itself, and within eighteen months the young Princess had been received
into the Greek Church as Catharine, and married to the Grand Duke,
himself only seventeen years old.
But already she had learned not to expect happiness. He was, if we
believe the accounts of him, senseless and boorish in the extreme.
Certainly he did not pretend to the least affection for Catharine. A few
days after her arrival, he had confided to her, "as his cousin," that he
was "ardently in love with one of the maids-of-honor; since, however,
the Empress desired it, he had resigned himself, and was willing to
marry her instead!" She was forced, according to her assertion, to
listen to confidences of a like nature during many years. His
puerilities and eccentricities, we are told, amounted almost to madness.
He was fond of drilling dogs and tin soldiers, together with his
disgusted suite. But, like everyone else about the court, he lived in
terror of the strong-willed, strong-drinking Czarina. His kennel must be
kept a secret, and was accordingly located in his wife's bedroom. He
would spend hours indoors cracking whips or emitting weird sounds on
musical instruments. At night, after Madame Tchoglokoff, who was charged
with the surveillance of the grand-ducal _ménage_, had retired, under
the impression that she had locked everyone up safely, he would call for
lights again, like a schoolboy, and make Catharine and her attendants
play with marionettes on the counterpane till one, two, three o'clock in
the morning.
He had been more or less drunk, to credit his enemies, since the age of
ten; and Catharine declares he had a mortal aversion to the bath, which
it seems was then a Russian, not a German, observance. When ordered by
the Empress to take one as penance during Lent, he replied that it was
repugnant to his moral nature and unsuited to his physical constitution:
nothing, he said, but the most vital considerations could induce him to
risk the Empress' displeasure, but he was not prepared to die; and life
was dearer to him than her majesty's approbation. Both were obstinate,
and the dispute led to the most terrific outburst of rage on the part of
the Czarina that Catharine had yet witnessed.
On another occasion his wife discovered him presiding over a
court-martial in full regimentals, with a large rat in the centre of the
room, which had just been suspended with all the formalities of a
military execution. It appeared that the unfortunate beast had
transgressed the laws of war; it had climbed the ramparts of a
card-board fortress, and had actually eaten two pith sentries on duty at
the bastions. It was to be exposed to the public view as an example
during three days following! Catharine, unluckily, was so lost to the
fitness of things as to betray open merriment. The Grand Duke was
furious; and she had to retire, excusing herself with difficulty on
account of her ignorance of military discipline. The affair sensibly
aggravated the estrangement between them.
Of Elizabeth, who led an eccentric life with her own peculiar intimates,
Catharine knew little; but she was the victim of an unrelenting if petty
tyranny, which kept jealous watch over every word and movement, deprived
her of any attendant of whom she made a friend, and dictated every
minute circumstance of her life. It was like nothing so much as a dame
school, even to the various tutors and governesses ordered her by the
Czarina. When her father died she was allowed a week's mourning; at the
end of that time the Empress sent a command to leave off; "she was a
grand duchess, and her father was not a king." But Catharine was not of
the stuff from which are modelled the monuments of docility. Little by
little, as her character develops, she acquires a proud and lonely
self-dependence. She awakens to intellectual interests; from the first,
indeed, she had flung herself with ardor into the study of Russian
history and language. During these early years books are her great
distraction; "_dixhuit années d'ennui et de solitude_," we read in a
epitaph written by herself, "_lui firent lire bien des livres_."
After a trial in the wilderness of third-rate contemporary fiction,
Voltaire stirs her intellect. And he leads her, too, spellbound by that
incomparable _verve_ and intellectual agility of his; she surrenders
herself to the illusion of his brilliant assurances, dancing like some
triumphant will-o'-the-wisp over the obscure deeps and perplexities of
things. In a hundred ways, evil and good, she will remain the pupil of
Voltaire. He has his part in her social test of philosophical
speculations; he has his part also, be sure of it, in her long devotion
to ideals of monarchy expressed for her in Henri Quatre and Louis
Quatorze.
