every week. In her letters she showered him with pet names as in
public she hung him with orders. He was her belovedest, her little
love, her gold pheasant, her Papa. So she spurred him on to battle
with the Turks. It was not easy. The Ukrainian either stormed ahead
or collapsed in moods of desperate discouragement. There were days
when he was ready to evacuate the Crimea and to resign his generalship
in favor of Rumiantsov, his detested rival. “You are as impatient
as a five-year-old child,” the Empress chided, “while the business
entrusted to you demands unshakable patience.” The General was subject
to frequent relapses to his five-year-old emotions and in such moods he
was ready to abandon all to the Turks if the Empress’s letters had not
served to restore his aggressiveness. She had urgent need to write him
twice a week. The Prince of Tauris was ready to give up Tauris itself
whenever these pessimistic moods overcame him.
The Empress was distressed by the terrible cost of war. She discovered
that it was even more expensive than diplomacy and bribery. Up to the
unpleasantness with the Turks, she had managed to get her way by means
of money and lively military display. But it seemed that actual warfare
demanded an additional expenditure of treasure. She complained to the
sculptor, Falconet, “To make war three things are necessary: money,
money, money.” Yet she was always able to find the wherewithal to carry
on and keep her three quarrelsome generals, Potiomkin, Suvarov, and
Rumiantsov, active in the field.
She built a fleet and planned to sweep the Black Sea with it. The
Russians, in spite of the efforts of Great Peter, had never become
navigators, a deficiency which obliged her to import her naval officers
from England. The scheme was easily carried out. The English were
employable and adjustable, and all went well until the Empress had
the idea, inspired from Paris by Dr. Benjamin Franklin, of adding the
American naval officer, John Paul Jones, to her forces. The American
hero’s exploits resounded at the moment through Europe while he himself
was sojourning in Paris, rather lonely, very famous, and extremely hard
up. The Empress met his terms, which were sufficiently high, for Jones
was a good bargainer, and the American was soon sailing a Russian ship
on the Black Sea. But luck, it seems, had deserted the little man. He
not only played an undistinguished part in the Turkish wars but left
Russia under the shadow of a personal scandal, invented, his defenders
said, by British officers serving under Catherine who resented the
presence of the colonial in the same navy with themselves. However,
that may be, he earned no honorable mention in Russia and the history
of that country gives no credit to John Paul Jones for helping to win
the Turkish Wars.
In June, 1788, Catherine’s fleet won the battle of Otchakov. The
victory made a great impression on Europe and even Frederick the Great
spoke of it respectfully. Was the Empress really marching toward India?
She believed that she was marching toward Constantinople at least and
that the Prince of Tauris would enter the Turkish city within the year.
But France and Prussia and England thought otherwise. English policy
was well clarified by now and was neatly expressed in a book on Russia
published by an English captain in the year 1790. “The Turks,” he said,
“happily for us, are not a commercial people; we cannot do without
those valuable articles which their soil produces almost spontaneously;
and the Turks, like the easy possessor of a very rich mine, allow us to
enrich ourselves at our pleasure. Three per cent. duty equally on all
exports and imports is, with little exception, their only restriction
to Europeans engaged in their trade. Would the Empress be equally
moderate, if in possession of the fertile region? Believe me, she would
not.”
It appeared that Europe did not wish to be cleansed of the Turks by
Catherine the Great. The easy-going Mussulman with his three per cent.
duty had great advantages over a Christian monarch like the Russian
Empress. The representatives of Protestant Europe in Constantinople
put their heads together and backed up Turkish diplomacy in the south
while the King of Sweden prepared to invade Russia on the north. The
Swedish invader was Gustavus III, the son of the Princess Ulrica whose
gown had once been offered to Princess Fike to make her presentable at
the German court. Ulrica’s son had a curious relationship with Cousin
Catherine of Russia. He paid friendly visits and wrote flattering
letters to her and then made war on her. As soon as the treaty was
signed, he wrote and asked her to forget their differences, “like a
storm that has passed.” The passing storm, however, had shaken the
Empress as she had seldom been shaken. She was not prepared to carry
on war on two fronts and the Swedish invasion had made the Turkish
Wars no longer endurable. “If you wish to roll a stone from my heart,”
she wrote to Potiomkin on the Turkish front, “if you wish to free
me from a heavy nightmare, then send a courier at once to the army
with instructions to begin operations immediately by sea and by land;
otherwise you will drag out this war still longer and that you can wish
just as little as I.”
