Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman (26 page)

The war between the new governess and her charge began immediately. Madame Choglokova’s first act was to inform Catherine that she was to be kept at a greater distance from the sovereign. In the future, she said, if the grand duchess had anything to say to the empress, it must be passed along through her, Madame Choglokova. Hearing this, Catherine’s eyes filled with tears. Madame Choglokova ran to report the lack of enthusiasm with which she had been received, and Catherine’s eyes still were red when Elizabeth appeared. She led Catherine to a room where they were completely alone. “
In the two years I had been in Russia,” Catherine said, “this was the first time she had ever spoken to me privately, without witnesses.” The empress then unleashed a torrent of complaint and accusation. She asked “whether it was my mother who had given me instructions to betray her to the King of Prussia. She said that she was well aware of my wiles and deceitfulness and, in a word, knew everything. She said that she knew it was my fault that the marriage had not been consummated.” When Catherine again began to weep, Elizabeth declared that young women who did not love their husbands always wept. Yet no one had forced Catherine to marry the grand duke; it had been her own wish; she had no right to weep over it now. She said that if Catherine did not love Peter, she, Elizabeth, was not to blame; Catherine’s mother had assured her that her daughter was marrying Peter for love; certainly, she had not forced the girl into marriage against her will. “
Now, as I was married,” Catherine reported Elizabeth saying, “I must not cry anymore. Then she added that, of course, she knew very well that I was in love with another man, but she never mentioned the name of the man I was supposed to love.” Finally, she added, “
I know quite well that you alone are to blame if you have no children.”

Catherine could think of nothing to say. She believed that at any moment Elizabeth was going to strike her; the empress, she knew, regularly
slapped the
women of her household
and even the men when she was angry.

Unaware of the degree to which Bestuzhev had agitated Elizabeth on the subject of Prussia, Catherine assumed that there was only one reason for Elizabeth’s outburst. None of the empress’s criticisms was valid. She was obedient and submissive; she was not indiscreet; she was not betraying Russia to Prussia, she never bored holes through doors, and she did not love another man. Her failure was that she had not produced a child.

A few days later, when Peter and Catherine accompanied the empress on a visit to Reval (today Tallinn, capital of Estonia), Mme Choglokova rode in their carriage. Her behavior, Catherine said, was “a torment.” To the simplest remark, however innocent or trivial, she responded by saying, “
such talk would displease the empress” or “such things would not be approved by the empress.” Catherine’s reaction was to close her eyes and sleep through the journey.

Madame Choglokova kept her position for the next seven years. She possessed none of the qualities necessary to assist an inexperienced young wife. She was neither wise nor sympathetic; on the contrary, she had a reputation as one of the most ignorant and arrogant women at court. Not even remotely did it occur to her to win Catherine’s friendship or, as a wife and the mother of a large family, to discuss the underlying problem she had been called in to solve. In fact, she had no success in the area about which Elizabeth cared most; her oversight of the marriage bed was fruitless. Nevertheless, her power was real. Functioning
as Bestuzhev’s jailor and spy, Madame Choglokova made Catherine a royal prisoner.

In August 1746, in the first full summer following their marriage, Elizabeth allowed Peter and Catherine to go to Oranienbaum (Orange Tree), an estate on the Gulf of Finland that Elizabeth had given to her nephew. There in the courtyard and terraced gardens, Peter established a simulated military camp. He and his chamberlains, gentlemen-in-waiting, servants, gamekeepers, even gardeners, walked around with muskets on their shoulders, doing daytime parade ground drill and taking turns standing guard at night. Catherine was left with nothing to do except sit and listen to the Choglokovs grumble. She tried to lose herself in reading. “
In those days,” she said, “I read romances only.” Her favorite that summer was an exaggerated French romance titled
Tiran the Fair
, the story of a French knight-errant who travels to England, where he triumphs in tournaments and battles and becomes a favorite of the daughter of the king. Catherine particularly loved the description of the princess, “whose skin was so transparent that when she drank red wine, you could see it pass down her throat.” Peter read too, but his taste lay in tales of “highwaymen eventually hanged for their crimes or broken on the wheel.” Of that summer, Catherine wrote:

Catherine began to suffer from severe headaches and insomnia. When Madame Krause insisted that these symptoms would disappear if the grand duchess would drink a glass of Hungarian wine in bed at night, Catherine refused. Whereupon Madame Krause always raised the glass to Catherine’s health—and then emptied it herself.

