Part 6

Fike’s memories of her arrival in Petersburg are appropriate to a fourteen-year-old girl. She remembered the names of the four young ladies of honor who came forward to welcome her and the names of the men they subsequently married; the fourteen elephants which the Shah of Persia had given to the Empress and which actually performed tricks in the snowy palace court-yard; the carnival and the wonderful coasting expedition led by Semion Kyrilovich Narishkin; above all she remembered and described to the last knot and ringlet the extraordinary style of hair-dressing favored by her new Russian friends. Once in the Petersburg palace, the girl promptly forgot all the hardships of the journey. Her mother, a little tired but ever busy with her pen, continued her stream of correspondence with Zerbst and Berlin. “Fike bears the fatigue better than I, yet we are both well, praise be to God. May He continue to guide and direct us.” This to her husband, the General; to King Frederick, she wrote rather less piously: “Considering the hardships of the season, the journey and the change of air, I should need to have an iron constitution to keep up my resistance. My daughter is more fortunate. Her youth supports her health and like young soldiers who scorn danger because they know nothing about it, she delights in the splendor by which she is surrounded.”

In some subtle way, the conquering spirit of the Princess of Zerbst began to fail her as soon as she arrived in Russia. It was equally evident that Fike, from the moment when Narishkin helped her with a jest into the sleigh at Riga, was swimming with the current. Not that the Princess was aware of falling behind in the race. Courageous and confident, she attacked the great task before her, her diplomatic mission from King Frederick and von Podewils. She had found everything in Petersburg just as they had said. Things had to be changed. Bestushev, the enemy of Prussia, must go. While her mother pursued these political interests, Fike was learning to stand on her own feet in a strange environment. For the first time she allowed herself the luxury of a cold-blooded judgment of the Princess’s character. It happened on the journey from Petersburg to Moscow.

“After the departure from Petersburg,” says Fike, “the sleigh in which my mother and I were traveling struck in turning against a house, whereby an iron hook became dislodged and fell, striking my mother on the head and shoulder. She insisted that she was severely hurt but outwardly there was nothing to be seen, not even a bruise. This incident delayed our journey by several hours.” In describing the accident, her mother says, “I believed myself to be wounded but I was not. The blow had struck with full strength against the fur; otherwise, without doubt, my head, neck and arm would have been crushed.” Only the costly furs given by the Empress had saved her.

With this one interruption, the train of thirty sleighs, each drawn by ten horses, dashed onward without pause. They intended to arrive in Moscow before the Grand Duke’s birthday, on the twenty-first of February. The way was prepared. Bonfires burned at night along the snowy highway. Post-stations sprang up suddenly out of the snow-drifts, ready with hot coffee and fish soup, while fresh horses stood waiting in their dugas. The excitement was intense. At four o’clock on the third day, the flying train came suddenly to a halt within seventy versts of Moscow. An envoy from the Empress met the party here with the request that they should delay their entrance into Moscow until after darkness had fallen. While they waited, the travellers arrayed themselves with as much care as possible. Fike put on a close-fitting dress of rose-colored moiré silk, trimmed with silver.

The horses were again put to the sleighs, this time sixteen instead of ten to each, and the train leaped forward. Sievers, the Empress’s envoy, seated himself beside the Princess of Zerbst, and urged the coachman forward at every breath in true Russian style. The procession drew up before the Golovin Palace at eight o’clock in the evening. It was just six weeks since the country cousins had driven with so much caution and secrecy out of the little Lutheran town of Zerbst.

They were received on the stairway by the Prince von Hessen-Homberg, General Adjutant of the Empress, who conducted them to their chambers. Scarcely had they laid aside their heavy sables when the Grand Duke came running into their room, unable longer to control his impatience to see them. At ten o’clock Lestocq appeared with greeting and a summons from the Empress. Attended by the Prince von Hessen-Homberg and the Grand Duke, the two Princesses made their way to the Empress’s reception room. As they passed from room to room, the court ladies and gentlemen were presented and bowed low to them. “It is impossible to say how all those present stared at these Germans from head to foot,” wrote the Princess to her husband. Yet those musty old aunts at Quedlinburg who opposed the journey would have wished the Princess of Zerbst to forego this triumph.

