Part 17

This was a sincere effort on the part of a sixty-year-old Empress to be truthful and candid about her past. Aside from certain obvious misrepresentations, such as saying that she had an attractive appearance though she did not believe it herself, she thought that she was speaking the truth. But one is struck by the extraordinary weakness of her defense. A woman who has had twelve lovers and has learned no more from life than to defend herself on moralistic grounds shows that she has remained unteachable to the last. Her explanation of her conduct might suitably be given by a girl of fifteen. Catherine once said of Diderot that in some respects he was a hundred years old and in others he was no more than ten. It was a wise remark and could be equally well applied to herself. When she tries to explain the irregularities of her sex life by saying that temptation has been too strong for her to resist she speaks as the pupil of Pastor Wagner. It shows that her conduct was still just as much of a mystery to herself as it was to anybody else. She had learned however one thing which Pastor Wagner and the rationalists of the eighteenth century had not taught her, and that is that the heart does not obey the commands of reason.

However impulsive the Empress may have been in the initial stage of a love affair, she was shockingly rational in the way that she developed it. Like Frederick the Great, she had a terror of venereal disease but she had a less ascetic method of protecting herself. She required the hopeful candidate to submit himself to a medical examination at the hands of Dr. Rogerson, her Scotch physician. He was then put through a kind of ordeal or apprenticeship by Countess Bruce or Princess Protassov who were known for their function as “les eprouveuses.” If these experienced ladies recommended the young man for his office, he was installed in the elegant apartments prepared for his reception. In the drawer of his dressing-table he found the generous salary allotted to the Empress’s Adjutant General, and then began for him a life of the most appalling regularity.

At ten o’clock every morning, he called on the Empress, and at ten every evening he escorted her to her private chambers. When she drove out, he sat beside her, and on all occasions stood ready to offer his arm. He was dedicated to his duties and lived in complete retirement. After Gregory Orlov, none of Catherine’s lovers was allowed to make visits or receive them. No Sultan could have been more arbitrary with his harem than Catherine with her favorites. She lavished presents and honors upon them; her extravagance toward them knew no bounds. The English Ambassador Harris, who had a talent for statistics, estimated that she spent $190,000,000 in cash on the men she kept. The amount seems staggering even for our day. Yet it was not enough, with all the other perquisites added, to prolong the bondage of the victim more than two or three years on the average. After Gregory Orlov, they all escaped in one way or another at the end of a period of about this duration.

Vassilchikov, with whom she carried on the most perfunctory affair she ever had, describes his life with the Empress thus: “I was nothing more than a kept woman and was treated as such. I was not allowed to receive guests or to go out. If I made a request for anyone else, I received no answer. If I spoke for myself, it was the same. When I wished to have the order of Saint Anne, I spoke to the Empress about it. The next day I found a thirty thousand ruble banknote in my pocket. In this way, they always stopped my mouth and sent me to my room.”

It must be said that Vassilchikov’s courtship was probably the poorest performance given by any of Catherine’s lovers. The only one of them who had royal blood in his veins, for he was supposed to be a descendant of Rurik, he was nevertheless the last and least of all in the eyes of his mistress. Catherine had installed him in Orlov’s stead to displace the absent Gregory, and Vassilchikov’s office was primarily to help her wean the Count. Not that the Empress was aware that she was pushing Orlov out of his warm nest into a cold hard world. On the contrary, she had got the idea that Orlov intended to desert her and she did not mean to be left in the lurch. She also thought at first that she was in love with Vassilchikov, tall scion of the Ruriks, and was bitterly disappointed when the affair proved cold. Her complaints of their relationship were fully as dismal as his and her disappointment even more pathetic. This appears in a confession which she wrote for Gregory Potiomkin, who in turn displaced Vassilchikov and became Gregory Orlov’s first real and genuine successor. It appears that Potiomkin had heard stories about his predecessors, which shows that gossip had already begun to exaggerate the number of the Empress’s lovers. To reassure him, the Empress wrote a brief confession in which she told him all the facts about her previous relationships.

The Empress’s list begins with Sergei Saltikov and tells how she accepted him on the advice of Madame Choglokov and how Madame Choglokov in her turn had been induced to act by the “insistence of Sergei’s Mama.” This sudden peeping out of Sergei’s mama from behind the scenes of Catherine’s life makes a vivid impression. The lady was already an invalid, it seems, who pulled the strings of history, just once and silently, and died.

The next lover named in Catherine’s confession is the King of Poland. “He was amiable,” says his mistress, “and was loved from 1755 to 1761. After he had been away three years, that is since 1758, and because Prince Gregory Gregorevich, to whom well-meaning people called my attention, took trouble for me, I changed my way of thinking. He would have stayed forever if he had not grown tired. I learned this on the very day of his departure from Czarskoe Selo for the Congress and drew from it the simple conclusion that with this knowledge I could no longer have any confidence. The thought tortured me cruelly and led me to make out of desperation a choice by chance (Vassilchikov). During this time, yes until this month, I have fretted more than I can say and never more than when others were satisfied. Every expression of tenderness caused my tears to flow and I believe that never since I was born have I wept so much as in this year and a half. In the beginning I thought I would get used to it, but the longer it lasted the worse it grew. For the other person began to sulk for three months at a time and I must confess that I was never more contented than when he was angry and left me in peace. But his tenderness forced me to weep.”

The confession ends for the time being with Gregory Potiomkin, the lover to whom it is addressed and of whom she begs forgiveness for earlier sins. “And now, Sir Hero, can I after this confession hope for forgiveness of my sins? You will see that it is not fifteen but only one-third as many. The first, against my will, and the fourth, who was taken out of desperation, cannot be charged to frivolity. Of the other three, only believe the truth. God knows that I took them not out of debauchery, to which I have no tendency. If fate had given me in my youth a husband whom I could love, I should have remained true to him forever. The trouble is that my heart would not willingly be one hour without love.... But I write you that needlessly for accordingly you will love or will not wish to go away to the army, out of fear that I could forget you. But really I do not believe that I could be so foolish. If you would attach me to yourself forever, then show me as much friendship as love, and beyond everything, love and speak the truth.”

3

Potiomkin must have understood his lady’s wish and satisfied it in his way, for Catherine loved him fifteen years. She had loved her first Gregory ten years before she cast him off; her second Gregory held first place in her affections for a longer period. She had a degree of faithfulness with which she has never been credited. Not that Potiomkin lingered in the terem all this time. As official favorite and public escort he lasted only two years. He was too restless for captivity and he could not bear to be stared at, a part which the handsome Orlov had played to perfection. A curious arrangement was reached between the wandering favorite and the Empress. Potiomkin went away to Novgorod, to the Turkish wars, to the Crimea; he was driven hither and thither across the endless plains of Russia by his craving restless spirit. The Empress, left alone, something that she could not bear, took one lover after the other in his place. But always Potiomkin returned and compelled her to dispose of them. At a word from him, she turned them out.

According to the legend, Potiomkin became a sort of panderer to his lady and the gentlemen whom he chose for her survived as long as they remained in his good graces. What really happened was that the Empress chose each new lover for herself and certainly with the hope that he would see her through. But, after a year or two, the unmanageable Potiomkin would suddenly arrive on the scene and turn the rascal out. His appearance would be preceded by threatening letters about what he was going to do. For instance, the big blond Yermalov sat uneasily in his armchair one day because Potiomkin had written her that he was coming to Petersburg to send “that white nigger” away. Potiomkin came and the white nigger went. Catherine turned her attention to dark lovers and chose two of them, Mamonov and Zubov.

Mamonov proved to be one of her few mistakes. He was a normal man who fell in love with one of the ladies of the court of his own age and married her. It was the only time that her Majesty was ever actually deserted by one of her lovers, unless Saltikov may be said to have done so, and it was a shattering experience. She chose another dark man, Plato Zubov, and tried to gain for him the approval of the absentee Potiomkin. The little black boy, she wrote, was learning fast, sent his love to Papa, and so on. But Potiomkin wrote back that he was returning to Petersburg “to have a tooth out,” which had an ominous play on Zubov’s name, which means “tooth.” The conflict over Zubov’s removal brought to an end the relation between Catherine and Potiomkin which had lasted for fifteen years. Potiomkin was not able to send this rival away.

The lovers who followed Potiomkin were Zavadovsky, Zoritch, Korsakov, Lanskoy, Yermalov, Mamonov, and finally Zubov. Except for Lanskoy, who died, and Mamonov, who married, Potiomkin had arbitrarily dismissed all of them or believed that he had so dismissed them. When he could no longer do that he realized that his lady had discarded him for good. He became, as Gregory Orlov had become fifteen years before, an exile from the warm nest that had sheltered him for so long, and, like Gregory Orlov, he could not survive his banishment.

Potiomkin had a fascinating personality. He was not likable but he seized the imagination and captured the attention. Legend has pictured him as a great Russian brute who drank heavily and swore outrageously. Doubtlessly he swore, as every Russian swears as naturally as he breathes. But he was not a drunkard and he was not a brute. He was a frightened, timid hare, with a certain creative genius which came through here and there without ever developing very far in any direction. He could be a real poet on occasion, although he is known as the author of only one song, and also a real general on occasion, although he trembled at the sound of guns. The most contradictory things have been said about him because the most contradictory things were true about him.

He had the tall, well-built figure which Catherine required of her lovers but otherwise his appearance was not prepossessing. He had lost an eye and it is characteristic of Potiomkin’s reticence that nobody knew when or how the accident had happened. Potiomkin himself never spoke of it but his feelings on the subject may be imagined from the fact that when a one-eyed man was sent to him one day with a message, Potiomkin struck him down. Various stories are told about the loss of his eye. Alexei Orlov is said to have put it out in a struggle over a game of billiards. Another story told is that Potiomkin himself destroyed it because it had a blemish, probably a squint. It is doubtful whether Catherine herself knew the true cause of the accident. In writing about Potiomkin, she passed over his handicap as if it did not exist. And yet she made one indirect reference in her memoirs. In speaking of the ignorance of the Russian court, she remarked that even an ordinarily intelligent person at this court was like a one-eyed man among the blind. Another peculiarity of Potiomkin’s which she passed over in silence was a nervous jerking of his face, a kind of facial _tic_ which she had once detested in Count Shuvalov. One trait, however, she did refer to sometimes in a jesting tone and that was the way he constantly gnawed his finger-nails. The rest of his peculiarities she passed over in silence.

Potiomkin was cynical, morose, and silent; a wistful, tortured creature who was obliged to make people afraid of him in order to conceal his timidity toward others. They called him “Cyclops” and his imposing figure did not belie the reference to the one-eyed giant. Perhaps the original Cyclops also was as sensitive and fearful at the core as was the awe-inspiring Potiomkin. Legend has made a great deal of the middle syllable of his name, “tiom,” which means dark, and has served to accentuate the romantic picture of Potiomkin as a villain and a hero.

Like Razumovsky who had been the favorite and the reputed husband of Empress Elisabeth, Potiomkin was a Southerner, a Ukrainian. The men of his family had followed either a military or a cloistered life. His father was an obscure captain and an uncle, who had risen to the rank of colonel, retired from the army to enter a monastery. Gregory Potiomkin reversed his uncle’s course. He first became a monk or almost became one, having spent several years in preparation travelling from one monastery to the other. He was well versed in the theology of the Greek Church and was extremely superstitious. His orthodoxy was another aspect of her lover which Catherine, who prided herself on being a free-thinker, did not like to expose. During the first year that she lived with him, they made a pilgrimage through the old Russian cloisters together. It happened that Prince Henry of Prussia was due to pay a visit to Catherine during these months, but she wrote asking him to postpone his visit until the following year. Usually she liked to have foreign guests accompany her on her travels, but this time she did not wish to combine the Protestant prince and the Greek theologian in one religious pilgrimage.

Up to the age of thirty-five, when he became the favorite of the Empress, Potiomkin seems to have had no love affairs and no idea of marriage. He was deeply attached to his sister, whom, with her five daughters, Catherine kept about the court. With one of his nieces, Countess Branicky, Potiomkin was especially intimate. After he left the Empress, this niece accompanied him everywhere. It was as if, like Catherine, he was morbidly afraid of being left alone, and Sashinka Branicky was obliged to be always with him. One of the scandals about General Potiomkin was that, instead of galloping over the battlefield on a war horse like General Suvarov, he usually appeared driving along in a kibitka with Sashinka at his side. In this state, nevertheless, he managed to cover a great deal of ground, for few Russians travelled farther or more swiftly than did General Potiomkin. And always his devoted niece was near at hand. How Sashinka found time to marry and have children, as she did, is hard to explain. It has been said that her relations with her uncle were not above reproach. If it was true that a physical intimacy existed, there would have been nothing shocking in the circumstances to the Russian Empress who had once contemplated marriage with her Uncle George of Holstein and spoke in later life almost regretfully of the unfulfilled engagement.

Potiomkin had been one of the original conspirators who had helped to make Catherine the Empress. He had ridden to Peterhof in her train on that white night in 1762 when she seized the Czar and imprisoned him. He had been one of the guardsmen left in charge of the ex-Czar at Ropsha, and he had been present at Peter’s death. Alexei Orlov’s letter absolves him from all responsibility for the murder. The worst that can be said of him in this connection is that with many others, who were likewise not blamed, he also was present. The Empress did not forget him during the next ten years, for she furthered his career by sending him with a letter to General Razumovsky, who employed him in the Turkish wars. His picture lay dormant in her mind through all this time until it began to take on an increased vividness by comparison with the actual presence of a Vassilchikov whose caresses made her weep. The stories of Potiomkin’s wooing give him credit for an amount of initiative which he did not have. In Catherine’s confession, addressed to Potiomkin, she says that she deliberately recalled him to Petersburg, whereas the current story tells how Potiomkin schemed to be sent to the Little Mother with a painting and a message and how when he got there he impetuously wooed her. The second story is the one which the Empress would have much preferred to have us believe had her own statements of what took place not weakened its credibility.

“Then came a certain hero,” she wrote. “This hero was, through his services and his enduring tenderness, so wonderful that as soon as people heard of his arrival they began to say that he ought to remain here. They did not know of course that we had summoned him secretly by a letter, but with the secret intention after his arrival not to proceed quite blindly but to investigate whether that inclination existed of which Bruce had spoken and which many had long suspected; that is, the kind of inclination which I wished that he should have.”

It is not difficult to picture the impulsive Catherine sitting down to her writing-table one fine morning to pen the letter which brought Potiomkin to Petersburg as fast as a kibitka could carry him. The image of the dark, morose man, biting his nails and glowering at the world, which had slept so long at the bottom of the pool, had at last risen to the surface and now floated there with a sharp commanding vividness. Potiomkin’s time had come. The Empress sat down and addressed to the hero whose image summoned her the letter which was to be the making of his fortune. He came to Petersburg and for two years he remained in close attendance on the Empress. He played his part in the Hermitage gatherings in his own peculiar way. He was a ventriloquist and could imitate to perfection the voices of various animals. He could reproduce with uncanny accuracy the voice of Catherine herself uttering some characteristic remark. This trick hugely delighted the Empress who had also a gift for mimicry. In return, she would caterwaul a duet with the Princess Dashkov who, like the Empress, was unable to carry a tune.

Potiomkin was a semi-Tartar in his habits. Slovenly and indolent, he would lie on his couch for days clad only in a khalat. In the same informal habit he would visit the Empress, to the horror of the Europeans and the astonishment even of the Russians. Potiomkin fancied himself in this informal costume, over and beyond the fact that the lazy undress suited the inertia of his temperament. The loose khalat was not unlike the monastic robe which he had once planned to wear and which now and then, when things went wrong between himself and his imperial mistress, he thought of putting on again. He was friendly with all priests, with whom he spent much time, not, it appears, so much in theological discussion, though he is said to have excelled in this, as in card-playing and betting. His devotion to the Church is seen in the way that he could stand motionless and decorous all day while mass was being said. He was not physically too lazy for this effort although otherwise so indolent that the formalities of Russian court life were too arduous for him.

Many vindictive outré portraits of Catherine’s lover have been drawn for posterity. Most of them were produced by French writers who could not understand a man who, notwithstanding all the riches that his mistress placed at his disposal, preferred to live as a Byzantine when he might have lived as a Parisian. To the sophisticated French who left most of the written accounts of Russia in the eighteenth century, Potiomkin was scarcely a Russian; he was almost an Asiatic. The big one-eyed man who sprawled on a couch all day in a bright dressing-gown, playing with a handful of unset jewels or listening to Plutarch’s Lives which some one read aloud, was a strange creature who had deliberately turned his back on the civilization of Louis XV and France and who yearned only to revive the ancient glories of Alexander the Great and Constantinople.

The mere name of Alexander was an inspiration to Catherine and Potiomkin: it had been the name of Potiomkin’s father and became the name of Catherine’s grandson. It symbolized the magnificent dream which united them. Together they would go to Constantinople. One day Potiomkin burst forth, as he sprawled on his couch and listened to Plutarch’s Lives, “If anyone should come today and tell me that I should never go thither, I would shoot myself through the head.” In a similar mood, though less violent, the satirical Empress threatened, in case the Swedes bombarded her out of Petersburg, to set up her capital in Constantinople. If she did not revive the Byzantine Empire, she hoped that Monsieur Alexander, her grandson, would one day revive it in her stead. United in their feverish dream, the Empress and her lover drove in perfect unison toward their common hope. Together they would one day enter Constantinople. For many years they passionately believed it; and when they no longer believed it, they died.

4

Potiomkin, a true son of Ukrainia, was a troubadour. He composed a song to his lady which became a popular lyric. “As soon as I beheld thee, I thought of thee alone; thy lovely eyes captivated me, yet I trembled to say I loved. To thee, love subjects every heart, and enchains them with the same garlands. But, ah heaven, what a torment to love one to whom I dare not declare it! One who can never be mine. Cruel gods, why have you given her such charms? Or, why did you exalt her so high? Why did you destine me to love her and her alone, her whose sacred name will never pass my lips, whose charming image will never quit my heart.”