Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman (90 page)

Catherine and Paul had both remained with her through the five days. “
Never in my life have I found myself in a more difficult, more hideous, more painful position,” the empress told Grimm. “
For three days, I neither ate nor drank. There were moments when her suffering made me feel that my own body was being torn apart. Then I went stony. I, who am tearful by nature, saw her die, and never shed a tear. I said to myself, ‘If you cry, others will sob. If you sob, others will faint.’ ” Catherine’s anguish was magnified by the knowledge that her dead
grandchild had been a “
perfectly formed boy.” The autopsy revealed that the baby had been too large to pass through the birth canal; the cause was an inoperable malformation of the bone, which the empress was told would have prevented Natalia from ever giving birth to a living child. After the young woman’s body was opened after her death, Catherine reported that “it was found that there was only a space of four fingers’ breadth; the child’s shoulders were eight fingers wide.”

Despite fatigue, Catherine maintained her presence of mind. She had to; Paul, in a frenzy of grief, was refusing to allow his wife to be removed, and insisting on remaining beside her body. He did not attend the burial at Alexander Nevsky Monastery. His mother was accompanied by Potemkin and Gregory Orlov.

Beyond Natalia’s death and Paul’s uncontrolled grief, Catherine now faced the fact that three years of marriage and a pregnancy had produced no heir. Further, the grand duke’s emotional state was such that no one could predict when he would be willing and able to fulfill his dynastic duty. At one moment rigid with grief, the next sobbing and screaming, throwing himself around the room, smashing furniture, threatening to kill himself by jumping out a window, he refused ever to think of marrying again.

To subdue this emotional storm, Catherine chose a cruel remedy. She broke into Natalia’s desk. There, as she expected, she found the love letters exchanged by the dead woman and Andrei Razumovsky. Furious at seeing her son weep over a wife who had betrayed him with his best friend, Catherine decided to use the letters to wrench him back to reality. She thrust the pages under Paul’s eyes. He read the proof that the two people he had loved most had deceived him; he did not even know whether the dead child had been his. He groaned, wept—and then erupted with rage. He demanded that Razumovsky be sent to Siberia, but the empress, loyal to Andrei’s father, refused and simply ordered Andrei to leave the capital immediately. Exhausted, almost unable to function, Paul then agreed to all of his mother’s decisions. He was ready to marry again immediately, long before the year of official mourning had passed. To Grimm, Catherine wrote, “
I have wasted no time. At once, I put the irons in the fire to make good the loss, and by so doing I have succeeded in dissipating the deep sorrow that overwhelmed us. The dead being dead, we must think of the living.”

Catherine was distressed by Natalia’s death, not because she had lost a daughter-in-law but because she had lost a grandson. In a letter to Frau Bielcke, she addressed the situation with an icy absence of sympathy: “Well,
since it has been proven that she could not give birth to a living child, we must not think about her any more.” The essential thing now was to replace the dead wife quickly. The future of the dynasty and the empire were at stake; ensuring them was a sovereign’s duty. On the day Natalia died, Catherine was already considering possible replacements.

65
Paul, Maria, and the Succession

T
HREE YEARS BEFORE
, Princess Sophia of Württemburg had been Catherine’s first choice as a bride for Paul, but Sophia had been ruled out because she was only fourteen. Now, Sophia, almost seventeen, was in every respect exactly what Catherine sought: a German princess whose family was aristocratic but of modest circumstances, prolific with nine children, the three sons tall and strong, the six daughters handsome and wide-hipped. The presence of Prince Henry of Prussia in St. Petersburg made Catherine’s new project easier to achieve. Sophia of Württemburg was a great-niece of Frederick II and Prince Henry, and, as Paul idealized Prussia and the Prussian monarch, Catherine hoped that Prince Henry could help persuade her distraught son to marry a relative of his hero. Henry, knowing that his brother was always eager to strengthen ties with Russia, sent a message to Frederick by the fastest courier.

Frederick did everything he could to satisfy and please Catherine. He urged Sophia and her parents to accept the marriage, stressing its political advantages for Prussia and potential financial benefits for the house of Württemburg. He pointed out that Catherine had pledged a dowry for all three Württemburg daughters. An obstacle had to be overcome: Sophia was already engaged to Lewis (Ludwig), prince of Hesse-Darmstadt, who happened to be the brother of the recently deceased Natalia and therefore Paul’s former brother-in-law. On the king’s orders, the Hesse engagement was broken off, and, with the promise of a pension from Catherine and the hand of another Württemburg daughter, Prince Lewis was appeased.

The next step was to arrange a meeting of the prospective bride and groom. Frederick summoned Sophia to Berlin, where Paul would travel to meet her. This plan suited everyone. Foreign travel was what Paul needed as a distraction from thoughts of Natalia’s death and the stinging humiliation of her betrayal. Further, the prospect of a trip to Berlin appeared certain to delight the young widower, who had never been abroad. The opportunity to meet Frederick II provided another powerful incentive.

The journey to Berlin began on June 13, 1776, with Paul sitting in a large, comfortable carriage and Prince Henry at his side. During Paul’s absence, Catherine wrote frequently, praising his letters and worrying about his health. With her encouragement, Paul inspected local Russian government offices, military garrisons, and commercial enterprises along the road to the frontier. She responded to Paul’s praise of the orderliness and manners of Livonia by saying, “
I hope that in time the main part of Russia will not yield to … [Livonia] in anything, neither in order nor in the correction of manners, and that your lifetime will be sufficient to see such a change.” While Paul was traveling, Frederick was briefing Sophia of Württemburg about the Russian court, just as he had briefed Sophia of Anhalt-Zerbst thirty-two years before. As he had done with the earlier Sophia, he emphasized that conversion from Lutheranism to Orthodoxy was of little consequence, especially when high matters of state were involved.

When Paul reached Berlin, Frederick made every effort to impress and honor the twenty-three-year-old grand duke. Paul was saluted by cannon, rode beneath triumphal arches, and passed between double lines of soldiers. He attended receptions, dinners, and balls. Few were more practiced and effective in the art of political flattery than the king. Paul, accustomed to playing an insignificant role at his mother’s court, now found himself honored and celebrated by the great Frederick. For the first time in his life, he received the consideration due to the heir to a great throne. “
Nothing can exceed the attention His Prussian Majesty pays to the grand duke, nor the pains he takes to captivate and please him,” reported the British ambassador from Berlin. Paul reveled in this attention, which cemented his view that the king of Prussia was the greatest man and greatest monarch in Europe. He wrote to his mother that the level of civilization in Prussia was two centuries ahead of that in Russia.

Not only did Paul’s reception in Berlin thoroughly reconcile him to the idea of a second marriage, but he also developed an immediate liking for Sophia. She was tall, blond, wholesome, amiable, and sentimental.
And, because she had been recommended by Frederick, she seemed to Paul twice as desirable. As for Sophia, she made no protest when her engagement to the handsome Lewis of Hesse was suddenly broken off and her great uncles Frederick and Henry introduced the small, less attractive Paul. Whatever her innermost feelings when she first saw Paul, she dutifully accepted him. “
The grand duke is exceedingly amiable,” she wrote to her mother. “He has every charm.”

Catherine was pleased by what Paul wrote in his letters about Sophia’s appearance and good sense, her determination to be a good wife, and her resolve to learn Russian. The empress sent her blessing, but, in order to make certain that she would keep absolute control, she insisted that Sophia leave her mother behind in Berlin and come to Russia alone. She wrote to the princess, praising her willingness to make herself “
my daughter.… Be assured that I shall not neglect a single occasion where I may prove to Your Highness the sentiments of a tender mother.” She also stressed that she wanted the marriage to take place as soon as possible. She wrote to Grimm:

Meanwhile, the empress sent a diamond necklace and earrings to the bride-to-be, and a jewel-encrusted snuffbox and a sword to her parents. On August 24, Sophia crossed the Russian frontier at Riga, and on August 31, she and Paul were received by Catherine at Tsarskoe Selo. The empress greeted Sophia warmly, and, a few days later, she wrote to Madame Bielcke:

On September 6, Catherine, Paul, and Sophia traveled from Tsarskoe Selo to St. Petersburg. A Lutheran pastor and an obliging Orthodox priest confirmed Frederick of Prussia’s opinion that the differences between Lutheranism and Orthodoxy were minimal. On September 14, Sophia Dorothea’s official conversion took place; she accepted Orthodoxy and became Maria Fyodorovna. Her formal betrothal followed the next day, on which occasion she wrote to Paul, “
I swear to love and adore you all my life and to be always attached to you, and nothing in the world will make me change with respect to you. Those are the sentiments of your ever affectionate and faithful betrothed.”

On September 26, 1776, only five months after Natalia died, Paul and Maria were married and the new grand duchess set about her duty. Fourteen and a half months later, on December 12, 1777, after only a few hours of labor and without complications, Maria gave birth to a healthy boy, Catherine’s first grandchild, a future emperor. Catherine, ecstatic, named him Alexander. A second child arrived eighteen months later, another healthy boy, insurance for the dynasty. Again, Catherine rejoiced. She named him Constantine.

Paul’s second marriage probably gave him the greatest happiness of his life. “
This dear husband is an angel, the pearl of husbands. I am madly in love with him and I am perfectly happy,” Maria wrote to a friend in Germany. She was an excellent wife for Paul. She did her best to make him happy and to calm his anxieties, becoming not only his wife but his friend. She encouraged Paul’s best qualities at home and treated him with respect and deference in public. Paul was grateful and wrote to Henry of Prussia, “
Wherever she goes, she has the gift of spreading gaiety and ease. And she has the art of not only driving out all my melancholy thoughts, but even of giving me back the good humor that I had completely lost during these last three unhappy years.” Together, Paul and Maria produced nine healthy children.

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