tenderness and adroitness possible, my mother understands clearly what
it is that makes me so ardently wish to return to you.... I pressed
her more strongly to consent formally to my return; she said to me
with tears in her eyes that she foresaw with grief that this affair
was going to cause her to lose my affection on which she depended for
all the happiness of her life; that it was hard to refuse some things
but in the end she was determined not to consent. Upon which I was
beside myself; I threw myself at her feet and begged her to change
her sentiments. She said, melting into tears, ‘This is just what I
expected.’ Nevertheless she went away, pressing my hand, and left me in
the most horrible dilemma I have ever experienced in my life.... Oh,
Poutres [his nickname for Catherine] ... share with Bonn [Williams]
this story about my mother and beg him to write my father and ask him
to send me back over there because I am necessary to him. For among
other things she disputes with me that I am necessary to him....”
With the assistance and encouragement of one of his Czartorisky
uncles, the young Count finally escaped from his mother and arrived
in Petersburg in time for the Russian Christmas of 1756. He remained
in Russia as the lover of Catherine for another year and a half, and
left the country finally in July, 1758. Catherine’s daughter, the Grand
Duchess Anna, born in December, 1757, was Poniatovsky’s child. The
infant was taken from the mother by the Empress just as the first one
had been and put into the nursery with her three-year-old half-brother.
She did not long survive under the Empress’s régime and seems to have
been soon forgotten by her mother and her father. The life and death of
the little Grand Duchess Anna, wafted so carelessly in and out of her
mother’s career, was the slightest of slight episodes. Catherine was
absorbed in political intrigue. Her alliance with Chevalier Williams
and Grand Chancellor Bestushev had developed her talents in this
direction, and she allowed herself to go far and to take great risks.
She saw the death of the Empress approaching and the accession of Grand
Duke Peter to the throne. What would then be her position and that of
her son by Saltikov?
A midnight encounter which took place between Poniatovsky and the
Grand Duke at Oranienbaum caused the Pole to leave Russia and showed
Catherine how desperately uncertain her footing had become. The Count
was accustomed to come and go in disguise. Wearing a blond peruke he
would say, “Musician of the Grand Duke” and would pass unquestioned.
But one mid-summer night his ruse failed to save him from embarrassing
developments. Poniatovsky tells the story thus: “On this night I met
unluckily in the woods at Oranienbaum the Grand Duke and his whole
retinue, all of them half drunk. They asked my _izvostchik_ whom he
was driving. My page replied, ‘A tailor.’ We were allowed to pass. But
Elisabeth Vorontsov, lady-in-waiting of the Grand Duchess and mistress
of the Grand Duke, who was present, made a few joking remarks about
the alleged tailor which put the Grand Duke into a bad humor. As I
was leaving the pavilion where I had spent several hours with the
Grand Duchess and which she occupied under the pretense of taking a
water-cure, I was suddenly stopped, after taking a few steps, by three
mounted men, who, sabres in hand, seized me by the collar and dragged
me before the Grand Duke.”
According to Catherine’s story, Brockdorf the pelican played a
prominent part in this scene. The Holsteiner advised the Grand Duke to
kill the prisoner. But Peter had no such intention; he only exposed and
ventilated the scandal. Poniatovsky was allowed to go free after the
episode had become known to the entire court. With broad patronizing
jokes, the Grand Duke invited the Pole to Oranienbaum and facilitated
his meetings with the Grand Duchess. The Shuvalov tried to reassure the
Count, but neither Catherine nor her lover were reassured. “I could not
but remark,” says Poniatovsky, “that all was not clear and that it was
time for me to go away.” Catherine says that she perceived through this
episode that her lot was finally separated from that of the Grand Duke;
that she must either perish with him and through him or save herself
and her children and the state from shipwreck. After Poniatovsky’s
departure for Poland, the Grand Duchess went into strict retirement.
Soon after he left, Sir Charles Hanbury Williams left Russia also.
The Chevalier was strangely reluctant to go away. He should have gone
early in the summer, but he could not decide on his itinerary. At
first he planned to journey through Poland but changed his mind and
decided to go through Sweden. He got as far as Finland and then came
back again saying that his horses had fallen ill. Again he hesitated
and it was not until the end of October that he finally took leave of
Catherine at Oranienbaum. She was extremely depressed by his leaving
and wept the whole day when he came to say farewell. The separation
seems to have added the last straw to the Chevalier’s unstable mental
condition. After a stormy passage from Kronstadt, he arrived in Hamburg
already a sick man, and almost immediately he was declared insane by
the physicians and taken to England. A year later he ended his life by
suicide and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
Two months after his death, Catherine wrote to the Russian envoy in
Warsaw the following confidential message: “Count Poniatovsky is out
of humor with me, but he is wrong if he believes that obstacles or
other incidents can detach me from him. I put my profession of faith
into your hands, and I desire only the moment of our reunion; I wish
he would place himself above all vulgar trifles. There is so much
complexity in my present rôle that I have need of that enthusiasm which
he pretends I sometimes inspire. Adversity shall not conquer me and if
it is necessary to triumph, courage will not be lacking. I esteem and
love Poniatovsky above all the rest of the human race. He must be sure
of that, and if I have good fortune events will prove it. In the name
of God, do not remind your hearer [Poniatovsky] of the scene with the
late Williams who, while haranguing me began to sob; you will picture
me inspiring you with courage and the surface will be smiling....”
These cryptic messages indicate that the relationship between Catherine
and Williams was more emotional than the political situation required.
The complexity of her rôle in January, 1761, the last year of Empress
Elisabeth’s life, took all of her attention. During this winter
especially she strove to ingratiate herself with the Russian public,
possibly because she realized that her recent intimacy with foreigners
tended to recall the fact that she herself was not a Russian. Her
assurances of affection for Poniatovsky were still sincere at this time
for his successor did not arrive in Petersburg until the following
March. It was not wholly accidental that her new lover was a Russian.
6
The part which the Grand Duchess Catherine played in the Seven Years’
War was devious if not exactly traitorous. In the spring of 1757, the
Russian army advanced against Frederick the Great, the “blasphemous
Prince” whom Elisabeth Petrovna so cordially detested. Austria and
France breathed a sigh of relief to see their ally at last in motion.
But General Apraxin, in charge of the Russian forces, got into the
fight with extreme deliberation. He captured Memel and Grossjägerndorf,
and then, to the astonishment of all the world, began a most
unaccountable and hasty retreat toward the Russian border. Petersburg
buzzed with excitement. The French and Austrian ambassadors demanded
an investigation, which the outraged Empress was prompt in ordering.
Before the eyes of Europe, her armies had let down her allies.
Apraxin’s only excuse for his retreat was that he was too far away from
provisions.
In the investigation which followed all clues seemed to lead
mysteriously to the Grand Duchess but none of them ever quite reached
her. Bestushev was arrested and subjected to an inquisition which
lasted intermittently for a year. Nearly all the questions put to
him by the commissioners related in some way to Catherine. In the
end, still without having incriminated her, he was sent into exile.
Adadurov, Catherine’s old teacher, and several other subordinates who
had been confidential messengers between Bestushev and herself, were
also arrested, investigated, and banished to remote parts of Russia.
Finally Apraxin, the star culprit in this historical affair, was
recalled from the army and arrested on the border as he entered Russia.
A court of inquiry was set up on the spot and the General was subjected
to a trial which carried on into the summer. On the first of August
his ordeal was brought to an unexpected close. He suffered a stroke of
paralysis and died in twenty-four hours. Like Bestushev, he had not
incriminated the Grand Duchess seriously, even though he had in his
possession several letters written by her to himself. These letters
were taken from him by Count Alexander Shuvalov, the man with the
grimace which Catherine had so often ridiculed, and were safely carried
back to the Empress Elisabeth. Except for the fact that the Grand
Duchess was not allowed to write letters at all, there was nothing
incriminating in this correspondence.
No real evidence ever came out against her. Bestushev had found time
to destroy all his documents before he was arrested and Catherine, on
hearing of his arrest, destroyed every scrap of written paper in her
possession. She made a clean sweep of everything. An innocent sketch of
herself, written at the age of fifteen, was sacrificed with the rest,
a loss which she always regretted. We must assume that she felt that
there was no time to lose. All her closest friends and associates were
tried and convicted. She alone survived the crisis without serious
consequences.
The historian Bilbassov was able to prove to his own complete
satisfaction by the total absence of documentary evidence, that the
Grand Duchess Catherine, throughout the whole shady Apraxin business,
never once wavered in her loyalty to Russia. Her correspondence with
Chevalier Williams, however, indicates that she played with fire at
this time and was only saved from the charge of treason by her amazing
instinct for self-preservation. Believing the Empress to be on the
verge of death--and apparently the infatuated Williams helped her to be
over-confident about the near gratification of this wish--she realized
that the Grand Duke Peter would in that event instantly reverse any
attack on Frederick the Great. Hoping for the Empress’s death and
encouraged by a fit that the unfortunate lady one day had in public,
she schemed to hold Apraxin back from the German campaign. Just what
she did to cause the General to turn in his tracks as he did and when
he did is a fact not knowable to history since Catherine burned up all
her papers. But if the Russian general on this occasion betrayed his
Empress and his country, the Grand Duchess was without doubt one of the
influences which led him into this serious and fatal mistake.
There came at last a dramatic midnight scene in which the Grand Duchess
faced the Empress and saved herself once for all. After the arrest of
Bestushev, she spent many weeks in an agony of suspense. At last she
wrote a letter to the Empress asking for an interview, and waited for
an answer six weeks longer. By this time she was actually and literally
walking the floor, a symptom which belies the good conscience which
Bilbassov would have us believe she enjoyed at this crucial time.
By pretending to be sick and calling in her father confessor, who
interceded on her behalf, she managed at last to induce the Empress to
receive her. Her courage and resourcefulness throughout this crisis
prove that her famous boast of intrepidity made to impress Poniatovsky
in the presence of the French Ambassador was not an empty one.
The Empress, who habitually turned night into day, summoned her to
an audience at half-past one in the morning. Alexander Shuvalov,
grimacing, came to call her. Catherine pictures for us with brief
strokes the room in which she was received by the Empress: the three
windows, the wash-stand with gold utensils, the tall screen, and,
behind the screen, the favorite of the Empress and the defender of
the political interests of France--Ivan Ivanovich Shuvalov. In the
gold wash-basin she saw the crumpled letters which she had written
to Apraxin, a detail which gives us by the way a picture of how the
Empress Elisabeth respected important documents. When Catherine arrived
in this room, she found the Grand Duke already there before her. In
his presence, in that of Alexander Shuvalov, and in that of the hidden
Ivan Ivanovich,--a solid trio of her enemies--she was obliged to defend
herself. The manner in which she rose to the occasion shows that the
woman loved danger; she ate it like cake.
She began by throwing herself at the Empress’s feet and asking to be
sent home to her mother. Elisabeth reminded her that she had children
in Russia; Catherine replied that the Empress was a better mother to
them than she herself could possibly be. Elisabeth further reminded
her that the Princess of Zerbst had fled to Paris; Catherine replied
that her mother had been driven out of Germany by the persecutions of
Frederick the Great, the enemy whom Elisabeth hated. What chance had
a mere emotional Empress against astuteness like this? Elisabeth fell
back upon her real grievance.
“You are immoderately proud. Do you remember one day in the summer
garden when I came up to you and asked you if you had a crick in your
neck because you scarcely greeted me?”
“Ah, my God. How could Your Majesty believe that I could be proud
toward you? I swear to you that I had not the least idea that your
question of four years ago signified that.”
“You fancy that nobody alive is as clever as yourself.”
“If I really believed this of myself, then my present situation and
this conversation seem best designed to cure me of my error: until this
very day, I have not understood, out of mere stupidity, what you wished
to say to me four years ago....”
At this point the Grand Duke began to talk with Alexander Shuvalov in
the background, taking sides against Catherine. For a moment the two
women allowed the Grand Duke to enter the quarrel, and then excluded
him again. He was not really worthy to close with either of them in
combat. The Empress brushed him aside and returned to the attack.
“You mix into all kinds of matters which do not concern you. During the
Empress Anna’s time, I was not allowed to do that. How could you, for
example, have the audacity to issue commands to Field Marshal Apraxin?”
“I? It never once entered my head to issue commands to him.”
