Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman (24 page)

In the fall of 1745, when Johanna returned to Germany and Elizabeth became the dominant influence in Catherine’s life, the empress was nearing her thirty-sixth birthday. She remained handsome and statuesque, but she was tending to heaviness. She continued to move and dance with grace, her large blue eyes remained brilliant, and she still possessed a rosebud mouth. Her hair was blond, but for some reason, she dyed it black, along with her eyebrows and sometimes her eyelashes. Her skin remained so pink and clear that she needed few cosmetics. She cared immensely about what she wore and refused to put on a gown more than once; on her death, fifteen thousand robes and dresses were supposedly discovered in her closets and wardrobes. On formal occasions, she layered herself with jewels. Appearing with
her hair flecked with diamonds and pearls, and her neck and bosom covered with sapphires, emeralds, and rubies, she created an overwhelming impression. She intended this always to be so.

Nevertheless, she indulged her appetites without restraint. She ate and drank as much as she pleased. She often stayed up all night. The result—although no one dared to say so—was that her celebrated beauty was fading. Although Elizabeth herself knew this, she continued to live by her own rules. Her daily schedule was a constantly changing mixture of time-honored formality and imperial impromptu. She observed and enforced rigid court protocol when it served her purpose; more often, like her father, she ignored routine and behaved according to impulse. Instead of regularly dining at noon and supping at six, she arose and began the day whenever she felt like it. Often, she postponed the midday meal until five or six in the afternoon, had supper at two or three in the morning, and finally went to bed at sunrise. Until she became too heavy, she went riding or hunting in the morning and then drove out in her carriage in the afternoon. Several times a week there was a ball or an opera in the evening, followed by an elaborate supper and a display of fireworks. For these occasions, she kept changing her gowns and having her elaborate coiffure constantly reshaped. Court dinners offered fifty to sixty different dishes, but sometimes—to the despair of her French chef—the empress herself ate Russian peasant fare: cabbage soup, blini (buckwheat cakes), pickled pork, and onions.

To maintain her dazzling preeminence at court, Elizabeth made certain that no other woman present could shine as brightly. Sometimes, this required draconian coercive measures. During the winter of 1747, the empress decreed that all of her ladies-in-waiting must shave their heads and wear black wigs until their hair grew in again. The women wept but obeyed. Catherine assumed that her own turn would come, but to her surprise, she was spared; Elizabeth explained that Catherine’s hair was just growing back after an illness. Soon, the reason for the general pruning became known: after a previous festive occasion, Elizabeth and her maids had been unable to brush a heavy powder out of her hair, which became gray, coagulated, and gummy. The only remedy was to have her head shaved. And because she refused to be the only bald woman at court, bushels of hair were cropped.

On St. Alexander’s Day in the winter of 1747, Elizabeth’s jealous eye fell specifically on Catherine. The grand duchess appeared at court in a white dress trimmed with Spanish lace. When she returned to her
room, a lady-in-waiting appeared to tell her that the empress commanded her to take off the dress. Catherine apologized and put on a different gown, also white but decorated with silver braid and a fiery red jacket and cuffs. Catherine commented:

Elizabeth went to bed reluctantly and late. When the festivities and official receptions were over and the crowd of courtiers and guests had retired, she would sit in her private apartment with a small group of friends. Even when these people had left her and she was exhausted, she allowed herself only to be undressed; she still refused to sleep. As long as it was dark—and in winter in St. Petersburg, dark could last until eight or nine o’clock in the morning—she continued to talk to a few of her women, who took turns rubbing and tickling the soles of her feet to keep her awake. Meanwhile, not far away behind the brocaded curtains of the royal alcove, a fully clothed man lay on a thin mattress. This was Chulkov, the empress’s faithful bodyguard, who had the strange ability to do without sleep and who for twenty years had not slept in a proper bed. At last, as the pale light of dawn came creeping through the windows,
the women would leave, and Razumovsky, or whoever happened to be the favorite of the moment, would appear, and in his arms Elizabeth would finally fall asleep. Chulkov, the man behind the curtain, remained at his post as long as the empress slept, sometimes into the afternoon.

The explanation for these unconventional hours was that Elizabeth feared the night; most of all she feared to sleep at night. The regent Anna Leopoldovna had been asleep when she was overthrown, and Elizabeth was afraid that a similar fate might overtake her. Her fears were exaggerated; she was popular with the public and only a palace coup, organized to elevate some new pretender, could mean loss of the throne. Only the dethroned boy tsar Ivan VI, a helpless child locked in a fortress, was a threat to Elizabeth. But it was the specter of this child that haunted Elizabeth and robbed her of her sleep. Potentially, of course, there was a remedy. Another child, a new baby heir, an offspring of Peter and Catherine, was what was needed. When such a child was born, and was surrounded, guarded, and loved by all of Elizabeth’s power, then Elizabeth could sleep.

15
Peepholes

E
LIZABETH’S INTERVENTIONS
in the daily life of the young married couple were often trivial. One night, when Catherine and Peter were having supper with friends, Mme Krause appeared at midnight and announced, “
on the empress’s behalf,” that they were to go to bed; the monarch considered it wrong “to stay up so late.” The party broke up, but Catherine said, “
It seemed strange to us as we knew the irregular hours kept by our dear aunt … it seemed to us more ill-humor than reason.” On the other hand, Elizabeth was unusually friendly to Catherine when the younger woman was in difficulty and the empress could play the role of supportive mother. One morning, Peter had a high fever and severe headache and could not get out of bed. He remained in bed for a week and was bled repeatedly. Elizabeth came to visit him several times a day and, observing tears in Catherine’s eyes, “was
satisfied and pleased with me.” Soon afterward, when Catherine was saying her evening prayers in a palace chapel, one of Elizabeth’s
ladies-in-waiting came in to tell her that the empress, knowing that the grand duchess was upset by the grand duke’s illness, had sent her to say that Catherine should have faith in God and should not worry, because under no circumstances would the empress abandon her.

Similarly, in the early months of Catherine’s marriage, the people leaving the young court were not always forced to do so by Elizabeth. Catherine’s chamberlain, Count Zakhar Chernyshev, suddenly disappeared. He had been one of the young courtiers invited by Catherine and Peter to join them in the large, pillowed cart in which they traveled to Kiev before their marriage. But Count Zakhar’s departure in the form of a diplomatic assignment had nothing to do with the empress. Instead, the initiative came from the young man’s mother, who had begged Elizabeth to send her son away. “
I fear he may fall in love with the grand duchess,” the mother had said. “He never takes his eyes off her and when I see that, I tremble for fear that he might do something rash.” In fact, her intuitions were sound: Zakhar Chernyshev was indeed attracted to Catherine, as he would make clear a few years later.

The next to go, lamented by no one, was Peter’s longtime tormentor, Otto Brümmer. In the spring before his marriage, seventeen-year-old Peter had been formally declared to be of age and had become, in title at least, the reigning Duke of Holstein. In matters concerning his duchy, he now was entitled to make certain decisions. The decision he most wanted to make was to get rid of Brümmer. After reading the document confirming his title, Peter turned to his nemesis and said, “
At last my wish is fulfilled. You have dominated me long enough. I shall take steps to have you sent back to Holstein as soon as possible.” Brümmer struggled to save himself. To Catherine’s surprise, he turned to her, asking her to make more frequent visits to Elizabeth’s dressing room and speak to the empress. “I told Brümmer that his suggestion could not help him as the empress almost never appeared when I was there. He begged that I should persevere.” Catherine, understanding that “
this might serve his purposes but could do me no good,” told Count Brümmer that she was reluctant. Desperate, he continued to try to persuade her—“without success.” In the spring of 1746, the empress sent Brümmer back to Germany with an annual pension of three thousand rubles.

Living under the eye of Empress Elizabeth was difficult for Catherine, but with the early exception of her vigorous, and ultimately failed, attempt to help Maria Zhukova, the young grand duchess tried to accept
her situation. Peter was less pliable. He had little desire to please his aunt; Instead, a belligerent rebelliousness often led him to do foolish things.

The episode of the peepholes was an example: Around Easter in 1746, Peter created a puppet theater in his apartment and insisted that everyone in the young court attend performances. On one side of the room in which he had erected his theater, a door had been walled up because it led into the dining room of the empress’s private apartment. One day while working with his puppets, Peter heard voices through the blocked door. Curious to see what was happening in the next room, he took a carpenter’s bore and drilled peepholes through the door. To his delight, he found himself witnessing a private, mid-day dinner party with the empress surrounded by a dozen of her friends. Next to his aunt sat Count Razumovsky, who, recovering from an illness, was dressed informally in a brocaded dressing gown.

Then, having already trespassed beyond the limits of discretion, Peter went further. Excited by his discovery, he summoned everyone to come and peek through the holes. Servants placed chairs, footstools, and benches before the perforated door to form an impromptu amphitheater so all could enjoy the spectacle. When Peter and his entourage had finished staring, he invited Catherine and her ladies-in-waiting to come and see this remarkable sight.

When the group that had been peeking through the door saw that Catherine refused to do so, they all began, one by one, to walk away. Peter himself became apprehensive and went back to arranging his puppets.