The Memoirs of Catherine the Great (29 page)

In mid-August, we returned to the country. On September 5, the Empress’s name day, she went to Ascension Monastery. While she was there, lightning struck the church. Fortunately, Her Imperial Majesty was in a chapel next to the main church. She learned of the event only because of the fright of her courtiers. However, no one was injured or killed in this accident. A short time later she returned to Moscow, where we also went from Liubertsy. Upon our return to the city, we saw the Princess of Courland kiss the Empress’s hand publicly for the permission granted her to marry Prince Georgy Khovansky. She had fallen out with her first fiancé, Peter Saltykov, who for his part immediately married Princess Solntseva.

At three in the afternoon on November 1 of that year, I was in Madame Choglokova’s apartment when her husband, Sergei Saltykov, Lev Naryshkin, and several other gentlemen of our court left the room to go to Chamberlain Shuvalov’s apartment to congratulate him on his birthday, which was that day. Madame Choglokova, Princess Gagarina, and I chatted together. After hearing some noise in a little chapel that was near the apartment where we were, we saw a couple of these gentlemen return. They told us that they had been prevented from passing through the halls of the palace because there was a fire. I immediately went into my room, and crossing an antechamber, I saw that the balustrade in the corner of the great hall was on fire. It was twenty steps from our wing. I entered my rooms and found them already full of soldiers and servants, who were removing the furniture and carrying what they could. Madame Choglokova followed me closely, and as there was nothing more to do in the house but wait for it to catch fire, Madame Choglokova and I went out. Outside the door we found the carriage of the chapel master Araya, who had come for a concert in the Grand Duke’s apartment and whom I myself warned that the house was burning. She and I got into the carriage, the street being covered in mud because of the continual rains that had fallen for a few days, and there we watched both the fire and the way in which the furniture was carried from all directions out of the house. Then I saw a singular thing. It was the astonishing number of rats and mice that descended the staircase in a line, without even really hurrying. They could not save this vast wooden house because of a lack of equipment, and because the little there was, was located precisely under the burning hall. This hall was more or less at the center of the buildings around it, all of which may have measured two or three versts in circumference. I left precisely at three, and at six no vestige of the house remained. The heat of the fire became so great that neither I nor Madame Choglokova could tolerate it anymore, and we had our carriage go into the field several hundred feet away. Finally, Monsieur Choglokov came with the Grand Duke and told us that the Empress was going to her house at Pokrovskoe and that she had ordered us to go to Monsieur Choglokov’s house, which stood on the first corner to the right of the main street of the Sloboda. We went there immediately. There was a salon in the middle of this house and four rooms on each side. It is hardly possible to be more uncomfortable than we were there. The wind blew in from all directions, the windows and doors were half rotted, the floor was split with cracks two or three inches wide. Moreover, the vermin had the run of the house. The children and servants were living there when we arrived. They were sent out, and we were lodged in this horrible house, which was devoid of furniture.

The second day of my stay in this house, I learned what a Kalmuck nose is. The little girl whom I had in my service told me as I awoke, while pointing at her nose, “I have a hazelnut in here.” I touched her on the nose and found nothing, but the whole morning this child kept repeating that she had a hazelnut in her nose. She was a child of four or five. No one knew what she meant by saying she had a hazelnut in her nose. Around noon, she fell while running and bumped her head against the table, which made her cry, and while crying she pulled out her handkerchief and blew her nose. As she wiped it, the hazelnut fell out of her nose, which I myself saw, and at this I understood that a hazelnut, which could not fit into any European nose without one noticing it, could fit in the cavity of a Kalmuck nose, which is sunk into the head between two fat cheeks.

Our clothes and everything we needed had stayed in the mud in front of the burned palace and were brought to us that night and the following day. What pained me most were my books. At the time, I was finishing the fourth volume of Bayle’s
Dictionnaire.
¹⁰¹
I had devoted two years to it. Every six months I finished a volume, and from this, one can imagine in what solitude I spent my life. Finally they were brought to me. Among my clothes were those of Countess Shuvalova. Out of curiosity Madame Vladislavova showed me this woman’s underskirts, which were all lined in back with leather because ever since her first confinement she had been incontinent, and the odor of urine permeated all her underskirts. I sent them back to their owner as quickly as possible.

