[Illustration: CATHERINE THE GREAT]
[Illustration]
CATHERINE
THE GREAT
BY
KATHARINE ANTHONY
[Illustration]
GARDEN CITY NEW YORK
GARDEN CITY PUBLISHING COMPANY, Inc.
COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
CONTENTS
I. FIKE OF ZERBST IS BORN 3
II. SHE IS EDUCATED 22
III. RUSSIA 38
IV. SHE GOES TO RUSSIA 58
V. FIKE BECOMES CATHERINE 80
VI. CATHERINE BECOMES A MOTHER 101
VII. PONIATOVSKY 123
VIII. ORLOV 153
IX. CATHERINE THE GREAT 189
X. POTIOMKIN 225
XI. CATHERINE BECOMES A GRANDMOTHER 266
XII. SHE GROWS OLD 300
CATHERINE THE GREAT
[Illustration]
I
FIKE OF ZERBST IS BORN
Early in the eighteenth century, the north German town of Stettin had
all the grim and rigid characteristics of a frontier post. It was a
border town and had long been a center of warfare. The broad rich lands
of Pomerania, bursting with fertility, had been repeatedly devastated
by the march and countermarch of Russian and Prussian soldiers. High
on a strip of barren coast, the gray stone walls of Stettin overlooked
a bleak northern sea over which the boats of the great Russian Peter
had come sailing to batter and destroy the town. But if Stettin had
trembled before Peter, who was six and a half feet tall, it had
trembled even more before Frederick William who was so short that his
children called him Stumpy behind his back. Ceded finally to Stumpy by
treaty in 1720, Stettin settled down to the dull routine of garrison
life.
It was not a place in which the refinements of society flourished.
A reviving commercial life brought no relief to the rigid military
atmosphere which prevailed. Ships moved out of the harbor laden with
guildsmen’s stuff from the interior of Germany. A chamber of commerce
came into existence and a new class of prosperous trades-people
appeared on the scene. But the hereditary aristocracy of Stettin was
not prosperous. Stumpy’s officers were usually hard-up; they were
under-paid and over-regimented. Their wives led a dull life in the
Prussian garrison where society was neither gay nor gracious. Stettin
had no style.
Its military and religious grandees understood each other perfectly. In
those days the Prussian warrior was so pious and the Lutheran believer
so militant that they faded imperceptibly into each other. Frederick
William and Martin Luther worshiped an identical God.
“Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott,
Ein’ gute Wehr und Waffen.”
The Lutheran idol was an armored hero whom a Prussian soldier could
fear and respect. He dominated the spiritual climate of Stettin
without a rival, except for the unimportant claims of a Calvinist
deity worshiped by the French governesses and emigrant school-masters
of the place. Luther had elected to throw in his lot with the German
nobles and they in turn had embraced his religion with the puritanical
devotion of recent converts. In military circles bigotry was the
fashion.
Such was Stettin in 1727, after seven years of regimentation by the
Prussian king. In that year there stood at Number One in the Grosse
Domstrasse a substantial gray stone house owned by the president of the
Handelskammer. A newly married pair took up their residence there in
early winter. They were rather ill-matched as to age, the husband being
thirty-seven and the wife fifteen. They were poor but pretentious, the
kind of gilded paupers that heralded the decline of feudalism. Prince
Christian August of Zerbst-Dornburg was the commander of a regiment
of infantry quartered in Stettin. He was one of Frederick William’s
generals, who had reached this degree of promotion after many years
of campaigning in the Prussian service. The business of soldiering had
given him little taste or opportunity for home and the family which he
was to found in Stettin was not to see a great deal of him. His wife
seemed to manage just as well without him.
The general was a cousin of the reigning Prince of Anhalt-Zerbst who
was growing old without an heir. Christian August and his brother
Johann Ludwig, of the Dornburg branch, both had an eye on the little
principality and its petty emoluments which loomed large to them. The
brothers were both pious and unmarried and were on excellent terms with
each other. It was clearly the duty of one of them to perpetuate the
family. But Johann Ludwig, the elder and the logical successor, lived
in Jever with a spinster sister and did not wish to change his state.
It therefore fell to Christian August to go forth and seek a wife. The
history of his wooing is unfortunately not known to us. Whether he
saw it as a duty or an opportunity we cannot say. At any rate, he was
successful.
Promoted to the status of a married man and the father of a family,
he was regarded by the elder but childless brother Ludwig as co-heir.
When the reigning duke finally died the two brothers inherited
Zerbst together and ruled the principality as co-regents. They were
peace-loving men who lived in harmony with each other, except for
occasional strife, stimulated, it is said, by sister Sophie Christine.
At any rate the loyal pair did not live long to rule in Zerbst. After
three years Johann Ludwig died and five months later Christian August
followed him. Two months afterward Sophie Christine was buried beside
her brothers. They died as they had lived in the narrow bonds of
mediæval clannishness. It was an unaggressive and obscure strain. Not
all the efforts of German historical research have availed to discover
any brilliance or heroism in the race.
In the meantime, the marriage of Christian August had yielded, after
some disappointments, the desired heir. This son lived to become the
last reigning Prince of Zerbst and followed in the undistinguished
steps of his ancestors. Only because he turned out to be the brother
of Catherine of Russia did he become more famous than the rest.
Catherine’s memoirs refer with vague sarcasm to the “peculiar exploits”
of his career and Schlözer speaks of him as a gentleman of “unstable
temperament.” Although married in his youth for a few brief years, he
left no heirs behind. With his death in 1793 the house of Anhalt-Zerbst
came to an end. The heroic attempt of his father to perpetuate the
family had only resulted in prolonging it by one generation. In
the personality of this sterile princeling, however, the general
commonplaceness of the Zerbst family was touched with eccentricity.
This proceeded from his mother without doubt, who was a clever,
energetic and hysterical woman.
Johanna Elisabeth of Holstein-Gottorp was not yet sixteen when she
married her Prussian general, yet she ruled the family from the first.
The portraits of this lady and her spouse which hang in the Potsdam
palace reveal, even through the conventional art of Pesne, marked
differences of temperament. The general has the dreamy eye that betrays
the extreme idealist, while his wife looks out with the peculiar verve
and readiness of a real woman of action. “Apparently they got on
excellently with each other,” says their daughter in her memoirs, “in
spite of the great difference in age and although their inclinations
were so different. My father, for instance, was very saving; my mother,
on the other hand, was quite extravagant and open-handed. My mother
loved pleasure and fashionable society exceedingly; my father valued
retirement. She was cheerful and wilful; he serious and austere in
his morality.... My mother passed as more clever and intellectual
than my father; but he was a man of earnest and sterling character
and well-stocked knowledge. He liked to read, as did my mother, but
all that she knew was very superficial. Her spirit and beauty had won
for her a great reputation; moreover, she understood the ways of the
fashionable world better than my father.”
Christian August had married his wife at the court of the Duchess of
Brunswick, her godmother, who had brought her up as if she were her own
child. Johanna Elisabeth was the daughter of the Bishop of Lübeck who
had twelve children. Having lost Schleswig to the Danes and finding
himself therefore in reduced circumstances, he willingly gave away
one of his children to the kind godmother who offered to bring her
up. The court of Brunswick, which thus became the home of the keen
little Princess of Holstein-Gottorp, was one of the most showy in
Germany. It was far more elegant than the court of the parsimonious
King of Prussia. Here Johanna Elisabeth seems to have grown up
partly as a much-spoiled favorite and partly as a poor relation. She
brought nothing to her marriage but the bridal chest given her by
her godmother. The newly married pair started housekeeping in the
Domstrasse house under the most frugal circumstances. Garrison life
must have seemed sordid to her after the refinements of Brunswick. One
hope at least she had. If she produced an heir she might one day become
the reigning Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst instead of being merely the wife
of a Prussian general in a garrison town.
In the meantime she made the most of being a Holstein-Gottorp, a clan
whose members had married royalty and were related to thrones. Johanna
Elisabeth’s brother had been affianced to the youngest daughter of
Peter the Great and, but for his death by the smallpox, would have
become the great Czar’s son-in-law. Johanna Elisabeth’s first cousin,
who was a nephew of Charles XII of Sweden, had married another daughter
of Peter the Great and had left a son who had claims upon the thrones
of both Sweden and Russia.
These alliances with Holstein-Gottorps were supposed to bring to Russia
a strip of sea-coast, and sea-coast was Peter’s passion. No doubt he
regretted that he had only two daughters to sell for a bit of strand.
But he never realized on these schemes and the young ladies themselves
fared badly. Elisabeth, who lost her bridegroom through smallpox,
remained unmarried all her life, while Anne, who went to live in Kiel,
was scandalously neglected by her husband. “I have to tell you,” she
wrote her sister, “that the Duke and Mavrushka [her best friend] are
quite loose. He stays not a single day at home, rides out with her in
the same carriage, or goes visiting or to the theatre.” Poor jealous
Anne was obliged to stay at home because she expected a child. Three
months after its birth, she gave up her spiritless existence and died
of “tuberculosis and homesickness.” Her son, who was called Karl
Peter Ulrich, was handed over to nurses and developed into a sickly,
unpromising boy.
But no tragedy could dim the luster of the Russian connection in the
eyes of the romantic Johanna Elisabeth of Holstein-Gottorp. She felt
that her husband should announce their marriage to the Russian court.
The Prince of Zerbst therefore wrote: “Imperial Highness: May you,
in your world renowned magnanimity, not take it ill that I venture
to inform you with the most humble respect that on the eighth of
November, after previous betrothal, I married the youngest sister of
the Bishop of Lübeck recently deceased in Petersburg, the Princess
Johanna Elisabeth of Holstein-Gottorp, in the country seat of Weheln in
Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel.” This humble composition bears all the marks of
being the Prince’s own.
Soon after her marriage, the Princess made a round of visits
accompanied by her husband in order to present the general to his
numerous Holstein relatives. “In this week,” says a family letter,
“comes the Princess Elisabeth and her man.” The Holsteiners were not
especially impressed by the Prince of Zerbst and took him rather
casually from the first. As time went on the Princess managed to escape
from the dulness of her Stettin home as much and as often as possible
by making long visits to Holstein relatives in Hamburg and Brunswick.
After the first formalities of introduction were over she left her
husband at home. But she was always accompanied by her daughter on
these restless flights from the tedium of small town life.
2
The ambitious Lady of Zerbst had encountered several discouragements in
the process of producing an heir. Her first child, born May 2, 1729,
in the Domstrasse house, was a girl. “It has been told me,” wrote this
girl, looking backward after forty years, “that I was not so very
joyfully welcomed when I first appeared because a son was expected.
My father, however, showed more satisfaction than his environment.”
Perhaps his natural reserve and a certain philosophy which he
undoubtedly possessed helped him to conceal his disappointment. The
Princess’s chagrin can easily be imagined. The child had nearly cost
the sixteen-year-old mother her life. We can picture the ordeal of her
confinement in the small bedroom one flight above the noisy Domstrasse:
the long Lutheran Sunday which happened also to be May-day; the morning
and evening chiming of the church bells; the religious atmosphere of a
prayerfully expectant household; the crude methods of the midwife; the
waiting cradle and the charcoal pan beside which the first-born son was
presently to be swaddled. Finally in the gray dawn of Monday morning,
at the chill hour of half-past two, a daughter was born instead of the
expected son.
As the new-born infant lay in her cradle, the charcoal pan set fire to
the floor. The board was almost burned through before anyone noticed
it, so preoccupied was everybody with the condition of the mother. The
new baby was further overlooked in several ways. Neither her birth nor
her baptism was registered in any Stettin church, an extraordinary
omission for such a pious family. The only birth record in existence
is the letter which Christian August wrote to Cousin Johann August who
was waiting with his barren wife at Anhalt-Zerbst to hear the outcome
of events at Stettin. The general announced that his consort had been
delivered that morning of a Princess-daughter who would be baptized
on the next day but one and would receive the name of Sophie Auguste
Friedrike. The little girl was always called Fike.
Of Fike’s relation to her parents, she says, “My father, whom I saw
less frequently, regarded me as an angel; my mother did not trouble
much about me. A year and a half later she bore a son whom she loved
idolatrously. I was merely endured and was often harshly and vehemently
scolded, and not always with justice. I felt this without being,
however, quite clear in my knowledge.”
This son, Wilhelm Christian, at first an object of so much pride,
soon became a source of deep concern and even of humiliation. From an
unknown cause, which was discovered after his death to have been a
dislocated hip, he was from infancy a cripple unable to walk without a
crutch. He died at the age of twelve. Johanna Elisabeth’s talent for
the enhancement of life’s experiences is shown again in her exaggerated
grief at her son’s death. “My mother was inconsolable,” writes Fike,
“and the presence of the entire family was necessary to help her bear
her grief.” Even Fike’s old grandmother journeyed all the way down from
Hamburg to Dornburg to comfort the bereaved Princess. But a second
son, Friedrich August, born in 1734, came to take his brother’s place
and eventually to become the last Prince of Anhalt-Zerbst. Two more
daughters were added to the family but both died in infancy. Of the
five children, only two, Fike and Fritz, lived to grow up.
Fike was oldest sister. She played teacher to her brothers, training
them in the art of penmanship as she had learned it from Monsieur
Laurent and Pastor Wagner. This doubtless meant a saving for
the general’s pocket-book, which was always too slender for the
requirements of Fike’s mother. When, at the age of fifteen, she held in
her hands the first money which she had ever owned and which had been
given her by the Russian Empress for card-playing, she wrote to her
father at once, “I have heard that your Highness has sent my brother
to Homburg; I know that this occasions a rather heavy expense. I beg
your Highness to allow my brother to remain there as long as necessary
for his recovery, requesting for myself the privilege of paying all his
expenses; and beg your Highness to mention a banker to whom I may send
whatever is necessary.” Her maternal attitude toward Fritz survived
for many years. As an Empress she played with the idea of making him a
Kurfürst, but nothing came of it. The best that she could ever do for
him, after she had become an influence in the international politics of
Europe, was to restore him to his modest inheritance of Anhalt-Zerbst,
which through his own and his mother’s folly had been temporarily lost.
3
Born a girl, Fike’s only prospect for a career was to become the wife
of some German princeling whose rank was at least equal to that of
brother Fritz. Her chances of marriage were often discussed in her
presence. They were not brilliant. In the first place, the girl was
not beautiful. “I do not know for sure,” she says in her memoirs,
“whether as a child I was really ugly, but I remember well this was
often said of me, and that I must therefore strive to show inward
excellence and intelligence. Up to the age of fourteen or fifteen
years, I was firmly convinced of my ugliness and was therefore more
concerned with acquiring inward accomplishments and was less mindful of
my looks. I have seen a portrait of myself painted when I was ten years
old and that is certainly very ugly. If it really resembled me, they
told me nothing false.” While this confession tells us little of Fike’s
real looks as a young girl, it tells us a great deal about her private
hopes of getting a husband.
It was not as if her parents could dower her with influence or riches.
There was, for instance, her third cousin in Eutin, the son of the dead
Anna Petrovna, a peevish boy for whom no one had a good word. Sophie’s
mother dangled the sickly Duke of Holstein before her daughter’s eyes
from time to time, only to withdraw him again with the remark, “Not
him; he needs a wife who can support his rights and claims by the power
and prestige of her family. My daughter will not be suitable for him.”
More hopeful was old Bolhagen, a faithful henchman of Fike’s father,
who visited the nursery every afternoon and there spun yarns about his
travels. One afternoon when Fike was seven, the old man brought with
him a newspaper from which he read the report of the marriage of the
Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha with the Prince of Wales. “Do you know,”
said the old soldier to the governess, “this Princess is not really so
well educated as ours, and nevertheless, she is now destined to become
Queen of England. Who knows what ours may yet become?” “He then began,”
says Fike, “to preach to me wisdom and Christian virtues, and stern
morality, to the end that I might be worthy to wear a crown, should one
ever be allotted to me. This crown never again went out of my head and
has since given me much to do.”
This story indicates that the girl began to think of marriage at the
age of seven. By the time she was fifteen she had had a long time
to occupy herself with hopes and fears. In her memoirs there is no
mention of the latter. Perhaps the passage of years erased these
unhappy recollections. On the other hand, her memory for episodes in
which this Prince or that sued for her hand and was turned away by her
high-minded father is very good. Her account of how Prince Heinrich
of Prussia almost became a suitor does not quite ring true, although
one’s imagination likes to dwell on the possible consequences of such
a union. What would the aggressive Sophie of Zerbst have done had she
been immured like those other women who were married to the Princes of
Prussia, the wives of Prince Heinrich and Great Frederick himself? It
is hardly conceivable that she would have succumbed without adding a
dramatic chapter to the annals of the Prussian house.
As a portionless Princess, she had probably considered before she was
fifteen the alternative to marriage. The alternative was vivid enough.
Both sides of her family bristled with old maids. Two hundred years
of Lutheranism had failed to abolish celibacy among the daughters of
the German nobility. For, while Luther preached against celibacy, he
also preached in favor of monogamy. The combination, however, was
better adapted to the stable bourgeois class which was just beginning
to dominate society than to the restless aristocracy which had
flourished in the middle ages. The feudal families who went over to the
Reformation and the Lutheran idea of marriage were still obliged to
dedicate as many surplus daughters as ever to the abbeys and priories.
The reason is that for these princesses and other high-born ladies
there was not enough monogamy to go round.
Little Princess Fike had several aunts who lived in abbeys. There was
great-aunt Marie Elisabeth who was Abbess of Quedlinburg; and Aunt
Hedwig Sophie who was Provost in the same abbey. There was also Aunt
Sophie Christine who was Canoness of Gandersheim. Fike often went with
her mother to visit the aunts at Quedlinburg. “These two Holstein
princesses,” she says, “who remained unmarried and had to live in one
and the same house, quarreled incessantly and often refused to see each
other for years at a time. My mother often tried to mediate between
them and sometimes she was successful.”
Fike’s memories of her aunts remained ever vivid. Her portraits of
them, penned after thirty years of life in Russia, have a clearness
of detail like a Dürer drawing. “The Princess-Provost Hedwig Sophie
Augusta was a great friend of dogs and especially loved the so-called
pugs. As a child, I have been amazed to see at one time in her chamber,
which measured in size at most four cords of wood, as many as sixteen
pugs. Many of the curs had young which also lived in the same room with
my aunt. They slept and ate there and attended to their necessities.
A maid was employed to keep them clean and this took her the whole
day. A large number of parrots besides lived in the same room; one can
imagine the fragrance which reigned there! When the Princess drove
out, she had always in her carriage at least one parrot and a half a
dozen dogs; the latter even accompanied her to church. I have never
seen anyone who loved animals as much as she; she was wholly occupied
with them the livelong day and only bestirred herself for their sakes.
She had consequently grown quite stout, which with her short stature,
made her very ugly and even deformed. The Princess might have had her
talents had she taken any trouble. She wrote German and French in the
most beautiful hand that I have ever seen written by a woman.”
This dumpy old lady was an elder sister of Fike’s mother, who was by
contrast in her daughter’s eyes the perfect pattern of beauty, grace,
and fashion. Fike herself, who was not beautiful and had only her fine
handwriting and good conduct to recommend her, might easily end her
days at Quedlinburg in a room no bigger than four cords of wood, with a
family of dogs. To be sure Aunt Hedwig might have had a bigger room and
a much better thing of it altogether if she were appointed, as Fike’s
great-aunt had been, Abbess of Quedlinburg. Fike’s mother tried to
bring this about by using her influence, which she over-estimated, with
the Prussian King. But Frederick had a sister of his own who needed
this refuge and who eventually got it. Even to become a prioress, there
was competition. Everywhere there was competition in life. This was one
of the earliest lessons that Fike absorbed from her worldly-wise mother.