17
“He Was Not a King”

I
N
Z
ERBST
on March 16, 1747, Catherine’s father, Prince Christian Augustus, suffered a second stoke and died. He was fifty-six; Catherine was seventeen. He had not been allowed to come to her betrothal or to her wedding, and she had not seen him since leaving home three years before. In the last year of his life, she had had little contact with him. This was the work of Empress Elizabeth, Count Bestuzhev, and their agent, Madame Choglokova. Relations between Prussia and Russia were worsening, and Bestuzhev insisted to the empress that all private correspondence between Russia and anyone in Germany be stopped. Catherine, therefore, was strictly forbidden to write personal letters to her parents. Her monthly letters to her mother and father were drafted by the Foreign Office; she was allowed only to copy her message from this draft and then to sign her name at the bottom. She was forbidden to slip any personal news or even a single word of affection into the text. And now her father, who in his quiet, undemonstrative way had given her the only disinterested affection she had ever known, was gone, without a final word of tenderness from her.

Catherine’s grief was profound. Shutting herself up in her apartment, she sobbed for a week. Then Elizabeth sent Madame Choglokova to tell her that a grand duchess of Russia was not permitted to mourn for more than a week “because, after all,
your father was not a king.” Catherine replied that “it was true that he was not a reigning sovereign, but he was my father.” Elizabeth and Choglokova prevailed, and after seven days Catherine was forced to reappear in public. As a concession, she was allowed to wear black silk in mourning, but only for six weeks.

The first time she left her room, she encountered and spoke a few casual words to Count Santi, the Italian-born Court Master of Ceremonies. A few days later, Madame Choglokova came to tell her that the empress had learned from Count Bestuzhev—to whom Count Santi had reported it in writing—that Catherine had said she found it strange that ambassadors had not offered her condolences on her father’s
death. Madame Choglokova said that the empress considered her remarks to Santi highly improper; that Catherine was too proud, and, once again, that she ought to remember that her father had not been a king; for that reason no expressions of sympathy from foreign ambassadors should be expected.

Catherine could hardly believe what Madame Choglokova was saying. Forgetting her fear of the governess, she said that if Count Santi had written or said that she had spoken a single word to him on this subject, he was a monstrous liar; that nothing of the kind had entered her head; that she had never said a word to him or to anyone else on the subject. “
Apparently, my words carried conviction,” Catherine wrote in her
Memoirs
, “for Madame Choglokova conveyed my words to the empress who then directed her rage at Count Santi.”

Several days later, Count Santi sent a messenger to Catherine to tell her that Count Bestuzhev had forced him to tell this lie and that he was very ashamed of himself. Catherine told this messenger that a liar was a liar, whatever his reasons for lying, and that in order that Count Santi should not further entangle her in his lies, she would never speak to him again.

If Catherine imagined that the petty tyranny of Madame Choglokova and her sorrow at the death of her father had brought her to the nadir of her early years in Russia, she was in error. In that same spring of 1747, even as she was mourning her father, her situation—and Peter’s—became decidedly worse when Madame Choglokova’s husband was promoted to become Peter’s governor. “
This was a dreadful blow for us,” Catherine said. “He was an arrogant, brutal fool; a stupid, conceited, malicious, pompous, secretive and silent man who never smiled; a man to be despised as well as feared.” Even Madame Krause, whose sister was the principal ladies’ maid to the empress and one of Elizabeth’s favorites, trembled when she heard about this choice.

The decision had been made by Bestuzhev. The chancellor, distrusting everyone who might come in contact with the grand ducal couple, wanted another implacable watchdog. “
Within a few days of Monsieur Choglokov taking over, three or four young servants of whom the grand duke was very fond were arrested,” Catherine said. Then Choglokov forced Peter to dismiss his chamberlain, Count Devier. Soon after, a master chef who was a good friend of Madame Krause’s and whose dishes Peter particularly liked was sent away.

In the autumn of 1747,
the Choglokovs imposed more restrictions. All of Peter’s gentlemen-in waiting were forbidden access to the grand duke’s room. Peter was left alone with only a few lesser servants. As soon as it was noticed that he showed a preference for one of these, that person was removed. Next, Choglokov forced Peter to dismiss the head of his domestic staff, “
a gentle, reasonable man who had been attached to the grand duke since birth, and who gave him much good advice.” Peter’s valet, the rough old Swedish retainer Romburg, who had given him brusque advice on how to treat a new wife, was dismissed.

The restrictions tightened again. An order from the Choglokovs prohibited anyone, on pain of dismissal, from entering either Peter’s or Catherine’s private rooms without the express permission of Monsieur or Madame Choglokov. The ladies and gentleman of the young court were to remain in the antechamber, where they were never to speak to Peter or Catherine except in a loud voice that everyone in the room could hear. “
The grand duke and I,” Catherine noted, “were now forced to remain inseparable.”

Elizabeth had her own reason for isolating the young couple: she believed that if they were reduced to each other’s company they would produce an heir. The calculation was not entirely irrational: