Ever the romantic, if Stanislaus had hoped for some rekindling of ancient passions, he was disappointed. Disappointed in her appearance, for one thing; where was the shapely young brunette he had loved? Disappointed in her manner, for another; polite but coolly distant. In a private conversation, Stanislaus asked for a new constitution for Poland. Catherine refused; she wanted Poland to remain weak. Dinner was difficult; the empress looked embarrassed, the king depressed. After dinner the empress refused to attend the ball Stanislaus had prepared for her, even though he had built a special ballroom just for the occasion. As for Stanislaus, his shimmering memories had vanished. “I don’t know her anymore,” he said sadly.81 She had not set a crown on his head, but a dunce cap. While guests danced at the king’s ball, Catherine stood on the deck of her galley and watched the fireworks. “The king bores me,” she told Alexander Momonov.
But without a doubt the most bored traveler on the journey was not Catherine but Momonov himself. During the interminable months of travel in closed sleighs or onboard the imperial galley, Momonov was dying of boredom and called his job “imprisonment.”82 Though the empress constantly tried to bribe him into contentment, he complained bitterly. When Catherine confided to Potemkin her many grievances against her spoiled lover, Serenissimus replied with characteristic gusto, “Eh, Little Mother, spit on him!”83
Catherine, seeing Potemkin in his own kingdom, glittering like a maharaja, his fleet bobbing in the Black Sea firing their guns for their sovereign, could not help comparing him with the bored and boring Momonov. She wrote Potemkin impassioned letters, and he responded with gratitude and devotion. But not with passion. As dirty and careless as he often was with his own appearance, he was fastidious with his women and was only aroused by slender blooming girls, not tubs of wrinkled flesh.
Once Catherine and her entourage spilled out of their carriages in St. Petersburg, the Turks, alarmed by Potemkin’s naval maneuvers during his three-ring circus for the empress, attacked. Potemkin, barely convalescing from the greatest, biggest, longest-lasting show on earth, was totally unprepared. His men were scattered, manning far-reaching outposts. Potemkin quickly recruited tens of thousands of soldiers from across Europe. One young Corsican officer volunteered but was summarily turned down because he insolently demanded too high a rank. His name was Napoleon Bonaparte.
In the first year of the Turkish War, Potemkin suddenly sunk into a dark swirl of apathy and could not be roused to defend, much less attack. Many wondered whether he was in the pay of the Turks. The fact was that his health had been deteriorating for several years from a rich diet, sexual excess, overindulgence in alcohol, and recurring bouts of malaria. Now, in his deepest depression, he was waited on by seven hundred servants as his one-hundred-twenty-piece orchestra played. The Prince of Princes regaled himself with a harem of women chosen from his officers’ wives. He had an underground palace built for one of his mistresses, and each time he approached orgasm, he tugged on a bellpull to signal the cannoneers to fire. When the woman’s husband heard the cannon, he yawned, “What a lot of noise about nothing.”84
Back in St. Petersburg, Momonov wrote Potemkin imploring him to release him from his onerous duties as Catherine’s lover. Potemkin replied angrily, “It is your duty to remain at your post for the duration of the war, and don’t be a fool and ruin your career.”85
By the spring of 1789 Alexander Momonov was suffering from sexual exhaustion, complaining he could no longer perform. He confessed to Catherine that he was in love with another woman. Wiping away her tears, she summoned his beloved and realized that the young woman was heavily pregnant. Catherine suggested they marry immediately and told the trembling girl—who had been fearing exile in Siberia—that the imperial wedding gift would be a country estate and one hundred thousand rubles. The bride promptly fainted. On the day of the wedding, the empress dressed the girl’s hair with a diamond coronet and presided over the wedding supper. “God be with them!” she said wistfully. “Let them be happy.”86
A few days after the wedding the empress took a new lover. Twenty-two-year-old Plato Zubov had not been selected by Potemkin but thrust in at the right moment by the prince’s enemies when he had returned to the war. Catherine gave Zubov one hundred thousand rubles, made him a general, and appointed him her personal aide-de-camp. The new lover quickly lifted her sadness over Momonov’s betrayal. “I am healthy and merry and have come alive like a fly,” she wrote Potemkin.87
Catherine and Zubov were an incongruous pair. She was a barrel-shaped toothless grandmother; he was young, slender, and the handsomest of all her lovers since Orlov. His face was a study in elegant curves with its high cheekbones, refined jawline, and small cleft in the middle of his chin. His eyes were deep and hooded, his nose aristocratic, his lips perfectly shaped. One of her advisers, looking at the two, remarked, “The empress wears him like a decoration.”88 Others eyeing the pair believed that Zubov earned every last penny of his pay.
