A little boy, the ten-year-old son of Potemkin’s valet, witnessed a row and reconciliation that sound like any couple: the Prince banged the table and left the room slamming the door so hard that the glasses jumped. Catherine burst into tears. Then she noticed the alarmed child, who was no doubt wishing he was elsewhere. She smiled through her tears and gesturing at the absent Potemkin told the boy, ‘Go and see how he is.’ So the child obediently ran along to Serenissimus’ apartments and found him sitting at his desk in the study.
‘So it’s she who sent you?’, asked the Prince.
Yes, replied the child, with the open-hearted courage of the innocent; maybe Serenissimus should go and comfort Her Imperial Majesty because she was crying and apologizing.
‘Let her blub!’, said Potemkin callously – but he was too soft-hearted to leave her for long. A few minutes later, he calmed down and went to make friends again.38 Such was their personal and political relationship towards the end of their lives.
‘Obstinacy’, recorded Catherine’s secretary on 7 April, ‘leads to new war.’ But now the prospect of a war on several fronts – since there was every likelihood that Poland and Sweden would join England, Prussia and Turkey – made Catherine blink. She told her staff that there would no more ‘beer and porter’ – English products – but on 9 April Potemkin and Bezborodko drafted a memorandum to appease Frederick William enough to distract him from the war. ‘How can our recruits fight Englishmen?’, Potemkin had grumbled. ‘Hasn’t Swedish cannon-fire tired [anyone] here?’ Catherine was indeed tired of shooting: she buckled and agreed secretly to renew the old Prussian treaty, encourage Poland to agree to the cession of Thorn and Danzig to Prussia, and make peace with the Porte, gaining Ochakov and its hinterland.39 But they prepared for war. ‘You’ll have news of me if they attack on land or sea,’ Catherine wrote to a friend in Berlin, deliberately en clair, and offering no concessions.40
The partners did not know that the coalition was collapsing. Before Catherine’s proposal reached Berlin, the British faltered. Pitt’s Government technically won the three Parliamentary debates on the Ochakov Crisis – but lost the argument. On 18/29 March, Charles James Fox scuppered the weak arguments for the naval expedition against Russia with a rousing speech, asking what British interests were at stake in Ochakov, while Edmund Burke attacked Pitt for protecting the Turks – ‘a horde of barbaric Asiatics’. Catherine’s envoy, Simon Vorontsov, rallied the Russian ‘lobby’ of merchants, from Leeds to London, and primed his own armament of hacks. Ink and paper proved mightier than Prussian steel and British gunpowder. Even the navy was against it: Horatio Nelson could not see ‘how we are to get at her fleet. Narrow seas and no friendly ports are bad things.’ Within days, ‘no war with Russia!’ was daubed on walls all over the Kingdom. Cabinet support waned. On 5/16 April, Pitt withdrew his ultimatum and despatched a secret emissary, William Fawkener, to Petersburg to find a way out of the débâcle that almost cost him his place.41
The Prince and Empress were jubilant. Catherine celebrated by placing Fox’s statue in her Cameron Galley between Demosthenes and Cicero. Potemkin celebrated by happily boasting to the humiliated British envoy, Charles Whitworth, that he and Catherine were ‘the spoilt children of Providence’. The Ochakov Crisis posed the Eastern Question to the British for the first time, but they were not yet interested in the survival of ‘the sick man of Europe’. Jingo would have to wait. Potemkin had been wrong to force Catherine to negotiate – but only with hindsight. His advice had been sensible. They had just been fortunate. The Prince believed that he and the Empress shared a lucky star: ‘in order to be successful’, he told the Englishman, ‘they only have to desire it’.42
His masquerade ball, which he had been rehearsing day and night since his return, was to mark Russian triumph over Turks, Prussians and Britons – Catherine and Potemkin’s defiant celebration of Providence. His servants galloped around St Petersburg delivering this invitation:*2
The General–Field-Marshal Prince Potemkin of Taurida
invites you to render him the honour of coming
on Monday, 28th April at six o’clock
to his palace on Horse-Guards
to the masquerade which will be favoured by the presence of
Her Imperial Majesty and Their Imperial Highnesses.43
Skip Notes
*1 It was no coincidence that the first and most vicious anti-Potemkin biography, written even before Helbig, Panslavin Fürst der Finsternis (Panslavin Prince of Darkness) was by a Freemason, J. F. E. Albrecht, probably a Rosicrucian. Mystical Freemasonry was surprisingly fashionable among the parodomaniacs of Prussia: the fat, dull and dim Frederick William of Prussia supposedly spent evenings communicating with the spirits of Marcus Aurelius, Leibniz and the Great Elector, from whom he hoped to learn greatness. If so, the lessons failed.
*2 The author found what is probably the sole surviving copy of this card, addressed to Countess Osterman, in the archives of the Odessa State Local History Museum.
32
CARNIVAL AND CRISIS
That Marshal Prince Potemkin gave us a superb party yesterday at which I stayed from seven in the evening until two in the morning when I went home…Now I am writing to you to improve my headache.
Catherine II to Baron Grimm
At 7 p.m. on 28 April 1791, the imperial coach arrived before the Classical colonnade of the Prince’s palace on Horse-Guards, which was illuminated with hundreds of torches. The Empress, wearing a full-length long-sleeved Russian dress with a rich diadem, dismounted slowly in the rain. Potemkin stepped forward to greet her. He wore a scarlet tailcoat and, tossed over his shoulders, a gold and black lace cloak, ornamented with diamonds. He was covered with ‘as many diamonds as a man could possibly wear’.1 Behind him, an adjutant held a pillow that bore his hat, which was so weighed down with diamonds that it could barely be worn. Potemkin moved towards her through two lines of footmen, wearing their master’s livery of pale-yellow with blue and silver. Each bore a candelabrum. Bathed in this imperial effulgence, Potemkin knelt on one knee before Catherine. She brought him to his feet. He took her hand.
There was a dull roar as 5,000 members of the public, more interested in eating than in observing history, rushed forward to feast on tables of free food and drink. There were swings, roundabouts and even shops where people were given costumes, but now they wanted the food. The Prince had ordered that it should be laid out after the Empress had entered. But a steward mistook a courtier’s carriage and started the feast too early. There was almost a riot. For a second, Catherine, nervous of the people as the French Revolution dismantled the Bourbon monarchy, thought ‘the honourable public’ were stampeding. She was relieved to see they were simply filling their pockets with food to take home.2
The Prince led his Empress towards the door of the Palace, later named the Taurida, which set a new standard for Classical simplicity and grandeur. ‘All was gigantic.’ That was its clear message: the façade was plain and colossal, designed by the architect Ivan Starov to symbolize Potemkin’s power and splendour. Two long wings led out from a domed portico supported by six Doric columns. Inside, the couple entered an anteroom and walked along a receiving line that led into the Cupola or Colonnade Hall, where the Grand Duke Paul and his wife along with 3,000 guests awaited Catherine in their costumes.
‘Imagine it if you can!’, Catherine dared Grimm. The Hall was the biggest in Europe – 21 metres high, its oval shape was 74.5 metres long and 14.9 metres wide, supported by two rows of thirty-six Ionic columns – the ‘poetry of columns’ that dwarfed the thousands of guests. (It could easily hold 5,000 people.) The floors were inlaid with precious woods and decorated with ‘astonishingly huge’ white marble vases, the ceilings hung with multi-tiered chandeliers of black crystal – treasures bought from the Duchess of Kingston. At each end was a double row of French windows.3 The entire Hall was so bright it almost appeared
to be on fire, illuminated by the massive chandeliers and fifty-six smaller ones each with sixteen candles. Five thousand torches burned. The wind orchestra of 300 musicians and an organ, accompanied by choirs – all hidden in the two galleries – burst into a concert of specially written choral pieces.
Straight ahead of her, the Empress could not miss the famous Winter Garden. This too was the biggest in Europe, for it was the same size again as the rest of a palace that covered 650,700 square feet. The huge glass hall was supported by columns in the form of palm-trees which contained warm water pipes. This was William Gould’s chef d’oeuvre – an organized jungle of exotic plants, ‘flowers, hyacinths and narcissuses, myrtles, orange trees in plenty’ – where the walls were all mirrors that concealed more immense stoves.*1 Lamps and diamonds were hidden in mock bunches of grapes, clusters of pears and pineapples so that everything seemed alight. Silver and scarlet fishes swam in glass globes. The cupola was painted like the sky. Paths and little hillocks crisscrossed this arbour, leading to statues of goddesses. Its most striking effect was its ‘infinite perspective’, for Catherine could see straight through the brightness of the Colonnade Hall into the tropical lightness of the Winter Garden and, further, through its glass walls into the English Garden outside, where its ‘sanded paths wind, hills rise up, valleys fall away, cuttings open groves, ponds sparkle’,4 its follies and hills, still snow-covered, rolling all the way down to the Neva. The tropical forest and the snowy hills – which was real?
In the midst of the Winter Garden stood a temple to the Empress on a diamond-studded pyramid. At the feet of Shubin’s statue of Catherine the Legislatrix, a placard from Potemkin read: ‘To the Mother of the Motherland and my benefactress’.5 The Prince escorted Catherine to the left of the Colonnade Hall on to a raised dais, covered in Persian carpets, facing the garden. Out of the tropical gardens came two quadrilles, each of twenty-four children, ‘the most beautiful in St Petersburg’ according to Catherine, dressed in costumes of sky blue and pink, and covered from head to foot in ‘all the jewels of the town and suburbs’ – the boys in Spanish garb, the girls in Greek. Grand Duke Alexander, the future Emperor and vanquisher of Napoleon, danced a complicated ballet in the first quadrille, choreographed by Le Picq, the celebrated dancemaster. Grand Duke Constantine danced in the second. ‘It’s impossible’, wrote Catherine afterwards, ‘to see anything more gorgeous, more varied or more brilliant’. Then Le Picq himself danced a solo.
As darkness fell, Potemkin conducted the imperial family, followed by the entire party, into the Gobelins Room, where the tapestries told the story of Esther. In the midst of sofas and chairs stood a Potemkinian wonder: a lifesized gold elephant, covered in emeralds and rubies, with a clock concealed in its base, ridden by a blackamoor mahout in Persian silks who gave a signal at which curtains were raised to reveal a stage and amphitheatre with boxes. Two French comedies and a ballet were followed by a procession of all the peoples of the Empire, including captured Ottoman pashas from Ismail, in the Asiatic splendour of their national dress. While guests watched the show, servants in the other halls were lighting a further 140,000 lamps and 20,000 wax candles. When the Empress returned, the Colonnade Hall was bathed in a blaze of light.
The Prince took Catherine by the hand to the Winter Garden. When they stood before the statue in the temple, he again fell to his knees and thanked the Empress. She raised him to his feet and kissed him tenderly on the forehead: she thanked him for his deeds and devotion. Derzhavin’s ‘Ode’ to Potemkin’s victories was recited: ‘Thunder of victory, ring! Brave Rus, rejoice!’6
Potemkin signalled the orchestra. The ball began at last. Catherine played cards with her daughter-in-law in the Gobelins Room, then went to rest. Just as he had apartments in her palaces, so Catherine had a bedroom in his. Their rooms here showed their cosy intimacy together. Both loved monumental palaces and tiny bedrooms: her bedroom was in Potemkin’s wing and its ceiling was decorated with Classical symbols of voluptuousness, goats and shepherds. There was a secret door, concealed behind a rug hung on the wall, into Potemkin’s anteroom, bedroom and study, so that they could enter each other’s rooms. His bedroom was simple, snug and light, with walls of plain silk.*2 (Sometimes, when he was in residence, she is said to have stayed; she certainly held dinners there.)7
At midnight, Catherine returned for the supper in such high spirits that the forty-eight children returned to dance their quadrilles all over again. The Empress’s table, placed where the orchestra in the amphitheatre had played, was covered in gold. Forty-eight magnates sat down around her. Fourteen tables surrounded hers. There were other tables and buffets in different halls. Each was illuminated by a ball of white and blue glass. On one table, a huge silver goblet stood between two more of the Duchess of Kingston’s gargantuan vases. While waiters in Potemkin’s livery served, the Prince stood behind the Empress’s chair, looming over her like a diamond-glinting Cyclops, and served her himself until she insisted he sit down and join her. After dinner, there were more concerts and the ball began again. At 2 a.m., four hours after she usually left balls, the Empress rose to leave. The Prince of Taurida led her out as he had led her in.
In the vestibule, Serenissimus fell to his knees – the ritual submission of this scarlet-coated giant before his empress, in front of the great of the Empire and the cabinets of Europe. He had had her bedroom prepared if she wished to stay. It was unlikely, but he wanted to be able to offer it. She was too tired to stay any longer. The orchestra was primed with two different airs – one if the Empress stayed, and one if she left. If she was leaving, Potemkin had arranged to put his hand on his heart, and, when he did, the orchestra burst into the melancholic bars of a lover’s lament, written, long before, by the Prince himself. ‘The only thing that matters in the world’, went the cantata, ‘is you.’ The magnificence of the ball, the sadness of the song and the sight of this unwieldy one-eyed giant on his knees touched Catherine. The partners felt old and had loved each other for a very long time. Both of them burst into tears. He kissed her hand again and again, and they sobbed together before she climbed into her carriage and drove away.8
This looked like a parting. It is often interpreted as a premonition of Potemkin’s death. So much of this last stay in St Petersburg is distorted by hindsight.*3 But it was a most emotional night, the climax of their adventure together. Potemkin lingered among the debris of the party, touched by melancholy and nostalgia, almost in a trance.
When he came to say goodbye to one lady who knew him well – Countess Natalia Zakrevskaya – she noticed his air of sadness. Her heart went out to him. She knew him well enough to say: ‘I don’t know what will become of you. You are younger than the Sovereign. You’ll outlive her: what will become of you then? You would never agree to be the second man.’ Potemkin contemplated this dreamily: ‘Don’t worry. I’ll die before the Sovereign. I’ll die soon.’ She never saw him again.9
‘That fête was magnificent,’ wrote Stedingk, who was there, ‘and no other man could have given it.’10 But it had been irresponsibly extravagant – Potemkin supposedly spent between 150,000 and 500,000 roubles during those three months. Everyone knew that the Treasury was paying for the ball as it paid all his bills, but it was soon widely believed that, as Stedingk reported, ‘this prodigality displeases the Empress’.
Catherine was so overexcited when she got home that night that she could not sleep. She got over her ‘little headache’ by writing to Grimm to rave about the ‘fête superbe’ with the enthusiasm of a young girl the morning after her début. She even drew a map to show Grimm where she sat and told him how late she stayed: so much for her disapproval! Then she ‘spun’ Grimm the political purpose of what was clearly a joint Catherine–Potemkin production: ‘There you are, Monsieur, that is how, in the midst of trouble and war and the menaces of dictators [she meant Frederick William of Prussia], we conduct ourselves in Petersburg.’ There is no evidence that she grumbled about Potemkin’s
expenditure, colossal and excessive though it was, but she probably did. Like all of us, she may well have got a shock when she received the bill.
Just as she was writing to Grimm, a letter arrived bringing dramatic Polish news that meant that Potemkin would have to stay in Petersburg much longer.
* * *
—
On 22 April/3 May 1791, the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania had adopted a new constitution amid tumultuous scenes in the Sejm: one deputy even drew his sword in mid-debate and threatened to kill his son like Abraham and Isaac. Poland’s ‘May the Third’ Revolution created a hereditary monarchy, in which the succession was to be offered to the Elector of Saxony or his daughter, with a strong executive, almost combining the powers of the English Crown and American presidency, and an army. Warsaw celebrated with the slogan ‘The King with the Nation’. Those who had thought Poland was beyond help were impressed. ‘Happy people,’ wrote Burke, ‘happy prince.’
The timing was useful for the Russians but unfortunate for the Poles, because the Anglo-Prussian coalition was about to free Russia’s hands to deal with their awkward and recalcitrant satellite. Catherine shared Potemkin’s disgust for the French Revolution: Republicanism was ‘a sickness of the mind’ she declared, and she was already cracking down on radical ideas in Russia itself. The Polish Revolution was actually politically conservative, strengthening, not weakening, the monarchy, decreasing, not increasing, the franchise. But Catherine chose to regard it as a Jacobin extension of the French Revolution into her sphere of influence: ‘We’re perfectly prepared,’ Catherine signed off ominously to Grimm, ‘and unfortunately, we don’t yield to the very devil himself!’11
Potemkin, who was receiving almost daily reports from Bulgakov, Branicki and spies in Warsaw, was watching Poland closely too. He did not like what he saw12 and resolved to take supreme control of Polish policy and put his secret plans into action. He had not yet succeeded in budging Zubov but he probably felt that an Ottoman peace and a Polish success would overpower his critics. So he stayed much longer than he had agreed with Catherine, to discuss Poland, which severely strained their partnership. But, before they could turn on Poland, they had to fight the Turks to a settlement and negotiate their way out of the Ochakov Crisis with Pitt’s emissary, Fawkener, who was about to arrive.
Catherine the Great & Potemkin Page 72