Part 17

The middle-aged Empress grew enormously stout. Some of the clothes which she wore at fifty and thereabouts are still preserved in the Kremlin Museum. A skirt of blue velvet, her favorite wear, testifies to the ungraceful breadth of beam which detracted from her Majesty’s appearance and afflicted her pride. She had always been eager to look her best and as she grew older and stouter and more toothless, her cheeks grew brighter and brighter with rouge. She made up every day as if for a dress rehearsal. Her _friseur_ came regularly to arrange her really fine rich crop of hair, and the only time, so far as known, that he was turned away for more important matters was the day when the Empress rode up from Peterhof to Petersburg to seize her husband’s throne. She was proud of her hair, and her hairdressers were persons of considerable importance in her life. Yet none of them approached in this respect old Yevreinov who had been her first barber and paternal adviser when she came to Russia, and who had been banished from court because of his friendship for her.

She liked to dress well but not to eat well. Her contemporaries say she had no interest in food, that she employed wretched cooks and set a poor table. Those who enjoyed the distinction of dining daily with the Empress had to put up with bad cooking. When the cook burned the food, the Empress thought it a joke and that was the end of it. She herself had such an indifferent palate that all the dishes set before her were pretty much alike. At supper she ate nothing and wine she eschewed altogether. A decanter of currant-juice, _alcohol-frei_, stood beside her plate.

But this does not mean that she avoided stimulants entirely: she was addicted to both coffee and snuff. Catherine’s morning coffee was a daily feat which has impressed itself on history. Her cook used one pound of coffee for the five cups which she drank to the last drop. She was apparently immune to caffeine. “Anybody else would have got heart disease from this concentrated poison,” says one biographer, “Catherine however needed it for her health.” It certainly seems true that the health of those persons who lived to acquire the surname of “The Great” was apparently in need of some very peculiar things. The constitution of Catherine the Great might be expected to develop unique necessities, and it did. Besides one pound of coffee daily, it needed vast quantities of snuff. Like Frederick the Great, also a snuff addict, Catherine spilled the brown powder in her pockets and her clothes reeked of it.

The story goes that her son Paul detested snuff and could not abide the smell of it. This prejudice is said to have aided the conspiracy which was formed against his life. But for his hatred of the smell, the Emperor might have discovered the conspiracy. A certain official who was talking with him had in his pocket at the moment a paper which divulged the plans and the names of the conspirators. Paul put his hand into the man’s pocket on some jesting pretext, but hastily withdrew his fingers when they encountered loose snuff, which disgusted him. And so, according to the story, Paul’s fate was sealed and the conspiracy which was to cost him his life matured in secrecy.

Perhaps it was Catherine’s snuff-taking and coffee-drinking which had made her palate indifferent to food. Nevertheless she continued to put on weight in the most distressing way until her tiny feet ached from carrying her heavy body around. The stout old lady never lost the dignity of her carriage nor the uprightness of her posture, thanks to the hangman’s jacket in which she had spent so many years of her youth. Her bearing was extremely impressive. It was one of the things for which her aunt, the Empress, and her husband, the Czar, had hated her. Her blue-gray eyes had a commanding and open gaze. She had a long chin and a firm jaw. In short, she had the features which are supposed to go with a commanding personality and which in her Majesty’s case fulfilled the tradition. Withal her eyes were friendly and smiling and at times roguish. The person on whom they rested had an impulse to obey.

The Empress loved flattery. Her letters from Grimm, from Voltaire, from Frederick the Great, are full of it. Best of all she liked to be praised to her face. Diplomats arriving at the Russian Court were warned by their well-wishers to indulge the Empress in her whim. It was said that there was no limit to either the amount or the crudity of what she could enjoy. This was an exaggeration. She wanted the tributes to sound convincing, the flowers to seem real. Diderot, for instance, was not always happy in his efforts, and the Empress could be cynical if the flatterer allowed her to catch him red-handed.

“I do not like flattery,” she wrote to Prince Viazemsky, “and I expect none from you.” But the Prince would not have risen to be one of the chief advisers of her reign if he had taken her instructions too literally. “Sie hatte die Eitelkeit eines _parvenu_, eines self-made man,” says Brückner, borrowing from both French and English to express her quality. The German Princess, whose native language has no word to express exactly the kind of person that she became as Russian Empress, was every inch a parvenu, if not literally a self-made man, and she had the psychology of this type. Certainly she loved flattery, an art in which the eighteenth century excelled. There were giants in those days; magnificent egoists who knew how to drink their flattery like gentlemen.

