The truth was that, before his departure, Apraksin had frequently visited the grand duchess and had explained to her that the poor state of the Russian army made a winter campaign against Prussia inadvisable and that it would be better to delay his campaign. These conversations were not the stuff of treason; Apraksin had had similar conversations with the empress, with Bestuzhev, and even with foreign ambassadors. The difference was that Catherine had been commanded by the empress to avoid involvement in political and diplomatic affairs. Perhaps the grand duchess had ignored this command and discussed the matter with Hanbury-Williams, but, if so, she did it unaware that she was speaking not just to her intimate English friend but to someone who would pass along her words to the king of Prussia.
32
Poniatowski
STANISLAUS PONIATOWSKI, the young Polish nobleman to whom Catherine had been introduced on the night she met Sir Charles Hanbury-Williams, was one of the adornments of the European aristocracy. His mother was a daughter of the Czartoryskis, one of Poland’s great families. She had married a Poniatowski, and Stanislaus was her youngest son. The young man was adored by his mother and patronized by her brothers, his uncles, two of the most powerful men in Poland. Politically, the family hoped, with Russian support, to end the rule of the elected king, Augustus III, a Saxon, and establish a native Polish dynasty.*
At eighteen, Stanislaus had begun touring the capitals of Europe, accompanied by a retinue of servants. He carryied with him an impressive portfolio of introductions. In Paris, he was presented to Louis XV and Madame de Pompadour; in London to George II. He had already met Charles Hanbury-Williams, and when the diplomat was appointed English ambassador to Russia, he invited Stanislaus to accompany him as his secretary. The young man’s mother and uncles were pleased; the offer provided the Czartoryskis a means of strengthening their own diplomatic footing in St. Petersburg, and simultaneously gave Stanislaus a chance to begin his public career. Once in the Russian capital, Hanbury-Williams gave his young secretary complete confidence: “He let me read the most secret despatches and code and decode them,” said Stanislaus. Sir Charles rented a mansion on the bank of the Neva River to use as an embassy, and the two men lived together, sharing a view across the water of the Peter and Paul Fortress and its golden four-hundred-foot cathedral spire.
Stanislaus Poniatowski, three years younger than Catherine, could not compete in male beauty with Sergei Saltykov. He was short, his face heart-shaped, his eyes shortsighted and hazel. He had prominent eyebrows and a tapering chin, but he spoke six languages, his charm and conversation made him welcome everywhere, and, at twenty-three, he was a model of the young, sophisticated European aristocrat. He was the first of this type to stand before Catherine, and he represented in person the brilliant world for which the writings of Madame de Sévigné and Voltaire had stimulated her taste. He spoke in the language of the Enlightenment, could talk playfully on abstract questions, be dreamily romantic one day and childishly frivolous the next. Catherine was intrigued. Two qualities, however, Stanislaus lacked. There was little originality and no real gravitas in this young Pole, deficiencies that Catherine came to recognize and accept. In fact, no one recognized these limitations better than Stanislaus himself. In his memoirs he confessed:
An excellent education enables me to conceal my mental defects, so that many people expect more from me than I am able to give. I have sufficient wit to take part in any conversation, but not enough to converse long and in detail on any one subject. I have a natural penchant for the arts. My indolence, however, prevents me from going as far as I should like to go, either in the arts or sciences. I work either overmuch or not at all. I can judge very well of affairs. I can see at once the faults of a plan or the faults of those who propose it, but I am much in need of good counsel in order to carry out any plans of my own.
For a man of his sophistication, he was, in many respects, extraordinarily innocent. He had promised his mother not to drink wine or spirits, not to gamble, and not to marry before the age of thirty. Further, by his own account, Stanislaus had another singularity, odd enough in a young man just come from social triumph in Paris and other European capitals:
A severe education had kept me out of all vulgar debauchery. An ambition of winning and holding a place in high life had stood by me in my travels and a concourse of singular circumstances in the liaisons that I had barely entered upon, had seemed expressly to reserve me for her who has disposed of all my destiny.
In a word, he came to Catherine a virgin.
