the most of her lover in her memoirs but not a great deal could be made
of him. He was a merry fellow, a brunet, who said of himself when he
was once attired in a silver costume that he looked “like a fly in the
milk.” Catherine says of him that he “was beautiful as the day; no one
could compare with him, even in the great court, still less in our
own. He was not without spirit and possessed those charming manners
which one acquires from living in the world of fashion and especially
at the court. In the year 1752 he was twenty-six years old. His birth
and other qualities made him an outstanding personality. He had his
faults, which he knew how to conceal; his greatest faults were a
tendency to intrigue and a lack of strong principles. This however was
unknown to me at that time.”
She then passes on to his brother Peter, whom she presents in quite a
different light. Peter “was a fool in the fullest sense of the word,
and had the most stupid physiognomy that I have ever seen in my life:
great leaden eyes, a turned-up nose, a mouth always half open. Besides
he was a terrible tattle-tale.” Evidently Peter was no credit to the
Saltikov family. Yet he happened to be the uncle of her son.
It was afterwards said of Paul, when he became Paul I of Russia, that
his physiognomy with its turned-up nose was considered even by himself
too ugly to be imprinted on his coins; and that when the crowds of
Paris gathered to look at him they cried out, “My God, how ugly he
is!” His looks, we might fairly conclude, were a gift which the bad
fairies of heredity had borrowed from Uncle Peter. There were other
disadvantages which the bad fairies doubtless took from the Saltikov
family, for Paul was afflicted in several ways which always remained a
puzzle to his mother.
[Illustration]
VII
PONIATOVSKY
After the birth of her son, the Grand Duchess recuperated but slowly.
The icy winds from the Neva penetrated her apartment and she suffered
continually from colds. She was querulous. Her chamber, in which she
was obliged to pass all her time as a convalescent, was too small.
Eight archins in one direction and four in the other, it measured but
little more than the humble room in Stettin in which Catherine herself
had been born. As a Grand Duchess, she resented these narrow walls; she
resented the badly drawn pictures on the tiles of her Dutch stove; she
resented the Grand Duke’s tobacco smoke which invaded her premises;
and she resented the “wretched pieces of jewelry” which the Empress
had been pleased to give her. The present of a hundred thousand rubles
which accompanied the jewels was the sole bright lining of her cloud.
Catherine always needed money.
But even this joy was tarnished by the fact that the Empress
immediately borrowed the whole sum back again and did not repay her
until the following January. The Empress recalled the money because the
Grand Duke, on hearing that his wife had received it, raised a great
outcry on his own behalf. As there was no money in the treasury with
which to silence him, the Empress hastily sent to the Grand Duchess
and asked for the loan of her treasure. Obviously Catherine was in no
position to refuse; besides she eventually got it back again. It was
not so with her baby, which the Empress had taken away without once
saying by your leave and which was never restored to her. Here also,
apparently, the young mother believed herself in no position to refuse,
for she allowed the Empress to rob her without a single protest. Her
acquiescence was complete. She was permitted to see the child but
rarely, and when she did consoled herself with criticisms of the way
his foster-mother took care of him. “From sheer over-carefulness, he
was literally smothered. He lay in a very hot room entirely wrapped
in flannel, in a crib made of black fox fur and covered with a wadded
satin coverlet. Above this was a red velvet coverlet lined with black
fox fur.... The sweat ran down his face and down his whole body.” Yet
she made no attempt to rescue him. To try it would have been useless,
for the autocrat of all the Russias was easily supreme in her own
household. Catherine also probably had too little confidence in her own
rights of possession.
Three weeks after the child’s birth, Saltikov was sent to Sweden to
announce the event. “That depressed me greatly,” says Catherine,
“because I was thereby exposed to the talk of the whole world.” She
must have felt even at that early date that her secret was pretty
widely known. It could have been no comfort to her, sitting alone
in her little drafty, smoke-filled room, to hear, as she soon did,
that the frivolous Saltikov was continuing his Don Juan career in the
Swedish capital. “I held fast to what I had begun,” she writes, “less
from inclination than from steadfastness, and worked for his return,
tirelessly conquering obstacles and battling with all my strength
against every hindrance.” Through her new alliance with Bestushev
success was achieved. Sergei Saltikov returned to Petersburg during the
Carnival season.
With great difficulty the Grand Duchess arranged a rendezvous and
waited until three o’clock in the morning for a lover who never
came. There was an elaborate explanation, how he had been dragged
into a Freemason lodge by one of the Dolgorukys, and could not
escape. But the Grand Duchess, much as if she had been an honest
wife, was not deceived. She no longer opposed the plan which had
been suggested of sending Saltikov to Hamburg as resident envoy. His
departure was delayed from week to week, but Catherine’s influence
was not causing the delay. The Empress did not get around to signing
his official papers, and this was what kept the young man waiting.
Elisabeth Petrovna was growing more and more dilatory every day in the
performance of her duties, more and more irregular in her habits, more
and more uncertain in her health. Her passionate attachment to the baby
in the fox-fur cradle had not given her the new lease on life which
might have been expected.
The effect of Saltikov’s neglect on the feelings of the Grand Duchess
was soon apparent. She says in her memoirs that, brooding in her
winter of solitude, she decided definitely to assert herself, to
let her environment know that she would not suffer insult without
retaliation. Had she not after all risen to her supreme obligation?
Had she not given to Russia an heir? She was entitled to consideration
and was determined to have it. Looking about for a scapegoat, she did
not have far to seek. Saltikov was safely out of reach in Hamburg
and the Empress was rapt in her phantasy cloud. But the brothers
Shuvalov remained within reach, and she found to her joy that they
were vulnerable. Neither of the brothers was clever and Alexander was
disfigured by a grimace--an ugly facial _tic_. It was easy to make
people laugh at the Shuvalovs and her _bon mots_ at their expense ran
through the town like wild-fire. She says that her attack was supported
by Count Razumovsky, ex-favorite of the Empress, and his brother
Kyril. But their support must have been weak, however willing. The two
Razumovskys were artists and dreamers and feeble fighters even for
their own cause.
Catherine throve on her new aggressiveness. Soon another enemy was
added to her list. A mysterious Herr Brockdorf had come up from
Holstein and had quietly established himself in the retinue of the
Grand Duke. The Grand Duchess did not like Herr Brockdorf and pursued
him with her mockery. She gave him a nickname, “Baba-ptitza” (a pelican
for ugliness!) and wherever the somber Holsteiner went he heard it
whispered after him.
2
Following the birth of Paul, the breach between the Grand Duke and
the Grand Duchess widened. “After my confinement,” says Catherine in
her memoirs, “he usually slept in his own chamber.” The change of
habit broke the only tie which existed between them. For nine years
he had slept in chastity beside his wife. But something disturbing,
incomprehensible had come between them, and he was no longer at ease
in his wife’s bed. He made futile efforts to attach himself to other
ladies of the court, but his enthusiasm wandered and failed to strike
root anywhere. His interest in military occupations began to absorb all
others.
More and more he occupied himself with his favorite toys, soldiers
made of lead, wood, starch, or wax. Whole regiments were set up on
tables and operated by means of ingenious mechanical devices, in making
which the youth, who had never been able to learn anything from his
tutors, showed a high degree of skill. Entering his room one day, the
Grand Duchess found a dead rat on a gallows and was informed that a
military execution had just taken place following a court-martial of
the culprit. On another occasion when the Grand Duke was expecting a
visit from a lady to whom he was paying court, he called his wife to
survey the bower which he had prepared for her. “He showed me,” says
Catherine, “how, in order to please the lady, he had fitted it out with
muskets, military caps, shoulder-belts, so that it looked like a corner
in an arsenal.”
The year which followed the birth of Catherine’s child and the
retreat of the Grand Duke from her bed saw a marked increase in the
preoccupation of the latter with his military toys. By the time her
second child was born, which was three years later, his preoccupation
had grown abnormal and he was capable of the following extraordinary
display. He had been called by the midwife, says Catherine in her
description of that night, and after some delay put in an appearance.
