by Simon Dixon
By the time their party approached the Russian capital on Saturday 15 June 1773, Grigory Orlov had already been back at Court for almost a month, having resumed all his former offices except that of favourite on 20 May. It was he who rode out with General Bauer to meet the girls on their way from Count Karl Sievers’ estate at Seltsa. Catherine was waiting for them at Gatchina, where they arrived at two o’clock in time for lunch. Paul caught his first sight of his future wife when they set off for Tsarskoye Selo three hours later. He met them halfway, stepping out of his carriage to pay his respects to their mother, Landgravine Caroline. On reaching the palace, where a small crowd had gathered to greet them at the gates, the guests were given an hour to unwind in their apartments before being taken to the Picture Gallery, lined from floor to ceiling with 130 seventeenth-century masterpieces, mostly Flemish and Dutch, as a way of emphasising Russia’s rightful place among the European great powers.24 At her most resplendent in the insignia of the Order of St Andrew, the empress engaged them in conversation until she retired to bed at ten. At the dinner which followed, protocol dictated that the eldest girl, Amalia, and her mother should sit beside Paul while the seventeen-year-old Wilhelmina found herself sandwiched between Panin and Lev Naryshkin, the leading voice in foreign affairs and the wittiest man at Court.25 The same pattern followed next day, as banquet followed upon banquet in an effort to overwhelm the guests with the magnificence of Russian power. Sometimes they dined outside on the balcony, on tables made from the finest mahogany; a band played as they strolled through the garden to the grotto. Catherine was delighted to find that Wilhelmina seemed to confirm all her instincts. In view of her evident desire that her son’s marriage should be happier than her own, it was even more reassuring that Paul instantly liked the girl (by no means a foregone conclusion, particularly for such a temperamental youth) and she accepted him. At lunch on 17 June, they sat next to each other for the first time.26 Within four days of her arrival, the deal was done. Soon the young princess was taking instruction in Orthodoxy from Father Platon, now archbishop of Tver, whose Short Course in Christian Theology was familiar to her mother in German translation.27
Still dreaming of a ‘crusade’ to Constantinople, Voltaire would have preferred Wilhelmina to be ‘re-baptised in the church of Saint Sophia, in the presence of the prophet Grimm’.28 Instead, she was converted at the end of the Dormition Fast on 15 August, taking the name Natalia Alekseyevna. The couple were betrothed next day. At the end of the month, in a further demonstration of Orthodox splendour, Catherine was again persuaded to trudge to the Alexander Nevsky monastery on the saint’s feast day, for only the second time since 1762. While Landgravine Caroline looked on from Field Marshal Golitsyn’s house near the Kazan Church, Paul and his fiancée joined the empress in the procession. Wearing the small crown and dressed as a knight of the Order of St Alexander, she emerged from the Winter Palace at ten o’clock to be driven to the church, where Grigory Orlov greeted her at the door, resplendent in his silver guards’ uniform. Platon and the bishop of Mogilëv, Georgy (Konissky), led a brief service for the knights, already gathered inside the church. Then, flanked by more than fifty liveried servants, banner-carrying clergy set out on foot to the monastery. The knights followed two-by-two in order of seniority. Behind them came Paul, Natalia and Catherine herself, accompanied by senior courtiers. The Horse Guards brought up the rear. Having twice paused for prayers, first at the Anichkov bridge and then opposite the Church of the Entry into Jerusalem, the empress reached the monastery gates just before midday. Archbishop Gavriil led her past the serried ranks of the Izmailovsky Guards to a service conducted by Innokenty (Nechaev), the bishop of Pskov. Suspending her disbelief during prayers, Catherine kissed the shrine containing the saint’s relics. It was three in the afternoon before she returned to the palace, where the customary banquet and ball continued into the small hours.29
They returned to the Kazan Church for the wedding on 29 September, nine days after Paul’s nineteenth birthday had signalled his coming-of-age in Russia. Just as Catherine’s wedding had been, the ceremony was followed by ten days of celebrations, advertised almost immediately in an official guide to the proceedings.30 Gunning echoed Lord Hyndford’s praise in 1745: ‘The weather was remarkably fine, which added much to the splendid appearance of the equipages and dresses, the magnificence of which nothing could exceed.’31 To compensate him for the loss of his tutorship, and with it the direction of the Young Court, Panin was rewarded on coronation day with the rank of field marshal, 10,000 serfs, 100,000 roubles for a house, another 50,000 for a silver service, and an annual pension of 30,000. For eleven years, Catherine had lived in fear that Paul might die before reaching the age of majority. His survival had helped to ensure hers. Relieved that her son’s majority had passed without any increase in his political influence, she was not to know that a very different menace was brewing among rebellious Cossacks in the lands east of the Volga. Instead, in the brief interval before disaster struck, she delighted in her first encounter with one of the closest friends of her life and one of the most brilliant minds of the age.
* * *
Friedrich-Melchior Grimm had edited the Correspondance littéraire for twenty years before leaving for Russia in the entourage of Wilhelmina’s brother, Ludwig, whose Grand Tour he had been conducting since 1771. D’Alembert, who edited the Encyclopédie with Diderot, had recommended this fortnightly manuscript newsletter to Catherine as long ago as 1764. She became a regular subscriber in the following year, joining the elite circle of crowned heads, never more than fifteen in number, who relied on Grimm for a digest of the Parisian journals and an insider’s view of the salons. As a member of the philosopher Baron d’Holbach’s circle, he was well placed to report on the philosophes and pulled no punches in his accounts of their debates. D’Holbach’s own Good Sense, written in response to critics of his System of Nature, was breezily dismissed as ‘atheism made easy for chambermaids and wigmakers’.32 Grimm helped to confirm Catherine’s low view of Rousseau (Voltaire was delighted to join in) and steered her towards a more favourable appreciation of Beccaria. He sent her the abbé Galiani’s influential treatise on grain prices in 1770. More practically, in his acknowledged role as ‘a great friend of humanity’,33 he had not only helped her to acquire Diderot’s library and numerous works of art, but also, as a trusted servant of Landgravine Caroline, played a crucial part as matchmaker for Paul and Natalia.
Since Catherine had every reason to admire him, Grimm found himself subjected to a charm offensive almost as soon as he arrived in St Petersburg. Even before the wedding, General Bauer had already made the first attempt to lure him into Russian service; Vladimir Orlov tried again shortly afterwards. Grimm found the courage to refuse in an audience, scheduled to last five minutes, which went on for an hour and a half.34 Dubbed ‘the white tyrant’ thanks to his penchant for face powder, he knew that no amount of make-up could conceal the social chasm separating a pastor’s son from Regensburg from a reigning empress. Nevertheless, he was determined to try. ‘I believe that it is unprecedented that a man of my station should have been treated by the sovereign of one of the most powerful empires with the kindness that I have experienced,’ Grimm boasted to Mme Geoffrin. Though protocol kept him well down the table at mealtimes, he was drawn into Catherine’s intimate circle after dinner. Predictably, he found her ‘a charming woman, the like of whom is not to be found in Paris’, admiring the way that she chattered, ‘often very gaily about serious things, and very seriously about frivolous things, by virtue of the laws of all good conversation’.35
Had Grimm accepted her repeated offers of jobs, either during this first visit or on his return to Russia in 1776, when she hoped he might play a leading role in educational reform, their talks might have lasted for longer. As it was, while he accepted a retainer from the empress from 1777, he chose to preserve a degree of independence by returning to Paris in the service of the duke of Saxe-Gotha (who promptly made him a baron). Now they ha
d to pursue their friendship by other means. Since correspondence formed a natural extension of salon conversation in the eighteenth century, they started to write to one another as soon as he left St Petersburg in the spring of 1774. ‘Adieu, monsieur’, Catherine concluded her opening salvo on 25 April, ‘this letter is beginning to resemble our gossip after eight at Tsarskoye Selo, and the fools who read it after you might find it indecent that people as serious as us should write such letters.’36 It was worth taking care over compositions that straddled the boundary between private and public spheres. The whole correspondence is punctuated by the sorts of self-conscious literary artifice that characterised all such exchanges at the time.37 ‘For as long as there have been German barons in the world,’ ran a typical missive from the empress, ‘no one has been so passionately in favour of the post-scriptum as you.’ ‘For my honour and glory,’ she continued on another occasion, ‘I have to tell you that everything that was written above on the 20th of September between dinner and the ball is divine in style and inspiration and the promulgation of a divine communication [from Grimm himself] acting on a mortal brain on a day half cloudy, half rainy. You will see that it is vital for you to know all this for the sake of historical understanding. If anyone ever makes a commentary on this letter, I think the price of paper will go up.’38 Since there could be no more responsible business than writing for posterity, it was crucial that nothing should fall into unscrupulous hands. Appalled in 1787 that Beaumarchais might include her letters in his edition of Voltaire’s correspondence, Catherine ordered Grimm to buy up every relevant volume and consign it to the flames. ‘And make sure that this objectionable man doesn’t keep a copy, so that having sold it to me, he cannot publish it again.’ ‘Listen, we are all mortal,’ she had written earlier that autumn. ‘Burn my letters so that they cannot be printed in my lifetime; they are much more sprightly than the ones I wrote to Voltaire, and could do the most awful damage; I insist that you burn them, do you understand? Or that you put them somewhere so safe that no one will unearth them for a hundred years.’39
Quite how Grimm managed to inspire her to write such revealing letters remains a mystery. His own are deadly dull. Yet somehow he gave her the confidence to rise above conventional generic pleasantries so that her side of the correspondence not only sparkles, but also takes us to the heart of her sensibility. It was to her Parisian ‘whipping-boy’ that Catherine confided some of her most intimate thoughts for the remainder of her life. ‘I think,’ she declared in 1791, ‘that it is decreed on high that you and I have been created expressly so that we may each have a pen continually in hand to write to one another without stopping.’40
One reason why Catherine felt so secure with Grimm was that he was generally to be found at the least radical end of the Enlightened political spectrum. Whereas Voltaire was uncomfortably aware that by supporting his heroine’s campaign against the Turks he was not thinking ‘sufficiently as a philosophe ought’, Grimm regarded war as a good in itself because it channelled man’s violent instincts into active, noble virtues. Along with his growing intimacy with Catherine, that was one reason why he was eventually disowned by one of his oldest pacifist collaborators. ‘My friend, I no longer recognise you,’ sighed Diderot, looking back on their time together in Russia. ‘Perhaps without suspecting it, you have become one of the most closet and yet most dangerous anti-philosophes. You live among us, yet you hate us.’41
Having been the beneficiary of Catherine’s largesse since she purchased his library in 1765, Diderot was in no position to refuse her invitation to St Petersburg. His arrival on the eve of Paul’s wedding brought the empress into contact with a very different sort of Enlightenment from Grimm’s. For a sixty-year-old with no experience of continental travel, the journey had proved predictably gruelling. Illness had delayed him along the way and continued to afflict him for much of his stay (he drank from the infested waters of the River Neva and ‘paid them the tribute they obtain from all foreigners’).42 The visit could hardly have got off to a less auspicious start when he discovered, to his distress, that the room promised by his friend Falconet was occupied by the sculptor’s artist son, a pupil of Sir Joshua Reynolds. Forced to take refuge at the Naryshkin mansion in St Isaac’s Square, Diderot was a fish out of water at Court, turning up for all the dinners and balls in his little black suit to widespread ridicule and suspicion. Etiquette and intrigue were foreign to him; he had virtually no Russian, though he made desultory efforts to learn some over the course of the autumn; and he made little impact on polite or academic society. Although he and Grimm were elected foreign members of the Russian Academy of Sciences on 25 October, that inauguration was the only meeting he attended, even though a further twenty-six were held before he left for Holland in the following March. Grimm told Mme Geoffrin that it was ‘the only occasion on which I should have been well disposed to see my name alongside that of Diderot’.43
Catherine, however, was fascinated by him. ‘And with her he is just as odd, just as original, just as much Diderot, as when with you,’ Grimm explained to another Parisian salon hostess, Suzanne Necker. ‘He shakes her hand as he takes yours, he shakes her arm as he shakes yours; but in this last point he obeys sovereign orders, and, as you may imagine, a man does not seat himself opposite to Her Majesty unless he is so obliged.’44 By the end of October, if not before, they were meeting daily at the Winter Palace. So bored was she with Vasilchikov that Diderot was received at the lover’s hour, after lunch, when he joined her to discuss the essays he presented to her in advance. Happy to borrow an occasional joke from Lev Naryshkin—‘A capital at the edge of an empire is like an animal with a heart at the tip of its finger’—he kept most of these essays short, out of a self-confessed antipathy to ‘purely systematic ideas on serious subjects’. Nevertheless, the empress had encouraged him to write at length and he had no intention of patronising her. Following their disillusion with Frederick the Great, Catherine was the monarch that the philosophes had been waiting for. It was for her, Diderot proclaimed, that Montesquieu has written his great book, The Spirit of the Laws. ‘Your Majesty has a strong mind, a great soul, extensive vision.’45
A meeting of minds was nevertheless prevented by the recent radicalisation of Diderot’s political views. In 1765, when Catherine bought his library, he could still reconcile his materialism with his politics by trusting the superior abilities of the ‘great soul’—a wise, absolute ruler surrounded by equally enlightened advisers who could realise the general will by their unique capacity to incorporate in microcosm the social and physiological harmony of the whole species.46 But that confidence had been severely undermined by Chancellor Maupeou’s abolition of the French parlements in January 1771. Though Diderot had little respect for these noble-dominated law courts, they played an important constitutional role in registering the king’s edicts and their abolition was widely interpreted as an act of tyranny. ‘We are on the brink of a crisis which will end in slavery or liberty,’ Diderot warned Princess Dashkova in an apocalyptic letter that April, ‘and if it is slavery, it will be slavery like that which exists at Morocco or Constantinople.’47 By the time he arrived in Russia, he was already convinced that liberty could be preserved only by a shift of power away from the monarch and towards a representative national body. ‘All arbitrary government is bad,’ he insisted to Catherine, not excepting the ‘arbitrary government of a good, firm, just and enlightened master’. ‘One of the greatest misfortunes that could happen to a free nation,’ he continued, in an essay urging the creation of a permanent representative assembly, ‘would be two or three consecutive reigns of a just and enlightened despotism. Three sovereigns in a row like Elizabeth, and the English would have been imperceptibly led to a condition of servitude of which no one could predict the end.’48
Few monarchs would have listened to such subversive talk. Yet the empress remained unperturbed as Diderot went on to inform her, in the space of that same essay, that resistance was ‘a natural right, inalienable
and sacred’; that the sovereign was made for the nation and not the other way round; and that any impartial judge of the conflict between the English monarchs and their parliaments would conclude that the king was ‘almost always wrong’ because he attacked popular liberties.49 ‘I am allowed to say everything that comes into my head,’ the astonished philosophe explained to Dashkova, ‘wise things, perhaps, when I’m feeling stupid, and perhaps very silly things when I’m feeling wise. Ideas transplanted from Paris to Petersburg certainly take on a very different colour.’50 The most remarkable thing was that Catherine should be prepared to condescend so graciously to a mere writer. ‘I swear to you that the empress, this astonishing woman, does all in her power to come down to my level,’ Diderot wrote to his wife, ‘but it is at moments like these that I find her ten feet tall.’51
Catherine was quite right to tell a later French ambassador that if she had placed her faith in Diderot, ‘every institution in my empire would have been overturned’.52 Nevertheless, she was prepared to offer guarded responses to a questionnaire he gave her in search of information on the Russian economy. Since he frankly admitted that the French government hoped to profit from their acquaintance—‘I should be transported by joy to see my nation united with Russia’—it is hardly surprising that sensitive information was held back from the representative of a hostile power.53 Some of his questions were deflected to officials; others were answered more frankly, particularly when they offered Catherine the opportunity to boast about the rich variety of her empire’s wildlife; still more received a curt ‘I don’t know’. The most delicate inquiries were brushed aside with a playfulness she knew he would appreciate: