Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe (34 page)

Life was never dull with Grigory Potemkin around. He took prerogatives with the empress that no one had ever dared before, appearing in her rooms at all hours unannounced and unsummoned. Sometimes he would be the wittiest member of the party; at other times he would remain silent, in one of his sulks, barely acknowledging Catherine’s presence. His appearance, when he had no need to be
anywhere, was that of mountain man–meets-dandy: barefoot, with a shaggy fur cloak thrown over his enormous frame, and a pink sash tied about his head like a bandanna. Seeing him thus attired, Catherine nicknamed him
bogatyr
, the knightly Slavic hero from the mythology of Rus. And if it was too warm for the fur pelts, Potemkin would wear a dressing gown, open at the chest, and a pink shawl. He would settle his bulk on the Turkish divan he had placed in Catherine’s salon, and watch her work while he munched on raw radishes or chewed his fingernails “with frenzy,” a habit that gave rise to yet another one of Catherine’s sobriquets: “The greatest nail biter in the Russian Empire.”

“Calmness for you is a state your soul cannot bear,” she once observed. If not his nails, he gnawed on whatever was at hand, prompting an affectionate warning from her that she offered as part of a list of rules to abide by in order for harmony and informality to be achieved. Rule number three stated, “You are requested to be cheerful, without however destroying, breaking or biting anything.”

Potemkin’s uncouth behavior scandalized the courtiers, who took pains to emulate their counterparts at the sophisticated court of Versailles. He was a slob who marked his territory in Catherine’s domain by leaving his personal possessions strewn about her rooms—which she took pride in keeping neat and orderly. His slovenliness engendered another imperial scolding: “Please do not throw your handkerchiefs all over the shop in your Turkish fashion. Many thanks for your visit and I love you a lot.”

Their apartments were connected by a secret spiral staircase covered in green carpeting, a lovers’ color perhaps, the same shade as the carpet in the corridor connecting Madame de Pompadour’s suite to Louis XV’s royal apartments. It was so cold in the palace that Potemkin once caught a chill. “Sorry you’re sick. It is a good lesson for you: don’t go barefoot on staircases. If you want to get rid of it, take a little tobacco,” nurse Catherine chided affectionately. Nevertheless, Potemkin would often pop up to visit her, munching on one of the several raw fruits or vegetables—apples, turnips, radishes, and even garlic—that he kept at his bedside, yet another of his eccentricities. His contemporaries condemned his simple gustatory tastes as “truly barbaric and Muscovite.”

But Catherine took it in stride. Potemkin was one of a kind, and she adored him all the more for it. The pair of them also shared a thirst for glory, and were as well matched in that regard as Louis XIV had been with Athénaïs de Montespan. Catherine and Potemkin were both savvy political animals as well. Their romance was based on laughter, sex, intelligence, and power, in an ever-shifting order of importance.

Sir Robert Gunning, the British envoy, damned the empress’s new man with faint praise. “His figure is gigantic and disproportioned, and his countenance is far from engaging. From the character I have had of him he appears to have a great knowledge of mankind, and more of the discriminating faculty than his countrymen in general possess, and as much address for intrigue and suppleness in his station as any of them; and though the profligacy of his manner is notorious, he is the only one who has formed connections with the clergy….”

Within weeks of becoming Catherine’s lover, Potemkin collected promotions like blooms in a bouquet. In addition to the adjutant-general post on March 1, on the fifteenth of the month he was made lieutenant-general of the Preobrazhensky Guards, a position formerly held by Grigory Orlov. Catherine herself was the colonel of the regiment. And at the end of March, he was named Governor General of New Russia, the vast expanse to the south bordered by the Crimea and the Ottoman Empire.

Yet in April, less than two months into their romance, this passionate letter to Potemkin reflects Catherine’s anxiety regarding his level of commitment to her.

Fear not that one can free oneself from your webs, but from hour to hour one becomes more entangled. But should you yourself somehow lessen my passion, you would make me unhappy. And even then I would probably not stop loving you. But I pray God that I might die at that hour when it seems to me that you are not the same towards me as you have deigned to be these seven weeks! Only whatever happens, I need to think that you love me and the slightest doubt about this troubles me cruelly and makes me unspeakably sad.

