had made the journey on foot, leaving the others to overtake her
in carriages. The entire party entered the gates in the form of
a procession, which first turned into the Cathedral for mass and
afterward became a sort of English house-party in which affairs of
state and sociability were indiscriminately mixed. “After the midday
meal,” Catherine says, “when the Grand Duke had come to our chambers,
the Empress entered unexpectedly and commanded my mother to follow
her into the next room. Count Lestocq went in with them. Awaiting my
mother’s return, I seated myself with the Grand Duke upon the window
ledge, and we chatted. The conversation in the closed room lasted a
long time.”
The first to appear was Count Lestocq who, assuming his best German
manners, said to the young girl, “There is nothing left for you but to
pack your things; you will start at once on your home-ward journey.”
Lestocq did not waste courtesy on fallen favorites, but he was not
always shrewd enough to know who had fallen and who had not. Then
the Empress appeared at the door. For a moment her imposing figure
towered beneath the low ceiling, her blue eyes flashing with anger.
Behind her appeared the culprit, the Princess of Zerbst, her eyes red
with weeping. The two young people hastily sprang down from the high
window-seat and stood in attitudes of respect. The impulsive Elisabeth
laughed, kissed the boy and girl who were to make up to her for the
romantic marriage she had missed, and passed quickly out of the room.
Lestocq’s prophecy was not fulfilled. The Princess and her daughter
were not sent home.
Frederick the Great was to feel the effects of this family quarrel
in the Seven Years War. Elisabeth’s dislike of the Prussian King was
greatly strengthened by the explosion at Troitsky. The Princess of
Zerbst she never forgave. Mardefeld, the Prussian minister, was allowed
to linger for a time, but when the Princess of Zerbst returned to
Germany, the Empress demanded Mardefeld’s recall. She hit upon the
humiliating device of requiring the Princess herself to go to the King
of Prussia and deliver the message requesting his minister’s recall.
The Prussian Ambassador, who had survived twenty years at the Russian
court and had landed on his feet after two palace revolutions, was
finally wrecked by his alliance with the Princess of Zerbst. Frederick
the Great lost substantially then and afterward by enlisting the
diplomacy of Catherine’s mother. He did not forget it.
3
In all her difficulties, Catherine could look for no support from her
natural protector and future consort. If she had been an average girl,
the defective Peter would still have been a child beside her. But she
was far from being an ordinary girl. The fifteen-year-old Princess was
more than a match for the two adult women who fancied they were leading
her. To steer her course between the Empress and her mother took all
her attention at first. For a time she disregarded the Grand Duke as a
factor in the situation.
Her account of their relationship shows that they met like children,
without any thought of a more mature relationship. “The Grand Duke
appeared to rejoice at my arrival. In the first days he was very
complaisant toward me.” During her illness, his good will continued.
“During my sickness the Grand Duke had shown me much attention. When
I became better he continued this. I seemed to please him; but I can
neither say that he pleased me nor displeased me. I only knew how to
obey and my mother had to marry me.” The boy gave her his confidence,
chattering like a child about everything that came into his head. He
confided to her his former love for Princess Lapukin whom the Empress
had banished from the court and whose place had been taken by Catherine
herself. The girl, who was passionately proud, could not understand
that these were the outpourings of a fragile sexless boy. She only saw
that her lover was indifferent and pretended to the others that she did
not see it.
“When the fair weather came we moved over into the Summer Palace. Here
the visits of the Grand Duke grew less frequent. I must say this lack
of attention and his coldness so to speak on the eve of our wedding did
not exactly incline me in his favor. The nearer the time came, the less
could I hide from myself the possibility that my marriage might be very
unhappy. But I had too much pride and too much self-respect to allow
the world to suspect that I thought myself unloved. I regarded myself
too highly to believe that I was contemptible. The Grand Duke had a
somewhat free manner with the ladies-in-waiting of the Empress which
did not exactly please me, but I restrained myself from speaking about
it and no one knew my deepest feelings. I tried to distract myself by
romping in my chamber with my maidens.”
