Terrible tsarinas

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Another Catherine!

Alexis Razumovsky supported her in her intransigence. He too had never ceased believing in the military and moral supremacy of the fatherland. However, when it came time to make the decisions to commit her troops in merciless combat, she consulted not her old lover, Alexis Razumovsky, not her current favorite, Ivan Shuvalov (so cultivated and so learned), nor her too-cautious and too-clever chancellor Mikhail Vorontsov, but the awesome memory of her grandfather, Peter the Great. It was he whom she had in mind on January 1, 1760, while everyone was making New Year’s resolutions, when she publicly wished that her army would prove to be “more aggressive and more daring” in order to oblige Frederick II to submit. As a reward for this supreme effort, she stated that she would ask for nothing more than to take possession of Eastern Prussia, subject to a territorial exchange with Poland (which could, if need be, retain a semblance of autonomy).

That last clause should be enough, she judged, to alleviate Louis XV’s concerns.

To prepare for such delicate negotiations, the king of France rested his hopes on the assistance that the baron of Breteuil could lend to the aging marquis de l’Hopital. In fact, it was not the baron’s diplomatic experience that he counted on in circumventing the tsarina, but the seductive influence that the 27-year-old dandy seemed to have over women. Elizabeth knew the game too well not to see through Breteuil’s false admiration of her glory; moreover, in analyzing his ploy, she understood that it was not she but the grand duchess whom he sought to allure into cooperating in furthering the interests of France. In order to win favor with Catherine, he offered her a choice - to allow him to make love to her as only a Frenchman knows how to do, or to persuade the tsarina to bring back Stanislaw Poniatowski, moldering as he was in his dull Poland. Whether she accepted either one of these offers or combined them both for her pleasure, she surely would