Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman (106 page)

At one in the afternoon, her morning work was finished, and Catherine retired to dress, often in gray or violet silk, for midday dinner. Ten to twenty guests sat down with her: personal friends, noblemen, senior
officials, and her favorite foreign diplomats. She was not interested in food, and the fare was Spartan; afterward guests discreetly retreated to the apartments of courtiers living in the palace where they could supplement their meal.

In the afternoon, Catherine read books or was read to while she sewed or embroidered. At six, if there were a court reception, she moved among her guests in the drawing rooms of the Winter Palace. Supper was served, but Catherine never ate, and at ten she withdrew. When there was no official court reception, she entertained privately in the Hermitage. The company listened to a concert, watched a French or Russian play, or simply played games, performed charades, or played whist. During these gatherings, her long-standing rules remained in force: formality was banned; it was forbidden to rise when the empress stood; everyone talked freely; bad tempers were not tolerated; laughter was required. To her friend Frau Bielcke, she wrote: “
Madame, you must be gay; only thus can life be endured. I speak from experience for I have had to endure much, and have only been able to endure it because I have always laughed whenever I had the chance.”

In the 1790s, Catherine’s health was declining. For years, she had suffered from headaches and indigestion; now colds and rheumatism were added. By the summer of 1796 she was afflicted by open leg sores. Sometimes swollen and bleeding, her legs bothered her so much that she tried soaking them daily in fresh, ice-cold seawater; Dr. Rogerson’s skepticism regarding this unconventional treatment only made her more certain that it was having “marvelous effects.”

Her physical infirmities were an inconvenience, but she was not immobilized. She spent autumn and winter at the Winter Palace and the Hermitage. After Potemkin’s death, she had another residence in the capital and lived for a few weeks in spring and again in autumn in the Tauride Palace, which she had bought from the prince’s heirs. Living there helped her keep fresh the memory of the man who had been her partner, lover, and perhaps her husband. In preference to the estates at Peterhof and Oranienbaum on the Gulf of Finland, which could summon unhappy memories from the past, Tsarskoe Selo, where she could be surrounded by her friends and grandchildren, was her favorite summer retreat. No serious barriers were placed between the imperial family and the public; all parks in the capital and the nearby countryside were open to all who were “decently dressed.” This included the park at Tsarskoe Selo. One day, Catherine was seated on a
bench with her favorite personal maid after their early morning walk. A man passed by, glanced briefly at the two elderly women, and, failing to recognize the empress, walked on, whistling. The maid was indignant, but Catherine merely remarked, “What do you expect, Maria Savichna?
Twenty years ago this would not have happened. We have grown old. It is our fault.”

Catherine was forty-eight when, in 1777, her daughter-in-law, Maria, gave birth to the empress’s first grandson. She, not the child’s mother or father, named him Alexander. Motherhood had provided Catherine with few joys; now, as a grandmother, she had an opportunity to catch up. Setting aside her long-ago grief when Empress Elizabeth had taken away her firstborn, Paul, Catherine assumed the dominant role in the new infant’s life. Her reason was similar to Elizabeth’s. Both women had been frustrated by their inability, in one case to conceive, in the other to mother a child. Both used the same excuse for their subsequent behavior: a young, inexperienced mother could not be given the responsibility of raising and educating a future tsar.

Catherine did not take complete possession of Alexander, as Elizabeth had done with Paul. She had him brought to her every afternoon to be placed on the carpet next to her desk. When he arrived, she stopped whatever she was doing to play with him. She lay on the floor next to him, told him stories, invented games, corrected his mistakes, and hugged him repeatedly. “
I have said it to you before and I say it again,” she wrote to Grimm. “I dote on the little monkey.… In the afternoon, my little monkey comes as often as he likes and spends three or four hours a day in my room.” She called him “Monsieur Alexander” and announced, “
It is astonishing that, although he cannot yet talk, at twenty months he knows things that are beyond the grasp of any other child at the age of three.” When he was three, she said, “
If you only knew what wonders Alexander achieves as a cook, and an architect; how he paints, mixes colors, chops wood; how he plays being the groom and the coachman; how he is teaching himself to read, draw, calculate and write.” These conceits are no different from the effusions of any grandmother eager for the world to know—indeed, insisting that the world must know—of the extraordinary qualities and accomplishments of her grandchild. In any case, Catherine was convinced that Alexander was unique and that this was due exclusively to her.
“I am making a
delicious child of him,” she said. “
He loves me instinctively.” She designed a loose, one-piece garment that could be put on him easily and would not restrict his arms and legs. “
It is sewn together and goes on at once, and fastens behind with four or five little hooks,” she told Grimm. “The king of Sweden has demanded and received a pattern of the dress of Monsieur Alexander.”

Her second grandson was born eighteen months after Alexander. The empress named him Constantine to indicate the throne she had in mind for him: one day, she hoped, he would reign over a great new Orthodox Greek empire based on Constantinople. When Constantine was old enough, he joined his brother to play on her carpet. As they were intended for different thrones, they were given different educations. Alexander, who would become the future occupant of Catherine’s own throne, was brought up on the English model. He was given an English nanny and was taught the history of Europe and the literature of the Enlightenment. Constantine, destined for Constantinople, was given a Greek nurse, Greek servants, and Greek playmates so that he could begin speaking the language early. His lessons included the histories of Greece, Rome, and Byzantium, as well as of Russia.

When Alexander was seven and Constantine almost six, and they had reached the age for tutors, Catherine wrote thirty pages of instructions to guide their education. They were to be truthful and courageous. They were to be courteous to servants as well as to elders. They must go to bed early in rooms with plenty of fresh air circulating at a temperature of sixty degrees Farenheit. They were to sleep on flat beds with leather mattresses. They were to wash every day in cold water, and, in winter, to go to Russian steam baths. In summer, they were to learn to swim. Food was to be plain; fruit of all kinds was to serve as breakfast in summer. They were to plant their own gardens and grow their own vegetables. Any necessary punishment would consist of teaching the child to be ashamed of his misbehavior. Rebukes were to be delivered in private; praise in public. Corporal punishment was forbidden.

In 1784, Catherine appointed a Swiss, Frédéric-César de La Harpe, to be the boys’ primary tutor. A republican, skeptical of autocracy, he won Alexander’s respect and affection and, with Catherine’s permission, continued to preach the blessings of liberty and the duties of a sovereign toward his people. Alexander listened to these teachings; Constantine rebelled against them. Once he shouted at La Harpe that when he came to power, he would enter Switzerland with his army and
destroy the country. La Harpe replied calmly, “
There is in my country, near the little town of Morat, a building in which we keep the bones of those who pay us such a visit.”

From Alexander’s earliest years, Catherine nourished a hope that she could put him in place of her son, Paul, as her successor. Just as it had not taken Paul long to suspect that his mother’s intention to disinherit him was behind her possessive behavior regarding his son, Alexander, as he grew older, realized that he was the object of a struggle between his parents and his grandmother. He learned to adapt himself to the company he was in. At Gatchina, he listened to his father’s diatribes against the empress; back at court, he concurred with whatever his grandmother said. Unable to choose, he retreated into irresolution and equivocation; throughout his life, Alexander had difficulty making straightforward, unambiguous decisions.

Paul and Maria’s ten children were produced over a period of nineteen years. There were four boys and six girls. Their third son, Nicholas, arrived in 1796, the last year of Catherine’s life, and he escaped her strict supervision. The girls, unlike their older brothers, were left with their parents, who were allowed to educate them however they wished. Alexander remained Catherine’s primary concern, and her anxiety about the succession and the future of the dynasty led her to push him to marry early. Although his tutors believed that he was too immature for marriage, Catherine, in October 1792, invited two German princesses from Baden to visit St. Petersburg for scrutiny. The elder sister, Louisa, was fourteen; Fredericka was a year younger. Louisa was shy but quickly fell in love with the Russian prince. Alexander admitted that he liked her. This was sufficient for Catherine. In January 1793, Louisa converted to Orthodoxy and became the Grand Duchess Elizabeth Alekseyevna. The wedding of Alexander when he was still fifteen and the newly named Elizabeth was fourteen took place in September 1793. Unfortunately for Catherine’s dynastic hopes, Elizabeth never gave birth to a living child. Constantine, who refused the throne at the end of Alexander’s reign in 1825, remained without legitimate children. That left Nicholas, the grandson Catherine had left to his mother to educate, to inherit the throne and, through his descendants, to carry on the dynasty.

