Part 20

After this orgiastic meal, his bed became intolerable to him. He demanded to be taken from Jassy to Nikolaev, as he said, for a change of air. With his niece in the kibitka beside him, the dying man drove westward. Gradually his strength faded and his raging temperature subsided. The attendants were obliged to take him from the carriage and lay him on a rug at the roadside. There beside the dusty chaussée, in the arms of Sashinka, he expired. He had gone the way of Gregory Orlov, but had gone more directly. His Little Mother, his Matushka, had killed her last man.

When the Empress heard of Potiomkin’s death, she fainted three times. Once upon a time she had written to Potiomkin, “Without thee, I am without hands.” This proved to be true. With Plato Zubov’s hands, she could never work the same, for Plato’s hands worked alone for their master. The last years of Catherine’s reign were years of disappointment, unwisdom, and failure. Her glory had passed when Potiomkin died by the roadside. In destroying him, she had struck a fatal blow at herself.

[Illustration]

XI

CATHERINE BECOMES A GRANDMOTHER

Over a mantelpiece in the palace of Gatchina hangs a portrait of Paul I as a boy of ten. It is the only one of his portraits which bears a resemblance to his mother. Of all the artists who painted him, this one alone seems to have caught an aspect of the Grand Duke which suggests the Empress. Fleeting it must have been, for Paul grew up to be strikingly unlike his maternal parent. He was destined to advertise by his face and figure to all the world the anonymous paternity which had produced him.

Catherine was annoyed by Paul’s appearance and disposition, inherited as they were from his father’s family. It offended her that he should turn out to be so completely a Saltikov. That her son derived so little from herself seemed a perversity of fortune. She reflected a great deal on the subject. “My God,” she burst out in one of her letters to Grimm, “why do children so often resemble their fathers when it would be better to resemble their mothers? That is not common sense; dame Nature is often a blockhead. One day I shall write a dissertation on that, which I shall dedicate to you.” She did not write the dissertation for Grimm, although dissertations in general were much in her line. She dipped into scientific research from time to time with impressive results. Her contributions to comparative philology have won recognition from scholars in that field; but her contemplated study of inheritance of characteristics was never carried out. She never got beyond posing the question, to which, however, she repeatedly returned without ever pushing onward to any kind of theory. She bred dogs and observed that they showed the same tendency as human beings in this respect. “Witness Sir Tom Anderson,” she said of her favorite hound, “all his family resembles him. The same spirit, the same taste, the same figure, the same physiognomy, the same tendency.” She was puzzled and resentful.

Catherine was estranged from her son Paul from the day of his birth. Deprived of all opportunity to express her maternal feelings by the Empress’s theft, she had no actual experience of motherhood. Painful associations clustered around the infancy of this over-precious child. Catherine had been deserted by her first lover who openly replaced her by unworthy rivals. She hated Saltikov, as she afterwards learned not to hate any of her favorites after their affair had run its course. The child whom she saw once a week in his fox-fur cradle reminded her of bitter disillusionment. As he grew older, his querulous disposition, his under-sized stature, his wizened skin, his baldness, and his ugly nose all helped to make him seem alien to his mother. He was a cringing, sickly boy of whom it was difficult to be proud. She had produced him at such a cost and he represented such an inferior triumph after all. As human material he was in the same class as Peter the Third, from which many historians have argued that Paul was Peter’s son and a genuine descendant of the Romanovs.

Catherine’s second son and her first child by Orlov, Prince Bobrinsky, also failed to inherit the genius of his mother. He was brought up under the Empress’s supervision by an Italian tutor, Admiral Ribas, and as a young man was a ne’er-do-well and a waster. His mother sent him on a tour through Europe and the gay young Prince of the Beaver-skin left a trail of debts behind him in city after city. Finally the exasperated Empress had him arrested and interned in Riga, after which history knows him no more. He was a spendthrift, like both his parents, but he had none of the mental and moral handicaps of Grand Duke Paul. After his public disgrace in Riga, he returned to Russia and led an unambitious and uneventful life. He married and left descendants in whom history takes no interest.

The chief part which Bobrinsky played in the drama of his mother’s life was to heighten the conflict which always existed between Catherine and her first-born. There was a moment in the Empress’s life when she thought of marrying Gregory Orlov but was suddenly checked in her intentions by the enemies of the Orlovs and the opposition of Panin. Count Panin, who wanted from the first to make Paul emperor, became suddenly energetic when he suspected that the Empress wished to legitimatize Bobrinsky. Even after the danger of the marriage had been averted, this bastard Prince still hovered threateningly in the background, well cared for by the Empress, his mother, a permanent object of suspicion to Count Panin and of fear to the Grand Duke Paul. This boy who trembled for his life could find no reassurance in the existence of a rival half-brother as long as he kept his health and his mother’s favor. The young Bobrinsky, like everything else in their environment, contributed to the estrangement between Catherine and her heir.

