Catherine the Great & Potemkin

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Potemkin and his circle were continually sending each other opera scores, as music lovers today give each other new CDs. Catherine enjoyed Potemkin sending music to her friend Grimm, who called him ‘my benefactor in music’.20 Music was a way to curry favour. Prince Lubomirski, a Polish magnate whose estates provided Potemkin’s timber, frequently sent him horn music: ‘If this genre of music is to the taste of Your Highness, I will take the liberty of following it with another.’21 The Austrians used music as a diplomatic weapon. When Cobenzl, himself an opera fanatic, was at home in Vienna, he reported to Potemkin: ‘We’ve heard the details of the charming show’ of Sarti and Marchesini in Petersburg. The opera in Vienna could not equal it, the envoy claimed tactfully. Later, when the war began, Kaiser Joseph thought it worth while to send Cobenzl ‘two choral pieces for Prince Potemkin’s orchestra’.22 Just as Russian ambassadors found his art deals and did his shopping, so they also were always looking for new musicians for him.23

  Serenissimus took a personal pride in Sarti’s work, especially since he wrote parts of it himself. He had always written love songs, like the one to Catherine, and religious music, like the ‘Cannon to our Saviour’, published by his own printing press. It is hard to judge the quality of Potemkin’s composition but, since his critics did not mock his music, he was probably talented, as Frederick the Great was with his flute. Indeed, Miranda, Potemkin’s cynical travelling guest and a just witness, was impressed by his musical talents. He met Sarti in the south and watched Potemkin ‘writing scores here and there, then gave them back to Sarti indicating the tone, rhythm and melody of the two points composition written on the spur of the moment, which gives some idea of his fecundity and great skill’. Sarti presumably then took Potemkin’s ideas and arranged them for the orchestra.24

  Certainly Catherine was proud of his musical abilities. ‘I can send you the tune of Sarti,’ she wrote to Grimm, ‘composed on the notes put together haphazardly by Prince Potemkin.’ The Prince, who always wanted an immediate reaction, ‘is very impatient to know if all the music has been delivered to you’.25 Sarti and his itinerant hornblowers were with Potemkin to the end, but later he was also offered the greatest musical genius of his time – Mozart.

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  At about 11 a.m., the ritual moment arrived that defined Potemkin’s mysterious power. The Prince was ‘receiving all the great nobles at his lever, wearing their decorations’, recalled the Comte de Damas, ‘while he sat in the middle of the circle with his hair unbound and a great dressing gown around him with no britches underneath.’ In the midst of this Asiatic scene, the Empress’s valet de chambre appeared and whispered in the Prince’s ear: ‘he quickly wrapped his dressing gown more closely round him, dismissed everyone with a bow of farewell, and, disappearing through the door that led to the privy apartments, presented himself to the Empress’.26 She had already been awake for about five hours.

  He might then decide to get dressed – or not. Potemkin adored shocking everyone, thought Ligne, so he affected ‘the most attractive or the most repulsive manners’. He enjoyed dressing up and down. On formal occasions, no one was more richly clothed than Potemkin, who adopted ‘the style and manners of a grand seigneur at Louis XIV’s court’. When he died, the clothes in his palace were listed: there were epaulettes set with rubies worth 40,000 roubles and diamond buttons worth 62,000 roubles, and he always wore his diamond-set portrait of the Empress worth 31,000 roubles. He had a hat so heavy with jewels that only an adjutant could bear it, worth 40,000 roubles. Even the garters for his stockings were worth 5,000 roubles. His full-dress wardrobe was worth 276,000–283,000 roubles. Yet he was often seen ‘hair loose, in dressing gown and pantaloons, lying on a sofa’. He also favoured furs – the Prince was ‘unable to exist without furs; always without drawers in his shirt – or in rich regimentals embroidered on all the seams’.27 Foreigners implied that a man in a dressing gown was obviously not working, but this was not so: wearing wraps or regimentals, Potemkin usually worked extremely hard.

  When Ségur arrived in Petersburg, Serenissimus appalled the French Ambassador by receiving him in his fur wrap. So Ségur invited Potemkin to dinner and Ségur greeted him in the same garb, which the Prince enjoyed immensely – though only a friend of Marie-Antoinette could have got away with it. There was political method in this sartorial madness: at a time when the ritual of Catherine’s Court was getting richer, more stratified, the courtiers competed to follow etiquette while dressing as ostentatiously as possible. Catherine’s favourites were always keenest to display their prosperity and power in lace, feathers and diamonds. Favourites used dress to symbolize their affluence and influence.28 Potemkin’s shaggy furs announced that he was no mere favourite. It emphasized his superiority: he was above the Court. He was the imperial consort.

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  The Prince had now been up for a few hours, reviewing papers with Popov, receiving petitioners and meeting the Empress. But there were days when he was too depressed to get out of bed at all. Once he summoned Ségur to his bedroom, explaining that ‘depression had prevented him from getting up or dressing…’. Harris believed that his illnesses arose solely from ‘his singular manner of living’.29 Serenissimus certainly lived on his nerves. The life of a favourite, let alone a secret consort, was extremely stressful, for he was the man to destroy and he had to defend himself against all comers.*2 The work of a chief minister, in an era when states were expanding so fast, but the bureaucracies had not caught up, was debilitating – no wonder leaders like Pitt and Potemkin died at the ages of forty-six and fifty-two.30

  Potemkin had to be doing something with his hands and mouth, so he was either ‘gnawing his nails or apples and turnips’. He even bit his nails in the company of monarchs, a winning trait.31 But he overdid it and often suffered from infected hangnail. Catherine saw it as just another part of his unique charm.32 When Grand Duke Alexander was born, the Empress joked that ‘he chewed his nails just like Prince Potemkin’.33

  His moods were ever changing – from ‘distrust, to confidence, to jealousy or to gratitude, to ill-humour or pleasantness’, recalled Ligne. Crises or bursts of work were usually followed by bouts of illness, which afflicted other politicians such as Sir Robert Walpole, whose feverish attacks always struck after anxiety was eased by success. These were partly the result of the malarial fevers he contracted in 1772 and 1783. The exhaustion of travelling vast distances at high speed, along with tireless inspections, political tension, heat and cold, and bad water, was enough to make anyone ill: indeed the other most widely and swiftly travelled Russian leader, Peter the Great, whom Potemkin in some ways resembled, was constantly ill with fevers on his journeys. The Prince’s need to bestride Russia made his life much harder because he almost literally had to be in two places at once.

  His temperament was abnormally turbulent, swinging from wild exuberance to the depths of depression in moments. ‘On some occasions, he was insouciant to the point of immobility and on others capable of putting forth incredible exertions.’ When he was depressed, he brooded silently and often felt desperate, even frantic. Twenty adjutants were summoned, then he would not speak to them. Sometimes he did not speak for hours. ‘I sat next to Prince Potemkin at dinner,’ wrote Lady Craven, ‘but except for asking me to eat and drink, I cannot say I heard the sound of his voice.’34

  He may have been cyclothymic, even manic–depressive, swerving between lows of depression, inactivity and despair on one hand, and hypomania, a whirl of energy, elation and activity, on the other. He was frequently described as manic, and his euphoria, intense loquacity, insomnia, wild spending of money and hypersexuality were all characteristics of cyclothymic behaviour. But so was ‘the intense creativity’ that enabled him to do several things at once and, during his periods of activity, to do much more than a normal person could. His excessive optimism was often self-fulfilling. It also contributed to the aura of se
ductiveness and sexual enjoyment that made him so attractive. Such characters are difficult to live with – but are often talented.*3 They sometimes possess outstanding powers of leadership, precisely because they suffer from this manic condition.35

  People who knew Potemkin admired his ‘agile imagination’ but attacked his fickleness. ‘Nobody thought out a plan more swiftly, carried it out more slowly and abandoned it more easily,’36 said Ségur, an attitude that is disproved by the scale of his actual achievements. But that was certainly the impression Potemkin gave. Ligne was nearer than truth when he said Serenissimus ‘looks idle and is always busy’.

  He was quite capable of doing many things at once: when Ségur visited him to help the French merchant Antoine in Kherson, he told the diplomat to read his memorandum aloud. But Ségur was ‘greatly surprised to see the Prince beckon into the room one after another, and give orders to a priest, an embroiderer, a secretary and a milliner’. The Frenchman was annoyed. Potemkin ‘smiled and said he had heard everything quite well’. Ségur was not convinced, until three weeks later Antoine wrote from Kherson to say that every request had been fulfilled by the Prince. Ségur went round to Potemkin’s to apologize: ‘As soon as he caught sight of me he flung his arms open and came towards me saying, “Well batushka did I not listen to you?…Do you still think I can’t do several things simultaneously and are you still going to be put out with me?’ ”37 But he worked when he wanted and if he wanted.

  If he was in a state of depressive collapse or just relaxing, no papers were signed and part of Russian government came to a halt. The secretaries in his Chancellery were frustrated, so one bright spark, who was nicknamed ‘the Hen’, probably for his busy-body bustle, boasted he could get them signed. Finding the Prince, the Hen explained how necessary it was to sign the papers. ‘Ah! You’ve come to the point. I have free time’ – and Potemkin tenderly took the boy to his study and signed everything. The secretary boasted of his achievement back in the Chancellery. But when the office began to process the papers, the unfortunate official discovered that Potemkin had signed every one, ‘Cock, Cockerel, Hen.’38 He could be shamelessly childish.

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  Every day, he studiously ignored and disdained the many of the princes, generals and ambassadors who crowded his anterooms to win his favour. Lying half naked and fur-wrapped on his divan, he might summon one of them with his finger.39 Diplomats so feared being made to look silly that they hid in their carriages outside the Palace and sent in their underlings to wait until Potemkin deigned to receive them.40

  Serenissimus would not tolerate sycophancy and devised appropriate punishments to tease those who practised it, but he respected and rewarded courage. ‘I’m bored with these nasty people,’ he grumbled one day. The witty but sycophantic writer Denis von Vizin saw his opportunity: ‘Why do you let such scoundrels in? You should order them barred.’

  ‘Really?’ said the Prince. ‘I’ll do it tomorrow.’ The next day, von Vizin arrived at the Palace, satisfied at having expelled his rivals from the Prince’s circle. The Guards would not admit him.

  ‘There must be some mistake,’ said von Vizin.

  ‘No,’ replied the doorman. ‘I know you, and His Highness ordered me not to admit you, thanks to your own advice yesterday.’41

  A general, kept waiting for hours in the antechamber, shouted that he would not be treated ‘like a corporal’ and demanded to be received, whatever the Prince was doing. Potemkin had him shown into his office. When the general came in, the Prince got up, an unheard-of honour. ‘Your Highness, please!’, said the general.

  ‘I’m on my way to the lavatory,’ laughed the Prince.*4

  When an impoverished old colonel burst into his office to ask for a pension, Potemkin snapped, ‘Get him out of here.’ An adjutant approached the Colonel, who punched him and went on hitting him even on the floor. Potemkin ran over, pulled them apart and led the veteran into his apartments. The Colonel received a new job, travel expenses and a bonus.42

  Serenissimus feared no one and felt that, like a tsar, he was on a different level from the aristocracy: indeed, he identified much more with the Russian peasant or the European cosmopolitan than the Russian nobleman. At Mogilev, when he caught a provincial governor cheating at faro, he grabbed him by the collar and cuffed him. He once struck a grand seigneur, a Volkonsky, because he clapped at one of Potemkin’s jokes. ‘What, you applaud me as if I was a jester.’ Slap! ‘There…that’s the way to treat this sort of scoundrel.’ The chastized nobleman kept away from the Prince’s table for a week but was soon back.43

  Midday

  Once the audiences were over, Popov reappeared with piles of papers to sign. Potemkin shared with Kaunitz the distinction of being Europe’s most flamboyant hypochondriac: he always saw his doctors while going over state papers. ‘A torrent of correspondence fell on Prince Potemkin and I don’t know how he could be so patient with all the idiots who attack him everywhere,’ observed Miranda.44 These varied from German princes and Russian widows to Greek pirates and Italian cardinals. All used the word ‘importune’ in their requests, which were often requesting lands in the south or the opportunity to serve in the army. One has the impression that Potemkin was in correspondence with virtually every prince in the Holy Roman Empire, which he called ‘the archipelago of princes’. Even kings apologized if their letters were too long. ‘I know by experience’, wrote King Stanislas-Augustus of Poland, ‘how one doesn’t like long letters when one is busy…’.

  He received many ludicrous letters of over-the-top flattery such as the Samgrass-like Professor Bataille who sent an ode to Catherine adding: ‘Could I, Monseigneur, write without a mention of Your Highness? Deign you, Monseigneur, to cast a glance on my work.’45 Potemkin’s fifty-strong perambulant Chancellery answered many of these, but he was also notorious for forgetting to reply to eminent people like the King of Sweden: Field-Marshal Loudon, an Austrianized Scotsman, complained to Joseph II that ‘Prince Potemkin had had the politeness not to reply to two letters he had sent him.’

  There were also tragic requests for help from unfortunates of all ranks which give a glimpse of life in that time: a male protégé of Potemkin’s thanked him for his help in marrying one of the Naryshkin girls, who suddenly revealed that she had 20,000 roubles of debts, obviously from playing cards, probably faro, the heroin addiction of its day. Some were from aristocrats in trouble like the Princess Bariatinskaya, who wrote from Turin, ‘I struggle against the horrors of misery,’ but ‘you alone my Prince can make a woman happy who has been unhappy all her life’. Another German count, dismissed by the Empress, wrote, ‘I can no longer have the means to sustain a wife always ill, a girl of 14, sons…’. An ordinary man wrote: ‘I beg you to have pity on us…’.46 But, being Potemkin, there was always some exotica: one mysterious correspondent was Elias Abaise, soi-disant Prince of Palestina, who confessed, ‘I am forced by misery lacking so greatly money, credit and all the basic necessities, to implore the high protection and benevolence of Your Highness…and to aid my departure…winter is coming.’ It was signed in Arabic. Was this a Wandering Jew or Arab from the Ottoman province of Palestine? If so, what was he doing in St Petersburg in August 1780? And would Potemkin help him? ‘Your Highness’, reads the next letter, ‘has had the favour to give me gracious help.’47

  The Prince wrote many replies himself, in his scratchy, slanted hand, in Russian or French, but Popov was so trusted that the Prince told him his wishes and the secretary sent them out in his own name. Potemkin was extremely tolerant towards his subordinates48 – even when they were making a mess of things. First he gave them their orders again. If tolerance did not work, he tried biting, if droll, sarcasm. When Admiral Voinovich made excuses after a ship ran aground, the Prince replied: ‘I am very pleased to learn the ship Alexander is wedged off a sandbar but it would’ve been better not to have run into it…I like your view that this accident
will make officers more diligent but I wish and demand diligence without accidents…And if Captain Baronov is such an experienced seaman I would be more convinced…if he ran Turkish ships on to sandbars and not his own.’49

  Before dinner, the Prince liked to be alone for an hour. It was then that he came up with the richness of political ideas that distinguished him from Catherine’s other advisers. Popov and his secretaries seldom interrupted him. This was a golden rule: one secretary who did not get the message was actually sacked for speaking. Potemkin would call for his jewels.

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  Jewels calmed the Prince as much as music. He sat there with a little saw, some silver and a box of diamonds.50 Sometimes visitors noticed him sitting alone like a giant child, playing with them, pouring them from hand to hand, making them into patterns and drawings until he had worked out the problem.51

  He showered his nieces with diamonds. Vigée Lebrun said that Skavronskaya’s jewellery box in Naples was the richest she had ever seen. Ligne marvelled that he had a 100,000 rouble fleece of diamonds in his collection.52 Jewels were another good way to win favour. ‘I send you a little red ruby and bigger blue ruby,’53 wrote Sashenka’s husband, Branicki, in one of his shockingly obsequious letters. Potemkin’s correspondence with his jewellers showed his impatient enthusiasm. ‘I’m sending Your Highness the ruby of St Catherine,’ wrote Alexis Deuza, probably a Greek craftsman working in Potemkin’s stone-cutting fabrick at Ozerki, ‘It’s not as fine as I’d like, to perfect this sort of work, one needs a cylinder and the one Your Highness ordered won’t be ready for ten…days and I did not think I should wait. It seems Your Highness wants it urgently.’54 His spending reveals his passionate pursuit of brilliants: he owed a procession of merchants money for ‘diamonds, gems, amethyst, topaz and aquamarine, pearls’.55 Everything had to be exquisite and beautiful. Here is a typical bill from Duval, a French jeweller, in February 1784: