Part 2

This dumpy old lady was an elder sister of Fike’s mother, who was by contrast in her daughter’s eyes the perfect pattern of beauty, grace, and fashion. Fike herself, who was not beautiful and had only her fine handwriting and good conduct to recommend her, might easily end her days at Quedlinburg in a room no bigger than four cords of wood, with a family of dogs. To be sure Aunt Hedwig might have had a bigger room and a much better thing of it altogether if she were appointed, as Fike’s great-aunt had been, Abbess of Quedlinburg. Fike’s mother tried to bring this about by using her influence, which she over-estimated, with the Prussian King. But Frederick had a sister of his own who needed this refuge and who eventually got it. Even to become a prioress, there was competition. Everywhere there was competition in life. This was one of the earliest lessons that Fike absorbed from her worldly-wise mother.

Another aunt, an elder sister of her father’s, is also portrayed in her memoirs. Tante Sophie Christine, Canoness of Gandersheim, is the same spinster lady who is said to have fomented quarrels between her brothers, the Princes of Zerbst. “She was more than fifty,” writes her niece, “very tall and so thin that I had at eleven years old a bigger waist than she; she was, however, very proud of her figure. At six o’clock when she arose she carefully laced herself in and only took off her stays when she went to bed. She used to maintain that she had once been beautiful but that an accident had damaged her beauty. When she was ten years old her powder-mantle had caught fire and thereby the lower part of her face had been seriously hurt; the chin and the lower part of the cheeks were shriveled up and the parchment skin really looked ghastly. She was kind and good but when she wanted anything, very hard-headed too. Upon the various German Princes who had passed under her inspection, she had made serious demands, and but for lack of willingness on their part she might have been well married.

“She made wonderful embroidery and loved birds very much. Her kind heart mostly went out to those who had suffered a misfortune. I have seen in her chamber a thrush that had only one foot, a lark with a broken wing, a one-eyed goldfinch, a hen whose head was half-way pecked off by the cock, a cock whose tail-feathers had been torn out by the cat, a lame and lop-sided nightingale, a parrot that could not use its feet and lay flat on its belly, and many other birds of different kinds that ran and flew about her room. I was a very lively and right wilful child, and I remember how once I offended this Princess by doing something for which she never forgave me. I was left alone in her room for a few moments and the idea of opening the window occurred to me. Naturally half of the menagerie flew out! I shut the window and ran away. When my aunt returned she found only her little cripples left. She could guess how this had happened and her room was in the future closed to me.”

Fike’s gallery of portraits includes another spinster, Fräulein Khayn, who always accompanied her mother and herself on their travels. In the depths of the bitter-cold winter of 1740, the restless Johanna and her daughter, together with the companion, went to visit the old Duchess of Brunswick. “I slept in the same room with Fräulein Khayn, a companion of my mother’s,” says Fike. “My bed stood against the wall and hers not far from mine, with only a small passage between. Another passage remained open between the windows and the bed of Fräulein Khayn. On a table between the windows stood a water-pitcher, a silver basin, and a night-light. The only door of the room was at the foot of the bed and was closed. Toward midnight, I was suddenly awakened by someone who lay down beside me in bed; I opened my eyes and saw that it was Fräulein Khayn. I asked her why she wanted to come into my bed. She answered, ‘For God’s sake leave me and go to sleep quietly.’ I wanted to know what had caused her to leave her bed and come to mine, for I saw that she was trembling from fright and was almost speechless. When I pressed her she said, ‘Don’t you see what is going on in the room and what is there on the table?’ and drew the cover over her face. I got on my knees and reached over her to draw away the curtain and see what was going on. But I heard and saw absolutely nothing. The door was closed; candles, basin, and silver pitcher were on the table. I told her what I saw and she became somewhat quieter. A few minutes later she arose to shove the bolt on the door but it was already locked. I went to sleep again but the next morning she looked wretched and quite distracted. I wanted now to know why and what she thought she had seen in the night; but she answered that she could not say. I knew that she believed in ghosts and visions and that she often claimed to have seen apparitions. She often said that she was a Sunday child and that those who were born on other days did not have the clear sight that she had. I related the occurrence to my mother who was already accustomed to Fräulein Khayn’s experiences. Often she had frightened and disturbed my mother. I have often wondered why this adventure did not make me fearful.”

