Part 21

Catherine gave them the village of Pavlovsk for a residence. Here Paul built a little palace and Marie laid out her flower garden. After the death of Prince Orlov, Catherine purchased Gatchina for them. It was a place of evil memories for Paul, the scene of Orlov’s final insanity and death. The ghost of Peter the Third had walked there and had carried off to judgment the guilty soul of Gregory Orlov. These uncanny memories meant nothing to the Empress but they had an unhealthy influence on her son. He shut himself up in Gatchina away from all the world and expressed himself in the development of the place. To this day it reflects his personality as Czarskoe Selo reflects the personality of his mother. In Gatchina he played with his military passions and his mysticism. He tried to make himself as much as possible like Peter III, whose ghost walked with him through the endless corridors.

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Catherine was forty-eight when her first grandson was born. She called him Alexander, as she said, a “pompous name.” In 1777, her ambitious imagination ranged over the southern part of her dominions wherever Alexander the Great had passed and where he first met the Scythians. Catherine was just then entering upon her great dream of empire, the dream which dominated the rest of her life. She needed children and children’s children to carry on the vast work she had planned. The dutiful Marie responded by producing two sons within a short space of time. Alexander was followed by Constantine, for the Empress loved resounding names. Catherine’s joy in these infants was unbounded. She had borne five children but had never nursed one of them. At last her time had come. She took possession of the little new-born creatures and sent the mother back to Pavlovsk, childless. She re-enacted to the last detail the crime of Empress Elisabeth against herself.

In a lyrical letter to Grimm, she announced the birth of her first grandson. But when she spoke of Alexander’s future her rapturous tone fell to a pensive strain. “Aber, mein Gott, was wird aus dem Jungen werden?” She fell back as she rarely did into her native German. “I console myself with Boyle and the father of Tristram Shandy, who was of the opinion that a name is an influence that matters.... Do you think his examples from the family prove anything? His choice of them embarrasses sometimes. His examples only show, to speak the gospel according to the venerable Pastor Wagner, that it is the _naturel_ which counts. But where to find that! Is it at the bottom of the pack of a good constitution?... It is a pity that fairies have gone out of fashion; they would give an infant all that one wished. I should have made them beautiful presents and I should have whispered in their ears: Mesdames, _naturel_, just a little bit of _naturel_ and experience will then do all the rest.”

The interests of a grandmother did not distract her attention from the events of the fast spinning world. As its happenings sped past, like a flying factory belt, she invariably registered the passage of episodes which concerned her. Even the christening of Alexander did not obscure the defeat of General Burgoyne in America. “Monsieur Alexander was baptized the day before yesterday,” she wrote, “and everyone is doing well, except the English, who hang their heads to their stomachs since the deplorable adventure of General Burgoyne. He should gnaw his fingers after the fashion of Prince Potiomkin; that sets the blood in circulation. If that of the Parliament of Great Britain remains calm now I call them plodding nags....” She was scornful of George III who was evidently going to allow the American colonies to slip through his fingers. His grandchildren might lose America at the same time that her own might enter Constantinople. That is, they would if _naturel_ led them in that direction. Her magnificent dreams for Alexander alternated with an uncertain mood which usually brought on an attack of the German language. “Aber, mein Gott, was wird aus dem Jungen werden?”

Having appropriated her two grandsons in this unceremonious fashion, Catherine’s cupidity seemed for the time satisfied. Marie Feodorovna came up to the Petersburg palace at regular intervals and bore her children there. It turned out that granddaughters were not wanted in Catherine’s nursery and the young mother was allowed to take her girl babies back to Pavlovsk and educate them herself. Catherine thought the little Princesses beautiful and charming but she was content to give them lovely Greek names and send them home with Mama. Alexander and Constantine, however, were ardently studied, ardently educated and ardently sewed for.

The Empress designed a garment for Alexander of which she was extremely proud. She boasted that the King of Sweden and the Prince of Prussia had heard of it and had borrowed the pattern for their own little boys. The picture which she drew and sent abroad vindicated her boast of its simplicity. “Nowhere,” she explains, “is there any ligature, and the child scarcely knows that he is being dressed. The arms and legs go into the garment at the same time and lo! all is finished. It is a stroke of genius on my part, this habit.” Her letters were filled with the sayings and doings of her darling. She gave a catalogue of his achievements at the age of four. He could write, spell, draw, use a spade, shoulder arms, and mount a horse; he could make twenty playthings out of one and ask endless questions. The other day he had asked whether there were human beings in the moon and whether he had been born in the moon or on the earth. “I do not know,” said Grandmamma fervently, “but there is a kind of profundity which springs up in the head of this little monkey.”

