Part 22

There is a tradition, not well established, that her relationship with Zubov was Platonic. If this was true, the aging Empress took good care that it should not be known. She hated growing old and resisted to the last the infirmities of her advancing years. She detested glasses though she was obliged to use them. This was not, she told her secretary, due to any ordinary process of physical decay but “because she had worn her eyes out in the service of the state.” The loss of her teeth did not worry her nearly so much, because the infirmity was so universal and so irremediable. In spite of powder, wigs, and beauty spots, the teeth of the eighteenth century lady were at the mercy of her years, and the Empress with her millions of rubles was no better off than any peasant grandmother of her realm.

Worst of all, she lost the use of her legs. They became so swollen that she could not move about on them, and was obliged to sit in a wheeled chair while she took her airing in the colonnade of her Czarskoe Selo palace. To reach her beloved English garden which lay directly below, she built of stone and sod an inclined way down which her chair could be gently propelled until it reached the grove of live oaks. Those members of the nobility whose invitations she accepted built similar approaches to their palaces in order that the Empress need climb no stairs. Leaning on the arm of her beplumed, beribboned and bestarred escort, the handsome Plato, she would toil slowly up the incline while her host stood bowing to await her successful arrival. In this fashion Catherine the Great made her last public appearances, tottering before the eyes of all beholders like a child learning to take its first steps.

In spite of her physical handicaps, she persisted in acting as if they did not exist and her prowess was amazing. Her love of society remained as strong as ever and she was always the gayest in any company. Her infirmities were greater than those which had imprisoned Frederick the Great in his armchair during his last years, and had shut him off from the world. But unlike the Prussian King, whom she derided as being as “old as Herod,” she never fell into the mental rigidity which comes from loss of contact with the world. Her reactionary acts, which were plentiful enough in the last decade of her reign, were due to something other than the hardening of the social arteries which sometimes sets in with the advent of old age.

She took to card-playing more assiduously than ever, and her passion for conversation grew rather less than in the old days when she would talk with Grimm and Diderot for seven hours at a stretch. The change may have been due to the fact that she no longer had men like Grimm and Diderot about her to tempt her to these conversational orgies. Madame Vigée Lebrun was in Petersburg during the last years of the Empress, but Catherine never spent seven hours at a time conversing with any woman. Even after sixty, she was not reduced to that. Her energy sufficed to the very last to defend her dominant likes and dislikes. She had suffered great physical losses. The use of her legs, all of her teeth, and half of her eyesight were gone, yet the vigor and virility of her personality remained unimpaired. On the arm of a handsome young lover, she would brazen it out to the end. She wore him like a decoration.

There is no doubt that Catherine was afraid of Zubov; that is, afraid of losing him, and that she spoiled him dreadfully. She spoiled all the Zubov brothers, Plato, Valerian, and Nicholas. It was a repetition of her situation with the Orlov brothers, only the Zubov family was more grasping. Gregory Orlov had stumbled into his good luck, so to speak, but Plato Zubov had worked for his; besides he was younger and times had changed. He lost no opportunity to garner the rewards of his enterprise for himself and his brothers. In a short time, they had acquired all the honors and riches for which the Orlovs had waited ten years and Potiomkin and his protégés fifteen. Needless to say, the Zubovs were extremely unpopular. Nicholas was married and was rather less prominent about the court than Plato and Valerian, who were the center of its social and political life. They enjoyed the constant society of the Empress.

From the point of view of the elder nobility, Plato and Valerian were upstarts. The ministers and foreign diplomats, who had not achieved at a single bound, were obliged to stand hat in hand as these youngsters passed. Catherine’s favorites had always been parvenus and the nobles had grown accustomed to bare their heads to General-Adjutants who had no ancestry. But the Zubovs were not merely unknown; they were reckless youths without experience or any other measure of the power which was theirs. There was not even a Potiomkin to trim their claws, since the Prince of Tauris had been laid away in an anonymous southern grave because Plato Zubov would not allow the Empress to build a worthy tomb for him. No survivor of the Empress’s own generation had any influence with her.

The character of the Little Hermitage, in which Catherine had always received her intimates, had changed. In the days when Gregory Orlov had strutted about like an apple-cheeked Adonis with his illiterate conversation, the Hermitage had all been more or less of an age and had frolicked like children together. Later, when Gregory Potiomkin had gloomed in a corner while the Empress played cards with tear-marks on her cheeks or had performed his ventriloquist tricks until her sides ached with laughter, there had still been a kind of harmony among them. But the group now threatened to break into two parts along a line of social cleavage which separated the old from the young. As the Empress had grown older, the most prominent men in the Hermitage had grown younger. The two Zubovs and her grandsons now occupied the foreground while all the middle-aged and elderly cavaliers were relegated to the background. Only Leo Narishkin was as old as herself, Leo who had once meowed like a cat to call her forth to a rendezvous with Poniatovsky and whom she had whipped with nettles on the one occasion in all his life when his allegiance had wandered. Narishkin had no influence with her. He was her oldest friend in Russia, now grown as fat as she and caring no longer to play blind-man’s-buff which had once been their favorite game. She played cards with him and quarreled with him and lampooned him in verse. When the evening was over, the Empress got upon her feet with difficulty, and leaning on the arm of her dark-eyed Plato retired to her bed chamber adjoining. The Princess Alexandrina, who was now fourteen and a member of the Hermitage, was a witness of this unconventional exit of her grandmother.

