Part 9

The Empress’s irritation made her variable temper more variable than ever. She grew more restless and eccentric. Every day she had the furniture shifted in her apartments. Her people were left waiting hours and days for orders which she delayed for mere whims. Once the Grand Duchess remained sitting upright on a chair fully dressed for early mass while the hours slowly passed from four o’clock in the morning to three o’clock in the afternoon. The Empress had summoned her to go to church but had changed her mind at the last moment and gone to the bath instead.

The wishes of the young court were never consulted, even formally, about anything. A favorite attendant would vanish overnight and be heard of next in Astrakhan, Orenburg or Kazan whither he had been banished. Always, Catherine says, the exiles passed first through the court called the Secret Chancellary, a form of inquisition which was the terror and horror of Russia at the time. One day the Grand Duke’s Holstein servants were suddenly sent back to Germany without warning, and he was left alone with Russians whom he detested. Another day Catherine’s attendant, Madame Kruse, who happened also to be a Holsteiner, was suddenly dismissed and replaced by Madame Vladislav, who was a Russian. The Empress had apparently hit upon the forlorn hope that it might be German influence which kept the young couple sterile.

Catherine’s new woman, Prascovia Nikitichna Vladislav, made an important contribution to her education. Prascovia was about fifty and her gossip about the Russian grandees and their families went back to the time of Peter the Great. Catherine was fascinated by these histories which gave her the orientation in Russia that she needed. Peter would not listen to Prascovia. He was homesick for Holstein and as the German group which once surrounded him grew less and less and finally disappeared completely, his Heimweh increased. The last to go was Baron Lestocq, who was imprisoned for five years in the Fortress of Saint Peter and Saint Paul and finally banished to Uglitch. The Empress was done with Germans for all time.

Catherine seemed to forget very easily the old friends of her mother’s party and to pass on quickly to an alliance with the Russians. In time she found herself and Bestushev, the official enemy of that party, on the same side and even united in their political schemes. She had an elasticity of temperament which was her one salvation in her trying circumstances. For there is no denying they were intensely trying. “For eighteen years,” she writes, “I have led a life from which ten others would have gone insane and twenty in my place would have died of melancholy.”

The petty persecutions of the Empress were the only thing that drew the young couple together. When Catherine was scolded by her duenna, Peter flared up in her defence. In return, Catherine gave Peter advice and comfort when he fled to her in terror at the threats of the Empress and his governors. But Catherine found his fears excessive; with a certain detachment and objectivity she recognized that they were beyond the ordinary and uncontrollable. She wondered at this trait at first and yet sympathized with him; but later on when other things had come between them, her wonder changed to scorn. Her story of the Grand Duke and his abhorrence of the Russian bath shows that she early appreciated the dangers into which the young man’s stubbornness was leading him.

During the first week of Lent, the Empress ordered Catherine and Peter to go to the steam bath, as a part of the regular preparation for communion. The Grand Duke excitedly refused. He would not enter the bath; he had never been there before and it was a ridiculous ceremony anyhow to which he attached no significance. Besides, the bath was harmful and would make him ill. “He did not wish to die; his life was his most precious possession. The Empress could never force him to the point of going there.” To all this Madame Choglokov replied with equal heat. She threatened the young man with the fortress of Saint Peter and Saint Paul and reminded him that the son of Peter the Great had perished from disobedience. “Much of this,” Catherine reflected, watching Madame Choglokov, “comes from herself but much is from the Empress. I came to the conclusion that the threat of the fortress must have come from the monarch and I saw in it a sign of her strong resentment against the Grand Duke.”

The mischief-making Maria reported all this back to the Empress, whose wrath flared out in her usual strong language: “Very good; if he is so disobedient toward me, I will not kiss his damned hand any more.” This was faithfully carried back to the Grand Duke who said, “That depends on herself. But I will never go into the bath. I cannot bear the heat.” The Empress kept her word and her nephew kept his. Yet she never gave up the attempt to force him into the bath. He was not again threatened with the fortress, but he always felt the threat lurking in the background. The quarrel made a great impression on the Grand Duchess who tells of it at length in her memoirs. She regarded it correctly as a symptom of something extreme in his character, but she could not understand it. Her common sense was baffled by the behaviour of a youth who feared the Russian bath more than he feared imprisonment in a fortress. In his obstinacy and excitement, Peter gave various reasons for refusing to obey the Empress but he scarcely gave the real one. The Russian bath was a social affair, participated in by naked men and women. The custom, a mere everyday fact in Russia, was regarded with horror in Germany and the rest of Europe. The young Grand Duke was still a German and, without being clearly aware of why he felt that way, he dreaded the exposure and found it unendurable. Imprisonment was a trifle by comparison. The Grand Duchess took this hurdle as she took others in her new life. She had been brought up a puritan and a protestant. But she no longer lived in Zerbst; she lived in Russia and did as the Russians did. The Grand Duke continued to dwell in an imaginary Holstein of his own which was as different as possible from the Russia which lay around him.

4

Elisabeth’s capriciousness increased. Having changed her furniture and everything else in her environment that could be changed, at last she changed her favorite. The easy-going Razumovsky was displaced and relegated with honors and riches to private life. There is a tradition that the Count had been secretly married to Elisabeth. Whether this be true or not does not matter much. The time had come for him to go. The discarded lover retired to the Anitchkov Palace which the Empress had built for him and where he dreamed away his life for another twenty years. Razumovsky was a charming decoration on the early reign of Elisabeth Petrovna. He was wholly impractical and without ambition of any kind, a poetic indolent Ukrainian. He was loyal to his mistress to the end and devoted to her successor, Catherine the Great.

Ivan Ivanovich Shuvalov, the new favorite, was a cousin. As the Empress grew older she suffered increasingly from melancholy which she strove to lighten by drawing the circle of relatives closer around her. Ivan Ivanovich was ably supported in his new duties by his family. He had a sister, a cheerful person whom the Empress relied upon to rescue her from low spirits. He had besides two brothers who guarded him on both flanks and reaped a rich harvest of monopolies. The Shuvalov brothers were ambitious and grasping as the Razumovskys had never been. Their advent made a great difference at court, for the Empress, who became more indolent and fantastic every day, gave more and more power to the Shuvalovs. She had failed in her dearest scheme: her nephew and successor, the Grand Duke Peter, had no heir.

With the year 1750 the problem of an heir seemed to grow desperate. In the Grand Ducal camp a realistic view was growing up. It was represented chiefly by Madame Vladislav, Catherine’s lady-in-waiting, and by the mother of young Sergei Saltikov, a young chamberlain of the Grand Duke. Slowly the idea took shape without anybody’s expressing it that the Grand Duchess might, by merely transgressing her marriage vows, redeem the situation. By some means this idea was insinuated into the heads of the stupid Choglokovs who afterwards thought they had invented it. Maria Choglokov suggested it to Catherine; put it to her, so to speak, as her patriotic duty. It seems rather odd that all of them had been so slow in coming to this plan. Apparently Catherine would have gone on indefinitely in the dilemma if the older married women had not finally suggested a way out.

Catherine wrote two accounts of her affair with Sergei Saltikov. One was set down only three or four years after it was over, and the other she wrote in her old age. The old lady’s story is a lively romance, portraying an ardent courtship, a horseback ride, a lonely island, and an importunate lover. The young woman’s story is less romantic and more political. She says in this version: “Madame Choglokov used all possible arts of persuasion to seduce me. This and the attractiveness and talents of him for whom she spoke would have found less resistance in another than in me. It is really true that I was distinguished by discretion and exemplary innocence.”

Sergei Saltikov was a merry and irresponsible youth without ulterior ambitions. His relations with the Grand Duchess began in the year 1752, In December of that year the Grand Duchess reported miscarriage. The following July the same misfortune befell her. She seemed doomed to bad luck and delay. Not until the 20th of September, 1754, did she actually become a mother. On that date she bore a son. “There was inexpressible joy over it,” is her laconic comment. It was about this time, according to her memoirs, that her skull-bones closed up.

Whether the Empress was aware of the intrigue between Catherine and Sergei Saltikov we do not know. We do know, however, that with the year 1754 her attitude toward the young count underwent a decided change. Choglokov and his wife saw great possibilities for the future, hoping to reap the credit for the new and gratifying turn of events. When the Empress began to turn a friendly gaze upon the young court, Choglokov lost his head and tried to woo her. Catherine admits that she and her mischievous Sergei encouraged this indiscretion which invited dangers unforeseen by their inexperience and youth. The brothers Shuvalov were strongly intrenched and were ready to make short shrift of any rival. At a masquerade ball, the softened Empress encouraged Choglokov with tender glances. Ivan Ivanovich, the favorite, saw them and his clan closed in around her, at once, and insidiously. In the end Choglokov was insulted by the Empress in public. “She called him,” says Catherine, “in a public conversation at dinner a blockhead and a traitor, which he so took to heart that he fell into the jaundice. Kandoid, the Shuvalov’s man, was called in, and, as he had long known that the patient was an enemy of theirs, believed that he would do them a favor by murdering him. At least all the doctors who were called in during his last days maintained that he had been treated like a creature whom one wished to kill. Four days after his death his wife was told that she could remain in Moscow.... I believe that Saltikov would have been banished at that time too if I had not been pregnant and they had not feared to afflict me with this grief.”

At last the midwife declared that the moment was at hand. The Empress, who occupied adjoining chambers, was summoned from her bed at two o’clock in the morning. She swept upon the scene in a mantle of blue satin, for the room was cold with the chill of a late September dawn. At noonday the child was born. The Empress waited only for the midwife to bathe and swaddle the infant. Then she called the priest and had him christened Paul. This was the name of the first child born to her mother and Peter the Great, a bastard son who had died at the age of three. Commanding the midwife to carry the child in front of her, the Empress retired to her own apartments where she arranged a nursery and cared for him with her own hands. If he whimpered she ran to him at once; her devotion became the subject of wide comment and general praise. It gave rise to the rumor that the child was actually Elisabeth’s own and not Catherine’s at all. The Empress was not displeased with the rumor; there were moments in her last years, years given over to vapors and moods, when she almost believed the myth herself. That she had done violence to the young mother in kidnapping her child never entered her head. She asked Maria Theresa of Austria, that prolific mother whom she had always envied, to be godmother to her child. Austria should realize that Russia also had an heir.

5

Very little is known of the father of Paul. The unhappy life of Catherine’s son and his final insanity have set many writers and historians at work discussing his heredity. But they always have assumed that his father was Peter III and that his grandfather was Peter the Great. If this were true, the deficiencies of Catherine’s son would be easy to explain, for heredity on the Romanov side left much to be desired. Peter the Great had a weak-witted brother and Peter III had a mental twist. But all this has nothing to do with Paul, who was not a Romanov but a Saltikov.

We must rely upon Catherine’s memoirs for the little that we know about the Saltikovs. Sergei and Peter were brothers in the service of the Grand Duke. Their father was the General Saltikov who had welcomed Catherine and her mother in Riga on their way to Russia. The mother of the Saltikov brothers had been a Princess Galitsin and a loyal helper of the Empress Elisabeth when Elisabeth seized the throne. The tradition is that Maria Saltikov had squandered her virtue for Elisabeth’s cause. However this may have been, the Empress was devoted to this lady and attached her two sons to the court of the Grand Duke. Sergei was a great favorite of Peter’s and often slept with him. At the time when Maria Saltikov promoted the affair between her son and the Grand Duchess she was a confirmed invalid, but she seems to have kept her initiative and energy to the last. As she had helped her Empress gain a throne she now stood ready to help her gain an heir for it.

Sergei Saltikov was a typical ne’er-do-well. Catherine tried to make the most of her lover in her memoirs but not a great deal could be made of him. He was a merry fellow, a brunet, who said of himself when he was once attired in a silver costume that he looked “like a fly in the milk.” Catherine says of him that he “was beautiful as the day; no one could compare with him, even in the great court, still less in our own. He was not without spirit and possessed those charming manners which one acquires from living in the world of fashion and especially at the court. In the year 1752 he was twenty-six years old. His birth and other qualities made him an outstanding personality. He had his faults, which he knew how to conceal; his greatest faults were a tendency to intrigue and a lack of strong principles. This however was unknown to me at that time.”

She then passes on to his brother Peter, whom she presents in quite a different light. Peter “was a fool in the fullest sense of the word, and had the most stupid physiognomy that I have ever seen in my life: great leaden eyes, a turned-up nose, a mouth always half open. Besides he was a terrible tattle-tale.” Evidently Peter was no credit to the Saltikov family. Yet he happened to be the uncle of her son.

It was afterwards said of Paul, when he became Paul I of Russia, that his physiognomy with its turned-up nose was considered even by himself too ugly to be imprinted on his coins; and that when the crowds of Paris gathered to look at him they cried out, “My God, how ugly he is!” His looks, we might fairly conclude, were a gift which the bad fairies of heredity had borrowed from Uncle Peter. There were other disadvantages which the bad fairies doubtless took from the Saltikov family, for Paul was afflicted in several ways which always remained a puzzle to his mother.

[Illustration]

VII

PONIATOVSKY

After the birth of her son, the Grand Duchess recuperated but slowly. The icy winds from the Neva penetrated her apartment and she suffered continually from colds. She was querulous. Her chamber, in which she was obliged to pass all her time as a convalescent, was too small. Eight archins in one direction and four in the other, it measured but little more than the humble room in Stettin in which Catherine herself had been born. As a Grand Duchess, she resented these narrow walls; she resented the badly drawn pictures on the tiles of her Dutch stove; she resented the Grand Duke’s tobacco smoke which invaded her premises; and she resented the “wretched pieces of jewelry” which the Empress had been pleased to give her. The present of a hundred thousand rubles which accompanied the jewels was the sole bright lining of her cloud. Catherine always needed money.

