Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman (87 page)

The problem, as the years went by, was not the institution of favoritism but the extreme youth of the favorites and the discrepancy between their ages and Catherine’s. As attention focused increasingly on the question of age, Catherine explained that these relationships served an important pedagogical function. Her young men, she said, were being schooled to ornament a sophisticated, cosmopolitan court; they were to be accomplished and useful, not just to the monarch personally but ultimately to the empire. In her correspondence with Grimm, she explained that these young men were so extraordinary that she was obliged to give them opportunity to develop their talents.

When Peter Zavadovsky fell from favor, Potemkin looked around for a candidate whom Catherine might accept and whose loyalty to him he could trust. His choice was thirty-two-year-old Simon Zorich, a Russian officer of Serbian descent. Zorich was tall, handsome, and polite, although he lacked notable intelligence. He had an honorable war record; he had displayed bravery in battle against the Turks and had borne up well during five years as a prisoner of war. Returning to Russia in 1774, he became an aide to Potemkin. In May 1777, with Zavadovsky’s departure, he became the new favorite.

Zorich’s tenure was briefer than Zavadovsky’s. His new position went to his head. Catherine made him a count, but he demanded to be made a prince like Orlov and Potemkin. His complaints offended the empress; Zorich had been in favor for only ten months when she told Potemkin, “
Last night I was in love with him; today I cannot stand him any more.” Potemkin had ignored the fact that Catherine needed someone she could talk to. As the relationship deteriorated, Zorich could not understand why the woman who had covered him with riches had suddenly retreated. Blaming Potemkin, he determined to fight for his place. He challenged Potemkin; the prince disdainfully turned his back and walked away. In May 1778, only a year after his arrival, Zorich was dismissed with a pension. A compulsive gambler, he was later discovered embezzling army funds and died in disgrace.

Zorich was replaced by a twenty-four-year-old Guards officer, Ivan Rimsky-Korsakov, whose term lasted two years. The new favorite was handsome, played the violin, and had a fine tenor voice. In Catherine’s eyes, his male beauty evoked the heroes of ancient Greece, and in her letters to Grimm she refers to her new lover as “
Pyrrhus, king of Epirus whom every painter should paint, every sculptor should sculpt and every poet should sing.… He makes no gesture, no movement, that is not graceful and noble.”

His brilliance did not encompass the intellect, however. When Catherine gave him a mansion in St. Petersburg, he decided that it needed a library to proclaim his new status. He had shelves built and then called on the capital’s leading bookseller. What books were wanted, he was asked. “You understand that better than I,” said the new bibliophile. “
Big books at the bottom, then smaller books, and so on up to the top.” The bookseller unloaded many rows of unsold German Bible commentaries bound in fine leather. Soon afterward, the British ambassador probed the favorite’s background and discovered that he had “
changed his original common name of Ivan Korsak to the better-sounding one of Ivan Rimsky-Korsakov.”
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Despite Catherine’s praise, most in the Russian court expected Rimsky-Korsakov to last only briefly, because everyone except the empress
saw that his heart was not in his work. He was expected to be in constant attendance, was forbidden to leave the palace, and became bored and restless. He escaped into the arms of Countess Bruce, Catherine’s principal lady-in-waiting and for years one of her closest friends. Foolishly, the couple believed that they could carry on their affair inside the palace. They managed for almost a year, but it ended abruptly one day when the empress opened a door and discovered them making love. Catherine sent a message to Rimsky-Korsakov informing him that she would be generous provided he left St. Petersburg immediately. Countess Bruce was commanded to return to her husband.

There was more to this tangled plot. Catherine, the court, and Countess Bruce soon learned that Rimsky-Korsakov had been using Bruce as a decoy with whom to pass the time and alleviate his boredom. His real object was a beautiful young countess, Catherine Stroganova, married to one of the wealthiest men in Russia. The Stroganovs had just returned from six years of living in Paris, and, on first seeing the handsome “king of Epirus,” the young countess fell in love. Only when the disgraced Rimsky-Korsakov left for Moscow and Countess Stroganova immediately followed him, was the extent of this operatic, labyrinthine double betrayal fully revealed. Count Stroganov behaved with patrician dignity. Worried that his young son would be affected by public scandal, he installed his wife in a Moscow palace, where she and her lover lived happily for thirty years. There, they brought up the three children they had together.

For six months following the Rimsky-Korsakov debacle, Catherine remained alone, but at Easter in 1780 a new favorite, Alexander Lanskoy, appeared. Then twenty-two, he came from an impecunious family of the provincial nobility and had served as an officer in the Horse Guards. When he found that he lacked sufficient funds to keep pace with his brother officers, he asked for reassignment to a provincial garrison, where his expenses would be lower. His application was rejected at the College of War by Potemkin himself, who then, surprisingly, appointed the young man his personal aide-de-camp and introduced him to Catherine. Lanskoy had an elegant bearing and a sensitive face; Catherine described him as “
kind, gay, honest, and full of gentleness.” In November 1779, he was was officially installed in the palace apartment vacated by Rimsky-Korsakov. The usual shower of riches descended: jewels, a hundred
thousand rubles, and a country estate. Two cousins became officers in the Preobrazhensky Guards; three sisters came to court as maids of honor, married noblemen, and became ladies-of-the-bedchamber.

Catherine’s admiration for this adoring acolyte stimulated her pedagogical belief that more Russians should be trained to serve the empire. Lanskoy responded wholeheartedly to this approach. His education had been modest, and his devotion to Catherine was based on her role as his teacher as much as her position as empress. When she discovered his desire to learn, she helped him write to Grimm in French.

Lanskoy did not arouse in Catherine the passion she had for Orlov or Potemkin, but his gentleness and devotion inspired in her an almost maternal affection. He was intelligent and tactful; he refused to take any part in public affairs; he was artistic, had good taste, and was seriously interested in literature, painting, and architecture. He became an ideal companion, accompanying her to concerts and the theater, sitting quietly and listening as she talked, even helping her to design new gardens at Tsarskoe Selo.

As the months stretched into years, Catherine’s young lover became indispensable to her. Even the cynical Bezborodko admitted that “
compared to the others, he was an angel. He had friends, did not try to harm his neighbors, and often he tried to help people.” From time to time, there were rumors that Potemkin was jealous of this nonthreatening young man and that Lanskoy was on the brink of dismissal. This was far from the truth. Potemin was thoroughly satisfied, and Catherine was free to devote herself to Lanskoy, whose good humor, she said, had made Tsarskoe Selo “into the most charming and pleasant of places where the days passed so quickly one did not know what had become of them.”

Four years passed, a longer period than Catherine had spent with any lover since she had separated from Orlov twelve years earlier. On June 19, 1784, Lanskoy complained of a sore throat. It grew worse. A high fever set in. Suddenly, five days from the onset, he died of inflammation of the throat. It was said to have been diphtheria.

The suddenness of this death was overwhelming, and the reaction of the woman left behind was uncontrollable grief. She collapsed into bed and for three weeks refused to leave her room. Her son, his wife, and her beloved grandchildren all were refused admittance; they heard only endless sobbing behind her bedroom door. Potemkin came immediately from the south. He and others tried to comfort her, but, as Catherine later told Grimm, “
they helped, but I could not endure the
help. No one was able to speak, to think in accord with my feelings. One step at a time had to be taken, and with each step a battle had to be endured; one to be won; one to be lost.” Eventually, Potemkin managed to calm and distract her. “He succeeded in awakening us from the sleep of the dead,” she said.

Her weeping stopped, but her depression remained. As she described it to Grimm:

Lanskoy left to Catherine the fortune he had acquired as her favorite; she divided it equally among his mother, brother, and sisters. She could not face spending the rest of the summer at Tsarskoe Selo without him, did not appear in public until September, and refused to return to the Winter Palace until February. Eventually, when she went back to Tsarskoe Selo, it was to place a Grecian urn dedicated to his memory in the garden where they had worked together. The inscription read, “
From Catherine to my dearest friend.”