In that fire, the Empress lost everything in her immense wardrobe that had been brought to Moscow. She did me the honor of telling me that she had lost four thousand outfits and that of all of them, she regretted losing only the one made of the cloth I had given her, which I had received from my mother. She lost other precious things too in the fire, among them a bowl covered with engraved stones that Count Rumiantsev had bought in Constantinople for eight thousand ducats. All these possessions had been placed in a room above the hall in which the fire had started. This hall served as the entrance hall to the palace’s great hall. At ten in the morning the stokers had come to heat this entrance hall. After putting the wood in the stove, they lit it as usual. This done, the room filled with smoke. They thought that it was escaping through a few imperceptible holes in the stove and began to cover the spaces between the stove tiles with clay. The smoke grew thicker, and they began to look for cracks in the stove; not finding any, they realized that the crack was inside the apartment’s walls, which were only made of wood. They went to look for some water and extinguished the fire in the stove. But as the smoke grew thicker, it filled the antechamber, where there was a sentry from the horse guards. Thinking he would suffocate, and not daring to budge from his post, he broke a window and began to shout, but when he saw that no one heard him or came to his aid, he shot his rifle out the window. This shot was heard in the main guardhouse opposite the palace. Guards ran to him and upon entering found thick smoke everywhere, from which they pulled the sentry. The stokers were put under arrest. They had believed that they could extinguish the fire or else prevent the smoke from spreading without warning anyone. They had struggled earnestly for five hours. This fire led to a discovery by Monsieur Choglokov. In his apartment, the Grand Duke had many very large dressers. When they were carried from his room, a few open or badly closed drawers revealed their contents to the spectators. Incredibly, these drawers contained nothing but a huge number of wine and hard liquor bottles. They served as His Imperial Highness’s wine cellar. Choglokov spoke to me about this. I told him that I was unaware of this situation, and I was telling the truth. I knew nothing of it, but very often, almost daily, I saw the Grand Duke drunk.

After the fire, we stayed at the Choglokovs’ house for about six weeks, and when we went out we would often pass a wooden house, situated in a garden near the Saltykov bridge, which belonged to the Empress and was called the bishop’s house because the Empress had bought it from a bishop. We decided to ask the Empress, unbeknownst to the Choglokovs, to allow us to reside in this house, which seemed to us and was said to be more livable than the one we were in. Finally, after many exchanges, we received permission to go live in the bishop’s house. It was a very old wooden house without a view. It was built over a stone cellar and as a result was more elevated than the one we had just left, which had only a ground floor. The stoves were so old that when they were lit, one could see the fire in the furnace, so numerous were its cracks, and smoke filled the rooms. We all had headaches and sore eyes. We risked being burned alive in this house. There was only one wooden staircase, and the windows were high. Fire did in fact break out there two or three times during our stay, but they were extinguished. I came down with a sore throat and a very high fever. The same day that I fell ill, Monsieur de Bretlach, who had returned to Russia to represent the Viennese court, was supposed to come and have a farewell supper at our house, and he found me with red, swollen eyes. He thought that I had been crying, and he was not mistaken. The boredom, illness, and discomfort, both physical and mental, of my situation had made me very melancholy all day long. I had spent the day alone with Madame Choglokova, waiting for visitors who had not come. She repeatedly said, See how they abandon us. Her husband was dining out and had taken everyone with him. Despite all of Sergei Saltykov’s promises to slip away from this luncheon, he only returned with Choglokov. All this put me in a foul mood.

Finally, a few days later, we were allowed to go to Liubertsy. Here we believed ourselves in paradise. The house was completely new and quite well furnished. We danced every evening, and our entire court was assembled there. During one of these balls, we saw the Grand Duke earnestly speaking into Monsieur Choglokov’s ear for a long time, after which the latter appeared upset, distracted, and more withdrawn and sullen than usual. Seeing this, and because Choglokov gave him an especially cold shoulder, Sergei Saltykov went to sit with Mademoiselle Marfa Shafirova and tried to find out from her the reason for this unusual intimacy between the Grand Duke and Choglokov. She told him that she did not know, but that she suspected what it might be because the Grand Duke had said to her several times, “Sergei Saltykov and my wife are utterly deceiving Choglokov. Choglokov is in love with the Grand Duchess, and she cannot stand him. Sergei Saltykov is Choglokov’s confidant. He makes Choglokov think that he is lobbying my wife on his behalf, when instead he is wooing her for himself, and she is happy to tolerate Sergei Saltykov, who is amusing. She uses him to deceive Choglokov as she pleases, and deep down she is toying with them both. I must open this poor devil Choglokov’s eyes because I pity him. I must tell him the truth and then he will see who is his true friend, my wife or I.” As soon as Sergei Saltykov learned of this dangerous talk and the scandal that could follow from it, he repeated it to me and then went to sit with Choglokov and asked him what was wrong. At first Choglokov did not want to explain and did nothing but sigh. Then he began to moan about how difficult it was to find faithful friends. Finally Sergei Saltykov brought him round and extracted a confession from him about the conversation that he had just had with the Grand Duke. Certainly one could not have predicted what they had said to each other unless one had been told. His Imperial Highness had poured forth solemn declarations of friendship to Choglokov, telling him that it was only in life’s most demanding situations that one could distinguish true from false friends. To prove the sincerity of his friendship, he was going to give him striking proof of his honesty. He knew without doubt that Choglokov was in love with me. He said that he did not condemn him for this, that I might well seem loveable to him, and that we are not the masters of our hearts. But he had to warn him that he chose his confidants poorly, that Choglokov might well believe that Sergei Saltykov was his friend, and that he was wooing me on Choglokov’s behalf, while Saltykov acted only for himself, and the Grand Duke suspected him of being Choglokov’s rival, and that for my part, I was deceiving both Saltykov and Choglokov, but that if he, Choglokov, wanted to follow the Grand Duke’s advice and confide in him, then he would see that he, the Grand Duke, was his true and only friend. Monsieur Choglokov thanked the Grand Duke profusely for his friendship and protestations of friendship, but deep down he considered the rest a chimera of the Grand Duke’s imagination. It is easy to believe that in any case Choglokov did not care to have a confidant who was by nature and character equally feckless and useless. Once Choglokov had said all this, Sergei Saltykov had little trouble in reestablishing calm and tranquility in his mind, since Choglokov was not accustomed to attaching much importance or paying much attention to the discourse of a man who had no judgment and was known for it. When I learned of all this, I admit that I was outraged with the Grand Duke. And in order to prevent him from repeating this accusation, I made him understand that I was not unaware of what had occurred between him and Choglokov. He blushed, said not a word, and went away and ignored me, and the matter ended there.

Back in Moscow, we were moved from the bishop’s house into the apartments of what was called the Empress’s summer house, which had not caught fire. The Empress had had new apartments built in the space of six weeks. To this end, beams had been removed from the house at Perova, from that of Count Hendrikov, and from the house of the princes of Georgia, and transported there. She finally moved in toward the new year.

1754

Choglokova’s infidelity and Choglokov’s illness and death;
Catherine’s pregnancy; Elizabeth’s talk with Catherine; Count
Alexander Shuvalov replaces Choglokov; birth and baptism of heir,
Paul; Elizabeth’s neglect of Catherine and miserable gift; a spell on
the royal bed; Saltykov’s departure; Catherine sees her son;
her melancholy and reading

The Empress celebrated the first day of January 1754 in this palace, and the Grand Duke and I had the honor of dining with her in public under the dais. During the meal, Her Imperial Majesty appeared very gay and talkative. At the foot of the throne, tables were set for several hundred people of the highest ranks. During dinner the Empress asked who this very skinny and ugly person with a crane’s neck, as she put it, was whom she saw seated there (she indicated the seat). She was told that it was Marfa Shafirova. She burst out laughing, and, speaking to me, she said that this reminded her of the Russian proverb
“A long neck is good only for the hangman’s noose.” I could not keep myself from smiling at this imperial mischief and sarcasm, which did not go unnoticed and which the courtiers spread by word of mouth so that, as I rose from the table, I found several people already informed of it. As for the Grand Duke, I do not know if he heard it, but he certainly did not breathe a word of it, and I was careful not to mention it to him.

No years had ever seen more fires than 1753 and 1754. More than once I saw two, three, four, and up to five fires at a time in different parts of Moscow, from the windows of my apartment in the Summer Palace. During carnival the Empress ordered different balls and masquerades in her new apartment. During one of these, I saw that the Empress had a long conversation with General Matiushkin. He did not want his son to marry Princess Gagarina, my maid of honor, but the Empress persuaded the mother, and Princess Gagarina, who was well into her thirty-eighth year, was given permission to marry Monsieur Dmitry Matiushkin. She was very pleased about this, and I was too; they married for love. At the time, Matiushkin was very handsome. Madame Choglokova did not come to live with us in the summer apartments. Under different pretexts she stayed with her children in her house, which was very near the court. But the truth was that this virtuous woman, who had loved her husband so much, had conceived a passion for Prince Peter Repnin and a quite marked aversion for her husband. She believed that she could not be happy without a confidante, and I seemed the most trustworthy person. She showed me all the letters she received from her lover. I kept her secret very faithfully, with scrupulous care and prudence. She would see the Prince very secretly. Despite this, the lady’s husband conceived a few suspicions. An officer of the horse guard, Kamynin, had given rise to them. By nature, this man was jealousy and suspicion personified. He was an old acquaintance of Choglokov’s. The latter confided in Sergei Saltykov, who sought to reassure him. I was careful not to tell Sergei Saltykov what I knew, for fear of some involuntary indiscretion. Finally the husband mentioned something to me too. I played dumb, acted astonished, and was silent.

In the month of February, I had signs of pregnancy. On Easter Day itself, during mass, Choglokov fell ill with dry colic. He was given many medicines, but his illness only worsened. During Easter week the Grand Duke went riding with the gentlemen of our court. Sergei Saltykov was among them. I stayed at the house because they feared letting me out given my state and because I had already had two miscarriages. I was alone in my room when Choglokov asked me to come into his. I went there and found him in bed. He made a thousand complaints to me about his wife, told me that she was seeing Prince Repnin, who went to her house on foot, that during carnival, he had gone there during a court ball dressed as a Harlequin, and that Kamynin had had him followed. In the end, God knows all the details he told me. At the moment he was most worked up, his wife arrived. He launched into a thousand reproaches against her in my presence, saying that she was abandoning him in his illness. They were very suspicious and narrow-minded people. I was dying of fear that the wife would believe it was I who had betrayed her in many of the details that he recounted about her trysts. The wife told him that it would not be strange if she punished him for his conduct toward her, that, at least, neither he nor anyone else could reproach her for having failed him up until now in any way, and she finished by saying that it was unbecoming of him to complain. Both of them continually appealed to me as judge and arbiter of what they were saying. I was silent out of fear of offending one or the other or both, or of being compromised; my face flushed with anxiety. I was alone with them.

At the height of the dispute, Madame Vladislavova came to tell me that the Empress had come to my apartment. I ran there immediately, and Madame Choglokova left with me, but instead of following me she stopped in a corridor where there was a staircase that led into the garden, where she sat down, according to what I was later told. I entered my room completely out of breath and indeed I found the Empress there. As she saw me out of breath and a bit flushed, she asked me where I had been. I told her that I was coming from the apartment of Choglokov, who was sick, and that I had hurried back as quickly as possible, having learned that she had deigned to come to my apartment. She did not ask me any more questions, but it seemed to me that she was considering what I was saying and that it seemed odd to her. Nevertheless, she continued to speak with me. She did not ask where the Grand Duke was, because she knew he had gone out. During the Empress’s entire reign, neither he nor I dared go into the city nor out of the house without sending to ask her permission. Madame Vladislavova was in my room. The Empress addressed her several times and then me, speaking of indifferent matters; then she left after about half an hour, telling me that because of my pregnancy, she excused me from appearing in public on April 21 and 25. I was surprised that Madame Choglokova had not followed me. When the Empress had gone, I asked Madame Vladislavova what had become of her. She told me that she had sat down on the stairs, where she had wept. As soon as the Grand Duke returned, I recounted to Sergei Saltykov what had happened to me during their ride, how Choglokov had sent for me, what had been said between husband and wife, my apprehension, and the Empress’s visit. Then he said, “If this is the case, I think that the Empress came to see what you do in your husband’s absence and to make sure that you were completely alone in both your apartment and Choglokov’s. Since we are covered in mud from head to toe, I am going to take all of my comrades to Ivan Shuvalov’s house.” The Grand Duke having already retired, Sergei Saltykov went with all who had gone riding with the Grand Duke to the home of Ivan Shuvalov, who resided at the court. When they arrived there, Shuvalov asked for details about their ride, and Sergei Saltykov later told me that from his questions it appeared that he had not been mistaken.

