Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman (91 page)

In 1781, Catherine, hoping to convince her Prussophile son of the advantages of her new friendship with Joseph II of Austria, arranged for Paul and Maria to make a European tour. It would take them a year and carry them to Vienna, Italy, her home in Württemburg, and Paris, but would pointedly exclude Berlin. Maria Fyodorovna was eager to see her family, but her pleasure faded when she was told that her children would remain behind. Paul’s disappointment was political; his mother’s refusal to let him revisit Berlin meant that he could not renew his acquaintance with Frederick. Tension between mother and son was heightened by the almost simultaneous dismissal of Nikita Panin from leadership of the College of Foreign Affairs. In fact, Panin’s removal and Catherine’s refusal to let Paul visit Berlin were linked. The close relationship between Russia and Prussia, which had been the centerpiece of Panin’s foreign policy, was crumbling even as Catherine’s friendship with Joseph II of Austria was growing stronger. Joseph had visited Catherine and St. Petersburg the year before, and the empress was hoping to embrace Austria as a partner and ally against the Turks.

On October 1, 1781, the journey began with the couple traveling incognito as the Comte et Countess du Nord—the Count and Countess of the North. Maria, upset to be leaving her children, fainted three times before the carriage could get under way. Once on the road, however, she recovered and the tour was a triumph. Catherine had been generous, supplying three hundred thousand rubles for travel expenses. She wrote affectionate letters to “my dearest children,” telling them to come straight home if they became homesick and that three-year-old Alexander “
had been given a map of Europe so that he could follow his parents’ itinerary.”

Their first stop was in Poland, where Stanislaus charmed Maria Fyodorovna. Catherine, curious about her former lover, asked Paul “
whether his Polish majesty was still such a delightful conversationalist or whether the cares of royalty had destroyed these qualities.” She added, “My old friend must have had difficulty in tracing any resemblance between my contemporary portraits and the face he remembers from the past.”

The warm reception in Poland was a taste of what was to come. Joseph II traveled to the Austrian frontier to welcome the heir to the
Russian throne. Vienna celebrated the couple’s presence, and Maria reveled in the elegance of the Austrian court and aristocracy. A visit scheduled to last a fortnight was extended to a month, during which Paul moderated his pro-Prussian sentiments and gravitated toward Joseph II. When his guests were leaving for the south, Joseph instructed his relatives in Tuscany and Naples that the grand duchess “
prefers stewed fruit to rich deserts and neither she nor her husband touches wine. She has a fondness for mineral water.”

The Hapsburg princes in Italy continued the warm welcome, but the culmination of their long journey was Paris. Crowds cheered the young couple wherever they appeared: at the theater, the racetrack, or walking in the Tuileries Gardens. At Versailles, Marie Antoinette, Joseph II’s sister, concentrated on pleasing Paul and reported, “The grand duke has the air of
an ardent and impetuous man who holds himself in.” The queen treated the grand duchess as an old and dear friend. Presented with a rare porcelain dinner set produced at Sèvres, Maria thought it was intended for the empress, her mother-in-law, until, with astonishment, she saw the arms of Russia and Württemburg intertwined on the plates.

Their return to Russia was painfully anticlimactic. The Count and Countess of the North had been absent for fourteen months; on first meeting their sons, the boys looked at them as strangers and clung to their grandmother’s skirts. The empress appeared determined to deflate the couple’s sense of accomplishment. The welcome Paul had received everywhere had enhanced his sense of self-worth; now Catherine told him that his travels had spoiled him. The young grand duchess was met with a more specific rebuff. She had gone to Marie Antoinette’s milliner, the famous Mlle Bertin, and made a number of purchases. The trunks from Paris were still being unpacked in St. Petersburg when Catherine forbade the wearing at court of tall headdresses with feathers, exactly the fashion which Maria had brought home to emulate the queen of France. Paul’s wife was commanded to return the purchases, having been told that a tall woman looked better in simple Russian costume than in these gaudy Parisian trappings. Paul, meanwhile, found that Nikita Panin’s health had collapsed. In 1783, the grand duke and his wife were at the deathbed of the man who had been Paul’s teacher, adviser, protector, and friend for twenty-three years.

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Paul was fortunate in his second marriage, but in most other areas of life, he suffered constant frustration. At different times he exhibited two distinctly different personalities, and people meeting him often took away entirely opposite views of the heir to the throne. In 1780, Emperor Joseph II of Austria paid his first visit to Russia, and he reported his impressions to his mother, Maria Theresa. Like everyone, he admired Maria Fyodorovna. More surprisingly, his verdict on Paul was largely favorable:

The French ambassador, the Comte de Ségur, who arrived in St. Petersburg in 1784, also had a generally positive opinion of Paul, although it was tinged with qualifications:

Years later, after his return to France and after Paul’s reign had ended in assassination, Ségur had more to say about the emperor. It was less favorable:

After the death of Gregory Orlov in 1783, Catherine purchased the palace at Gatchina, thirty miles south of the capital, which she had given her favorite; now she presented it to Paul. Living there with his family, he complained bitterly about his exclusion from power and responsibility. “
You tax me with my hypochondria and black moods,” he wrote to Prince Henry. “It may be so. But the inaction to which I am condemned makes the part excusable.” On another occasion, he wrote to Prince Henry, “
Permit me to write you often; my heart has need to unburden itself, especially in the sad life that I lead.” The letter stopped abruptly: “My tears prevent me from continuing.”

At Gatchina, Paul was free to indulge his version of Peter III’s mania for soldiering. To console himself for the humiliation of being barred from a regular army command, he engaged a Prussian drillmaster
and proceeded to create his own small, private army. By 1788, he had five companies of men dressed in tightly buttoned Prussian uniforms and powdered wigs. Every day, Paul appeared, wearing high boots and elbow-length gloves, and drilled his men to exhaustion—just as Peter III had done. He was short-tempered and, when displeased, would lash out with his cane. Count Fyodor Rostopchin wrote to a friend:

A humiliation Paul could never overcome and which kept him away from court was the presence of his mother’s favorites; they automatically became his enemies. As a child, he had hated Orlov. Then Orlov was replaced by Vasilchikov and other nobodies like Zorich, Yermolov, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Zubov. The vast sums continually bestowed on these young men emphasized to Paul, himself always in debt, the difference between the way she treated them and him. Potemkin, upon becoming all-powerful, stopped bothering even to be polite to the grand duke and openly dismissed him as a fool.

When she seized the throne, Catherine had proclaimed Paul to be her heir. Conceivably, when he reached his majority, she might also have enthroned him as co-ruler with significant responsibilities, as Maria Theresa had done with her son Joseph. In Vienna, Paul had seen the results of this other mother giving her son opportunities to learn by assisting her in ruling. There was never a chance that Catherine would do this. She saw her son as a rival, not a helpmate, and she gave Paul no role in the government of Russia. He and his wife were required to appear at official ceremonies; otherwise, mother and son saw little of each other.

To keep Paul in his place as a political cipher, Catherine found constant fault with him; at times he was too childish; at others too independent. One minute, she would accuse him of paying insufficient
attention to serious matters; the next, she complained that he was interfering in matters beyond his competence. Unable to decide how or where to use him, she gave up and decided not to use him at all. When he asked to become a member of the Imperial Council, he was rejected. “
I told you that your request needs mature consideration,” his mother said. “I do not think your entrance into the Council would be desirable. You must be patient until I change my mind.” On the outbreak of her second war with Turkey in 1787, Paul, who was thirty-three, asked to join the army as a volunteer. At first, she refused permission; then she gave in, but she reversed course again when Maria became pregnant. Her reasoning, she told Paul, was that if he deserted his wife at the moment of childbirth, his absence might jeopardize a precious Romanov life. He bitterly resented this veto on military service. When war suddenly broke out with Sweden a year later, Catherine relented sufficiently to allow Paul to visit the army in Finland. His passion for this duty was reflected in the degree to which his wife worried about his safety; she believed that he was actually going to fight. “
I shall be separated from my beloved husband,” Maria wrote. “My heart is almost broken by anxiety for the life of him for whom I would willingly sacrifice my own.” Paul put on his uniform and left St. Petersburg on July 1, 1788, but his service was brief. He criticized the hastily assembled Russian soldiers in Finland because they did not live up to the parade ground standards of Gatchina; he quarreled with the Russian commander in chief; he was not allowed to see maps or discuss military operations. By mid-September he was back in the capital; he never went to war again.

During the childhood of Paul and Maria’s first son, Alexander, Catherine began to think seriously about disinheriting Paul and passing the succession directly to her grandson. There was no constitutional barrier to this: the law of succession decreed by Peter the Great empowered every reigning Russian sovereign to overrule the tradition of primogeniture and name his or her successor, male or female. Catherine could make that decision right up to the moment of death. That the empress was thinking of naming her gifted and handsome grandson to succeed her was widely suspected, especially by Paul. He had another reason to hate his mother: not only had she stood between him and any training for the throne; now she was confronting him with his own son—precocious, attractive, and beloved by the empress—as a rival for the prize for which he had been waiting most of his life.

As years of frustration warped Paul’s character, his eccentricities became more pronounced. Already, he was melancholy and pessimistic; now he began to appear unbalanced. His behavior sometimes worried even his loyal wife. “
There is no one who does not every day remark the disorder of his faculties,” Maria said. Ironically, Paul’s shaky reputation and strange behavior reinforced Catherine’s hold on the throne; everyone desired the reins of government to remain in her strong hands as long as possible. When she felt her own strength declining, and she worried about the future of Russia, she never spoke of the reign of her son. It was Alexander of whom she spoke as her heir. Otherwise, she said gloomily, “
I see into what hands the empire will fall when I am gone.” In a letter to Grimm in 1791, referring to the bloody turmoil of the French Revolution, she predicted the coming of a Genghis Khan or a Tamerlane to Europe. “This will not come in my time,” she said, “and
I hope not in the time of M. Alexander.” In the last months of her life, she may have thought of changing the succession. Thirty years later, Maria, as Paul’s widow, confided to her daughter Anna that a few weeks before Catherine’s death, the empress had invited her to sign a paper demanding that Paul renounce his right to the throne. Maria had indignantly refused. A subsequent appeal by Catherine to Alexander to save his country from rule by his father was equally fruitless.