The Grand Duchess did not understand that the Grand Duke’s attachments
to other ladies was as childish and unvirile as his attachment to
herself. She says in her memoirs that at this time she scarcely knew
the difference between the sexes. But jealousy was an old familiar
feeling. Far back among the dim memories of her Stettin childhood was
the shadow of a dreadful day when a baby brother had upset her world.
She did not like those memories. “I should have been the most unhappy
creature in the world if I had allowed myself to be carried away by
feelings of tenderness for him,” she says of the Grand Duke. “He would
have ill-repaid me and I should have died of jealousy, which would have
done nobody any good. So I tried to control myself in order that I
might not be jealous of a man that did not love me. But in order not to
be jealous there was only one means: not to love him.”
The Grand Duchess grew high-strung and nervous. It was not the first
time that she had failed to meet the requirements of an important
situation. Born a girl, she had disappointed her parents’ hopes of
the succession at Anhalt-Zerbst. Lacking beauty, she had not been
attractive to suitors. And now that her future husband did not love
her, she had to reassure herself that she was not “contemptible.” Under
the stress of bruised self-feeling, she became capricious and masterful
with her maidens. Covering the floor of her room with mattresses, she
had all eight of them sleep in her room. Another time she led the
damsels out for a midnight walk through the gardens of Peterhof for
which they were all roundly scolded. Like a Sultana she divided the
custody of her possessions among them, entrusting her jewels to one,
her laces to another, her linen to another and so on. She cut her front
hair short, wore it in a kind of frizzled bang and ordered her girls to
do the same. Some of them wept and pleaded but the Grand Duchess had
issued a ukas. She would not be moved. Peter the Great had not relented
when old men wept and begged to be allowed to keep their beards. Let
Maria Petrovna, the Skorodov sisters, and the two dwarfs dry their
tears and order in the barber at once to cut off their hair exactly
like the Grand Duchess.... In addition to her elaborate hair-dressing,
Catherine had taken on the habit of painting her face.
4
The Empress arranged the marriage for her two adopted children as if
they had been puppets or ballet dancers. No such marriage had ever
been seen in Russia except perhaps the famous ice festival in the
reign of Anna Ivanovna, when Prince Galitsin married his Lilliputian
bride. To satisfy a whim of their Empress the couple had been escorted
to an illuminated ice-palace on the Neva and put upon a bed made of
ice. Fortunately for Catherine and Peter they were to be married in
mid-summer. The date was originally set for July the first, but was
postponed twice. Not until late in August was everything finally ready.
All summer long the Empress was so taken up with preparations that
she suspended all affairs of state. Her own ministers and the foreign
ambassadors had nothing to do but play cards and drive in the Nevsky
Prospect.
For months in advance the fashionable world was busy providing itself
with “the richest clothes possible” since nothing less was specified by
the ukas issued by the Empress. Bales of silk, velvet, and brocade were
constantly arriving from England and Germany, for the Russians were no
weavers. The English ambassador wrote home complaining of the Empress’s
neglect of official business when he might have better congratulated
his country on the increased importation of English goods in Russia.
From German looms came the heavy cloth-of-silver from which Catherine’s
wedding gown was made. It was a rigid structure with a bodice shaped
over a wooden form, to which was suspended a train more than three
yards long. The fabric was spun silver and the whole thing weighed upon
her like a suit of armor.
Clad in this unyielding garment and bearing on her head a ponderous
crown of jewels the Grand Duchess spent a miserable day. She held out
bravely during the wedding ceremony in the church of Our Lady of Kazan
and throughout the state repast in the Winter Palace afterwards. But
just before the ball began, she humbled her pride and begged to have
the crown removed for a few minutes. The Empress, who thought this
might bring bad luck, reluctantly consented.
The wedding was a triumph for Elisabeth’s maternal pride. She ordered
every detail of the ceremony with jealous tyranny, not omitting to
command the bride to take a bath the evening before. Early next morning
she sent for Catherine to come to her chamber to be robed in state.
There ensued a heated argument between the Empress and the barber
concerning the bride’s style of hair-dressing. Catherine sat before the
mirror and seemed to take no part. There was not a rift on this day
in her good relations with the Empress. A supreme satisfaction in the
great event united them completely.
Although it was also the wedding day of the Grand Duke, he played a
rather minor part. The ill-starred boy had managed to contract the
smallpox recently and appeared at his nuptials with a dreadfully
pockmarked face. His august aunt always dreaded his public appearances
lest some piece of childish misbehaviour on his part should disgrace
the Romanov family. Peter bore himself sufficiently well on his wedding
day, however, to cause no comment among the on-lookers. His only
caprice was to offend his bride. While the young couple were still
kneeling opposite to each other, waiting the final words of the priest,
one of the court ladies whispered in the Grand Duke’s ear. “I heard
him say to her,” says Catherine, “‘Clear out! Such nonsense!’ Then he
turned to me and told me that she had advised him not to turn his head
while he stood before the priest, for whoever of us first turned our
head would die first and she did not wish him to be that one. I thought
this compliment not very friendly on our wedding day but I did not
allow myself to notice it. She saw, however, that he had repeated to
me her good advice. She grew red and made reproaches, which he again
repeated to me.”
At ten o’clock, the Empress herself conducted the young people to their
apartment and left the Grand Duchess with her maidens. She was relieved
of her burdensome wedding garments and put to bed beneath a velvet
coverlet. “All of them went away,” Catherine’s narrative relates, “I
remained alone more than two hours and did not know what I should do.
Should I get up again? Should I remain in bed? I knew nothing. Finally
my new lady of honor, Madame Kruse, came and informed me with great
merriment that the Grand Duke was waiting for his supper which was
about to be carried up to him. After his Imperial Highness had supped
well, he came to bed; and as he laid himself down, he began to talk
of how it would amuse his servant in the morning to see us both in
bed. Then he fell asleep and slept soundly until the next morning. The
cloths of fine linen on which I lay were very uncomfortable owing to
the summer weather and consequently I slept badly; all the more as the
morning gray of the daylight disturbed me considerably, for the bed had
no curtains, although otherwise furnished magnificently in red velvet
with silver embroidery. Madame Kruse attempted the next morning to
question us young married people. Her hopes however proved unfounded.
And in this condition our affairs remained during the next nine years
without the least change.”
The Empress was not satisfied with one day’s celebration of the
marriage. The festivities were prolonged for ten days. The streets were
given over to merry-making; heralds on horseback, fountains spouting
wine, fire-works and white nights, and all the bells and cannons of
Petersburg made a continuous carnival. An unbroken succession of
dinners, operas, masquerades, and quadrilles crowded upon each other.
The Princess of Zerbst was hard put to it to describe these festivities
adequately to her spouse. For he was not present. Somehow the
invitation which should have brought the Prince of Zerbst to his
daughter’s wedding had never been sent. He had expected it from week to
week, since Frederick had told them that it would surely come. In the
end, the old Prince was overlooked and had to console himself with his
wife’s description of his daughter’s wedding. The exuberant Princess
wrote, “The Grand Duchess sends you her respects, but has no time to
write, since it is still so new for her to be with her husband. They
can scarcely be separated for a quarter of an hour.”
The little Grand Duchess moved through everything like an automaton.
She stepped through the white and gold quadrilles with tears in her
eyes. “Never in my life,” said she afterward, “have I seen a more
woeful and stupid amusement than were those quadrilles.” The beginning
of her honeymoon was just as woeful. “After my wedding,” she said, “I
felt best when I was with my mother. I strove all the more eagerly to
stay with her as my household could scarcely be called pleasant. The
Grand Duke had nothing but child’s play in his head; he gave himself
up to playing at soldiers, surrounded by his menials in whom alone he
showed any interest.”
[Illustration]
VI
CATHERINE BECOMES A MOTHER
Two weeks after the wedding, the Empress sent the young married pair
with the Princess of Zerbst to Czarskoe Selo. It was the month of
September and the birches were turning to gold. But the bride had
suddenly lost her enthusiasm for the Russian scene. For the first time
she was homesick for Germany and dreaded the moment of her mother’s
departure. “At that time I would have given much if I could have left
the country with her.”