When Catherine became Empress, one of her first concerns was to provide for the education of the Grand Duke Paul. She selected no less a person for the post than d’Alembert. But the French scholar declined her invitation. The Empress would not take no for an answer; she stooped to conquer. “I know you too well for a good man,” she wrote, “to ascribe your refusal to vanity. I know that the sole motive of it is the desire for peace and leisure to cultivate letters and the friendship of those whom you esteem. But what is there in this objection? Come with all your friends. I promise both them and you every convenience and advantage that depends upon me; and perhaps you will find more liberty and ease here than in your native country. You refused the invitation of the King of Prussia, notwithstanding your obligations to him. But that Prince has no son. I admit to you that I have the education of my son so much at heart, and I think you so necessary to it, that perhaps I press you with too much earnestness. Excuse my indiscretion for the sake of its occasion; and be assured that it is my esteem for you that makes me so urgent.”

This petitioning of d’Alembert brought one of the sharpest humiliations of her life. D’Alembert steadfastly refused. Privately he uttered a sarcastic remark which travelled far. In Russia, he said, people died too easily of colic, it was better to remain in France. The Empress never forgave him this sly reference to her manifesto concerning Peter’s untimely end. A decade or more afterwards, when she was engaged in the invasion of Poland, a group of French professors living there fell into her hands and were interned at Kiev. D’Alembert, remembering his old prestige with the Empress, attempted to secure their release by sending a personal petition to the Russian Empress, but she turned a deaf ear to his intercession. The distressed scholar at last appealed to Voltaire who succeeded in getting only a cold reply from the Empress. She said that the French professors were doing very well in Russia and would stay there for the present. She implied that d’Alembert, who had thought that people died too easily of colic in this barbarous land, might now see for himself how well people could live there. The professors were being cared for and would remain interned until the Empress found leisure to release them. Their period of internment was probably not greatly prolonged by d’Alembert’s appeal.

When the Empress’s efforts to import higher education for her son shattered on this embarrassing passage between herself and the French encyclopædist, she gave up all further attempts to improve on Panin’s pedagogy. Her opinion of the lazy Count as an educator was not high but it was probably as high as he deserved. Nevertheless she left him in possession of the field. “At that time,” she commented, “everybody believed that if Panin did not educate him, the Grand Duke would be lost.” Panin remained in exclusive charge as governor until Paul’s marriage took place. He continued his watchfulness even after that from his post as head of the College of Foreign Affairs until Prince Orlov died in 1783. For twenty years, Panin’s chief interest in life had been to watch and circumvent this man whom he regarded as the dangerous enemy of his Grand Duke. Panin had failed to save the Czar when he had piteously kissed his hand and pleaded and he could never forgive himself for that failure. He felt to blame for Peter’s death and was therefore obliged to hate, suspect, and persecute Gregory Orlov. After Orlov’s death he no longer had an incentive to live. The sensitive old man soon followed his arch-enemy into the grave. The Empress was bereaved at the same time of two of her oldest and nearest friends.

2

Compelled to leave Paul’s education alone, she waited impatiently for the time to marry him. She resolved to be less hasty than the Empress Elisabeth, who had married her nephew at sixteen against the doctor’s advice. Catherine waited until her son had reached the age of eighteen before she sought a wife for him. Relations between the mother and son improved considerably during Paul’s eighteenth summer. They spent the warm season together in Czarskoe Selo and the Empress for the first time made a companion of her son. A new sympathy grew up between them; the long estrangement seemed to be over at last. It is easy to account for Catherine’s new interest in Paul. Presumably she had been told that it would be safe to go ahead and marry him. The young man found himself taken to his mother’s bosom with unexpected warmth. Those who looked on thought this was the beginning of a friendliness at last between the mother and son, but the happy condition was not destined to last long. For once their interests coincided. Paul wanted a wife and his mother wanted him to marry. In all other situations of life which preceded and followed this halcyon interlude the two were ever in conflict.

The Empress surveyed with a critical eye the German supply of Princesses. Some not too powerful Prince’s daughter after her own image was the object of her search. At last she selected a mother with three daughters and invited all three sisters to Russia that the Grand Duke might choose among them. In the old days when the Russian Czarevich wished to marry a Russian princess, it was customary for the eligible damsels to seat themselves in two long rows in the Kremlin palace while the young heir passed between them, looking to right and left, until he chose his bride. This ancient custom was in the Empress’s thoughts when she invited the Landgravine of Hessen-Darmstadt to bring her three daughters to Petersburg.