The Empress advanced to her threshold to meet them. “She allowed me,” exulted the Princess, “scarcely time to take off my gloves and embraced me, I must say, with tenderness.” In rhetorical French, the Princess delivered an address of gratitude for all the Empress had done for the Holstein-Gottorp family. The Empress replied that her own blood was not more dear to her than that of the Princess and that all she had done was nothing in comparison with what she intended to do. It was a meeting of Greek with Greek. Fike was at last presented and embraced. The Empress invited the company to be seated, but, since she herself was too excited to sit down, nobody else could do so. The reception lasted for half an hour. At one point the Empress abruptly left the room to conceal the tears she was obliged to shed. They were called forth by the strong resemblance between the Princess Johanna Elisabeth and her deceased brother once betrothed to the Empress Elisabeth. Fike’s memoirs say nothing of these tears, although her mother was much affected by them.

Fike preserved for us, however, the appearance of the Empress at this time: “More than anything else, I was astonished by her great height,” she says. “I must say one could not behold her for the first time without astonishment at her beauty and her majesty. She was tall and, though rather stout, it did not detract, as no lack of freedom was noticeable in her movements. Her head was very beautiful. On this day she wore an enormous hoop-skirt, which she loved to do when she made a grand toilette and which she only did when she showed herself in public. Her dress was of shimmering silver taffeta trimmed with gold lace; she wore a black feather on her head standing upright a little to one side with many diamonds in a coiffure of her own hair.” The young girl in the rose-colored moiré frock never forgot the picture.

The next morning, the Princess and her daughter were summoned to the audience chamber by the Empress. “A few moments later, the Empress in grand attire came from her dressing-room. She wore a brown dress embroidered in silver and quite, that is as far as head, neck and waist were concerned, covered with jewels.” She presented the ribbon and star of Saint Catherine to her guests. Then she passed on to mass. When they next saw her, she was on her way to confession; the next time, to communion. A few days later, on her way to the Troitsky Monastery, she came to say farewell “in a long-sleeved gown of black velvet adorned with all the Russian orders; that is, the order of Saint Andrew as a scarf, of Saint Alexander about the neck, and of Saint Catherine on the left side.” There seemed no possible limit to all this grandeur. Elisabeth had ten thousand dresses and five thousand pairs of shoes.

But Fike, her mother’s own child, was not over-awed. She expanded in an atmosphere where ostentation was the rule. With precocious tact, which she owed either to her own glands or to Babet Cardel but scarcely to her mother, she established herself securely in this glittering and treacherous environment.

4

Prince Christian August had given his daughter a book as a parting gift. It was a treatise by a professor at Halle which discussed at tedious length the differences between religious creeds. He had prepared to go with this book a memorandum of instructions for his daughter’s use. It was headed: “Pro Memoria, so ich meiner gemahlen mitgegeben.” Somewhere along the route, how attentively can be imagined, Fike had read this document, and had written one of her primmest letters to dear Papa thanking him for his “gracious instructions.” The first half of the memorandum was taken up with religious counsel and the second half with her future marriage. The General’s style is an awkward contrast to the fluent preciosity of his wife. He addressed his daughter in the third person and outlined her future duties thus:

“Next to the Empress, her Majesty, she has to respect the Grand Duke above all as her Lord, Father, and Sovereign; and withal to win by care and tenderness at every opportunity his confidence and love. Her Lord and His will are to be preferred to all the pleasures and treasures of the world; and do nothing which he dislikes or which causes him only a little pain; and still less to insist on her own will.

“Never to enter into familiarity or badinage, but always have respect as much as possible.

“To regard the domestics and favorites of her Lord with a gracious mien; not to demand the services of her Lord but ever to respond to the favor and love of her Lord.

“To speak with no one alone in the audience chamber and to conduct herself always according to etiquette there.

“To detest and avoid playing cards for high stakes, which is a mark of avarice and self-interest.

“To take charge herself of the pocket money which may be given her, to guard it and to pay it out gradually to a servant on an account, in order that she may not submit herself to the trusteeship of a governess; to employ it for her use and pleasure, and with it to do good, in order that she may win for herself and not for others instead of her the love and inclination of her dependents.

“To intercede for no one, because one may not understand the laws and a one-sided report cannot be trusted, and the side discriminated against becomes a disgruntled enemy; and he whom one helps out with such intercessions forgets the good deed and goes and sins again.

“Especially to enter into no affairs of government in order not to irritate the Senate.”

At fifteen Fike was not mature enough to appreciate the irony of this document and probably she never came to be. The abject submissiveness which her father thought appropriate to her status as a wife had certainly never been exemplified by her vivacious mother. She must have been aware that her father played a minor part in the family life at Stettin and at Zerbst, but it was a condition in her little world which from sheer familiarity seemed only natural. What could be more normal than that the man of the family should be kept in leading strings? Few girls in her situation would have contrasted her father’s theories with his actions and Fike certainly did not.

Frederick the Great always kept the delusion that he had played the chief rôle in this German-Russian marriage. But he over-estimated his actual part. If Elisabeth had found it necessary to spirit the young Princess away against his royal will she would have done so. Since it was not necessary she welcomed his timely and useful aid. At the right moment Frederick promoted Prince Christian August to the post of Field Marshal, and after Fike had gone to Russia he helped to reconcile her father to her conversion. “My good Prince of Zerbst was very restive on this point,” he wrote. “I had a great deal of trouble in overcoming his religious scruples. He responded to all my representations with: ‘Meine Tochter nicht Griechisch werden!’” His struggles died away gradually under the tactful treatment of his free-thinking King who persuaded him that Greek and Lutheran were the same. “Lutherisch-Griechisch, Griechisch-Lutherisch, das gehet an,” the submissive General repeated. If the King of Prussia said so what else could a Prussian officer reply?

The marriage was made by three women. It was begun by the Princess of Zerbst and the Empress of Russia and carried through by the fifteen-year-old Fike who took charge of the campaign herself when her mother’s tactics failed. None of the men-folk who might have been expected to influence the situation did so. Those like Lestocq and the Prince of Zerbst who offered contrary advice were over-ridden. The others were permitted to play the part of benevolent bystanders.

[Illustration]

V

FIKE BECOMES CATHERINE

“My daughter,” wrote Fike’s father, “is already so well grounded in her religion that she knows the principles of the true redeeming faith, and that no one can win or attain it by his own works, vows or the words of the saints, but that all must proceed alone from the merit of Christ, the Son of God. Whatever resembles this faith she can herself prove and accept; the other not.... To compel or persuade my daughter to accept a strange religion in which she herself finds errors is never to be advised.... And rather eventually to give up the regency than to suffer offense in her conscience.”

These solemn words made a deep impression on the girl. The admonitions which related to her marriage, the Empress, and the Senate were not so serious. She felt herself able to cope with these concrete forces but the abstraction called conscience is a more terrifying thing. “I beseech you,” she wrote, replying to her father in his own vein, “to be assured that your admonitions and precepts will be forever implanted within my heart, as is the seed-corn of our holy religion in my soul. I pray God to give me the strength which I need to withstand the temptations to which I shall be subjected. Through the prayers of your Highness and of my dear mother, God will grant me this grace which my youth and weakness cannot give.”

Fike still believed when she penned these lines that she would be acceptable in Russia as an Evangelical Grand Duchess. In common with her God-fearing father she put her trust in the precedent supplied by the Grand Duchess Charlotte. Their trust was misplaced. Peter the Great was liberal in religious matters, but his daughter was orthodox. Peter did not himself go to church and took pleasure in exposing the sham miracles of the wonder-working Virgins of Russia who were able to shed real tears before their worshippers. His daughter did not inherit his skeptical spirit. She was loyal to the Russian Church and a lover of miracles. Her mother’s will provided that no one should occupy the Russian throne who did not profess the orthodox faith. Fike perceived the finality of this at once. “From my entrance into the empire,” she said, “I had been firmly convinced that the heavenly crown could not be separated from the earthly one.” On the threshold of her new life she was plunged into a conflict with her conscience. She wrestled with temptation and the scars of her struggle remained with her through life.

“The change of religion,” wrote Mardefeld to King Frederick, “gives the Princess infinite pain and her tears flow abundantly when she is alone with persons of whom she is not suspicious. Nevertheless ambition is gaining finally the upper hand.” Remembering the religious conflict of his own youth, Frederick was alarmed. But he put his faith in the Princess Johanna Elisabeth. “It only remains, Madame, for me to beg you to overcome the repugnance of your daughter for the Greek Church, after which you will have crowned your work.”