She was sustained, however, by a new sense of power and importance
which came from having money in her pocket. This enabled her to
patronize her mother by assuming her debts, for the extravagant
Princess had obligations amounting to seventy thousand rubles and no
idea how she was ever going to meet them. Catherine promised to pay
in her mother’s stead a sum which was absurdly beyond her means, for
the Empress allowed her only thirty thousand rubles a year. Lifted so
suddenly from the meager circumstances of her Stettin life, the Grand
Duchess had no measure for her newly acquired riches. They seemed to
her limitless. Of course she was in a position to come to her mother’s
assistance and she came. Even if her new husband did not love her she
was a rich woman now and could afford to be generous. This was the
beginning of a labyrinth of debt in which she progressively involved
herself until it brought her within a few years to the verge of
bankruptcy.
At the end of September the Princess of Zerbst and Fräulein Khayn
set forth on their homeward journey. They were laden with presents
from the Empress. Two chests filled with Chinese and Damascene stuffs
accompanied the travellers; and to console the long-neglected Prince of
Zerbst, his wife carried with her as gifts from the Grand Duke diamond
shoe-buckles, diamond coat-buttons, and a diamond-studded dagger. The
party was escorted by Catherine and Peter as far as Krasnoe-Selo, the
old Red Village of the Czars, where the Princess and her daughter saw
each other for the last time. “I wept a great deal,” says Catherine,
“and in order not to make me still more sad my mother went away without
taking leave of me.”
As soon as she arrived home, the Grand Duchess went to find her
favorite maiden Maria Petrovna Shukov, to comfort her in her
loneliness. But the girl had disappeared during Catherine’s absence.
It developed that she had been sent away at the suggestion of the
Princess of Zerbst. The Princess and the Empress had put their heads
together over the unpromising status of the newly-made marriage and
the banishment of Maria was the result. They remembered the part which
Julie von Mengden had played in alienating the former regent, Anna
Leopoldovna, from her husband, and they feared that Maria Shukov might
play a similar part by increasing the estrangement between Catherine
and Peter. The Grand Duchess learned then that she could never have a
confidante in the future.
Anything which reminded Elisabeth of Anna Leopoldovna’s family was
hateful to her. She wished to forget the deposed Regent if possible,
but the wretched woman, as if to revenge herself on the Empress, had
continued to increase her family at regular intervals. Four children
had been born to her at Kolmogory, two of whom were sons. The Major in
charge sent a faithful report of each birth to the Empress, who tore
his reports to pieces. At last he sent a report which she did not tear
into pieces. The prolific Anna had died in childbed. The Empress gave
orders that the body of the deceased Regent should be dissected, and
brought to Petersburg for burial. Accompanied by the Grand Duchess,
both draped in heavy black, she attended the funeral ceremonies in the
Alexander Nevsky Cathedral where the ill-starred Anna was laid to rest
between her grandmother and her mother. Her grandmother was the old
Czarina Prascovia Feodorovna, who had laid a curse on her daughter,
and her mother was the daughter who had been cursed. The unlucky Anna
weighed on Catherine’s conscience not a little.
The death of Anna occurred about nine months after the marriage of the
Grand Ducal pair. The Empress gave them another month of grace while
she repaired with her favorite to spend May at Czarskoe Selo. Presently
she returned, advancing upon the sterile couple like a threatening
Juno. She had apparently expected that the Grand Duchess would, without
preliminary warning or symptoms, present her with a Romanov heir in the
ninth month after marriage. Disappointed in her hopes, she took drastic
measures to remedy the situation.
This time it was Bestushev and the Empress who put their heads
together. Bestushev, it will be remembered, had not favored this
marriage and Elisabeth’s discontentment with its results directed
her thoughts toward him. At her wits’ end, she asked him to devise a
régime, a program, for the young people, which he did with spirit and
enthusiasm. He gave the Empress an elaborate memorandum concerning the
behaviour of the Grand Duchess and a still more elaborate memorandum
concerning the behaviour of the Grand Duke. The instructions were
for the use of the guardians who were to take charge of the pair.
Bestushev’s document rehearsed at length the faults of the Grand Duke:
his disrespectful behaviour in church; his weakness for toys and tin
soldiers; his familiarity with pages and lackeys; his low language,
his grimaces, his indecencies at table. In short, the Vice-Chancellor
drew a picture of the Russian heir-apparent that might have been
mistaken for the portrait of a child in bibs. All of its statements are
confirmed by Catherine in her memoirs. The rules which he prepared for
the Grand Duchess consisted entirely of prohibitions, chief of which
was a ban on all private correspondence with her mother, the Princess
of Zerbst. This drove the girl to underground communications in which
she became at last very skilful and learned to use it for political
ends.
The keystone of the new régime was the appointment of a married couple
as guardians. The Choglokovs were chosen for special reasons. Maria
Choglokov had married her husband for love and was known to all the
court as the pattern of a faithful and devoted wife. Bestushev brought
the young matron to the Grand Duchess’s apartment and introduced her as
the new governess or duenna. “Immediately,” says Catherine, “I began to
weep violently.” This did not help to ingratiate her governess. The
atmosphere became hysterical. Catherine went to bed for a whole day and
had to be bled the next morning. The Empress came and scolded angrily.
Young wives who did not love their husbands always wept; Catherine’s
mother had assured her that Catherine had no objection to marrying the
Grand Duke; she, the Empress, had not forced her to marry him; and,
finally, now that they were already married there was no use in crying
about it. Thoroughly frightened at the Empress’s display of temper,
Catherine murmured, “Little mother, forgive me, I am in the wrong.” She
feared that the Empress would actually beat her as she did sometimes
beat the ladies and gentlemen of the court.
The new duenna performed her duties well, setting the good example
which the Empress had expected of her. “From 1746 until the death of
her husband,” says Catherine, “who died in the year 1754, we really
never saw her except pregnant or in childbed.” The Grand Duchess
hated the prolific Maria and no wonder. Scarcely was the wretched
Anna Leopoldovna well underground than this new and vivid reproach
sprang up before her very eyes. The Kolmogory family had been at least
invisible but Maria’s babies were born under her very eyes and were
heralded as important public events. Bestushev wrote to Count Vorontsov
in London, “In these days it has pleased her Imperial Majesty to
commission Nicolai Naumovich Choglokov to journey to the Roman Emperor
to congratulate him on the attainment of his high distinction; he will
not, however, depart before his wife has been delivered; that is, the
middle of March.” On the 14th of March Bestushev added: “In these days
Maria Semionovna ... has given birth to an infant daughter. And Nicolai
Naumovich will depart soon from here to Vienna.”
The Empress hoped apparently that Maria’s fertility was something which
the Grand Duchess might acquire by association and imitation. Yet year
after year passed by and the miracle did not happen. Catherine remained
childless while Maria bore a child every year. In writing her memoirs
drops of gall fall from her pen whenever she speaks of the Choglokovs.
“Although he was loved so much he was not at all lovable. Of all the
people in the world, he was the most puffed up and conceited; he
thought himself extraordinarily beautiful and clever. He was a stupid
coxcomb, arrogant and spiteful, and at the least quite as malicious as
his wife, who was so not a little.” The Grand Duchess allowed herself
small revenges that were not quite refined. One of her maidens had
a trick of imitating with a pillow the walk of the pregnant Maria.
Catherine encouraged her in this performance by peals of appreciative
laughter. Her spitefulness extended itself to Maria’s sister Marfa.
“How far the stupidity of this woman went is shown by the following
pretty story: she was quite astonished at the cleverness of the midwife
who prophesied that she would bring either a boy or a girl into the
world. She could not understand whence the midwife had this knowledge.”
Madame Choglokov and her sister were Skavronskys, nieces of the
Empress. They represented the stock from which Elisabeth had sprung on
her mother’s side. The Skavronskys were more prominent in the Empress’s
environment than the Romanov side of her family, and Catherine
liked to remember that the Empress was a Skavronsky. The houses of
Zerbst and Holstein, although impoverished, did not produce women as
weak-witted as the Empress’s nieces. Catherine found in that comparison
a satisfaction for her resentment and jealousy.
2
Her memoirs describe a nine-years’ purgatory of mental and physical
suffering. She says but little of her attitude toward the Grand Duke
but that little is significant. When the Empress accused her of not
loving him, she spoke the truth, for Catherine says herself that, as
a protection against jealousy she schooled herself to be indifferent
toward her husband.