In the shadow of this wonderful brother, Constantine was obliged to make such headway as he could. There was less than eighteen months’ difference in age between the two boys and in many respects they were treated like twins. They had two low chairs exactly alike in Grandmamma’s boudoir and the model garment of her invention was always made up in pairs. In their education, however, certain distinctions were observed. Alexander, the future Czar, was brought up on the English plan as far as possible. This, to the Empress, meant fresh air and liberal ideals and she saw to it that Alexander was nourished on these things from his earliest infancy. Constantine showed from the beginning a strong repugnance to fresh air. The unregenerate infant annoyed his grandmother greatly by “burying his nose in the linen and shutting out the air.” She gave him a Greek nurse and surrounded him with Greek attendants in order that he should begin life speaking this language only. Constantine was brought up to be King of Greece, where a salubrious climate would enable him to hold his head up and breathe the fresh air like a man. This younger brother of Alexander was destined never to be King of Greece or King of anything, least of all himself. The intensity of his secondary part deprived him of all aggressiveness in infancy, saddled him with an irascible temper, and cast him for an utterly passive rôle in life.

Alexander idolized his grandmother while Constantine hated her. “Do you know,” Constantine said to the Swedish Prince when he met him in the palace of his grandmother, “that you are in the house of the greatest whore in Europe?”

Catherine had been obliged by circumstances to refrain from interfering in the education of her own son. Her attempt to import D’Alembert from France had failed and she had allowed matters to proceed as they had started under the guidance of Panin. But she was not satisfied with the results and hoped to do much better for her two grandsons. She wrote an extensive Instruction for the guidance of their teachers, producing this time a far more original piece of work than her famous message to the commission on a code of laws. It contained common sense and insight only occasionally darkened by the author’s well-known prejudices. She counselled those in charge of young children to avoid scolding them and to cultivate a gentle attitude in order that they should learn not to fear people. The spirit of Babet Cardel, the spirit of common sense, expressed itself repeatedly in Catherine’s pedagogy. Her prejudice appeared in a flat prohibition against the arts for which she herself had no understanding. “The Grand Dukes are to be taught neither poetry or music; because it would occupy too much of their time to attain excellence in either....”

Whatever latent talent the two boys may have had in the creative arts was never encouraged to express itself. Grandmother’s repressions were too strong. Alexander might have learned to sing like a bird if he had had another Babet Cardel to teach him and if his devoted but jealous grandmother had not cut him off from every opportunity to learn. She succeeded in transmitting her own tone-deafness to him in an aggravated form.

Alexander was as his name indicated destined for a military career; Catherine pictured him as the conqueror of Constantinople at least. But she loathed the idea of what she called Prussian corporalism. The imitation battles of Peter the Third and her son Paul, their drilling and dragooning, their manœuvring and parading struck her as unwarlike. She preferred the looser methods of her Russian generals, Suvarov, Rumiantsov, Potiomkin. Her grandson was to be a conqueror of the Russian school. In any case, however, he must operate with big guns and tolerate the noise they made. A worry had grown up in her mind around this matter of big guns. General Potiomkin, leader of her forces against the Turks, had a terrible handicap. When the sound of firing came to him in his encampment behind the lines, he trembled in his Russian boots. The Empress knew this well; indeed far too many people knew it well and the idiosyncrasy ill became the chief of the Russian army. If Potiomkin failed to take Constantinople, it would probably be due to this mysterious weakness of his. Mysterious it was, for Potiomkin was really no coward.

If Constantinople held out against Potiomkin, the conquest would remain for Alexander. It was imperative that the young Grand Duke should have no fear of guns. His grandmother decided to prevent the possibility of such a disaster by habituating the child in early life to the sound. She had him systematically exposed to the noise of cannon in the hope that the early experience would inoculate him against this unmanly fear as vaccination had made him immune from the terror of smallpox. Her experiment with the cannon did not work as well as her experiment with vaccination. The boy, it is true, grew up without fear of the noise of guns firing; but that was partly because his deafness prevented him from hearing them. Alexander the First was merely hard of hearing. The explanation usually given is that his disability was acquired from being forced by his grandmother to listen to gun practice in his childhood.

Another feature in Catherine’s pedagogy which throws a light on her character concerns the subject of sex and reproduction. She was as rigid with her grandsons as she had been with the young ladies at Smolny. She thought it was better not to call their attention to such things too early. Just as the Smolny pupils had produced Voltaire’s plays with the passages about love cut out, so her grandsons were expected to study science and omit the subject of reproduction. Their tutors were instructed to keep them in strict ignorance about all that related to the relation of the sexes. “Her great modesty in this respect,” says Masson, “appears strikingly contrasted with other parts of her character.... The celebrated Pallas was giving the Princes a short course of botany in their garden near Pavlovsk; but the explanation of Linnæus’s system of the sexes gave them the first ideas of those of human nature and led them to put a number of very amusing questions with great naïveté. This alarmed their governors; Pallas was requested to avoid entering into further particulars; and the course of botany was even broken off.”

The Empress, who was devoted to science, who loved the study of comets and philology, who strove industriously to wipe out superstition with knowledge, went so far as to interrupt a course of botany for prudish reasons. The modesty for which she was so often admired but which would be more accurately called prudery was doubtless present in her make-up. Her efforts to preserve the innocence of her grandsons did not have the happy result which she hoped for. As she had been eager to have grandchildren, she was also eager to have great-grandchildren. Her hopes were destined to disappointment. She married both of her grandsons at an early age but neither of them had descendants. Their marriages were not happy and remained childless. The outcome was not according to their grandmother’s scheme. Not for this did she bring them up in ignorance of sex and sacrifice the course in botany to preserve their innocence. Their sterility was a bitter disappointment to her. Paul’s youngest son, the only one she had left to be educated by his mother, carried on the dynasty that she had founded. From the Empress’s own point of view, Nicholas, who was brought up by her Philistine daughter-in-law, was a greater success in life than his two elder brothers whom she had so carefully reared. Perhaps she had worked too hard on the training of her precious young. A more casual upbringing might have produced happier results for her own purposes, which included first of all the production of progeny.

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While the Empress was educating Paul’s children at the court, Paul was living in strict retirement at Pavlovsk and Gatchina. He complained bitterly of his exclusion from active life. “You tax me with my hypochondria and black moods,” he wrote to Prince Henry. “It may be so.... But the inaction to which I am condemned makes the part excusable.” Two years after his second marriage, which had lifted his spirits temporarily, he was again writing to Prince Henry, “Permit me to write you often, my heart has need to unburden itself, especially in the sad life that I lead.” After abruptly closing his letter, he adds, “My tears prevent me from continuing.”

Paul was not yet twenty-five years of age when he was writing in this despondent strain. He was already the victim of pessimism and melancholy, any intensification of which might lead him beyond the bounds of mental health. Brückner says that Paul was eccentric in his behavior, his moods, and his ideas from the very cradle. In middle age he was called insane. Paul’s wife, Marie Feodorovna, considered him so. “There is no one,” she wrote, “who does not every day remark the disorder of his faculties.” For years before the Empress died, it was reported throughout Europe that her son was mad.

Here was an extraordinary coincidence. If Paul was not the son of Peter the Third as had been whispered at the time of Paul’s birth, whence came the similarity in their morbid tendencies? The unfortunate Grand Duke seemed to be following in the footsteps of the late Czar. Peter certainly had a severe mental twist with passionate preferences and prejudices which the Grand Duke imitated. In his sequestered life at Gatchina he cultivated the personal habits and tastes of the murdered Peter. He professed, for instance, the same partiality for Frederick the Great and accomplished what Peter had longed for but had never attained: he saw the Prussian idol in the flesh. When Paul and his wife made the grand tour of Europe in 1781, they visited Frederick in Berlin. It was a memorable meeting for several reasons. Frederick the Great for the first time in many years had a new suit made--new throughout. It was a great concession from the Potsdam recluse and miser, an eloquent testimonial of respect for the painted lady of Petersburg who was, incidentally, not so friendly toward Prussia as she once had been. The King’s new clothes were the talk of Berlin.

As a topic of conversation, they were only superseded by the Hamlet story. A special production of Hamlet had been announced in the Grand Duke’s honor but the director of the theatre withdrew the piece at the last moment as inappropriate for the occasion. The public was agog with curiosity and the sensitive self-pitying Paul became the focus of an over-wrought and over-acted romance of public sympathy. For several days Paul’s picture of his own tragedy hung before the German public; Berlin saw him as a Russian Hamlet whose father had been a martyr partly for his love of Prussia. All this was extremely bad for the melancholy Grand Duke, for whom any picturesque enhancement of his misfortunes added an element of danger to that already inherent in his habitual brooding. The comparison with Hamlet was grateful to him for every reason, but most of all for the reason that Hamlet was his father’s own son. If the public identified Paul with Hamlet, it meant that they accepted him as the son of Peter the Third. This aspect of the drama represented something that Paul was obliged to believe. To doubt it meant for him unendurable suffering, to be escaped at every cost.