“Can you deny that you have written to him? Your letters lie there in
the basin....”
The Grand Duchess knew full well that there was nothing in the letters
which Alexander Shuvalov had travelled so far to bring home to the
Empress. She rehearsed their contents now.
“Bestushev says,” Elisabeth persisted, “that there were many more
letters.”
“If Bestushev says that, he lies.”
“Good. If he lies, he shall be put to torture.”
It was the Empress’s last shot and still the Grand Duchess did not
flinch. Elisabeth began to walk up and down the room, while Catherine
and the Grand Duke fell to quarrelling with each other. It was apparent
from the Grand Duke’s remarks that he was under the influence of the
Vorontsov family and nursed the idea of putting Elisabeth Vorontsov in
the place of Catherine. He was not aware that this project appealed
neither to the Empress nor to Ivan Shuvalov behind the screen. “This
went beyond the mental capacity of his Imperial Highness, who believed
all that he wished,” says Catherine, “and pushed aside every other
thought which happened to interfere with the one that momentarily
governed him.”
At three o’clock in the morning the Empress dismissed them. The Grand
Duke left the room first and vanished down the corridor with his usual
long flying strides. Catherine returned to her chamber and undressed
herself. It was the middle of April and the white dawn filled the room
in which for so many days past she had paced the floor in suspense and
sleeplessness. She went to bed and slept soundly.
7
It was true that Catherine’s mother, the Princess of Zerbst, had
fled to Paris. The redoubtable Johanna Elisabeth had, by a series
of political errors, succeeded at last in reaching the city of her
dreams, the haven of art and fashion for which she had always longed.
To achieve this paradise she had made a stormy pilgrimage; and her joy
in her achievement was to be short-lived, for her residence in Paris
proved to be her undoing.
In the year 1758 she was living at Zerbst with her son, Friedrich
August, the reigning Prince. It can not be said that she was living
altogether quietly there, for Fritz had married a young wife with whom
his mother did not get on well. According to the Princess, Fritz also
did not get on well with his wife, who had been an obscure Princess
of Hessen-Kassel. After five years of marriage, they still had no
children. Presumably the domestic atmosphere at Zerbst was anything but
pleasant, although the relations of the trio with the outside world
were peaceable enough. The Princess of Zerbst received a comfortable
pension from the Empress of Russia and there was at least a hope that
the future Empress, who was Fritz’s own sister, would one day succeed
in making him a real Kurfürst of Germany. The Zerbst family had only to
be good and await events.
Suddenly the French foreign office cast an eye on this little
principality. Would it not be possible to use the Princess of Zerbst to
influence her daughter, the Grand Duchess of Russia, who was suspected
of being pro-English and anti-French? The French office decided to
take the chance. A dashing French officer, the Marquis de Fraigne, was
dispatched on this mission and arrived without difficulty at the castle
of Zerbst. Although France and Germany were at war, little Zerbst had
declared itself neutral. A French officer might therefore visit the
Prince in perfect safety, protected by its neutrality. De Fraigne
lingered on at Zerbst, while the weeks passed by in pleasant social
converse. The Princess Johanna Elisabeth wrote letters to her daughter,
which never reached their destination but conveyed to Frederick the
Great all that he needed to know.
Suddenly the little idyl became a volcano. Frederick the Great was
not pleased to have a French officer tarrying at Zerbst. He sent
a detachment of soldiers to arrest the stranger and remove him to
Prussian soil where he could be properly court-martialed. But the
Marquis argued his case and presented his side so well that the
Prussian soldiers retired without him. The offended Frenchman, aided by
the foolish Prince of Zerbst and the still more foolish mother of the
Prince, sent an indignant protest to the King of Prussia. After all,
Zerbst was neutral, and the Prussians ought really to apologize.
Frederick’s answer was prompt: a squadron of artillery appeared before
the old gray walls of Zerbst. Either de Fraigne would come out or the
walls would go down. The Marquis decided to give himself up, and the
Prussians took him quietly away. But the Princess of Zerbst and her
son had pushed the issue too far and Frederick was not going to let
them off too easily. He imposed a penalty of a hundred thousand ducats
and the supply of forage enough for a regiment. It was a devastating
penalty; it wiped them out. In desperation the Princess and her son
fled the situation and abandoned the principality to the Prussian King.
In their haste they left behind them the young wife of the Prince. Or
did she perhaps decline to go with them? Perhaps she thought she had
nothing to lose by remaining with the Prussian occupation. However
this may have been, she did not long survive the flight of the others.
Within less than a year, she died of a stroke of paralysis. It began to
look as if the house of Zerbst was doomed to extinction.
In the meantime, the fleeing mother and son went first to Hamburg.
From Hamburg Fritz departed to enlist in the Austrian army and fight
Frederick the Great, while his mother went on to Paris. She believed
that the French government would welcome her with open arms after the
great sacrifice that she had made for that country. But the French
government lacked appreciation. They now knew as much about Johanna
Elisabeth as Frederick the Great knew when she came back from Russia
with Mardefeld’s dismissal in her _chatelaine_. The Princess loved
intrigue but she was doomed to fail in it; her projects always turned
against her, as if she tried to crack a whip too long for her strength
and was caught in the bite of its cruel tapering end.
The French government made ineffectual attempts to delay the progress
of the Princess as she hastened toward Paris. They sent a last
desperate message to arrest her at Brussels, but Johanna Elisabeth was
on the last lap of her journey to Paris before the message arrived.
There was a certain pathos in the letter which Berni, the foreign
minister, wrote to the French resident at Petersburg. “The Princess
of Zerbst hastened so that the letter which explained the necessity
of postponing her arrival in France did not reach Brussels until she
was already in Valenciennes, from which one could not prevent her from
coming on to Paris.” Berni wished the Empress to understand that he
had not connived at the Princess’s flight to France.
Elisabeth was furious with the Princess of Zerbst. The mother’s
behavior coincided with the daughter’s meddlesomeness in the Apraxin
business. The full wrath of the Empress fell upon the mother’s
frivolous head; she promptly withdrew the lady’s pension. The Princess,
who pretended to observe an incognito in Paris as Countess of
Oldenburg, set up an establishment and plunged into literary and court
society. Suddenly she found herself cut off without a sou. Her letters
to the Empress are pitiable. As her creditors pressed her harder and
harder, she multiplied her petitions. The Empress condescended to be
positively vindictive. She sent a message to the bankrupt woman that,
after first paying her debts, she ought to leave Paris. This silenced
the poor woman at last.
This was in the autumn of 1759, and the Princess was already ill of
dropsy. She passed the winter in bed attended by physicians. Her
letters to Russia ceased to petition for money; she seemed to realize
that Elisabeth was inexorable. The Grand Duchess, who did not know of
her mother’s financial distress, sent her a present of some tea and
rhubarb. But the Princess died before this little gift arrived. It was
only with the greatest effort that Catherine and Ivan Shuvalov, whom
she finally persuaded to help her, could induce the Empress to pay the
debts of the deceased Princess. Elisabeth was willing the Princess’s
personal effects should be sold at public auction. It was hard even for
the favorite, Ivan Shuvalov, to persuade her to save her kinswoman’s
memory from this disgrace. Toward Johanna Elisabeth she had always
been revengeful.
8
The Empress did not long outlast her enemy. For many years she had
really been an invalid. She had secretly imported a famous French
physician who said that she suffered from hysterical “vapors” and
convulsions. Elisabeth’s personal physician was a Greek, Kondoidi, who
at first refused to consult with the foreign specialist. After much
diplomatizing on the part of the French and Russian governments, the
rivals at last consented to meet. It turned out that they agreed in
their diagnosis of melancholia and hysteria, and so they shook hands
over the poor Empress who continued to get no better. Nothing more
definite than this was the Empress destined to die of. Owing to the
convulsions to which she was subject, her death seemed several times
imminent; but then she would suddenly pull herself together and death
would recede to a respectful distance. Her illness dragged on like
the Seven Years’ War and the outcome was as unpredictable. From the
beginning of the year 1761, however, her condition patently grew worse.
During the summer she fell into convulsions which caused her to lose
consciousness for several hours at a time. On Christmas Day, 1761, she
died, at the age of fifty-two. Her span of life was but slightly less
than that of her tall turbulent father, Peter the Great, who died at
fifty-three.