Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman (27 page)

Catherine could not talk about her own interests; Peter was usually indifferent:

18
In the Bedroom

P
ETER NOW SPENT
most of the day with his wife. Sometimes he played his violin for her; Catherine listened, hiding her hatred of his “noise.” Often, he talked about himself for hours. Sometimes, he was permitted to hold small evening parties at which he ordered his and her servants to wear masks and dance while he played the violin. Bored by this primitive shuffling, so different from the graceful movement at the great court balls she loved, Catherine, pleading a headache, lay on a couch, still wearing her mask, and closed her eyes. And then at night when they went to bed—during the first nine years of their marriage, Peter never slept elsewhere than in Catherine’s bed—he would ask Madame Krause to bring his toys.

Because everyone in the young court detested and feared the Choglokovs, everyone united against them. Madame Krause had suffered from her supplanter’s arrogance and so despised Madame Choglokova that she had swung her allegiance entirely to Peter and Catherine. She delighted in outwitting the principal duenna and regularly broke the new restrictions, mostly on behalf of Peter, whom she wanted to please because she, like the grand duke, was a native of Holstein. She rebelled most dramatically by procuring for him as many toy soldiers, miniature cannon, and model fortresses as he wanted. He could not play with them during the day, because Monsieur and Madame Choglokov would
have demanded to know from where and whom they came. The toys were hidden in and under the bed and Peter played with them only at night. After supper, Peter undressed and went to bed; Catherine followed. As soon as both were in bed, Madame Krause, who slept in the next room, came in, locked their door, and brought out so many toy soldiers dressed in blue Holstein uniforms that the bed was covered with them. Whereupon Madame Krause, then in her fifties, joined Peter in moving them around as he commanded.

The absurdity of what they were doing, often until two in the morning, sometimes made Catherine laugh, but usually she simply endured. She could not move in bed, the whole surface being covered with toys, some of which were heavy. In addition, she worried that Madame Choglokova would hear of these nocturnal games. Sure enough, one evening toward midnight, she knocked at the bedroom door. It had a double lock, and those inside did not open it immediately because Peter, Catherine, and Madame Krause were scrambling to collect the toys from the top of the bed and cram them under the blankets. When Madame Krause eventually opened the door, Madame Choglokova entered, furious at having been kept waiting. Madame Krause explained that it had been necessary for her to go and get her key. Then Madame Choglokova asked why Catherine and Peter were not asleep. Peter replied curtly that he was not ready to sleep. Madame Choglokova lashed back that the empress would be furious to learn that the couple was not asleep at this late hour. Eventually, she left, grumbling. Peter began playing again and continued until he fell asleep.

The situation was farcical: a newly married couple constantly on guard lest they be caught playing with toys. Behind this farce lay the greater absurdity of a young husband playing with toys in the marital bed, leaving his young wife with nothing to do but to watch. (In her
Memoirs
, an older, more sophisticated Catherine commented wryly, “
It seems to me that I was good for something else.”) Yet the real context in which these games were played was as dangerous as it was bizarre. Elizabeth was a woman accustomed to having her way. These two impudent grand ducal children were thwarting her. She had done everything for them: she had reached out and brought them to Russia; she had loaded them with gifts, titles, and kindness; she had given them a magnificent wedding; all in the hope of a speedy fulfillment of her wish for an heir.

When, as the months passed, Elizabeth found her hope still frustrated, she was determined to know which of the pair was responsible.
Was it conceivable that Catherine, at seventeen, with her freshness, her intelligence and charm, should leave her eighteen-year-old husband entirely cold? Was it not far more likely that Peter’s ugliness and disagreeable nature had repelled his wife, and that she was expressing her revulsion in the privacy of their bedroom by repulsing his advances? If this were not so, what other reason could there be?

Peter was not completely indifferent to women. Proof of this was his constant infatuation with one or another of the ladies of the court. His remark on his wedding night, “How it would amuse my servants …,” is proof of his awareness of the role of intimacy in sex, although by mocking it, he was turning intimacy into a vulgar joke.

It may be that the doctors were right and that Peter, in spite of his eighteen years, had not yet fully arrived at physical manhood. This was more or less Madame Krause’s opinion as she fruitlessly interrogated the young wife every morning. We do not know why he did not or would not or could not reach over and touch his wife. In her
Memoirs
, Catherine gives no answer. Peter left no records. But two possible explanations, one psychological, the other physical, have been suggested.

The psychological inhibitions brought forward from youth may have prevented Peter from exposing his fragile ego to the physical intimacy of lovemaking. Peter’s childhood and youth had been horrendous. He had grown up an orphan in the unloving care of martinet tutors. He had been barred from having companions and playmates his own age. He had known people who gave him orders and people who obeyed him, but never anyone with whom he could share common interests and develop friendship and trust. Catherine, during her first year in Russia, had offered him companionship, but she had unintentionally failed him at the moment in the dimly lit hall when he stood before her bearing the hideous scars of smallpox. In that instant, his new friend had struck his self-confidence a blow. To forgive her, to trust her again, to recommit his shaky self-image to her; these were steps he could not bring himself to take. Peter had some idea of what he was supposed to do with Catherine in bed, but her intelligence and charm, even her close female presence, aroused no initiative in him. Instead, they stimulated his sense of inadequacy, failure, and humiliation.

Another possibility has been offered to explain Peter’s apparent indifference. The Marquis de Castéra, a French diplomat who wrote a three-volume
Life of Catherine II
published a year after her death, suggested:
“
The least rabbi of Petersburg or the least surgeon would have been able to correct his little imperfection.” He was talking about a physiological condition called phimosis, a medical term for a tightness of the foreskin that prevents it from easily and comfortably sliding down over the tip of the penis. This problem is normal in a newborn or an infant and sometimes cannot be detected in an uncircumcised boy before the age of four or five because some foreskins remain tight until then. Usually, the problem naturally resolves itself before puberty, when the foreskin loosens and becomes flexible. If this does not happen, however, and the condition continues into adolescence, it can become acutely painful. Sometimes, the foreskin is so tight that the boy cannot have an erection without pain. This, of course, would make sexual intercourse unappealing. If this was true in Peter’s case, his reluctance to reach arousal—and to attempt to explain this problem to an uninformed young woman—can be understood.
^*

If Peter suffered from phimosis when he and Catherine were betrothed, this may have been the reason Elizabeth’s doctors recommended that the marriage be delayed. In another context in her
Memoirs
, Catherine says that Dr. Lestocq recommended waiting until the grand duke reached twenty-one; this advice may have stemmed from Lestocq’s awareness that the condition should certainly have resolved itself by then. But if Lestocq did discuss this matter with the empress, Elizabeth simply overrode his opinion. She was in a hurry for an heir.

Neither explanation for Peter’s persistent coldness in the marriage bed can be proved or disproved. In any case, whether the problem was psychological or physical—or perhaps involved elements of both—Peter was guilty of no wrong. Still, it was inevitable that, just as Catherine’s rejection of him when she first saw his ravaged face had affected him, so his physical rejection of her produced a reaction in her. Approaching marriage, she had not been in love with Peter, but she had made up her mind to live with him and to fulfill the expectations of her husband and the empress. Catherine, who knew little about sex, about erections and foreskins, and, certainly, nothing about phimosis, knew well what was expected of wives in a royal marriage. It was not Catherine who said no.

But Peter made it impossible for her. He scorned her physically and acted moonstruck over other women. He encouraged her to flirt with other men. The whole court witnessed her humiliation. Every foreign ambassador observed that she could not attract her husband’s interest; every servant knew the name of whatever young woman the grand duke happened to be pursuing at the moment. And since no one understood why Peter was ignoring his young wife, everyone, including the empress, laid the blame on her. Peter and Catherine continued to live together; they had no choice. But they were estranged by a thousand mutual misunderstandings and mortifications, and a desert of unspoken animosity stretched between them.

19
A House Collapses

N
EAR THE END
of May 1748, the empress Elizabeth and the court visited Count Razumovsky’s country estate outside St. Petersburg. Catherine and Peter were assigned to a small three-story wooden house built on a hill. Their apartment, in the upper story, had three rooms; they slept in one, Peter dressed in another, and Madame Krause slept in the third. The floor below lodged the Choglokovs and Catherine’s ladies-in-waiting. The first night, the party lasted until six in the morning, when everyone went to bed. Around eight, while all were asleep, a sergeant of the guards posted outside heard strange creaking noises. Looking around the base of the house, he saw that the large blocks of stone supporting the building were moving on the damp, slippery earth, detaching themselves and sliding downhill from the bottom timbers of the house. He hurried to awaken Choglokov, telling him that the foundation was giving way and that everyone had to get out. Choglokov rushed upstairs and burst open the bedroom door where Catherine and Peter were sleeping. Tearing aside the curtain around their bed, he shouted, “
Get up and get out as fast as you can! The foundation of the house is crumbling!” Peter, who had been fast asleep, made one leap from the bed to the door and disappeared. Catherine told Choglokov that she would follow. While dressing, she remembered that Madame Krause was sleeping in the next room and went in to awaken her.
The floorboards began to rock—“
like the waves of the sea,” said Catherine—and there was a tremendous crash. The house was settling and disintegrating, and Catherine and Madame Krause fell to the floor. At that moment, the sergeant entered, picked up Catherine, and carried her back to the staircase—which was no longer there. Amid the rubble, the sergeant handed Catherine down to the nearest person below, who handed her down to the next, and the next, from one set of hands to another, until she reached the bottom, from where she was carried into a field. There she found Peter and other people who had walked or been carried from the house. Soon, Madame Krause, rescued by another soldier, appeared. Catherine escaped with bruises and a severe shock, but, on a lower floor, three servants sleeping in the kitchen had been killed when the fireplace collapsed. Next to the foundation, sixteen sleeping workers had been crushed and buried in the rubble.