimes the scale of his success seemed to disgust him. Perhaps this was deeply Russian: he was ashamed of his vast power and proud of his turbulent soul, repulsed by the cold machinery of state, proud of his boundless capacity for suffering and self-abasement in which the greatness of the Russian character resides. His appetites for fame, fortune and pleasure were insatiable – yet they did not make him happy. Only massive accomplishment, whether in statesmanship or battle, aesthetic beauty, in music or art, or the serenity of religious mysticism, seemed to excuse the obscenity of mere power.⁷⁷

Once he called for his adjutant and ordered coffee. Someone rushed out to get it. Then he asked again. Another courier was despatched. Finally he ordered it again and again, almost in a frenzy. But when it arrived he said, ‘It’s unnecessary. I only wanted to wait for something but now I’ve been deprived even of that pleasure.’⁷⁸

Afternoon: The Lover’s Hour

The afternoon was traditionally the ‘lovers’ hour’ in Russia, like the Gallic cinq-à-sept or the Spanish siesta. There must have been much coming and going of closed carriages and ladies’ maids bringing billets-doux to Potemkin’s house. Still more married women were now sending him love letters, begging to see him. One of them always hailed him: ‘Hello, my unique friend!’ These unpublished notes, handwritten in an argot of French and Russian but always unsigned and undated, fill an entire section of the archive. ‘I have not been able to give you pleasure because I’ve had no time, you left so quickly,’ wrote another in a big girlish hand. This was repeated in all the love letters. When the same woman wrote again, she declared, ‘I wait with the most tender impatience the moment when I can come to kiss you. While waiting, I do it in my imagination and with equal tenderness.’

Serenissimus’ whims and moods tormented his mistresses. ‘You’re rendering me mad with love,’ wrote one. His restlessness and long departures to the south made him unobtainably attractive: ‘I’m so angry at being prevented from [having] the pleasure of embracing you,’ wrote one girl. ‘Don’t forget that I beg you to be persuaded that I am involved only with you!’ But it seemed that Potemkin had soon forgotten that. ‘Don’t forget me,’ she beseeched him later. ‘You have forgotten.’ Yet another declared melodramatically that ‘if I didn’t live in the hope of being loved by you, I would give myself to Death’. Finally, driven to the edge by Potemkin’s impossible lack of commitment, the girls had to retreat and become friends again: ‘I don’t want to recall the past and I forget all except that I loved you and that suffices to wish sincerely for your happiness…Adieu, mon Prince.’⁷⁹

He was accustomed to languish on his divan surrounded by women like a sultan, though he called his harem ‘the hen-run’. He always enjoyed the company of women and saw no need to restrain his ‘Epicurean appetites’.⁸⁰ Diplomats always called his maîtresse en titre ‘sultana-in-chief’. But he behaved ‘nobly’ to his mistresses, according to Samoilov, who had reason to know since his wife was probably one of them: his affairs were always questions of passion, not merely vanity, ‘as they are for many famous people’.⁸¹ His subordinates knew they had to keep their wives at a distance if they wanted to preserve their virtue. Potemkin’s ‘wandering and capricious glance sometimes stopped, or better to say, slid, upon my mother’s good-looking face’, recalled Wiegel. One day, a ‘fool’ in his entourage told him that Wiegel’s mother had the most exquisite feet. ‘Indeed,’ said Potemkin, ‘I hadn’t noticed. Some time I’ll call her over and ask her to show me them without stockings.’ Wiegel’s father quickly despatched her to their estates.⁸²

If Potemkin was bored, he often went over to the palace of Catherine’s buffoonish friend, the Master of Horse, Lev Naryshkin, where eating, drinking and dancing went on all day and night. Potemkin treated it like his private club – he usually sat in his own special alcove – as it was the ideal place to meet high-born married mistresses. ‘It was the foyer of all pleasure,’ wrote Ségur, ‘the rendezvous of all the lovers because, in the midst of so many happy people, secret trysts were 100 times easier than at balls or salons where etiquette reigned.’ The Prince relaxed there, sometimes in silence, sometimes ‘very cheerful, chatting to women, he who never talked to anyone’. Potemkin, whom ‘one hardly saw anywhere else’, was drawn by the Naryshkin daughters, with whom he was ‘always’ in ‘tête-à-tête’. He seemed to work his way through the Naryshkin girls: ‘he consoles himself for the absence of his niece with Madame de Solugub, daughter of Madame Naryshkina’, reported Cobenzl to his Emperor. Ivan Solugub was one of his generals. All his officers had to endure his conquests both on the battlefield and in their own households.⁸³

The Prince still dominated the lives of all his nieces and insisted on running their households whenever possible. His ‘angel of fleshly delights’, Katinka Skavronskaya, was inconveniently visiting her operatic husband in Naples, but we can follow her movements across Europe by Potemkin’s instructions to his bankers to pay for her expenses. When she passed through Vienna, even Emperor Joseph had to entertain⁸⁴ ‘your kitten’, as Catherine tolerantly called her.⁸⁵ By 1786, Katinka was ‘more beautiful than ever’, according to that connoisseur Cobenzl, and always ‘favourite sultana-in-chief’ of her uncle’s harem.⁸⁶

The spirited Sashenka Branicka was as imperious as her uncle: they were always arguing, even though they were closest of all. In 1788, Serenissimus tried to remove Mademoiselle Guibald from one of the Engelhardt households. Guibald was the Frenchwoman in Potemkin’s entourage who had supposedly stolen Harris’s letter and became a companion for the nieces and a seraglio-manageress for the Prince. Branicka refused to dismiss her, so he wrote to insist because Guibald ‘wants my niece to remain a child for ever’. We do not know which niece was being discussed, but all were married by then. Branicka evidently reassured the French lady, which made Potemkin furious: ‘I’m master of my house and I want what I wish. I don’t understand how Countess Branicka dared to calm her against my will…’. The Prince believed that ‘my exalted station confers benefits on my relatives; they owe me everything and they’d be in a paltry state without me…’. He stated simply: ‘There are a lot of reasons but the main one is that I wish it to be so.’⁸⁷

Evening

At about 10.30 p.m., when the Empress retired with her favourite, Potemkin, who usually spent the early evening in attendance, whether at the Little Hermitage or at a ball, received his ‘pink ticket’. His real day, as it were, was just beginning. He woke up at night, his most creative hours. One could define absolutism as the power to overrule even the laws of time. Potemkin paid no attention to the clock and his subordinates had to do the same: he was an insomniac, said Ligne, ‘constantly lying down, but never sleeping whether day or night’.⁸⁸

Night

Sir James Harris experienced the Prince’s nocturnal habits: ‘His hours for eating and sleeping are uncertain and we were frequently airing in the rain in an open carriage at midnight.’⁸⁹ There is no more Potemkinish scene than that.

Potemkin was relentlessly curious and was always asking questions, teasing and provoking his companions, discussing religion, politics, art and sex – ‘the biggest questioner in the world’. His questions reminded Richelieu of ‘a bee, which with the help of the flowers, whose pollen it sucks, creates an exquisite substance’. In this case the ‘honey’ was Potemkin’s racy and pungent conversation, aided by a flawless memory and a whimsical imagination.⁹⁰

Everyone who met Potemkin and even those who loathed him had to admit that he was gifted with admirable mental equipment: ‘Potemkin joined the gift of prodigious memory with that of natural, lively, quick mind…’.⁹¹ Ligne thought he had ‘natural abilities, an excellent memory, much elevation of soul; malice without the design of injuring, artifice without craft, a happy mixture of caprices’, concluding that he had ‘the talent of guessing what he is ignorant of and a consummate knowledge of mankind’. Not every Westerner liked Potemkin: Sir John Sinclair called him ‘a worthless and dangerous character’, but even he thought Potemkin had ‘great abilities’.⁹² His more intelligent Russian opponents agreed: Simon Vorontsov believed the Prince had ‘lots of intelligence, intrigue and credit’ but lacked ‘knowledge, application and virtue’.⁹³

Ségur was often astonished by Potemkin’s knowledge ‘not only of politics but travellers, savants, writers, artists and even artisans’. All those who knew him acclaimed his ‘vast erudition on antiquities’. His travelling companion in the south, Miranda, was amazed by his knowledge of architecture, art and music. ‘It seems this man of so much intelligence and prodigious memory also wanted to study sciences and arts in depth and that he has achieved this to some extent,’ wrote the Venezuelan after they had discussed the music of Hayden and Boccherini, the paintings of Murillo and the writings of Chappe d’Auteroche – he turned out to be profoundly knowledgeable on all of them.⁹⁴ It was no wonder that Damas owed ‘the most instructive and agreeable moments of my life’ to the ‘strange’ Prince.⁹⁵

His knowledge of Russian history was equally impressive. ‘Thanks for your chronology, it’s the best part in my Russian history,’ wrote Catherine about her Notes on Russian History, with which he helped her. The partners loved history. ‘I’ve spent years researching this subject,’ Catherine told Seinac de Meilhan, the French official and writer. ‘I’ve always loved to read things no one else reads. I’ve only found one man who has the same taste – that’s Marshal Prince Potemkin.’⁹⁶ Here was another pleasure they shared. When the translator of the History of Armenia, one of Potemkin’s pet subjects, was hanged by the Turks, ‘Prince Potemkin’, joked Catherine to Grimm, ‘was very angry about it.’⁹⁷

He always wanted to set up his own printing press, and Jeremy Bentham tried to help him find one.⁹⁸ Just before the war started, Potemkin at last acquired his press, which was to follow him around throughout the war, printing political journals and classics in Russian, French, Latin and Greek, as well as his own compositions.⁹⁹

Ségur and his friend Ligne claimed that Potemkin ‘had less acquired his knowledge from books than from men’. This was clearly untrue. The Prince was widely read. Pole Carew, who spent so much time with him at the start of the decade, stated his culture came from ‘copious reading in his earlier years’ – hence his ‘knowledge and taste for the Greek language’.¹⁰⁰ Potemkin’s advice to Catherine on a Greek education for the little Grand Dukes shows his artistic ear for the Greek language: ‘It’s hard to imagine how much knowledge and delicate taste one can get from learning it. The language has the loveliest harmony and much play of thought.’¹⁰¹

His library, which he gradually expanded by buying collections from scholars and friends like Archbishop Voulgaris, reveals his broad interests: there were all the classics from Seneca, Horace and Plutarch to Les Amours de Sappho, published in Paris in 1724; many works of theology, war, agriculture and economics including Coutumes monastiques, manuals of artillery, Uniformes Militaires and La Richesse des Nations de Schmitt (Adam Smith); many works on Peter the Great, but also the masterpieces of the philosophes from Voltaire and Diderot to Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. His Anglophilia and his obsession with English gardens were covered in histories of England, the works of Locke and Newton, the Caricatures de Hoguard (Hogarth) and of course Britannia Illustré ou deux livres des vues des principales maisons et jardins…de la Grande Bretagne. By the time he died his huge collection contained 1,065 foreign works and 106 in Russian: it filled eighteen carriages.¹⁰²

His political ideas were quintessentially Russian, despite imbibing the tolerance of the philosophes and the utilitarianism of Bentham. He believed that absolutism was the best system for an empire the size of Russia. The ruler was a woman and a state and he served both. The three revolutions – the American, French and Polish – appalled and fascinated him. He cross-examined Ségur about the Americans, for whom the Frenchman had fought, but ‘did not believe that republican institutions could have a long life in a land so vast. His mind, so accustomed to absolute despotism, could not admit the possibility of a union of order and liberty.’¹⁰³ As for the French Revolution, Potemkin simply told the Comte de Langeron: ‘Colonel, your countrymen are a pack of madmen.’¹⁰⁴ The Prince believed that politics was the art of infinite flexibility and philosophical patience in order to attain a fixed objective. ‘You must have patience,’ he lectured Harris, ‘depend on it. The chapter of accidents will serve you better than all your rhetoric.’ Potemkin’s political motto was ‘Improve events as they arise.’^105*6

The Prince liked to talk ‘divinity to his generals and tactics to his bishops’, said Ligne, and Lev Engelhardt observed him ‘playing off’ his ‘erudite rabbis, Old Believers and different scholars against each other’.¹⁰⁶ His ‘favourite topic’ was the ‘separation of the Greek and Latin Churches’, the only sure way to win his attention was talk about ‘the Councils of Nicaea, Chalcedon and Florence’. Sometimes he wanted to found a religious order, sometimes wander Russia as a monk. This was why Frederick the Great had ordered his ambassador in the 1770s to study Orthodoxy, the best way to befriend the Prince.

He joked about religion – teasing Suvorov for observance of fasts – ‘You wish to enter paradise astride a sturgeon’ – but essentially he was a serious ‘son of the Church’, never joining the Masonic lodges.¹⁰⁷ He may have swung between being a coenobite and a sybarite, but he was certainly a believer, who could tell Catherine during the coming war, ‘Christ will help, He’ll put an end to our adversity. Look through your life and you can see what a lot of unexpected benefits came to you from Him in misfortune…It was a mere chance that your coronation coincided with the feast of the Apostles’ – and who could then quote the appropriate chapter 16 verse 1 from the Epistle of Paul to the Romans.¹⁰⁸ He often dreamed of retiring to the Church. ‘Be a good mother,’ he asked Catherine, ‘prepare a good bishop’s mitre and a quiet tenure.’¹⁰⁹ Potemkin never let religion ruin his pleasures – Ségur ‘saw him spend a morning examining models of hats for dragoons, bonnets and dresses for his nieces, and mitres and habits for priests’. He staggered from church to orgy and back, ‘waving with one hand to the women that please him and with the other making the sign of the Cross’, observed Ligne, ‘embracing the feet of a statue of the Virgin or the alabaster neck of his mistress’.¹¹⁰ A religious man and a great sinner, he was the ‘epitome of the Russian’s staggering ability to live upright within while enveloped in unceasing sin’.¹¹¹

—

The Prince also passed much of the night at the green baize tables. If French was the language that united Europe, faro was the game: a squire from Leicestershire, a mountebank from Venice, a planter from Virginia and an officer from Sebastopol played the same game that required no language. A night of faro at Potemkin’s Palace in the mid-1780s was probably very much like a game at Chatsworth with Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, who was also a compulsive gamester. The players would sit at an oval table covered in green baize with a wooden rim across it to separate the cards. A tailleur (banker) sat opposite the croup and the players bet on the cards turned up on either side of the rim. The players could double stakes all the way up to a soixante et le va – sixty times the stake, all of which was wordlessly announced by complicated mutilations, or bending, of the cards. Thus faro peculiarly suited Potemkin: the taking of vast risks without the need to speak a word.

He used gambling in a very Potemkinish manner. One occasion was recounted later by Pushkin. A young man, named ‘Sh.’, was about to be ruined by the debts owed to ‘Prince B.’, who was going to complain to the Empress. The young man’s family begged Potemkin to intercede. He sent a message to ‘Sh.’ to visit him during the card game the next day and insisted, ‘Tell him to be bolder with me.’ When ‘Sh.’ arrived, Potemkin was already playing. When ‘Prince B.’ arrived, he was poorly received, so he sat and watched the game. Suddenly Potemkin called ‘Sh.’ over and, showing him his cards, asked, ‘Tell me, brother, how would you play this hand?’ Young ‘Sh.’, remembering his instructions, replied rudely, ‘What affair is it of mine? Play the best you can!’ Everyone watched Potemkin to see how he would react to this insolence. ‘Dear me,’ said Serenissimus, ‘one can’t say a word to you, batinka. You fly straight off the handle!’ When ‘Prince B.’ saw this, he realized that ‘Sh.’ must be in the highest favour with Potemkin and Catherine. He never called in the debt.¹¹² Gamblers played for rouleaux of banknotes, but the Prince had long since forgotten the value of money. So he insisted that they play for gemstones, which sat beside him on the green baize in a glistening pile.¹¹³ Debts were settled among adventurers by duels – but not by a man of Potemkin’s stature. Nonetheless, his fellow gamblers risked cheating because, while Potemkin was playing for fun backed by Catherine’s bottomless purse, they were placing their entire family fortunes at the mercy of the dice. When one player (possibly Levashov, Yermolov’s uncle) paid his winnings with rhinestones, Potemkin said nothing but arranged his vengeance with the coachman. That afternoon during a storm, the Prince went riding alongside the cheat’s carriage. When the carriage was in the midst of a flooded field, Potemkin yelled, ‘Off you go,’ to the coachman, who galloped off with the horses, leaving the victim behind. When he finally walked home, hours later, his silk clothes soaked, the bedraggled cheat was greeted with gales of laughter from the Prince at the window. But nothing more was ever said about his cheating.¹¹⁴

Potemkin’s games could not be interrupted. When summoned to the Council, he simply refused to go. When the messenger humbly asked the reason, Potemkin snapped, ‘In the 1st Psalm and 1st verse.’ When the Council looked it up, this read: ‘Beatus vir qui non abiit in consilio impiorum,’^*7 thereby simultaneously displaying his wit, memory, arrogance, theological knowledge and gambling mania.¹¹⁵

Somehow, between sunset and sunrise, the Prince also sliced through swathes of papers – it was probably when he did the greatest part of his work. His secretaries were on duty and Popov, in between gambling bouts, often stood behind his chair with pen and pad, awaiting his orders, recording his ideas.

Dawn

When this insomniac finally went to sleep, the carriage of one of his mistresses sometimes stood on Millionaya Street outside the Winter Palace. Inside it, the lady longingly and lovingly watched the candles still burning, just before dawn. ‘I passed your house and I saw all the lights on. No doubt you were playing cards. My dear Prince…give me this pleasure, do something for me and don’t stay up as you do until four or five in the morning…my darling Prince.’¹¹⁶

—

Since the Prince could not live without his English gardens, the travels of his gardener William Gould were a weathervane of Potemkin’s intentions. In late 1786, the English ‘Emperor of Gardens’ set off for the south in style with his ‘general staff’ of gardeners and workmen. The cognoscenti knew this meant that something important was afoot.¹¹⁷ The Empress was about to depart on her grandiose journey to the Crimea to meet the Holy Roman Emperor under the gaze of Europe. In November 1786, Serenissimus, the impresario of this imperial progress, departed to make the last checks on the route. On this trip, he excelled himself in his flamboyant choice of carriage companions: a Venezuelan liberator and mountebank who kept a diary of his Ukrainian whorings, and an aspiring king of Ouidah and freebooter, who had been seduced by the Queen of Tahiti.

Skip Notes

*1 Giambattista Lampi, 1751–1830, was one of the most fashionable portrait painters in Vienna – Joseph II and Kaunitz sat for him. Potemkin seemed to have shared him with the Austrians, sometimes asking Kaunitz to send him over. The paintings done in 1791 before he died were copied by painters like Roslin and sold in prints.

*2 The great favourites of earlier epochs, such as the Count-Duke of Olivares and Cardinal Richelieu, both suffered recurring nervous collapses.

*3 Oliver Cromwell, the Duke of Marlborough and Clive of India are among the many gifted leaders who are said to have displayed cyclothymic traits.

*4 In our times, this resembles President L.B. Johnson humiliating his cabinet from his lavatory seat.

*5 The Prince loved his food and when Monsieur Ballez’s much anticipated arrival from France was delayed by his being stranded at Elsinor in Denmark, Potemkin mobilized the Russian Ambassador and various special envoys to get him quickly overland to Petersburg.

*6 This was an earlier, more proactive version of British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s description of politics as ‘Events, dear boy, events.’

*7 ‘Blessed is he who does not go to the council of the ungodly.’