tried to console himself in the usual way. He became a good deal of
a ladies’ man. In tender glances and in compliments he was not at
all backward; he could give an excellent imitation of a young man in
love. His pose was so good that it deceived his aunt and humiliated
his wife. He became better and better at it. Finally he entered into a
relationship with Elisabeth Vorontsov who came to be regarded as a real
mistress. Catherine knew that Peter was incompetent to have a physical
relationship but she realized that others did not know it. As Peter’s
affectations grew his actual condition became worse. Nor did the stony
indifference of his wife help to make bad matters any better. On the
contrary, it helped to make them worse. The Grand Duke crystallized
into a little manikin incapable of feelings of any kind.
Catherine’s life was full of illness and hypochondria. A catalogue of
her ailments can be made up from her reminiscences. She fills up pages
with stories of headaches, toothaches, insomnia, influenza and measles.
She describes these afflictions with a serious attention to detail
which she scarcely achieved in describing the Turkish Wars of her
later years. She says impressively that her colds were so severe that
she used twelve pocket-handkerchiefs a day. At one time her physician
thought she had tuberculosis. He ordered her to bed and put her on a
diet of ass’s milk. She suffered from a consuming fear of smallpox and
every time anything went wrong with her she believed herself stricken.
Once it turned out only to be measles, but her spots, she assures us,
were as large as rubles. All of her illnesses and afflictions during
those years were the worst that could be suffered and survived.
The story of her skull-bones has a dramatic climax and a happy ending.
“During this entire year,” says the heroine, “I suffered continually
from headache and sleeplessness. Madame Kruse brought me as a so-called
medicine a glass of Hungarian wine after I lay in bed, which I was
supposed to drink regularly every evening. I refused this remedy for
sleeplessness and Frau Kruse drank it in my stead and to my health.
After I had returned to the city, I complained to Dr. Boerhaave of
my sufferings. He was a very sympathetic man; he also knew the kind
of life I lived and knew my relation to my husband as well as to my
environment. He bade me show him my head some morning before my hair
was dressed and carefully he went over the skull. Finally he said that,
although I was seventeen years old, my head had the formation of a
six-year-old child; that I must be very careful and never allow the
upper part of my skull to get cold; in short, the bones of my head had
never yet closed up. He believed that the bones would only close up
when I had reached the age of twenty-five or twenty-six and that this
was the cause of my headaches. I followed his advice and it was a fact
that the separation between the skull-bones disappeared only when I was
twenty-five or twenty-six years old as he had prophesied.”
This happy cure of Catherine’s skull coincided with the birth of her
first child which occurred when she was halfway between twenty-five
and twenty-six. Apparently her physician was also something of a
fortune-teller who could read the future, predict events, and give
accurate dates.
Catherine pictures her experience with toothache and tooth-pulling
with more than Russian realism. Twenty-five years after she had lost
a tooth, she could seat herself at her writing table and recall in
fancy the painful moment when her physician and her surgeon and a male
assistant had removed it. After the operation was completed it was
discovered that the Grand Duchess had lost a piece of jaw-bone “as
large as a ten-sous piece.” The surgeon wished to examine the wound but
the patient would not allow him to touch her. “I learned then,” she
says, “that the pain which one suffers often creates hatred toward the
one who causes it.” In the midst of her absorption in her tragedies,
Catherine was capable of flashes of psychological insight.
“My situation was really not to be laughed at,” she says. “I stood
completely isolated among all the people there. Meantime I had
accustomed myself to it; the reading of good books and my cheerful
turn of temperament helped me easily over the situation. Besides I had
a presentiment of future destiny which gave me courage to bear all
that I had to bear and to endure daily unpleasantries from more than
one side. Already I wept much less when I was alone than in the first
years.”
The Empress had given Oranienbaum to Peter for a summer residence.
Here the young people led a comparatively free life. Catherine used
her freedom to go duck-hunting, rising at three o’clock in the morning
to pursue her sport. With one old man for an attendant, she sometimes
took a boat and followed her game far out into the open waters of
the Finnish gulf. As she roamed about alone in the white light of
the summer dawn, her romantic musings were mingled with ambitious
thoughts. “At that time I read only romances which heated my phantasy,
of which verily I had no need.” She wore men’s clothes on her shooting
expeditions, as Elisabeth had once done before she became Empress. But
her thoughts were occupied far more than Elisabeth’s had ever been with
thoughts of the crown and the succession.
Sometimes for as much as thirteen hours a day she rode horseback. It
was an exercise which she passionately loved. Whenever she touches
on the subject of her skill as a rider, her vanity gets entirely
out of hand. Her prowess was such that her riding master wept tears
of enthusiasm and, speechless with joy, could only run to kiss her
riding-boot. The actress in blue velvet whom little Fike had seen at
the age of three could hardly have expected more! Catherine’s horseback
riding soon became another source of conflict between herself and the
Empress. She preferred to ride astride and the Empress feared that
this might be the reason why she had no children. The Empress forbade
the practice and Catherine did not dare to disobey her openly. But
she had an English saddle made with a movable pommel, so that she
could ride either sidewise or astride. When safely out of sight of the
Empress and her nasty Skavronsky relations, she rode as she pleased.
3
In Bestushev and his drastic Instructions, Elisabeth had exhausted her
last resource of discipline. But her disappointment and chagrin caused
her to continue in a thousand petty ways to harass the Grand Ducal
pair. They were kept on a nursery régime of liberties. Neither of them
was allowed to leave the house even for a drive without the express
permission of the Empress. She regulated their slightest movements,
ordering them from the Winter Palace to the Summer Palace or from
Petersburg to Oranienbaum without a moment’s notice. Sometimes she
allowed them to form a part of her entourage when she took a journey.
Catherine complains, however, that the Empress always omitted her from
her hunting parties, although she knew how passionately the Grand
Duchess loved to ride and shoot. On the other hand the Empress always
remembered to include her in her religious pilgrimages.
Catherine describes Elisabeth’s excursions in a rather critical spirit.
There was for instance a trip to Reval when she had to sleep in a
kitchen where bread was being baked and where the ovens sent out a
terrible heat. Sometimes the Empress’s party spent the night in tents
and Catherine recalls rather scornfully those forlorn occasions when
storms came on and the wind blew out the torches and the rain soaked
the finery of the courtiers. Once they went to visit a Wonder-working
Virgin in a holy cloister but she could not possibly be seen because
the boards on which she was painted were covered with black filth. In
this carping spirit Catherine described the Empress’s best shows, and
yet she felt surprised and injured because the Empress did not like
her. “Her dislike of me,” she said, “has increased from year to year,
although my entire aim has been to please her in everything. The Grand
Duke is a witness that I have done everything to persuade him also to
do this. My respect, my obedience in all that she has wished, has been
carried to the uttermost limit to which a human being can carry it.”
Yet the Empress called her, “Ochen upriany,” very stubborn, and refused
to see her for weeks and months at a time.
During the second spring following her marriage, Catherine received
the news of her father’s death. The Prince had died of a stroke of
apoplexy. Catherine wept so violently and long that the doctors came
and bled her. Still she wept on. The Empress grew impatient and finally
sent word through Madame Choglokov that Catherine should dry her tears.
“My father had been no King, and the loss was not so great.... But to
the credit of her Majesty, I cannot believe that the woman said to
me what she had been commanded to say, for that did not exactly show
goodness of heart!” Catherine was allowed to wear mourning for only
six weeks and was limited to mere black silk instead of crêpe. “I must
confess,” writes Catherine, “that to-day (twenty-five years later) I
cannot think of it without rebellion in my heart.”
The Empress’s irritation made her variable temper more variable than
ever. She grew more restless and eccentric. Every day she had the
furniture shifted in her apartments. Her people were left waiting hours
and days for orders which she delayed for mere whims. Once the Grand
Duchess remained sitting upright on a chair fully dressed for early
mass while the hours slowly passed from four o’clock in the morning to
three o’clock in the afternoon. The Empress had summoned her to go to
church but had changed her mind at the last moment and gone to the bath
instead.