Catherine was proud to be able to write to Prince Henry of Prussia, who had also planned to visit her, that his visit would have to be postponed because his apartments would be needed for the young Princesses and their mother. “I may say to you in confidence, with the indiscretion that is natural to ladies, that these apartments are destined this summer for Madame the Landgravine of Hessen-Darmstadt.” If Prince Henry then so far betrayed her confidence as to inform his royal brother, Frederick the Great, that the Empress of Russia was about to marry her son and heir, the indiscretion of the Empress would be justified. That the King of Prussia had no son was a fact she liked to dwell upon. She was always in one way or another the rival of the Prussian monarch and in becoming a parent she had outstripped him. Paul was about to continue the Romanov dynasty as his mother had done before him, while the childless old King of Potsdam, aging in solitude, could point to no such happy line of succession. Like the late Russian Empress, he was obliged to make the best of a nephew as an heir.

The Landgravine of Hessen-Darmstadt came to Petersburg with her three daughters and went away again with two of them. The betrothal and marriage were rather hasty and not particularly gay. The new Grand Duchess, re-baptized as Natalie Alexeievna, was not a vivid personality and her short life in Russia left no legends. It was an unhappy marriage from the beginning and lasted but three years, at the end of which Natalie died in childbirth. Just what happened to the young wife during these years is a story that no one has told. Paul’s complaints of Natalie show that he must have behaved very badly toward her. While this marriage lasted, his disposition took on a fixed habit of depression. Scarcely twenty years old, he succumbed to pessimistic moods from which he looked to his wife in vain to extract him. As Natalie had not the gift of lighting up his “papillons noirs,” his favorite name for them, he settled more and more stubbornly in the black depths of miserable self-pity. Frequently he wept.

No doubt his mother had her moments of anxiety because the marriage did not produce a grandchild at once. In the third year, however, the Grand Duchess became pregnant; the hopes of the Empress were at last to be realized. Catherine made preparations for the lying-in to take place in Petersburg, where Czars might be born although they might not be crowned. In the springtime of 1776, she expected the son of her son. The fatal outcome of Natalie’s lying-in was described by the Empress in one of her most characteristic letters. The swiftness and vividness of her narrative reflect the sure movement of her spirit. In this letter we see her moving through a crisis as she moved through every crisis of a life that was so extraordinarily rich in danger and risks. It mirrors that acceptance of facts which enabled her to pass through murder at Peterhof and to emerge almost unscathed by comparison with temperaments like Orlov and Panin. In Catherine’s make-up was some of that tough fibre which enabled Alexei, the head of the Orlov clan, to profit by his crimes while others far less guilty than himself did morbid penance on his behalf.

“On the 10th of April,” wrote Catherine to Grimm, “at four o’clock in the morning, my son came to find me because his wife perceived the pains of confinement. I leaped out of bed and ran to her. I found her much tormented but nothing beyond the ordinary. Time and patience would end the affair. A mid-wife and a skilful surgeon aided her.... Monday passed in waiting and in a similar condition, very disturbing.... The doctors’ conference produced no new expedients or assuagement. On Tuesday they demanded my physician and an old _accoucheur_ to renew their consultation.... They decided to save the mother, as the infant was probably dead; instruments were employed; a combination of unfortunate circumstances, occasioned by malformation and divers accidents, made all that human science could do on Wednesday useless. On Thursday the Grand Duchess received the sacrament. Prince Henry suggested his physician; he was admitted but he agreed with his confrères. On Thursday the Princess gave up the ghost at five o’clock in the evening. Today she has been cut open in the presence of thirteen physicians and surgeons who found that it was a unique and irremediable case....

“Twenty-four hours before the death of the Grand Duchess, I sent to ask Prince Henry, for my own relief, to take charge of the Grand Duke. He came and has not left him since. He endures his profound chagrin with composure but today he has taken a fever. Since the death of his wife, I have picked him up and brought him here [Czarskoe Selo].

“Imagine me, who am tearful by temperament; I have seen someone die without shedding a tear. I said to myself: If you cry, the others will sob; if you sob, the others will swoon; and everybody will lose their heads and be at their wits’ end; all of which will be irresponsible....”

While the widowed Grand Duke still lay in ruins, his mother set about finding a new wife for him. She has been reproached for her unseemly haste in the matter. Brückner says critically that even while Natalie was dying, the Empress’s thoughts were occupied with a second marriage for her son. Of this there is not the least doubt. Three years of marriage had ended in a still-birth; much time had been lost already and the business-like Empress saw no reason for losing any more. She had maternal and imperial interests at stake, and match-making was a chore like any other, something to be done with as little delay as possible. It was apparent that the Grand Duke, who had gone to pieces in the crisis and who developed a fever afterwards, was unable to do anything on his own behalf. He had no more initiative to bring to the making of a second marriage than he had brought to the first. He would have to be inducted into matrimony once again.

