Part 11

The part which the Grand Duchess Catherine played in the Seven Years’ War was devious if not exactly traitorous. In the spring of 1757, the Russian army advanced against Frederick the Great, the “blasphemous Prince” whom Elisabeth Petrovna so cordially detested. Austria and France breathed a sigh of relief to see their ally at last in motion. But General Apraxin, in charge of the Russian forces, got into the fight with extreme deliberation. He captured Memel and Grossjägerndorf, and then, to the astonishment of all the world, began a most unaccountable and hasty retreat toward the Russian border. Petersburg buzzed with excitement. The French and Austrian ambassadors demanded an investigation, which the outraged Empress was prompt in ordering. Before the eyes of Europe, her armies had let down her allies. Apraxin’s only excuse for his retreat was that he was too far away from provisions.

In the investigation which followed all clues seemed to lead mysteriously to the Grand Duchess but none of them ever quite reached her. Bestushev was arrested and subjected to an inquisition which lasted intermittently for a year. Nearly all the questions put to him by the commissioners related in some way to Catherine. In the end, still without having incriminated her, he was sent into exile. Adadurov, Catherine’s old teacher, and several other subordinates who had been confidential messengers between Bestushev and herself, were also arrested, investigated, and banished to remote parts of Russia.

Finally Apraxin, the star culprit in this historical affair, was recalled from the army and arrested on the border as he entered Russia. A court of inquiry was set up on the spot and the General was subjected to a trial which carried on into the summer. On the first of August his ordeal was brought to an unexpected close. He suffered a stroke of paralysis and died in twenty-four hours. Like Bestushev, he had not incriminated the Grand Duchess seriously, even though he had in his possession several letters written by her to himself. These letters were taken from him by Count Alexander Shuvalov, the man with the grimace which Catherine had so often ridiculed, and were safely carried back to the Empress Elisabeth. Except for the fact that the Grand Duchess was not allowed to write letters at all, there was nothing incriminating in this correspondence.

No real evidence ever came out against her. Bestushev had found time to destroy all his documents before he was arrested and Catherine, on hearing of his arrest, destroyed every scrap of written paper in her possession. She made a clean sweep of everything. An innocent sketch of herself, written at the age of fifteen, was sacrificed with the rest, a loss which she always regretted. We must assume that she felt that there was no time to lose. All her closest friends and associates were tried and convicted. She alone survived the crisis without serious consequences.

The historian Bilbassov was able to prove to his own complete satisfaction by the total absence of documentary evidence, that the Grand Duchess Catherine, throughout the whole shady Apraxin business, never once wavered in her loyalty to Russia. Her correspondence with Chevalier Williams, however, indicates that she played with fire at this time and was only saved from the charge of treason by her amazing instinct for self-preservation. Believing the Empress to be on the verge of death--and apparently the infatuated Williams helped her to be over-confident about the near gratification of this wish--she realized that the Grand Duke Peter would in that event instantly reverse any attack on Frederick the Great. Hoping for the Empress’s death and encouraged by a fit that the unfortunate lady one day had in public, she schemed to hold Apraxin back from the German campaign. Just what she did to cause the General to turn in his tracks as he did and when he did is a fact not knowable to history since Catherine burned up all her papers. But if the Russian general on this occasion betrayed his Empress and his country, the Grand Duchess was without doubt one of the influences which led him into this serious and fatal mistake.

There came at last a dramatic midnight scene in which the Grand Duchess faced the Empress and saved herself once for all. After the arrest of Bestushev, she spent many weeks in an agony of suspense. At last she wrote a letter to the Empress asking for an interview, and waited for an answer six weeks longer. By this time she was actually and literally walking the floor, a symptom which belies the good conscience which Bilbassov would have us believe she enjoyed at this crucial time. By pretending to be sick and calling in her father confessor, who interceded on her behalf, she managed at last to induce the Empress to receive her. Her courage and resourcefulness throughout this crisis prove that her famous boast of intrepidity made to impress Poniatovsky in the presence of the French Ambassador was not an empty one.

The Empress, who habitually turned night into day, summoned her to an audience at half-past one in the morning. Alexander Shuvalov, grimacing, came to call her. Catherine pictures for us with brief strokes the room in which she was received by the Empress: the three windows, the wash-stand with gold utensils, the tall screen, and, behind the screen, the favorite of the Empress and the defender of the political interests of France--Ivan Ivanovich Shuvalov. In the gold wash-basin she saw the crumpled letters which she had written to Apraxin, a detail which gives us by the way a picture of how the Empress Elisabeth respected important documents. When Catherine arrived in this room, she found the Grand Duke already there before her. In his presence, in that of Alexander Shuvalov, and in that of the hidden Ivan Ivanovich,--a solid trio of her enemies--she was obliged to defend herself. The manner in which she rose to the occasion shows that the woman loved danger; she ate it like cake.

She began by throwing herself at the Empress’s feet and asking to be sent home to her mother. Elisabeth reminded her that she had children in Russia; Catherine replied that the Empress was a better mother to them than she herself could possibly be. Elisabeth further reminded her that the Princess of Zerbst had fled to Paris; Catherine replied that her mother had been driven out of Germany by the persecutions of Frederick the Great, the enemy whom Elisabeth hated. What chance had a mere emotional Empress against astuteness like this? Elisabeth fell back upon her real grievance.

“You are immoderately proud. Do you remember one day in the summer garden when I came up to you and asked you if you had a crick in your neck because you scarcely greeted me?”

“Ah, my God. How could Your Majesty believe that I could be proud toward you? I swear to you that I had not the least idea that your question of four years ago signified that.”

“You fancy that nobody alive is as clever as yourself.”

“If I really believed this of myself, then my present situation and this conversation seem best designed to cure me of my error: until this very day, I have not understood, out of mere stupidity, what you wished to say to me four years ago....”

At this point the Grand Duke began to talk with Alexander Shuvalov in the background, taking sides against Catherine. For a moment the two women allowed the Grand Duke to enter the quarrel, and then excluded him again. He was not really worthy to close with either of them in combat. The Empress brushed him aside and returned to the attack.

“You mix into all kinds of matters which do not concern you. During the Empress Anna’s time, I was not allowed to do that. How could you, for example, have the audacity to issue commands to Field Marshal Apraxin?”

“I? It never once entered my head to issue commands to him.”

“Can you deny that you have written to him? Your letters lie there in the basin....”

The Grand Duchess knew full well that there was nothing in the letters which Alexander Shuvalov had travelled so far to bring home to the Empress. She rehearsed their contents now.

“Bestushev says,” Elisabeth persisted, “that there were many more letters.”

“If Bestushev says that, he lies.”

“Good. If he lies, he shall be put to torture.”

It was the Empress’s last shot and still the Grand Duchess did not flinch. Elisabeth began to walk up and down the room, while Catherine and the Grand Duke fell to quarrelling with each other. It was apparent from the Grand Duke’s remarks that he was under the influence of the Vorontsov family and nursed the idea of putting Elisabeth Vorontsov in the place of Catherine. He was not aware that this project appealed neither to the Empress nor to Ivan Shuvalov behind the screen. “This went beyond the mental capacity of his Imperial Highness, who believed all that he wished,” says Catherine, “and pushed aside every other thought which happened to interfere with the one that momentarily governed him.”

At three o’clock in the morning the Empress dismissed them. The Grand Duke left the room first and vanished down the corridor with his usual long flying strides. Catherine returned to her chamber and undressed herself. It was the middle of April and the white dawn filled the room in which for so many days past she had paced the floor in suspense and sleeplessness. She went to bed and slept soundly.

7

It was true that Catherine’s mother, the Princess of Zerbst, had fled to Paris. The redoubtable Johanna Elisabeth had, by a series of political errors, succeeded at last in reaching the city of her dreams, the haven of art and fashion for which she had always longed. To achieve this paradise she had made a stormy pilgrimage; and her joy in her achievement was to be short-lived, for her residence in Paris proved to be her undoing.

In the year 1758 she was living at Zerbst with her son, Friedrich August, the reigning Prince. It can not be said that she was living altogether quietly there, for Fritz had married a young wife with whom his mother did not get on well. According to the Princess, Fritz also did not get on well with his wife, who had been an obscure Princess of Hessen-Kassel. After five years of marriage, they still had no children. Presumably the domestic atmosphere at Zerbst was anything but pleasant, although the relations of the trio with the outside world were peaceable enough. The Princess of Zerbst received a comfortable pension from the Empress of Russia and there was at least a hope that the future Empress, who was Fritz’s own sister, would one day succeed in making him a real Kurfürst of Germany. The Zerbst family had only to be good and await events.

Suddenly the French foreign office cast an eye on this little principality. Would it not be possible to use the Princess of Zerbst to influence her daughter, the Grand Duchess of Russia, who was suspected of being pro-English and anti-French? The French office decided to take the chance. A dashing French officer, the Marquis de Fraigne, was dispatched on this mission and arrived without difficulty at the castle of Zerbst. Although France and Germany were at war, little Zerbst had declared itself neutral. A French officer might therefore visit the Prince in perfect safety, protected by its neutrality. De Fraigne lingered on at Zerbst, while the weeks passed by in pleasant social converse. The Princess Johanna Elisabeth wrote letters to her daughter, which never reached their destination but conveyed to Frederick the Great all that he needed to know.

Suddenly the little idyl became a volcano. Frederick the Great was not pleased to have a French officer tarrying at Zerbst. He sent a detachment of soldiers to arrest the stranger and remove him to Prussian soil where he could be properly court-martialed. But the Marquis argued his case and presented his side so well that the Prussian soldiers retired without him. The offended Frenchman, aided by the foolish Prince of Zerbst and the still more foolish mother of the Prince, sent an indignant protest to the King of Prussia. After all, Zerbst was neutral, and the Prussians ought really to apologize.

Frederick’s answer was prompt: a squadron of artillery appeared before the old gray walls of Zerbst. Either de Fraigne would come out or the walls would go down. The Marquis decided to give himself up, and the Prussians took him quietly away. But the Princess of Zerbst and her son had pushed the issue too far and Frederick was not going to let them off too easily. He imposed a penalty of a hundred thousand ducats and the supply of forage enough for a regiment. It was a devastating penalty; it wiped them out. In desperation the Princess and her son fled the situation and abandoned the principality to the Prussian King. In their haste they left behind them the young wife of the Prince. Or did she perhaps decline to go with them? Perhaps she thought she had nothing to lose by remaining with the Prussian occupation. However this may have been, she did not long survive the flight of the others. Within less than a year, she died of a stroke of paralysis. It began to look as if the house of Zerbst was doomed to extinction.

In the meantime, the fleeing mother and son went first to Hamburg. From Hamburg Fritz departed to enlist in the Austrian army and fight Frederick the Great, while his mother went on to Paris. She believed that the French government would welcome her with open arms after the great sacrifice that she had made for that country. But the French government lacked appreciation. They now knew as much about Johanna Elisabeth as Frederick the Great knew when she came back from Russia with Mardefeld’s dismissal in her _chatelaine_. The Princess loved intrigue but she was doomed to fail in it; her projects always turned against her, as if she tried to crack a whip too long for her strength and was caught in the bite of its cruel tapering end.

The French government made ineffectual attempts to delay the progress of the Princess as she hastened toward Paris. They sent a last desperate message to arrest her at Brussels, but Johanna Elisabeth was on the last lap of her journey to Paris before the message arrived. There was a certain pathos in the letter which Berni, the foreign minister, wrote to the French resident at Petersburg. “The Princess of Zerbst hastened so that the letter which explained the necessity of postponing her arrival in France did not reach Brussels until she was already in Valenciennes, from which one could not prevent her from coming on to Paris.” Berni wished the Empress to understand that he had not connived at the Princess’s flight to France.

Elisabeth was furious with the Princess of Zerbst. The mother’s behavior coincided with the daughter’s meddlesomeness in the Apraxin business. The full wrath of the Empress fell upon the mother’s frivolous head; she promptly withdrew the lady’s pension. The Princess, who pretended to observe an incognito in Paris as Countess of Oldenburg, set up an establishment and plunged into literary and court society. Suddenly she found herself cut off without a sou. Her letters to the Empress are pitiable. As her creditors pressed her harder and harder, she multiplied her petitions. The Empress condescended to be positively vindictive. She sent a message to the bankrupt woman that, after first paying her debts, she ought to leave Paris. This silenced the poor woman at last.

This was in the autumn of 1759, and the Princess was already ill of dropsy. She passed the winter in bed attended by physicians. Her letters to Russia ceased to petition for money; she seemed to realize that Elisabeth was inexorable. The Grand Duchess, who did not know of her mother’s financial distress, sent her a present of some tea and rhubarb. But the Princess died before this little gift arrived. It was only with the greatest effort that Catherine and Ivan Shuvalov, whom she finally persuaded to help her, could induce the Empress to pay the debts of the deceased Princess. Elisabeth was willing the Princess’s personal effects should be sold at public auction. It was hard even for the favorite, Ivan Shuvalov, to persuade her to save her kinswoman’s memory from this disgrace. Toward Johanna Elisabeth she had always been revengeful.

8

The Empress did not long outlast her enemy. For many years she had really been an invalid. She had secretly imported a famous French physician who said that she suffered from hysterical “vapors” and convulsions. Elisabeth’s personal physician was a Greek, Kondoidi, who at first refused to consult with the foreign specialist. After much diplomatizing on the part of the French and Russian governments, the rivals at last consented to meet. It turned out that they agreed in their diagnosis of melancholia and hysteria, and so they shook hands over the poor Empress who continued to get no better. Nothing more definite than this was the Empress destined to die of. Owing to the convulsions to which she was subject, her death seemed several times imminent; but then she would suddenly pull herself together and death would recede to a respectful distance. Her illness dragged on like the Seven Years’ War and the outcome was as unpredictable. From the beginning of the year 1761, however, her condition patently grew worse. During the summer she fell into convulsions which caused her to lose consciousness for several hours at a time. On Christmas Day, 1761, she died, at the age of fifty-two. Her span of life was but slightly less than that of her tall turbulent father, Peter the Great, who died at fifty-three.

There were three people who had awaited her death with varying degrees of impatience. To Frederick the Great the news was manna in the wilderness; it made him at last victor in the Seven Years’ War. To Grand Duke Peter, it was the release of all his dreams; as Czar of Russia, he could now follow his illusions wherever they led him, even to the last limits of destruction. To Grand Duchess Catherine, it was not altogether opportune. Three years before she had been more eager for Elisabeth’s death than she was when the Empress at last made way for her. Catherine was at this time pregnant with her third child and more than ever at odds with the Grand Duke, her husband. Her new lover was Gregory Orlov, a handsome young captain of artillery.

While Peter celebrated his accession to the throne with the usual ceremonies, she withdrew herself discreetly from the public gaze. She draped herself in heavy black and paid her daily homage to the corpse of the Empress, kneeling for hours beside the sarcophagus. According to custom the body lay exposed to public view for six weeks. In the fifth week, with her own hands and without a quiver, she placed a golden crown on the head of this malodorous object. It was her final act of obeisance to the Empress who preceded her.

[Illustration]

VIII

ORLOV

In the six weeks which intervened between the death and burial of Elisabeth Petrovna, the new Czar had offended public opinion in numberless ways. While the Grand Duchess was diligently observing all the rituals ordained by the Greek Church for the dead Empress, Peter III was conducting himself like a boy just let out from school. His sharp strident tones could be heard down the corridors, conveying the joyous excitement he was unable to control. He could not kneel endlessly beside the coffin, as Catherine did, nor even stand, but paced restlessly about the church talking and grimacing. On the day of the funeral his grotesque behaviour shocked the people in the street. He was in a good humor, says Catherine, and allowed himself his little joke.

As the long procession passed through the Nevsky Prospect, across the bridge, and into the island fortress of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, Peter walked immediately behind the coffin. He wore a mourning robe of state with a long train, the end of which was borne by Count Sheremetiev. The Czar’s little joke was to stop in his tracks from time to time and then hasten forward with long strides to overtake the coffin. The unhappy Count was unable to manage the train of his master, which flapped wildly in the wind to the great delight of the Czar who repeated the jest again and again. The procession was finally so jammed by this trick that a messenger was sent forward to stop the leaders until they could catch up. The new Czar who amused himself so well at the funeral of his late aunt, was nearly thirty-five years old. The public was scandalized and his courtiers blushed for him before the gossips of Europe. Still they continued to kiss the hand of his Imperial Highness and to observe all the forms of supreme respect. Like crows they circled in awe around this feeble image of dignity and awe.

The reign of Peter III lasted altogether six months. His ukases were a hodge-podge of foolish and reasonable commands. One day he gave an order that the gentlemen of the court might hunt ravens and other birds in the streets of Petersburg; also that they might shoot on sight all dogs found in the vicinity of the palace. Another day he freed the nobles from compulsory military service. Although the princes and counts were delighted with this law, they still mistrusted their capricious emancipator and feared his next measure. Petersburg was filled with rumors of what it might be. It was reported that Peter III meant to divorce Catherine and to marry Elisabeth Vorontsov, and that, to cement this innovation, all the other ladies of the court would be required to divorce their husbands and take new ones. So jumpy was the public and so whimsical was their Czar that this nonsense was easily believed.

Wherever Peter III appeared in public his reputation for capriciousness grew. When he went to see the guard changed, which he often did, he would beat the soldiers and even the spectators. Countess Dashkov tells a story of how his negro servant Narcissus was redeemed by a ceremony after having had a fight with the scavenger of the regiment. It was at a military parade. An officer suggested jokingly, “Let Narcissus pass three times under the banners of the regiment.” Peter, intensely serious, was delighted with the idea; he insisted that the points of the banners should draw blood from the negro’s head, which caused Narcissus to set up a loud yell to the immense amusement of the officers and the solemn satisfaction of the Emperor. His beloved Narcissus had been cleansed by a ritual. Numerous stories of his behaviour survive as sufficient evidence that his mind had wholly lost its unity and integrity. Bilbassov says of his condition, “a man of sound sense and clear memory can not understand the conceited blindness in which the Duke of Holstein, who had become Emperor of Russia, lived. The frequent drunkenness of Peter III does not explain it.... It must be traced back to the unfortunate coincidence between the personal qualities of Peter III and the unlimited power which became his by inheritance.... He had lost the power to think straight.”