Catherine’s favorite was expected to hold levees for visitors, favor seekers, and supporters, but Zubov’s levees were nothing short of a demonstration of arrogance. Comte Antoine de Langeron reported, “Every day, starting at eight o’clock in the morning, his antechamber was filled with ministers, courtiers, generals, foreigners, petitioners, seekers after appointments or favors. Usually, they had to wait four or five hours before being admitted….At last the double doors would swing open, the crowd would rush in and the favorite would be found seated before his mirror having his hair dressed, and ordinarily resting one foot on a chair or a corner of the dressing table. After bowing low, the courtiers would range themselves before him two or three deep, silent and motionless, in the midst of a cloud of powder.”89
Grand Duke Paul’s tutor, the Swiss-born Charles Masson, twittered, “The old generals, the great men of the Empire, did not blush to ingratiate themselves with the least of his valets. Stretched out in an armchair in the most indecent, careless attire, with his little finger in his nose and his eyes fixed vaguely on the ceiling, this young man with his cold, vain face, scarcely deigned to pay attention to the people around him.”90
Courtiers had to put up not only with Zubov’s rudeness, but with his monkey. This nasty little creature jumped on visitors’ shoulders and plucked off their wigs, at which they were required to chuckle politely.
Having finally won the war against the Turks, Potemkin returned to a triumphal hero’s welcome in St. Petersburg. Zubov fidgeted with jealousy. Courtiers rushed to see the face-off between the empress’s lovers, and most placed their wagers on Potemkin. As Serenissimus descended his carriage and marched into the palace, a servant behind him carried his hat, which was so loaded with diamonds it was too heavy to wear.
When the empress and Potemkin faced each other once more, both were sadly changed. Potemkin had been under tremendous strain from the Turkish War and suffered from exhaustion and depression. Catherine had become so obese that she took up two seats at the theater. Her legs were so swollen that she could hardly walk, and architects installed gently sloping ramps over the palace stairs. Worse, the former brilliance of her mind was dimming. Tired and cranky, she increasingly left political matters in the inept hands of Zubov. At court Potemkin’s friends advised him to oust the arrogant Zubov and resume his position in Catherine’s bed. Potemkin was horrified at the thought.
But he did try to warn Catherine of the danger of allowing the feckless, stupid Zubov to take over state affairs. Catherine loudly proclaimed that the boy was a budding political genius who only required a bit of training to mature. “I am doing a great service to the state by educating young men,” she said with a straight face.91 Too tired to fight further, Potemkin gave up. Russia was now in the hands of a conceited youth whose sole recommendation was the sexual satisfaction he gave an old woman.
Turning to something at which he excelled, Potemkin gave a show—one last, brilliant show that would be talked about for decades after his death—Potemkin’s ball. Fountains ran with
wine. Three thousand guests were invited to dance in a room lit by 200 chandeliers; the fragrant gardens shimmered with the light of 140,000 lanterns, 20,000 candles, and fireworks bursting overhead. Draped in Persian silks, a dark-skinned African sitting on a mechanical golden elephant called the guests to dine as the elephant’s trunk, studded with diamonds, rose and fell.
After dinner Potemkin led Catherine into the Winter Garden and presented her with a valuable statue bearing the inscription “To one who is Mother, and more than Mother to me.”92 At the end of it all Potemkin fell on his knees before Catherine and, kissing her hand, wept. Was it joy? Sadness? Fear? Loss of all the beauties of youth? Or knowledge that the end was coming? She, too, wept.