In the procession of Catherine’s favorites, it seemed that the ending of a significant relationship was often followed by the appearance of a lesser figure. Orlov had been followed by Vasilchikov, and Zavadovsky by Zorich. Now, this sequence recurred: after the death of Lanskoy came Alexander Yermolov, although not immediately. The deep wound caused by Lanskoy’s death healed slowly, and the favorite’s apartment remained vacant for a year. When she resumed life, she found only tepid consolation in the thirty-year-old Yermolov.

He, like most of the others, was a Guards officer, and he, like Lanskoy,
had served as an aide to Potemkin. The prince approved of Yermolov, whom he thought to be safe and knew to be ignorant and uninterested in being taught anything. He was handsome and seemed honest, which suited Catherine at that moment. She was in no mood for another ardent young student; in her mind, no one could compete with the charm, brilliance, and devotion of Lanskoy. By the spring of 1785, she was writing to Grimm, “
I am once more inwardly calm and serene.… I have found a friend who is very capable.”

During his seventeen months as favorite, Yermolov made little claim on Catherine’s time or interest. In the end, he engineered his own demise. He had been Potemkin’s protégé, but he began behaving toward Potemkin as if he considered himself the prince’s equal. Secure, he thought, in his position, he began to criticize the prince to Catherine. He reported every scandalous story, true or false, that reached his ears. He passed along an accusation that Potemkin was pocketing the pension intended for the deposed khan of the Crimea. The denouement was predictable. In June 1786, an infuriated Potemkin descended on Yermolov at court and shouted, “
You cur, you monkey, who dares to bespatter me with the mud of the gutters from which I have raised you.” Yermolov, who was proud, put his hand on his sword hilt, but a sudden blow from Potemkin sent him reeling. Then Potemkin burst into Catherine’s’s apartment and roared, “
Either he or I must go! If this nonentity of nonentities is allowed to remain at court, then I quit the state’s services as of today.” Yermolov was dismissed immediately and was given 130,000 rubles in cash and permission to live abroad for five years. Catherine never saw him again.

After Yermolov’s dismissal, Catherine followed her pattern of replacing a nonentity with a seeming paragon, someone she believed was another Lanskoy. Alexander Mamonov, then twenty-six, was another Guards officer, handsome, educated, fluent in French and Italian, and the nephew of the generous Count Stroganov, whose young wife had run off with Rimsky-Korsakov. Only one evening after Yermolov’s dismissal, Mamonov escorted Catherine to her apartment. “
They slept until nine o’clock,” Catherine’s secretary wrote in his notebook the following morning. The new favorite was immediately promoted to high rank in the Preobrazhensky Guards and in May 1788 was elevated to the rank of lieutenant general. Later that month, Catherine made him
a count. Her private name for him was “L’habit rouge” (the Red Coat), after the color of his favorite uniform. Because he was more intelligent than most of his predecessors, she occasionally asked his advice on political matters. Although she treated him seriously to his face, she spoke of him to others as a doting mother might speak of her child: “
We are as clever as the very devil; we adore music; we hide our fondness for poetry as though it were a crime,” she wrote to Grimm. To Potemkin, she reported enthusiastically: “
Sasha is beyond price … an inexhaustible source of gaiety, original in his outlook and exceptionally well-informed.… Our whole tone is that of the best society. We write Russian and French to perfection; our features are very regular; we have two black eyes and eyebrows, and a noble, easy bearing.”

Despite Catherine’s initial enthusiasm, her relationship with Mamonov began to cool after eighteen months. By January 1788, the favorite was showing signs of weariness, and there were rumors that he was attempting to evade his intimate duties. In fact, Mamonov found the restrictions involved in life with Catherine burdensome. In St. Petersburg, he was rarely permitted out of her sight, and he hated trips outside the capital, when he was shut up for days on a boat or in a coach; he complained that he found traveling in her coach “
stifling.”