Great Catherine (46 page)

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two-and-a-half-year-old Alexander and year-old Constantine, products of Paul's second marriage, the Greek theme was brought forward. Constantine was named for Constantinople, the city she meant to conquer; she had had the infant's portrait painted against a classical Greek backdrop. Someday, she said, the tiny Constantine would rule over a revitalized Greece, liberated by Russia from centuries of Turkish oppression.

The meeting between the two sovereigns accomplished Catherine's goal. In 1781 Russia and Austria signed a secret alliance; henceforth they would stand together against the Turk. Now Catherine had the might of the Austrian Empire behind her in her grand endeavor. And now Joseph was no longer archduke, but emperor, his mother Maria Theresa having recently died.

Catherine's Austrian initiative led to changes at her court. Pan-in, who had always favored a northern orientation in Russian foreign policy and who advocated a close alliance with Prussia, not Austria, left for his estates in the spring of 1781 and did not return. Paul too was gone for a time, sent away to travel in Europe with his wife.

Paul was becoming more and more of a liability, and the hardheaded Catherine, who did not allow herself illusions where the security of her rule was at stake, recognized that she had to protect herself against him. He and his new wife, Maria, had done what she needed them to do: they had produced two healthy heirs to the throne. But Paul, described by King Frederick after the two men met in 1776 as "haughty, arrogant and violent," was acting at cross purposes to Catherine's political aims. Partly from angry frustration, partly because he had well-formed (if undistinguished) views of his own on what the aims of the Russian Empire should be abroad, partly because he was Panin's student, and shared many of the former chancellor's prejudices, Paul did not agree with his mother. He was critical of the increasing rapprochement with Austria. Frederick II had become Paul's hero, as he had once been Peter Ill's, and Paul's secret correspond-

ence with King Frederick—a secret he could not manage to keep from the all-knowing Catherine—aroused the empress's suspicions. She decided it was best that her son leave Petersburg for a time.

The first stages in the accomplishment of Catherine's sweeping Greek Project took quite a different turn from what the empress expected. Though she authorized Potemkin to launch what amounted to a full-scale invasion of the Crimea, he hesitated for many months, suffering from one of his periods of lassitude and inertia. Joseph too dragged his heels, despite Catherine's ex-, hortations ("I think that there is little our two strong states could not do, given our united efforts," she wrote to him). In the end the Crimea fell into Russian hands. In 1784 the puppet khan gave his territory to the Russian empress in return for an annual pension of a hundred thousand rubles, and Potemkin belatedly marched his troops in and took possession of the newly christened "Tauride Region." Potemkin himself, named governor-general, took the title Prince of Tauris.

Catherine had made a start on gaining her vast objective. But she had had to do it alone. Potemkin had let her down, losing his courage just at the time she needed him most, while Emperor Joseph was proving to be a fair-weather ally. In international affairs, as in the more treacherous, more delicate matters of the heart, Catherine was discovering that, in the end, she had no one to rely on but herself.

That sobering truth announced itself cruelly in June of 1784. One afternoon while the court was in residence at the summer palace of Tsarskoe Selo Alexander Lanskoy began to complain of a sore throat, and went to his quarters to lie down. By six o'clock he was well enough to accompany Catherine on a walk around the garden pond, and suffered through a social evening that had been planned in advance, not wanting Catherine to cancel it on his account. Such an accommodating attitude was like him; it was among the things the empress valued most in him—his mild and

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sweetly self-effacing nature. Lanskoy took himself off and went to lie down again, sending a messenger to fetch a surgeon who lived in the neighborhood of the palace.

The following day the surgeon informed Catherine that Lan-skoy's pulse was intermittent and that he and a colleague he had consulted both thought that the young man had much more wrong with him than just a sore throat. Catherine summoned a German specialist from Petersburg, who told her, in blunt German, that Lanskoy had a virulent fever and would die of it.

Full of dread, yet continuing to get what medical advice she could and taking note of Lanskoy's worsening symptoms—severe fever, swelling, and changes in skin color—Catherine kept vigil by the bedside of her Sashinka. Since Natalia's death she had been having to come to terms with mortality all too often: her mentor Voltaire had succumbed, and a number of her courtiers; only months earlier Diderot had died, and the previous winter she had buried her beloved greyhound, Tom Anderson, after sixteen years of close companionship.

Lanskoy was a robust man with a strong constitution, but he could not seem to shake off the affliction that was weakening his heart. He refused to eat or drink and would not take any medicine until a friend of his, a Polish doctor, persuaded him to drink a little cold water and eat some ripe figs. After three days he was terribly pale and burning with fever, but the Petersburg specialist gave Catherine some hope. Taking her aside he said that if Lanskoy did not become delirious, he might recover.

By this time Catherine had a sore throat of her own, though she told no one, unwilling to let her advisers force her away from her beloved Sashinka's bedside in order to nurse her own illness. Another day passed, and Lanskoy was able, making a supreme effort, to get up and walk under his own power into a different bedroom. He confided to Catherine that the previous night, feeling terribly ill, he had made his will.

An hour later he began raving, and Catherine knew that the hope the specialist had held out was gone. Lanskoy still recog-

nized her, and knew her name, but he no longer knew where he was. He kept on calling for his carriage and grew angry when the servants would not hitch his horses to the bed. In a final effort to stave off death Catherine ordered her physician Dr. Rogerson to administer to Lanskoy a cure she had heard of called "James's powders," but the medicine had no appreciable effect.

"I left his room at eleven at night," Catherine wrote later to Grimm. "I could do no more and I concealed my own illness." That night, or early the following morning, Lanskoy died.

