Great Catherine (17 page)

While Leon Naryshkin was distracting the company with his inspired nonsense, Sergei Saltykov was ingratiating himself with the Choglokovs. With all the surface charm of a twenty-six-year-old man of the world, he insinuated himself into their circle, flattering the vain Nicholas Choglokov by telling him he had a gift for writing music, and turning all his solicitude on the pregnant Maria, who was often unwell. Catherine noticed what was going on, but did not mind. She liked looking at the man Petersburg society called, with a hint of disdain, "le beau Serge." His black hair, black eyes and rugged-looking dark skin seemed manly compared to her husband's adolescent pallor. Sergei remarked self-deprecatingly that, dressed in the prescribed white-and-silver "uniform" worn for court days, he looked like "a fly in milk." But Catherine found his looks compelling—as he thought she might—and could not take her eyes off of him.

Sergei was honey-tongued and full of compliments. It was obvious to Catherine that he wanted something—no one would deliberately seek out the companionship of the dull Choglokovs for their own sake—but she couldn't see clearly what that something was. Night after night Maria invited Sergei, along with Catherine, Leon Naryshkin, Pierre Saltykov, Catherine's friend Princess Gagarin and others, to join her in her apartments. There Sergei would amuse himself by drawing Nicholas Choglokov off into a corner near the stove and entreating him to compose a song—which preoccupied Nicholas for the remainder of the evening. (His songs, Catherine recalled, were quite pedestrian; he

was, after all, "the most dull-witted man, without an ounce of imagination.")

With Nicholas out of the way, and Leon entertaining the assembled company with his hilarious absurdities, Sergei proceeded to attend to his deeper purpose. Night after night he displayed his wit, his savoir-faire, his self-deprecating charm. He knew full well that he had no equal in looks; now he showed his polish, his urbanity, the debonair manner that had always, until this moment, won him the prize he sought.

Then one night, choosing his time with great skill, he turned to Catherine and told her candidly that she was the reason he came to the Choglokov's apartments every night. She and she alone was the object of his desire.

At first she didn't answer him. Quite possibly she was genuinely taken aback by his words, and feared to acknowledge by whatever response she gave that she was attracted to him. He persisted, however, and would not leave her in peace.

What could he possibly hope to gain from a liaison with her? Catherine asked Sergei boldly. Just how far did he think it could lead?

It was the opening the deft seducer had been waiting for. He began to pour out his fantasies to her, drawing her in by confessing to her the depths of his ardor, the joy he would know when she was his at last. "He set himself to paint a picture of the happiness which he promised himself," Catherine wrote years later. "Actually it was rather laughable, as laughable as it was passionate." Laughable or not, Catherine was clearly vulnerable, and Saltykov knew it.

"I said to him, 'And your wife, whom you loved to the point of madness—as she loved you—and married only two years ago? What will she say about all this?'

Here Sergei bent to his task. Handsome head down, eyes averted, he confided to Catherine that what appeared to the world to be a loving marriage was only a sham. He was in torment. Every day he paid a heavy price for the one heedless moment of

blindness when he had deceived himself into thinking he loved Matriona.

"I did everything in the world to make him give up this idea," Catherine recalled. "I really thought I could succeed." But he elicited her pity; she listened, she succumbed.

Sergei knew how to play on a woman's emotions, and how to hide the calculating cynicism that lay behind his words. His honey-tongued glibness got around her defenses. His dark eyes, when he lifted them to her face, melted what resistance remained.

Catherine had been warned against him. Princess Gagarin disliked "le beau Serge," and Catherine usually listened to her. But in her unguarded state, her better judgment deserted her. There in the Choglokov's salon, warmed by wine and the heat of her youth, the philosopher who had sworn never to give in to her passions was caught in the silken snare of courtly love.

Chapter Ten

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THE MINUET OF SEDUCTION LASTED FOR SEVERAL MONTHS. Sergei advanced and Catherine retreated. She saw him nearly every day, and as often as he could he told her how he dreamed of her and longed for her. She kept him at a distance, trying to avoid being alone with him, all the while feeling the delicious tension between them, the lure of the forbidden and the dangerous promise of delights to come.

There is no hint, in Catherine's own accounts of her liaison with Sergei, that she held back from encouraging him out of fear. The climate had changed: the Choglokovs were now so impatient to see that Catherine became pregnant that they were ready to persuade her to take a lover. The empress had altered their mandate. Where before they had been watchdogs, they were now to be matchmakers. Elizabeth could no longer afford to let the realm drift toward disaster; her nephew had to have a son and heir, and if, as everyone said, he could not father one, then his wife must become pregnant by another man. The Choglokovs were to make certain that this desired outcome occurred, and soon.

Who better to play the role of lover to the grand duchess than the handsome Sergei, who had made himself so agreeable and who was evidently enamored of Catherine? Maria spoke to Catherine, urged her to put aside her scruples concerning marital

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fidelity and yield to Saltykov. Meanwhile Nicholas, who had been in disgrace for seducing one of the waiting women, Mademoiselle Kosheliev, had begun to flirt with Catherine himself

Peter was complaisant; he liked Sergei, and was enough of a voyeur to enjoy watching the suave courtier pursue his wife. He was not in the least possessive, and although the succession was not a matter of complete indifference to him, how his heir was begotten apparently was. He stood by and let events unfold.

So Sergei continued his suit, and, for a time, Catherine held firm, treating Sergei with neither more nor less courtesy than anyone else, teasing him when he gave her no peace with his ceaseless declarations of love. "How do you know I don't have my heart set on someone else?" she asked him, but instead of discouraging him this only made him more urgent in his pursuit.

Summer came, and the Young Court, as the grand duke and grand duchess's circle was known, began its peripatetic rounds. Nicholas Choglokov gave a hunting party on an island in the Neva, and a select group of courtiers, including Sergei, was ferried across to spend the day in the fields. As Catherine remembered it afterwards, Sergei "seized a moment when the others were off hunting hares and approached me about his favorite subject." She listened with more patience than usual while he spun out his plan for their secret happiness, and he, noting that for once she did not raise a thousand objections, took advantage of her silence to show her how much he loved her.

For an hour and a half, isolated in their quiet refuge, Catherine listened to Sergei, while the chill wind swept up from the river and swirled around them. He begged her to let him believe that she was not entirely indifferent to him, and she, while feigning amused tolerance, was lulled to acquiescence by his words. "He pleased me," she wrote, even though she laughed at his vanity and found his ceaseless wooing somewhat wearying. Probably she was curious about love; after seven years of sham marriage, living amid sexual intrigue that seemed to touch everyone but her, reading romances and observing the unrestrained eroticism of the

son

empress, Catherine must have yearned to be initiated into the mysteries of sexual passion.

"At heart I was convinced," she confessed in her memoirs, though she was still sufficiently in command of herself to tell Sergei to go "because such a long conversation could be suspect. He told me that he wouldn't go, unless I told him that I found him acceptable."

"Yes, yes, but go away!"

"I consider it settled then," Sergei said as he spurred his horse and rode off.

"No, no," she called out after him.

"Yes, yes," he shouted, his voice fading.

"So we parted," Catherine wrote, though it was with mixed feelings that she returned to the hunting lodge on the island to face Peter and the others. "A thousand worries filled my head that day and I was very cross with myself and discontented. I had thought that I could govern and discipline his head and my own, and now I understood that both our inclinations were difficult if not impossible to govern."

The elements too were wayward. As the company was eating supper the wind increased, and a storm blew in from the Baltic. The waters rose, the entire island was flooded and the lower floor of the hunting lodge was inundated, waves lapping at the staircase. Servants and masters alike were forced to take refuge in the upper story and wait for the storm to die down—which it finally did toward dawn.

Sergei, stranded with his beloved, was exultant. "The heavens themselves are favorable!" he declared, and strutted gleefully among the bedraggled courtiers, the image of the triumphant lover. The meaning of his elation was not lost on Peter, who commented to his valet soon afterward that Sergei and Catherine were "fooling Choglokov" and carrying on behind his back. Peter's current love was Catherine's waiting woman Martha Sha-firov, and it could not have escaped his shrewd notice—as it did

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Catherine's—that Sergei was carrying on more than one intrigue, pursuing both Peter's wife and Martha's sister Anna at the same time.

Sergei Saltykov's seduction of Grand Duchess Catherine was not merely tolerated but welcomed. The Choglokovs, realizing that Catherine might soon become pregnant with her lover's child, took steps to ensure that the child could be passed off as legitimate. To silence the rumors that Peter was still a virgin, Maria found an accommodating widow, Madame de Groot, who taught him what he needed to know. Peter's initiation into sex was publicized, and the stage was set for Catherine to ensure the succession.

Some time in the fall of 1752 Catherine conceived a child. Her memoirs are silent about these early months of her affair with Sergei—who was almost certainly the child's father. Whether love brought her elation, fulfillment, anguish, or perhaps disillusionment we cannot know. She did record that Sergei did not prove to be a steadfast, devoted lover; he was at times moody and distracted, he was only sporadically attentive to her (his romantic attentions were after all divided, as Catherine was later to discover), and his arrogance and conceit annoyed her. When she told him so he spouted a stream of persiflage and, drawing himself up to his full aristocratic height, accused her of failing to understand him. She was, after all, only a minor German princess by birth while he was a highborn Russian nobleman.

In mid-December the empress ordered the court to travel from Petersburg to Moscow. Catherine prepared to make the journey, but Sergei stayed behind with Maria Choglokov, who had just given birth and would not be fit to travel for several more weeks. Catherine had reason to suspect that she herself was pregnant, but decided to risk the rough roads to Moscow anyway. The going was hard, the road was cratered with deep ruts and jutting rocks. Instead of taking an easy pace, the drivers whipped the horses to a gallop and sped onward, day and night. Catherine was violently

shaken and jostled, and when the traveling party reached the last coaching station before the capital she was seized with cramping pains. She lost the child.

Her recovery was lonely and uncomfortable. Lodged in Moscow in a new and carelessly built wing of the Golovin Palace, where the scuffling of rats kept her awake at night and water dripped ceaselessly down the panelled walls, making the rooms steamy with humidity, she tried to console herself for her loss and to think kindly of her absent lover. When Sergei at last arrived from Petersburg, he avoided her. Moscow was a large city, Sergei told Catherine; he had many friends and relatives to see there, and they lived at great distances from one another. Sergei was practiced at dissimulation, and he succeeded in throwing Catherine into confusion. "To tell the truth," she wrote in her memoirs, "I was afflicted, but he gave me such good and plausible reasons that when I saw him and spoke to him my dire thoughts vanished."

Having just suffered a miscarriage, and aware, however much she tried to deny it to herself, that her lover's ardor was cooling, Catherine suffered through the dark winter days, ordering screens put up in the room she shared with her seventeen waiting women in order to create at least an illusion of privacy. She read, she endured Peter's unwelcome intrusions and complaints, she watched the rats scurry in and out of the worm-eaten wainscot-ting and waited for Sergei's occasional visits.

She knew that she was more vulnerable than ever, now that she had—albeit for the best of reasons—betrayed her marriage vows. She needed a protector, and turned to the aging Chancellor Bestuzhev.