On another occasion the empress rather desperately wrote to her lover, “How awful it is for someone with a mind to lose it! I want you to love me. I want to appear lovable to you. But I only show you madness and extreme weakness. Oh, how awful it is to love extraordinarily. You know, it’s an illness…only I don’t send for an apothecary and neither do I write long letters. If you like, I’ll summarize this page for you in three words…here it is—I love you.”

Even autocrats get moonstruck.

Catherine feared that such discombobulation made her feel like a “headless chicken,” incapable of attending to affairs of state.

On April 21, 1774, Catherine’s forty-fifth birthday, Potemkin was given a gift of fifty thousand rubles and received the Order of St. Alexander Nevsky from the empress’s former paramour the king of Poland, Stanislas Poniatowski. But the honoree must have said something unpleasant during the ceremony, because the following day Catherine scolded him for reproaching her in public, writing to Potemkin, “We ask that in future you don’t humiliate us, but that you cover our vices and mistakes with a stole [the vestment a priest places over a penitent’s head when he grants them absolution] and don’t parade them in front of people, for that cannot be pleasant for us. And anyway it’s inappropriate to treat a friend, let alone your w[ife], like that. Now there’s a reprimand for you, though a most affectionate one.”

Catherine’s reference to herself as Potemkin’s wife is what immediately catches one’s attention. By this stage in their relationship, he was already boasting that he would kill any successor as the empress’s favorite, and although each would eventually take other lovers, Potemkin was never supplanted as her primary confidant and counselor. Catherine was also complaining in the manner of neglected wives, accusing Potemkin of being sleepy when she came to him, peeved that he visited her only “on forays,” saying he couldn’t spend much time with her because he was dashing off elsewhere on business. Catherine hinted that Grigory Orlov had behaved the same way.

Perhaps she had an emotional pattern of choosing strong men who would master her, and then resenting them for it, both as the sovereign and as the tenderhearted woman beneath the autocrat’s protective
carapace who had vulnerably exposed herself by falling so hard for them and letting them know just how dependent she was upon their love and esteem.

During the spring of 1774, Catherine consulted Potemkin on matters large and small, from affairs of state to spelling and grammatical errors in her documents, both personal and official. “If there are no mistakes, please return the letter and I will seal it. If there are some, kindly correct them. If you want to make any changes, write them out…. Either the ukase [a proclamation made by a Russian emperor] and the letter are perfectly clear, or else I am stupid today.”

On May 5, Potemkin became a member of Catherine’s council. Later in the month he was made vice president of the College of War and awarded the rank of General in Chief, a promotion that particularly offended Russia’s top military brass.

And then, on June 8, 1774, came an event that historians continue to dispute; even the couple’s contemporaries could not agree on what happened. That evening, Potemkin and Catherine attended a dinner at the Summer Palace in St. Petersburg. At midnight, accompanied only by her loyal maid, Catherine slipped away. Wearing a hooded cloak, she clambered into an unmarked carriage that clattered away for the jetty on the Little Nevka. From there she was rowed across the river and climbed into another coach that brought her to the Church of St. Sampson, where Potemkin was already waiting for her. He was wearing his General in Chief uniform: a red-collared green coat with gold lace trim and braid, red breeches, a regimental sword, and a hat bordered in gold trim and festooned with white plumes. Catherine had not even changed clothes for the ceremony. She’d spent the entire day in her green regimental gown trimmed in gold lace, which resembled a ladies’ riding habit.

Inside the church, in addition to the unidentified priest, were two groomsmen. Potemkin’s nephew Alexander Samoilov stood up for him; Catherine’s chamberlain, Yevgraf Alexandrovich Chertkov, was her witness. In accordance with Russian Orthodox tradition, two crowns were held over the heads of the bridal couple. It was a lengthy ceremony, after which the wedding certificates were signed and given to the two witnesses, both of whom were sworn to secrecy.

This is the story that has passed into legend. But the reputed certificates
have never come to light. And there are other versions of the “secret marriage,” one of which alleges that the pair wed in Moscow in 1775. Another claims the ceremony took place in St. Petersburg in 1784 or 1791 (long after their sexual relationship had ended). Catherine’s biographer Virginia Rounding doubts the veracity of a legal union, yet believes the June 8 rite may have been more of a commitment ceremony. Meanwhile, Simon Sebag Montefiore, who has written the definitive twenty-first-century biography of Potemkin, allows for the probability of a fully legitimate wedding ceremony that night and gives the legend credence.

The empress’s most recent biographer, Robert K. Massie, leaves the door open for the possibility that a royal wedding did indeed occur, pointing out that Catherine never addressed any of her other lovers as “husband,” nor ever referred to herself as their “wife.” Only Potemkin received that distinction. Additonally, the empress allowed him vast viceregal power, even long after their sexual liaison ended—and she was not a woman who relinquished power lightly. The existence of a marriage provides the best explanation for the unique authority Potemkin wielded in the empire and the special place he retained in her heart and esteem.

What can be confirmed regarding their putative royal wedding are the dates and content of the court records that show Catherine leaving the palace on the night of June 8. The certificate that was placed in the hands of Chamberlain Chertkov passed into obscurity, but the document given to Potemkin’s nephew was passed down through several generations. However, Montefiore provides conflicting information as to its denouement, saying at one point that it was buried with one of Potemkin’s male descendants, but later mentioning that the certificate was tossed into the Black Sea by one of his grandnieces. Under the assumption that Potemkin and Catherine were indeed married on June 8, 1774, Montefiore does justify the suppression of the documents, stating that no one would have wanted them to come to light during the reign of Paul I, Catherine’s son (who detested both his mother and Potemkin), nor during the militaristic reigns of the two subsequent tsars. And the Victorian-era Russians were embarrassed about Catherine’s sex life.

Another thing that is certain is that Catherine and Potemkin behaved
both publicly and privately like a married couple. They even bickered like spouses—and indeed referred to each other in their letters as husband and wife. These terms of endearment could have been statements of fact, or merely a reflection of the way the lovers perceived their relationship. If Potemkin and Catherine had indeed married (and at least in her heart she felt that way), it makes his insecurity more difficult to comprehend. However, in a misogynistic society like imperial Russia, one has to wonder why a female autocrat would legally remarry when her husband, especially one as gifted and capable as Potemkin, might be expected to seize the reins of power from her hands. Why would she risk losing the scepter? On the other hand, Potemkin, for all his eccentricities, was exceptionally devout and may have wanted to legalize their liaison. Catherine was so passionately in love with him that she was incapable of denying him anything. Perhaps the
secret
marriage was the compromise.

The empress refers to Potemkin as her husband in at least twenty-two surviving letters, and calls him her “lord” or “master” in many others. She also treated several of his relatives as generously if they were her own kin. That is still no proof of a legal marriage ceremony, but a letter from Catherine to Potemkin written most likely in early 1776 provides the strongest evidence in favor of a genuine religious wedding.

My Lord and
Cher Epoux
[French for “dear spouse”]…Why do you prefer to believe your unhealthy imagination rather than the real facts, all of which confirm the words of your wife. Was she not attached to you two years ago by holy ties? I love you and I am bound to you by all possible ties. Just compare, were my acts more meaningful two years ago than they are now?

Foreign ambassadors suspected something, but didn’t mention the word “marriage” in their written dispatches. Many years later, in December 1788, the French ambassador, the comte de Ségur, informed Versailles that Potemkin “takes advantage of…certain sacred and inviolable rights…The singular basis of these rights is a great mystery which is
known only to four
people in Russia; a lucky chance enabled me to discover it and when I have thoroughly sounded
it, I shall, on the first occasion…inform the King.” By October of the following year, Louis XVI was jokingly referring to the empress of Russia as “Madame Potemkin.”

The British envoy, Lord Keith, as well as the Holy Roman Emperor (Joseph II, brother of Marie Antoinette) also found out what the French had been surmising.

And perhaps, although it might dilute her power, the more Catherine came to know Potemkin, the easier it was to understand that there would be no one better to rule the vast empire with her, and she really did not lose much in marrying him as long as the union remained a secret.