Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

33

THE LAST RIDE

His niece wanted to know…

‘What news do you bring?’

‘I bring you great sorrow

Put on black

Your uncle has died

Lying on a coat in the midst of the steppes.’

Soldiers’ marching song, ‘The Death of Potemkin’

The ringing of bells, the firing of cannons and the cloud of dust raised by his carriages marked Potemkin’s arrival in Mogilev on his way south. Civil servants and nobles from distant corners of the province, and the ladies in their best clothes, waited at the Governor’s house.

When his carriage pulled up, the crowd rushed to the bottom of the steps: the Prince of Taurida emerged in a flowing summer dressing gown, covered in dust, and strode through the crowd without glancing at anyone. At dinner that night, Serenissimus invited a noble Polish Patriot, Michel Oginski, to join his entourage and cheerfully treated him to a virtuoso performance, discussing Holland, ‘which he knew as if he’d lived his whole life there; England, of which the Government, customs and morals were perfectly known to him’, and then music and painting, ‘adding that the English knew nothing of either’. When they talked about the art of war, the Prince declared the key to victory was breaking the rules, but studying strategy was not enough: ‘You’ve got to be born with it.’¹ This was hardly the reception of a fallen politician and scarcely the behaviour of a broken one.

As Potemkin approached Moldavia, Prince Repnin was already negotiating with the Grand Vizier in Galatz. Potemkin cheerfully told Catherine that preliminaries had been agreed on 24 July, but on the 31st, when he was only one day away, Repnin signed a truce. Potemkin was said to be furious with jealousy that Repnin had stolen his thunder. But Repnin’s reports show that Potemkin was perfectly happy for him to negotiate the preliminaries, though not necessarily sign them. Potemkin’s rage was political and personal – but hardly based on jealousy. Repnin, whom Catherine called ‘worse than an old woman’, was the late Panin’s nephew, a Freemason of the Martinist sect and part of Paul’s Prussophile Court, yet he had become Potemkin’s submissive workhorse. ‘The Bible unites them,’ Ligne explained – the Martinism of one and the superstition of the other ‘fit together marvellously’.² No more. Repnin’s trick was surely encouraged by letters from the capital, claiming that Zubov would protect him from Potemkin’s fury. ‘You little Martinist,’ Potemkin shouted in one version. ‘How dare you!’³

Repnin had signed the wrong deal at the wrong time: ignorant of the latest agreement with Fawkener, he had agreed an eight-month armistice, which allowed the Turks an ample breather to rebuild their forces, and a Turkish demand that Russia should not fortify ceded territory. Nor did Repnin realize Potemkin was waiting for news of Ushakov and the fleet: if they succeeded, the terms could be raised. It just happened that Ushakov had defeated the Ottoman Fleet on the very day Repnin had signed the terms; Constantinople was in panic. Catherine too was over the moon when Potemkin informed her about the peace, but both she and Bezborodko immediately denounced Repnin’s clumsy mistakes. When Catherine learned of Ushakov’s triumph, she was angry.⁴ Potemkin could have used Ushakov’s victory to force the Turks to fight again and therefore free Russia from the Fawkener deal.⁵ This was still possible, but Repnin’s concessions made it harder.

Serenissimus rushed down to Nikolaev to inspect his new battleships and Palace and almost flew the 500 versts back to Jassy in thirty hours. He then fell ill, as he often did after months of nervous tension, debilitating debauchery, overwork and exhausting travel. There was plague in Constantinople and an epidemic of fevers across the south. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ he told Catherine, who was fretting over his health like old times.⁶ Jassy was riddled with ‘putrid marsh miasma’.⁷ Everyone was falling ill.

Granz Vizier Yusuf-Pasha collected yet another Ottoman army of 150,000 over the Danube. His envoy began the negotiations by testing Potemkin’s resolve, asking if there was any chance of keeping the Dniester. The Prince broke off talks. The Vizier apologized and offered to execute his own envoy. Potemkin demanded independence for Moldavia, Russian approval for the appointment of the Hospodars of Wallachia, and the cession of Anapa.⁸ He was raising the stakes, daring the Turks to fight again and free him from Fawkener’s deal. Then came an ominous omen.

