It was a bizarre, perhaps an unprecedented arrangement, a highly idiosyncratic variation on the menage a trois. Few people at Catherine's court or outside it ever understood it, or the empress who initiated it. In time it gave rise to an avalanche of dispraise.
On January 2, 1776, the empress's young, handsome Polish secretary, Peter Zavadovsky, moved into the suite of rooms assigned to the imperial favorite—the rooms Orlov had occupied, then Vassilchikov, then Potemkin.
At once a nearly palpable wave of apprehension swept through the court as servants, officials and others began to calculate how best to ingratiate themselves with Zavadovsky. Potemkin was out, Zavadovsky was in, they assumed. But closer observation revealed that Potemkin was still very much in favor. He did not entirely vacate the suite into which Zavadovsky had installed himself, and though Catherine presented her "husband" with the beautifully redecorated Anitchkov Palace as his own residence, he preferred to stay near her, either in the imperial palace itself or in a nearby house on the palace grounds.
In March of 1776, Catherine informed her court that Potemkin would henceforth enjoy the title His Serene Highness, or Prince Potemkin. Though Zavadovsky was her lover-in-residence, Potemkin was her lord and master, her consort, almost her co-ruler. A new order prevailed.
Just at the time Catherine was making these new arrangements, she learned that Grand Duchess Natalia was pregnant. Natalia, whom Catherine had initially welcomed as a "golden woman," vital and fresh and charming, had proven to be more dross than gold. She was flighty, superficial and much less intelligent than Catherine had hoped. She "loved extremes in all things," as Catherine wrote to Grimm, and in particular, fell extremely in love with Andrei Razumovsky, one of the grand duke's favorite companions. Paul did not suspect Natalia of being unfaithful to him, but the entire court knew of the liaison, and when Natalia's pregnancy was announced, there was much speculation as to the child's paternity.
Still, the child Natalia carried, especially if it was a son—as everyone fervently hoped it would be—would become the next in line to the throne, assuming Paul succeeded his mother. The continuity of the imperial line depended on the birth of a healthy heir.
Paul sent a servant to his mother very early on the morning of April 10, 1776, to announce that Natalia had gone into labor. The aged Countess Maria Rumyantsev, who in her six decades at court had helped hundreds of babies safely into the world, was acting as midwife to the grand duchess, and there were doctors on call to give their assistance should the traditional techniques of midwifery fail.
As the morning advanced, the courtiers gathered in clusters outside the birth chamber, waiting for word that the baby had been born. Noon came, then afternoon. There were sounds of movement in the room, but no servant came forth to announce the birth of a prince. All evening they kept up their vigil, but by midnight they retired to their quarters, fully expecting to be awakened before dawn with the good news of Natalia's delivery.
The empress visited her daughter-in-law from time to time during that long Sunday and conferred with Countess Rumyantsev. No doubt Catherine recalled her own excruciatingly uncomfortable first labor, the near-fatal neglect she had suffered and the long hours of agonizing pain. She saw to it that Natalia was as comfortable as possible.
On the following morning, Catherine visited the birth chamber again. Natalia, exhausted, was still not delivered of her burden, and the countess was worried. The empress ordered two German accoucheurs, doctors Kruse and Tode, to examine Natalia but their long consultation did not result in decisive action. Surgeons were available to cut open the grand duchess's belly, a drastic operation that might perhaps save the child but at the cost of the mother's life. It was decided not to attempt the operation.
This decision, however arrived at, proved to be fateful. With Catherine constantly in attendance, Natalia struggled bravely on, but could not muster the strength to expel her baby. Her piercing screams gave way to hoarse cries, then to whimpers. Her tear-stained face was white. By this time she had been in labor forty-eight hours, and more doctors were called in. Countess Rumyantsev, weary and defeated, in great distress, told the empress that she feared neither Natalia nor her child could now be saved. The doctors agreed; there was no longer any apparent movement in the womb. Most likely the baby was dead.
Still, this was an imperial infant, and every effort had to be made to save it, and the mother as well. The doctors could be wrong. Catherine, who had slept little since Natalia's labor began, and who was suffering strong spasms of pain in her back in sympathy with the wretched girl, became completely caught up in the tragic events.
"Never in my life have I found myself in a more difficult, more hideous, more painful position," she wrote to Grimm later. "I forgot to drink, to eat, and to sleep, and my strength sustained me I know not how." It was harrowing, standing by and watching in helpless sorrow as Natalia inched toward death in great pain. In all, fourteen doctors, surgeons, and midwives were in attendance, plus a large staff of assistants and servants. Yet they could do little or nothing.
Natalia took five long days to die. When she finally expired, something died inside the empress.
"I turned to stone," she wrote.
The body was opened and a very large, "perfectly formed" boy was found in the womb. He had been so large that the grand duchess, who suffered from a deformation of the spine, could not deliver him. The wretched business was traumatic for everyone. There was universal disappointment that the succession had not after all been assured. Paul indulged in a torrent of grief-stricken rage, breaking chairs and smashing mirrors and even threatening to destroy himself. Catherine, in a badly miscalculated effort to restore his sanity, arranged for him to discover the fact of his late wife's infidelity, which only increased his maddened frustration besides making him hate his mother all the more.
While she prepared for the grand duchess's funeral at the Nevsky monastery, with the whole court in deep mourning, Catherine passed a melancholy forty-seventh birthday, convinced that if this nervous ordeal had not destroyed her, nothing could.
Chapter Twenty-Five
AS SHE REACHED THE AGE OF FIFTY EMPRESS CATHERINE astounded the Western world. She had risen in rank as the insignificant daughter of an unheralded soldier to become ruler of an enormous realm stretching from the Baltic to eastern Siberia. Her achievements were legion: military conqueror, peacemaker, lawgiver, patron of the arts, beacon of enlightenment to a benighted people in an iron age. Her praises were sung throughout Europe, her name known wherever cultivated people gathered. And if a certain dark rumor still clung to her—that she had arranged her husband's murder in order to seize the throne— many years of exceptionally benevolent rule had gone a long way to dissipate it.
The Prince de Ligne, an Austrian envoy of exceptional sensitivity who came to Petersburg to aid in the close military cooperation Russia and Austria were to have, came to know the empress well. He described her as she reached her half-century mark. "Her face," he wrote, "disclosed genius, justice, courage, depth, equanimity, sweetness, calm, and decision." "Frankness and gaiety dwelt on her lips," he added. "One scarcely noticed that she was short."
If Catherine, who was in fact of moderate height, seemed short to de Ligne it was because of her increasing stoutness. ("People generally grow fat in Russia," Prince de Ligne remarked.) Gray-haired and heavy, her hair drawn efficiently and severely back into a knot, Catherine gave an impression of soberness and good sense. Her dress as a rule was elegant, yet simple; in the eyes of European visitors, it appeared almost stark at a time when, at the court of France, women spent many hours lacing themselves into impossibly fantasticated costumes and having their hair dressed into intricate mounds of curls a foot high.
The Baron de Corberon, attempting to take Catherine's measure, confessed that he was baffled. He recognized how remarkable she was, yet he could not reconcile what he viewed as Catherine's "unheard-of mixture of courage and weakness, knowledgeability and incapacity, firmness and irresolut
ion. Ever darting from one extreme to the other," he wrote, "she presents a thousand different surfaces to the observant onlooker, who wishes in vain to grasp hold of her and find her essence and who, frustrated by his futile efforts, ends, in his uncertainty, by placing her among the ranks of the leading actresses, unable to place her among those of the great rulers."
Corberon was baffled, partly because of his own incapacity to reconcile Catherine's humanity with her majesty and immense capability, partly because the empress was in truth a mercurial figure, able to transform herself from regal commander to informal hostess to witty conversationalist at will. She had never been a poseur; her naturalism and authenticity set her apart in an artificial age. She did not trouble to hide her many selves from those at her court (except, of course, the self that wept and showed weakness; that she endeavored to conceal, with partial success). As her correspondent Frau Bielke wrote, Catherine "gave laws with one hand and did needlework with the other."