But even this joy was tarnished by the fact that the Empress immediately borrowed the whole sum back again and did not repay her until the following January. The Empress recalled the money because the Grand Duke, on hearing that his wife had received it, raised a great outcry on his own behalf. As there was no money in the treasury with which to silence him, the Empress hastily sent to the Grand Duchess and asked for the loan of her treasure. Obviously Catherine was in no position to refuse; besides she eventually got it back again. It was not so with her baby, which the Empress had taken away without once saying by your leave and which was never restored to her. Here also, apparently, the young mother believed herself in no position to refuse, for she allowed the Empress to rob her without a single protest. Her acquiescence was complete. She was permitted to see the child but rarely, and when she did consoled herself with criticisms of the way his foster-mother took care of him. “From sheer over-carefulness, he was literally smothered. He lay in a very hot room entirely wrapped in flannel, in a crib made of black fox fur and covered with a wadded satin coverlet. Above this was a red velvet coverlet lined with black fox fur.... The sweat ran down his face and down his whole body.” Yet she made no attempt to rescue him. To try it would have been useless, for the autocrat of all the Russias was easily supreme in her own household. Catherine also probably had too little confidence in her own rights of possession.

Three weeks after the child’s birth, Saltikov was sent to Sweden to announce the event. “That depressed me greatly,” says Catherine, “because I was thereby exposed to the talk of the whole world.” She must have felt even at that early date that her secret was pretty widely known. It could have been no comfort to her, sitting alone in her little drafty, smoke-filled room, to hear, as she soon did, that the frivolous Saltikov was continuing his Don Juan career in the Swedish capital. “I held fast to what I had begun,” she writes, “less from inclination than from steadfastness, and worked for his return, tirelessly conquering obstacles and battling with all my strength against every hindrance.” Through her new alliance with Bestushev success was achieved. Sergei Saltikov returned to Petersburg during the Carnival season.

With great difficulty the Grand Duchess arranged a rendezvous and waited until three o’clock in the morning for a lover who never came. There was an elaborate explanation, how he had been dragged into a Freemason lodge by one of the Dolgorukys, and could not escape. But the Grand Duchess, much as if she had been an honest wife, was not deceived. She no longer opposed the plan which had been suggested of sending Saltikov to Hamburg as resident envoy. His departure was delayed from week to week, but Catherine’s influence was not causing the delay. The Empress did not get around to signing his official papers, and this was what kept the young man waiting. Elisabeth Petrovna was growing more and more dilatory every day in the performance of her duties, more and more irregular in her habits, more and more uncertain in her health. Her passionate attachment to the baby in the fox-fur cradle had not given her the new lease on life which might have been expected.

The effect of Saltikov’s neglect on the feelings of the Grand Duchess was soon apparent. She says in her memoirs that, brooding in her winter of solitude, she decided definitely to assert herself, to let her environment know that she would not suffer insult without retaliation. Had she not after all risen to her supreme obligation? Had she not given to Russia an heir? She was entitled to consideration and was determined to have it. Looking about for a scapegoat, she did not have far to seek. Saltikov was safely out of reach in Hamburg and the Empress was rapt in her phantasy cloud. But the brothers Shuvalov remained within reach, and she found to her joy that they were vulnerable. Neither of the brothers was clever and Alexander was disfigured by a grimace--an ugly facial _tic_. It was easy to make people laugh at the Shuvalovs and her _bon mots_ at their expense ran through the town like wild-fire. She says that her attack was supported by Count Razumovsky, ex-favorite of the Empress, and his brother Kyril. But their support must have been weak, however willing. The two Razumovskys were artists and dreamers and feeble fighters even for their own cause.

Catherine throve on her new aggressiveness. Soon another enemy was added to her list. A mysterious Herr Brockdorf had come up from Holstein and had quietly established himself in the retinue of the Grand Duke. The Grand Duchess did not like Herr Brockdorf and pursued him with her mockery. She gave him a nickname, “Baba-ptitza” (a pelican for ugliness!) and wherever the somber Holsteiner went he heard it whispered after him.

2

Following the birth of Paul, the breach between the Grand Duke and the Grand Duchess widened. “After my confinement,” says Catherine in her memoirs, “he usually slept in his own chamber.” The change of habit broke the only tie which existed between them. For nine years he had slept in chastity beside his wife. But something disturbing, incomprehensible had come between them, and he was no longer at ease in his wife’s bed. He made futile efforts to attach himself to other ladies of the court, but his enthusiasm wandered and failed to strike root anywhere. His interest in military occupations began to absorb all others.