On 13 August 1791, one of his officers, Prince Karl Alexander of Württemberg, Grand Duke Paul’s brother-in-law, died of the fever. Potemkin, who had become friendly with Paul’s wife, laid on an elaborate royal funeral for her brother. The Prince, already haunted by premonitions of death, was fighting his own sickness. He followed the cortège for miles on foot in the stifling heat and took two glasses of iced water at the burial site. As the hearse passed him in the midst of the funeral, the delirious Potemkin thought it was his carriage and tried to climb into it. For a superstitious man, this was the tolling of the bell. ‘God is my witness, I am tormented.’ He collapsed and was borne out of Galatz, ordering Repnin to evacuate the army from the unhealthy town.⁹

Potemkin rested in nearby Gusha, where Popov finally persuaded him to take his medicine, probably cinchona, the South American bark, an early form of quinine. He recovered enough to appoint Samoilov, Ribas and Lazhkarev as Russian plenipotentiaries – but Catherine sensed that she could lose her indispensable consort: ‘I pray to God that He turns away this misfortune from you and saves me from such a blow,’ she wrote to him. She wept for several days. On 29 August, she even prayed for Potemkin’s life at the night service at the Nevsky Monastery, to which she donated gold and diamonds. Alexandra Branicka was summoned to attend her uncle. But ten days later: ‘I am better,’ Potemkin told Catherine, ‘I did not hope ever to see you again, dear Matushka.’¹⁰ He headed back to Jassy – but he could not shake off the fever.

‘I don’t understand how you can move about from one place to another, in such a state of weakness,’ Catherine wrote, adding that Zubov was ‘very worried and for one day he didn’t know how to ease my sorrow.’ Even a sick Potemkin must have rolled his eye at that, but until his last days he always sent his regards to the ‘tooth’ he had failed to extract. For four days, he suffered more fevers and headaches, which improved on 10 September. ‘I am in God’s power,’ Potemkin told the Empress, ‘but your business will not suffer until the last minute.’¹¹

This was true: he supervised the peace talks, sent the Vizier presents,¹² positioned the army in case the war broke out again and reported that the fleet had returned to Sebastopol. Nor did he cease Polish intrigues. He secretly summoned his Polish allies, General of the Polish Artillery Felix Potocki and Field-Hetman of the Polish crown Seweryn Rzewuski: ‘I have the honour to propose a personal interview,’ at which he would make known the Empress’s ‘sincere intentions’ and ‘specific dispositions’.¹³ They set off at once. Throughout the summer, he never neglected his colonization, his shipbuilding or his own entertainment.¹⁴ He wanted harmonious music and vibrant company, writing on 27 August to the French politician and historian Sénac de Meilhan, whose thoughts on the French Revolution and Ancient Greece ‘are such amiable things that they merit a discussion in person. Come and see me in Moldavia.’

Musically, Potemkin convalesced by writing hymns: ‘And now my soul, fearing and hoping in the abyss of its wickedness, seeks help but cannot find it,’ went his ‘Canon to the Saviour’: ‘Do give it your hand, Purest Virgin…’.¹⁵ But he also was about to hire a new and more accomplished composer. ‘I want to send you the first pianist and one of the best composers in Germany,’ suggested Andrei Razumovsky, Russian envoy in Vienna, to the Prince. He had already offered the job to the composer, who agreed to come: ‘He’s not happy with his position here and would be eager to undertake this journey. He’s in Bohemia now but is expected back. If Your Highness wishes, I shall hire him for a short time, just to listen to him and keep him for a while.’¹⁶ Potemkin’s answer is lost. The composer’s name was Mozart.^*1

—

Potemkin’s condition worsened. All the labyrinthine complexities of the Prince’s interests were now reduced to the one relationship that had been constant in his life for twenty years. Catherine and Serenissimus wrote simple love letters to each other again as if neither wished to miss an opportunity to express their deep affection. Fever-ridden Jassy was a ‘veritable hospital’. Most patients, including Repnin and Faleev, recovered slowly after four days of shivering delirium¹⁷ but Potemkin, attended by Sashenka Branicka and Sophie de Witte, did not.

Catherine wished to follow his illness and supervise his recovery as if he were in her apartments in the Winter Palace, but the couriers took between seven and twelve days, so her caring, frantic letters were always behind events: when she thought the Prince was better, he was really worse. If the initial letter said he was improving, the second would say he was failing fast. On 16 September, the first letter she received ‘made me happy because I saw you were better but the second one amplified my anxiety again because I saw you’ve permanent fever and headaches for four days. I ask God to give you strength…Goodbye my friend, Christ bless you.’¹⁸

Catherine could not hear enough about him: she ordered Popov to send daily reports and asked Branicka, ‘Please, Countess, write to me how he is and do your best that he takes as much care as possible against a relapse which is the worst of all in someone already weakened. And I know how careless he is about his health.’ Branicka and Popov assumed control of the sickroom while the three doctors, the Frenchman, Massot, and two Russians, could do little.¹⁹ So we follow the agonizing decline through the letters of the two partners – Catherine ever more concerned by the day and Potemkin ever weaker, until Popov’s reports take over.

When Catherine’s letters arrived, Potemkin sobbed as he read them. He thought he was improving even though the ‘shooting in the ear torments me’. Even as he sank, he worried about the 8,000 ill soldiers. ‘Thank God they don’t die,’ said Potemkin. The Turkish plenipotentiaries would arrive in four days: ‘I expect lots of trickery but I’ll be on my guard.’ Potemkin was moved out of Jassy to a country house.²⁰

The Prince stopped feasting and ate moderately: starving a fever worked and ‘His Highness is better every hour.’ Potemkin took the opportunity to arrange the route the Russian army should take in withdrawing from Moldavia, since the passage through Poland was still closed. The negotiations progressed. The world watched carefully: the Austrians had now signed their peace with the Porte at Sistova. The gazettes in Vienna followed the Prince’s illness, informed almost daily by couriers. They heard he was better and worse and better. If war came, Potemkin was to command himself, but meanwhile he was demanding some influence over Wallachia and Moldavia. The peace talks would be ‘stormy’. The Prince was expected to visit Vienna in the autumn as soon as the peace was signed.

The Prince felt ‘tired as a dog’ but reassured the Empress via Bezborodko: ‘I don’t spare myself.’²¹ Three days later, the fever returned with redoubled strength. The Prince shivered and weakened. Branicka spent day and night beside him.^*2 He refused to take his quinine. ‘We persuade His Highness to take it in the Highest name of Your Imperial Majesty in spite of his strong aversion to it,’ reported Popov. Serenissimus begged Bezborodko to find him a ‘Chinese robe…I need it desperately.’ Catherine rushed to send it down to him, along with a fur coat. The Prince was still dictating notes to Catherine about sickness in the army on the very day that he wrote pathetically: ‘I am right out of energy and I don’t know when the end will come.’²²

The Prince was suffering ‘incessantly and severely’. By the 25th, the Prince’s groaning and weeping were distressing the entourage. Once he realized the fever had taken hold, the Prince seemed to have decided to enjoy his decline. Legend claimed that he ‘destroyed himself’, and certainly his eating did not help. This feverish ‘Sultan’ devoured a ‘ham, a salted goose and three or four chickens’, lubricated with kvass, ‘all sorts of wines’ and spirits. Sterlet and smoked goose were ordered from Astrakhan and Hamburg. ‘He purposely looked for the means to avoid recovering.’ When he was soaked with sweat, he poured ‘ten bottles of eau-de-Cologne over his head’. He was to die as eccentrically as he had lived.²³ He was too ill to care any more.

Potemkin talked ‘hopelessly about life’, Popov wrote sorrowfully to Catherine, ‘and said goodbye to all, without listening to our reassurances.’ The Prince was attended by Bishop Ambrosius and Metropolitan Iona, a Georgian who begged him to eat sensibly and take his medicine. ‘I’ll scarcely recover,’ replied Potemkin. ‘But God will decide.’ Then he turned to Ambrosius to discuss the meaning of his life and showed that, for all his Russian superstitions, he was also a creature of the Enlightenment: ‘You, my confessor, you know that I have never wished evil to anybody. To make all men happy was the one thing I wished for.’^*3 When they heard Potemkin’s noble confession, the entire chamber burst into sobs. The priests came out and Dr Massot told them the situation was hopeless. ‘Deep despair seized us,’ wrote the priest, ‘but there was nothing we could do.’²⁴

The Prince rallied the next day, 27 September. Nothing made him feel better than a line from the Empress. Her letters arrived with the shaggy fur coat and dressing gown, but they made him think about his past with her and his future. ‘Abundant tears always flow from his eyes at every mention of Your Majesty’s name.’ He managed to write her this note: ‘Dear Matushka, life is even harder for me when I don’t see you.’²⁵

On 30 September, he turned fifty-two. Everyone tried to comfort him but, whenever he remembered Catherine, he ‘wept bitterly’ because he would never see her again. That day, thousands of versts to the north, the Empress, reading all Popov’s reports, wrote to her ‘dear friend’: ‘I am endlessly worried about your illness. For Christ’s sake,’ she implored, he must take his medicines. ‘And after taking it, I beg you to keep yourself from meals and drinks that ruin the medicine’s effect.’ She was reacting to Popov’s reports from ten days before, but, as her letter was leaving Petersburg, Potemkin woke up finding it difficult to breathe, probably a symptom of pneumonia. The fever returned again and he fainted. On 2 October, he woke up feeling better. They tried to persuade him to take the quinine but he refused. And then, desperate to see the steppes, this eternal bedouin yearned to travel again and feel the wind off the Black Sea. ‘His Highness wishes that we take him away from here,’ Popov told Catherine, ‘but I don’t know how we can move him. He’s so exhausted.’²⁶

The entourage discussed what to do, while the Prince wrote his last letter to the Empress in his own hand – a simple, courtly expression of devotion to the woman he loved:

Matushka, Most Merciful Lady! In my present condition, so tired by illness, I pray to the Most High to keep your precious health and I throw myself down at your holy feet.

Your Imperial Majesty’s most faithful and most grateful subject,

Prince Potemkin of Taurida.

Oh Matushka, how ill I am!

Then he collapsed, did not recognize anyone and subsided into coma. The doctors struggled to find a pulse for nine hours. His hands and feet were cold as ice.²⁷

In Petersburg, Catherine was just reading the letters of the 25th and 27th – ‘life is even harder when I don’t see you’. She wept. She even examined the handwriting, trying to find some hope. ‘I confess I am desperately worried by them but I see that your last three lines are written a little better,’ she wrote in her last letter to her friend. ‘And your doctors assure me you are better. I pray to God…’. She also wrote to Branicka: ‘Please stay with him…Goodbye, dear soul. God bless you.’²⁸

In the afternoon, Potemkin awoke and commanded that they set out. He believed that if he could reach Nikolaev he would recover. He could not sleep that night, but he was calm. The next morning, he kept asking, ‘What time is it? Is everything ready?’ It was too foggy, but he insisted. They sat him in an armchair and carried him to the six-seater carriage, where they tried to make him comfortable. He dictated his last letter to tell Catherine he was exhausted. Popov brought it to show him and, at the bottom, he managed to scrawl, ‘The only escape is to leave.’ But he was not strong enough to sign it.

At 8 a.m. accompanied by doctors, Cossacks and niece, his carriage moved off across the open steppe towards the Bessarabian hills.

Skip Notes

*1 Mozart died soon afterwards on 24 November/5 December 1791.

*2 The Beautiful Greek was presumably no longer required – she disappeared as his illness worsened. Branicka probably ordered her to entertain the Polish magnates arriving to see the Prince.

*3 Jeremy Bentham, whose utilitarianism measured the success of a ruler by the happiness he gave to his subjects, would have appreciated this: one wonders if Samuel had discussed the idea with the Prince on one of their long carriage rides across the south.