The Memoirs of Catherine the Great (32 page)

I believe that on Pentecost we were taken from Oranienbaum to the city. It was around this time that the Ambassador from England, Sir Williams, came to Russia. In his entourage he had Count Poniatowski, the son of the Poniatowski who had belonged to the faction of Charles XII, King of Sweden.
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After a short stay in the city, we returned to Oranienbaum, where the Empress ordered the celebration of the Feast of St. Peter. She did not come herself, because she did not want to celebrate my son Paul’s first name day, which falls on the same day. She stayed at Peterhof. There she sat herself at a window, where apparently she remained all day, because all those who came to Oranienbaum said that they had seen her at this window. A great many people came. We danced in the salon at the entrance to my garden and then we had supper. The ambassadors and foreign ministers came. I remember that the Ambassador from England, Sir Hanbury-Williams, was my neighbor at supper and that we had a conversation as pleasant as it was merry. As he had great wit and knowledge and was familiar with all of Europe, it was not difficult to have a conversation with him. Later I learned that at this supper he had been as amused as I and that he spoke of me with praise, which I always elicited from those minds or wits that squared with mine, and at that time I had fewer people who were envious of me, so I was generally spoken of with a fair amount of praise. I was known for having intelligence, and many people who knew me more intimately honored me with their confidences, trusted me, and asked me for advice and benefited from what I told them. The Grand Duke had long been calling me Madame Resourceful, and however upset or sulky he was toward me, if he found himself in any distress, he ran as fast as he could, as was his habit, to my apartment to get my opinion, and as soon as he had got it, he ran away again as fast as his legs could carry him.

I still recall that at this celebration of the Feast of St. Peter at Oranienbaum, while watching Count Poniatowski dance, I spoke with Sir Williams about the Count’s father and about the harm that he had done to Peter I. The English Ambassador told me many good things about the son and confirmed what I knew, to wit, that at the time, his father and his mother’s family, the Czartoryskis, made up the Russian faction in Poland and that they had sent this son to Russia and had entrusted him to the English Ambassador so as to nourish in him the parents’ sentiments for Russia, and that he hoped that this young man would succeed in Russia. He might have been twenty-two or twenty-three at the time. I replied that in general I thought that for foreigners Russia was like a touchstone for their merit and that he who succeeded in Russia could be sure of succeeding in all of Europe. I have always considered this observation infallible because nowhere are people more skillful than in Russia at noticing the weakness, ridiculousness, or faults of a foreigner. One can be assured that nothing will get past a Russian, because every Russian naturally, viscerally, dislikes all foreigners. Around this time I learned that Sergei Saltykov’s conduct had been as indiscreet in Sweden as in Dresden, and in addition, in both countries he had wooed every woman whom he had met. At first I did not want to believe any of it, but in the end I heard it repeated from so many sides that even his friends could not exculpate him.

During this year I formed a closer friendship than ever with Anna Nikitichna Naryshkina. Lev, her brother-in-law, contributed greatly to this. He was almost always with us, and his antics were endless. At times he would say, “To the one who behaves the best, I promise a jewel for which you will thank me.” We let him talk and were not even curious to ask him what this jewel was. In autumn, the Holstein troops were sent back to sea, and we returned to the city and went to reside in the Summer Palace. During this time, Lev Naryshkin fell ill with a severe fever during which he wrote me letters that I saw clearly were not by him. I replied to him. In his letters he asked me at times for sweetmeats, at other times for similar trifles, and then thanked me for them. These letters were perfectly well written and quite pleasant; he said that he employed his secretary to write them. Finally I learned that this secretary was Count Poniatowski, that he had become intimate with the house of Naryshkin, and that he did not budge from their residence.

At the beginning of winter we were moved from the Summer Palace to the new Winter Palace that the Empress had built from wood on the site where the Chicherins’ house presently stands.
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This palace occupied the entire neighborhood up to the house of Countess Matiushkina, which at the time belonged to Naumov. My windows were opposite this house, which was occupied by the maidens of the court. Upon arriving there, I was quite struck by the height and size of the apartments that were assigned to us. Four large antechambers and two rooms with an alcove had been prepared for me and the same for the Grand Duke. My apartment was rather well situated, so that I did not have to bear the proximity of those of the Grand Duke. This was a great advantage. Count Alexander Shuvalov noticed my contentment and immediately went to tell the Empress that I had greatly praised the beauty, the size, and the number of the rooms that had been assigned to me. He later told me this with a kind of satisfaction, accented by his twitching eye and accompanied by a smile.

During this period and for a long time thereafter, the Grand Duke’s principal toy in the city was an excessive number of little toy soldiers made of wood, lead, papier-mâché, and wax, which he arranged on very narrow tables that occupied an entire room. One could barely move between these tables. He had nailed thin strips of brass along the length of these tables. Strings were attached to these brass bands, and when one pulled them, the brass strips made a noise that according to him imitated the running fire of rifles. With great frequency, he celebrated court ceremonies by making these troops shoot their rifles. In addition, every day the guard was changed, which meant that the figures who were supposed to mount the guard were taken from each table. The Grand Duke attended this parade in uniform with boots, spurs, high collar, and scarf, and those servants admitted to this lovely exercise were obliged to dress in the same manner.

Toward winter that year I believed that I was pregnant again; I was bled. I had, or rather thought I had, gumboils under both my cheeks, but after suffering for a few days, four wisdom teeth appeared in the four corners of my mouth. As our apartments were very spacious, the Grand Duke instituted a weekly ball on Thursdays and concerts on Tuesdays. The only ones who came to these were our maids of honor and the gentlemen of our court, with their wives. These balls could be interesting depending on the people who came to them. I very much liked the Naryshkins, who were more sociable than others. I include in their number Mesdames Seniavina and Izmailova, sisters of the Naryshkins, and the wife of the elder brother, whom I have already mentioned. Lev Naryshkin, always crazier than before and regarded by everyone as a man of no importance, which indeed he was, had gotten into the habit of running continually from the Grand Duke’s room to mine without stopping anywhere for long. When entering my room he had the habit of meowing like a cat in front of my door, and when I replied, he would enter.

On December 17, between six and seven in the evening, he announced himself in this way at my door. I told him to enter. He began by giving me regards from his sister-in-law, telling me that she was not doing very well, and then he said, “But you should go see her.” I said, “I would do so willingly, but you know that I cannot go out without permission and that I will never be permitted to go to her house.” He replied, “I will take you there.” I retorted, “Have you lost your mind? What do you mean, go with you? You will be put in the fortress, and God knows what trouble I will be in.” “Oh,” he said, “no one will know about it. We will take our precautions.” “How’s that?” Then he said, “I will come to get you an hour or two from now. The Grand Duke will be eating supper” (for a long while I had been keeping to my room under the pretext of not wanting supper), “he will be at table for a good part of the night, will only leave very drunk, and will go to bed.” Since my confinement, he had been sleeping in his room most of the time. “To be on the safe side, dress as a man and we will go to Anna Nikitichna’s together.” The adventure was beginning to tempt me. I was always alone in my room with my books and without any company. Finally, after debating with him this plan, which was itself mad and which had seemed so to me from the first, I began to find it plausible and agreed so as to give myself a moment of amusement and pleasure. He left. I called for a Kalmuck hairdresser who was in my service and told him to bring me one of my men’s outfits and everything that went with it because I needed to make a present of it to someone. This boy never opened his mouth, and it was more difficult to make him talk than it is to make others be quiet. He promptly carried out my commission and brought me everything I needed. I pretended to have a headache and went to bed earlier than usual. As soon as Madame Vladislavova had put me to bed and withdrawn, I got up and dressed from head to toe in the man’s outfit. I arranged my hair as best I could. I had been doing this for a long time and was not clumsy at it. At the appointed time Lev Naryshkin came through the Grand Duke’s apartment and meowed at my door, which I opened for him. We passed through a little antechamber into the vestibule and got into a carriage without anyone seeing us, laughing like fools at our escapade. Lev was living with his brother and sister-in-law in the same house, which was also occupied by their mother. When we arrived, Anna Nikitichna, who suspected nothing, was there. We found Count Poniatowski there too. Lev introduced me as one of his friends and asked them to receive me well, and the evening passed in the merriest manner one can imagine. After visiting for an hour and a half, I left, and returned to the palace the happiest person in the world without meeting a living soul. At the morning court and the evening ball on the following day, the Empress’s birthday, none of us who shared the secret could look at one another without bursting with laughter at the previous day’s madness. A few days later Lev proposed a second visit that would take place in my residence, and as before he escorted his group into my room so that no one caught wind of this.

1756

The Seven Years’ War with Prussia begins; Elizabeth’s frequent
illness; Peter courts Mme. Teplova; Catherine’s miscarriage; her
riding lessons; Count Poniatowski, Count Horn, and her little
Bolognese dog; her quarrel with Peter over his mistresses; the Franco-
Austrian faction defeats Bestuzhev-Riumin’s Anglo-Prussian party

So began the year 1756. We took a singular pleasure in these furtive gatherings. Not a week went by without one, two, or three of them, alternating between different people’s houses, and when someone in the group was sick, we were sure to go to that person’s house. Sometimes at the theater, although we were in different loges and some of us were in the orchestra, each of us knew in a flash where to go by certain agreed-upon signs without speaking to one another, and there was never a misunderstanding among us, except that it happened twice that I had to return to the palace on foot, which meant a walk.

At the time, there were preparations for war against the King of Prussia. Under her treaty with the house of Austria, the Empress was supposed to give thirty thousand men in assistance. This was the opinion of Grand Chancellor Bestuzhev, but the house of Austria wanted Russia to assist with all its might. Count Esterhazy, the Ambassador from Vienna, schemed for this with all his might wherever he could and often through different channels. The faction opposed to Count Bestuzhev was Vice Chancellor Count Vorontsov and the Shuvalovs. At the time, England was allied with the King of Prussia and France with Austria.
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That was when Empress Elizabeth began to fall ill frequently. At first no one understood what this was, and they attributed it to the tapering off of her menstrual periods. The Shuvalovs often seemed distressed and deep in intrigue, heavily fawning over the Grand Duke from one moment to the next. The courtiers whispered among themselves that Her Imperial Majesty’s illness was more serious than was believed. Some called it hysteria, while others called it fainting, convulsions, or bad nerves. This lasted the entire winter of 1755 and 1756. Finally, in the spring, we learned that Marshal Apraksin was leaving to command the army that was supposed to invade Prussia. His wife came to our residence with her youngest daughter to take her leave of us. I spoke to her of the worries that I had about the Empress’s health and said that I was upset that her husband left at a time when I thought I could not expect much from the Shuvalovs, whom I regarded as my personal enemies and who were terribly angry with me because I preferred their enemies, namely the Counts Razumovsky, to them. She repeated all this to her husband, who was as happy with my inclination toward him as was Count Bestuzhev, who did not like the Shuvalovs and was allied with the Razumovskys, his son having married one of their nieces.
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Marshal Apraksin was able to be a useful intermediary between all the interested parties because of his daughter’s liaison with Count Peter Shuvalov.
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It was claimed that this liaison was known to the mother and father. In addition, I understood perfectly and saw clear as day that the Shuvalovs employed Monsieur Brockdorff more than ever to distance the Grand Duke from me as much as they could. Despite this, he instinctively trusted me even then. To a singular degree, he almost always maintained this trust, which he himself neither perceived, suspected, nor distrusted.

For the moment, he had fallen out with Countess Vorontsova and was in love with Madame Teplova, a niece of the Razumovskys. When he wanted to see the latter, he consulted me on how to decorate the room and showed me that to please the lady more he had filled the room with rifles, grenadiers’ hats, swords, and bandoliers, so that it had the air of an arsenal. I let him do as he wished and went my way. In addition, he also brought a little German singer, whom he supported and who was named Leonore, to have supper with him in the evening. It was the Princess of Courland who had put the Grand Duke on bad terms with Countess Vorontsova. To tell the truth, I do not quite know how. At the time, the Princess of Courland played a special role at court. To begin with, she was then a girl of around thirty years old, small, ugly, and hunchbacked, as I have already said. She had been able to arrange for herself the protection of the Empress’s confessor and of several of Her Imperial Majesty’s old ladies-in-waiting, so that she got away with everything she did. She lived with Her Imperial Majesty’s maids of honor. They were under the iron rule of a Madame Schmidt, who was the wife of a court trumpeter. This Madame Schmidt was of Finnish nationality, prodigiously large and stout. Moreover, she was a formidable woman who had retained perfectly the coarse peasant manner of her former station. Nevertheless, she played a role at court and was under the immediate protection of the Empress’s old German, Finnish, and Swedish ladies-in-waiting and consequently under that of Marshal of the Court Sievers, who was himself Finnish and who had married the daughter of Madame Kruse, the sister of one of the most beloved ladies, as I have already said. Madame Schmidt ruled the domestic affairs in the residence of the maids of honor with more strictness than intelligence, but never appeared at court. In public, the Princess of Courland was at their head, and Madame Schmidt had tacitly entrusted their conduct at court to her. In their residence, they all lived in a row of rooms that led at one end to that of Madame Schmidt and at the other to that of the Princess of Courland. They were two, three, and four to a room, each with a screen around her bed and all the rooms with exits only into one another. At first glance it therefore seemed that with this arrangement the apartment of the maids of honor was impenetrable because one could enter it only by passing through the room of either Madame Schmidt or the Princess of Courland. But Madame Schmidt was often ill with indigestion from all the greasy patties and other delicacies that the relatives of these maidens sent her. Consequently there remained only the passage through the Princess of Courland’s room. Malicious gossip had it that to pass through here into the other rooms, it was necessary to pay a toll one way or another. What could be verified about this was that the Princess of Courland arranged and broke the engagements of the Empress’s maids of honor, promised and unpromised them over several years as she saw fit. I have the story of the toll from the mouths of several people, among others Lev Naryshkin and Count Buturlin, which they themselves claimed did not in their case have to be paid in money. The love affair between the Grand Duke and Madame Teplova lasted until we went to the country. Here it was interrupted because His Imperial Highness found that this woman was intolerable during the summer, when she claimed that since he was unable to see her, he should write to her once or twice a week. To engage him in this correspondence, she began by writing him a four-page letter. As soon as he received it he came into my room with a very irritated look, holding Madame Teplova’s letter in his hand, and with vehemence and in an angry tone said rather loudly, “Imagine, she writes me a full four-page letter and claims that I should read it and, what is more, respond, I who have to go drill” (he had again had his troops from Holstein come), “then eat dinner, then shoot, then watch the rehearsal for an opera and the ballet that the cadets are going to dance in. I will tell her very firmly that I do not have the time, and if she gets upset, I will break off with her until winter.” I replied that this was surely the easiest path. I think that the traits I am disclosing are characteristic of him and therefore not out of place.

Here is the crux of how the cadets appeared at Oranienbaum. In the spring of 1756, the Shuvalovs believed that they had found a very diplomatic way to detach the Grand Duke from his Holstein troops by persuading the Empress to give His Imperial Highness command of the cadet infantry corps, which at the time was the only cadet corps that existed. Melgunov, the intimate friend and confidant of Ivan Ivanovich Shuvalov, had been placed under the Grand Duke. This man was married to one of the Empress’s German maids of honor and favorites. Thus the Shuvalovs had one of their most devoted intimates in the Grand Duke’s entourage, able to speak to him at all hours. Under the pretext of the Oranienbaum opera ballets, a hundred cadets were thus brought there, and Monsieur Melgunov and the officers attached to the corps, who were his closest intimates, came with them. These were so many spies for Shuvalov.