"I am plunged into the most lively sorrow," she told her correspondent, "and my happiness is no more. I thought I would die myself from the loss of my best friend." Lanskoy had been the hope of her future, she told Grimm, referring to him as "the young man whom I was raising." He had sorrowed with her over her difficulties and rejoiced with her when things went well. He had been gentle and decent, and very grateful to her for her patronage. He had responded quickly and well to her training. Now she had lost him, and she felt as if she had lost everything. "My room, once so pleasant, has become an empty cave; I drag myself around in it like a shadow." She could not bring herself to face anyone, and though she did what work had to be done ("with order and intelligence," she assured Grimm), life had lost all its color and savor.

"I can't eat, I can't sleep," she told the Swiss. "Reading bores me, and I can't muster the strength to write. I don't know what will become of me, but I do know that I have never before in my life been so unhappy as I have since my best and most lovable friend abandoned me."

For nearly a year Catherine mourned Lanskoy. She shut herself in a tiny room and read ancient Russian chronicles and began work on a comparative study of words in two hundred languages. Servants brought her books—a Finnish dictionary, a multivolume study of early Slavonic peoples, atlases and grammars—but for months she felt too crushed by grief to face her court, and there were rumors that she had died. Her four grandchildren were a

slight consolation, especially the youngest, a pretty infant girl who people said resembled her grandmother. ("I have a weakness for her," Catherine admitted.) Yet she continued to "suffer like one of the damned," inconsolable over her great loss. After six months Potemkin, who had arrived from his new kingdom of Tauris soon after Lanskoy's death to console her, forced Catherine to leave her cramped study and learn to live and breathe again. She rebeled, she fought him with every step, but in the end she was grateful to him. Finally she was able to put on court dress and appear in public. In private, however, she remained "a very sad being," she told Grimm, "who speaks only in monosyllables . . . Everything afflicts me."

The depth of the empress's mourning, and her unprecedented personal sorrow over the loss of Lanskoy did nothing to stop the tide of scurrilous tales about her. Atrocious stories circulated about the death of the gentle and poetic young man. Catherine had exhausted him with her sexual demands, it was said. He had died in her bed, while trying in vain to satiate her insatiable passion. She had forced him to swallow poisonous aphrodisiacs, potions so strong they had made his body swell up and burst. She had poisoned him, as surely as she poisoned her husband Peter, and the proof was that his corpse gave off an unbearably foul odor and his limbs separated from his torso.

The real Catherine grieved, while the Catherine of legend, unrepentant and ever more sexually voracious, called for more young men and got on with her unsavory career.

Chapter Twenty-Six

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HUNDREDS OF BLAZING TORCHES LIT THE IMMENSE COURT-yard of Empress Catherine's palace of Tsarskoe Selo in the pre-dawn hours of January 7, 1787. Deep snow covered the ground, frost rimed the elaborate wrought iron gates and the four classical statues that presided over the entryway to the imposing palace were waist-deep in white drifts.

The torches sputtered in the cold, clear air, their hissing and crackling audible over the creaking of carriage wheels and the clatter of horses' hooves, the shouting of servants and the scraping of wooden crates. Fourteen huge traveling carriages, mounted on wooden runners, were being made ready to receive their distinguished occupants. Their wheels were newly gilded and their painted panels retouched. In the empress's carriage, largest and most splendid of all, were stored fuel for the stove, baskets of food and drink, warm rugs, extra clothing, toilet articles and— just in case—needed medicines.

Despite the bitter cold that stiffened the beards of the men and reddened the hands of the shivering serving girls, preparations for the great imperial journey proceeded. Nearly two hundred sledges were being loaded with trunks and coffers, barrels of beer and wine and honey, sacks of grain, chests full of cheeses, fruit, and other provisions, linens and napery, warm fur-lined blankets and braziers—all the supplies necessary for an extended journey.

Grooms and stable-boys attended to the thousand horses that would pull the hundreds of vehicles, while pages and footmen, maids and kitchen servants scrambled to find their own places in the grand procession.

Empress Catherine was about to undertake the longest and most ambitious tour of her reign, to visit the southern reaches of her realm and display her magnificence and military power there to afright the Turk. Planning for the long journey had begun nearly a year earlier, and for many months household officials had been preoccupied with arrangements, under the exacting supervision of their imperial mistress.

The journey was one of Catherine's principal enthusiasms. It would further her aims of conquest while advertising what she, and especially her sometime consort and deputy Potemkin, had done so far. It would give her an opportunity to show off her wealth and power. She could hardly wait to start on her travels.

There were many at her court who had tried to dissuade her. She was, after all, nearly fifty-eight years old, they told her, reminding her that she suffered from the accumulating aches and pains of advancing years and could no longer expect to summon the stamina for travel that she had once enjoyed.

"I was assured on all sides that my progress would be bristling with obstacles and unpleasantness," Catherine told Grimm in a letter. 'They wished to frighten me with stories of the fatigue of the journey, the aridity of the deserts and the unhealthiness of the climate. Those people had a very poor knowledge of me," she added. "They do not know that to oppose me is to encourage me; and that every difficulty that they put in my way is an additional spur that they give me."

At fifty-eight, no less than at any earlier point in her life, Catherine was stubborn and headstrong, determined to have her way. It had become her outstanding quality, this obstinate determination to follow through and bring to pass what she desired. ("God, grant us our desires, and grant them quickly," had be-

come her favorite toast.) Nearly all those who encountered her remarked on this characteristic: Ambassador Harris called her "a vain, arrant, spoiled woman" who would not be denied anything; Emperor Joseph thought that it was Catherine's misfortune that there was no one in her entourage who dared to restrain her. ("Be on guard against the force and impetuosity of her opinions," Joseph confided to the English ambassador in Vienna.)