Part 9

Elisabeth’s capriciousness increased. Having changed her furniture and everything else in her environment that could be changed, at last she changed her favorite. The easy-going Razumovsky was displaced and relegated with honors and riches to private life. There is a tradition that the Count had been secretly married to Elisabeth. Whether this be true or not does not matter much. The time had come for him to go. The discarded lover retired to the Anitchkov Palace which the Empress had built for him and where he dreamed away his life for another twenty years. Razumovsky was a charming decoration on the early reign of Elisabeth Petrovna. He was wholly impractical and without ambition of any kind, a poetic indolent Ukrainian. He was loyal to his mistress to the end and devoted to her successor, Catherine the Great.

Ivan Ivanovich Shuvalov, the new favorite, was a cousin. As the Empress grew older she suffered increasingly from melancholy which she strove to lighten by drawing the circle of relatives closer around her. Ivan Ivanovich was ably supported in his new duties by his family. He had a sister, a cheerful person whom the Empress relied upon to rescue her from low spirits. He had besides two brothers who guarded him on both flanks and reaped a rich harvest of monopolies. The Shuvalov brothers were ambitious and grasping as the Razumovskys had never been. Their advent made a great difference at court, for the Empress, who became more indolent and fantastic every day, gave more and more power to the Shuvalovs. She had failed in her dearest scheme: her nephew and successor, the Grand Duke Peter, had no heir.

With the year 1750 the problem of an heir seemed to grow desperate. In the Grand Ducal camp a realistic view was growing up. It was represented chiefly by Madame Vladislav, Catherine’s lady-in-waiting, and by the mother of young Sergei Saltikov, a young chamberlain of the Grand Duke. Slowly the idea took shape without anybody’s expressing it that the Grand Duchess might, by merely transgressing her marriage vows, redeem the situation. By some means this idea was insinuated into the heads of the stupid Choglokovs who afterwards thought they had invented it. Maria Choglokov suggested it to Catherine; put it to her, so to speak, as her patriotic duty. It seems rather odd that all of them had been so slow in coming to this plan. Apparently Catherine would have gone on indefinitely in the dilemma if the older married women had not finally suggested a way out.

Catherine wrote two accounts of her affair with Sergei Saltikov. One was set down only three or four years after it was over, and the other she wrote in her old age. The old lady’s story is a lively romance, portraying an ardent courtship, a horseback ride, a lonely island, and an importunate lover. The young woman’s story is less romantic and more political. She says in this version: “Madame Choglokov used all possible arts of persuasion to seduce me. This and the attractiveness and talents of him for whom she spoke would have found less resistance in another than in me. It is really true that I was distinguished by discretion and exemplary innocence.”

Sergei Saltikov was a merry and irresponsible youth without ulterior ambitions. His relations with the Grand Duchess began in the year 1752, In December of that year the Grand Duchess reported miscarriage. The following July the same misfortune befell her. She seemed doomed to bad luck and delay. Not until the 20th of September, 1754, did she actually become a mother. On that date she bore a son. “There was inexpressible joy over it,” is her laconic comment. It was about this time, according to her memoirs, that her skull-bones closed up.

Whether the Empress was aware of the intrigue between Catherine and Sergei Saltikov we do not know. We do know, however, that with the year 1754 her attitude toward the young count underwent a decided change. Choglokov and his wife saw great possibilities for the future, hoping to reap the credit for the new and gratifying turn of events. When the Empress began to turn a friendly gaze upon the young court, Choglokov lost his head and tried to woo her. Catherine admits that she and her mischievous Sergei encouraged this indiscretion which invited dangers unforeseen by their inexperience and youth. The brothers Shuvalov were strongly intrenched and were ready to make short shrift of any rival. At a masquerade ball, the softened Empress encouraged Choglokov with tender glances. Ivan Ivanovich, the favorite, saw them and his clan closed in around her, at once, and insidiously. In the end Choglokov was insulted by the Empress in public. “She called him,” says Catherine, “in a public conversation at dinner a blockhead and a traitor, which he so took to heart that he fell into the jaundice. Kandoid, the Shuvalov’s man, was called in, and, as he had long known that the patient was an enemy of theirs, believed that he would do them a favor by murdering him. At least all the doctors who were called in during his last days maintained that he had been treated like a creature whom one wished to kill. Four days after his death his wife was told that she could remain in Moscow.... I believe that Saltikov would have been banished at that time too if I had not been pregnant and they had not feared to afflict me with this grief.”