Potiomkin was unable to make an attack or to conclude a treaty. He
had reached the same state of mind which had rendered Gregory Orlov
incompetent to negotiate terms with the Turks at Fokshani in 1772.
Orlov’s mental inertia on that occasion had caused the first Turkish
War to drag on two years longer. The history of Orlov was repeated
by Potiomkin in 1791. Potiomkin’s relations with the Empress were
threatened in that year as Orlov’s had been threatened in 1772.
Potiomkin felt that it was time for him to go to Petersburg and dismiss
“the little black boy” who seemed to be settling into his place there
with an air of permanence.
As soon as Potiomkin departed from the field, Prince Repnin took
command and brought the second Turkish War to a speedy close. The
treaty of Jassy was signed at the end of 1791. But Potiomkin was
already dead.
6
The myth about Catherine the Great relates that she had three hundred
lovers. The same legend is attached to the Empress Elisabeth and the
mother of Sergei Saltikov. It belongs to the Russian fable.
There is no need to speculate on the number of lovers that Catherine
had; she has herself told us the facts. Besides her husband, there
were twelve. After she became Empress she made no secret of her love
affairs, but rather the contrary. The only place where any vagueness
exists is in the beginning before the birth of Paul. Her German
biographer, Gertrud Kircheisen, as well as Bilbassov, thinks that her
early intimacy with Andrei Chernichev must have gone farther than she
admits in her memoirs. Chernichev was banished from the court on her
account and Catherine’s letters to him, discovered in later years,
suggest that their relations were not merely platonic. But Catherine’s
memoirs are not the only evidence we have concerning her lovers. Her
confession to Potiomkin leaves him out. In this document, which has all
the marks of a genuine confession, she tells Potiomkin that he is the
fifth. The favorites of Catherine as Empress were a public institution
and their number was certainly no secret. After Potiomkin there were
seven.
They were: Zavadovsky, her secretary, who was one of the most
intellectual of her lovers and minister of public instruction under her
grandson, Alexander I; Zoritch, the Serbian, who afterwards founded
a school for boys in the country; Rimsky-Korsakov, a sergeant of the
guards, the most beautiful and the most stupid of them all, who ordered
a library to fit the shelves of his house; Lanskoy, with whom she is
said to have had only platonic relations and who died in her arms;
Yermalov, the “white nigger” whom Potiomkin dismissed from the palace
on a day’s notice; Mamonov, a man of some ability, who married one of
her court ladies and eliminated himself from office; and Plato Zubov,
the young man of twenty-four who became her lover when she was sixty
and lived with her until her death.
Altogether there were thirteen men with whom the Empress made, so to
speak, twelve unhappy marriages. The Russians accepted her arrangements
without much comment; the irregularity of her relationships did not
trouble them. What did scandalize them, however, was the frequency
with which she changed the incumbent of the office. She would dismiss
her Adjutant General one day and install another the next day, and her
fickleness seemed to increase with her years.
There were a few things which all her lovers had in common. They were
tall, well-built men and graced a military uniform to perfection. It
is true that so long as they remained in office as favorites they
were obliged to lead an idle life and forego all active service; only
sedentary occupations were possible for them. But with two or three
exceptions, the men were not intellectual. The Adjutant-General’s main
duty was to wear his clothes well and give his arm to the Empress. He
was an officer on leave. At the age of fifty, the restless woman was
capable of falling in love with a military uniform at first sight, as
she did when she espied Rimsky-Korsakov among the guards at the palace
gates. She was as susceptible to an imposing military figure as any
German _backfisch_ was in the day before the great war abolished the
temptation. The Empress was herself once a German _backfisch_ in a
military garrison where her father, the Prince of Anhalt-Zerbst, was
commandant. He was a tall man and a handsome one, rather silent and
stupid presumably but every inch a military officer who graced his
uniform. Old memories of that impressive Prince, her father, sometimes
rose within her, when she beheld her favorite in all the glory of his
uniform and the decorations which she had pinned upon him. No doubt the
stiff old Prince had been rather splendid in his time.