Among the instructors who came to Oranienbaum with the cadets was their riding master Zimmermann, who was said to be the best horseman in Russia at that time. As my supposed pregnancy of the previous autumn had disappeared, I decided to take formal lessons from Zimmermann to handle my horse properly. I spoke of this to the Grand Duke, who made no objections to it. For a while now all the old rules introduced by the Choglokovs had been neglected, forgotten, or ignored by Alexander Shuvalov, who in any case did not enjoy any or even a little respect. We made fun of him, his wife, his daughter, and his son-in-law practically in their presence.
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They invited this because one never saw more horrible, petty people. Madame Shuvalova had received from me the epithet “pillar of salt.” She was thin, small, and rigid. Her miserliness was perceptible in her dress. Her skirts were always too tight and one panel fewer than was necessary and than those of the other ladies. Her daughter, Countess Golovkina, dressed in the same manner. Their headwear and their cuffs were meager and always smacked of stinginess. Although these were very rich people and comfortably off, their taste ran to everything that was small and constrained, which painted a true picture of their minds. As soon as I began to take formal lessons in horseback riding, I again gave myself passionately to this exercise. I awoke at six in the morning, dressed in a man’s outfit, and went into my garden. There I had had an outdoor area prepared that served as my riding ground. I made such rapid progress that Zimmermann often ran to me from the center of this manège with a tear in his eye and kissed me on the boot with an uncontrollable enthusiasm. Other times he declared, “Never in my life have I had a student do me so much honor and make such progress in so little time.” At these lessons only my old surgeon, Guyon, a lady-in-waiting, and some servants were present. As I had put much effort into my lessons, which I took every morning except Sundays, Zimmermann rewarded my labors with silver spurs, which he gave me according to the riding school custom. After three weeks, I was familiar with all the riding styles, and toward autumn, Zimmermann had a steeplechaser brought that he wanted me to ride. But the day before I was to ride it, we received the order to return to the city. The outing was therefore postponed until the following spring.

During this summer Count Poniatowski went to make a tour of Poland, from which he returned with his diplomatic credentials as minister from the King of Poland. Before leaving he came to Oranienbaum to take leave of us. He was in the company of Count Horn, whom the King of Sweden had sent to Russia under the pretext of announcing the death of his mother, my grandmother, to Petersburg so as to protect the Count from the persecutions of the French faction, called the Hats, against the Russian faction, the Caps.
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This persecution became so great in Sweden that at the Diet of 1756, almost all the leaders of the Russian faction had their heads cut off. Count Horn himself told me that if he had not come to Petersburg, he would certainly have joined them. Count Poniatowski and Count Horn stayed at Oranienbaum for two days. The first day, the Grand Duke treated them very well, but on the second they bored him because he had a huntsman’s wedding on his mind, where he wanted to go drink, and when he saw that Counts Poniatowski and Horn were staying, he walked out on them, and it was I who stayed to honor our guests and show them around. After lunch, I took the group that had stayed with me and was not very large to see the Grand Duke’s and my private apartments. When we arrived in my study, a little Bolognese dog that I owned ran up to us and began to bark loudly at Count Horn, but when it noticed Count Poniatowski, I thought the dog would go mad with joy. As the study was very small, no one saw this except Lev Naryshkin, his sister-in-law, and I, but Count Horn was not deceived, and while crossing the apartment to return to the salon, Count Horn grabbed Count Poniatowski by the coat and said to him, “My friend, there is no worse traitor than a little Bolognese dog. The first thing I always did with the women I loved was give them one, and it was from these dogs that I always knew if there was someone more favored than I. This rule is sure and certain. You see, the dog wanted to eat me, whom it did not know, whereas it only rejoiced when it saw you again, for this is surely not the first time it has seen you here.” For his part, Count Poniatowski treated all this as nonsense, but could not dissuade him. Count Horn only replied to him, “Fear not. You are dealing with a discreet man.” The following day they left. Count Horn said that when he went so far as to fall in love, it was always with three women at once. He put this into practice before our eyes in Petersburg, where he courted three of the Empress’s maids of honor at the same time.

Count Poniatowski left two days later for his country. During his absence, the English Ambassador, Sir Williams, told me through Lev Naryshkin that Grand Chancellor Bestuzhev was mounting a conspiracy so that Count Poniatowski’s nomination would not go through, and that it was through Williams that Bestuzhev had attempted to dissuade Count Brühl, at the time minister and favorite of the King of Poland, from this nomination. Williams had taken care not to fulfill this commission, although he had not declined it, for fear that the Grand Chancellor would give it to someone else who would have carried it out more conscientiously perhaps, and in this way would have undermined Williams’s friend, who hoped above all to return to Russia. Sir Williams suspected that Count Bestuzhev, who for a long while had had the Saxon and Polish ministers at his disposal, wanted to nominate someone from among his closest henchmen for this position. However, Count Poniatowski obtained it and returned toward winter as the envoy from Poland, and the Saxon mission remained under the immediate direction of Count Bestuzhev.