After Voltaire and Madame de Sévigné, Montesquieu, Baronius, Tacitus,
Bayle, Brantôme, and the early volumes of the _Encyclopædia_. But her
gay, expansive nature was not capable, for long, of purely intellectual
or stoic consolation. In a moral environment such as that of Elizabeth's
court it was too easy for the reader of Brantôme to seek elsewhere the
"love" romances had spoken of, but marriage had denied her. She was
remarked by all in her day for her gift of fascination. To outward
observers she seemed at this time a radiant and happy presence, as Burke
saw Marie Antoinette, the morning-star of a pleasure-loving society,
"full of life, and splendor, and joy." She says that she never
considered herself extremely beautiful, but "she was able to please, _et
cela était mon fort_." All contemporary testimony bears out this
singular faculty of attracting others, rarest of natural gifts, but to a
woman such as Catharine a very perilous one.
Not even those set to spy upon her could resist her personal magnetism.
She could be beautiful or terrible, playful or majestic, at pleasure. At
St. Petersburg there were few wits, and her intellectual superiority to
those about her was sufficient to gain her the nickname among her
husband's friends of "Madame la Ressource." Despite Peter's difficult
relations with her, he would refer to her in most of his perplexities,
especially when political, connected with his duchy of Holstein. "I
don't understand things very well myself," he would explain to
strangers, "but my wife understands everything." We observe in the
_Autobiography_ a fixed idea to "gain over" as many people as possible,
to attach them to her interests; partly because of the opposition to the
Czarina's circle, which gradually came to characterize the "_Jeune
Cour_," but specially in the service of those vague, ambitious
foreshadowings which from her first years in Russia had possessed her
mind. Clear-sighted, with a keen sense of her husband's inadequacy to
his position, warned by the implacable hostility of his mistress
Elizabeth Vorontsoff and her relations, above all with a passionate
thirst to realize her presentiment of greatness, she was instinctively
preparing for some emergency, she knew not exactly what. As for the more
precise premonitions of the memoirs, they are what would naturally
appear to her after the _fait accompli_. Ambition, calculation looking
before and after, patience in adversity, quickness to note and use the
weakness of those about her, a steady indifference to unessentials, a
political intelligence unhampered by the keener sensibilities--these are
the master traits of the Catharine of the _Autobiography_.
So far, then, of these earlier years, while we have the memoirs with us.
We must now pass quickly over many things. The motto of the Romanoffs
might be taken from _Macbeth_: "The near in blood, the nearer
bloody."[44] But in that sombre history there is no darker page than the
conspiracy of 1762.
In January Elizabeth died and the Grand Duke ascended the throne,
quietly enough, as Peter III. But the position of Catharine was worse
than before. The Czar was completely under the influence of her enemies;
he insulted her in public; and it seemed certain that his next step
would be to divorce her, throw her into prison, and marry Elizabeth
Vorontsoff. He had once already ordered her arrest, which his uncle had
afterward persuaded him to retract. The very reforms with which he had
begun his reign worked against him. He had made himself unpopular not
only with the clergy, but with the Preobrajenski Guards, which, like the
prætorians of the Roman Empire, disposed of the throne. He smoked and
drank till three or five o'clock in the morning, writes the French
ambassador; yet he would be up again at seven manoeuvring his troops.
He would order a hundred cannon to be fired together that he might have
a foretaste of war, and his eccentricities in general were intensified
by absolute power. The history of the _coup-d'état_ is still obscure. A
considerable party, however, formed round Catharine: the brothers
Gregory and Alexis Orloff won over several regiments, and the princess
Dashkoff gained adherents in society. Matters were precipitated by the
accidental arrest of one of the conspirators; and although their plans
were incoherent, the good-fortune of Catharine carried her through. At
five o'clock in the morning of July 9th Alexis Orloff entered her room
at Peterhoff, and told her to set out for St. Petersburg, where she was
to be proclaimed immediately. She hastened there with the Orloffs. Three
regiments, to whom _vodka_ had judiciously been dispensed beforehand,
took the oath of allegiance with enthusiasm; and others followed suit.
Peter was thunderstruck. On the advice of Marshal Muennich he embarked
for Cronstadt, where he was challenged, and demanded admittance as
emperor. "_Il n'y a plus d'empéreur!_" replied the commandant,
Talitsine. He hurried back again, and after agonies of indecision
finally abdicated. "He had lost his crown," as Frederick said
scornfully, "like a naughty child sent to bed with a whipping."
So far the revolution had been bloodless, but its darker hour was to
come. "I placed the deposed Emperor under the command of A. Orloff, with
four 'chosen' officers and a detachment of 'quiet' and 'sober' men, and
sent him to a distance of twenty-seven versts from St. Petersburg to a
place called Ropsha, 'very retired,' but very pleasant"--so runs
Catharine's account to Poniatowski. On the 15th he was dead; of
"hemorrhoidal colic," said the official announcement; strangled, as
Europe rightly believed, by Alexis Orloff with his own hands. It is
hardly possible that this hideous murder was without Catharine's at
least tacit consent. She certainly condoned the crime. There was danger
in a name; and her sentiment was doubtless that of Lord Essex when the
fate of Stafford hung in the balance: "Stone dead hath no fellow!"
Already, where the Neva turns toward the Baltic, one wretched boy-Czar
languished beneath the melancholy fortress of the Schluesselburg. Two
years, and he too, after having known the bitterness of life, will be
violently done to death in his turn. But Voltaire wrote to Madame du
Deffand: "I am aware that people reproach her with some bagatelles _à
propos_ of that husband of hers; however, one really cannot intermeddle
in these family squabbles!"
Such was the tragedy of Peter III. He dies, as Catharine said, unpitied:
a fool, echo her friends, who perished in his folly. But history is
precise and simple; truth complex and difficult. Was there no light, no
touch of nobility at all in that strange chaotic temperament? No
reverence in the boy who would kneel to the picture of the great
Frederick? No generosity in the Czar who sacrificed victory to a
sentiment; who abolished the hateful "secret chancery," torture,
monopolies, and refused a statue of gold offered by St. Petersburg,
"desiring rather to raise a monument in the hearts of the people"? There
was something inarticulate there, surely--in the would-be musician who
must shut himself up for hours to scrawk madly, passionately, on a crazy
violin, and whose last request was for his confidant and instrument.
"What is history," said Napoleon, "but a fiction agreed upon?" Such,
nevertheless, is the form and spirit of the hapless Peter as portrayed
by his enemies.
This was the Catharine of Elizabeth's court, and protagonist of that
revolution which first made her known to Europe. But it was the
sovereign who dazzled her contemporaries, and still lives splendidly
with the "Great Czar" in the annals of Russia. That exuberant
personality of hers is so eloquent, so omnipresent in the sphere of
politics, that one is often the most luminous illustration of the other.
There is a note you will find common to her grandiose schemes of
territorial expansion, of intellectual enlightenment and domestic
reform. It is the note of theatricality, of extravagance, of excess. The
strangest chimeric phantasy sometimes here possesses her, hitherto
prosaic enough in so many ways; and it communicates itself to men like
the Orloffs, Patiomkin, Suvaroff. It is, I think, M. Leroy-Beaulieu, who
remarks that in Russia the shows of things are more important than
reality. So rite, ceremonial, the spectacular, the symbolic, seem to
have a power there greater than in any other people of civilization.
But stronger still was Catharine's overmastering desire to play to the
applause of Europe. She had conceived herself as the heroine of a
grandiose drama. It was her ambition to be the "Grand Monarque" of the
North, and to show the Paris of Louis Quinze that the age of Olympian
sovereignty was not yet past. Hence her sensitiveness to Western
opinion, her assiduous court to the men of intellect, her anxiety to be
admired and feared in Europe. Nowhere is this pose, this consciousness
of a gallery, more evident than in the sphere of foreign policy. The
great Peter had fulfilled the dream of Ivan in reaching the Baltic, and
so, in her wars with the Turk, Catharine realized the aim of Peter by
forcing her way to the Black Sea.