Thereafter, Choglokov’s illness only worsened. By April 21, my birthday, the doctors had lost all hope for his recovery. The Empress was informed, and as was her custom, she ordered the sick man transported to his own house so that he would not die at court, because she was afraid of the dead. I was very distressed as soon as I learned of Monsieur Choglokov’s state. He was dying just when, after several years of trouble and effort, we had succeeded in making him not only less mean and wicked, but also tractable. One could even dominate him if one studied his character. As for his wife, she sincerely loved me at the time, and she had changed from a harsh and malevolent Argus into a staunch, devoted friend. Choglokov lived on in his house until April 25, the day of the Empress’s coronation, when he died in the afternoon. I was immediately informed, as I sent for information almost every hour. I was truly grieved and I cried a great deal. His wife was also sick in bed during the last days of her husband’s illness. He was on one side of the house, she on the other. Sergei Saltykov and Lev Naryshkin were in the wife’s room at the moment of the husband’s death. The windows of the room were open. A bird flew in and landed on the ceiling cornice opposite Madame Choglokova’s bed. Seeing this, she said, “I am convinced that my husband has just given up the ghost. Find out if this is so.” Someone came to say that he was indeed dead. She said that this bird was the soul of her husband. They wanted to prove to her that this was an ordinary bird, but could not find it again. She was told that it had flown away, but since no one had seen it, she remained convinced that it was her husband’s soul come to find her. As soon as Monsieur Choglokov’s funeral was over, Madame Choglokova wanted to come to my apartment. Seeing her cross the long bridge over the Yauza, the Empress sent someone to tell her that she excused her from her duties in my service and that she should return to the house. Her Imperial Majesty found it improper that a widow should go out so soon.

That same day, she named Monsieur Alexander Ivanovich Shuvalov to take up the late Monsieur Choglokov’s duties in the Grand Duke’s service. Now Monsieur Alexander Shuvalov was the terror of the court, the city, and the whole empire, not because of who he was but because of the position he occupied. He was head of the tribunal for crimes against the state, which was then called the Secret Chancery. His duties, it was said, had given him a sort of convulsive movement, which seized the entire right side of his face from the eye to the base of his jaw each time he was affected by joy, anger, fear, or apprehension. It was astonishing that one could have chosen to place a man with such a hideous grimace in the constant presence of a pregnant young woman. If I had given birth to a child who had this unfortunate tic, I think the Empress would have been very upset. Yet this could have happened, as I saw him all the time, never willingly and most of the time with an involuntary wave of repugnance because his servants, his relatives, and his office, as one might well suspect, could not increase the pleasure of his company. But this was only the beginning of the joys that were in store for us and principally for me.

The following day I was told that the Empress was once again going to place Countess Rumiantseva in my service. I knew that she was the sworn enemy of Sergei Saltykov, that she hardly liked Princess Gagarina any better, and that she had done much to harm my mother in the Empress’s opinion. When I learned this, I lost all patience. I began to cry bitterly and I said to Count Alexander Shuvalov that if Countess Rumiantseva were placed with me, I would regard this as a very great misfortune, that in the past this woman had wronged my mother, that she had blackened her in the Empress’s mind, and that at present she would do the same to me, that she had been feared like the plague when she had been at our residence, and that this arrangement would make many people unhappy if he did not find a way to avert it. He promised to work on this and tried to calm me, fearing above all for my condition. In fact, he went to the Empress’s residence, and when he returned, he told me that he hoped that the Empress would not place Countess Rumiantseva with me. Indeed, I heard no more talk of this, and from then on we were occupied only with the departure for Petersburg.

It was decided that we would journey for twenty-nine days. In other words, we would do only one relay per day. I was scared to death that Sergei Saltykov and Lev Naryshkin would be left in Moscow, but I do not know how it happened that the Empress deigned to place them in our entourage. Finally we left on May 10 or 11 from the Moscow palace. I was in a carriage with Count Alexander Shuvalov’s wife, a conceited woman who was the dullest thing imaginable, Madame Vladislavova, and the midwife, whom it was claimed we could not do without, because I was pregnant. I was bored to death in the carriage and did nothing but cry. Finally Princess Gagarina—who personally did not like Countess Shuvalova, because the Countess’s daughter, who was married to Golovkin, the Princess’s cousin, was insufficiently considerate toward her husband’s family—found a moment when she could approach me to say that she was trying to make Madame Vladislavova well disposed toward me, because she and everyone else feared that the melancholy I felt due to my situation would harm both me and the child I was carrying. As for Sergei Saltykov, he dared not come anywhere near me because of the oppressive and continual presence of the Shuvalovs, husband and wife. In fact, Princess Gagarina succeeded in making Madame Vladislavova see reason. She deigned to alleviate somewhat the state of discomfort and perpetual oppressiveness that was the true source of this melancholy, which it was no longer in my power to master. It required so little effort, only a few moments of conversation; in the end she succeeded.

After twenty-nine days of such tedious travel, we arrived in Petersburg at the Summer Palace. There the Grand Duke immediately reinstated his concerts. This gave me some opportunity for conversation, but my melancholy had become such that at every moment and with every remark, I had tears in my eyes and a thousand worries passed through my head. In a word, I could not rid my mind of the thought that everything pointed to Sergei Saltykov’s removal. We went to Peterhof. There I walked a lot, but despite this my worries followed at my heels.