Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman (98 page)

At the end of the evening, following a ball and an extravagant supper, Catherine and Potemkin withdrew alone to the winter garden to walk between the fountains and marble statues. When they spoke, he
mentioned Zubov; she did not reply. Catherine stayed until two in the morning, later than she had ever remained at a party. Escorted to the door by Potemkin, she stopped to thank him. They said goodbye. Overwhelmed, he threw himself at her feet; when he looked up, both were in tears. After she left, Potemkin stood quietly for a few minutes, then walked alone to his room.

At five o’clock in the morning on July 24, 1791, Potemkin left Tsarskoe Selo for the last time. He was already tired, and the journey to the south further exhausted him. He was still deeply unhappy about Zubov, and, as if Catherine did not realize how much she was wounding him, she continued to fill her letters with talk of her young lover: “
The child sends his greetings.… The child thinks that you are more intelligent … and far more amusing and pleasant than all those who surround you.” Years later, when both Potemkin and Catherine were dead, “the child” revealed his true feelings about his rival: “
I could not remove him from my path, and it was essential to remove him because the empress always met his wishes halfway and simply feared him as though he were an exacting husband. She loved only me, but she often pointed to Potemkin as an example for me to follow. It is his fault that I am not twice as rich as I am.”

Sunk in melancholy, Potemkin began by traveling slowly—the jolting of the carriage was painful—then, suddenly, he demanded speed. Hurtling down dusty roads and through towns and villages, he reached Jassy only eight days after leaving the Neva. The journey drained his declining strength; on arriving, he wrote to Catherine that he felt the the touch of the hand of death. His illness showed symptoms of the malaria that had infected him in the Crimea in 1783. Traveling south, he refused to take quinine and other medicines prescribed by the three doctors accompanying him; like Catherine, he was convinced that the best way to recover from illness was to let the body itself solve the problem. Instead of dieting, as the doctors recommended, he ate huge meals and drank heavily. To ward off pain, he wrapped his head in wet towels. When he reached Jassy, his staff sent for his niece, Sashenka Branitsky, hoping that she could persuade him to be reasonable and accept treatment. She hurried from Poland. In the middle of September, he had an attack of fever and shivered uncontrollably for twelve hours. He wrote to Catherine, “
Please send me a Chinese dressing gown. I badly need one.” The Russian ambassador in Vienna, Andrei Razumovsky, wrote
suggesting that he send “
the first pianist and one of the best composers in Germany” to soothe him. The offer was made and the composer accepted, but Potemkin did not have time to respond and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart did not make the journey.

Oppressed by the humid air of Jassy, he twice drove out seeking country air, only to give up and come back. In St. Petersburg, Catherine waited for messages and letters and asked Countess Branitsky to write to her every day. On Potemkin’s behalf, Catherine reversed her position on doctors and medicines. “
Take that which in the doctors’ estimation will give you relief; and having taken it, I beg you also to save yourself from food and drink that opposes the medicine.” With this support, Sashenka and the doctors finally persuaded the sick man to take medicine. For a few days he seemed better. Then, shivering and sleeplessness returned. Saying that he was “burning up,” he demanded more wet towels, drank cold liquids, and had bottles of eau de cologne poured over his head. He asked that all windows be opened and, when that failed to cool him, insisted on being carried into the garden. Every day, he asked repeatedly whether any messages had come from the empress; when a new letter arrived, he wept and read it, then reread it and kissed it repeatedly. When state documents were brought and read to him, he could barely scribble his signature at the bottom. It was clear that he was dying; Potemkin himself realized this. He refused to take quinine. “
I’m not going to recover. I have been ill for a long time … God’s will be done. Pray for my soul and do not forget me when I am gone. I never wished anybody any harm. To make people happy has always been my desire. I am not a bad man and not the evil genius of our mother, the Empress Catherine, as has been said.” He asked for the Last Sacrament, and once it had been given, he relaxed. A courier from Moscow brought another letter from Catherine, a fur coat, and the silk dressing gown he had asked for. He cried. He said to Sashenka, “
Tell me frankly, do you think I shall recover?” She assured him that he would. He took her hands and caressed them. “
Good hands,” he said. “They have often soothed me.”

Gradually, the passionate, ambitious man, still only fifty-two, became calm; those around him watched him dying in serenity. He begged everyone to forgive him for any pain he might have caused them. They must promise to convey to the empress his humblest gratitude for everything she had done for him. When a new message arrived from her he wept. He agreed to try quinine but could not hold it down. He began to faint; he was conscious only half the time; he felt that he was suffocating.
He wrote to Catherine, “
Matushka, oh how sick I am!” He asked to be moved from Jassy to Nikolaev; its cooler air might do him good. On the day he started out on the journey, he dictated a note to Catherine: “Your most gracious Majesty.
I have no more strength to endure my torments. My only remaining salvation is to leave this town and I have ordered myself be taken to Nikolaev. I do not know what is to become of me.”

At eight on the morning of October 4, he was carried to his carriage. He went a few miles and said that he could not breathe. The carriage stopped. Carried into a house, he fell asleep. After three hours’ rest, he talked cheerfully until midnight. He tried to sleep again but could not. At daybreak, he asked that the journey resume. The procession had gone only seven miles when he ordered it to stop. “
This will be enough,” he said. “There is no point in going on. Take me out of the carriage and put me down. I want to die in the field.” A Persian carpet was unrolled on the grass. Potemkin was placed on it and covered with the silk gown Catherine had sent him. Everyone searched for a gold coin to close his eye in the Orthodox fashion, but no gold coin was found. An escorting Cossack offered a copper five-kopeck piece and with this his eye was covered. At midday on Sunday, October 5, 1791, he died. A message went to the empress: “His Serene Highness
the prince is no longer on this earth.”

At five in the evening on October 12, a courier bringing the news reached the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. Catherine collapsed. “
Now I have no one left on whom I can rely,” she cried. “How can anybody replace Potemkin? Everything will be different now. He was a true nobleman.” The days passed and her secretary could only report: “Tears and despair … tears … more tears.”

69
Art, Architecture, and the Bronze Horseman

T
HE FOUNDATION
of the superb collection of art in St. Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum today was laid by Catherine only a year after she reached the throne. In 1763, she learned that a collection of 225 paintings accumulated by a Polish art dealer in Berlin who regularly
supplied pictures to Frederick II had not been paid for. The dealer had been buying and holding the paintings for the king’s Potsdam palace, Sans Souci, but Frederick had decided that he could not afford them. His finances, personal and national, had been ravaged by the cost of the Seven Years’ War, and the need to pay his army and to begin reconstruction of his devastated country took precedence over the purchase of paintings for his palace walls. The art dealer was, therefore, deeply in debt and urgently needed a customer. Catherine stepped forward and, without serious bargaining, bought the entire collection.

There may have been an element of spite in her purchase of a collection originally destined for Frederick. When Elizabeth was on the throne, Russia had been at war with Prussia; then Peter III had succeeded his aunt, had switched sides, and had become Frederick’s ally. Now, pulling Frederick’s paintings out from under him would partially balance the ledger. Not all of her new paintings were masterpieces, but they included three Rembrandts, a Franz Hals, and a Rubens.

When the paintings arrived in St. Petersburg, Catherine was so pleased that she sent word to her ambassadors and agents in Europe to be alert for other collections that might come up for sale. Fortunately, the Russian ambassador in Paris was Prince Dmitry Golitsyn, a polished Enlightenment figure, a friend of Voltaire’s and Diderot’s, and a habitué of the intellectual and artistic salon of Madame Geoffrin. Golitsyn arranged Catherine’s purchase of Diderot’s library in 1765 and continued to buy paintings for Catherine as long as he remained in Paris. When he left France to become Russian ambassador in The Hague, Diderot agreed to become Catherine’s scout, selecting and buying paintings for her. The most prestigious and best-informed art critic in the world now was acting for the richest and most powerful woman in the world.

A few years later, in 1769, Catherine scored a coup when the famous Dresden collection of the late Count Heinrich von Brühl, minister of foreign affairs to Augustus II, king of Poland and elector of Saxony, came on the market. She paid 180,000 rubles to acquire the collection, which included four more Rembrandts, a Caravaggio, and five works by Rubens. The paintings were delivered by sea, up the Baltic and into the Neva River, where the ships tied up at the Winter Palace quay only fifty feet from the palace doors. For the next quarter of a century, this was a frequent sight in St. Petersburg: vessels from France, Holland, and England lying against the quay, unloading packing crates
and boxes containing paintings by Rembrandt, Rubens, Caravaggio, Franz Hals, and Van Dycks. Inside the palace, Catherine had the crates opened in her presence alone so as to see and judge them first. As the containers were unpacked and the paintings emerged and were propped against the walls, she stood in front of them and walked back and forth studying them, trying to understand them. In her first years of collecting, Catherine valued the paintings she bought less for their visual beauty or artistic technique than for their intellectual and narrative content and for the notice and prestige their acquisition conferred on her.

On March 25, 1771, the empress surprised Europe again by buying the famous collection of Pierre Crozat, which, since the collector’s death, had passed through many hands. It included eight works by Rembrandt, four by Veronese, a dozen by Rubens, seven by Van Dyck, and several by Raphael, Titian, and Tintoretto. The entire collection came to her with a single exception: Van Dyck’s portrait of King Charles I of England, who had been beheaded by Oliver Cromwell. Madame du Barry, mistress of Louis XV, bought this painting because she was convinced that she had Stuart blood. Catherine was pleased when Diderot told her that he had succeeded in acquiring the collection for half its value. Four months later in the same year, Catherine bought 150 paintings from the collection of the Duc de Choiseul. Again, Diderot, who arranged the purchase, estimated that she had paid less than half the market value.

In 1773, Diderot and Grimm both came to St. Petersburg. Once back in France, Grimm took over Diderot’s role as Catherine’s agent in Paris. She felt more at ease with Grimm; Diderot, like Voltaire, seemed to her a great man who had to be handled carefully; Grimm was a clever, congenial man with whom she exchanged an informal correspondence of more than fifteen hundred letters. Grimm spread his net wide on Catherine’s behalf: it was Grimm, for example, who acquired for her a copy of the sculptor Houdon’s extraordinarily lifelike statue of a seated Voltaire. The original is now in the Comédie Française; Catherine’s copy is in the Hermitage Museum.

In 1778, the empress received news from her ambassador in London that George Walpole, the spendthrift grandson and heir of Sir Robert Walpole, intended to sell the family’s collection of paintings. Robert Walpole, a Whig who had been prime minister for more than twenty years under George I and George II, had been a lifelong collector
of paintings. For thirty-three years, since Robert
Walpole’s death, they had been hanging in the family home at Houghton Hall in Norfolk. Walpole’s grandson, in order to pay his debts and support his passion for raising greyhounds, had decided to sell the entire collection, the finest and most famous private art collection in England, and among the finest in the world. There were almost two hundred paintings, including Rembrandt’s
Abraham’s Sacrifice of Isaac
, fifteen works by Van Dyck, and thirteen works by Rubens. Catherine wanted them all. After two months of negotiations, she acquired the entire collection for thirty-six thousand pounds.