“He entered my chamber in his Holstein uniform, booted and spurred,
with a scarf around his body and a great dagger at his side; that is,
in complete regalia. Astonished at this pomp I asked him the reason for
this elaborate costume. Whereupon he replied that only in time of need
could one know one’s true friends; in this costume he was prepared to
do his duty. And the duty of a Holstein officer was to be true to his
oath and defend the Ducal House against all enemies. Because I was not
well he had come to my aid.”
Catherine decided that her consort was drunk and sent him back to bed.
Although she was an accurate observer of the Grand Duke’s behaviour,
she had no real comprehension of the nature of his affliction. His
old tutor, Stehlin, who had once made such heroic efforts to teach
him, was apparently the only person in the young man’s environment
who perceived the morbid element in his behaviour. Stehlin called it
his “marotte militaire,” that is to say, a kind of “folie militaire,”
something which surpasses the limits of normal youthful folly. The
Empress was merely angered at every eccentricity and hurled punishments
and penalties upon the offender’s head. “That damned nephew of mine has
angered me unspeakably,” she would say. “He is a monster; may the devil
fly away with him.”
The crux of the Grand Duke’s military obsession was his devotion to
Frederick of Prussia, the greatest military general of his age. It was
clearly not the thing for the heir to the throne of Russia to bestow
his heart thus unreservedly on a foreign potentate and especially on
one with whom Russia was actually at war. Peter’s strange devotion
is reasonably explained in Poniatovsky’s memoirs: “One must assume
that his nurse and his earliest teachers in his fatherland had been
Prussian and devoted to the King of Prussia. For from childhood on he
nourished such a strong and at the same time such a comical feeling of
veneration and love for this Prince that the King of Prussia once said
about this passion (for it was really a passion): “I am his Dulcinea.
He has never seen me and has fallen in love with me like Don Quixote.”
3
The military madness of the Grand Duke found a congenial ally in the
person of the mysterious man from Holstein, Herr Brockdorf, whom
Catherine so cordially detested and nicknamed “the pelican.” The
red-haired Holsteiner, who wore a “miserable, discontented look because
the corners of his mouth hung down to his chin,” hated the Grand
Duchess cordially in return. He repaid her compliment about the pelican
by announcing that he had come to Russia to “tread upon the serpent,”
meaning thereby no other than Catherine herself.
Brockdorf was apparently a nondescript visitor of no real political
importance, but his influence over Peter at this crucial period has
given him a place in history. Exactly what this oddly assorted pair
had in common is hard to say. Perhaps it was the protestant complex
which united them. We know that Peter’s only reading was the Lutheran
prayer-book, which he imported from Germany by the hundred, and we
suspect that Herr Brockdorf’s references to “the snake” in Catherine
was his metaphorical way of saying that she had gained the reputation
of being an immoral woman. At any rate the contest between Catherine
and Brockdorf was intense and their feud a bitter one. They competed
for influence over the Grand Duke who wavered back and forth between
them as guides and advisers in the management of the affairs of his
beloved Holstein.
It was shortly after the entrance of Brockdorf on the scene that the
first real quarrel took place between Catherine Alexeievna and Peter
Feodorovna. The encounter assumed a significant form. “His Imperial
Highness came to my room one evening after dinner,” says Catherine,
“and declared to me that I really was becoming too unbearably proud,
but he would soon bring me to reason. I asked him wherein this pride
consisted and he replied that I carried myself too upright. Thereupon I
asked him whether I should bend my back to please him, like the slaves
of the Sultan! At this he grew angry and repeated he would soon bring
me to reason. I asked him how he would do this. Thereupon he placed
himself with his back against the wall, half-way drew his dagger and
showed it to me. I asked him what that meant, whether he would fight
me. Then I also must have one. He thrust his half-drawn dagger again
into its sheath and said my malice had grown to be something quite
amazing....”
It was through the kind offices of Brockdorf that a regiment of
Holstein soldiers appeared at Oranienbaum in the early summer of 1775.
The Grand Duke’s military play had suddenly become a dangerous reality.
Soldiers of lead and wax no longer satisfied him. He was obliged to
have flesh-and-blood toys, strong burly fellows who had to be housed
and fed and who quarreled with the Russian guard already stationed
at Oranienbaum. “These accursed Germans are all sold to the King of
Prussia,” said the Russians. “They are traitors brought to Russia.”
The Grand Duchess realized the danger of this new development. She
decided to eliminate herself from the situation as completely as
possible and devoted her summer to reclaiming waste land and planning
a large English garden. The Empress’s advisers, the Shuvalovs, also
realized that the presence of the Holstein soldiers at Oranienbaum
was undesirable and yet they found it curiously impossible to make
Peter see the point or to persuade him to remove this very disturbing
element. Like parents trying to get a child to exchange a dangerous toy
for a safe one, the Shuvalovs decided to present the Grand Duke with
real Russian soldiers for his games. In the spring of 1756, they sent a
detachment of one hundred cadets to Oranienbaum for Peter to command.
But the Grand Duke was not so easily duped. The Russian cadets might
remain but the number of his beloved Holsteiners continued to increase.
The accommodations of the little village were strained, giving rise to
more friction and more rumors....
While the Grand Duke delighted in playing with his Holstein soldiers,
he found the administration of the government, for which he had been
responsible since the age of nineteen, tedious and burdensome. He
relied much on the Grand Duchess whom he called Madame la Ressource.
While Brockdorf contested her influence in Holstein affairs, she
nevertheless retained first place in the long run. It was a great
relief to Peter to hand the seal over to her along with all important
and difficult documents and to forget the government of Holstein while
he paraded his fascinating soldiers. In time it came about that the
diplomats who had anything to say about Holstein consulted Catherine
directly and accepted her decision. Things went on in this wise for a
series of years until the Empress, suddenly discovering that Holstein
was being ruled by the Grand Duchess, issued a ukase that the Grand
Duke should take care of these political matters himself. It was a
ukase, however, which commanded the impossible.
4
In the autumn of 1755 an Englishman came to Petersburg. He was a man
just past middle age, a Whig, and an aristocrat. He had been for nine
years in the diplomatic service and was known for his caustic wit and
elegant manners. His satirical poetry was much admired. These talents,
however, were not always an asset. Six years previously he had been
sent to Berlin as Ambassador at the court of Frederick the Great. But
Frederick had not liked the biting tongue of the man and had asked for
his removal. The Englishman was sent back to his old post at Dresden
where August the Strong was apparently oblivious to his satire. Not
being a satirist himself, as was Frederick the Great, perhaps he could
more comfortably endure the presence of a rival. Transferred to the
Court of Petersburg, the sophisticated Englishman found himself in
a still less intellectual atmosphere than that of the Saxon court.
Catherine says that the art of conversation was unknown among the
Russian courtiers of that time. The arrival of a polished diplomat who
dealt in brilliant talk and repartee could not fail to make a great
impression on the Grand Duchess although most of his barbs were lost
on the card-playing court which surrounded Elisabeth. The name of the
interesting Englishman was Sir Charles Hanbury Williams.
As Ambassador to the Saxon Court, Williams had spent much time in
Poland, over which August of Saxony ruled as elective king. In Warsaw,
the Chevalier had made friends with the Czartorisky clan and the
Poniatovsky family. A strong-minded daughter of the Czartoriskys had
married Count Stanislas Poniatovsky and her son was likewise Count
Stanislas. The young man was adored by his mother and patronized by
her brothers, the powerful Czartoriskys. His career was the subject of
earnest family conclaves. When Sir Charles Hanbury Williams offered to
take him to Russia as Secretary it was decided that Stanislas should
go. The Ambassador was almost twenty-five years older than his Polish
secretary and called him his son. In Petersburg they lived together in
the house of Count Skavronsky on the bank of the Neva.
The Grand Duchess met them both for the first time on St. Peter’s
day at Oranienbaum. She sat beside Chevalier Williams at supper and
conversed with him while she admired the graceful dancing of his
secretary. It was the beginning of a political and personal alliance
which rapidly developed among the three. Poniatovsky became her lover,
while the Chevalier, ever attentive from the background and regularly
corresponding with her, was in some curious vicarious fashion also in
love with the fascinating and aggressive Catherine. Sitting at supper
one evening with Poniatovsky vis-à-vis, the Grand Duchess threw out
this remark, ostensibly addressed to the French Ambassador, “There was
never a woman bolder than I; I have an unbridled temerity.” There was
much recklessness in her at this time.
The English Ambassador had come to Russia with a special mission
from George II, who was anxious lest Frederick the Great should turn
covetous eyes on Hanover as he had on Silesia. Williams was empowered
to offer an annual subsidy of five hundred thousand livres to Russia in
return for which Russia was to stand ready to aid Hanover against any
possible depredations on the part of the Prussian King. Such a treaty
between England and Russia, Williams actually got signed in September
1755. But no sooner was this done than the wily Frederick put through
the Treaty of Westminster in which he and the German-English George
mutually guaranteed their possessions against both France and Russia.
This created a complicated situation for the English diplomat. The
Russian Empress loathed Frederick the Great and wanted no allies in
common with him. Russia therefore disregarded the treaty begun in the
Fall of 1755 and refused to accept the five hundred thousand livres
which England had sent. Williams spent his time in Petersburg trying in
vain to induce the Russian government to take his money. He also found
himself in the curious position of having to represent the interests of
Frederick the Great after he had started to work against them. Opposed
to him was the whole French party headed by the powerful Ivan Shuvalov,
favorite of the Empress. The Chevalier was left to cultivate the Grand
Ducal court and this he did with whole-hearted enthusiasm. He advised
Catherine about the government of Holstein which was at that time in
her hands and succeeded in buying the Grand Chancellor Bestushev with a
pension of twelve thousand rubles a year from the English Government.
Unfortunately for his schemes, Bestushev was no longer a power at
court. Ivan Shuvalov had gathered the reins into his own hands as the
health of the Empress declined. But Williams regarded Bestushev as
a fine capture. He wrote an enthusiastic account of his success to
Catherine and concluded his letter thus: “These are the scenes written
in haste which will make delightful anecdotes for a future century.
You alone have my secret; my heart, my life, my soul are yours. I
regard you as a creature wholly superior to myself. I adore you and my
adoration goes so far I am persuaded that I can have no merit apart
from you.... Here is my castle in Spain which I have been building for
some time and with which I often amuse myself. When you come to your
place on the throne, I shall not be here. I shall come here at once....
I should wish to come with the character of ambassador in my pocket
but I should not wish to produce it, because that would oblige me to
maintain a rank and etiquette which would disturb me. And I flatter
myself that I should live much with you as a faithful servant and
humble friend. I should have the entrée to and profit by your hours of
leisure, because I always love Catherine better than the Empress....”
Both Poniatovsky and Williams have left extensive records of their
experiences in Russia. This is how Catherine looked at the age of
twenty-six in the eyes of her Polish lover. “At this time she had
attained that degree of beauty which represents for every woman to
whom beauty is given at all the climax of its development. Her hair
was black, her skin a dazzling white and vivid red; she had large
blue, round, very expressive eyes, very long black lashes, a Greek
nose, a mouth which seemed to ask for kisses. Her arms and shoulders
were surpassingly beautiful; she had a tall graceful figure and her
walk was very agile though full of nobility, the sound of her voice
was pleasant, and her laugh as joyous as her temperament.” The Grand
Duchess found in Count Poniatovsky the romantic lover for whom she had
all her life been longing.
5
During the summer of 1756, Count Poniatovsky departed for Warsaw to
make a brief visit. He failed to return at the expected time and the
Grand Duchess bestirred herself to have him recalled to Russia as
Polish Ambassador. She enlisted Williams and Bestushev to this end and
showered favors upon them until the two elderly diplomats began to be
jealous of each other. She had done her work almost too well. At last,
however, she succeeded in her purpose and the Grand Chancellor was able
to secure the young Pole’s return. He imposed as a condition, however,
that Poniatovsky should no longer live with Williams on such intimate
terms as formerly. The way was now clear for Poniatovsky’s return, but
still he lingered in Poland. What was the obstacle? A letter which he
sent to Catherine explains the cause of his delay.