Part 8

At ten o’clock, the Empress herself conducted the young people to their apartment and left the Grand Duchess with her maidens. She was relieved of her burdensome wedding garments and put to bed beneath a velvet coverlet. “All of them went away,” Catherine’s narrative relates, “I remained alone more than two hours and did not know what I should do. Should I get up again? Should I remain in bed? I knew nothing. Finally my new lady of honor, Madame Kruse, came and informed me with great merriment that the Grand Duke was waiting for his supper which was about to be carried up to him. After his Imperial Highness had supped well, he came to bed; and as he laid himself down, he began to talk of how it would amuse his servant in the morning to see us both in bed. Then he fell asleep and slept soundly until the next morning. The cloths of fine linen on which I lay were very uncomfortable owing to the summer weather and consequently I slept badly; all the more as the morning gray of the daylight disturbed me considerably, for the bed had no curtains, although otherwise furnished magnificently in red velvet with silver embroidery. Madame Kruse attempted the next morning to question us young married people. Her hopes however proved unfounded. And in this condition our affairs remained during the next nine years without the least change.”

The Empress was not satisfied with one day’s celebration of the marriage. The festivities were prolonged for ten days. The streets were given over to merry-making; heralds on horseback, fountains spouting wine, fire-works and white nights, and all the bells and cannons of Petersburg made a continuous carnival. An unbroken succession of dinners, operas, masquerades, and quadrilles crowded upon each other.

The Princess of Zerbst was hard put to it to describe these festivities adequately to her spouse. For he was not present. Somehow the invitation which should have brought the Prince of Zerbst to his daughter’s wedding had never been sent. He had expected it from week to week, since Frederick had told them that it would surely come. In the end, the old Prince was overlooked and had to console himself with his wife’s description of his daughter’s wedding. The exuberant Princess wrote, “The Grand Duchess sends you her respects, but has no time to write, since it is still so new for her to be with her husband. They can scarcely be separated for a quarter of an hour.”

The little Grand Duchess moved through everything like an automaton. She stepped through the white and gold quadrilles with tears in her eyes. “Never in my life,” said she afterward, “have I seen a more woeful and stupid amusement than were those quadrilles.” The beginning of her honeymoon was just as woeful. “After my wedding,” she said, “I felt best when I was with my mother. I strove all the more eagerly to stay with her as my household could scarcely be called pleasant. The Grand Duke had nothing but child’s play in his head; he gave himself up to playing at soldiers, surrounded by his menials in whom alone he showed any interest.”

[Illustration]

VI

CATHERINE BECOMES A MOTHER

Two weeks after the wedding, the Empress sent the young married pair with the Princess of Zerbst to Czarskoe Selo. It was the month of September and the birches were turning to gold. But the bride had suddenly lost her enthusiasm for the Russian scene. For the first time she was homesick for Germany and dreaded the moment of her mother’s departure. “At that time I would have given much if I could have left the country with her.”

She was sustained, however, by a new sense of power and importance which came from having money in her pocket. This enabled her to patronize her mother by assuming her debts, for the extravagant Princess had obligations amounting to seventy thousand rubles and no idea how she was ever going to meet them. Catherine promised to pay in her mother’s stead a sum which was absurdly beyond her means, for the Empress allowed her only thirty thousand rubles a year. Lifted so suddenly from the meager circumstances of her Stettin life, the Grand Duchess had no measure for her newly acquired riches. They seemed to her limitless. Of course she was in a position to come to her mother’s assistance and she came. Even if her new husband did not love her she was a rich woman now and could afford to be generous. This was the beginning of a labyrinth of debt in which she progressively involved herself until it brought her within a few years to the verge of bankruptcy.

At the end of September the Princess of Zerbst and Fräulein Khayn set forth on their homeward journey. They were laden with presents from the Empress. Two chests filled with Chinese and Damascene stuffs accompanied the travellers; and to console the long-neglected Prince of Zerbst, his wife carried with her as gifts from the Grand Duke diamond shoe-buckles, diamond coat-buttons, and a diamond-studded dagger. The party was escorted by Catherine and Peter as far as Krasnoe-Selo, the old Red Village of the Czars, where the Princess and her daughter saw each other for the last time. “I wept a great deal,” says Catherine, “and in order not to make me still more sad my mother went away without taking leave of me.”

As soon as she arrived home, the Grand Duchess went to find her favorite maiden Maria Petrovna Shukov, to comfort her in her loneliness. But the girl had disappeared during Catherine’s absence. It developed that she had been sent away at the suggestion of the Princess of Zerbst. The Princess and the Empress had put their heads together over the unpromising status of the newly-made marriage and the banishment of Maria was the result. They remembered the part which Julie von Mengden had played in alienating the former regent, Anna Leopoldovna, from her husband, and they feared that Maria Shukov might play a similar part by increasing the estrangement between Catherine and Peter. The Grand Duchess learned then that she could never have a confidante in the future.