But a Hellenic empire at Constantinople haunts her dreams. She stirs up
Greek against Ottoman, and her trumpeter Voltaire heralds a new Sparta
and Athens; she calls her grandson Constantine, and surrounds him with
Greek nurse and servants. Her famous progress southward, the most
eccentric pageant in history, is typical of Patiomkin's _régime_. This
extraordinary man--mountebank, writes the English envoy, "_esprit
réveur_," says the keener-eyed Prince de Ligne--a barbarian, of terrific
appearance; fantastic beyond the verge of madness, acquired a greater
influence with Catharine than any other man of her reign. He had been
created "Prince of Taurida" (the Crimea) after the conquest of the
southern provinces; and was resolved to dazzle Europe and his sovereign
with her new acquisitions.
In January, 1787, she set out on her triumphal journey. A huge retinue
accompanied her, together with the foreign ambassadors, Cobenzl,
Fitzherbert, and Ségur, the last of whom has described this strange
procession. Forty miles were covered every day. There is a palace at
every stopping-place; towns and villages dot what six months ago had
been a howling wilderness. Painted forests seem to clothe the horizon:
fertile solitudes swarm with gayly dressed peasants--imported for this
occasion only. From Kiev floating pavilions carry them down the Dnieper:
the prince-magician alone has a hundred twenty of his beloved musicians.
Again the same _mise-en-scène_: operatic Cossacks rowing out from either
shore, the village of yesterday in the foreground, roofless façades in
the middle distance; the same reviews in successive provinces of hussars
out of her own escort! The greatest of optimists saw everything and
affected to see through nothing--the works of his highness surpass
conception. Suddenly spring appears, glittering on the enamelled meadows
and majestic river; they journey to the music of the galleys between
throngs of spectators from thirty nations. Every morning a fresh scene
opens, the days "travel more quickly than they themselves."
At Kanioff she is met by his majesty of Poland, none other than
Poniatowski, the lover, of Peterhoff in the old days! At Kherson, on an
eastern gate, appears the famous legend "The road to Byzantium"; and
there it is the Holy Roman Emperor who is drawn into her train--they
have already mapped out the Ottoman dominions. So with excursions and
alarums eastward by Poltava of glorious memory to the new "Glory of
Catharine," her city of Ekaterinoslaff; and last of all through
undulating steppes to the gorgeous palace piled upon the sand at
Inkerman, where after banquetings a curtain falls away, and behold--the
pasteboard fortifications of Sebastopol! where a green-wood squadron
anchored beneath them splutters forth its husky artillery. _Splendide
mendax!_ The West applauded frantically: never had such a
travelling-show been seen in Europe.
At home, too, the cult of appearances went hand in hand with generosity
and enthusiasm. "_C'est presque un monde_," she writes to Voltaire, "_à
créer, à unir, à conserver!_" First comes the administration of justice,
and her ukase of 1762, on its abuses, has a ring of sincerity that can
hardly be mistaken. There is a real courage again in her dealings with
the clergy. Four years later she summons a great assembly to Moscow to
consider a new code; and her "Instruction" to the delegates, saturated
as it is with Montesquieu and the rest, shows her abreast of her time.
Politicians of the old school, indeed, shuddered at its array of
grandiloquent maxims--"there are bombs enough in it," cried Panin, "to
bring the walls about our ears." She is here, in spite of all that has
been said, exactly where we invariably find her, neither a day in front
of her age nor a day behind.
Reform of the _ex cathedra_ sort was just then in the air. From the
Tagus to the Dnieper, and from Copenhagen to the Vatican, Europe was
crowded with paternal monarchs and earnest ministers, who were willing
to do almost everything for the people and nothing by them. The world
had not seen statesmen so sincere, enlightened, and plausible. A
generation later, on the meeting of the National Assembly, the despotic
reformation of Montesquieu and Voltaire will still seem about to be
translated into action. Men read their Rousseau: soon they will
understand him; they will also understand that _Non de nobis sine
nobis_, which was the haughty motto of the Hungarian magnates.
But her attention soon became diverted. She was not, as Gunning thought,
insincere, only fickle; she wanted patience and continuity of aim. The
"States-General" had produced an excellent effect in the world, and, in
fact, had afforded her information afterward turned to account. Her eye
is on the Turk: as with the second Pitt, had it not been for this cursed
war we should have seen greater things. "Beginnings--only beginnings!"
exclaims an eye-witness, "there are plenty of sketches to be seen, but
where is the finished picture?" Another reports that shoals of academies
and secondary schools bear witness to Catharine's enthusiasm for
education, but that some exist only on paper, while others seem to have
everything except scholars. Things are done hastily, and without just
measure or proportion; the imitative talent of the Russian does not seem
to carry him quite far enough. At her death, says a historian who wrote
eight years after it, most of her foundations were already in ruins;
everything seemed to have been abandoned before completion. Yet we must
not forget that liberal ideas were in themselves a revelation to the
Russia of her days, and that after a succession of contemptible
sovereigns she appeared as the first worthy successor of Peter. It was
already something for a woman there to be governed by large social
conceptions; has it not been said even elsewhere that the politics of
women are proper names? You may say what you will: she saved the
European tradition of Peter the Great, and was in a sense the creator of
modern Russia.
But to her philosophic friends at Paris it mattered little whether her
designs were in the parchment or any other stage. Since Voltaire had
hailed her as the "Northern Semiramis," no adulation was enough to
translate their enthusiasm: the "charms of Cleopatra," for example, were
united in her to "the soul of Brutus." On her side she "distributed
compliments in abundance, gold medals also (but more often in bronze?),
and from time to time even a little money." La Harpe, Marmontel, Volney,
Galiani, and many others fallen silent in these days were sharers in
her bounty. She would buy the books of some specially favored and instal
them at home again as "her librarians." Only one or two, D'Alembert,
Raynal, stood aloof, with the mistrustful Jean Jacques, who refused the
demesne of Gatschina. Diderot came to St. Petersburg in those days,
declaiming for two, three, five hours with unmatched copiousness of
discourse, astounding Catharine with his large argument and fiery
eloquence, and entertaining her hugely by his oblivion of everything
once fairly launched on his foaming torrent. The philosopher who, borne
on spiritual hurricanes, would leap from his chair at Princess
Dashkoff's, striding to and fro as he spat upon the floor in his
excitement, forgot himself equally in the presence of "Semiramis." "In
the heat of exposition he brought his hands down on the imperial knees
with such force and iteration" that Catharine complained they had turned
black and blue. But for all that she would egg on this strange
wild-fowl. "_Allons_," she would exclaim, a table once set safely
between them, "_entre hommes tout est permis!_"
As for Voltaire, his proudest title was that of "lay preacher of the
religion of 'St.' Catharine." Her correspondence with him, which begins
the year after her accession and continues until his death, is in truth
a kind of journalism, written partly by herself, partly by others. Its
object is to keep the friend of princes and dictator of literary opinion
_au courant_ with her ideas, measures, and general policy. She is not
content now, however, with the applause of her generation; she aims at
commanding the sources of history itself. Here she motions posterity to
take its stand behind contemporaries in the church of Voltaire's
foundation, while the archpriest of Ferney prostrates himself with
iterated formula, "_Te Cathariniam laudamus, te Dominam confitemur_."
For St. Catharine was an interested reader of that correspondence of
Diderot's with her sculptor Falconet, whose theme is the solidity of
posthumous fame. Rulihière had already written an account of the events
of 1762, of which he had been an eye-witness; she had tried first to buy
him, and then to have him thrown into the Bastille. She will search
Venice for a pliable historian; and her own letter on the _coup-d'état_,
together with her memoirs, shows how strong in her was that "_besoin de
parolier_" analyzed by the great Pascal a century before. Catharine, be
quite certain of it, is no earnest seeker after truth; rather "the plain
man," with something of the acuteness as well as the insensibility of
common-sense. The _Philosophes_ were the interest of the cultivated "as
scholars had been in one century, painters in another, theologians in a
third." They had the ear of Europe, who rest now in Mr. Morley's bosom.
But Catharine confessed years after: "Your learned men in '_ist_' bored
me to extinction. There was only my good protector Voltaire. Do you know
it was he who made me the mode?"