Another aunt, an elder sister of her father’s, is also portrayed in
her memoirs. Tante Sophie Christine, Canoness of Gandersheim, is the
same spinster lady who is said to have fomented quarrels between her
brothers, the Princes of Zerbst. “She was more than fifty,” writes her
niece, “very tall and so thin that I had at eleven years old a bigger
waist than she; she was, however, very proud of her figure. At six
o’clock when she arose she carefully laced herself in and only took
off her stays when she went to bed. She used to maintain that she had
once been beautiful but that an accident had damaged her beauty. When
she was ten years old her powder-mantle had caught fire and thereby the
lower part of her face had been seriously hurt; the chin and the lower
part of the cheeks were shriveled up and the parchment skin really
looked ghastly. She was kind and good but when she wanted anything,
very hard-headed too. Upon the various German Princes who had passed
under her inspection, she had made serious demands, and but for lack of
willingness on their part she might have been well married.
“She made wonderful embroidery and loved birds very much. Her kind
heart mostly went out to those who had suffered a misfortune. I have
seen in her chamber a thrush that had only one foot, a lark with a
broken wing, a one-eyed goldfinch, a hen whose head was half-way pecked
off by the cock, a cock whose tail-feathers had been torn out by the
cat, a lame and lop-sided nightingale, a parrot that could not use
its feet and lay flat on its belly, and many other birds of different
kinds that ran and flew about her room. I was a very lively and right
wilful child, and I remember how once I offended this Princess by doing
something for which she never forgave me. I was left alone in her room
for a few moments and the idea of opening the window occurred to me.
Naturally half of the menagerie flew out! I shut the window and ran
away. When my aunt returned she found only her little cripples left.
She could guess how this had happened and her room was in the future
closed to me.”
Fike’s gallery of portraits includes another spinster, Fräulein Khayn,
who always accompanied her mother and herself on their travels. In the
depths of the bitter-cold winter of 1740, the restless Johanna and her
daughter, together with the companion, went to visit the old Duchess of
Brunswick. “I slept in the same room with Fräulein Khayn, a companion
of my mother’s,” says Fike. “My bed stood against the wall and hers
not far from mine, with only a small passage between. Another passage
remained open between the windows and the bed of Fräulein Khayn. On a
table between the windows stood a water-pitcher, a silver basin, and a
night-light. The only door of the room was at the foot of the bed and
was closed. Toward midnight, I was suddenly awakened by someone who lay
down beside me in bed; I opened my eyes and saw that it was Fräulein
Khayn. I asked her why she wanted to come into my bed. She answered,
‘For God’s sake leave me and go to sleep quietly.’ I wanted to know
what had caused her to leave her bed and come to mine, for I saw that
she was trembling from fright and was almost speechless. When I pressed
her she said, ‘Don’t you see what is going on in the room and what is
there on the table?’ and drew the cover over her face. I got on my
knees and reached over her to draw away the curtain and see what was
going on. But I heard and saw absolutely nothing. The door was closed;
candles, basin, and silver pitcher were on the table. I told her what I
saw and she became somewhat quieter. A few minutes later she arose to
shove the bolt on the door but it was already locked. I went to sleep
again but the next morning she looked wretched and quite distracted. I
wanted now to know why and what she thought she had seen in the night;
but she answered that she could not say. I knew that she believed in
ghosts and visions and that she often claimed to have seen apparitions.
She often said that she was a Sunday child and that those who were born
on other days did not have the clear sight that she had. I related the
occurrence to my mother who was already accustomed to Fräulein Khayn’s
experiences. Often she had frightened and disturbed my mother. I have
often wondered why this adventure did not make me fearful.”
Fike must have been deeply interested in the eccentricities of all
these spinster ladies since she remembered and described them so
vividly so many years afterwards. Her mother, the Princess Johanna
Elisabeth, towered above other women and also above her honest and
pious consort, undoubtedly a superior being. The Princess had a way
of absorbing the whole environment within herself and becoming its
embodiment. Fike writes, for instance, “My mother had that year an
extraordinary adventure on the return journey to Stettin.” As the
story develops, one learns that Fike herself, the ever-present Khayn,
another attendant, and several postilions, shared along with Fike’s
mother the adventure of being lost in a terrible snowstorm. On another
occasion, when Frederick the Great ascended the throne, Fike says,
“When my father had received in the name of the King of Prussia the
allegiance of Pomerania, my mother journeyed to Berlin.” There several
events took place at court in the account of which the General is not
mentioned. Presumably as the Governor of Stettin, he accompanied the
party and had his day at court as well. In the eyes of his little
daughter, moving in her accustomed place in mother’s entourage, the
General appears to have played a minor part even when he was officially
the center of the picture.
Princess Johanna Elisabeth was a clever woman but also a bit of a fool;
that is to say, she was romantic and proud. As the wife of the Governor
of Stettin, she tried to introduce in her dull town some semblance of
court etiquette. For instance, she required Fike to kiss the hem of
the garments of distinguished ladies who visited the house. When the
old King of Prussia died, she strove to induce the ladies of Stettin
to wear mourning as the court at Berlin was doing. But so cordially
was the old King hated that not a lady would wear black for him. The
Princess and her daughter and the faithful Khayn went bravely forth for
a couple of Sundays in solemn weeds, but all the other Stettin dames
united against them and the Princess was at last obliged to give up the
fight.