Catherine took counsel with Prince Henry of Prussia, who happened to be in Petersburg at this dismal time. The death of Natalie made it impossible for the Empress to entertain her guest with the same elaborate festivities with which his former sojourn had been celebrated. Prince Henry protested that he was not at all bored, which the apologetic hostess refused to believe. But the melancholy and oppressed younger brother of Frederick the Great was more at home in the midst of tragedy and misfortune than in the gaiety and abandon of a Russian masquerade. In a court that mourned for the dead Natalie, he was at ease. He had a contribution to make. A second wife for Paul was to be brought from Germany and the Prince was asked to arrange the match. It seems that he approved of the Empress’s choice.

One reason that Catherine was already occupied with the thought of marrying her son while his wife lay dying was that she had long wished she had chosen another Princess instead. Three years before, when making her first survey of the field, she had considered the Princess Sophie von Württemberg and had passed her over because she was too young. Time had remedied this difficulty but had substituted another. Sophie had recently become engaged and was shortly to be married to the hereditary Prince of Hesse-Darmstadt. This young man was well known in Russia and disliked by the Empress. He was a brother of Paul’s first wife and had come to Russia to make his career there in Catherine’s army. But after a couple of years she sent him home to his father. “God help him,” she wrote; “he is better off there than in Moscow.” This annoying young man had then engaged himself to Sophie of Württemberg and the betrothal presented a serious obstacle to Catherine’s plans. There was nothing for the Empress to do but to buy him off. Apparently he was able to drive a pretty sharp bargain for he received, as a compensation for his disappointment, a pension for life. “On condition,” the Empress wrote peevishly, “that I shall never see or hear from him again.”

This delicate matter was arranged through the agency of Prince Henry, on whom Catherine at this time leaned heavily. She trusted all the details to the solemn silent Prussian. She even consented that her son should leave home under Henry’s tutelage to court his bride in a foreign land. So far as the Grand Duke was concerned, the opportunity to visit Prussia gave him the greatest thrill of his courtship and furnished a strong incentive to marriage. He was already in love with Prussia and the Prussian King in imitation of the ex-Czar, Peter III.

Accompanied by Prince Henry, he was allowed to make a pilgrimage to the land of his ideals and to sue in person for the hand of his bride. Whatever Sophie’s feelings may have been when she first saw this ugly little man, she dutifully accepted him and made no fuss about it. The Princess was a tall blonde girl, in stature not unlike the late Empress Elisabeth, but German and _spiessbürgerlich_ to her finger-tips. She was and remained all her days an incurable Philistine.

As soon as Paul returned from Germany, the Empress began to expedite the marriage. “The Princess is yet to come,” she wrote to Grimm, “and we shall have her here within ten days. As soon as we have her, we shall proceed with her conversion. To convince her, it ought to take about fifteen days I think. I do not know how long will be necessary to teach her to read intelligibly and correctly the confession of faith in Russian. But the faster this can be hurried through, the better it will be. To accelerate all that, M. Pastukov has gone to Memel to teach her the alphabet and the confession en route; conviction will follow afterwards. You see by this we are foresighted and cautious and this conversion and confession of faith travels by post. Eight days from this act, I fix the wedding. If you wish to dance at it, you will have to hasten.” The tall Princess Sophie was converted according to Catherine’s schedule and became the Grand Duchess Marie Feodorovna.

Within five months after the death of his first wife, Paul was married again. His second wife was a healthy, phlegmatic woman. He was almost happy. “Wherever _my wife_ goes,” he wrote to Prince Henry, “she has the gift of spreading gaiety and ease, and she has the art not only of dissipating my black moods but of giving me back again the disposition I had almost lost during the last three unhappy years.”

Paul’s second marriage was probably the best marriage that could possibly have been made for him. The fair tall wife called up pleasant memories of the devoted nurse who had run to the fox-fur cradle every time the baby in it cried. Marie Feodorovna was complacent and domestic; she loved her flower garden and she loved the proprieties. Paul lived many pious uneventful years with her and the Philistine pair often sat in judgment on the life of the Empress. Nowhere in Europe was the light woman on the Russian throne so severely condemned as she was by her son and his virtuous wife. Marie Feodorovna was like the heroine of a Gartenlaube story and a long and stormy life in Russia never succeeded in making her anything else. She was a sentimental German to the last.