Fike was converted by Simon Todorsky. Having studied four years at the University of Halle, at that time a hot-bed of theology, he knew the language of Luther well. What was more to the point in dealing with the young person from Zerbst, Todorsky was familiar with the subtleties of higher criticism which the intellectuals of Halle had recently invented. These were things of which good Pastor Wagner, who, after all, was only an army chaplain, had never even dreamed. With the assistance of Todorsky’s hair-splitting, Fike was able to see that there was very little real difference between the Lutheran and the Greek Church. If only her father had not continued to harry her conscience. “Thou shouldest not take this trial frivolously,” he wrote, “must search thyself with care whether thou art really in thy heart inspired by inclination; or whether, perhaps, without thy being aware of it, the marks of favor shown thee by the Empress and other high-placed persons have influenced thee in that direction. We human beings often see only that which is before our eyes. But God in His infinite justice searches the heart and our secret motives, and manifests accordingly to us His mercy.”

As the awful shades of Judgment Day closed about her, Fike fell ill. Once before in childhood she had succumbed to an attack of religious terror complicated by pneumonia. In Russia she repeated the experience. “The physicians ascribe the disease,” wrote her mother, “to the inflaming of the blood caused by the hard journey.” For twenty-seven days the child hovered between life and death. In unconsciousness and delirium she made the decision which her father had urged her to weigh so carefully. Believing that Fike might die, the Princess suggested that a Lutheran clergyman should be called to her bedside. But the sick girl said, coming for a moment to consciousness, “Why? Call Simon Todorsky rather. I would like to speak with him.” It was a triumph of diplomacy, anyway presence of mind which was to carry Fike through every crisis of her life.

During her convalescence, Fike resumed her lessons with the Russian priest, a fact which her mother carefully concealed from the Prince of Zerbst. As soon as she was able to hold a pen, she wrote a stiff respectful letter to her father asking permission to change her religion. She sent her greetings to Uncle Johann Ludwig and promised to write to him by the next post. “My hand is still very weak,” she said, “so that I cannot do it to-day.” The two old Puritans at Zerbst with their white wigs and pious ways were vastly important to Fike although nobody else felt that they had to be conciliated.

In after years, when she had become Catherine the Great, Fike made light of the whole business of conversion. When her daughter-in-law had to go through the same experience, she spoke of it merely as a routine chore. “As soon as we have her here we shall go about the conversion. In order to convince her, we shall need about fourteen days. How much time will be needed to teach her to read the confession of faith correctly and distinctly in Russian, I do not know.” The fourteen days were taken from Fike’s own experience; it was after two weeks of Todorsky’s hair-splitting dogma that she had succumbed to pneumonia and the temptings of ambition. Though she could speak of her conversion so casually in after life it had almost killed her at the time. The great crimes of which she was accused as Empress made less impression on her conscience. As Catherine the Great she identified herself with Henri le Grand of France, that brilliant wayward monarch who changed his religion for the sake of a crown. It was only one of many ways in which she tried to justify her departure from her father’s church.

On the twenty-eighth of June, pale from a three days’ fast, Fike was confirmed and re-christened. The Empress had a gown made for her exactly like her own, of red _gros de Tour_ worked with silver. Her godmother was the aged Abbess of the Novodeviche Convent, bowed with years and steeped in sanctity. The Empress with her fondness for tableaux, had arranged all. Krazny, the gorgeous red so beloved by the Russians, dominated the scene. Kneeling on a big square cushion, the convert recited the creed in a clear unfaltering voice. She had learned it, she says, “by heart, like a parrot.” Indeed she had learned it twice, for Simon Todorsky, the priest, had taught her the Ukrainian pronounciation, and Basil Adadurov, the tutor, had taught her the Russian. For the public ceremony she chose the Russian. As her clear young voice rang out in the first response, the tears of the assembled company gushed forth. Fike maintained her self-control, which gave an impression of deep sincerity and religious fervor and was much praised. “Her bearing from the moment when she first entered the church,” wrote her mother, “and throughout the entire ceremony was so full of nobility and dignity that I should have admired her had she not been to me that which she is.”

Standing before her in embroidered and bejewelled robes, the Archbishop of Novgorod intoned: “Wherefore art thou come to the Holy Orthodox Church of God and what seekest thou from her?” And Fike recited in stereo-typed phrases a long melodious creed, in which among other things she professed: “I believe and confess that faith alone is not sufficient for our justification, but that good works also which proceed from faith and charity, withal as badges of Christ are necessary to salvation; without the same faith is dead according to the testimony of holy writ....

“I believe and confess that the pictures of Christ and the mother of God, the Virgin Mary, as those of other saints should be preserved and should be duly venerated, but should not be worshipped.”