Part 11

It was the Empress’s last shot and still the Grand Duchess did not flinch. Elisabeth began to walk up and down the room, while Catherine and the Grand Duke fell to quarrelling with each other. It was apparent from the Grand Duke’s remarks that he was under the influence of the Vorontsov family and nursed the idea of putting Elisabeth Vorontsov in the place of Catherine. He was not aware that this project appealed neither to the Empress nor to Ivan Shuvalov behind the screen. “This went beyond the mental capacity of his Imperial Highness, who believed all that he wished,” says Catherine, “and pushed aside every other thought which happened to interfere with the one that momentarily governed him.”

At three o’clock in the morning the Empress dismissed them. The Grand Duke left the room first and vanished down the corridor with his usual long flying strides. Catherine returned to her chamber and undressed herself. It was the middle of April and the white dawn filled the room in which for so many days past she had paced the floor in suspense and sleeplessness. She went to bed and slept soundly.

7

It was true that Catherine’s mother, the Princess of Zerbst, had fled to Paris. The redoubtable Johanna Elisabeth had, by a series of political errors, succeeded at last in reaching the city of her dreams, the haven of art and fashion for which she had always longed. To achieve this paradise she had made a stormy pilgrimage; and her joy in her achievement was to be short-lived, for her residence in Paris proved to be her undoing.

In the year 1758 she was living at Zerbst with her son, Friedrich August, the reigning Prince. It can not be said that she was living altogether quietly there, for Fritz had married a young wife with whom his mother did not get on well. According to the Princess, Fritz also did not get on well with his wife, who had been an obscure Princess of Hessen-Kassel. After five years of marriage, they still had no children. Presumably the domestic atmosphere at Zerbst was anything but pleasant, although the relations of the trio with the outside world were peaceable enough. The Princess of Zerbst received a comfortable pension from the Empress of Russia and there was at least a hope that the future Empress, who was Fritz’s own sister, would one day succeed in making him a real Kurfürst of Germany. The Zerbst family had only to be good and await events.

Suddenly the French foreign office cast an eye on this little principality. Would it not be possible to use the Princess of Zerbst to influence her daughter, the Grand Duchess of Russia, who was suspected of being pro-English and anti-French? The French office decided to take the chance. A dashing French officer, the Marquis de Fraigne, was dispatched on this mission and arrived without difficulty at the castle of Zerbst. Although France and Germany were at war, little Zerbst had declared itself neutral. A French officer might therefore visit the Prince in perfect safety, protected by its neutrality. De Fraigne lingered on at Zerbst, while the weeks passed by in pleasant social converse. The Princess Johanna Elisabeth wrote letters to her daughter, which never reached their destination but conveyed to Frederick the Great all that he needed to know.

Suddenly the little idyl became a volcano. Frederick the Great was not pleased to have a French officer tarrying at Zerbst. He sent a detachment of soldiers to arrest the stranger and remove him to Prussian soil where he could be properly court-martialed. But the Marquis argued his case and presented his side so well that the Prussian soldiers retired without him. The offended Frenchman, aided by the foolish Prince of Zerbst and the still more foolish mother of the Prince, sent an indignant protest to the King of Prussia. After all, Zerbst was neutral, and the Prussians ought really to apologize.

Frederick’s answer was prompt: a squadron of artillery appeared before the old gray walls of Zerbst. Either de Fraigne would come out or the walls would go down. The Marquis decided to give himself up, and the Prussians took him quietly away. But the Princess of Zerbst and her son had pushed the issue too far and Frederick was not going to let them off too easily. He imposed a penalty of a hundred thousand ducats and the supply of forage enough for a regiment. It was a devastating penalty; it wiped them out. In desperation the Princess and her son fled the situation and abandoned the principality to the Prussian King. In their haste they left behind them the young wife of the Prince. Or did she perhaps decline to go with them? Perhaps she thought she had nothing to lose by remaining with the Prussian occupation. However this may have been, she did not long survive the flight of the others. Within less than a year, she died of a stroke of paralysis. It began to look as if the house of Zerbst was doomed to extinction.

In the meantime, the fleeing mother and son went first to Hamburg. From Hamburg Fritz departed to enlist in the Austrian army and fight Frederick the Great, while his mother went on to Paris. She believed that the French government would welcome her with open arms after the great sacrifice that she had made for that country. But the French government lacked appreciation. They now knew as much about Johanna Elisabeth as Frederick the Great knew when she came back from Russia with Mardefeld’s dismissal in her _chatelaine_. The Princess loved intrigue but she was doomed to fail in it; her projects always turned against her, as if she tried to crack a whip too long for her strength and was caught in the bite of its cruel tapering end.

The French government made ineffectual attempts to delay the progress of the Princess as she hastened toward Paris. They sent a last desperate message to arrest her at Brussels, but Johanna Elisabeth was on the last lap of her journey to Paris before the message arrived. There was a certain pathos in the letter which Berni, the foreign minister, wrote to the French resident at Petersburg. “The Princess of Zerbst hastened so that the letter which explained the necessity of postponing her arrival in France did not reach Brussels until she was already in Valenciennes, from which one could not prevent her from coming on to Paris.” Berni wished the Empress to understand that he had not connived at the Princess’s flight to France.

Elisabeth was furious with the Princess of Zerbst. The mother’s behavior coincided with the daughter’s meddlesomeness in the Apraxin business. The full wrath of the Empress fell upon the mother’s frivolous head; she promptly withdrew the lady’s pension. The Princess, who pretended to observe an incognito in Paris as Countess of Oldenburg, set up an establishment and plunged into literary and court society. Suddenly she found herself cut off without a sou. Her letters to the Empress are pitiable. As her creditors pressed her harder and harder, she multiplied her petitions. The Empress condescended to be positively vindictive. She sent a message to the bankrupt woman that, after first paying her debts, she ought to leave Paris. This silenced the poor woman at last.

This was in the autumn of 1759, and the Princess was already ill of dropsy. She passed the winter in bed attended by physicians. Her letters to Russia ceased to petition for money; she seemed to realize that Elisabeth was inexorable. The Grand Duchess, who did not know of her mother’s financial distress, sent her a present of some tea and rhubarb. But the Princess died before this little gift arrived. It was only with the greatest effort that Catherine and Ivan Shuvalov, whom she finally persuaded to help her, could induce the Empress to pay the debts of the deceased Princess. Elisabeth was willing the Princess’s personal effects should be sold at public auction. It was hard even for the favorite, Ivan Shuvalov, to persuade her to save her kinswoman’s memory from this disgrace. Toward Johanna Elisabeth she had always been revengeful.

8

The Empress did not long outlast her enemy. For many years she had really been an invalid. She had secretly imported a famous French physician who said that she suffered from hysterical “vapors” and convulsions. Elisabeth’s personal physician was a Greek, Kondoidi, who at first refused to consult with the foreign specialist. After much diplomatizing on the part of the French and Russian governments, the rivals at last consented to meet. It turned out that they agreed in their diagnosis of melancholia and hysteria, and so they shook hands over the poor Empress who continued to get no better. Nothing more definite than this was the Empress destined to die of. Owing to the convulsions to which she was subject, her death seemed several times imminent; but then she would suddenly pull herself together and death would recede to a respectful distance. Her illness dragged on like the Seven Years’ War and the outcome was as unpredictable. From the beginning of the year 1761, however, her condition patently grew worse. During the summer she fell into convulsions which caused her to lose consciousness for several hours at a time. On Christmas Day, 1761, she died, at the age of fifty-two. Her span of life was but slightly less than that of her tall turbulent father, Peter the Great, who died at fifty-three.

There were three people who had awaited her death with varying degrees of impatience. To Frederick the Great the news was manna in the wilderness; it made him at last victor in the Seven Years’ War. To Grand Duke Peter, it was the release of all his dreams; as Czar of Russia, he could now follow his illusions wherever they led him, even to the last limits of destruction. To Grand Duchess Catherine, it was not altogether opportune. Three years before she had been more eager for Elisabeth’s death than she was when the Empress at last made way for her. Catherine was at this time pregnant with her third child and more than ever at odds with the Grand Duke, her husband. Her new lover was Gregory Orlov, a handsome young captain of artillery.

While Peter celebrated his accession to the throne with the usual ceremonies, she withdrew herself discreetly from the public gaze. She draped herself in heavy black and paid her daily homage to the corpse of the Empress, kneeling for hours beside the sarcophagus. According to custom the body lay exposed to public view for six weeks. In the fifth week, with her own hands and without a quiver, she placed a golden crown on the head of this malodorous object. It was her final act of obeisance to the Empress who preceded her.

VIII

ORLOV

In the six weeks which intervened between the death and burial of Elisabeth Petrovna, the new Czar had offended public opinion in numberless ways. While the Grand Duchess was diligently observing all the rituals ordained by the Greek Church for the dead Empress, Peter III was conducting himself like a boy just let out from school. His sharp strident tones could be heard down the corridors, conveying the joyous excitement he was unable to control. He could not kneel endlessly beside the coffin, as Catherine did, nor even stand, but paced restlessly about the church talking and grimacing. On the day of the funeral his grotesque behaviour shocked the people in the street. He was in a good humor, says Catherine, and allowed himself his little joke.

As the long procession passed through the Nevsky Prospect, across the bridge, and into the island fortress of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, Peter walked immediately behind the coffin. He wore a mourning robe of state with a long train, the end of which was borne by Count Sheremetiev. The Czar’s little joke was to stop in his tracks from time to time and then hasten forward with long strides to overtake the coffin. The unhappy Count was unable to manage the train of his master, which flapped wildly in the wind to the great delight of the Czar who repeated the jest again and again. The procession was finally so jammed by this trick that a messenger was sent forward to stop the leaders until they could catch up. The new Czar who amused himself so well at the funeral of his late aunt, was nearly thirty-five years old. The public was scandalized and his courtiers blushed for him before the gossips of Europe. Still they continued to kiss the hand of his Imperial Highness and to observe all the forms of supreme respect. Like crows they circled in awe around this feeble image of dignity and awe.

The reign of Peter III lasted altogether six months. His ukases were a hodge-podge of foolish and reasonable commands. One day he gave an order that the gentlemen of the court might hunt ravens and other birds in the streets of Petersburg; also that they might shoot on sight all dogs found in the vicinity of the palace. Another day he freed the nobles from compulsory military service. Although the princes and counts were delighted with this law, they still mistrusted their capricious emancipator and feared his next measure. Petersburg was filled with rumors of what it might be. It was reported that Peter III meant to divorce Catherine and to marry Elisabeth Vorontsov, and that, to cement this innovation, all the other ladies of the court would be required to divorce their husbands and take new ones. So jumpy was the public and so whimsical was their Czar that this nonsense was easily believed.

Wherever Peter III appeared in public his reputation for capriciousness grew. When he went to see the guard changed, which he often did, he would beat the soldiers and even the spectators. Countess Dashkov tells a story of how his negro servant Narcissus was redeemed by a ceremony after having had a fight with the scavenger of the regiment. It was at a military parade. An officer suggested jokingly, “Let Narcissus pass three times under the banners of the regiment.” Peter, intensely serious, was delighted with the idea; he insisted that the points of the banners should draw blood from the negro’s head, which caused Narcissus to set up a loud yell to the immense amusement of the officers and the solemn satisfaction of the Emperor. His beloved Narcissus had been cleansed by a ritual. Numerous stories of his behaviour survive as sufficient evidence that his mind had wholly lost its unity and integrity. Bilbassov says of his condition, “a man of sound sense and clear memory can not understand the conceited blindness in which the Duke of Holstein, who had become Emperor of Russia, lived. The frequent drunkenness of Peter III does not explain it.... It must be traced back to the unfortunate coincidence between the personal qualities of Peter III and the unlimited power which became his by inheritance.... He had lost the power to think straight.”

The pathos of his condition was that it inspired in his environment so much hatred and so little sympathy. As a rule, only the women, to whom he turned with childish appeal, took pity on him. Even Catherine, his wife, who has gone down in history as his greatest enemy, wrote tolerantly of him in her memoirs, “He did not have a bad heart; but a weak man usually has not.” And Elisabeth Vorontsov, his mistress, was loyal to him all through the final crash of his fortunes with which his brief reign came to an end. Her behavior in that crisis shows that her attitude toward Peter all along had had something in it besides the mere ambition which was supposed to have guided her. But Peter had no friend among the men. He was afraid of men and therefore he challenged and insulted them on every occasion. From the period of his early fights with his tutors, it could be foreseen that Peter’s greatest safety in the future would consist in keeping as far as possible away from his own sex. It would be an ominous day for him if he were ever cut off wholly from the mercy of women and cast entirely on the protection of men.

2

The political acts of Peter III were of a kind which no Czar of Russia could have perpetrated and survived. He prattled about his devotion and allegiance to the King of Prussia with an openness which embarrassed even the Prussian representative. One of his first steps as Czar was to make peace with Prussia. Not satisfied with a mere cessation of hostilities, he signed a treaty of eternal peace with Prussia in April, 1762. It was celebrated with great pomp and ceremony, during which the Czar brought forth his famous toast to the “3 times 3.” On being questioned he said that the trio whom he had in mind consisted of himself, Peter III, George III of England, and Frederick III of Prussia. When it was pointed out to him that Frederick was only the II’d, it did not disturb him in the least nor interfere with the elaborate design of fireworks which he ordered to burn upon the sky above the Neva this historic alliance: “3 × 3.” It was a union over which Elisabeth Petrovna, now sleeping in the Fortress of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, and Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, now sleeping in Westminster Abbey, had once waged a long and bitter controversy. Peter had suddenly brought it to pass, like a mischievous child. But it was too much like a harlequinade. What Europe wanted to know was, how long would it last? Peter was playing with big destinies.

His domestic policies were as ill-inspired as his foreign policies. The whole of Russian politics revolved around the two pillars: the army and the church. During his seventeen years as Grand Duke in Russia Peter had never made friends with either. Soon after his accession he issued an order confiscating the possessions of the church and allowing the priests an income from the state. This of course was never executed as the six months of his reign were not long enough to accomplish such a revolution. It sufficed however to solidify the antagonism of the people toward a Lutheran Czar who had no respect for icons and priestly robes and who read the German Bible. They believed he wished to change their creed.

Peter’s tactlessness with the army was no less damaging than with the church. He made his uncle, Prince George of Holstein, generalissimo of the Russian army. This was a double error, in that he placed a foreigner in command and resigned to him a place which as Czar he should have filled himself. He took away the long, loose Russian coats of the soldiers and put them into tight German uniforms. His next step was to mobilize the army for a campaign against Denmark. He was Czar of all the Russias yet a few square miles of Holstein territory in the possession of Denmark occupied all his attention and filled all his military dreams. “He had a passionate love,” says Catherine, “for the little corner of the earth where he was born. He was constantly preoccupied with it. He had left the land of his birth at the age of twelve or thirteen years; his phantasy grew heated whenever he spoke of it, and because no one in his environment, beginning with myself, had ever been in this wonderful land according to his accounts, he told us daily stories about it which put us to sleep but which we were supposed to believe. He grew angry when he saw that we did not believe him.” This had been his attitude as Grand Duke; as Czar of Russia he behaved as if he had just come into his own as the ruler of Holstein and seemed to forget entirely his vast Russian domain.

His indifference to being crowned was a part of his satisfaction with the rôle of mere Duke. It was immemorial custom to crown the Czars of Russia in Moscow, in the Kremlin, with all the colorful pageantry of the Church and Army arrayed against that rich Byzantine background. Peter neglected to make any preparations for this ceremony. His model in all things, Frederick the Great, had never been crowned; nor had Frederick’s father before him. As a matter of fact, both of these Prussians, father and son, were too penurious to spend money on coronation spectacles. But the Czar did not question their reasons; the precedent was sufficient. When Frederick heard that Peter was dilatory about his coronation ceremony, he was alarmed and wrote to the young Czar urging him to proceed at once to Moscow and crown himself there. He reminded Peter III that Ivanushka was still living in the Schlüsselburg fortress and that he represented a possible rival to the throne. The Czar was impervious to this good advice. He replied that the crowns were not ready. The months passed and the campaign against Denmark was his only interest. But even this he postponed from time to time. Almost ready to march, he nevertheless decided to delay a few weeks in order to celebrate his name-day, June 29, with the usual garden party gayeties at Peterhof.

3

During the six months of Peter III’s reign, Catherine lived in strict retirement. When obliged to appear in public, she wore heavy black draperies edged with costly ermine which served a double purpose: they showed her respect for the late Empress whom she genuinely mourned and they concealed her pregnancy. In April the new Winter Palace of stone overlooking the Neva, which had been built by Elisabeth, was completed. The Imperial family moved out of the old wooden palace on the Nevsky Prospect, of whose drafts and other discomforts the Grand Duchess had often and bitterly complained. Here Catherine was assigned rooms at the opposite end of the palace from the Czar, where on April 11th she bore a son. He was called Alexei Gregorevich Bobrinsky. His last name was taken from the beaver skin in which the new-born babe was wrapped. Bobrinsky went through life as Alexei, son of Gregory. With this child, Catherine abandoned finally the pretense that he was the son of Peter. Her eldest son, Paul Petrovich, remained as the sole representative of this fiction.

Catherine concealed the birth of her second son and brought him up in a school for cadets. Her position was too insecure to allow her to keep Orlov’s child with her. As with the other two, she was again deprived of any maternal satisfaction in the care of him. Ten days after her confinement, on her thirty-third birthday, she appeared in public to receive the customary congratulations. She carried off the occasion as if nothing had happened. Little Bobrinsky’s birth had not caused a ripple on the surface of things. Presumably the Czar did not even know of his existence. Catherine subsequently bore two daughters to Orlov who were spirited away even more completely than little “beaver-skin” had been. They were brought up under fictitious names at court and properly married in the course of time. The legends do not tell us whether their lives developed happily or otherwise.

Four months after his accession, Peter III called his wife a “fool” in public; it was at the great dinner of state given to celebrate the peace with Prussia. To Peter’s foggy mind this doubtless seemed only a casual insult, as was the case when he made Count Buturlin into a life-long enemy by calling him a “son of a bitch” at a dinner party. The Czar sat at the head of the table and proposed a toast to the Imperial family. As the pokals clattered down upon the board, Peter observed Catherine sitting in her place. He sent the adjutant who stood behind his chair to inquire why she had not risen and the adjutant returned with the reply that she herself belonged to the Imperial family. The silly inconsequential Czar leaned forward in his place and shouted down the table, in the presence of the assembled Russian nobles and foreign diplomats, “dura” which means “fool.” It is the epithet which one _izvostchik_ bawls out to another in a street argument. The Empress’s eyes filled with tears and she turned to Count Stroganov who stood behind her chair and begged him to say something amusing to keep her from crying. It was for Catherine the last straw. Two months from that date the reign of Peter III came to an end and the reign of Catherine II began.