Great Catherine (22 page)

The key to success or failure lay in the loyalty of Count Razu-movsky, a few key guards officers, and the household troops. She believed that they would be reliable, that they would not desert her when the moment of truth came. But even if they did, she was determined to go down fighting. "I am resolved," she told Hanbury-Williams, "to perish or to reign."

Yet Catherine would not reign alone. The foundation of all her plans, her bribes, her carefully nurtured alliances was that her husband would wear the crown, while she would be, as she had always been, his principal adviser and supporter. Many said that Catherine ought to be, if not empress in her own right, at least co-ruler with Peter. Hanbury-Williams, who was Catherine's principal sounding board and mentor at this time, was confident that, whoever wore the crown, Catherine alone would in fact rule. ("You are born to command and reign," he told her. "You do not realize your real power. You have a great deal.")

Bestuzhev, whose own political position had become very tenuous as a result of the Shuvalovs' rise to preeminence, believed that Catherine ought to rule entirely on her own, or as regent for her infant son, and drew up elaborate written plans to that effect. (He did not say what was to become of the unfit Peter.) But Catherine, realizing the extreme danger she would be in in the event that the empress did not die and these documents came into her possession, prudently told the chancellor that his plan could not be put into effect.

She did not dare to admit that she, too, foresaw herself ruling alone, yet her correspondence with Hanbury-Williams assumed a future in which, having come to the throne, she did not share power. She knew perfectly well that no one at Elizabeth's court

believed Peter capable of governing; if he reigned, it would be as a puppet ruler, with Catherine pulling the strings.

She already envisioned herself as empress, and referred to herself as such in her letters to the British ambassador. She told him how grateful she was for his support and advice, and assured him that when the time came she would repay him with imperial lavishness. 'The empress will repay Catherine's obligations and her own," she wrote, giving herself a dual persona, adding "I shall try, as far as my natural weakness will allow me, to imitate the great men of this country." She had been reading about Russia's "great men," including Peter the Great and the fearsome tyrant Ivan the Terrible. She dreamed that one day her name, like those of Ivan and Peter, would "adorn the archives" of the European states.

Dread, apprehension, and an exhilarating excitement filled the short October days. Catherine knew that much was expected of her, that many people looked to her to lead them. She was not at all certain of her ability to lead wisely—though she felt more certain of her courage. ("There is no woman bolder than I," she told one courtier. "I have the most reckless daring.")

"I tell you in confidence," she wrote to Hanbury-Williams, "that I am afraid of not being able to live up to a name which has too soon become famous." She did not trust herself to maintain her independence of judgment. She knew that she had weaknesses, and that her vanity and ambition made her vulnerable. "I have within myself great enemies to my success," she confessed. She could not even be sure that she would not lose her "reckless daring" should she come face-to-face with Shuvalov's men, muskets at the ready, or traitorous soldiers of the household guard.

No one could foretell what would happen once the empress expired, for with her last breath all order would vanish. What if the Shuvalovs were better prepared than Catherine herself was for the transition of power? What if they had anticipated her carefully laid plans, and had already arranged to checkmate her whichever way she turned?

"The nearer I see the time approaching, the more I am afraid that my spirit will play me false, and that it will prove nothing but tinsel or counterfeit coin," she told her confidant Hanbury-Williams. "Pray heaven to give me a clear head."

When her apprehension grew, she drew on a unique source of hope. She had come to believe that a force greater than herself was guiding her toward a predetermined destiny. How else could she account for her survival? She had been through so much—severe illness, excruciating tension, prolonged over years, privations and dangers. "The invisible hand which has led me for thirteen years along a very rough road will never allow me to give way, of that I am firmly and perhaps foolishly convinced," Catherine told the ambassador. "If you knew all the precipices and misfortunes which have threatened me, and which I have overcome, you would place more confidence in conclusions which are too hollow for those who think as deeply as you."

There was one complication that even the invisible hand had not been able to prevent, however. Nearly every day Catherine's head throbbed and her stomach heaved. She was fairly certain that she was pregnant again.

The father of her child was a sweetly handsome, softspoken young nobleman who was Sir Charles Hanbury-Williams's secretary. Stanislaus Poniatowski was fair, with widely spaced hazel eyes and a bow-shaped mouth as pretty as a woman's. He was younger than Catherine, twenty-three to her twenty-six when they met, and his face combined choirboy innocence with a feline grace.

In the sordid world of the court, Poniatowski stood out as a model of innocent love and guileless affection. Before leaving Poland he had promised his mother that he would not drink or gamble, and that he would not propose to any woman until he was at least thirty. He did not promise chastity, yet the easy, complaisant amours of court life held no charms for him. He was intimidated by dalliance and intrigue, and when he fell in love with Catherine—his first love—he had every intention of loving her until the day he died.

Poniatowski was as different from the practiced seducer Sergei Saltykov as it was possible to be: fair where Saltykov had been dark, reserved where Saltykov had been aggressive, thoughtful and cultivated where Saltykov had been reckless and shallow. And most important, where Sergei Saltykov had seen in Catherine a dangerously exciting challenge to his powers of conquest, Poniatowski saw in her a radiantly beautiful, highly intelligent woman who was at the peak of her attraction. He admired and loved her, as only a soulful, reflective young man can love.

And Catherine, basking in Poniatowski's admiration, her boldness coming to the fore, embarked on a rash and exciting romantic adventure.

Poniatowski suited her very well—far better, in fact, than the tall, pale Count Lehndorff whom Bestuzhev had brought to court in hopes that he would help Catherine forget Saltykov. Lehndorff had good looks, but Poniatowski had a melting tenderness and trusting affection that was balm to her wounded spirit. He was in the entourage of her dear friend the British ambassador. He shared her love of French books and English government. Of the quality of their passion no evidence remains, but to judge from his letters, Poniatowski was an unusually sensitive, even poetic man who was morbidly afraid of giving offense. (Once when he thought he had displeased Charles Hanbury-Williams he threatened to throw himself off a high wall. The ambassador, horrified, forgave whatever minor infraction the young man was guilty of and begged him not to think of destroying himself over such a trifling matter.)

Though Peter was largely indifferent—and even, eventually, jokingly encouraging—to Catherine and Poniatowski's affair, discretion was still necessary and to Catherine, the need for secrecy was itself seductive. She liked arranging hurried, private trysts. She liked knowing that, at any moment, a guardsman or servant might come upon them by accident, and report their intimacy to the empress. They met as often as they could, at least once a week and sometimes two or three times. Leon Naryshkin gave them a refuge away from the palace, and Catherine, unable to trust her

son

ladies, stole out of her apartments and put on the breeches, ruffled shirt and jacket she borrowed from her Kalmuk hairdresser for the walk to the Naryshkin mansion. Several times, having spent a long evening there, she had to walk back alone, braving the dangers of the dark streets.

"We took a singular degree of pleasure in these furtive meetings," she wrote in her memoirs, recalling her affair with Poniatowski. Certainly she enjoyed them; Poniatowski, aware of what had happened to Saltykov as a result of his liaison with Catherine and having read that Russian princesses treated their lovers harshly once they tired of them, may not have been so sanguine.

Escaping in secret from the palace, wearing disguises, dodging the empress's spies and then, her heart beating fast with excitement, falling into her lover's arms: it all brought a glow to Catherine's cheek and a shine to her eyes. The Chevalier d'Eon, a French spy who saw her at this time, wrote a memorable description of her.

"The grand duchess is romantic, passionate, ardent; her eyes gleam, fascinate, they are glassy, with the look of a wild beast. She has a lofty brow and, if I mistake not, there is a long and terrifying future written upon that brow. She is affable and obliging, but when she comes near me, I instinctively recoil. She frightens me."

The chevalier bore witness to Catherine's feral side. There had always been a wildness in her, even in childhood. Now, like a caged animal that has found a way to escape, she roamed free— although her freedom had distinct bounds, and she never forgot them. It was, in fact, only the illusion of freedom, for it was not long before her involvement with the cherub-faced Polish count was common knowledge at the court. The affair was tolerated primarily because Poniatowski's politics were acceptable to Best-uzhev and his imperial mistress.

Catherine and Poniatowski had been lovers for half a year and more, and then, in August of 1756, he had been sent back to Poland. Catherine's nausea and headaches began not long after-

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wards, and she thought Poniatowski had left her with a child. She did all she could to have him recalled to the imperial court, though her need for him had none of the desperation or anguish of her previous need for Saltykov. And with the empress's worsening health, other concerns were far more pressing.

Her stomach churning with nausea, her head throbbing, Catherine worked at her desk, alert throughout the day and much of the night for bulletins from the empress's sickroom. She was her own secretary, reading papers and writing responses, communicating with those loyal to her, copying out sheet after sheet of large thick writing paper in her own hand. "Since seven in the morning until this moment," she wrote to Hanbury-Williams, "omitting the hours for dinner, I have done nothing but write and read documents. Might it not be said of me that I am a Minister of State?"

Already, as the old reign waned, Catherine was feeling the weight of responsibilities she would soon bear. Several years earlier she had taken over management of her husband's Holstein domain—an arrangement that relieved Peter and gave Catherine a taste for governing. Now she was confronting the much greater task of imperial rule. It was all-consuming, fatiguing—all the more so given Catherine's daily sick headaches—but at the same time exhilarating. When she ran out of documents to read and respond to, Catherine put her hand to another task, that of writing her memoirs.

She was only twenty-seven, yet her life had been more eventful than that of most sixty-year-olds. She had spent nearly half of it in Russia, contending with the fierce climate and the treacherous hostilities of the court. At the suggestion of Hanbury-Williams, she made an effort to set down her recollections of her childhood, her education, the development of her mind and temperament, the course of her marriage. It was the sort of task to which she was well-suited. Her strong self-regard, her intellect, all those faculties of mind and spirit that had shored her up throughout her long ordeal, were now given voice.

The days were growing shorter, the air wintry. Cold drafts

swirled through the old empress's bedchamber, where she lay, pale and still, beneath a mound of fur blankets. A week passed. Still the wasted lungs pumped air, the ravaged throat gurgled with life. The old women who had been keeping their death watch around her bed began to mutter to one another.

Another week went by, and the court officials, their nerves in tatters from long anxious days and tense nights, took to their beds, leaving orders with their servants to awaken them the instant anything important happened. The Shuvalovs, sensing a change in the wind, paid off their soldiers and sent them away— with instructions to return on short notice. Peter, still fearful but easily distracted even in the midst of his fears, flirted with a niece of the Razumovskys, Madame Teplof, and invited a German singer called Leonora to dine with him in private in his rooms. Catherine's sick headaches got better, and then—much to her relief—her body gave her evidence that she was not, after all, pregnant with Poniatowski's child.

Condoidi, the imperial surgeon, was weary and exasperated. His patient refused to die. Fits of coughing still tore through the empress's chest but a hint of color had returned to her face, and she opened her eyes. The pallor of imminent death gave way to the faint bloom of reviving health. Condoidi had to admit the probability that she would recover.

The peasant healers nodded sagely to each other and pointed to the sky. They had been right after all, the doctor was wrong. Each night they stood at the windows of the imperial bedchamber, looking out into the blackness, watching for the rising of the moon.