friends, who had shared with her the experiences of 1762. Orlov and
Potiomkin had both stood over the warm body of Peter, stabbed to death
by Alexei and Bariatinsky. Although neither of them had lifted a hand
against the Czar, they shared with her the memory of a crime which had
to be made good. This was not such a bad thing, said Voltaire, since
it made the Empress one of the best monarchs of the century. To redeem
herself in the eyes of Europe, she was obliged to accomplish miracles.
In a lesser degree the same obligation rested on Orlov and Potiomkin.
Although they were both selfish and extravagant, they were good
patriots and did their utmost for the glory of Russia. A mysterious
force sustained Gregory Orlov, a very ordinary man, through a very
remarkable career. Potiomkin, a man of greater ability than Orlov,
was correspondingly more effective and more distinguished. The moody
Ukrainian must have been surprised to find himself regarded as a great
General and a great statesman and to realize that at times he actually
was all that he was supposed to be.
For nearly thirty years, the Empress had had the companionship of these
two men. After the death of Potiomkin, she was for the first time
alone. All at once she became uncertain, inadequate, unsuccessful,
and the inglorious years of her reign began. Her claim to the
title of Catherine the Great would have been stronger had she died
with Potiomkin. The last decade of her life diminished that claim
considerably, which has often been construed as showing the strength of
Potiomkin’s influence and the importance of his ideas. But Potiomkin
was merely the staff on which she leaned and which she had broken
without foreseeing the consequences to herself.
Young Plato Zubov had no realization of the crime at Ropsha. His
conscience was virgin and his youth made him irresponsible and selfish.
He was a man without a past, he had nothing to make good. Fortune had
suddenly rained treasure upon him out of a clear sky and he accepted
her bounty like a child who forgets to say “thank you.” He was
arrogant, arbitrary, and grasping, and he became ruthless after his
triumph over the redoubtable Potiomkin. The death of his rival left him
invincible and he knew it.
Zubov was not simply youthful; he was youth. The two brothers, Plato
and Valerian, were just emerging from the adolescent period which the
Empress’s grandsons, Alexander and Constantine, were just entering.
The difference in age and maturity between the two pairs of brothers
was not great. The Empress was in love with Alexander but she adopted
Plato Zubov instead and began casting about for a wife for Alexander
who had reached the age at which she had come to Russia to be married.
“Monsieur Alexander,” she had spoken of from infancy as if he were a
man and Zubov she now referred to always as “the child.” At the age of
sixty, the Empress had no eyes for anything but youth. Her lovers had
been growing younger and younger until all the world expected her to
end her life in the arms of a boy. So consistently had she lowered the
age of consent, this seemed the only logical outcome.
It was assumed by those about the court that only striplings need
apply for the post of favorite. There was a moment when it seemed as
if the seventeen-year-old son of Princess Dashkov might seriously
compete. His mother, who had ridden beside the Empress as a sister
Amazon on the night of the Peterhof campaign, says in her memoirs
that the young Prince had been advised by Gregory Orlov to become a
suitor. The Princess was shocked when she heard her son thus tempted by
Catherine’s ex-favorite. “As soon as he was gone,”--she tactfully sent
young Dashkov on an impromptu errand,--“I expressed my astonishment to
Prince Orlov that he could speak in such a manner to a young man not
seventeen years of age, and compromise the honor and dignity of her
Majesty in such a manner. As to favorites, I bade him recollect that I
neither knew nor acknowledged such persons, and that this was a subject
which I would not suffer to be renewed in my presence, much less in the
presence of my son, whom I had brought up with sentiments of the utmost
veneration for the Empress as his sovereign and godmother, never, as I
trusted, to know any other.”
The Princess nevertheless set off at once for Petersburg, where she
soon was sure to be dangerously exposed to the charms of the aged siren
on the Russian throne. As soon as the Dashkovs arrived, the mother’s
fears increased. “The absurd rumors that my son would be the favorite
began to be renewed.” One day the nephew of Prince Potiomkin called
at her house and asked to speak with the young Prince, who was out.
“All that you are doing me the honor to say,” the Princess burst forth
vehemently, although the messenger had said no more than that Prince
Potiomkin wished to see her son, “could never be meant for my ears.
Perhaps it might be your commission to speak with Prince Dashkov. As
for myself, whilst I love the Empress and dare not oppose her will, I
have too much self-respect and self-esteem to take part in any affair
of such a nature. And if what you are pleased to intimate should ever
occur, the only use I shall make of my son’s influence will be to
obtain leave of absence for some years and a passport to visit foreign
countries.”
There is no evidence except his mother’s memoirs that the Empress ever
really considered young Dashkov. Soon after his arrival in Petersburg,
he was ordered away to his regiment, a fate which never overtook
young men whom the Empress wished to see about her. The hopes of his
mother collapsed. The Prince went away under a cloud of failure,
like a student who had tried for college entrance and failed in his
examinations. Within a few weeks he met a peasant girl and married her
during a pause of his regiment. The rest of his story relates how his
mother never recognized his wife, how he lived apart from her, and how
he died early. He had never been a happy prince.
Young Dashkov’s tragedy throws a light on the Empress’s passion for
young men. There were mothers in Russia who were willing to offer up
their sons and profit by an unsuitable love-relationship which could
be glossed over as romantic. There were older men like Orlov who were
ready to advise a fine young soldier to try his fortunes with the
Empress. All of these counsellors expected to receive in some form,
whether in passports and funds for foreign travel or otherwise, wages
for their services. For the lucky young man it meant riches, honors,
titles, consideration. The Empress’s generosity was notorious--and she
could not possibly live long. But a long and princely future awaited
the youthful lover who survived her.
Plato Zubov was a choice after her own heart. The “child” was not
as tall as he might have been but he was dark like her first lover,
Saltikov, who had looked “like a fly in the milk-pan” and who had wooed
her at first so ardently. Plato was not diffident. He had taken pains
to put himself in the Empress’s way. His uncle, one of Catherine’s
field-marshals, had been induced to make him commander of the horse
guards at Czarskoe Selo and the young officer lost no opportunity of
placing himself in the foreground whenever the Empress passed. Zubov
had been on the ground for some time before Mamonov’s infidelity was
discovered. The dismissal of Mamonov was followed instantaneously by
the election of Zubov. The Empress spent only one night alone. The
next day Plato Zubov was promoted to the post of General-Adjutant and
appeared at the Empress’s right hand at dinner, as handsome a military
figure as had ever adorned the place. There was truculence in the set
of the young man’s head, though his dark eyes wore that dreamy look
which his predecessors all the way back to Prince Christian August of
Anhalt-Zerbst had always worn.
There is a tradition, not well established, that her relationship with
Zubov was Platonic. If this was true, the aging Empress took good
care that it should not be known. She hated growing old and resisted
to the last the infirmities of her advancing years. She detested
glasses though she was obliged to use them. This was not, she told her
secretary, due to any ordinary process of physical decay but “because
she had worn her eyes out in the service of the state.” The loss of
her teeth did not worry her nearly so much, because the infirmity was
so universal and so irremediable. In spite of powder, wigs, and beauty
spots, the teeth of the eighteenth century lady were at the mercy of
her years, and the Empress with her millions of rubles was no better
off than any peasant grandmother of her realm.
Worst of all, she lost the use of her legs. They became so swollen that
she could not move about on them, and was obliged to sit in a wheeled
chair while she took her airing in the colonnade of her Czarskoe Selo
palace. To reach her beloved English garden which lay directly below,
she built of stone and sod an inclined way down which her chair could
be gently propelled until it reached the grove of live oaks. Those
members of the nobility whose invitations she accepted built similar
approaches to their palaces in order that the Empress need climb no
stairs. Leaning on the arm of her beplumed, beribboned and bestarred
escort, the handsome Plato, she would toil slowly up the incline while
her host stood bowing to await her successful arrival. In this fashion
Catherine the Great made her last public appearances, tottering before
the eyes of all beholders like a child learning to take its first steps.
In spite of her physical handicaps, she persisted in acting as if they
did not exist and her prowess was amazing. Her love of society remained
as strong as ever and she was always the gayest in any company. Her
infirmities were greater than those which had imprisoned Frederick the
Great in his armchair during his last years, and had shut him off from
the world. But unlike the Prussian King, whom she derided as being as
“old as Herod,” she never fell into the mental rigidity which comes
from loss of contact with the world. Her reactionary acts, which were
plentiful enough in the last decade of her reign, were due to something
other than the hardening of the social arteries which sometimes sets in
with the advent of old age.