While little Fike lived in a chronic state of filial bedazzlement,
she had occasional glimpses of fact that left their mark. When her
mother visited the court at Berlin, she was questioned there about the
mourning episode at Stettin. “She denied the fact,” says Fike. “I was
present and wondered greatly at this. It was the first time I had ever
heard anyone deny a fact. I thought to myself, is it possible that my
mother has forgotten something which happened so recently? I was near
to reminding her; but I restrained myself, and that was surely my good
fortune.”
The Princess was not always truthful. Deliberate falsehoods of the kind
that her daughter noted at Berlin were probably not usual. But she
was a fluent weaver of inward and outward deceptions and she usually
wore her rose-colored glasses when she sat down to her correspondence.
In this respect Fike was quite different from her mother. Although
she could lie brazenly, for reasons, she had a clear sense of reality
and her letters and memoirs are remarkable for the small amount of
romancing they contain.
Perhaps she had from her father, the Prince of Anhalt, a saving sense
of moderation. He occupies so little space in his daughter’s memoirs
that no clear picture of his character is possible. But certain traits
come through in his correspondence. In spite of his stiff pedantic
style he reports the facts more reliably than does his wife in her
more eloquent epistles. His ambition was tempered with philosophy. At
one time in his life, after his daughter had gone to Russia, he tried
unsuccessfully to become the Duke of Courland. “I am, thank God,” he
wrote, “well satisfied with what I possess, yet I should like to hear
no reproaches later that we had slept away our luck at such a favorable
moment.”
This is the only time in his history that he shows himself in a
covetous light. Perhaps his motive in grasping at Courland was to be
nearer to his daughter in Russia. He seemed to realize, as his wife did
not, that German Princesses who married into the Czar’s family had a
way of being neglected and mislaid in that vast uncharted country.
[Illustration]
II
SHE IS EDUCATED
While Fike was still quite small, her father received an unexciting
promotion. Already Commander of the garrison, he was made Governor
of Stettin. This change did not bring the family any nearer to the
goal of the Princess’s hopes, a residence in Berlin. But it did
rescue them from the commonplace house in the Domstrasse which Fike
afterwards in the days of her grandeur referred to as “Greifenheim’s
house.” As Governor of Stettin, her father was given quarters in the
ancestral castle of the Duke of Pomerania. It was a gloomy rectangular
structure surrounding a roughly-paved courtyard and including as a
corner building a church with a bell-tower. Fike’s bedroom adjoined the
bell-tower.
The family occupied the third story of the left wing, the Princess’s
apartment being next to the entrance and her daughter’s next to the
church. Two or three times a day the little girl was allowed to visit
her mother. In her memoirs she describes how she ran through the long
corridor but does not describe the visits. The supervision over her
daughter’s education with which the Princess is credited was apparently
of the slightest. She was preoccupied with other things; an unambitious
husband and an invalid son gave her plenty to think about. Besides the
family finances were not improved by the general’s promotion. He still
clung to his parsimonious habits and was backed up by his second in
command, old Bolhagen, who as under-governor lived in the Pomeranian
castle and was always close at hand to help him out. “My father did
almost nothing without at least asking him about it,” says Fike. It was
certainly a situation which any wife would need philosophy to bear. The
harassed lady was often driven to extremes. She railed at old Bolhagen
that he “did not love her,” and she boxed her daughter’s ears from
sheer irritation.
The two Princesses came to be familiar figures at several North German
courts, for Fike after the age of eight always accompanied her mother
on her travels. Had the search for a husband already begun? Probably
so; the conversation at home seems to indicate as much. The Princess
neglected her daughter abroad, as well as at home. This did not
escape notice, and Fike occasionally had the satisfaction of having
strangers, with whom she early discovered how to get on, rebuke the
Princess for her maternal indifference. In this way, the Swedish Count
Gyllenborg incurred the life-long gratitude of the proud, sensitive
child. “When he saw,” says Fike, “how little or rather how not at all
my mother occupied herself with me, he said to her that she was not
right in giving me so little attention; that I was for my age a very
well-developed child.”
Still another partisan was unexpectedly raised up in the person of
a Catholic monk by the name of Mengden whom Fike and her mother met
at the Court of Brunswick. The monk occupied himself with palmistry
and prophecy, which were, by the way, forbidden by his Church. With
the certainty of her tendencies, the Princess gravitated toward
the sorcerer, leading by the hand the little Princess Marianna of
Brunswick-Bevern to whom she had taken a great fancy. She praised the
beauty of Marianna and demanded that the monk should prophesy a crown
for her. “He heard,” says Fike, “how my mother praised the Princess and
what she prophesied; he said to her that he saw not a single crown in
the features of the Princess but that he saw at least three above my
forehead.”
Fike never forgot this episode and related it more than once. She also
thought it sufficiently important to mention in her memoirs thirty
years later that the petted and beautiful Brunswick Princess eventually
died unmarried. The plain little Fike, who was to become the apostle of
enlightenment, continued always to believe in that fortune-telling monk.
Fike really owed her education to her French governess, Elisabeth
Cardel, and her German tutor, Pastor Wagner. With Mademoiselle Cardel
she spent her days and nights in the three small rooms beneath the
bell-tower. They were Fike and Babet to each other. Babet must be the
key to much that afterwards astonished the world in the Empress of
Russia. But what the French governess was like it would be difficult to
say. She has vanished into the limbo which is reserved for the domestic
servants of the famous. Our history books, like our etiquette books,
do not consider these people important. But almost any child takes her
nurse or governess quite seriously and is influenced by her character
regardless of the difference in their social station. The personality
of the servant who cares for genius in its helpless infancy and during
its stumbling childhood is a factor for biography to reckon with.
Certainly Babet Cardel was no ordinary servant; perhaps no ordinary
individual. She may have been an extraordinary person. All we know
of her is contained in the letters and memoirs of the pupil on whom
she left her impress. She was another genteel spinster but was of
a tougher-minded variety than the German aunts and lady companions
who otherwise figured in Fike’s life. She never saw ghosts and she
worshiped neither animals nor God too much. Without using flattery or
caresses she knew how to gain and keep the affections of her pupil.
Fike was a secretive child, yet she had no secrets from Babet, and this
was partly because Babet was clever. Her pupil had a life-long habit of
ready, off-hand scorn for stupidity.
The Cardel family were French emigrants; the father was a professor
in Frankfort. Two daughters, Madeleine and Elisabeth, made their way
to Stettin, where Madeleine was employed as Fike’s governess. When
her pupil was nearly four Madeleine was married to an advocate named
Colhard. The child made a scene at parting. “At Madame Colhard’s
wedding,” say her memoirs, “I drank too much and would not go to bed
without her. I bawled so loudly that they had to take me out and put
me to bed with my parents.” Fike passed into the hands of Elisabeth
Cardel. The two sisters were opposites: Madeleine was showy and
insincere while Elisabeth was just and consistent. Madeleine “took
great pains,” says her pupil, “to have me always appear before my
parents in such a way that I, and she also, should please them. So it
came about that I was for my years rather ‘deep.’”
Babet laid less stress on appearances and strove to counteract the
superficial methods of her sister. But Fike had acquired once for all
the knack of making an impression. She was a canny child, precocious in
her criticism of her environment and precocious in her ability to keep
her own counsel. Babet, who was something of a phrase-maker, called her
an “esprit gauche.” In mature years, Fike still delighted in the title.
“Mademoiselle Cardel and Herr Wagner had to deal with a perverse spirit
who took all that was said to her in the opposite sense.” Oppressed
by moralities and preachments, her eager, curious nature took refuge
behind a smiling but critical silence. “One does not always know what
children are thinking,” she says. “Children are hard to understand,
especially when careful training has accustomed them to obedience and
experience has made them cautious in conversations with their elders.”
Next to Elisabeth Cardel, Pastor Wagner was second in command. Fike
called herself, “half Mademoiselle Cardel’s, half Pastor Wagner’s
pupil.” With Pastor Wagner she studied religion, history and geography.
He also taught her to write German while Monsieur Laurent, a Calvinist
school-master, taught her French “calligraphy.” A French dancing-master
came to the little room beside the bell-tower, placed the four-year-old
child on a table and trained her in positions and steps. “This was
money thrown away,” remarked the affluent Empress of Russia many years
later; doubtless an echo of dear Papa’s views, hardly of dear Mama’s.
For seven long years Babet, who was musical herself, struggled to teach
her pupil the rudiments of singing but gave it up at last as hopeless.
A music-master by the name of Roellig was called in at Zerbst but his
efforts were also fruitless. A drawing teacher she never had; but
somewhere along in her career she learned both carving and engraving,
arts which she cultivated later in Russia. Her skill at embroidery
is evidenced by rich ecclesiastical robes still preserved in Russian
museums.
Fike afterwards described her teachers, always excepting Mademoiselle
Cardel, as rather a poor lot. Monsieur Laurent was “an old weak-head
who in his youth was but a dunce,” a Frenchman who spoke German “like
a Spanish cow.” The music-master was preserved in a burlesque sketch
addressed to Grimm. “About the poor devil Roellig I have never told you
yet, because you know what success his lessons had. He always brought
with him a creature who roared bass. He had him sing in my room; I
listened to him and said to myself, ‘he roars like a bull,’ but Herr
Roellig was beside himself with delight when ever this bass throat was
in action.” Concerning Wagner and Cardel, she offered as her mature
judgment: “I cherish absolutely no grudge against Herr Wagner, but
I am convinced in my inmost soul that he was a block-head and that
Mademoiselle Cardel was a clever girl.”
Fike scoffed at her education as she scoffed at her teachers. “Very
early it was noticed that I had a good memory; therefore I was
incessantly tormented with learning by rote. They called it training
the memory; but I believe it to have been rather a weakening. At first
it was Bible verses; then specially prepared pieces on the fables of
La Fontaine which I had to commit to memory and repeat. If I forgot
anything, I was scolded; I believe, however, it was not humanly
possible to retain all that I had to memorize; also I do not think it
worth the trouble. I still possess a German Bible in which all the
verses which I had to learn are underlined with red ink.”
The most valuable part of her education was incidental to her
association with Babet, “who knew everything without having learned
anything; she knew all the comedies and tragedies like her five fingers
and was very amusing.” Babet’s vocabulary and phrases were drawn from
her reading. Often she reminded her pupil that the word “Monsieur”
“never broke anyone’s jaw-bone,” a phrase which Fike assumed had been
drawn from some old comedy. She read Corneille and Racine and was
saturated with Molière, who consequently became the daily bread of
her pupil. Her favorite authority was “common sense” which she evoked
habitually. “That is not common sense,” represented a final judgment
with the governess as it eventually did with the Empress. Everybody
else in Fike’s early environment dealt in moral principles and
religious dogmas; Babet seems to have been a realist.
The governess had friends, French emigrants like herself,
intellectuals, who are to be distinguished from the simple-minded
Laurent, master of calligraphy. Babet received on Sundays in the
nursery a certain Monsieur de Mauclerc, a clergyman, who was remembered
by Fike chiefly as the editor of a History of England written by
his father-in-law, Rapin Thoiras. The Mauclerc-Thoiras circle was
pro-English, which meant in those days that they were philosophers and
liberals. With these fellow-exiles of hers Babet was intimate and her
pupil was adopted by the group. In their circle Fike had her first
experience of good conversation, which she afterwards passionately
pursued as one of the main interests of her life. Here she learned to
know as clever and delightful people those whom Pastor Wagner regarded
as heretics. “So far as Wagner was concerned, he had nothing in common
with these arch-heretics who did not understand his language; nor he,
theirs.” But Fike felt herself able through language and imagination to
bridge the mental chasm which yawned between her French governess and
her German tutor.
2
The Princes of Anhalt-Zerbst were a pious line. Before the Reformation,
one of them had been a celebrated saint. The sight of him wearing a
monastic garb, emaciated by fasting and begging through the streets,
had so impressed Martin Luther as a boy that it had helped to send him
into a monastery. Zerbst had been close to the war with Tetzel about
indulgences and the contemporary Prince of Anhalt had early ranged
himself on the side of the reformer. Two hundred years before Fike was
born, Luther had been intimate with the head of the house of Anhalt
and had played chess with him. The passage of six generations had
dimmed the worldly glory of these Princes but the heritage of piety had
persisted undiminished.
Prince Christian August followed in the footsteps of his forebears.
He was a rigid Protestant, one of those puritanical Lutherans, who,
according to Frederick the Great, were still numerous in that day.
Frederick seemed to think that the cult had declined during his reign.
But the free-thinking King exaggerated the extent of his own influence,
which did not reach far beyond his own round table. The pious Princes
of Germany, the special creation of Dr. Martin Luther, were destined to
survive many centuries. Long after Frederick was dead and buried, they
continued to impress their somber personalities upon the history of
Europe by marrying into all its royal families. Fike’s father was one
of these somber personalities.
It was a matter of course that the daughter of Christian August should
be educated by an evangelical pastor. In her little room against the
church, so close that the sound of the organ came through, the parson
instructed her and put her through her so-called _Prüfungen_. These
examinations were high lights in a monotonous childhood. The reverend,
black-robed gentleman did not scamp his duty like the music-master
Roellig. He built himself into the very foundation of his pupil’s
character. Although she ultimately decided that he was a pedant and
a block-head, she never forgot his teachings. The ghost of her old
teacher accompanied her to Russia where he frequently walked and
talked, and never out of character. As a middle-aged Empress, she
would often quote him thus: “The joys of this world, according to Herr
Wagner, are not worth its pains”; or, “The world is not good for much,
said the blessed Herr Wagner, because of original sin.” Or, “You say to
me that the evils for which there is no remedy, can be met with peace
and resignation. You learned that from your father; it is exactly the
same thing that the blessed Herr Wagner, of ancient memory, used to
say.” The pastor often discoursed to his pupil on the Last Judgment.
Fike was so impressed with the difficulty of being saved that she began
to have fits of weeping at twilight. Babet found her hiding behind the
window curtains to indulge these melancholy thoughts, and induced the
child to tell her the reason. Herr Wagner was forbidden to frighten
Fike in the future with his sermons on the Last Judgment.
The pastor was the faithful representative of the Princess’s father. He
was dear Papa’s man. The Prince of Anhalt, always on the march, could
rest easy in the thought that his daughter was being firmly grounded
in the doctrine of her fathers. In addition to her daily lessons with
Herr Wagner, who was after all merely an army chaplain, she had higher
religious education from the Lutheran pastor at Brunswick. By the time
she was fourteen, the Prince could well afford to congratulate himself,
as he did, on the thoroughness of his daughter’s religious foundation.
Yet Fike did not swallow Wagner whole; she argued with him. She
declared it unjust that Marcus Aurelius and other heroes of antiquity
should be damned because they had not known salvation. The pastor
proved by chapter and verse that they were damned, but his pupil
stubbornly defended her point. Babet Cardel was called in by the irate
pedagogue and the governess patched up a peace between them. A second
argument arose on the subject of chaos. Chaos, said the teacher, is
what went before the world. “But what is Chaos?” demanded the pupil.
And again Babet had to intervene and make peace. It was the same way
with circumcision which the pastor refused to explain. Babet’s tact
was once more called into service and order restored. It appears that
Babet was not allowed to use the rod. Only dear Mama could do that. But
a quick box on the ears was more in Mama’s manner.