The qualities of this complex Catherine scatter themselves before us like the pictures in a scrap-book. She was this and she was that, and in every instance she was also the opposite. Perhaps the simplest way to organize the variegated picture of her complex personality is to say at the start that she was a despot, in private relations and in public life. No temperament more dominating, not even that of Peter the Great, ever held sway over all the Russias, whose throne, by the way, both of them obtained by usurpation. Catherine was a successful tyrant because she knew how to command and also how to yield. She had extraordinary insight into human nature with not many prejudices to block the view. In all directions not so blocked, she was extremely clairvoyant. She was easy on her servants, allowing them to sleep late while she waited on herself and made her own fire. Petty graft she passed over with a jest. Laughter she adored. One of her scientific essays discussed the different ways of laughing. When Voltaire died it was not his wisdom that she mourned but his gaiety. “Since Voltaire died,” she wrote, “it seems to me that honor no longer attaches to good humor; it was he who was the divinity of gaiety. Procure for me an edition, or rather a complete copy of his works, to renew within me and confirm my natural love of laughter.” Voltaire once compared her to Saint Catherine, but she repudiated the title of saint. She prided herself on being a child of nature, and one of the rowdier children of that careless mother besides.

History has said of Catherine that she was a woman with a masculine disposition. She had brains, she was ambitious, she kept favorites. All this is comprised in the statement that she was one of the absolute monarchs of her time; she followed a trade to which women were not ordinarily admitted and got herself into it by her own efforts. To out-Herod Herod was her way of staying there. She said of herself that she had a masculine disposition and we know that she loved to play the part of “Monsieur” in her correspondence and in her horseback riding, and that she named herself Colonel of the Guards. As she grew older and stouter, the rôle of “Matushka” blotted out that of “Monsieur” and “Colonel”; but the change to Little Mother betokened no lessening of the aggressive note in her personality. It was her tendency to dominate and she could always find a rôle, either masculine or feminine, in which she could play out her natural disposition.

Catherine’s estimates of her own character are the best that have been written. It is a great loss to students of human nature that her sketch of herself, written at the age of fifteen, was destroyed. We should like to compare it with one which she wrote at the age of sixty-two, addressed to Sénac de Meilhan, as the adolescent portrait had been addressed to Count Gyllenborg. Her pen, it seems, moved best when her thoughts were directed toward some person as if in a conversation _à deux_.

“I have never believed that I had the creative spirit,” she wrote, “I have come to know many people in whom I have recognized, without envy or jealousy, much more genius than I have. It was always easy to influence me, because in order to do that it was only necessary to have really better and actually worthier ideas than my own. Then I was as teachable as a lamb.... I have never tried to force people’s views but I have also in any particular case held my own opinion. I do not love strife, because I have always found that in the end each remains of the same opinion. Besides I have never learned to lift my voice. I have never been resentful, because providence has given me a position in which I could not be so toward individuals, and because, in order to be just, I could not regard the circumstances as equal. In general I love justice but I am of the opinion that there is no unconditional justice and that moderation alone corresponds to human weakness.... When old people preached severity to me, I confessed my weakness to them with tears in my eyes and it sometimes happened that many of them, also with tears in their eyes, came over to my opinion. I am by nature cheerful and open-hearted, but I have lived too long in the world not to know that there are bitter natures which do not love cheerfulness and that it is not everybody who can endure candor and truth.”

2

The love relationships of Catherine the Great form the most fascinating aspect of her life and character. For nearly two hundred years she has been celebrated as a Northern Semiramis, a Russian Messalina. Myths and romances in countless numbers have been woven around her personality. Posterity knows her as a loose woman.

She loved to picture herself in heaven conversing with Confucius and Cæsar and Alexander the Great. If she could have seen herself as the theme of all the pornographic stories which float around in Russia about her to-day, or as the heroine with three hundred lovers who sparkles so wickedly on so many modern stages, she would, without the least shadow of a doubt, have been extremely happy and delighted. That posterity should think of her as a feminine Don Juan would be exactly to her taste. She thought of herself as a feminine Don Juan; or, rather, as a feminine Henri le Grand whose life was in so many respects the inspiration of her own. It was said of the brilliant Henri le Grand that but for his fatal prowess as a Don Juan he would have succeeded in driving the Turks out of Europe. Catherine hoped to succeed, though her hero had failed, in both. She was willing to go down to posterity as a light woman but she hoped also to be remembered as the monarch who had driven the Turks out of Europe.