Catherine permitted Paul and Maria to keep their daughters at home, but when she believed that the young women were ready to marry she
took charge. The eldest of her granddaughters, Alexandra Pavlovna, was thirteen years old when the empress decided the time had come. Catherine wanted a marriage to Gustavus Adolphus, the young uncrowned king of Sweden, the son of Gustavus III, who had been assassinated four years earlier. A marriage to young Gustavus would ameliorate the long-standing hostility between Russia and Sweden and secure the Russian position on the upper Baltic.

There was an obstacle. In November 1795, Gustavus’s engagement to Princess Louisa, the Protestant daughter of the Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, had been announced. Catherine was not deterred. Word was passed to the Swedish regent, the Duke of Sudermania, brother of the murdered Gustavus III and uncle of the young uncrowned king, that hundreds of thousands of rubles would be available to subsidize the Swedish treasury once the empress’s wish was granted. At the beginning of April 1796, the regent agreed to postpone his nephew’s marriage until the young man reached his majority at eighteen in November of that year.

Catherine invited Gustavus and his uncle to visit St. Petersburg. As the king was still uncrowned, it would be a “private” visit, and the royal Swedes would come incognito; Gustavus would arrive as “Count Haga” and the regent as “Count Vasa.” On August 15, the two “counts” arrived. The king turned out to be a solemn young man with fair hair down to the shoulders of his black suit. He was introduced to Alexandra, and the pair opened the ball that evening by leading a minuet. Catherine, contrary to custom, stayed until midnight. The next three weeks were crowded with entertainment, but the couple was given time to be alone. The empress was pleased to see that Gustavus was losing some of his stiffness and was often observed speaking in a low voice to Alexandra. Eventually, during a dance, he went so far as to squeeze her hand. “
I didn’t know what would become of me,” she whispered to her governess. “I was so frightened I thought I would fall.” Two days later, after a dinner in the Tauride Palace, Gustavus joined Catherine on a bench in the garden and confided that he would like to marry her granddaughter. Catherine reminded him that he was already engaged to someone else; Gustavus promised to break that engagement immediately. Negotiations began regarding the Russian-Swedish alliance that would accompany the marriage. The annual subsidy promised Sweden was to be three hundred thousand rubles.

Pleased with this progress, Catherine set a formal betrothal ceremony for September 11. One significant matter remained to be confirmed:
the bride’s religion after marriage. Catherine was determined that Alexandra be free to practice Russian Orthodoxy. Gustavus said he did not see how this would be possible; that he thought it had always been clear that, were he to marry Alexandra, she would be expected to embrace Lutheranism. Catherine reacted by insisting that he guarantee that, even as queen of Lutheran Sweden, her granddaughter would remain a member of the Russian Orthodox Church. In fact, Catherine was surprised; it never occurred to her that an uncrowned adolescent monarch would expect a Russian grand duchess, the granddaughter of an empress, to abandon her religion. For Catherine, personal and national prestige were as important as—perhaps more important than—religious observance. Further, she believed that she was entitled to set the terms because her large subsidies to Sweden would, in effect, be paying for the marriage.

There was still another reason. She had been the same age as Alexandra when she had received a marriage proposal that had been accepted for her and which had forced her, over her father’s objection, to change her religion. Now, she promised herself, her granddaughter would not have to endure what she had been through half a century before. She inserted into the marriage contract a clause not only guaranteeing Alexandra’s right to remain Orthodox as queen of Sweden but permitting her to have a private chapel with an Orthodox priest and confessor in the Swedish royal palace. Gustavus, devoted to his kingdom’s established Protestant religion, and believing that his queen should share his faith, refused. To Catherine’s protest that his ministers had already pledged the guarantees she desired, the young man replied that his ministers and the Russian officials with whom they were negotiating must have misunderstood each other. Catherine then demanded that the king now put his private pledge in his own handwriting. Gustavus hesitated; then, under pressure from his uncle, he agreed to amend the contract.