Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman (33 page)

As she grew intellectually, Catherine was also becoming perceived as more physically attractive. “I had a slender waist; all I lacked was a little flesh for I was very thin. I liked to go without powder, for my hair was of an exceedingly fine brown, very thick and strong.” She had admirers. For a while, the most persistent of these was none other than Nicholas Choglokov, who, after his adventure with Mlle Kosheleva, became infatuated with the grand duchess. Catherine noticed him smiling and nodding foolishly at her. His attention was abhorrent to her. “
He was blond and foppish, very fat, and as thick in mind as in body. He was universally hated; everyone considered him a disagreeable toad. I managed to evade all of his attentions, without ever failing to be polite to him. This was perfectly clear to his wife who was grateful to me.”

Catherine’s charms were most on display when she danced. She chose what she wore carefully. If a gown attracted everyone’s praise, she never wore it again; her rule was that if it made a striking impression the first time, it could only make a lesser one thereafter. At private court balls, she dressed as simply as possible. This pleased the empress, who did not like women to appear overdressed on these occasions. When women were ordered to come costumed as men, Catherine appeared in magnificent, richly embroidered outfits. This, too, seemed to please Elizabeth.

Dressing for a particular one of these masked balls at which the court women would be competing in splendor and elegance, Catherine decided to wear only a bodice of rough white cloth and a skirt of the same material over a small hoop. Her long, thick hair was curled and tied in a simple ponytail with a white ribbon. She wore a single rose in her hair and put a ruff of white gauze around her neck, with cuffs and a little apron of the same material. When she entered the hall, she walked up to the empress. “
Good God, what modesty!” Elizabeth said approvingly. In high spirits when she left the empress, she danced every dance. “In my life,” she wrote later, “I never remember being so highly praised by everyone as on that night. To tell the truth, I have never believed
myself to be beautiful, but I had charm and I knew how to please and I think this was my strength.”

It was during the masquerades and balls of that winter, 1750–51, that the former gentleman-of-the-bedchamber Count Zakhar Chernyshev, now a colonel in the army, returned to St. Petersburg after a five-year absence. When he had departed, Catherine was an adolescent of sixteen; now she was a woman of twenty-one.

At every ball, Chernyshev made this kind of remark. One day, Princess Gagarina, a lady-in-waiting, brought Catherine a printed billet-doux, a little slip of paper containing sentimental verses. It was from Chernyshev. The following day, Catherine received another envelope from Chernyshev, but this time she found inside a note with lines written in his own hand. At the next masquerade, while dancing with her, he said that he had a thousand
things to say to her that he could not put on paper. He begged her to give him a brief audience in her room. She told him that this was impossible, that her chambers were inaccessible. He told her that he would disguise himself as a servant if necessary. She refused.
“And so,” Catherine wrote later, “things went no further than these notes stuffed into envelopes.” At the end of the monthlong Carnival, Count Chernyshev returned to his regiment.

During these years when she was in her early twenties, Catherine was living the life of a royal Cinderella. On summer days, she galloped over the meadowlands and shot ducks in the marshes along the Gulf of Finland. Winter nights, she danced as the belle of court balls, exchanging whispered confidences and receiving romantic notes from attentive young men. These moments were elements of her dream world. The reality of her daily life was different: it was filled with frustration, rebuff, and denial.

One shock occurred on the day Madame Choglokova told her that the empress had just dismissed Timothy Evreinov, her chamber valet and friend. There had been a quarrel involving Evreinov and a man who served coffee to Catherine and Peter. During this argument, Peter had walked in unexpectedly and overheard the insults the two men were shouting at each other. Evreinov’s antagonist then had gone and complained to Monsieur Choglokov that, without consideration for the presence of the heir to the throne, Evreinov had covered him with abuse. Choglokov rushed to report the incident to the empress, who instantly dismissed both men from court. “
The truth,” Catherine reported, “is that both Evreinov and the other man were deeply devoted to us.” In Evreinov’s place, the empress placed a man named Vasily Shkurin.