As a baby in the cradle, Paul was a sensitive creature, starting and trembling at every sound. He was devotedly nursed by the Empress Elisabeth and oppressed by her hysteria. After her death he was dependent on Panin, a man who dreamed dreams and made no effort to realize them. Panin’s tutelage was not a course in courage and Paul’s situation especially required it. He was constantly in fear of being poisoned, in fear of being found out for a bastard, in fear of losing his claim to the throne of the Romanovs. His relations with his mother were always unsympathetic and after his second marriage they became unfriendly. Paul had no interest in politics and ascribed his indifference to the selfishness of the Empress who jealously excluded him from any participation in affairs of state. But he was far too shy and impractical by temperament to engage in politics in any form; to organize, to compromise, to adjust means to ends were not within his capacity.

He was, on the other hand, profoundly attracted by the mystical movements of his age. By this method he became connected with the protestant religions of Europe, an alliance which was not consistent with his future position as head of the Greek Church. It will be remembered that Peter the Third could never wholly abandon the religion of his native Holstein and remained to the end hostile to Russian orthodoxy. Paul developed the same tendency to ally himself with strange and rebellious faiths. He became a Freemason, a Martinist, and a Knight of Malta. The Eighteenth Century was prolific in mystic cults at the same time that it took its place in history as the age of enlightenment. As Catherine the Great was identified with all the movements for enlightenment, her son was identified with all the forms of obscurantism which flourished side by side with the new rationalism. Catherine was displeased with Paul’s alliance with black magic and prided herself on being free from any leanings toward superstition. When she was a very old woman, her latent credulity burst out; but her lapse at the eleventh hour need not deprive her of her position as one of the shining leaders of the age of reason. Paul always belonged in the other camp, the camp of the credulous, by virtue of his temperament. He might have found a kind of peace there if destiny had not called him to play an active part in life.

After he became Czar his morbid ideas waxed and led him into many grotesque and extreme acts. Like Hamlet, he thought his first duty was to avenge his father. Although Peter had been dead for more than thirty years, he had the grave opened, the corpse exposed to public view, and an impressive funeral acted out. The Czar had been buried in the Alexander Nevsky monastery, while all the other Czars of Russia after Peter the Great had been buried in the Fortress of Saint Peter and Saint Paul. An elaborate funeral procession transported the dead Peter from his old to his new resting-place. As the sarcophagus was borne along the Nevsky Prospect, Alexei Orlov followed immediately after as chief mourner. This was the crown of Paul’s revenge, to expose the murderer to the condemnation of the world.

Gregory Orlov was dead but fortunately for Paul’s mad drama his brother remained to play the sinister rôle which Paul had invented for him. What the aged Orlov thought of as he trudged along behind the corpse of the man he had struck down thirty-four years ago is matter for speculation. From what we know of Alexei’s character, he was probably not occupied with remorseful thoughts. Perhaps he was thinking of the strong fish-soup with which he was going to revive his weak old legs when the Czar’s fine funeral was over. Perhaps he was thinking that Paul was as mad as Peter had been, and wondering at the coincidence.

The resemblance between the fate of Catherine’s husband and her son was carried out to the end. As Emperor, Paul’s morbid suspicions increased and his reprisals against those whom he suspected aroused fear and hatred on every hand. His dread of persecution called forth actual persecution where none had formerly existed. Soon a conspiracy began to take shape among his enemies, headed by the Zubov brothers, Plato and Valerian. The last chapter of Peter’s history was repeated. After a brief reign of only four years, Paul was murdered one night by a band of conspirators who said that he was a dangerous lunatic and had to be put out of the way. There is every reason to suppose that his son and successor, Alexander the First, was aware of the conspiracy against his father’s life, and more definitely aware than Catherine had been when Peter had been assassinated at Ropsha. One of the things which Alexander had learned from his extraordinary grandmother was to overlook a murder which could not be prevented and make the best of the consequences. In both cases the consequences entitled them to ascend the throne over the dead body of their predecessors.

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