THE PEASANT AND THE EMPRESS
Many an autocrat of Russia has shown a truly sovereign contempt for
convention in the choice of his or her favourites, the "playthings of an
hour"; and at least three of them have carried this contempt to the
altar itself.
Peter, the first, as we have seen, offered a crown to Martha Skovronski,
a Livonian scullery-maid, who succeeded him on the throne; the second
Catherine gave her hand as well as her heart to Patiomkin, the gigantic,
ill-favoured ex-sergeant of cavalry; and Elizabeth, daughter of Peter
and his kitchen-Queen, proved herself worthy of her parentage when she
made Alexis Razoum, a peasant's son, husband of the Empress of Russia.
You will search history in vain for a story so strange and romantic as
this of the great Empress and the lowly shepherd's son, whom her love
raised from a hovel to a palace, and on whom one of the most amorous and
fickle of sovereign ladies lavished honours and riches and an unwavering
devotion, until her eyes, speaking their love to the last, were closed
in death.
It was in the humblest hovel of the village of Lemesh that Alexis
Razoum drew his first breath one day in 1709. His father, Gregory
Razoum, was a shepherd, who spent his pitiful earnings in drink--a man
of violent temper who, in his drunken rages, was the terror not only of
his home but of the entire village. His wife and children cowered at his
approach; and on more than one occasion only accident (or Providence)
saved him from the crime of murder. On one such occasion, we are told,
the child Alexis, who from his earliest years had a passion for reading,
was absorbed in a book, when his father, in ungovernable fury, seized a
hatchet and hurled it at the boy's head. Luckily, the missile missed its
mark, and Alexis escaped, to find refuge in the house of a friendly
priest, who not only gave him shelter and protection, but taught him to
write, and, above all, to sing--little dreaming that he was thus paving
the way which was to lead the drunken shepherd's lad to the dizziest
heights in Russia. For the boy had a beautiful voice. When he joined the
choir of his village church, people flocked from far and near to listen
to the sweet notes that soared, pure and liquid as a nightingale's song,
above the rest. "It was," all declared, "the voice of an angel--and the
face of an angel," for Alexis was as beautiful in those days as any
child of picture or of dreams.
One day a splendidly dressed stranger chanced to enter the Lemesh church
during Mass--none other than Colonel Vishnevsky, a great Court official,
who was on his way back to Moscow from a diplomatic mission; and he
listened entranced to a voice sweeter than any he had ever heard. The
service over, he made the acquaintance of the young chorister,
interviewed his guardian, the "good Samaritan" priest, and persuaded him
to allow the boy to accompany him to the capital. Thus the shepherd's
son took weeping farewell of the good priest, of his mother, and of his
brothers and sisters; and a few weeks later the Empress and her ladies
were listening enchanted to his voice in the Imperial choir at
Moscow--but none with more delight than the Princess Elizabeth, daughter
of Peter the Great, to whom Alexis' beauty appealed even more strongly
than his sweet singing.
Elizabeth, true daughter of her father, had already, young as she was,
counted her lovers by the score--lovers chosen indiscriminately, from
Royal princes to grooms and common soldiers. She was already sated with
the licence of the most dissolute Court of Europe, and to her the young
Cossack of the beautiful face and voice, and rustic innocence, opened a
new and seductive vista of pleasure. She lost her heart to him, had him
transferred to her own Court as her favourite singer, and, within a few
years, gave him charge of her purse and her properties.
The shepherd's son was now not only lover-elect, but principal
"minister" to the daughter of an Emperor, who was herself to wear the
Imperial crown. And while Alexis was thus luxuriating amid the splendour
of a Court, he by no means forgot the humble relatives he had left
behind in his native village. His father was dead; his mother was
reduced for a time to such a depth of destitution that she had to beg
her bread from door to door. His sisters had found husbands for
themselves in their own rank; and the favourite of an Imperial Princess
had for brothers-in-law a tailor, a weaver, and a shepherd. When news
came to Alexis of his mother's destitution he had sent her a sum of
money sufficient to install her in comfort as an innkeeper: the first of
many kindnesses which were to work a startling transformation in the
fortunes of the Razoum family.
Events now hurried quickly. The Empress Anna died, and was succeeded on
the throne by the infant Ivan, her grand-nephew, who had been Emperor
but a few months when, in 1741, a _coup d'état_ gave the crown to
Elizabeth, mistress of the Lemesh peasant. Alexis was now husband in all
but name of the Empress of all the Russias; honours and riches were
showered on him; he was General, Grandmaster of the Hounds, Chief
Gentleman of the Bedchamber, and lord of large estates yielding regal
revenues.
But all his grandeur was powerless to spoil the man, who still remained
the simple peasant who, so many years earlier, had left his low-born
mother with streaming eyes. His great ambition now was to share his
good-fortune with her. She must exchange her village inn for the
luxuries and splendours of a palace. And thus it was that one day a
splendid carriage, with gay-liveried postillions, dashed up to the door
of the Lemesh inn and carried off the simple peasant woman, her youngest
son, Cyril, and one of her daughters, to the open-mouthed amazement of
the villagers. At the entrance to the capital she was received by a
magnificently attired gentleman, in whom she failed to recognise her son
Alexis, until he showed her a birthmark on his body.
Picture now the peasant-woman sumptuously lodged in the Moscow palace,
decked in all the finery of silks and laces and jewels, receiving the
respectful homage of high Court officials, caressed and petted by an
Empress, while her splendid son looks smilingly on, as proud of his
cottage-mother as if she were a Princess of the Blood Royal. That the
innkeeper was not happy in her gilded cage, that her thoughts often
wandered longingly to her cronies and the simple life of the village, is
not to be wondered at.
It was all very well for such a fine gentleman as her son, Alexis; but
for a poor, simple-minded woman like herself--well, she was too old for
such a transplanting. And we can imagine her relief when, on the removal
of the Court to St Petersburg, she was allowed to bring her visit to an
end and to return to her inn with wonderful stories of all she had seen.
Her son and daughter, however, elected to remain. As for Cyril, a
handsome youth, almost young enough to be his brother's son, he was
quick to win his way into the favour of the Empress. Before he had been
many months at Court he was made a Count and Gentleman of the
Bedchamber. He was given for bride a grand-niece of Elizabeth; and at
twenty-two he was Viceroy of the Ukraine, virtual sovereign of a kingdom
of his own, with his peasant-mother, who declined to share his palace,
comfortably installed in a modest house near his gates.
Cyril, in fact, was to his last day as unspoiled by his unaccustomed
grandeur as his brother Alexis. Each was ready at any moment to turn
from the obsequious homage of nobles to hobnob with a peasant friend or
relative. How utterly devoid of false pride Alexis was is proved by the
following anecdote. One day when, in company with the Empress, he was
paying a visit to Count Löwenwolde, he rushed from Elizabeth's side to
fling his arms round the neck of one of his host's footmen. "Are you
mad, Alexis?" exclaimed the Empress, in her astonishment. "What do you
mean by such senseless behaviour?" "I am not mad at all," answered the
favourite. "He is an old friend of mine."
But although no man ever deposed the shepherd from the first place in
Elizabeth's favour, it must not be imagined that he was her only lover.
The daughter of the hot-blooded Peter and the lusty scullery wench had
always as great a passion for men as the second Catherine, who had
almost as many favourites in her boudoir as gowns in her wardrobes. She
had her lovers before she was emancipated from the schoolroom; and not
the least favoured of them, it is said, was her own nephew, Peter the
Second, whom she would no doubt have married if it had been possible.
She turned her back on one great alliance after another, preferring her
freedom to a wedding-ring that brought no love with it; and she found
her pleasure alike among the gentlemen of the Court and among her own
servants. In the long list of her favourites we find a General
succeeded by a Sergeant; Boutourlin, the handsome courtier, giving place
to Lialin, the sailor; and Count Shouvalov retiring in favour of
Voytshinsky, the coachman. Thus one liaison succeeded another from
girlhood to middle-age--indeed long after she had passed the altar. But
through all these varying attachments her heart remained constant to her
shepherd-lover, to whom she was ever the devoted wife, and, when he was
ill, the tenderest of nurses. To please him, she even accompanied him on
a visit to his native village, smiling graciously on his humble friends
of other days, and partaking of the hospitality of the poorest
cottagers; while on all who had befriended him in the days of his
obscurity she lavished her favours.
Of one man who had been thus kind she made a General on the spot; the
friendly priest was given a highly paid post at Court; high rank in the
army was given to many of his humble relatives; and a husband was found
for a favourite niece in Count Ryoumin, the Chancellor's son.
As for Alexis himself, nothing was too good for him. Although he had
probably never handled a gun in his life she made him Field-Marshal and
head of her army; and, at her request, Charles VII. dubbed him Count of
the Holy Roman Empire, a distinction which Gregory Orloff in later years
prized more than all the honours Catherine II. showered on him; while
the estates of which she made him lord were a small kingdom in
themselves. Alexis, the shepherd's son, was now, beyond any question,
the most powerful man in Russia. If he would, he might easily have
taken the sceptre from the yielding hands of the Empress and played the
autocrat, as Patiomkin played it under similar circumstances in later
years. But Alexis cared as little for power as for rank and wealth. He
smiled at his honours. "Fancy," he said, with his hearty laugh, "a
peasant's son, a Count; and a man who ought to be tending sheep, a
Field-Marshal!"
When courtly genealogists spread before him an elaborate family-tree,
proving that he sprang from the princely stock of Bogdan, with many a
Grand Duke of Lithuania among his lineal ancestors, he laughed loud and
long at them for their pains. "Don't be so ridiculous," he said. "You
know as well as I that my parents were simple peasants, honest enough,
but people of the soil and nothing else. If I am Count and Field-Marshal
and Viceroy, I owe it all to the good heart of your Empress and mine,
whose humble servant I am. Take it away, and let me hear no more of such
foolery."
Such to the last was the unspoiled, child-like nature of the man who so
soon was to be not merely the first favourite but husband of an Empress.
Probably Alexis would have lived and died Elizabeth's unlicensed lover
had it not been for the cunning of the cleverest of her Chancellors,
Bestyouzhev, who saw in his mistress's infatuation for her peasant the
means of making his own position more secure. Elizabeth was still a
young and attractive woman, who might pick and choose among some of the
most eligible suitors in Europe for a sharer of her throne; for there
were many who would gladly have played consort to the good-looking
autocrat of Russia.
Such a husband, especially if he were a strong man, might seriously
imperil the Chancellor's position; might even dispense with him
altogether. On the other hand, he was high in the favour of the
shepherd's son, who had such a contempt for power, and who thus would be
a puppet in his hands. Why not make him husband in name as well as in
fact? It was, after all, an easy task the Chancellor thus set himself.
Elizabeth was by no means unwilling to wear a wedding-ring for the man
who had loved her so loyally and so long; and any difficulties she might
raise were quickly disposed of by her father-confessor, who was
Bestyouzhev's tool. Thus it came to pass that one day Elizabeth and
Alexis stood side by side before the village altar of Perovo; and the
words were spoken which made the shepherd's son husband of the Empress.
The secrecy with which the ceremony was performed was but a fiction. All
the world knew that Alexis Gregorovitch was Emperor by right of wedlock,
and flocked to pay homage to him in his new and exalted character.
He now had sumptuous apartments next to those of his wife; he sat at her
right hand on all State occasions; he was her shadow everywhere; and
during his frequent attacks of gout the Empress ministered to him night
and day in his own rooms with the tender devotion of a mother to a
child. Two children were born to them, a son and a daughter, the latter
of whom, after a life of strange romance and vicissitude, ended her
days in a loathsome dungeon of the fortress of Saints Peter and Paul,
the victim of Catherine II.'s vengeance--miserably drowned, so one story
goes, by an inundation of her cell.
On Elizabeth's death, in the year 1762, her husband was glad to retire
from the Court in which he had for so long played so splendid a part.
"None but myself," he said, "can know with what pleasure I leave a
sphere to which I was not born, and to which only my love for my dear
mistress made me resigned. I should have been happier far with her in
some small cottage far removed from the gilded slavery of Court life."
He was happy enough now leading the peaceful life of a country gentleman
on one of his many estates.
Catherine II. had mounted the throne of Russia--the Empress who,
according to Masson, had but two passions, which she carried to the
grave--"her love of man, which degenerated into libertinage; and her
love of glory, which degenerated into vanity." A woman with the brain of
a man and the heart of a courtesan, Catherine's fickle affection had
flitted from one lover to another, until now it had settled on Gregory
Orloff, the handsomest man in her dominions, whom she was more than half
disposed to make her husband.
This was a scheme which commended itself strongly to her Chancellor,
Vorontsov. There was a most useful precedent to lend support to it--the
alliance of the Empress Elizabeth with a man of immeasurably lower rank
than Catherine's favourite; but it was important that this precedent
should be established beyond dispute. Thus it was that one day, when
Count Alexis was poring over his Bible by his country fireside,
Chancellor Vorontsov made his appearance with ingratiating words and
promises. Her Majesty, he informed the Count, was willing to confer
Imperial rank on him in return for one small favour--the possession of
the documents which proved his marriage to her predecessor, Elizabeth.
On hearing the request, the ex-shepherd rose, and, with words of quiet
scorn, refused both the request and the proffered honour. "Am not I," he
said, "a Count, a Field-Marshal, a man of wealth? all of which I owe to
the kindness of my dear, dead mistress. Are not such honours enough for
the peasant's son whom she raised from the mire to sit by her side, that
I should purchase another bauble by an act of treachery to her memory?
"But wait one moment," he continued; and, leaving the room, he returned
carrying a small bundle of papers, which he proceeded to examine one by
one. Then, collecting them, he placed the bundle in the heart of the
fire, to the horror of the onlooking Chancellor; and, as the flames were
reducing the precious documents to ashes, he said, "Go now and tell
those who sent you, that I never was more than the slave of my august
benefactress, the Empress Elizabeth, who could never so far have
forgotten her position as to marry a subject."
Thus with a lie on his lips--the last crowning evidence of loyalty to
his beloved Queen and wife--Alexis Razoum makes his exit from the stage
on which he played so strangely romantic a part. A few years later his
days ended in peace at his St Petersburg palace, with the name he loved
best, "Elizabeth," on his lips.