Gradually the Empress’s environment began to feel that the lioness was growing weaker. They no longer feared her claws as formerly. When they saw her looking anxiously to the arrogant Plato for approval, their courage to criticize awoke. Her dependence gave her away. For the first time in her reign rumors of disrespect and ridicule were heard. Long ago when she had thought of marrying Gregory Orlov, the gossips in Moscow had put their heads together and whispered. But they had stopped suddenly enough when the Empress had sent out with a roll of drums her famous Manifesto of Silence. The tongues of Moscow had ceased to wag when Little Mother spoke on that occasion. Nowadays she loosed no thunders and the gossips began to sense their freedom.

Her severest critics, as usual, were found in the French colony. These foreigners indulged themselves in vulgar jests at the expense of the Russian Empress and her court and went so far as to set down their Rabelaisian efforts on paper. At a Twelfth Night party they lampooned the Little Hermitage with a freedom which one might suppose to be Russian if one did not know that the composers of the document were Parisian. One by one they satirized the courtiers, beginning with Zubov.

“Zubov has never rendered any service to the state and is no longer of service to the Empress, since the Sapphics, Branicky and Protassov execute the functions of his office. Let a few emetics be given him, to make him bring up what he has swallowed.

“Prince Bariatinsky, Marshal of the Court, shall be appointed Jack Ketch. A more gentle mode of putting to death than that by the knout is to be introduced; and he shall have the office of smothering and strangling in secret those that are to be dispatched, whether it be an emperor or his son; it is expected, however, that he do not let them cry out, as he did about thirty years ago.

“Marshal Suvarov shall have a patent for dealing as a butcher in human flesh; and the army shall be allowed to feed on it in Poland, where nothing but carcasses are left.

“A committee of _uchiteli_ shall be appointed to examine whether Prince Yussupov be able to read; if he can, he shall be appointed prompter to the theatres, of which he is now manager.

“Madame von Lieven, governess to the Princesses, shall retain her place, though she has somewhat the air of an Amazon; but she shall be enjoined not to let beasts only have permission to speak at the table of the young Princess, unless they speak with sense as they did in Æsop’s days.

“Prince Repnin, having opened the door one day when Prince Potiomkin called for a glass of water that he might himself repeat this important order to the lackeys, shall receive a patent for the place of first valet de chambre to the favourites; a post which to him will be worth that of field-marshal. However, the crown of laurel which covered his gray hair shall be taken from him, because he suffered a buffoon to tread on him without saying a word; and because the gift of a small house appeared suited to him, and to console him for the insult.

“M. Zavadovsky, director and plunderer of the bank, shall be sent into Siberia to catch sables, to replenish her Majesty’s stock of furs, which it will not be in her power to keep up by any other means. She is already unable to furnish her family with them, and Zavadovsky is well known to be a better huntsman than financier.”

Such vulgar ridicule had long been rife in Paris. Since the Empress had welcomed French émigrés to Petersburg, it could now be heard in Russia.

2

Like Peter the Great, Catherine had always hated the French. She envied them their art and culture and resented the French attitude toward the Russians as barbarians. She had adopted Peter’s political policy which placed France always on the side of the enemy. There had always been misunderstanding and coolness between the courts of Versailles and Petersburg, and when the daughter of the detested Maria Theresa became the Queen of France it did not help to make their relations more friendly. If Catherine had any fellow-feeling, as she might very well have had, for Marie Antoinette’s ill-judged extravagance, she never expressed it before the revolution. Long ago, she had taken her cue toward French royalty from Voltaire and the Encyclopædists and for thirty years she had tacitly adhered to it. The outbreak of the French Revolution suddenly changed all that and made her overnight into a rabid protagonist of the French king. It was the greatest inconsistency of her life, a betrayal of her position as the most liberal monarch of her century.

The Empress had fought pretenders and rebels within her own kingdom. As a usurper herself, she was especially suspicious of conspiracy and rebellion, but she had been cool and wary in dealing with the cases which arose. The Churchman, Arsenii of Rostov, had felt her heavy hand when he tried to defend the lands of the Church against confiscation and had found himself put down from bishop to simple monk and banished to a cloister in a lonely forest. This was at the very beginning of her reign. Soon afterwards came the conspiracy of Mirovich and the death of Ivan VI, the Emperor whom Elizabeth had deposed twenty-three years before and who had gone straight from his cradle to prison. Ivanushka, for he was always remembered as a baby and spoken of as if he were one, had grown into a tall, stammering, red-haired man who occupied as a nameless prisoner a cell in the Schlüsselburg fortress. The effort of young Mirovich to rescue him resulted in the death of Ivan and the execution of the conspirator. Although the removal of Ivanushka was convenient for the Empress, or, as she called it providential, she could not have planned it, for Mirovich was a fantastic and quixotic individual who could not carry out the schemes of others.

For almost ten years afterwards, the Empress encountered no further alarms until the smallpox riots broke out in Moscow. While her attention was fixed on these, Pugachev’s rebellion began to roll up in the East and to take on the aspect of a civil war. Pugachev was a genuine revolutionist, an agitator, a leader of the masses. He was, after Stenka Rasin, the second great socialist hero of Russian history and his rebellion, however complicated by other elements, was essentially a social uprising. The condition of the peasants had not improved under Catherine’s régime although there had been a definite hope among the serfs that the liberal Empress was going to do something for them. The Cossack rebel, Pugachev, came along at just the right time to garner the resentment which grew out of these disappointed hopes. He said that he came to give satisfaction to the injured people. They brought the wild man with his blue-black beard to Moscow in a cage and executed him there.

Pugachev had gone the way of Peter the Third and Ivanushka and the Empress was left in undisputed possession of the throne. She had at last put her house in order, for no other insurrection of any consequence broke out during her reign. She could now pursue her operations against the Turks uninterrupted by domestic disturbances. Her Russians, the patient “dark” people, were quiescent. After Pugachev’s blue-black head had fallen and his blood had stained the January snow of the Red Square, no other leader appeared to arouse the people against their Empress.

When the news of the French Revolution reached Russia, Potiomkin and the Empress were marching toward Constantinople. For fifteen years the peasants of Russia had been submissive and the Empress had not been aware of the restlessness in France. The French uprising astonished and alarmed her profoundly and filled Potiomkin with a paralyzing terror. They had all the reactions that might be expected of parvenus under the circumstances. The outraged Empress gave vent to her indignation in the language of a fish-wife. She did not admit her awful fears. She boasted loudly to Count Ségur, the French envoy who favored the republic, “Je suis aristocrate, c’est mon métier.” Of all her court, only Leo Narishkin could remember her as an awkward country girl who arrived in Russia without even a bridal chest, and Leo would have been the last to remind her of her humble origin. He had not forgotten the sting of nettles applied by the Empress when she was a young and vigorous Grand Duchess.

Catherine followed the fortunes of the French royal family hour by hour with intense sympathy. She was at Peterhof when she heard of their flight from Paris and she was still rejoicing over it when she heard that they had been arrested and taken back. Something similar had happened to Peter thirty years before in the Peterhof palace, but Catherine had called herself at that time a revolutionist and had been in the opponents’ camp. This time she railed loudly and violently against the regicides of France. She shuddered to think of what might happen to Catherine the Great if another Pugachev should presently appear. After the death of Louis and Marie Antoinette, she said that her only hope for France was that a Cæsar or a Genghis Khan might rise up and overwhelm them. She supported the idea of intervention with enthusiasm but beyond her eloquent encouragement she gave no actual aid; all Europe echoed with her tirades and abuse. Her virile language over-topped that of any other monarch. She could denounce the friends of the republic as no one else and praise the old régime with matchless fervor. Her old friend, Prince Henry of Prussia, came in for the most extreme abuse because he would not join the hue and cry against the Jacobins; and Edmund Burke, who denounced the French Revolutionists although he had favored the American rebels, was heaped with undiscriminating praise.

The Empress’s whole attitude toward the French Revolution was one of bluster and ineffectiveness. Even her own camp found it ineffectual and inconsistent. She invited the émigrés to Petersburg, for which the republican side naturally detested her. Her reputation declined with her contemporaries who felt that this emotional defence was something less than might have been expected from Catherine the Great of former days. Formerly, she had understood the art of pulling the strings in silence and had known how to accomplish her will without threats. She had negotiated the partition of Poland and established the policy of armed neutrality with statesmanlike effectiveness. Now she had degenerated into vituperation and inaction. Not only the Russian court but all the courts of Europe began to feel that the lioness of Petersburg was growing old.

3

Catherine had married her two grandsons young, much too young their governors thought. It was now time, she considered, to marry Alexandrina, her granddaughter, although the Princess was but fourteen. The Empress had been scarcely older than this when she received a proposal of marriage and accepted it, although her father had feared to send so young a daughter to Russia. Catherine remembered that young girl with a great deal of affection and sympathy. “Tell me truly,” she once burst out in a letter to Grimm, “wouldn’t it be charming if an Empress could remain all her life long only fifteen years old?” It remained always the most vivid year of her life, the year in which she had told her dear Papa good-bye and had set out to seek her fortunes in Russia. And now the charming young Alexandrina had reached that ideal age. Her grandmother had already selected a husband for her.

To say that the Empress had selected a husband for her is to put it too mildly. Catherine had once said of herself with absolute truth that whenever she wanted a thing she was obliged to want it most terribly. She now wanted to marry her granddaughter to the grandson of Ulrica, the sister of Frederick the Great. A few days after Catherine’s betrothal in Petersburg, Frederick had married his sister Ulrica to the Crown Prince of Sweden. Ulrica’s marriage had had one advantage which Catherine’s had lacked; the Queen of Sweden had not been obliged to abandon the religion of her fathers and revert to a pagan church. Ulrica had remained a devout Lutheran all her life.

Her son, Gustav the Third of Sweden, was a man of fashion, an exiled Parisian obliged to live in Stockholm. Gustav was a fop in his habits and a weathercock in his politics. The skeleton in his closet was that his son and heir was not his son. Gustav was an unhappy, complaining man, devoted to his mother yet at odds with her. He was finally assassinated when his son, Gustav the Fourth, was only sixteen. It was this son, said to be a bastard, whom Catherine the Great chose to be the husband of her granddaughter Alexandrina. Her heart was set on the marriage.

Gustav the Fourth was seventeen when he came to the Russian court at the Empress’s invitation as a suitor for the hand of the Russian Princess. He was a serious young man who had reverted to the piety of his grandmother Ulrica. The young King was accompanied by his uncle, the Duke of Sudermania, an inexplicable man who concealed his hand so well during the ensuing drama that his part in the development of events remains forever hidden. He was, like his nephew, an ardent Protestant; but he was also a Freemason and a Martinist, a believer in all the mystical cults of the eighteenth century which the Empress disliked and her son embraced. Sudermania could not have been as indifferent to his nephew’s actions as his outward demeanor indicated. But it is doubtful whether he had any real responsibility for the fiasco of the Empress’s plans. Gustav’s course was so consistent with his character that no other explanation than native bent seems to be necessary.

Catherine’s entertainment of her Swedish guests was regal past all precedent. The court flowered in a succession of balls and festivities the like of which had not been seen since the first visit of Prince Henry to Russia. Gustav was impeccable as to form. The late King of Sweden, his putative father, had been the glass of fashion and the son, in spite of his ingrowing piety, bore the mark of Paris. The Grand Dukes, Alexander and Constantine, seemed uncouth by comparison with this solemn young man whose manners were so meticulously perfect. Gustav was an assiduous reader of the Bible, to which he was accustomed to turn for counsel whenever he found himself in any difficulty. If the Empress had had the advantage of modern psychology, she would have known her Swedish Prince at once for a repressed youth and an elusive bridegroom. But not having this advantage, she pressed onward to the goal on which she had set her heart and plunged headlong and unprepared into the greatest failure of her life. As she said, she was more than half in love with the young man herself.

The marriage contract was all but signed. Only one point of difference remained to be settled, the future religion of the Princess. Catherine had stipulated that the girl should be allowed to keep her faith, and should be permitted to have her Russian confessor and her Russian chapel in the Swedish palace. The young King demurred. On the surface, all went well. Zubov and Markov, who drew up the contract for the Empress, presented an amiable exterior and the Swedish Prince appeared non-committal.

It is at this point that Zubov is said to have advised the Empress badly. He is supposed to have induced her to stand out for impossible terms and to be responsible for the bad diplomacy she exhibited on this occasion. It is extremely unlikely that this was true. Zubov was as little responsible for the Empress’s attitude as Sudermania was accountable for the King’s. In the crisis which developed before the eyes of all the court, the actual contestants were the seventeen-year-old King and the sixty-seven-year-old Empress. It was a life and death contest. They had joined battle over an issue supremely precious to both of them and neither could endure to lose.

The Empress was extremely romantic about the whole business. She commanded the young couple to kiss each other in her presence and made airy remarks about wishing to capture the handsome bridegroom for herself. In fancy she re-lived her own betrothal, hoping in Alexandrina’s marriage to redeem all the undesirable features of her own. Her granddaughter should have not merely half a dozen chemises but every luxury that a bride could wish and above all she should be saved the ordeal of changing her religion. No doubt Alexandrina would just as soon have changed her creed as not, but Catherine could not picture this indifference. She had forgotten for the time being that she and her fifteen-year-old granddaughter were not one.