Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman (40 page)

R
EMARKABLE DIPLOMATIC CHANGES
were occurring in Europe, but within the small, closed world of Catherine and Peter’s marriage, the arrangements and antagonisms that had marked their lives for ten years continued. Catherine had found a new, supportive lover in Stanislaus Poniatowski; Peter ricocheted among Catherine’s maids of honor, making first one and then another the object of his attention. The married couple had extravagantly different tastes and enthusiasms: Peter’s were soldiers, dogs, and drink; Catherine’s were reading, conversation, dancing, and riding.

In the winter of 1755, most of Peter’s Holstein soldiers had been sent home, and Catherine and Peter returned from Oranienbaum to St. Petersburg to resume their separate lives. With the city deep in snow and the Neva River locked under a sheet of ice, Peter’s military obsession moved indoors. His soldiers now were toys, made of wood, lead, papier-mâché, and wax. He lined up these figures on so many narrow tables that he could scarcely squeeze between them. Strips of brass with strings attached were nailed to the tables, and when the strings were pulled, the brass strips vibrated and made a noise that, Peter informed Catherine, resembled the rolling fire of musketry. In this room, Peter presided over a daily changing of the guard ceremony in which a fresh detachment of toy soldiers, assigned to mount guard, replaced those who were relieved of duty and removed from the tables. Peter always appeared at this ceremony in full Holstein dress uniform, with top boots, spurs, high collar, and scarf. The servants participating in this exercise were also required to wear Holstein uniforms.

One day when Catherine entered this room, she saw a large dead
rat hanging from a model gallows. Appalled, she asked why it was there. Peter explained that the rat had been convicted of a crime that, according to the laws of war, merited the ultimate punishment; therefore, it had been executed by hanging. The rat’s crime was to have climbed over the ramparts of a cardboard fortress standing on a table and eaten two papier-mâché sentries standing watch. One of Peter’s dogs had caught the rat; the culprit had been court-martialed and immediately hanged. Now, Peter declared, it would remain exposed to public gaze
for three days as an example. Catherine listened and burst out laughing. Then she apologized and pleaded ignorance of military law. Nevertheless, he was stung by her facetious attitude and began to sulk. Her last word on the matter was that it could be argued on behalf of the rat that it had been hanged without having been heard in its own defense.

During this winter of 1755–56, Catherine become attached to Anna Naryshkina, Lev Naryshkin’s sister-in-law, the wife of his elder brother. Lev was a part of this friendship. “There was no end to his nonsense,” Catherine noted. He acquired the habit of running back and forth between Peter’s rooms and Catherine’s. In order to enter her room, he would meow like a cat at her door. One evening in December, between six and seven, she heard him meowing. He came in, told her that his sister-in-law was ill, and declared, “
You ought to go and see her.”

“When?” Catherine asked.

“Tonight,” he said.

“You know that
I cannot go out without permission and they would never give me permission to go to her house,” she said.

“I will take you there,” he said.

“Are you mad?” Catherine said. “You would be sent to the fortress and heaven knows what trouble I would be in.”

“But no one will know about it,” Lev said. “I will come for you in an hour or so. The grand duke will be at supper. He will remain at the table for most of the night, and will not get up until he is drunk and ready for bed. To be on the safe side, dress as a man.”

Tired of being alone in her room, Catherine agreed. Lev departed, and, pleading a headache, she went to bed early. Once Madame Vladislavova had retired, Catherine got up, clothed herself as a man, and arranged her hair as best she could. At the appointed time, Lev meowed at her door. They left the palace unnoticed, stepping into his
carriage and giggling at their escapade. When they arrived at the house where Lev was living with his brother and sister-in-law, she found—unsurprisingly—that Poniatowski was there. “
The evening passed,” Catherine wrote, “in the wildest gaiety. After staying for an hour and a half, I left and returned to the palace without meeting a soul. The next day, at the morning court and the evening ball, we could not look each other in the face without laughing at the folly of the night before.”