Before he left St. Petersburg for the south, a countess asked him what he planned to do when Catherine died. “Don’t worry,” he replied. “I’ll die before the Sovereign. I’ll die soon.”93
Potemkin left St. Petersburg in the scorching heat of summer to make peace with the Turks in the south. In the town of Jassy, burning with malarial fever, ravaged by liver failure and pneumonia, he insisted that he continue his journey despite the grave warnings of doctors. But on the second day of travel he suddenly cried to stop. “I’m dying,” he groaned. “There is no point in going any further. I want to die on the ground.”94 On the Russian soil from which he had sprung. They laid a mattress on the side of the road. Within an hour the mighty Cyclops was dead. The orchestra had ceased playing, the lights had faded, and the curtain had fallen. Potemkin’s show was over.
Potemkin “lived on gold,” said one court wit, but “died on grass.”95 Indeed, everyone found his death as remarkable as his life.
Between her sobs the empress kept asking, “Whom shall I rely on now?”96 And, “Prince Potemkin has played me a cruel turn by dying! It is me on whom all the burden now falls.”97
Grand Duke Paul announced that Potemkin’s death meant there was one less thief in the empire. Plato Zubov was also elated, though he feigned sympathy with the empress. “It is his fault I am not twice as rich as I am,” he told his friends peevishly.98 The large shadow of Potemkin which had loomed over him had suddenly disappeared. Zubov immediately pestered Catherine to give him Potemkin’s honors and riches. He further requested the top government positions for foreign affairs. Catherine was tired, fading slowly, and found it easier to give her lover whatever he wanted. Charles Masson, in comparing the empress’s two lovers, wrote, “Potemkin owed almost all his greatness to himself. Zubov owed his only to Catherine’s decrepitude.”99
In 1793 Catherine sent the Russian army into Poland and carved it up as if it were a pie, doling out slices to Prussia and Austria and keeping a large share for herself. In 1795, after a reign of thirty-one years, King Stanislaus abdicated. Catherine confined him to a Russian palace; she gave thousands of acres of Polish land and thousands of Polish serfs to Zubov, who was now the richest and most powerful man in Russia.
Yet success had its price. Catherine’s sexual needs grew stronger with age. One courtier reported seeing Zubov, having just serviced the empress, returning to his rooms “prostrate with fatigue and pitiably sad, throwing himself upon his couch, and drenching his handkerchief with scent.”100
Catherine gave Zubov the lead role in the delicate negotiations for the marriage of Paul’s thirteen-year-old daughter Alexandra to young King Gustavus IV of Sweden in September 1796. But Zubov mangled them horribly, neglecting to address the issue of religion. The Swedes insisted the bride become Protestant; Catherine insisted she retain her Orthodox faith. Zubov insisted to both sides that it was a small matter, easily cleared up.
When the Swedish ambassador told a stunned Catherine that under no circumstances would a queen of Sweden be permitted to profess the Orthodox faith, she grew so angry that she had a slight stroke. Zubov still argued that the betrothal ceremony should go forward, that the Swedish king would lose his honor if he didn’t follow through. At the last minute Gustavus would surely sign the wedding contract allowing her to remain Orthodox. Unaware of Zubov’s ploy, the king of Sweden came to St. Petersburg for the betrothal, believing his bride would convert.
The blushing princess, arrayed in a white gown, waited in a drawing room with hundreds of guests. But the king, who at the last minute had been handed documents to sign that would allow the girl to keep her religion, never showed up. Hours passed; the would-be fiancée wept quietly. In the half century since she had come to Russia, Catherine had never once lost her formidable dignity in public. But now, publicly humiliated and probably suffering brain damage from her recent stroke, Catherine vented her anger at the Swedish representatives, swearing at them like a fishwife and reportedly banging one of them over the head with her scepter, twice.
On the morning of November 5, 1796, Catherine rose and put on a white silk dressing gown. Her ladies commented on how remarkably youthful she looked. Settling down to her desk with her secretaries, she asked them to leave for a few moments and visited her private room with the chamber pot. She never came out. After waiting nearly an hour, her alarmed maids and valets opened the door and found her on the floor, felled by a stroke. She lived for two days without recovering consciousness. According to witnesses, Zubov looked like a man whose “despair was beyond comparison.”101 And well should he despair, for the new emperor hated him with particular venom.
Catherine’s enemies became Paul’s friends; her friends, his enemies. He liberated Stanislaus Poniatowski from his refined prison and invited him to live in a marble palace in St. Petersburg. The former king, who still had a spring in his step and a sparkle in his eye, was the toast of the town, the guest of honor at the best dinner parties. Yet some noticed an air of sadness about him as he promenaded from one social event to the other with his silver-tipped walking stick. He died suddenly in 1798, a bachelor to the end. He was, perhaps, one of those rare individuals who falls in love only once, and when his mate departs, remains true to the memory of those long-ago golden nights.
If Paul had rewarded Poniatowski, he had a score to settle with Potemkin who, though dead, could still be punished. The emperor decreed that his bones should be dug up and dispersed and his grave monument smashed. Soldiers sent to do the job destroyed the monument but could not bear to disturb their general’s bones. They pretended they had carried out the emperor’s orders, but let Potemkin rest in peace.
Paul’s most bizarre act of vengeance was his mother’s state funeral. He decreed that the ceremony should be not for her alone, but also for his father Peter III, who had been murdered thirty-four years earlier. The ornate casket with Peter’s remains was placed next to Catherine’s open casket for the viewing. It was a macabre reunion, a bloated corpse and a dusty skeleton lying next to each other. The bodies of Catherine the Great and her murdered husband were buried together as if they had been the most loving couple in the world. Over them hung a banner: “Divided in life, united in death.”102
Still stewing about the long, magnificent reign of his mother, in 1797 Paul changed the law regarding the imperial succession. Women, he decreed, would be disqualified from ruling. Never again would another Catherine the Great tell men what to do. This law remained in effect until the end of the Russian Empire in 1917.
Paul’s hallucinations and paranoia increased each year. He was stabbed to death in 1801 by a group of conspirators that included Plato Zubov. As in the case of Peter III, when it came time to punish the mad emperor’s murderers, there came from the Russian people a deafening silence. Paul’s gifted son Alexander would lead Russia through the Napoleonic Wars and into the future.
Was Catherine great? A woman of her time, she devoted her life to making her country powerful rather than her people happy. Today we could not imagine a great monarch keeping her people in miserable servitude. We could not admire palaces built on the broken and bleeding backs of helpless slaves.
Perhaps the quality that made Catherine truly great was an intensely personal quality—her understanding of the weakness of human passion
. Hypocrisy was not one of her failings. An unwise love affair, an unwelcome pregnancy, well did she understand these, and never did she judge. Generous in the face of romantic betrayal, she paid off her former lovers and their mistresses handsomely.
In her memoirs she wrote candidly, “Nothing in my opinion is more difficult than to resist what gives us pleasure. All arguments to the contrary are prudery.”103 Catherine thought society’s preoccupation with female chastity greatly exaggerated, and she laughed at stories of her nymphomania. Though she enjoyed sex, her work took precedence. “Time belongs not to me, but to the Empire,” she often said.104
She never permitted off-color jokes in her presence and maintained a strict decorum throughout the day; she gave in to her passions at night behind tightly closed doors. Deeply in love with all of her favorites, she practiced serial monogamy. Hers was a healthy sexuality, straightforward and uncomplicated, with no feigned shame or attempts at concealment. Hers was a sexuality which threatened the customs of the day.
The legend of her sexual appetites increased until it rewrote the story of her death. Catherine the Great died by impalement on a horse penis, it was said. According to a slightly varied version, the impalement didn’t kill her; it was the horse being lowered into position on top of her and suddenly falling that crushed her. That, then, was a suitable punishment for a woman’s unabashed sexual freedom. Perhaps Catherine’s loudest laugh would have been reserved for the horse story.
“In love she was indulgent,” wrote one courtier, “but in politics implacable; ambition was her ruling passion, and she made the lover subservient to the Empress.”105
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