Among the seven successors of Potiomkin, Sasha Lanskoy especially
stands out. He was a young man of taste if not of intellect. In all
the enterprises of the Empress which required artistic judgment
Lanskoy had a contribution to make and made it. He was capable of
enjoying her correspondence with Grimm and of being a real companion
to his mistress. She was fifty-one and Lanskoy was twenty-two when he
became her lover. He was a poor officer of the horse guards. Like all
her favorites, he had nothing and she gave him all. For four years
he flourished under her maternal care, a sensitive youth much liked
and respected by those about the court. Then in June, 1784, he fell
desperately ill. The physician who hastened from the city to attend him
at Czarskoe Selo said that he had angina and would die. This was ten
days before his death occurred. Catherine nursed him day and night,
passionately fighting for his life until at last the young man died in
her arms.
The Empress resolved to remain a widow. She would live without a lover
and comfort herself with her little grandson Alexander. For a whole
year, she moped in solitude, shutting herself up in her chamber and
valiantly trying to endure her loneliness. She strove to fortify her
resolution by poring over a book by a famous German hypochondriac
entitled “Uber die Einsamkeit.” To Zimmermann, the author, she sent
a ring and a portrait of herself, in grateful acknowledgment of his
words on the solitary life. But neither the book nor her correspondence
with Zimmermann was able to keep her always faithful to her vows. Her
struggles to get on without a lover became more and more pathetic until
after a year of sacrifice she installed Yermalov in the apartments of
the favorite.
Her trial of suttee after Lanskoy’s death is often brought forward to
show that Catherine at last experienced love in the true meaning of the
word. But the English Ambassador who wrote after her death that she had
died “a stranger to love” perhaps came nearer to the truth. The woman
who had had twelve lovers never learned to love. Death overtook her
while she was still trying to learn.
7
When Potiomkin came up to Petersburg in the spring to “have a tooth
out,” as he said, meaning thereby to dispossess Zubov, he growled his
usual thunders in advance. But the elderly Empress was infatuated
with her young lover and refused to drive him forth at Potiomkin’s
bidding. It was the first time that Potiomkin had felt himself wholly
powerless in this situation and the disturbance within him was acute.
Since bluster and threats were of no avail, though with all previous
rivals they had sufficed, he fell back upon his prowess as a wooer.
The Prince of Tauris would win his lady back as he had won her fifteen
years before. He would turn poet and troubadour as he had been in
the springtime of their love. At that time Potiomkin had been an
impecunious officer who could only afford to write verses to lay at
his mistress’s feet. Now he was a Prince with princely riches at his
command. The Empress loved gaiety and merry-making on a grand scale.
Potiomkin decided to give her such an entertainment as Petersburg had
never seen, and to stake all on the outcome.
The Prince had built a magnificent palace near the court of his
Empress. He had adorned it with the richest materials of the South.
His oriental furnishings and treasures would have inspired the great
Alexander himself with envy. In a vast room strewn with Persian rugs,
his guests dined from Persian glass and golden dishes of Russian
workmanship. Potiomkin’s cook was a person wholly different from the
botchers whom the Empress employed in her kitchen. His cook was famous
for making the best sterlet soup in Russia, and his master had been
known to send a military officer two thousand versts to fetch him a
tureen of it. In short, the Prince’s table was such a table as had
never before been spread in Russia and probably never since. He used
his military officers to fetch and carry for his cook. They brought
oysters from Riga, melons from Astrakhan, and grapes from the Crimea.
The first oranges ever eaten in Russia were served on Potiomkin’s
table. Even Frederick the Great, who was one of the great epicures of
his age, envied the dinners of the Prince of Tauris.
The festival of the despairing lover surpassed anything he had ever
done before. His resources were strained to the uttermost. He gave a
series of dinners, balls, pageants, arranged around the Empress as
the central figure, whose grandeur astonished the court. His food
and fireworks were an experience for the most blasé of the Russian
nobility. The magnificence of his effects mounted from day to day, as
the strain of his effort also increased. He was fighting for his life.
