Great Catherine

by Erickson, Carolly, 1943-

  And indeed their married life was hardly conducive to love. There was no sexual intimacy between them, Peter appeared to be utterly indifferent to Catherine as a sexual being, and, in her hearing, told his servants that her attractions were far inferior to those of his current love, Fraulein Karr. ("He was about as discreet as a gunshot," Catherine wrote in her memoirs.) They kept separate apartments, and though Peter slept in Catherine's bed each night, he insisted upon dressing and undressing in his own rooms, and lived as independently as he had before their marriage. He seemed, to feel no urgency about fathering an heir; though he knew perfectly well that his aunt expected him to have children with his new wife he ignored her expectations—perhaps because he knew that Catherine would bear the blame for her childless state. He may have been impotent. He was often ill, his doctor came frequently to his rooms to bleed him, and early in 1746 he caught a severe fever that lasted nearly two months.

  Once again, while the grand duke struggled to recover from a major illness, the empress became panicked about the succession. If Peter should die before Catherine became pregnant, all of Elizabeth's painstaking plans over several years, all the wedding preparations, the entire sequence of events that had been meant to culminate in the birth of a child to carry on the Romanov dynasty, would have been for naught.

  Peter's fever abated, but more months passed and still Catherine showed no sign of pregnancy. After nearly a year of marriage, she was barren. Elizabeth believed she knew why.

  The whispering had been going on for a long time. The grand duchess, it was said, was in love with Andrei Chernyshev, one of Peter's valets. She had been discovered alone with him in a compromising situation. Her heart was his; gripped by her love for him, she could not be a wife to Peter, and so she was childless.

  All the whispers reached the empress. She collected them, sifted them during the long wakeful hours of the night, and pondered what form of punishment might be a suitable response to Catherine's treachery. She ordered both Catherine and Peter to go to confession, and instructed the priest to question Catherine pointedly. Had she kissed Chernyshev? Catherine denied it vigorously. The priest relayed her denial to the empress, along with his opinion that the grand duchess was sincere. But the whispers continued, and the empress's suspicions grew until finally, tired of waiting for nature to take its course, and convinced that Catherine was endangering the very kingdom by her faithlessness, she took action.

  She strode into Catherine's apartments unannounced, and discovered the girl with her arms in bandages. Catherine had been suffering a severe headache for several days, and the surgeon had been bleeding her in an effort to alleviate it. At the sight of the empress, whose expression was ferocious, the surgeon and all the servants fled, leaving the bewildered Catherine to face Elizabeth on her own.

  Catherine, who described the scene in her memoirs, recalled being so frightened that she was sure Elizabeth would beat her. She had rarely seen such a fearsome display of anger, and she felt helpless as the empress paced back and forth in front of her, then pinned her against the wall, accusing her in thunderous tones of having betrayed Peter with another man.

  "I know you love someone else!" she raved over and over, working herself into such a state of rage that Catherine's servants, who were cowering on the other side of the door, became convinced that their mistress was in mortal danger. Madame Kraus, not knowing what else to do, ran into Peter's rooms and got him out of bed, telling him to come quickly to rescue his wife.

  Peter threw on a robe and came as quickly as he could. As soon as he entered the room where the two women were the atmosphere changed. Elizabeth backed off and Catherine was able to move away from the wall and begin to catch her breath, wiping her tearstained face, her chest still heaving. Abruptly the empress addressed herself affectionately to Peter, speaking in a normal tone of voice, ignoring Catherine entirely. She stayed on for a few more moments, never looking at Catherine, and then left.

  The alarming scene was over—for the moment. Peter went to his bedchamber to dress for the evening meal, and Catherine, badly shaken, sat down and tried to recover her presence of mind. She bathed her eyes and dressed, knowing that word of the terrible incident would have reached everyone in the palace by the time she emerged from her apartments to go to dinner. She felt, she later wrote, "as though the knife were in her breast," yet she managed, with supreme self-control, to eat her dinner in outward calm.

  After dinner, still very upset, she threw herself down on a sofa and tried to read. But she could not concentrate, the words blurred on the page. In her mind's eye she kept seeing another image, that of the fierce-eyed, red-faced empress, shouting at her and shaking her fist, saying again and again that it was her own fault that she had no child.

  Chapter Eight

  CHANCELLOR BESTUZHEV WAS SEVERELY DISPLEASED. NOT only had the empress disregarded his advice in choosing the Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst to marry her nephew and heir, but she was tolerating the intolerable: that the princess was not yet pregnant.

  In the chancellor's view, Peter and Catherine were two wayward, spoiled children who needed badly to be taken in hand. The best way to do this, he decided, was to appoint new, strict guardians to discipline them. He drew up instructions to be given to these disciplinarians, once they were appointed, and presented them to Elizabeth in May of 1746.

  The instructions for Catherine's new guardian stressed the primary importance of the grand duchess's reproductive obligations. Catherine must be made to understand, Bestuzhev wrote, that she had been elevated to imperial rank solely to provide the empire with an heir to the throne, and nothing must interfere with her swift accomplishment of that goal—not personal friendships or trifling with "the cavaliers, pages, or servants of the Court," not clandestine meetings with representatives of foreign powers, certainly not familiarities or flirtations. A pattern of conduct must be set for the grand duchess by her new chaperon, one in which all frivolity and shallowness was avoided and seriousness cultivated, along with wifely devotion and allegiance.

  At the same time, Peter's new guardian must reverse the ill effects of his bad upbringing, Bestuzhev's instructions insisted. Peter must be compelled to mature, his embarrassing habits must be restrained. Now that he was a married man, he must be made to see that he had new and serious obligations. He must be kept from spending his time with vulgar dragoons and uneducated lackeys, forced to give up his regiments of wooden soldiers and made to adopt a dignified posture and civil manners.

  Bestuzhev's instructions reveal just how odd a creature Peter was, his arms and legs constantly jerking and twitching, his scarred face a grotesque mask of scowls and frowns and clownish expressions, his speech foul and his favorite diversion pouring wine over his servants' heads at the dinner table. There was a manic quality to Peter's pastimes: he giggled and chortled while disrupting church services and provoking dignitaries by telling them dirty jokes. His pronounced cruel streak had more than an edge of lunacy to it. People said that he was mad, or would soon go mad, and averted their fear-filled eyes from his sometimes wild ones.

  The chancellor made his written recommendations to the empress, and the empress, after two weeks, finally read them. She decided to appoint to the post of Catherine's guardian her first cousin Maria Choglokov, a handsome young woman in her early twenties who, though somewhat thick-witted, had a strong sense of propriety and was not likely to be susceptible to Catherine's charm or to be diverted by her wiles. Humorless, unimaginative, and inclined to be spiteful, Maria was nonetheless a model wife who adored her good-looking young husband and had already given him several children. More than any of her other qualities, it was her fruitfulness that appealed to Elizabeth; Maria was perpetually pregnant, and the empress hoped that by placing her in charge of Catherine, some of this fruitfulness would be passed on to her.

  Where Peter was concerned the problem was more difficult. The grand duke's tutors and his governor Brummer, who had endeared himself to Catherine and "loved her like a daught
er," were not easy to replace. Elizabeth chose Prince Repnin, a cultivated aristocrat whose refined tastes, she hoped, would in time elevate Peter's aberrant ones. Witty, gallant and sociable, the prince was also a military man, a general, and had a soldier's candor and sense of loyalty. Whether Repnin could control, let alone transform, the willful grand duke was an open question. But for the moment it was Catherine who drew all the empress's attention.

  There was yet another purge of Catherine's and Peter's servants, with the favored ones sent away. In the aftermath all the remaining servants were upset a^nd anxious, Catherine wrote in her memoirs, and she and Peter indulged in "some sad reflections."

  That very afternoon the chancellor came to visit Catherine, bringing the pregnant, dour Maria Choglokov with him. As soon as Catherine saw her she burst into tears. "This was a thunderclap for me," she recalled. Not only was Maria a slavish partisan of the inimical chancellor, but she was known to be mean-spirited and rancorous, and Catherine, who had been suffering under the "Argus eyes" of Madame Kraus, now foresaw that she would come under worse scrutiny—edged with malice.

  Catherine's tears began to flow even more heavily when the chancellor announced that the empress had named Maria Choglokov to be grand mistress of her household. The two women crossed swords almost at once, though Catherine, through her tears, gave assurances that "the empress's orders were an immutable law" to her, and that she would of course be obedient to this change in her household. Conveying Elizabeth's sentiments, Maria told Catherine that she was obstinate. Catherine demanded to know what she had done to deserve that accusation, and Maria retorted tartly that she had said what she had said at the empress's orders and that was that.

  It was a bad beginning, and things rapidly got worse. Maria Choglokov rarely let Catherine out of her sight, and Catherine became her prisoner. They spent hour after hour together, the dully correct, leaden chaperon and the mercurial, energetic, clever grand duchess, who was now denied the company of her preferred companions and was forced to endure the tedium of Maria's constant corrections. Often Catherine had nothing to do but read, and she retreated gladly into her books, marking the days by the swelling of her chaperon's belly, praying that Maria would be delivered soon so that she, Catherine, could have a few days of respite from her ceaseless vigilance and harsh tongue.

  Catherine was allowed to spend time with Peter, but her contact with all others was severely limited. Maria prohibited the members of Catherine's household from conversing with her. "If you say more to her than yes or no," the guardian told them individually, "I'll tell the empress that you are intriguing against her, for the intrigues of the grand duchess are well known." Fearing the empress's wrath, the people in Catherine's suite were eager to avoid giving even the appearance of disloyalty, and so they served their mistress in silence, deepening her isolation.

  No one could speak to Catherine without arousing Maria's suspicions, and even brief compliments aroused her distrust. 'That winter," Catherine recalled in her memoirs, "I spent a good deal of time on my appearance. Princess Gagarin often said to me furtively, hiding from Madame Choglokov—for in her view it was a terrible crime for anyone to praise me, even in passing— that I was becoming prettier by the day." In her isolation, denied her usual recreations, Catherine spent more time in front of her mirror, and engaged a skilled hairdresser, a young Kalmuk boy, to arrange her hair twice a day. Catherine's hair was enviably thick and curled attractively around her face. Elizabeth had exempted her from having to shave her head and wear the ubiquitous black wig, and her hair flowed luxuriantly down her back—the envy of other women—and she left it unpowdered, its rich chestnut color eliciting universal admiration.

  Flattery reached Catherine's ears, if only in whispers. Someone told her that the Swedish ambassador Wolfenstierna judged her to be "very lovely," which made her embarrassed when, on rare occasions, she was allowed to address him. ("Whether from modesty or coquetry I don't know," she wrote later, "but the embarrassment was real.")

  Catherine was blooming, but Maria was there to put frost on her bloom, to dampen her spirits and rein in her enthusiasms. "I'm going to make my report to the empress!" Maria announced whenever she sensed a hint of frivolity or disorder (and, as Catherine wrote, she called "everything that was not total boredom, disorder"). To induce a more serious mood, Maria enforced the empress's wish that both Catherine and Peter add to their attendance at daily mass two more religious observances: matins and vespers. And she did her best to ensure that whenever they left the royal palace, whether to attend a social event or to follow the peripatetic empress on her sojourns through the countryside, they didn't lapse into their old lighthearted ways.

  Catherine remembered one particularly dismal journey, when for nearly two weeks she was stuck in a carriage with Maria and Peter and her uncle August, Johanna's wearisome, rather insipid brother who had been appointed by the empress to look after Peter's Holstein estates. (Johanna herself had departed, sent away in disgrace by Elizabeth soon after Catherine's wedding.) Uncle August was not very lively company. A short, dull-witted man who dressed shabbily and had pronounced views on the subordination of wives—views which he aired frequently for Peter's benefit—August ventured on one inconsequential topic after another. Each time, however, Maria interrupted him to say "Such discourse is displeasing to Her Majesty," or "Such a thing would not be approved of by the empress." Conversation was all but impossible, and Maria succeeded in "spreading tedium and desolation throughout our carriage," Catherine wrote.

  When they stopped for the night, the chaperon's censorship of their conversation continued; the travelers were not even allowed to discuss the inconveniences caused by their flooded tents and the freezing weather. Day after day the dreariness continued, with Maria harassing the servants and alienating everyone. Catherine tried to sleep as much as possible, both during the day and in the evenings, to avoid her vexing husband, her boring uncle and the everpresent, funereal Maria.

  Once they arrived at their destination, and were installed in a country house, the scene brightened somewhat. Prince and Princess Repnin, who were not insensitive to the excesses of the overbearing Madame Choglokov, steered Catherine away from her as often as they could and led her to softer and more affectionate companions, among them Countess Shuvalov and Madame Ismailof, the empress's most sympathetic waiting women. For her part, Maria was distracted by the card games that went on from morning until night in the antechamber of the imperial bedroom. There was, Catherine recalled, a "crazy furor" at court for games of chance that season, and Maria was an avid participant who became very angry when she lost. She became immersed in her cards, and forgot to supervise Catherine closely— though even so Catherine did not dare to stray out of her sight.

  The tyranny of Maria Choglokov, along with the empress's oft-repeated threats to disinherit Peter, drew Peter and Catherine together, despite the radical differences in their temperaments.

  "Never did two personalities resemble one another as little as ours," Catherine wrote, recalling her early years of marriage. "We had different tastes, our way of thinking and understanding things was so dissimilar that we could never have reached agreement on anything had I not compromised."

  There were times when Peter sought Catherine out, and talked over with her whatever was bothering him, but only when he was in distress. ("He was often in distress," she remembered, "because he was quite a coward at heart and he had a weak understanding.") When the empress scolded him, or sent away the valets who were his favorite drinking companions, he crumpled inwardly and went in search of his ever-indulgent wife, who humored him and treated him like a petted child.

  "He knew or sensed that I was the only person he could talk to without risking committing a crime by saying the least thing. I saw what his situation was like and I took pity on him. I tried to give him consolation." Though she was frequently bored by his visits, Catherine covered her boredom with an agreeable facade, even when he stayed for hours and wore her out with his ince
ssant talk of styles of epaulets and artillery maneuvers and punishments for disobedient soldiers.

  "He talked of military details, minutiae really, and never could come to the end of them," Catherine wrote in her memoirs. "He never sat down, and perpetually walked or paced, with very large steps, from one corner of the room to another, so that it was hard work keeping up with him." But keep up with him she did, even on long afternoons when her head was splitting, or her teeth aching, knowing that for the moment she was his only friend and talking to her his only permitted form of amusement. Sometimes, after hours of pacing and prattling, Peter's energy flagged and he agreed to sit down and read. Catherine got out her current book—the letters of Madame de Sevigne was among her favorites—and Peter found an adventure novel or a story about highwaymen to help him pass the time. "

  Many times Catherine submitted to her husband's whim and let him turn her into a soldier, giving her a musket and making her stand sentinel at the door of his room with the heavy gun on her shoulder for hours at a stretch. She stood there, a tall, slim girl in a silken gown, doing her best not to slump though the musket gouged a dent in her shoulder and her feet and legs were tired from hours of immobility, until Peter decided that she had served long enough and allowed her to leave her post.

  But her training did not end there. He taught her to march and countermarch, to obey field commands and take orders like a veteran. "Thanks to his pains," she wrote, "I still know how to do the complete musket exercise with as much precision as the most seasoned grenadier."