The wishes of the young court were never consulted, even formally,
about anything. A favorite attendant would vanish overnight and be
heard of next in Astrakhan, Orenburg or Kazan whither he had been
banished. Always, Catherine says, the exiles passed first through
the court called the Secret Chancellary, a form of inquisition which
was the terror and horror of Russia at the time. One day the Grand
Duke’s Holstein servants were suddenly sent back to Germany without
warning, and he was left alone with Russians whom he detested. Another
day Catherine’s attendant, Madame Kruse, who happened also to be a
Holsteiner, was suddenly dismissed and replaced by Madame Vladislav,
who was a Russian. The Empress had apparently hit upon the forlorn hope
that it might be German influence which kept the young couple sterile.
Catherine’s new woman, Prascovia Nikitichna Vladislav, made an
important contribution to her education. Prascovia was about fifty and
her gossip about the Russian grandees and their families went back
to the time of Peter the Great. Catherine was fascinated by these
histories which gave her the orientation in Russia that she needed.
Peter would not listen to Prascovia. He was homesick for Holstein and
as the German group which once surrounded him grew less and less and
finally disappeared completely, his Heimweh increased. The last to go
was Baron Lestocq, who was imprisoned for five years in the Fortress of
Saint Peter and Saint Paul and finally banished to Uglitch. The Empress
was done with Germans for all time.
Catherine seemed to forget very easily the old friends of her mother’s
party and to pass on quickly to an alliance with the Russians. In time
she found herself and Bestushev, the official enemy of that party, on
the same side and even united in their political schemes. She had an
elasticity of temperament which was her one salvation in her trying
circumstances. For there is no denying they were intensely trying.
“For eighteen years,” she writes, “I have led a life from which ten
others would have gone insane and twenty in my place would have died of
melancholy.”
The petty persecutions of the Empress were the only thing that drew the
young couple together. When Catherine was scolded by her duenna, Peter
flared up in her defence. In return, Catherine gave Peter advice and
comfort when he fled to her in terror at the threats of the Empress
and his governors. But Catherine found his fears excessive; with a
certain detachment and objectivity she recognized that they were beyond
the ordinary and uncontrollable. She wondered at this trait at first
and yet sympathized with him; but later on when other things had come
between them, her wonder changed to scorn. Her story of the Grand Duke
and his abhorrence of the Russian bath shows that she early appreciated
the dangers into which the young man’s stubbornness was leading him.
During the first week of Lent, the Empress ordered Catherine and Peter
to go to the steam bath, as a part of the regular preparation for
communion. The Grand Duke excitedly refused. He would not enter the
bath; he had never been there before and it was a ridiculous ceremony
anyhow to which he attached no significance. Besides, the bath was
harmful and would make him ill. “He did not wish to die; his life was
his most precious possession. The Empress could never force him to
the point of going there.” To all this Madame Choglokov replied with
equal heat. She threatened the young man with the fortress of Saint
Peter and Saint Paul and reminded him that the son of Peter the Great
had perished from disobedience. “Much of this,” Catherine reflected,
watching Madame Choglokov, “comes from herself but much is from the
Empress. I came to the conclusion that the threat of the fortress
must have come from the monarch and I saw in it a sign of her strong
resentment against the Grand Duke.”
The mischief-making Maria reported all this back to the Empress, whose
wrath flared out in her usual strong language: “Very good; if he is
so disobedient toward me, I will not kiss his damned hand any more.”
This was faithfully carried back to the Grand Duke who said, “That
depends on herself. But I will never go into the bath. I cannot bear
the heat.” The Empress kept her word and her nephew kept his. Yet she
never gave up the attempt to force him into the bath. He was not again
threatened with the fortress, but he always felt the threat lurking
in the background. The quarrel made a great impression on the Grand
Duchess who tells of it at length in her memoirs. She regarded it
correctly as a symptom of something extreme in his character, but she
could not understand it. Her common sense was baffled by the behaviour
of a youth who feared the Russian bath more than he feared imprisonment
in a fortress. In his obstinacy and excitement, Peter gave various
reasons for refusing to obey the Empress but he scarcely gave the real
one. The Russian bath was a social affair, participated in by naked men
and women. The custom, a mere everyday fact in Russia, was regarded
with horror in Germany and the rest of Europe. The young Grand Duke was
still a German and, without being clearly aware of why he felt that
way, he dreaded the exposure and found it unendurable. Imprisonment
was a trifle by comparison. The Grand Duchess took this hurdle as she
took others in her new life. She had been brought up a puritan and a
protestant. But she no longer lived in Zerbst; she lived in Russia
and did as the Russians did. The Grand Duke continued to dwell in an
imaginary Holstein of his own which was as different as possible from
the Russia which lay around him.
4
Elisabeth’s capriciousness increased. Having changed her furniture
and everything else in her environment that could be changed, at last
she changed her favorite. The easy-going Razumovsky was displaced and
relegated with honors and riches to private life. There is a tradition
that the Count had been secretly married to Elisabeth. Whether this
be true or not does not matter much. The time had come for him to go.
The discarded lover retired to the Anitchkov Palace which the Empress
had built for him and where he dreamed away his life for another twenty
years. Razumovsky was a charming decoration on the early reign of
Elisabeth Petrovna. He was wholly impractical and without ambition of
any kind, a poetic indolent Ukrainian. He was loyal to his mistress to
the end and devoted to her successor, Catherine the Great.
Ivan Ivanovich Shuvalov, the new favorite, was a cousin. As the Empress
grew older she suffered increasingly from melancholy which she strove
to lighten by drawing the circle of relatives closer around her. Ivan
Ivanovich was ably supported in his new duties by his family. He had a
sister, a cheerful person whom the Empress relied upon to rescue her
from low spirits. He had besides two brothers who guarded him on both
flanks and reaped a rich harvest of monopolies. The Shuvalov brothers
were ambitious and grasping as the Razumovskys had never been. Their
advent made a great difference at court, for the Empress, who became
more indolent and fantastic every day, gave more and more power to
the Shuvalovs. She had failed in her dearest scheme: her nephew and
successor, the Grand Duke Peter, had no heir.
With the year 1750 the problem of an heir seemed to grow desperate.
In the Grand Ducal camp a realistic view was growing up. It was
represented chiefly by Madame Vladislav, Catherine’s lady-in-waiting,
and by the mother of young Sergei Saltikov, a young chamberlain of the
Grand Duke. Slowly the idea took shape without anybody’s expressing
it that the Grand Duchess might, by merely transgressing her marriage
vows, redeem the situation. By some means this idea was insinuated
into the heads of the stupid Choglokovs who afterwards thought they
had invented it. Maria Choglokov suggested it to Catherine; put it to
her, so to speak, as her patriotic duty. It seems rather odd that all
of them had been so slow in coming to this plan. Apparently Catherine
would have gone on indefinitely in the dilemma if the older married
women had not finally suggested a way out.
Catherine wrote two accounts of her affair with Sergei Saltikov. One
was set down only three or four years after it was over, and the other
she wrote in her old age. The old lady’s story is a lively romance,
portraying an ardent courtship, a horseback ride, a lonely island, and
an importunate lover. The young woman’s story is less romantic and
more political. She says in this version: “Madame Choglokov used all
possible arts of persuasion to seduce me. This and the attractiveness
and talents of him for whom she spoke would have found less resistance
in another than in me. It is really true that I was distinguished by
discretion and exemplary innocence.”
Sergei Saltikov was a merry and irresponsible youth without ulterior
ambitions. His relations with the Grand Duchess began in the year 1752,
In December of that year the Grand Duchess reported miscarriage. The
following July the same misfortune befell her. She seemed doomed to
bad luck and delay. Not until the 20th of September, 1754, did she
actually become a mother. On that date she bore a son. “There was
inexpressible joy over it,” is her laconic comment. It was about this
time, according to her memoirs, that her skull-bones closed up.
Whether the Empress was aware of the intrigue between Catherine and
Sergei Saltikov we do not know. We do know, however, that with the
year 1754 her attitude toward the young count underwent a decided
change. Choglokov and his wife saw great possibilities for the future,
hoping to reap the credit for the new and gratifying turn of events.
When the Empress began to turn a friendly gaze upon the young court,
Choglokov lost his head and tried to woo her. Catherine admits that she
and her mischievous Sergei encouraged this indiscretion which invited
dangers unforeseen by their inexperience and youth. The brothers
Shuvalov were strongly intrenched and were ready to make short shrift
of any rival. At a masquerade ball, the softened Empress encouraged
Choglokov with tender glances. Ivan Ivanovich, the favorite, saw them
and his clan closed in around her, at once, and insidiously. In the
end Choglokov was insulted by the Empress in public. “She called him,”
says Catherine, “in a public conversation at dinner a blockhead and
a traitor, which he so took to heart that he fell into the jaundice.
Kandoid, the Shuvalov’s man, was called in, and, as he had long known
that the patient was an enemy of theirs, believed that he would do them
a favor by murdering him. At least all the doctors who were called
in during his last days maintained that he had been treated like a
creature whom one wished to kill. Four days after his death his wife
was told that she could remain in Moscow.... I believe that Saltikov
would have been banished at that time too if I had not been pregnant
and they had not feared to afflict me with this grief.”
At last the midwife declared that the moment was at hand. The Empress,
who occupied adjoining chambers, was summoned from her bed at two
o’clock in the morning. She swept upon the scene in a mantle of blue
satin, for the room was cold with the chill of a late September dawn.
At noonday the child was born. The Empress waited only for the midwife
to bathe and swaddle the infant. Then she called the priest and had
him christened Paul. This was the name of the first child born to
her mother and Peter the Great, a bastard son who had died at the
age of three. Commanding the midwife to carry the child in front of
her, the Empress retired to her own apartments where she arranged a
nursery and cared for him with her own hands. If he whimpered she
ran to him at once; her devotion became the subject of wide comment
and general praise. It gave rise to the rumor that the child was
actually Elisabeth’s own and not Catherine’s at all. The Empress was
not displeased with the rumor; there were moments in her last years,
years given over to vapors and moods, when she almost believed the myth
herself. That she had done violence to the young mother in kidnapping
her child never entered her head. She asked Maria Theresa of Austria,
that prolific mother whom she had always envied, to be godmother to her
child. Austria should realize that Russia also had an heir.
5
Very little is known of the father of Paul. The unhappy life of
Catherine’s son and his final insanity have set many writers and
historians at work discussing his heredity. But they always have
assumed that his father was Peter III and that his grandfather was
Peter the Great. If this were true, the deficiencies of Catherine’s son
would be easy to explain, for heredity on the Romanov side left much to
be desired. Peter the Great had a weak-witted brother and Peter III had
a mental twist. But all this has nothing to do with Paul, who was not a
Romanov but a Saltikov.
We must rely upon Catherine’s memoirs for the little that we know about
the Saltikovs. Sergei and Peter were brothers in the service of the
Grand Duke. Their father was the General Saltikov who had welcomed
Catherine and her mother in Riga on their way to Russia. The mother
of the Saltikov brothers had been a Princess Galitsin and a loyal
helper of the Empress Elisabeth when Elisabeth seized the throne.
The tradition is that Maria Saltikov had squandered her virtue for
Elisabeth’s cause. However this may have been, the Empress was devoted
to this lady and attached her two sons to the court of the Grand Duke.
Sergei was a great favorite of Peter’s and often slept with him. At the
time when Maria Saltikov promoted the affair between her son and the
Grand Duchess she was a confirmed invalid, but she seems to have kept
her initiative and energy to the last. As she had helped her Empress
gain a throne she now stood ready to help her gain an heir for it.