Catherine's reputation suffered as Zavadovsky was installed as official favorite—with Potemkin still being treated as the empress's consort and receiving more rewards than before—and moralists sneered and gossiped as never before. And not only moralists: people who did not condemn Catherine for her irregular personal life nonetheless were quick to see how politically damaging her behavior was likely to be. As a sovereign she was not free to follow her own inclinations where love and sex were concerned; she had the honor of her high office to think of. And she was putting that honor in peril.
The English ambassador Sir James Harris, embittered by his failure to hire Russian troops in England's struggle with the American colonists, sent a very unflattering portrait of Catherine to his superiors in London. According to Harris, Catherine had recently undergone a transformation, and was very much the worse for it. In the first seven or eight years of her reign, he believed, she had governed judiciously and with dignity. But she had allowed herself in latter years to be too much influenced by Frederick the Great. She had become cynical, she had lost her moral compass. What was worse, her "propensity for voluptuousness" was unleashed, leading her into "excesses that would debase a female character in any sphere of life."
Catherine's break with Gregory Orlov had been a grave mistake, in Harris's view, for Orlov, though far from brilliant, was "a man of integrity and completely honest." Orlov never flattered the empress. But after his departure she was surrounded by flatterers who corrupted her; she allowed their flattery to color her judgment. Her "unworthy tendencies" took over, and she gave herself up to them without restraint.
"Her court," Harris wrote, "which she had ruled with the greatest dignity and with the utmost decorum has gradually become an arena of depravity and immorality. This fall into decadence has been so rapid that in the brief time that I have been in this country a profound revolution has occurred in the mores and conventional habits of the courtiers."
Only a miracle could rescue the empress from her present unfortunate state, Harris informed his government, adding that in his view no such miracle was likely to occur at her age. Potemkin was behind it all, in Harris's judgment. He ruled Catherine completely. He was unscrupulous, using his intimate knowledge of the empress's weaknesses and her desires to maintain an unhealthy hold over her. He frightened her into thinking that her son intended to overthrow her, and that he, Potemkin, was the only one she could count on to prevent the takeover attempt when it came. Moreover, Potemkin had worked to undermine Catherine's reliance on the Orlovs, her staunchest allies for twenty years and more, by telling her that Alexis had cast his lot with Grand Duke Paul in expectation of a coup and by holding the ailing Gregory up to ridicule for marrying his child bride.
All in all the imperial court was in a sorry state—if the dispatches of foreign ambassadors are to be believed. In actuality the empress was weathering the censures and sneers of her critics with equanimity. De Ligne had a name for her: the Imperturbable. And imperturbable she was, on the whole, maintaining a remarkable degree of balance in her life between work, physical recreation— she liked to take long walks and went hunting when she could— and the pleasures of friends and of her favorites' company.
Throughout the late 1770s the favorites succeeded one another rapidly. Zavadovsky, a retiring character who fell in love with his imperial mistress and suffered very much when he was replaced by the dashing hussar Simon Zorich, complained of being kept under too close surveillance. Zorich, tall, handsome and moustachioed, had a weakness for gambling and generally lacked integrity where money was concerned. (Catherine confided to her intimates that she always expected him to "do something shady.") He made the mistake of quarreling with Potemkin, which guaranteed his departure from court after only eleven months. His successor Ivan Rimsky-Korsakov, a dandy who favored embroidered suits sewn with diamonds, was nicknamed by Catherine "Pyrrhus, King of Epirus" for his beautiful Greek profile. He betrayed the empress by dallying with Countess Bruce and left court after a little over a year.
None of these liaisons satisfied the empress's need for romance and undemanding sexual intimacy for long. Catherine found Zavadovsky to be jealous and demanding of her time. ("As often as possible," she wrote him, "I am only with you, but majesty, I confess, interferes a lot.") In the beginning he "fed her passion heart and soul," as she told him, yet later on his childishness, fits of weeping and periods of aggrieved isolation ended in a permanent breach—though the broken-hearted Zavadovsky continued to function in a variety of official positions. Neither Zorich nor Rimsky-Korsakov were any more satisfactory than Zavadovsky, and by the time Catherine and Potemkin's odd menage a trois had been in operation for three years the empress must have felt robbed of her emotional peace.
She who had written with devastating self-awareness that her "heart would not willingly remain one hour without love" had not found a way to secure that love without sacrificing either power or constancy or real fulfillment. Short-term sexual consorts gave her as much pain as pleasure, it would seem, either by being unfaithful, as Rimsky-Korsakov was, or by their moodiness and immaturity, or simply because they were personally shallow. Good-looking they certainly were, yet they fell far short of offering all that Potemkin had been able to give her. It was not only that she was personally disappointed; in addition, she had to be constantly vigilant, concerned lest Potemkin, whose jealousy and possessiveness were never far below the surface, might muscle in and send away any man he perceived as a serious rival.
So she went on, loving Potemkin and relying on him, and at the same time hoping to find with another man the joys of infatuation, craving a soul mate and a helpmeet, someone she could both turn to for romantic consolation and at the same time train to share her arduous labors. In 1779 she believed she found such a man. He was Alexander Lanskoy, a twenty-three-year-old captain in the Cavalier Guard, the imperial personal bodyguard.
All the men of the Cavalier Guard were supremely good-looking, and Lanskoy was no exception. Tall and strapping in his magnificent court uniform with silver armor (one courtier described him as "a very strong man, though ill made below and without the appearance of muscularity"), the fair young man with the poetically beautiful features captivated the empress, and renewed her hope for love and solace. In Lanskoy she believed she had found the one man who, she told Grimm, "would be the support of my old age."
Nothing was too good for her "Sashinka," as she called him. She showered him with jeweled swords and gorgeous suits of clothes embroidered in gold and silver thread, gave him estates and houses, a library, paintings and tapestries and art objects worth millions of rubles. In time, she hoped, she could begin to delegate responsibilities to him. As she aged, he would grow in maturity and competence. Theirs would be an ideal union, satisfying to them both and of benefit to Russia.
Catherine nurtured Lanskoy, tutoring him in poetry—which he had a gift for writing—and in history, teaching him to appreciate fine art and encouraging in him a love of good music and elevating reading. Their relationship was complex: sh
e was more than old enough to be his mother, and she mothered him; he looked on her with a devotion that had much of the filial in it; she was his teacher, and he her eager student, sincerely desirous of advancing himself culturally; there was a winter-spring romance, though of a unique kind, between a powerful empress and a poor young man from the Polish provinces; presumably there was tenderness, infatuation, intimacy. And there was, hovering in the background, the empress's true consort, Potemkin, at whose suffrance the liaison continued, and whose disapprobation could end it at any time.
By and large, these complexities escaped notice. In the eyes of the courtiers, visiting dignitaries and ambassadors from the European courts, the Russian empress had become an unrestrained nymphomaniac.
Gossips vied with one another over who could embroider or invent the most outrageous story. It was said that in addition to her official favorites Catherine entertained many other men, in fleeting liaisons. It was whispered that Catherine's friend Countess Bruce took each of Catherine's potential lovers to her bed and tested him before he was allowed to make love to the empress. Potemkin was seen as a procurer of young flesh for the insatiable empress, encouraging her in her descent into debauchery and then profiting from it since both his mistress and her lovers paid him well. Nearly as many stories swirled around Potemkin as around Catherine: that he had tried to poison Gregory Orlov, that when he began to feel threatened by Catherine's involvement with Zavadovsky he became enraged and violent and at one point threw a heavy metal candlestick at the empress's head, that his private sexual appetites were even more sordid than Catherine's.
Great Catherine Page 34