Poniatowski had other qualities appealing to a proud woman who had been rejected and discarded. His devotion showed her that she could inspire more than simple lust. He expressed admiration not merely for her title and beauty but also for Catherine’s mind and temperament, which both he and she recognized as superior to his own. He was affectionate, attentive, discreet, and faithful. He taught Catherine to know contentment and security as well as passion in love. He became a part of her process of healing.
At the beginning of this love affair, Catherine had three allies. One was Hanbury-Williams; the others were Bestuzhev and Lev Naryshkin. The chancellor made clear that he was willing to befriend Poniatowski on Catherine’s behalf. Naryshkin quickly stepped into the same role of friend, sponsor, and guide for the new favorite that he had performed during Catherine’s affair with Saltykov. When Lev was in bed with fever, he sent Catherine several elegantly written letters. The subjects were trivial—pleas for fruit and preserves—but they were written with a style that quickly told Catherine that Lev himself was not the author. Later, Lev admitted that the letters were written by his new friend Count Poniatowski. Catherine realized that, for all his travels and apparent sophistication, Stanislaus was still a shy, sentimental young man. But he was Polish and romantic, and here was a young woman isolated and trapped in a miserable marriage. It was enough to capture him.
This is how Catherine appeared in his eyes :
She was twenty-five, that perfect moment when a woman who has any claim to beauty is at her loveliest. She had black hair, a complexion of dazzling whiteness, large, round, blue, expressive eyes, long, dark eyelashes, a Grecian nose, a mouth that seemed to ask for kisses, perfect shoulders, arms, and hands, a tall, slim figure, and a bearing which was graceful, supple, and yet of the most dignified nobility, a soft and agreeable voice, and a laugh as merry as her temperament. One moment she would be reveling in the wildest and most childish of games; a little later she would be seated at her desk, coping with the most complicated affairs of finance and politics.
Several months were to pass before the unpracticed lover gathered sufficient courage to act. Even then, but for the persistence of his new friend Lev, the reluctant suitor might have been content to worship from a distance. Eventually, however, Lev deliberately placed Stanislaus in a situation from which the Pole could not retreat without risking embarrassment to the grand duchess. Unaware of what had been arranged, he was led to the door to her private apartment. The door was ajar. Catherine was waiting inside. Years later, Poniatowski remembered, “I cannot deny myself the pleasure of recalling the clothes I found her in that day: a little gown of white satin with a light trimming of lace, threaded with a pink ribbon for its only ornament.” From that moment, Poniatowski later wrote, “my whole life was devoted to her.”
Catherine’s new lover proved to be free of the smiling self-confidence that had led her to capitulate to Saltykov. In this matter, Catherine was dealing with a boy—charming, well traveled, and well spoken, but still a boy. She knew what needed to be done, and, once his hesitation was overcome, she guided the handsome, virginal Pole into manhood.
33
A Dead Rat, an Absent Lover, and a Risky Proposal
REMARKABLE DIPLOMATIC CHANGES were occurring in Europe, but within the small, closed world of Catherine and Peter’s marriage, the arrangements and antagonisms that had marked their lives for ten years continued. Catherine had found a new, supportive lover in Stanislaus Poniatow
ski; Peter ricocheted among Catherine’s maids of honor, making first one and then another the object of his attention. The married couple had extravagantly different tastes and enthusiasms: Peter’s were soldiers, dogs, and drink; Catherine’s were reading, conversation, dancing, and riding.
In the winter of 1755, most of Peter’s Holstein soldiers had been sent home, and Catherine and Peter returned from Oranienbaum to St. Petersburg to resume their separate lives. With the city deep in snow and the Neva River locked under a sheet of ice, Peter’s military obsession moved indoors. His soldiers now were toys, made of wood, lead, papier-mâché, and wax. He lined up these figures on so many narrow tables that he could scarcely squeeze between them. Strips of brass with strings attached were nailed to the tables, and when the strings were pulled, the brass strips vibrated and made a noise that, Peter informed Catherine, resembled the rolling fire of musketry. In this room, Peter presided over a daily changing of the guard ceremony in which a fresh detachment of toy soldiers, assigned to mount guard, replaced those who were relieved of duty and removed from the tables. Peter always appeared at this ceremony in full Holstein dress uniform, with top boots, spurs, high collar, and scarf. The servants participating in this exercise were also required to wear Holstein uniforms.
One day when Catherine entered this room, she saw a large dead rat hanging from a model gallows. Appalled, she asked why it was there. Peter explained that the rat had been convicted of a crime that, according to the laws of war, merited the ultimate punishment; therefore, it had been executed by hanging. The rat’s crime was to have climbed over the ramparts of a cardboard fortress standing on a table and eaten two papier-mâché sentries standing watch. One of Peter’s dogs had caught the rat; the culprit had been court-martialed and immediately hanged. Now, Peter declared, it would remain exposed to public gaze for three days as an example. Catherine listened and burst out laughing. Then she apologized and pleaded ignorance of military law. Nevertheless, he was stung by her facetious attitude and began to sulk. Her last word on the matter was that it could be argued on behalf of the rat that it had been hanged without having been heard in its own defense.
During this winter of 1755–56, Catherine become attached to Anna Naryshkina, Lev Naryshkin’s sister-in-law, the wife of his elder brother. Lev was a part of this friendship. “There was no end to his nonsense,” Catherine noted. He acquired the habit of running back and forth between Peter’s rooms and Catherine’s. In order to enter her room, he would meow like a cat at her door. One evening in December, between six and seven, she heard him meowing. He came in, told her that his sister-in-law was ill, and declared, “You ought to go and see her.”
“When?” Catherine asked.
“Tonight,” he said.
“You know that I cannot go out without permission and they would never give me permission to go to her house,” she said.
“I will take you there,” he said.
“Are you mad?” Catherine said. “You would be sent to the fortress and heaven knows what trouble I would be in.”
“But no one will know about it,” Lev said. “I will come for you in an hour or so. The grand duke will be at supper. He will remain at the table for most of the night, and will not get up until he is drunk and ready for bed. To be on the safe side, dress as a man.”
Tired of being alone in her room, Catherine agreed. Lev departed, and, pleading a headache, she went to bed early. Once Madame Vladislavova had retired, Catherine got up, clothed herself as a man, and arranged her hair as best she could. At the appointed time, Lev meowed at her door. They left the palace unnoticed, stepping into his carriage and giggling at their escapade. When they arrived at the house where Lev was living with his brother and sister-in-law, she found—unsurprisingly—that Poniatowski was there. “The evening passed,” Catherine wrote, “in the wildest gaiety. After staying for an hour and a half, I left and returned to the palace without meeting a soul. The next day, at the morning court and the evening ball, we could not look each other in the face without laughing at the folly of the night before.”
A few days later, Lev arranged a reciprocal visit to Catherine’s rooms and escorted his friends into her apartment so skillfully that no suspicion was aroused. The group delighted in these secret gatherings. Through the winter of 1755–56, there were two or three of these every week, first in one house, then in another. “Sometimes at the theater,” Catherine said, “even if in different boxes or in the orchestra, each of us knew without speaking, by certain private signs, where to go. And no one ever made a mistake. But twice I had to return home to the palace on foot.” The happiness of these evenings, Poniatowski’s love, and Bestuzhev’s political support bolstered Catherine’s self-confidence.
Among her own maids of honor, she found occasional opposition, encouraged by Peter’s sometimes flagrant belittling of his wife’s status and qualities. Now officially recognized as Paul’s father, he delighted in playing the untethered male. Singers and dancers, considered by society to be “loose women,” appeared at his private suppers. The woman in whom he showed the most interest was one of Catherine’s maids of honor, Elizabeth Vorontsova, a niece of Bestuzhev’s rival, the vice-chancellor Michael Vorontsov. Placed in Catherine’s entourage at the age of eleven, she was neither particularly intelligent nor pretty. Slightly hunchbacked, with a face scarred by smallpox, she had a fiery temperament and was always ready to laugh, drink, sing, and shout. Although she belonged to one of the oldest families in Russia, it was said that she spat when she spoke, and otherwise behaved “like a servant girl in a house of ill-fame.” Peter’s attachment to her may have grown out of his own sense of inferiority; the grand duke may have concluded that she loved him for himself. At first, Elizabeth Vorontsova was one among many. She had rivals and occasionally she quarreled with Peter, but it was always to Elizabeth that he returned.
At Oranienbaum in the summer of 1756, Catherine’s relationship with some of her maids of honor led to a fierce argument. Feeling that these young women had become openly disrespectful, she went to their apartment and told them that unless they changed their behavior, she would complain to the empress. Some were frightened and wept; others were angry. As soon as Catherine left, they rushed to tell the grand duke. Peter, furious, charged into Catherine’s room. He told his wife that she had become impossible to live with; that every day she became more insufferable; that they were all young women of rank whom she treated as servants; and that if she complained about them to the empress, he would complain to his aunt about her pride, her arrogance, and her bad temper.
Catherine listened. Then she said that he could say whatever he liked about her but if the matter were placed before his aunt, the empress would probably decide that the best solution would be to dismiss from Catherine’s service whichever young women were causing dissension between her nephew and his wife. She said that she was certain that, in order to reestablish peace between the two of them, and to avoid having their quarrels repeatedly dinned into her ears, the empress would take this course. This argument surprised Peter. Imagining that Catherine knew more than he about Elizabeth’s attitude regarding these maids of honor, and that she really might dismiss them over this matter, he softened his tone and said, “Tell me how much you know. Has anyone spoken to her about them?” Catherine replied that if the matter went far enough to reach the empress, she had no doubt that Her Majesty would deal with it in her usual decisive way. Peter paced back and forth, worried. That evening, to warn the women to stop making complaints about her, Catherine told the more sensible of them about the scene with the grand duke and what might happen next.
Catherine cared for Stanislaus Poniatowski—how deeply, she learned, when he was forced, temporarily, to leave her. Poniatowski brought this involuntary departure on himself. He disliked his nominal king, Augustus of Saxony, whose German electorate Frederick of Prussia had invaded, and he constantly belittled Augustus. Some took his attacks as expressions of sympathy for Frederick; they were interpreted this
way by Peter. But it was not just Peter who mistakenly saw Poniatowski as an admirer of Prussia. It was also the Saxon-Polish court, which now implored Elizabeth to send the young man home. Poniatowski had no choice, and in July 1756 he was obliged to depart. Catherine let him go, determined to bring him back.
Two days before Poniatowski left, he came to Oranienbaum, accompanied by Count Horn of Sweden, to say goodbye. The two counts were at Oranienbaum for two days; on the first, Peter was gracious, but on the second, because he had planned a day of drinking at the wedding of one of his huntsmen, he simply walked away, leaving Catherine to entertain the visitors. After dinner, she showed Horn through the palace. When they reached her private apartment, her little Italian greyhound began to bark furiously at Horn, but when it saw Poniatowski, it greeted him with a frantically wagging tail. Horn noticed and took Poniatowski aside. “My friend,” he said, “there is no worse traitor than a small lapdog. The first thing I always do when I am in love with a woman is to give her one of these little dogs. This way, I can always discover whether there is someone more favored than myself. The test is infallible. As you saw just now, the dog wanted to bite me because I am a stranger, but when it saw you, it went mad with joy.” Two days after this visit, Poniatowski left Russia.
When Stanislaus Poniatowski departed in July 1756, he assumed that he would return in a matter of weeks. When he failed to come back at the expected time, Catherine began a campaign to bring him back. For the first time, Bestuzhev felt the strong will of the future empress. Through the autumn of 1756, he struggled to do what she asked and persuade the Polish cabinet to return Poniatowski to St. Peterburg. He wrote to Count Heinrich Brühl, the Polish foreign minister: “In the present critical and delicate state of affairs, I find it all the more necessary that an envoy extraordinary should be sent here without delay from the kingdom of Poland whose presence would draw closer the ties of friendship between the two courts. As I have found no one more pleasing to my court than Count Poniatowski, I suggest him to you.” Eventually, Brühl agreed.
Catherine the Great Page 23