Fike must have been deeply interested in the eccentricities of all these spinster ladies since she remembered and described them so vividly so many years afterwards. Her mother, the Princess Johanna Elisabeth, towered above other women and also above her honest and pious consort, undoubtedly a superior being. The Princess had a way of absorbing the whole environment within herself and becoming its embodiment. Fike writes, for instance, “My mother had that year an extraordinary adventure on the return journey to Stettin.” As the story develops, one learns that Fike herself, the ever-present Khayn, another attendant, and several postilions, shared along with Fike’s mother the adventure of being lost in a terrible snowstorm. On another occasion, when Frederick the Great ascended the throne, Fike says, “When my father had received in the name of the King of Prussia the allegiance of Pomerania, my mother journeyed to Berlin.” There several events took place at court in the account of which the General is not mentioned. Presumably as the Governor of Stettin, he accompanied the party and had his day at court as well. In the eyes of his little daughter, moving in her accustomed place in mother’s entourage, the General appears to have played a minor part even when he was officially the center of the picture.

Princess Johanna Elisabeth was a clever woman but also a bit of a fool; that is to say, she was romantic and proud. As the wife of the Governor of Stettin, she tried to introduce in her dull town some semblance of court etiquette. For instance, she required Fike to kiss the hem of the garments of distinguished ladies who visited the house. When the old King of Prussia died, she strove to induce the ladies of Stettin to wear mourning as the court at Berlin was doing. But so cordially was the old King hated that not a lady would wear black for him. The Princess and her daughter and the faithful Khayn went bravely forth for a couple of Sundays in solemn weeds, but all the other Stettin dames united against them and the Princess was at last obliged to give up the fight.

While little Fike lived in a chronic state of filial bedazzlement, she had occasional glimpses of fact that left their mark. When her mother visited the court at Berlin, she was questioned there about the mourning episode at Stettin. “She denied the fact,” says Fike. “I was present and wondered greatly at this. It was the first time I had ever heard anyone deny a fact. I thought to myself, is it possible that my mother has forgotten something which happened so recently? I was near to reminding her; but I restrained myself, and that was surely my good fortune.”

The Princess was not always truthful. Deliberate falsehoods of the kind that her daughter noted at Berlin were probably not usual. But she was a fluent weaver of inward and outward deceptions and she usually wore her rose-colored glasses when she sat down to her correspondence. In this respect Fike was quite different from her mother. Although she could lie brazenly, for reasons, she had a clear sense of reality and her letters and memoirs are remarkable for the small amount of romancing they contain.

Perhaps she had from her father, the Prince of Anhalt, a saving sense of moderation. He occupies so little space in his daughter’s memoirs that no clear picture of his character is possible. But certain traits come through in his correspondence. In spite of his stiff pedantic style he reports the facts more reliably than does his wife in her more eloquent epistles. His ambition was tempered with philosophy. At one time in his life, after his daughter had gone to Russia, he tried unsuccessfully to become the Duke of Courland. “I am, thank God,” he wrote, “well satisfied with what I possess, yet I should like to hear no reproaches later that we had slept away our luck at such a favorable moment.”

This is the only time in his history that he shows himself in a covetous light. Perhaps his motive in grasping at Courland was to be nearer to his daughter in Russia. He seemed to realize, as his wife did not, that German Princesses who married into the Czar’s family had a way of being neglected and mislaid in that vast uncharted country.

[Illustration]

II

SHE IS EDUCATED

While Fike was still quite small, her father received an unexciting promotion. Already Commander of the garrison, he was made Governor of Stettin. This change did not bring the family any nearer to the goal of the Princess’s hopes, a residence in Berlin. But it did rescue them from the commonplace house in the Domstrasse which Fike afterwards in the days of her grandeur referred to as “Greifenheim’s house.” As Governor of Stettin, her father was given quarters in the ancestral castle of the Duke of Pomerania. It was a gloomy rectangular structure surrounding a roughly-paved courtyard and including as a corner building a church with a bell-tower. Fike’s bedroom adjoined the bell-tower.

The family occupied the third story of the left wing, the Princess’s apartment being next to the entrance and her daughter’s next to the church. Two or three times a day the little girl was allowed to visit her mother. In her memoirs she describes how she ran through the long corridor but does not describe the visits. The supervision over her daughter’s education with which the Princess is credited was apparently of the slightest. She was preoccupied with other things; an unambitious husband and an invalid son gave her plenty to think about. Besides the family finances were not improved by the general’s promotion. He still clung to his parsimonious habits and was backed up by his second in command, old Bolhagen, who as under-governor lived in the Pomeranian castle and was always close at hand to help him out. “My father did almost nothing without at least asking him about it,” says Fike. It was certainly a situation which any wife would need philosophy to bear. The harassed lady was often driven to extremes. She railed at old Bolhagen that he “did not love her,” and she boxed her daughter’s ears from sheer irritation.

The two Princesses came to be familiar figures at several North German courts, for Fike after the age of eight always accompanied her mother on her travels. Had the search for a husband already begun? Probably so; the conversation at home seems to indicate as much. The Princess neglected her daughter abroad, as well as at home. This did not escape notice, and Fike occasionally had the satisfaction of having strangers, with whom she early discovered how to get on, rebuke the Princess for her maternal indifference. In this way, the Swedish Count Gyllenborg incurred the life-long gratitude of the proud, sensitive child. “When he saw,” says Fike, “how little or rather how not at all my mother occupied herself with me, he said to her that she was not right in giving me so little attention; that I was for my age a very well-developed child.”

Still another partisan was unexpectedly raised up in the person of a Catholic monk by the name of Mengden whom Fike and her mother met at the Court of Brunswick. The monk occupied himself with palmistry and prophecy, which were, by the way, forbidden by his Church. With the certainty of her tendencies, the Princess gravitated toward the sorcerer, leading by the hand the little Princess Marianna of Brunswick-Bevern to whom she had taken a great fancy. She praised the beauty of Marianna and demanded that the monk should prophesy a crown for her. “He heard,” says Fike, “how my mother praised the Princess and what she prophesied; he said to her that he saw not a single crown in the features of the Princess but that he saw at least three above my forehead.”

Fike never forgot this episode and related it more than once. She also thought it sufficiently important to mention in her memoirs thirty years later that the petted and beautiful Brunswick Princess eventually died unmarried. The plain little Fike, who was to become the apostle of enlightenment, continued always to believe in that fortune-telling monk.

Fike really owed her education to her French governess, Elisabeth Cardel, and her German tutor, Pastor Wagner. With Mademoiselle Cardel she spent her days and nights in the three small rooms beneath the bell-tower. They were Fike and Babet to each other. Babet must be the key to much that afterwards astonished the world in the Empress of Russia. But what the French governess was like it would be difficult to say. She has vanished into the limbo which is reserved for the domestic servants of the famous. Our history books, like our etiquette books, do not consider these people important. But almost any child takes her nurse or governess quite seriously and is influenced by her character regardless of the difference in their social station. The personality of the servant who cares for genius in its helpless infancy and during its stumbling childhood is a factor for biography to reckon with.

Certainly Babet Cardel was no ordinary servant; perhaps no ordinary individual. She may have been an extraordinary person. All we know of her is contained in the letters and memoirs of the pupil on whom she left her impress. She was another genteel spinster but was of a tougher-minded variety than the German aunts and lady companions who otherwise figured in Fike’s life. She never saw ghosts and she worshiped neither animals nor God too much. Without using flattery or caresses she knew how to gain and keep the affections of her pupil. Fike was a secretive child, yet she had no secrets from Babet, and this was partly because Babet was clever. Her pupil had a life-long habit of ready, off-hand scorn for stupidity.

The Cardel family were French emigrants; the father was a professor in Frankfort. Two daughters, Madeleine and Elisabeth, made their way to Stettin, where Madeleine was employed as Fike’s governess. When her pupil was nearly four Madeleine was married to an advocate named Colhard. The child made a scene at parting. “At Madame Colhard’s wedding,” say her memoirs, “I drank too much and would not go to bed without her. I bawled so loudly that they had to take me out and put me to bed with my parents.” Fike passed into the hands of Elisabeth Cardel. The two sisters were opposites: Madeleine was showy and insincere while Elisabeth was just and consistent. Madeleine “took great pains,” says her pupil, “to have me always appear before my parents in such a way that I, and she also, should please them. So it came about that I was for my years rather ‘deep.’”

Babet laid less stress on appearances and strove to counteract the superficial methods of her sister. But Fike had acquired once for all the knack of making an impression. She was a canny child, precocious in her criticism of her environment and precocious in her ability to keep her own counsel. Babet, who was something of a phrase-maker, called her an “esprit gauche.” In mature years, Fike still delighted in the title. “Mademoiselle Cardel and Herr Wagner had to deal with a perverse spirit who took all that was said to her in the opposite sense.” Oppressed by moralities and preachments, her eager, curious nature took refuge behind a smiling but critical silence. “One does not always know what children are thinking,” she says. “Children are hard to understand, especially when careful training has accustomed them to obedience and experience has made them cautious in conversations with their elders.”

Next to Elisabeth Cardel, Pastor Wagner was second in command. Fike called herself, “half Mademoiselle Cardel’s, half Pastor Wagner’s pupil.” With Pastor Wagner she studied religion, history and geography. He also taught her to write German while Monsieur Laurent, a Calvinist school-master, taught her French “calligraphy.” A French dancing-master came to the little room beside the bell-tower, placed the four-year-old child on a table and trained her in positions and steps. “This was money thrown away,” remarked the affluent Empress of Russia many years later; doubtless an echo of dear Papa’s views, hardly of dear Mama’s. For seven long years Babet, who was musical herself, struggled to teach her pupil the rudiments of singing but gave it up at last as hopeless. A music-master by the name of Roellig was called in at Zerbst but his efforts were also fruitless. A drawing teacher she never had; but somewhere along in her career she learned both carving and engraving, arts which she cultivated later in Russia. Her skill at embroidery is evidenced by rich ecclesiastical robes still preserved in Russian museums.

Fike afterwards described her teachers, always excepting Mademoiselle Cardel, as rather a poor lot. Monsieur Laurent was “an old weak-head who in his youth was but a dunce,” a Frenchman who spoke German “like a Spanish cow.” The music-master was preserved in a burlesque sketch addressed to Grimm. “About the poor devil Roellig I have never told you yet, because you know what success his lessons had. He always brought with him a creature who roared bass. He had him sing in my room; I listened to him and said to myself, ‘he roars like a bull,’ but Herr Roellig was beside himself with delight when ever this bass throat was in action.” Concerning Wagner and Cardel, she offered as her mature judgment: “I cherish absolutely no grudge against Herr Wagner, but I am convinced in my inmost soul that he was a block-head and that Mademoiselle Cardel was a clever girl.”

Fike scoffed at her education as she scoffed at her teachers. “Very early it was noticed that I had a good memory; therefore I was incessantly tormented with learning by rote. They called it training the memory; but I believe it to have been rather a weakening. At first it was Bible verses; then specially prepared pieces on the fables of La Fontaine which I had to commit to memory and repeat. If I forgot anything, I was scolded; I believe, however, it was not humanly possible to retain all that I had to memorize; also I do not think it worth the trouble. I still possess a German Bible in which all the verses which I had to learn are underlined with red ink.”

The most valuable part of her education was incidental to her association with Babet, “who knew everything without having learned anything; she knew all the comedies and tragedies like her five fingers and was very amusing.” Babet’s vocabulary and phrases were drawn from her reading. Often she reminded her pupil that the word “Monsieur” “never broke anyone’s jaw-bone,” a phrase which Fike assumed had been drawn from some old comedy. She read Corneille and Racine and was saturated with Molière, who consequently became the daily bread of her pupil. Her favorite authority was “common sense” which she evoked habitually. “That is not common sense,” represented a final judgment with the governess as it eventually did with the Empress. Everybody else in Fike’s early environment dealt in moral principles and religious dogmas; Babet seems to have been a realist.

The governess had friends, French emigrants like herself, intellectuals, who are to be distinguished from the simple-minded Laurent, master of calligraphy. Babet received on Sundays in the nursery a certain Monsieur de Mauclerc, a clergyman, who was remembered by Fike chiefly as the editor of a History of England written by his father-in-law, Rapin Thoiras. The Mauclerc-Thoiras circle was pro-English, which meant in those days that they were philosophers and liberals. With these fellow-exiles of hers Babet was intimate and her pupil was adopted by the group. In their circle Fike had her first experience of good conversation, which she afterwards passionately pursued as one of the main interests of her life. Here she learned to know as clever and delightful people those whom Pastor Wagner regarded as heretics. “So far as Wagner was concerned, he had nothing in common with these arch-heretics who did not understand his language; nor he, theirs.” But Fike felt herself able through language and imagination to bridge the mental chasm which yawned between her French governess and her German tutor.

2

The Princes of Anhalt-Zerbst were a pious line. Before the Reformation, one of them had been a celebrated saint. The sight of him wearing a monastic garb, emaciated by fasting and begging through the streets, had so impressed Martin Luther as a boy that it had helped to send him into a monastery. Zerbst had been close to the war with Tetzel about indulgences and the contemporary Prince of Anhalt had early ranged himself on the side of the reformer. Two hundred years before Fike was born, Luther had been intimate with the head of the house of Anhalt and had played chess with him. The passage of six generations had dimmed the worldly glory of these Princes but the heritage of piety had persisted undiminished.

Prince Christian August followed in the footsteps of his forebears. He was a rigid Protestant, one of those puritanical Lutherans, who, according to Frederick the Great, were still numerous in that day. Frederick seemed to think that the cult had declined during his reign. But the free-thinking King exaggerated the extent of his own influence, which did not reach far beyond his own round table. The pious Princes of Germany, the special creation of Dr. Martin Luther, were destined to survive many centuries. Long after Frederick was dead and buried, they continued to impress their somber personalities upon the history of Europe by marrying into all its royal families. Fike’s father was one of these somber personalities.