Soon afterward, Catherine and Madame Choglokova clashed over a matter in which Shkurin played a critical role. From Paris, Princess Johanna, Catherine’s mother, had sent her daughter two pieces of beautiful cloth. Catherine was admiring these fabrics in her dressing room in the presence of Shkurin when she let slip that they were so beautiful that she was tempted to present them as a gift to the empress. She waited for an opportunity to speak to the monarch; she wanted the fabric to be a personal present and she wanted to hand it to Elizabeth herself. She specifically forbade Shkurin to repeat to anyone what she had said in his hearing. He immediately ran to Madame Choglokova to report what he had heard. A few days later, the governess came to Catherine and said that the empress thanked her for the fabrics; that Elizabeth was keeping one and sending the other back to the grand duchess to keep. Catherine was dumbfounded. “
How is this, Madame Choglokova?” she asked. Madame Choglokova replied that she had been told that Catherine meant the fabrics to go to the empress and so she had brought them to her. Catherine, stammering so badly that she could hardly speak, managed to tell Madame Choglokova that she had looked forward to presenting the empress with these fabrics herself. She reminded Madame Choglokova that the governess could not possibly have known her intentions because she had not spoken of them to her, and said that if Madame Choglokova was aware of what she planned, it was only from the mouth of a treacherous servant. Madame Choglokova replied that Catherine knew that she was not permitted to speak directly to the empress and that she also knew that her servants had orders to report to her, Madame Choglokova, everything Catherine
said in their presence. Consequently, her servant had only done his duty, and she hers by bringing the fabrics to the empress. In short, Madame Choglokova declared, everything had been done according to the rules. Catherine was unable to reply; her fury left her speechless.

When Madame Choglokova departed, Catherine rushed to the little antechamber where Shkurin spent his mornings. Finding him there, she slapped him with all her strength and told him that he was an ungrateful traitor for having dared to report to Madame Choglokova what she had forbidden him to speak about. She reminded him that she had showered him with gifts; still he had betrayed her. Shkurin fell to his knees, begging forgiveness. Catherine was touched by his remorse and told him that his future conduct would determine her treatment of him. In the days that followed, Catherine complained loudly to everyone about Madame Choglokova’s behavior, intending that the matter reach the empress’s ears. Apparently it did and, eventually, when Elizabeth saw the grand duchess, the empress thanked her for her present.

27
Saltykov

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1751, the empress assigned three young noblemen as gentlemen-in-waiting to Grand Duke Peter. One, Lev Naryshkin, came from the family that had produced Natalya Naryshkina, the mother of Peter the Great. Lev himself was an amiable, quick-witted wag whom everybody liked and no one took seriously; Catherine described him as someone who made her laugh more than anyone else in her life.

The other two were the Saltykov brothers, sons of one of the oldest and noblest families in Russia. Their father was an aide-de-camp to the empress; their mother was cherished by the empress for her devotion during Elizabeth’s seizure of the throne in 1740. Peter, the older of the brothers, was a lout whom Catherine describes as “
a fool in every sense of the word. He had the stupidest face I have ever seen: a pair of big, staring eyes, a flat nose, and a gaping mouth, always half open. He was a notorious gossip and, as such, on excellent terms with the Choglokovs.”

The second Saltykov brother, Sergei, was entirely different. Sergei was handsome and ruthless; a man who was making the seduction of women his life’s purpose. He was dark-complexioned, with black eyes, of medium height, and muscular yet graceful. Constantly on the lookout for a new triumph, he always went straight to work, employing charm, promises, and persistence, in whatever combination worked. Obstacles only increased his determination. When he first noticed
Catherine,
he was twenty-six years old and had been married for two years to one of the empress’s ladies-in-waiting, Matriona Balk. This marriage had resulted from impulse: he had seen her on a high-flying swing at Tsarskoe Selo and her skirt, flared by the breeze, had exposed her ankles; he had proposed the following day. Now he was tired of Matriona and ready for something new. He observed how blatantly Catherine was ignored by her husband, and how obviously bored she was by the company around her. The fact that the grand duchess was closely guarded added allure; her marriage to the grand duke made the prize more glittering; and the pervasive rumor that Catherine was still a virgin made the challenge irresistible.

Catherine noticed that the young man quickly made himself an intimate of the Choglokovs. She thought this strange: “
As these people were neither clever nor amiable, Saltykov must have had some secret purpose in these attentions. Certainly no man with any common sense would have been able to listen to these two arrogant, egotistical fools talking nonsense all day without having some ulterior motive.” Maria Choglokova was pregnant again and kept mostly to her room. She asked the grand duchess to visit. Catherine went and usually found Sergei Saltykov, Lev Naryshkin, and others present, along with Nicholas Choglokov. During these afternoons and evenings, Saltykov devised an ingenious way to keep Monsieur Choglokov occupied. He had discovered that this stolid, unimaginative man had a talent for writing simple poetic lyrics. Saltykov praised these lines extravagantly and asked to hear more. Thereafter, whenever the group wanted to rid itself of Choglokov’s attention, Saltykov suggested a theme and begged the flattered versifier to compose. Choglokov then would hurry to a corner of the room, sit down by the stove, and begin to write. Once started, he became so absorbed in his work that he would not rise from his seat the entire evening. His lyrics were pronounced wonderful and charming, and he kept writing new ones. Lev Naryshkin set these lyrics to music on the clavichord and sang them with him. Nobody listened and everyone else in the room was free to carry on uninterrupted conversation.