A few days later, Lev arranged a reciprocal visit to Catherine’s rooms and escorted his friends into her apartment so skillfully that no suspicion was aroused. The group delighted in these secret gatherings. Through the winter of 1755–56, there were two or three of these every week, first in one house, then in another. “
Sometimes at the theater,” Catherine said, “even if in different boxes or in the orchestra, each of us knew without speaking, by certain private signs, where to go. And no one ever made a mistake. But twice I had to return home to the palace on foot.” The happiness of these evenings, Poniatowski’s love, and Bestuzhev’s political support bolstered Catherine’s self-confidence.

Among her own maids of honor, she found occasional opposition, encouraged by Peter’s sometimes flagrant belittling of his wife’s status and qualities. Now officially recognized as Paul’s father, he delighted in playing the untethered male. Singers and dancers, considered by society to be “loose women,” appeared at his private suppers. The woman in whom he showed the most interest was one of Catherine’s maids of honor, Elizabeth Vorontsova, a niece of Bestuzhev’s rival, the vice-chancellor Michael Vorontsov. Placed in Catherine’s entourage at the age of eleven, she was neither particularly intelligent nor pretty. Slightly hunchbacked, with a face scarred by smallpox, she had a fiery temperament and was always ready to laugh, drink, sing, and shout. Although she belonged to one of the oldest families in Russia, it was said that she spat when she spoke, and otherwise behaved “
like a servant girl in a house of ill-fame.” Peter’s attachment to her may have grown out of his own sense of inferiority; the grand duke may have concluded that she loved him for himself. At first, Elizabeth Vorontsova was one among many. She had rivals and occasionally she quarreled with Peter, but it was always to Elizabeth that he returned.

At Oranienbaum in the summer of 1756, Catherine’s relationship with some of her maids of honor led to a fierce argument. Feeling that these young women had become openly disrespectful, she went to their apartment and told them that unless they changed their behavior, she
would complain to the empress. Some were frightened and wept; others were angry. As soon as Catherine left, they rushed to tell the grand duke. Peter, furious, charged into Catherine’s room. He told his wife that she had become impossible to live with; that every day she became more insufferable; that they were all young women of rank whom she treated as servants; and that if she complained about them to the empress, he would complain to his aunt about her pride, her arrogance, and her bad temper.

Catherine listened. Then she said that he could say whatever he liked about her but if the matter were placed before his aunt, the empress would probably decide that the best solution would be to dismiss from Catherine’s service whichever young women were causing dissension between her nephew and his wife. She said that she was certain that, in order to reestablish peace between the two of them, and to avoid having their quarrels repeatedly dinned into her ears, the empress would take this course. This argument surprised Peter. Imagining that Catherine knew more than he about Elizabeth’s attitude regarding these maids of honor, and that she really might dismiss them over this matter, he softened his tone and said, “
Tell me how much you know. Has anyone spoken to her about them?” Catherine replied that if the matter went far enough to reach the empress, she had no doubt that Her Majesty would deal with it in her usual decisive way. Peter paced back and forth, worried. That evening, to warn the women to stop making complaints about her, Catherine told the more sensible of them about the scene with the grand duke and what might happen next.

Catherine cared for Stanislaus Poniatowski—how deeply, she learned, when he was forced, temporarily, to leave her. Poniatowski brought this involuntary departure on himself. He disliked his nominal king, Augustus of Saxony, whose German electorate Frederick of Prussia had invaded, and he constantly belittled Augustus. Some took his attacks as expressions of sympathy for Frederick; they were interpreted this way by Peter. But it was not just Peter who mistakenly saw Poniatowski as an admirer of Prussia. It was also the Saxon-Polish court, which now implored Elizabeth to send the young man home. Poniatowski had no choice, and in July 1756 he was obliged to depart. Catherine let him go, determined to bring him back.

Two days before Poniatowski left, he came to Oranienbaum, accompanied
by Count Horn of Sweden, to say goodbye. The two counts were at Oranienbaum for two days; on the first, Peter was gracious, but on the second, because he had planned a day of drinking at the wedding of one of his huntsmen, he simply walked away, leaving Catherine to entertain the visitors. After dinner, she showed Horn through the palace. When they reached her private apartment, her little Italian greyhound began to bark furiously at Horn, but when it saw Poniatowski, it greeted him with a frantically wagging tail. Horn noticed and took Poniatowski aside. “My friend,” he said, “
there is no worse traitor than a small lapdog. The first thing I always do when I am in love with a woman is to give her one of these little dogs. This way, I can always discover whether there is someone more favored than myself. The test is infallible. As you saw just now, the dog wanted to bite me because I am a stranger, but when it saw you, it went mad with joy.” Two days after this visit, Poniatowski left Russia.

When Stanislaus Poniatowski departed in July 1756, he assumed that he would return in a matter of weeks. When he failed to come back at the expected time, Catherine began a campaign to bring him back. For the first time, Bestuzhev felt the strong will of the future empress. Through the autumn of 1756, he struggled to do what she asked and persuade the Polish cabinet to return Poniatowski to St. Peterburg. He wrote to Count Heinrich Brühl, the Polish foreign minister: “
In the present critical and delicate state of affairs, I find it all the more necessary that an envoy extraordinary should be sent here without delay from the kingdom of Poland whose presence would draw closer the ties of friendship between the two courts. As I have found no one more pleasing to my court than Count Poniatowski, I suggest him to you.” Eventually, Brühl agreed.

The way now seemed clear for Poniatowski to return, but, to Catherine’s surprise, he remained in Poland. What was the obstacle? In a letter to Catherine, Poniatowski explained that it was his mother:

Aided by his powerful Czartoryski uncles, Poniatowski finally escaped from his mother in December 1756 and returned to Russia as the official representative and minister of the king of Poland. Once back in St. Petersburg, he resumed his role as Catherine’s lover. He was to remain in Russia for another year and a half, during which time he fathered her second child.

Empress Elizabeth was frequently ill. No one understood the exact nature of her trouble, but some attributed it to complications with her menstrual periods. Others whispered that her indispositions were caused by apoplexy or epilepsy. In the summer of 1756, her condition became so alarming that her doctors feared for her life.

This crisis of health continued through the autumn of 1756. The Shuvalovs, frantically worried, showered attention on the grand duke. Bestuzhev took a different path. Like everyone else in St. Petersburg, he worried about the future, and he worried most about himself. He was well aware of the prejudices and limited political capacities of Peter, the heir to the throne, and also of the hostility that had been stirred up in Peter’s mind against him as chancellor. He could no longer be openly friendly with Hanbury-Williams, since England was now an ally of Prussia. There were other, more general, reasons for him to worry. He was growing old, the years had exhausted him, and, even when she was well, Elizabeth was a difficult mistress. Now, the empress’s failing health and the grand duke’s hostility left him with only one figure in the imperial family to whom he might turn for support. His relationship with Catherine had strengthened, and the approach of war speeded their rapprochement. By the autumn of 1756, both Catherine and Bestuzhev were deeply concerned about the transition of power that would follow Elizabeth’s death.

Bestuzhev began to plan. He had introduced Catherine to his friend General Stepan Apraksin, whom he had appointed commander in chief of the Russian forces mobilizing against Prussia. Next, he sent Catherine a draft of a secret ukase, an imperial decree, to be issued at the moment of Elizabeth’s death. This document set forth a restructuring of the administration of the Russian government. It proposed that
Peter immediately be declared emperor, while, at the same time, Catherine be formally installed as co-ruler. Bestuzhev’s intention was that Catherine would actually administer the affairs of Russia as she had managed those of Holstein on her husband’s behalf. Naturally, Bestuzhev did not forget himself in this new arrangement; indeed, he intended that Catherine’s oversight of the empire should be guided by his advice, and he reserved for himself nearly all the real power in the country. The posts he already held would remain his, and others would be added. He would continue as chancellor; he would also become president of three key ministries—foreign affairs, war, and the navy—and he would be appointed colonel of all four regiments of the Imperial Guard. It was a risky, even potentially suicidal, document. He was reaching out to make decisions related to the succession, a prerogative reserved exclusively for the monarch. If Elizabeth were to read this paper, Bestuzhev could pay with his head.