The number of her lovers was after all only thirteen if we count her husband. They were openly acknowledged and no legitimate consort could have enjoyed a brighter glow of publicity. The Empress did not indulge in secret _rendezvous_ or episodic affairs. During the period when she was breaking away from her ten-years’ union with Orlov, there were passing episodes, but these were only means to an end. Nothing is more surprising than the formality with which she surrounded her favorites or the curious acquiescence and matter-of-factness with which they were regarded by society in Russia. Most of the romancing and denouncing came afterwards when Catherine and her twelve lovers had gone the way of all flesh.

The Empress was, in this aspect of her life as well as others, a woman of few explanations. But she wrote a sort of apologia for her sex life and left it as a legacy to history, inserting it in the memoirs which she wrote for publication. “I was very affectionate,” she said, “and gifted with an appearance which was very attractive. I pleased at the first glance, without employing any arts or pains to that end. I was very sympathetic and possessed rather a masculine than a feminine temperament. As I have already said, I pleased the men. The first half of the temptation was there and the second followed the first according to human nature; for to tempt and be tempted are very close to each other. And if a strong feeling is added to this, however strongly the principles of morality may be imbedded in the mind, one goes farther than one would wish; and, even until now I do not know how that is to be prevented. In this case, perhaps absence might bring aid; but there are cases, situations in life, and circumstances which make absence impossible. How can one in the midst of court life flee away, remove oneself, turn aside? That would at once attract attention and cause talk. Yes, if one cannot remove oneself, nothing is harder in my opinion than not to yield to that which allures. All that is said to the contrary is hypocrisy and ignorance of the human heart. One does not hold one’s heart in one’s hand, and it does not obey the commands of reason.”

This was a sincere effort on the part of a sixty-year-old Empress to be truthful and candid about her past. Aside from certain obvious misrepresentations, such as saying that she had an attractive appearance though she did not believe it herself, she thought that she was speaking the truth. But one is struck by the extraordinary weakness of her defense. A woman who has had twelve lovers and has learned no more from life than to defend herself on moralistic grounds shows that she has remained unteachable to the last. Her explanation of her conduct might suitably be given by a girl of fifteen. Catherine once said of Diderot that in some respects he was a hundred years old and in others he was no more than ten. It was a wise remark and could be equally well applied to herself. When she tries to explain the irregularities of her sex life by saying that temptation has been too strong for her to resist she speaks as the pupil of Pastor Wagner. It shows that her conduct was still just as much of a mystery to herself as it was to anybody else. She had learned however one thing which Pastor Wagner and the rationalists of the eighteenth century had not taught her, and that is that the heart does not obey the commands of reason.

However impulsive the Empress may have been in the initial stage of a love affair, she was shockingly rational in the way that she developed it. Like Frederick the Great, she had a terror of venereal disease but she had a less ascetic method of protecting herself. She required the hopeful candidate to submit himself to a medical examination at the hands of Dr. Rogerson, her Scotch physician. He was then put through a kind of ordeal or apprenticeship by Countess Bruce or Princess Protassov who were known for their function as “les eprouveuses.” If these experienced ladies recommended the young man for his office, he was installed in the elegant apartments prepared for his reception. In the drawer of his dressing-table he found the generous salary allotted to the Empress’s Adjutant General, and then began for him a life of the most appalling regularity.

At ten o’clock every morning, he called on the Empress, and at ten every evening he escorted her to her private chambers. When she drove out, he sat beside her, and on all occasions stood ready to offer his arm. He was dedicated to his duties and lived in complete retirement. After Gregory Orlov, none of Catherine’s lovers was allowed to make visits or receive them. No Sultan could have been more arbitrary with his harem than Catherine with her favorites. She lavished presents and honors upon them; her extravagance toward them knew no bounds. The English Ambassador Harris, who had a talent for statistics, estimated that she spent $190,000,000 in cash on the men she kept. The amount seems staggering even for our day. Yet it was not enough, with all the other perquisites added, to prolong the bondage of the victim more than two or three years on the average. After Gregory Orlov, they all escaped in one way or another at the end of a period of about this duration.

Vassilchikov, with whom she carried on the most perfunctory affair she ever had, describes his life with the Empress thus: “I was nothing more than a kept woman and was treated as such. I was not allowed to receive guests or to go out. If I made a request for anyone else, I received no answer. If I spoke for myself, it was the same. When I wished to have the order of Saint Anne, I spoke to the Empress about it. The next day I found a thirty thousand ruble banknote in my pocket. In this way, they always stopped my mouth and sent me to my room.”

It must be said that Vassilchikov’s courtship was probably the poorest performance given by any of Catherine’s lovers. The only one of them who had royal blood in his veins, for he was supposed to be a descendant of Rurik, he was nevertheless the last and least of all in the eyes of his mistress. Catherine had installed him in Orlov’s stead to displace the absent Gregory, and Vassilchikov’s office was primarily to help her wean the Count. Not that the Empress was aware that she was pushing Orlov out of his warm nest into a cold hard world. On the contrary, she had got the idea that Orlov intended to desert her and she did not mean to be left in the lurch. She also thought at first that she was in love with Vassilchikov, tall scion of the Ruriks, and was bitterly disappointed when the affair proved cold. Her complaints of their relationship were fully as dismal as his and her disappointment even more pathetic. This appears in a confession which she wrote for Gregory Potiomkin, who in turn displaced Vassilchikov and became Gregory Orlov’s first real and genuine successor. It appears that Potiomkin had heard stories about his predecessors, which shows that gossip had already begun to exaggerate the number of the Empress’s lovers. To reassure him, the Empress wrote a brief confession in which she told him all the facts about her previous relationships.

The Empress’s list begins with Sergei Saltikov and tells how she accepted him on the advice of Madame Choglokov and how Madame Choglokov in her turn had been induced to act by the “insistence of Sergei’s Mama.” This sudden peeping out of Sergei’s mama from behind the scenes of Catherine’s life makes a vivid impression. The lady was already an invalid, it seems, who pulled the strings of history, just once and silently, and died.

The next lover named in Catherine’s confession is the King of Poland. “He was amiable,” says his mistress, “and was loved from 1755 to 1761. After he had been away three years, that is since 1758, and because Prince Gregory Gregorevich, to whom well-meaning people called my attention, took trouble for me, I changed my way of thinking. He would have stayed forever if he had not grown tired. I learned this on the very day of his departure from Czarskoe Selo for the Congress and drew from it the simple conclusion that with this knowledge I could no longer have any confidence. The thought tortured me cruelly and led me to make out of desperation a choice by chance (Vassilchikov). During this time, yes until this month, I have fretted more than I can say and never more than when others were satisfied. Every expression of tenderness caused my tears to flow and I believe that never since I was born have I wept so much as in this year and a half. In the beginning I thought I would get used to it, but the longer it lasted the worse it grew. For the other person began to sulk for three months at a time and I must confess that I was never more contented than when he was angry and left me in peace. But his tenderness forced me to weep.”

The confession ends for the time being with Gregory Potiomkin, the lover to whom it is addressed and of whom she begs forgiveness for earlier sins. “And now, Sir Hero, can I after this confession hope for forgiveness of my sins? You will see that it is not fifteen but only one-third as many. The first, against my will, and the fourth, who was taken out of desperation, cannot be charged to frivolity. Of the other three, only believe the truth. God knows that I took them not out of debauchery, to which I have no tendency. If fate had given me in my youth a husband whom I could love, I should have remained true to him forever. The trouble is that my heart would not willingly be one hour without love.... But I write you that needlessly for accordingly you will love or will not wish to go away to the army, out of fear that I could forget you. But really I do not believe that I could be so foolish. If you would attach me to yourself forever, then show me as much friendship as love, and beyond everything, love and speak the truth.”

3

Potiomkin must have understood his lady’s wish and satisfied it in his way, for Catherine loved him fifteen years. She had loved her first Gregory ten years before she cast him off; her second Gregory held first place in her affections for a longer period. She had a degree of faithfulness with which she has never been credited. Not that Potiomkin lingered in the terem all this time. As official favorite and public escort he lasted only two years. He was too restless for captivity and he could not bear to be stared at, a part which the handsome Orlov had played to perfection. A curious arrangement was reached between the wandering favorite and the Empress. Potiomkin went away to Novgorod, to the Turkish wars, to the Crimea; he was driven hither and thither across the endless plains of Russia by his craving restless spirit. The Empress, left alone, something that she could not bear, took one lover after the other in his place. But always Potiomkin returned and compelled her to dispose of them. At a word from him, she turned them out.