At last the midwife declared that the moment was at hand. The Empress, who occupied adjoining chambers, was summoned from her bed at two o’clock in the morning. She swept upon the scene in a mantle of blue satin, for the room was cold with the chill of a late September dawn. At noonday the child was born. The Empress waited only for the midwife to bathe and swaddle the infant. Then she called the priest and had him christened Paul. This was the name of the first child born to her mother and Peter the Great, a bastard son who had died at the age of three. Commanding the midwife to carry the child in front of her, the Empress retired to her own apartments where she arranged a nursery and cared for him with her own hands. If he whimpered she ran to him at once; her devotion became the subject of wide comment and general praise. It gave rise to the rumor that the child was actually Elisabeth’s own and not Catherine’s at all. The Empress was not displeased with the rumor; there were moments in her last years, years given over to vapors and moods, when she almost believed the myth herself. That she had done violence to the young mother in kidnapping her child never entered her head. She asked Maria Theresa of Austria, that prolific mother whom she had always envied, to be godmother to her child. Austria should realize that Russia also had an heir.

5

Very little is known of the father of Paul. The unhappy life of Catherine’s son and his final insanity have set many writers and historians at work discussing his heredity. But they always have assumed that his father was Peter III and that his grandfather was Peter the Great. If this were true, the deficiencies of Catherine’s son would be easy to explain, for heredity on the Romanov side left much to be desired. Peter the Great had a weak-witted brother and Peter III had a mental twist. But all this has nothing to do with Paul, who was not a Romanov but a Saltikov.

We must rely upon Catherine’s memoirs for the little that we know about the Saltikovs. Sergei and Peter were brothers in the service of the Grand Duke. Their father was the General Saltikov who had welcomed Catherine and her mother in Riga on their way to Russia. The mother of the Saltikov brothers had been a Princess Galitsin and a loyal helper of the Empress Elisabeth when Elisabeth seized the throne. The tradition is that Maria Saltikov had squandered her virtue for Elisabeth’s cause. However this may have been, the Empress was devoted to this lady and attached her two sons to the court of the Grand Duke. Sergei was a great favorite of Peter’s and often slept with him. At the time when Maria Saltikov promoted the affair between her son and the Grand Duchess she was a confirmed invalid, but she seems to have kept her initiative and energy to the last. As she had helped her Empress gain a throne she now stood ready to help her gain an heir for it.

Sergei Saltikov was a typical ne’er-do-well. Catherine tried to make the most of her lover in her memoirs but not a great deal could be made of him. He was a merry fellow, a brunet, who said of himself when he was once attired in a silver costume that he looked “like a fly in the milk.” Catherine says of him that he “was beautiful as the day; no one could compare with him, even in the great court, still less in our own. He was not without spirit and possessed those charming manners which one acquires from living in the world of fashion and especially at the court. In the year 1752 he was twenty-six years old. His birth and other qualities made him an outstanding personality. He had his faults, which he knew how to conceal; his greatest faults were a tendency to intrigue and a lack of strong principles. This however was unknown to me at that time.”

She then passes on to his brother Peter, whom she presents in quite a different light. Peter “was a fool in the fullest sense of the word, and had the most stupid physiognomy that I have ever seen in my life: great leaden eyes, a turned-up nose, a mouth always half open. Besides he was a terrible tattle-tale.” Evidently Peter was no credit to the Saltikov family. Yet he happened to be the uncle of her son.

It was afterwards said of Paul, when he became Paul I of Russia, that his physiognomy with its turned-up nose was considered even by himself too ugly to be imprinted on his coins; and that when the crowds of Paris gathered to look at him they cried out, “My God, how ugly he is!” His looks, we might fairly conclude, were a gift which the bad fairies of heredity had borrowed from Uncle Peter. There were other disadvantages which the bad fairies doubtless took from the Saltikov family, for Paul was afflicted in several ways which always remained a puzzle to his mother.

VII

PONIATOVSKY

After the birth of her son, the Grand Duchess recuperated but slowly. The icy winds from the Neva penetrated her apartment and she suffered continually from colds. She was querulous. Her chamber, in which she was obliged to pass all her time as a convalescent, was too small. Eight archins in one direction and four in the other, it measured but little more than the humble room in Stettin in which Catherine herself had been born. As a Grand Duchess, she resented these narrow walls; she resented the badly drawn pictures on the tiles of her Dutch stove; she resented the Grand Duke’s tobacco smoke which invaded her premises; and she resented the “wretched pieces of jewelry” which the Empress had been pleased to give her. The present of a hundred thousand rubles which accompanied the jewels was the sole bright lining of her cloud. Catherine always needed money.

But even this joy was tarnished by the fact that the Empress immediately borrowed the whole sum back again and did not repay her until the following January. The Empress recalled the money because the Grand Duke, on hearing that his wife had received it, raised a great outcry on his own behalf. As there was no money in the treasury with which to silence him, the Empress hastily sent to the Grand Duchess and asked for the loan of her treasure. Obviously Catherine was in no position to refuse; besides she eventually got it back again. It was not so with her baby, which the Empress had taken away without once saying by your leave and which was never restored to her. Here also, apparently, the young mother believed herself in no position to refuse, for she allowed the Empress to rob her without a single protest. Her acquiescence was complete. She was permitted to see the child but rarely, and when she did consoled herself with criticisms of the way his foster-mother took care of him. “From sheer over-carefulness, he was literally smothered. He lay in a very hot room entirely wrapped in flannel, in a crib made of black fox fur and covered with a wadded satin coverlet. Above this was a red velvet coverlet lined with black fox fur.... The sweat ran down his face and down his whole body.” Yet she made no attempt to rescue him. To try it would have been useless, for the autocrat of all the Russias was easily supreme in her own household. Catherine also probably had too little confidence in her own rights of possession.

Three weeks after the child’s birth, Saltikov was sent to Sweden to announce the event. “That depressed me greatly,” says Catherine, “because I was thereby exposed to the talk of the whole world.” She must have felt even at that early date that her secret was pretty widely known. It could have been no comfort to her, sitting alone in her little drafty, smoke-filled room, to hear, as she soon did, that the frivolous Saltikov was continuing his Don Juan career in the Swedish capital. “I held fast to what I had begun,” she writes, “less from inclination than from steadfastness, and worked for his return, tirelessly conquering obstacles and battling with all my strength against every hindrance.” Through her new alliance with Bestushev success was achieved. Sergei Saltikov returned to Petersburg during the Carnival season.

With great difficulty the Grand Duchess arranged a rendezvous and waited until three o’clock in the morning for a lover who never came. There was an elaborate explanation, how he had been dragged into a Freemason lodge by one of the Dolgorukys, and could not escape. But the Grand Duchess, much as if she had been an honest wife, was not deceived. She no longer opposed the plan which had been suggested of sending Saltikov to Hamburg as resident envoy. His departure was delayed from week to week, but Catherine’s influence was not causing the delay. The Empress did not get around to signing his official papers, and this was what kept the young man waiting. Elisabeth Petrovna was growing more and more dilatory every day in the performance of her duties, more and more irregular in her habits, more and more uncertain in her health. Her passionate attachment to the baby in the fox-fur cradle had not given her the new lease on life which might have been expected.

The effect of Saltikov’s neglect on the feelings of the Grand Duchess was soon apparent. She says in her memoirs that, brooding in her winter of solitude, she decided definitely to assert herself, to let her environment know that she would not suffer insult without retaliation. Had she not after all risen to her supreme obligation? Had she not given to Russia an heir? She was entitled to consideration and was determined to have it. Looking about for a scapegoat, she did not have far to seek. Saltikov was safely out of reach in Hamburg and the Empress was rapt in her phantasy cloud. But the brothers Shuvalov remained within reach, and she found to her joy that they were vulnerable. Neither of the brothers was clever and Alexander was disfigured by a grimace--an ugly facial _tic_. It was easy to make people laugh at the Shuvalovs and her _bon mots_ at their expense ran through the town like wild-fire. She says that her attack was supported by Count Razumovsky, ex-favorite of the Empress, and his brother Kyril. But their support must have been weak, however willing. The two Razumovskys were artists and dreamers and feeble fighters even for their own cause.

Catherine throve on her new aggressiveness. Soon another enemy was added to her list. A mysterious Herr Brockdorf had come up from Holstein and had quietly established himself in the retinue of the Grand Duke. The Grand Duchess did not like Herr Brockdorf and pursued him with her mockery. She gave him a nickname, “Baba-ptitza” (a pelican for ugliness!) and wherever the somber Holsteiner went he heard it whispered after him.

2

Following the birth of Paul, the breach between the Grand Duke and the Grand Duchess widened. “After my confinement,” says Catherine in her memoirs, “he usually slept in his own chamber.” The change of habit broke the only tie which existed between them. For nine years he had slept in chastity beside his wife. But something disturbing, incomprehensible had come between them, and he was no longer at ease in his wife’s bed. He made futile efforts to attach himself to other ladies of the court, but his enthusiasm wandered and failed to strike root anywhere. His interest in military occupations began to absorb all others.

More and more he occupied himself with his favorite toys, soldiers made of lead, wood, starch, or wax. Whole regiments were set up on tables and operated by means of ingenious mechanical devices, in making which the youth, who had never been able to learn anything from his tutors, showed a high degree of skill. Entering his room one day, the Grand Duchess found a dead rat on a gallows and was informed that a military execution had just taken place following a court-martial of the culprit. On another occasion when the Grand Duke was expecting a visit from a lady to whom he was paying court, he called his wife to survey the bower which he had prepared for her. “He showed me,” says Catherine, “how, in order to please the lady, he had fitted it out with muskets, military caps, shoulder-belts, so that it looked like a corner in an arsenal.”

The year which followed the birth of Catherine’s child and the retreat of the Grand Duke from her bed saw a marked increase in the preoccupation of the latter with his military toys. By the time her second child was born, which was three years later, his preoccupation had grown abnormal and he was capable of the following extraordinary display. He had been called by the midwife, says Catherine in her description of that night, and after some delay put in an appearance. “He entered my chamber in his Holstein uniform, booted and spurred, with a scarf around his body and a great dagger at his side; that is, in complete regalia. Astonished at this pomp I asked him the reason for this elaborate costume. Whereupon he replied that only in time of need could one know one’s true friends; in this costume he was prepared to do his duty. And the duty of a Holstein officer was to be true to his oath and defend the Ducal House against all enemies. Because I was not well he had come to my aid.”

Catherine decided that her consort was drunk and sent him back to bed. Although she was an accurate observer of the Grand Duke’s behaviour, she had no real comprehension of the nature of his affliction. His old tutor, Stehlin, who had once made such heroic efforts to teach him, was apparently the only person in the young man’s environment who perceived the morbid element in his behaviour. Stehlin called it his “marotte militaire,” that is to say, a kind of “folie militaire,” something which surpasses the limits of normal youthful folly. The Empress was merely angered at every eccentricity and hurled punishments and penalties upon the offender’s head. “That damned nephew of mine has angered me unspeakably,” she would say. “He is a monster; may the devil fly away with him.”

The crux of the Grand Duke’s military obsession was his devotion to Frederick of Prussia, the greatest military general of his age. It was clearly not the thing for the heir to the throne of Russia to bestow his heart thus unreservedly on a foreign potentate and especially on one with whom Russia was actually at war. Peter’s strange devotion is reasonably explained in Poniatovsky’s memoirs: “One must assume that his nurse and his earliest teachers in his fatherland had been Prussian and devoted to the King of Prussia. For from childhood on he nourished such a strong and at the same time such a comical feeling of veneration and love for this Prince that the King of Prussia once said about this passion (for it was really a passion): “I am his Dulcinea. He has never seen me and has fallen in love with me like Don Quixote.”

3

The military madness of the Grand Duke found a congenial ally in the person of the mysterious man from Holstein, Herr Brockdorf, whom Catherine so cordially detested and nicknamed “the pelican.” The red-haired Holsteiner, who wore a “miserable, discontented look because the corners of his mouth hung down to his chin,” hated the Grand Duchess cordially in return. He repaid her compliment about the pelican by announcing that he had come to Russia to “tread upon the serpent,” meaning thereby no other than Catherine herself.

Brockdorf was apparently a nondescript visitor of no real political importance, but his influence over Peter at this crucial period has given him a place in history. Exactly what this oddly assorted pair had in common is hard to say. Perhaps it was the protestant complex which united them. We know that Peter’s only reading was the Lutheran prayer-book, which he imported from Germany by the hundred, and we suspect that Herr Brockdorf’s references to “the snake” in Catherine was his metaphorical way of saying that she had gained the reputation of being an immoral woman. At any rate the contest between Catherine and Brockdorf was intense and their feud a bitter one. They competed for influence over the Grand Duke who wavered back and forth between them as guides and advisers in the management of the affairs of his beloved Holstein.

It was shortly after the entrance of Brockdorf on the scene that the first real quarrel took place between Catherine Alexeievna and Peter Feodorovna. The encounter assumed a significant form. “His Imperial Highness came to my room one evening after dinner,” says Catherine, “and declared to me that I really was becoming too unbearably proud, but he would soon bring me to reason. I asked him wherein this pride consisted and he replied that I carried myself too upright. Thereupon I asked him whether I should bend my back to please him, like the slaves of the Sultan! At this he grew angry and repeated he would soon bring me to reason. I asked him how he would do this. Thereupon he placed himself with his back against the wall, half-way drew his dagger and showed it to me. I asked him what that meant, whether he would fight me. Then I also must have one. He thrust his half-drawn dagger again into its sheath and said my malice had grown to be something quite amazing....”

It was through the kind offices of Brockdorf that a regiment of Holstein soldiers appeared at Oranienbaum in the early summer of 1775. The Grand Duke’s military play had suddenly become a dangerous reality. Soldiers of lead and wax no longer satisfied him. He was obliged to have flesh-and-blood toys, strong burly fellows who had to be housed and fed and who quarreled with the Russian guard already stationed at Oranienbaum. “These accursed Germans are all sold to the King of Prussia,” said the Russians. “They are traitors brought to Russia.”

The Grand Duchess realized the danger of this new development. She decided to eliminate herself from the situation as completely as possible and devoted her summer to reclaiming waste land and planning a large English garden. The Empress’s advisers, the Shuvalovs, also realized that the presence of the Holstein soldiers at Oranienbaum was undesirable and yet they found it curiously impossible to make Peter see the point or to persuade him to remove this very disturbing element. Like parents trying to get a child to exchange a dangerous toy for a safe one, the Shuvalovs decided to present the Grand Duke with real Russian soldiers for his games. In the spring of 1756, they sent a detachment of one hundred cadets to Oranienbaum for Peter to command. But the Grand Duke was not so easily duped. The Russian cadets might remain but the number of his beloved Holsteiners continued to increase. The accommodations of the little village were strained, giving rise to more friction and more rumors....