Anything which reminded Elisabeth of Anna Leopoldovna’s family was hateful to her. She wished to forget the deposed Regent if possible, but the wretched woman, as if to revenge herself on the Empress, had continued to increase her family at regular intervals. Four children had been born to her at Kolmogory, two of whom were sons. The Major in charge sent a faithful report of each birth to the Empress, who tore his reports to pieces. At last he sent a report which she did not tear into pieces. The prolific Anna had died in childbed. The Empress gave orders that the body of the deceased Regent should be dissected, and brought to Petersburg for burial. Accompanied by the Grand Duchess, both draped in heavy black, she attended the funeral ceremonies in the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral where the ill-starred Anna was laid to rest between her grandmother and her mother. Her grandmother was the old Czarina Prascovia Feodorovna, who had laid a curse on her daughter, and her mother was the daughter who had been cursed. The unlucky Anna weighed on Catherine’s conscience not a little.

The death of Anna occurred about nine months after the marriage of the Grand Ducal pair. The Empress gave them another month of grace while she repaired with her favorite to spend May at Czarskoe Selo. Presently she returned, advancing upon the sterile couple like a threatening Juno. She had apparently expected that the Grand Duchess would, without preliminary warning or symptoms, present her with a Romanov heir in the ninth month after marriage. Disappointed in her hopes, she took drastic measures to remedy the situation.

This time it was Bestushev and the Empress who put their heads together. Bestushev, it will be remembered, had not favored this marriage and Elisabeth’s discontentment with its results directed her thoughts toward him. At her wits’ end, she asked him to devise a régime, a program, for the young people, which he did with spirit and enthusiasm. He gave the Empress an elaborate memorandum concerning the behaviour of the Grand Duchess and a still more elaborate memorandum concerning the behaviour of the Grand Duke. The instructions were for the use of the guardians who were to take charge of the pair. Bestushev’s document rehearsed at length the faults of the Grand Duke: his disrespectful behaviour in church; his weakness for toys and tin soldiers; his familiarity with pages and lackeys; his low language, his grimaces, his indecencies at table. In short, the Vice-Chancellor drew a picture of the Russian heir-apparent that might have been mistaken for the portrait of a child in bibs. All of its statements are confirmed by Catherine in her memoirs. The rules which he prepared for the Grand Duchess consisted entirely of prohibitions, chief of which was a ban on all private correspondence with her mother, the Princess of Zerbst. This drove the girl to underground communications in which she became at last very skilful and learned to use it for political ends.

The keystone of the new régime was the appointment of a married couple as guardians. The Choglokovs were chosen for special reasons. Maria Choglokov had married her husband for love and was known to all the court as the pattern of a faithful and devoted wife. Bestushev brought the young matron to the Grand Duchess’s apartment and introduced her as the new governess or duenna. “Immediately,” says Catherine, “I began to weep violently.” This did not help to ingratiate her governess. The atmosphere became hysterical. Catherine went to bed for a whole day and had to be bled the next morning. The Empress came and scolded angrily. Young wives who did not love their husbands always wept; Catherine’s mother had assured her that Catherine had no objection to marrying the Grand Duke; she, the Empress, had not forced her to marry him; and, finally, now that they were already married there was no use in crying about it. Thoroughly frightened at the Empress’s display of temper, Catherine murmured, “Little mother, forgive me, I am in the wrong.” She feared that the Empress would actually beat her as she did sometimes beat the ladies and gentlemen of the court.

The new duenna performed her duties well, setting the good example which the Empress had expected of her. “From 1746 until the death of her husband,” says Catherine, “who died in the year 1754, we really never saw her except pregnant or in childbed.” The Grand Duchess hated the prolific Maria and no wonder. Scarcely was the wretched Anna Leopoldovna well underground than this new and vivid reproach sprang up before her very eyes. The Kolmogory family had been at least invisible but Maria’s babies were born under her very eyes and were heralded as important public events. Bestushev wrote to Count Vorontsov in London, “In these days it has pleased her Imperial Majesty to commission Nicolai Naumovich Choglokov to journey to the Roman Emperor to congratulate him on the attainment of his high distinction; he will not, however, depart before his wife has been delivered; that is, the middle of March.” On the 14th of March Bestushev added: “In these days Maria Semionovna ... has given birth to an infant daughter. And Nicolai Naumovich will depart soon from here to Vienna.”

The Empress hoped apparently that Maria’s fertility was something which the Grand Duchess might acquire by association and imitation. Yet year after year passed by and the miracle did not happen. Catherine remained childless while Maria bore a child every year. In writing her memoirs drops of gall fall from her pen whenever she speaks of the Choglokovs. “Although he was loved so much he was not at all lovable. Of all the people in the world, he was the most puffed up and conceited; he thought himself extraordinarily beautiful and clever. He was a stupid coxcomb, arrogant and spiteful, and at the least quite as malicious as his wife, who was so not a little.” The Grand Duchess allowed herself small revenges that were not quite refined. One of her maidens had a trick of imitating with a pillow the walk of the pregnant Maria. Catherine encouraged her in this performance by peals of appreciative laughter. Her spitefulness extended itself to Maria’s sister Marfa. “How far the stupidity of this woman went is shown by the following pretty story: she was quite astonished at the cleverness of the midwife who prophesied that she would bring either a boy or a girl into the world. She could not understand whence the midwife had this knowledge.”

Madame Choglokov and her sister were Skavronskys, nieces of the Empress. They represented the stock from which Elisabeth had sprung on her mother’s side. The Skavronskys were more prominent in the Empress’s environment than the Romanov side of her family, and Catherine liked to remember that the Empress was a Skavronsky. The houses of Zerbst and Holstein, although impoverished, did not produce women as weak-witted as the Empress’s nieces. Catherine found in that comparison a satisfaction for her resentment and jealousy.

2

Her memoirs describe a nine-years’ purgatory of mental and physical suffering. She says but little of her attitude toward the Grand Duke but that little is significant. When the Empress accused her of not loving him, she spoke the truth, for Catherine says herself that, as a protection against jealousy she schooled herself to be indifferent toward her husband.

Peter, who had all the pride which goes with a weak personality, tried to console himself in the usual way. He became a good deal of a ladies’ man. In tender glances and in compliments he was not at all backward; he could give an excellent imitation of a young man in love. His pose was so good that it deceived his aunt and humiliated his wife. He became better and better at it. Finally he entered into a relationship with Elisabeth Vorontsov who came to be regarded as a real mistress. Catherine knew that Peter was incompetent to have a physical relationship but she realized that others did not know it. As Peter’s affectations grew his actual condition became worse. Nor did the stony indifference of his wife help to make bad matters any better. On the contrary, it helped to make them worse. The Grand Duke crystallized into a little manikin incapable of feelings of any kind.

Catherine’s life was full of illness and hypochondria. A catalogue of her ailments can be made up from her reminiscences. She fills up pages with stories of headaches, toothaches, insomnia, influenza and measles. She describes these afflictions with a serious attention to detail which she scarcely achieved in describing the Turkish Wars of her later years. She says impressively that her colds were so severe that she used twelve pocket-handkerchiefs a day. At one time her physician thought she had tuberculosis. He ordered her to bed and put her on a diet of ass’s milk. She suffered from a consuming fear of smallpox and every time anything went wrong with her she believed herself stricken. Once it turned out only to be measles, but her spots, she assures us, were as large as rubles. All of her illnesses and afflictions during those years were the worst that could be suffered and survived.

The story of her skull-bones has a dramatic climax and a happy ending. “During this entire year,” says the heroine, “I suffered continually from headache and sleeplessness. Madame Kruse brought me as a so-called medicine a glass of Hungarian wine after I lay in bed, which I was supposed to drink regularly every evening. I refused this remedy for sleeplessness and Frau Kruse drank it in my stead and to my health. After I had returned to the city, I complained to Dr. Boerhaave of my sufferings. He was a very sympathetic man; he also knew the kind of life I lived and knew my relation to my husband as well as to my environment. He bade me show him my head some morning before my hair was dressed and carefully he went over the skull. Finally he said that, although I was seventeen years old, my head had the formation of a six-year-old child; that I must be very careful and never allow the upper part of my skull to get cold; in short, the bones of my head had never yet closed up. He believed that the bones would only close up when I had reached the age of twenty-five or twenty-six and that this was the cause of my headaches. I followed his advice and it was a fact that the separation between the skull-bones disappeared only when I was twenty-five or twenty-six years old as he had prophesied.”

This happy cure of Catherine’s skull coincided with the birth of her first child which occurred when she was halfway between twenty-five and twenty-six. Apparently her physician was also something of a fortune-teller who could read the future, predict events, and give accurate dates.

Catherine pictures her experience with toothache and tooth-pulling with more than Russian realism. Twenty-five years after she had lost a tooth, she could seat herself at her writing table and recall in fancy the painful moment when her physician and her surgeon and a male assistant had removed it. After the operation was completed it was discovered that the Grand Duchess had lost a piece of jaw-bone “as large as a ten-sous piece.” The surgeon wished to examine the wound but the patient would not allow him to touch her. “I learned then,” she says, “that the pain which one suffers often creates hatred toward the one who causes it.” In the midst of her absorption in her tragedies, Catherine was capable of flashes of psychological insight.

“My situation was really not to be laughed at,” she says. “I stood completely isolated among all the people there. Meantime I had accustomed myself to it; the reading of good books and my cheerful turn of temperament helped me easily over the situation. Besides I had a presentiment of future destiny which gave me courage to bear all that I had to bear and to endure daily unpleasantries from more than one side. Already I wept much less when I was alone than in the first years.”

The Empress had given Oranienbaum to Peter for a summer residence. Here the young people led a comparatively free life. Catherine used her freedom to go duck-hunting, rising at three o’clock in the morning to pursue her sport. With one old man for an attendant, she sometimes took a boat and followed her game far out into the open waters of the Finnish gulf. As she roamed about alone in the white light of the summer dawn, her romantic musings were mingled with ambitious thoughts. “At that time I read only romances which heated my phantasy, of which verily I had no need.” She wore men’s clothes on her shooting expeditions, as Elisabeth had once done before she became Empress. But her thoughts were occupied far more than Elisabeth’s had ever been with thoughts of the crown and the succession.

Sometimes for as much as thirteen hours a day she rode horseback. It was an exercise which she passionately loved. Whenever she touches on the subject of her skill as a rider, her vanity gets entirely out of hand. Her prowess was such that her riding master wept tears of enthusiasm and, speechless with joy, could only run to kiss her riding-boot. The actress in blue velvet whom little Fike had seen at the age of three could hardly have expected more! Catherine’s horseback riding soon became another source of conflict between herself and the Empress. She preferred to ride astride and the Empress feared that this might be the reason why she had no children. The Empress forbade the practice and Catherine did not dare to disobey her openly. But she had an English saddle made with a movable pommel, so that she could ride either sidewise or astride. When safely out of sight of the Empress and her nasty Skavronsky relations, she rode as she pleased.

3

In Bestushev and his drastic Instructions, Elisabeth had exhausted her last resource of discipline. But her disappointment and chagrin caused her to continue in a thousand petty ways to harass the Grand Ducal pair. They were kept on a nursery régime of liberties. Neither of them was allowed to leave the house even for a drive without the express permission of the Empress. She regulated their slightest movements, ordering them from the Winter Palace to the Summer Palace or from Petersburg to Oranienbaum without a moment’s notice. Sometimes she allowed them to form a part of her entourage when she took a journey. Catherine complains, however, that the Empress always omitted her from her hunting parties, although she knew how passionately the Grand Duchess loved to ride and shoot. On the other hand the Empress always remembered to include her in her religious pilgrimages.

Catherine describes Elisabeth’s excursions in a rather critical spirit. There was for instance a trip to Reval when she had to sleep in a kitchen where bread was being baked and where the ovens sent out a terrible heat. Sometimes the Empress’s party spent the night in tents and Catherine recalls rather scornfully those forlorn occasions when storms came on and the wind blew out the torches and the rain soaked the finery of the courtiers. Once they went to visit a Wonder-working Virgin in a holy cloister but she could not possibly be seen because the boards on which she was painted were covered with black filth. In this carping spirit Catherine described the Empress’s best shows, and yet she felt surprised and injured because the Empress did not like her. “Her dislike of me,” she said, “has increased from year to year, although my entire aim has been to please her in everything. The Grand Duke is a witness that I have done everything to persuade him also to do this. My respect, my obedience in all that she has wished, has been carried to the uttermost limit to which a human being can carry it.” Yet the Empress called her, “Ochen upriany,” very stubborn, and refused to see her for weeks and months at a time.

During the second spring following her marriage, Catherine received the news of her father’s death. The Prince had died of a stroke of apoplexy. Catherine wept so violently and long that the doctors came and bled her. Still she wept on. The Empress grew impatient and finally sent word through Madame Choglokov that Catherine should dry her tears. “My father had been no King, and the loss was not so great.... But to the credit of her Majesty, I cannot believe that the woman said to me what she had been commanded to say, for that did not exactly show goodness of heart!” Catherine was allowed to wear mourning for only six weeks and was limited to mere black silk instead of crêpe. “I must confess,” writes Catherine, “that to-day (twenty-five years later) I cannot think of it without rebellion in my heart.”