For the Empress also the strain was frightful. She endured it as long
as she could and then mercifully swung the axe which was to end his
struggles. One morning she sent for her host and thanked him expressly
for his entertainment of the evening before. She referred to it as a
farewell feast and spoke regretfully of his departure for the front
which she assumed was immediately necessary. Potiomkin understood. He
had lost his last throw.
He left for the South in a mood of the blackest depression. He told
his friends that he would never return. As soon as he arrived in camp
at Jassy, he fell ill with a fever. His niece, the faithful Sashinka
Branicky, was with him and nursed him. What the doctors prescribed
Potiomkin would not do; all that they forbade, he instantly demanded.
He insisted on eating like a gourmand. In every way he acted like a
man determined not to live. His last meal was like the repast of a
condemned man on the morning of his execution. He ate a quantity of
salt pork, raw beets, a goose and still another fowl, all of which he
washed down with Crimean wine and Russian _kwass_. He is said to have
died from over-eating while in a fever; but he had really died before
he left Petersburg. He was scarcely a living man when he arrived at
Jassy.
After this orgiastic meal, his bed became intolerable to him. He
demanded to be taken from Jassy to Nikolaev, as he said, for a change
of air. With his niece in the kibitka beside him, the dying man drove
westward. Gradually his strength faded and his raging temperature
subsided. The attendants were obliged to take him from the carriage and
lay him on a rug at the roadside. There beside the dusty chaussée, in
the arms of Sashinka, he expired. He had gone the way of Gregory Orlov,
but had gone more directly. His Little Mother, his Matushka, had killed
her last man.
When the Empress heard of Potiomkin’s death, she fainted three times.
Once upon a time she had written to Potiomkin, “Without thee, I am
without hands.” This proved to be true. With Plato Zubov’s hands,
she could never work the same, for Plato’s hands worked alone for
their master. The last years of Catherine’s reign were years of
disappointment, unwisdom, and failure. Her glory had passed when
Potiomkin died by the roadside. In destroying him, she had struck a
fatal blow at herself.
[Illustration]
XI
CATHERINE BECOMES A GRANDMOTHER
Over a mantelpiece in the palace of Gatchina hangs a portrait of Paul
I as a boy of ten. It is the only one of his portraits which bears a
resemblance to his mother. Of all the artists who painted him, this one
alone seems to have caught an aspect of the Grand Duke which suggests
the Empress. Fleeting it must have been, for Paul grew up to be
strikingly unlike his maternal parent. He was destined to advertise by
his face and figure to all the world the anonymous paternity which had
produced him.
Catherine was annoyed by Paul’s appearance and disposition, inherited
as they were from his father’s family. It offended her that he should
turn out to be so completely a Saltikov. That her son derived so little
from herself seemed a perversity of fortune. She reflected a great
deal on the subject. “My God,” she burst out in one of her letters to
Grimm, “why do children so often resemble their fathers when it would
be better to resemble their mothers? That is not common sense; dame
Nature is often a blockhead. One day I shall write a dissertation
on that, which I shall dedicate to you.” She did not write the
dissertation for Grimm, although dissertations in general were much in
her line. She dipped into scientific research from time to time with
impressive results. Her contributions to comparative philology have
won recognition from scholars in that field; but her contemplated study
of inheritance of characteristics was never carried out. She never got
beyond posing the question, to which, however, she repeatedly returned
without ever pushing onward to any kind of theory. She bred dogs and
observed that they showed the same tendency as human beings in this
respect. “Witness Sir Tom Anderson,” she said of her favorite hound,
“all his family resembles him. The same spirit, the same taste, the
same figure, the same physiognomy, the same tendency.” She was puzzled
and resentful.
Catherine was estranged from her son Paul from the day of his birth.
Deprived of all opportunity to express her maternal feelings by the
Empress’s theft, she had no actual experience of motherhood. Painful
associations clustered around the infancy of this over-precious child.
Catherine had been deserted by her first lover who openly replaced her
by unworthy rivals. She hated Saltikov, as she afterwards learned not
to hate any of her favorites after their affair had run its course. The
child whom she saw once a week in his fox-fur cradle reminded her of
bitter disillusionment. As he grew older, his querulous disposition,
his under-sized stature, his wizened skin, his baldness, and his
ugly nose all helped to make him seem alien to his mother. He was a
cringing, sickly boy of whom it was difficult to be proud. She had
produced him at such a cost and he represented such an inferior triumph
after all. As human material he was in the same class as Peter the
Third, from which many historians have argued that Paul was Peter’s son
and a genuine descendant of the Romanovs.
Catherine’s second son and her first child by Orlov, Prince Bobrinsky,
also failed to inherit the genius of his mother. He was brought up
under the Empress’s supervision by an Italian tutor, Admiral Ribas, and
as a young man was a ne’er-do-well and a waster. His mother sent him
on a tour through Europe and the gay young Prince of the Beaver-skin
left a trail of debts behind him in city after city. Finally the
exasperated Empress had him arrested and interned in Riga, after which
history knows him no more. He was a spendthrift, like both his parents,
but he had none of the mental and moral handicaps of Grand Duke Paul.
After his public disgrace in Riga, he returned to Russia and led an
unambitious and uneventful life. He married and left descendants in
whom history takes no interest.
The chief part which Bobrinsky played in the drama of his mother’s life
was to heighten the conflict which always existed between Catherine
and her first-born. There was a moment in the Empress’s life when
she thought of marrying Gregory Orlov but was suddenly checked in
her intentions by the enemies of the Orlovs and the opposition of
Panin. Count Panin, who wanted from the first to make Paul emperor,
became suddenly energetic when he suspected that the Empress wished
to legitimatize Bobrinsky. Even after the danger of the marriage had
been averted, this bastard Prince still hovered threateningly in the
background, well cared for by the Empress, his mother, a permanent
object of suspicion to Count Panin and of fear to the Grand Duke Paul.
This boy who trembled for his life could find no reassurance in the
existence of a rival half-brother as long as he kept his health and
his mother’s favor. The young Bobrinsky, like everything else in their
environment, contributed to the estrangement between Catherine and her
heir.
When Catherine became Empress, one of her first concerns was to provide
for the education of the Grand Duke Paul. She selected no less a person
for the post than d’Alembert. But the French scholar declined her
invitation. The Empress would not take no for an answer; she stooped to
conquer. “I know you too well for a good man,” she wrote, “to ascribe
your refusal to vanity. I know that the sole motive of it is the desire
for peace and leisure to cultivate letters and the friendship of
those whom you esteem. But what is there in this objection? Come with
all your friends. I promise both them and you every convenience and
advantage that depends upon me; and perhaps you will find more liberty
and ease here than in your native country. You refused the invitation
of the King of Prussia, notwithstanding your obligations to him. But
that Prince has no son. I admit to you that I have the education of my
son so much at heart, and I think you so necessary to it, that perhaps
I press you with too much earnestness. Excuse my indiscretion for the
sake of its occasion; and be assured that it is my esteem for you that
makes me so urgent.”
This petitioning of d’Alembert brought one of the sharpest humiliations
of her life. D’Alembert steadfastly refused. Privately he uttered a
sarcastic remark which travelled far. In Russia, he said, people died
too easily of colic, it was better to remain in France. The Empress
never forgave him this sly reference to her manifesto concerning
Peter’s untimely end. A decade or more afterwards, when she was
engaged in the invasion of Poland, a group of French professors living
there fell into her hands and were interned at Kiev. D’Alembert,
remembering his old prestige with the Empress, attempted to secure
their release by sending a personal petition to the Russian Empress,
but she turned a deaf ear to his intercession. The distressed scholar
at last appealed to Voltaire who succeeded in getting only a cold reply
from the Empress. She said that the French professors were doing very
well in Russia and would stay there for the present. She implied that
d’Alembert, who had thought that people died too easily of colic in
this barbarous land, might now see for himself how well people could
live there. The professors were being cared for and would remain
interned until the Empress found leisure to release them. Their period
of internment was probably not greatly prolonged by d’Alembert’s appeal.