She took to card-playing more assiduously than ever, and her passion
for conversation grew rather less than in the old days when she would
talk with Grimm and Diderot for seven hours at a stretch. The change
may have been due to the fact that she no longer had men like Grimm and
Diderot about her to tempt her to these conversational orgies. Madame
Vigée Lebrun was in Petersburg during the last years of the Empress,
but Catherine never spent seven hours at a time conversing with any
woman. Even after sixty, she was not reduced to that. Her energy
sufficed to the very last to defend her dominant likes and dislikes.
She had suffered great physical losses. The use of her legs, all of her
teeth, and half of her eyesight were gone, yet the vigor and virility
of her personality remained unimpaired. On the arm of a handsome
young lover, she would brazen it out to the end. She wore him like a
decoration.
There is no doubt that Catherine was afraid of Zubov; that is, afraid
of losing him, and that she spoiled him dreadfully. She spoiled all
the Zubov brothers, Plato, Valerian, and Nicholas. It was a repetition
of her situation with the Orlov brothers, only the Zubov family was
more grasping. Gregory Orlov had stumbled into his good luck, so to
speak, but Plato Zubov had worked for his; besides he was younger and
times had changed. He lost no opportunity to garner the rewards of his
enterprise for himself and his brothers. In a short time, they had
acquired all the honors and riches for which the Orlovs had waited ten
years and Potiomkin and his protégés fifteen. Needless to say, the
Zubovs were extremely unpopular. Nicholas was married and was rather
less prominent about the court than Plato and Valerian, who were the
center of its social and political life. They enjoyed the constant
society of the Empress.
From the point of view of the elder nobility, Plato and Valerian were
upstarts. The ministers and foreign diplomats, who had not achieved at
a single bound, were obliged to stand hat in hand as these youngsters
passed. Catherine’s favorites had always been parvenus and the nobles
had grown accustomed to bare their heads to General-Adjutants who had
no ancestry. But the Zubovs were not merely unknown; they were reckless
youths without experience or any other measure of the power which was
theirs. There was not even a Potiomkin to trim their claws, since the
Prince of Tauris had been laid away in an anonymous southern grave
because Plato Zubov would not allow the Empress to build a worthy tomb
for him. No survivor of the Empress’s own generation had any influence
with her.
The character of the Little Hermitage, in which Catherine had always
received her intimates, had changed. In the days when Gregory Orlov
had strutted about like an apple-cheeked Adonis with his illiterate
conversation, the Hermitage had all been more or less of an age and
had frolicked like children together. Later, when Gregory Potiomkin had
gloomed in a corner while the Empress played cards with tear-marks on
her cheeks or had performed his ventriloquist tricks until her sides
ached with laughter, there had still been a kind of harmony among them.
But the group now threatened to break into two parts along a line of
social cleavage which separated the old from the young. As the Empress
had grown older, the most prominent men in the Hermitage had grown
younger. The two Zubovs and her grandsons now occupied the foreground
while all the middle-aged and elderly cavaliers were relegated to the
background. Only Leo Narishkin was as old as herself, Leo who had once
meowed like a cat to call her forth to a rendezvous with Poniatovsky
and whom she had whipped with nettles on the one occasion in all his
life when his allegiance had wandered. Narishkin had no influence with
her. He was her oldest friend in Russia, now grown as fat as she and
caring no longer to play blind-man’s-buff which had once been their
favorite game. She played cards with him and quarreled with him and
lampooned him in verse. When the evening was over, the Empress got upon
her feet with difficulty, and leaning on the arm of her dark-eyed Plato
retired to her bed chamber adjoining. The Princess Alexandrina, who
was now fourteen and a member of the Hermitage, was a witness of this
unconventional exit of her grandmother.
Gradually the Empress’s environment began to feel that the lioness was
growing weaker. They no longer feared her claws as formerly. When they
saw her looking anxiously to the arrogant Plato for approval, their
courage to criticize awoke. Her dependence gave her away. For the
first time in her reign rumors of disrespect and ridicule were heard.
Long ago when she had thought of marrying Gregory Orlov, the gossips in
Moscow had put their heads together and whispered. But they had stopped
suddenly enough when the Empress had sent out with a roll of drums
her famous Manifesto of Silence. The tongues of Moscow had ceased to
wag when Little Mother spoke on that occasion. Nowadays she loosed no
thunders and the gossips began to sense their freedom.
Her severest critics, as usual, were found in the French colony. These
foreigners indulged themselves in vulgar jests at the expense of the
Russian Empress and her court and went so far as to set down their
Rabelaisian efforts on paper. At a Twelfth Night party they lampooned
the Little Hermitage with a freedom which one might suppose to be
Russian if one did not know that the composers of the document were
Parisian. One by one they satirized the courtiers, beginning with Zubov.
“Zubov has never rendered any service to the state and is no longer
of service to the Empress, since the Sapphics, Branicky and Protassov
execute the functions of his office. Let a few emetics be given him, to
make him bring up what he has swallowed.
“Prince Bariatinsky, Marshal of the Court, shall be appointed Jack
Ketch. A more gentle mode of putting to death than that by the knout
is to be introduced; and he shall have the office of smothering and
strangling in secret those that are to be dispatched, whether it be an
emperor or his son; it is expected, however, that he do not let them
cry out, as he did about thirty years ago.
“Marshal Suvarov shall have a patent for dealing as a butcher in human
flesh; and the army shall be allowed to feed on it in Poland, where
nothing but carcasses are left.
“A committee of _uchiteli_ shall be appointed to examine whether Prince
Yussupov be able to read; if he can, he shall be appointed prompter to
the theatres, of which he is now manager.
“Madame von Lieven, governess to the Princesses, shall retain her
place, though she has somewhat the air of an Amazon; but she shall be
enjoined not to let beasts only have permission to speak at the table
of the young Princess, unless they speak with sense as they did in
Æsop’s days.
“Prince Repnin, having opened the door one day when Prince Potiomkin
called for a glass of water that he might himself repeat this important
order to the lackeys, shall receive a patent for the place of first
valet de chambre to the favourites; a post which to him will be worth
that of field-marshal. However, the crown of laurel which covered his
gray hair shall be taken from him, because he suffered a buffoon to
tread on him without saying a word; and because the gift of a small
house appeared suited to him, and to console him for the insult.
“M. Zavadovsky, director and plunderer of the bank, shall be sent into
Siberia to catch sables, to replenish her Majesty’s stock of furs,
which it will not be in her power to keep up by any other means. She is
already unable to furnish her family with them, and Zavadovsky is well
known to be a better huntsman than financier.”
Such vulgar ridicule had long been rife in Paris. Since the Empress had
welcomed French émigrés to Petersburg, it could now be heard in Russia.
2
Like Peter the Great, Catherine had always hated the French. She envied
them their art and culture and resented the French attitude toward
the Russians as barbarians. She had adopted Peter’s political policy
which placed France always on the side of the enemy. There had always
been misunderstanding and coolness between the courts of Versailles
and Petersburg, and when the daughter of the detested Maria Theresa
became the Queen of France it did not help to make their relations
more friendly. If Catherine had any fellow-feeling, as she might very
well have had, for Marie Antoinette’s ill-judged extravagance, she
never expressed it before the revolution. Long ago, she had taken her
cue toward French royalty from Voltaire and the Encyclopædists and for
thirty years she had tacitly adhered to it. The outbreak of the French
Revolution suddenly changed all that and made her overnight into a
rabid protagonist of the French king. It was the greatest inconsistency
of her life, a betrayal of her position as the most liberal monarch of
her century.
The Empress had fought pretenders and rebels within her own kingdom.
As a usurper herself, she was especially suspicious of conspiracy and
rebellion, but she had been cool and wary in dealing with the cases
which arose. The Churchman, Arsenii of Rostov, had felt her heavy hand
when he tried to defend the lands of the Church against confiscation
and had found himself put down from bishop to simple monk and banished
to a cloister in a lonely forest. This was at the very beginning of her
reign. Soon afterwards came the conspiracy of Mirovich and the death
of Ivan VI, the Emperor whom Elizabeth had deposed twenty-three years
before and who had gone straight from his cradle to prison. Ivanushka,
for he was always remembered as a baby and spoken of as if he were
one, had grown into a tall, stammering, red-haired man who occupied as
a nameless prisoner a cell in the Schlüsselburg fortress. The effort
of young Mirovich to rescue him resulted in the death of Ivan and the
execution of the conspirator. Although the removal of Ivanushka was
convenient for the Empress, or, as she called it providential, she
could not have planned it, for Mirovich was a fantastic and quixotic
individual who could not carry out the schemes of others.
For almost ten years afterwards, the Empress encountered no further
alarms until the smallpox riots broke out in Moscow. While her
attention was fixed on these, Pugachev’s rebellion began to roll up
in the East and to take on the aspect of a civil war. Pugachev was
a genuine revolutionist, an agitator, a leader of the masses. He
was, after Stenka Rasin, the second great socialist hero of Russian
history and his rebellion, however complicated by other elements, was
essentially a social uprising. The condition of the peasants had not
improved under Catherine’s régime although there had been a definite
hope among the serfs that the liberal Empress was going to do something
for them. The Cossack rebel, Pugachev, came along at just the right
time to garner the resentment which grew out of these disappointed
hopes. He said that he came to give satisfaction to the injured people.
They brought the wild man with his blue-black beard to Moscow in a cage
and executed him there.
Pugachev had gone the way of Peter the Third and Ivanushka and the
Empress was left in undisputed possession of the throne. She had
at last put her house in order, for no other insurrection of any
consequence broke out during her reign. She could now pursue her
operations against the Turks uninterrupted by domestic disturbances.
Her Russians, the patient “dark” people, were quiescent. After
Pugachev’s blue-black head had fallen and his blood had stained the
January snow of the Red Square, no other leader appeared to arouse the
people against their Empress.
When the news of the French Revolution reached Russia, Potiomkin and
the Empress were marching toward Constantinople. For fifteen years the
peasants of Russia had been submissive and the Empress had not been
aware of the restlessness in France. The French uprising astonished and
alarmed her profoundly and filled Potiomkin with a paralyzing terror.
They had all the reactions that might be expected of parvenus under the
circumstances. The outraged Empress gave vent to her indignation in the
language of a fish-wife. She did not admit her awful fears. She boasted
loudly to Count Ségur, the French envoy who favored the republic,
“Je suis aristocrate, c’est mon métier.” Of all her court, only Leo
Narishkin could remember her as an awkward country girl who arrived in
Russia without even a bridal chest, and Leo would have been the last
to remind her of her humble origin. He had not forgotten the sting of
nettles applied by the Empress when she was a young and vigorous Grand
Duchess.
Catherine followed the fortunes of the French royal family hour by
hour with intense sympathy. She was at Peterhof when she heard of
their flight from Paris and she was still rejoicing over it when she
heard that they had been arrested and taken back. Something similar
had happened to Peter thirty years before in the Peterhof palace, but
Catherine had called herself at that time a revolutionist and had been
in the opponents’ camp. This time she railed loudly and violently
against the regicides of France. She shuddered to think of what might
happen to Catherine the Great if another Pugachev should presently
appear. After the death of Louis and Marie Antoinette, she said that
her only hope for France was that a Cæsar or a Genghis Khan might
rise up and overwhelm them. She supported the idea of intervention
with enthusiasm but beyond her eloquent encouragement she gave no
actual aid; all Europe echoed with her tirades and abuse. Her virile
language over-topped that of any other monarch. She could denounce
the friends of the republic as no one else and praise the old régime
with matchless fervor. Her old friend, Prince Henry of Prussia, came
in for the most extreme abuse because he would not join the hue and
cry against the Jacobins; and Edmund Burke, who denounced the French
Revolutionists although he had favored the American rebels, was heaped
with undiscriminating praise.
The Empress’s whole attitude toward the French Revolution was one of
bluster and ineffectiveness. Even her own camp found it ineffectual
and inconsistent. She invited the émigrés to Petersburg, for which
the republican side naturally detested her. Her reputation declined
with her contemporaries who felt that this emotional defence was
something less than might have been expected from Catherine the Great
of former days. Formerly, she had understood the art of pulling the
strings in silence and had known how to accomplish her will without
threats. She had negotiated the partition of Poland and established the
policy of armed neutrality with statesmanlike effectiveness. Now she
had degenerated into vituperation and inaction. Not only the Russian
court but all the courts of Europe began to feel that the lioness of
Petersburg was growing old.
3