Great Catherine (12 page)

The women of the court were Elizabeth's particular victims. She subjected them to minute scrutiny, taking particular note of any complexion more radiant than her own, any pair of eyes more entrancing than hers, any bosom more ample and alluring. To challenge her attractions was to feel her wrath: she was not above ordering a woman with a beautiful dress to leave the room and remove it immediately, and in time all the women of the court had to learn the art of dressing just well enough not to outshine the empress. At the same time, however, they knew that she was capable of being moved by an almost maternal tenderness; she liked to single out a pretty woman, cup her face between her hands and murmur compliments to the blushing object of her admiration, showering her with gifts and privileges.

In the winter of 1746 the empress suddenly issued an order that all the women of the court must shave their heads. Weeping and

wailing, they did as she commanded, not knowing why, and bitterly lamenting the loss of their crowning glory. It had come to Elizabeth's attention that in the western monarchies, black hair was the height of fashion. She was determined that her court would follow this fashion, and so she sent her women black wigs to wear over their shorn heads, and wore one herself. All season long the plague of black wigs struck balls and social gatherings. They clashed with the pastel silks and damasks that were the prevailing mode, and clashed even more with the fair-skinned coloring of most of the Russian women. Even temporary visitors to court had to follow the imperial dictate and hide their hair under coarse coal-black wigs. But the empress was content. She had created an oasis of taste amid the rustic wasteland of Russia, her court was in style with the sophisticates in France. The black wigs, badly combed and ill suited to their wearers, lasted until spring when, with the empress's permission, the women were allowed to take them off and be seen in their own gradually lengthening hair again.

The empress was bewilderingly inconsistent, especially when it came to such basics as food, clothing and sex.

Where food was concerned she gave in to the most outrageous gluttony, stuffing herself with pickled pork and French pates and rich breads and pastries. She imported chefs from France and kept them busy supplying her table with fattening delicacies. Loving fresh peaches and grapes, which were only grown in the southerly reaches of her kingdom, she ordered a special road built to connect Moscow and Astrakhan. Along its twelve-hundred-mile length swift riders passed, carrying fruit specially packed in wicker baskets. Yet her gluttony often gave way to abstinence, and when the church prescribed fasting Elizabeth deprived herself severely and grew furious when those around her failed to emaciate themselves by living on mushrooms and water.

No one knew how many expensive gowns there were in the empress's measureless wardrobe. By one estimate, she had fifteen thousand of them, each wrapped in lengths of silk and kept in a

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large leather trunk. Dressmakers amassed fortunes in Elizabeth's service, though she was always in debt to them and often kept them waiting years for their payments. Still, she spent lavishly, as if there were no end to her resources, on satin trims and lengths of frothy lace, delicate embroidery and chains of satin rosebuds. To match her countless gowns she had countless pairs of high-heeled slippers, trunks of silk stockings and gloves and chests of jewels and ornaments for her hair. Yet in matters of dress she could suddenly turn austere, appearing in the plain stark black of mourning or castigating her women for failing to adopt more simple modes. Her dress followed her moods, sometimes reflecting a gossamer lightness of spirit, sometimes flamboyant passion, at other times a somber piety, and no one could sense in advance how their own dress might clash with her current mood, resulting in an outburst of imperial temper.

When it came to men the empress indulged her appetites without restraint. Black-haired, black-eyed Alexei Razumovsky, supremely handsome and unfailingly amiable, was not enough for her. She had had lovers since the age of fourteen, and as empress, she favored many men with an invitation to share her bed. All were well rewarded afterward. When her courtiers strayed from marital fidelity, however, her response was unpredictable. Sometimes she turned a blind eye, and sometimes she was harshly critical. Beneath her sensual exterior was a wide puritanical streak, and from time to time she was overcome with righteous wrath when confronted with evidence of immorality. She strode energetically through the halls of her palaces, seeking out all those who pursued illicit liaisons, persecuting courtesans and other "worthless" women and ordering her officials to imprison them. Like the Austrian Empress Maria Theresa, whose own personal life was above reproach and who set up a Chastity Commission to regulate the morals of those who served her, Empress Elizabeth appointed a commission to discover and penalize adulterers, and though her efforts in this direction were sporadic they added to her fearsomeness.

Observers were puzzled by Elizabeth's quixotic temperament. To Emperor Frederick, who had never met her but who was kept well informed about her by his ambassador, she appeared to be "secretive but amenable, loathing work, unfitted for governing." Lady Rondeau, wife of the British ambassador to the Russian court and a perceptive judge of character, found the empress to be a lovable but fissured personality. "In public she has an unaffected gaiety, and a certain air of giddiness," Lady Rondeau wrote in her memoir of Russia, "that seem entirely to possess her whole mind; in private, I have heard her talk in such a strain of good sense and steady reasoning, that I am persuaded the other behavior is a feint."

Catherine too thought that the empress had an impressive intelligence, well disguised by her surface pleasure-seeking and capriciousness. "Laziness prevented her from applying herself to the cultivation of her mind," Catherine wrote. Indeed Catherine was convinced that laziness and vanity were the vices that controlled Elizabeth, and made her a slave to self-indulgence and to the flatterers who surrounded her. Elizabeth's beauty, which in another woman might have led to self-confidence, only made her feel rivalry and jealousy, especially as she advanced into her thirties and her coloring began to fade. Her hair was still a lovely natural reddish-brown, but her cheeks needed rouge, her lips had lost their vivid red and her eyes, which Catherine described as "like those of a merry bird," were a softer blue than they had once been.

It was partly in an attempt to deny that time was passing and robbing her of her attractions that the empress sought oblivion in frenetic activity. From the time she rose, generally in the late morning, until the time she went to sleep—which was often not until dawn—Elizabeth kept herself busy with time-consuming pastimes and pleasures. Always on the move, she threw herself into riding, hunting, going on journeys, visiting monasteries, attending to her devotions and, in the evening, presiding at grand banquets and balls. She went to church services at least three times

a day, more often in the frequent seasons of fasting, and spent many hours in prayer. She spent many more hours at her toilette, having herself gowned and coiffed and painted, and still more time with her dressmakers and jewelers. And while all this was going on, the empress gave grudging attention to the urgent matters her chancellor brought before her, gathered support from informants for her everpresent suspicions and vented her fury on those who fell out of favor.

Her nights, especially the long nights of winter, were the worst, for then she wound down, her bulky body sought rest and it was harder for her to distract herself from the darker realities of her life. Fears and suspicions crowded in, she remembered that there was war on Russia's western border and that, on the grand chessboard of European politics, Russia and her allies were for the moment losing. Despite her extreme resistance to serious work, Elizabeth was not entirely deaf to Bestuzhev's pleas that she give thought to Russia's predicament; it haunted her, as did the question of her successor.

Her blighted, pockmarked nephew Peter continued to disappoint her. Having made him her heir, she did not feel more secure, as she had hoped to, for he seemed to have a talent for alienating people. He was not improving as he grew older. Marriage had not matured him; on the contrary, instead of taking his responsibilities seriously he was retreating more and more into juvenile fantasies and showing no capacity for governance. As for his wife, the German Catherine, Elizabeth was dissatisfied with her. Rather than becoming pregnant right away, as was her clear duty, Catherine was still as slim as a reed, and was growing more disturbingly attractive by the day. She was not the robust, obedient breeder Elizabeth had expected her to be, but something else altogether: she was entirely too clever, too sociable, too shrewd a judge of people and too quick to learn. She made Elizabeth uncomfortable.

Elizabeth was afraid—of the dark, of being alone, of being overthrown or murdered while she slept. She herself had come to

the throne through a conspiracy to overthrow her predecessor Anna Leopoldovna, regent for the infant Emperor Ivan VI, carried out one night while Anna was sleeping. It could easily happen again.

Every night Elizabeth sent her women to seek a room where she could sleep in safety, and prepare it for her. She rarely slept in the same room for more than one night, hoping that if she kept moving it would help to foil lurking assassins. Once she was installed in her temporary bedroom, she was still much too afraid to sleep, and so she gathered her drowsy women around her and made them talk to her, telling her every piece of gossip that was circulating at court, no matter how minute, recounting their love affairs and confessing their innermost dreams. While they talked they tickled the soles of her feet, to keep her awake and amused and to distract her from her fears.

At the foot of her bed, on a thin mattress, lay her bodyguard, the powerfully built Shulkov, a former stove-stoker with thick muscular arms and a fierce scowl for anyone who came too near his mistress. Shulkov had protected Elizabeth ever since she was a child, and she relied on his strength. Yet she knew that even Shulkov, armed and intimidating as he was, would be no match for a clever band of assassins who might steal in in the quiet of the night and surprise him. So she stayed wakeful until dawn, examining the shadows and listening for the muffled footfalls that might mean that the end of her reign was near.

Catherine, ever in the fearsome empress's orbit though rarely, in the months following her marriage, in her good graces, trembled and worried like everyone else and struggled to avert Elizabeth's wrathful whims. She suffered continually from terrible headaches, fevers, and sore throats brought on by being dragged from one drafty, uncomfortable set of apartments to another and on long tiring journeys. She endured the anxiety of knowing that she was under constant suspicion, and that among the scheming deceitful courtiers, who, as she wrote in her memoirs, "all hated each other cordially" and were perpetually engaged in murky

intrigues, she was the subject of infinite gossip and accusation. She realized that the empress suspected her of working to subvert her purposes, of being a spy as Johanna had tried to be, of disobedience and disloyalty. And she knew that the empress not only bestowed blows freely on those whom she distrusted—her women, her officers, even her friends and lovers—and occasionally did real injury, but that she frequently sent them to the dreaded Fortress of Peter and Paul, from which no one ever emerged except to go into exile. Knowing all this, and knowing too that Elizabeth was watching her closely for early signs of pregnancy, Catherine tried to behave herself and keep her distance.

Treachery surrounded Catherine, she hardly knew whom to trust. Servants were bribed or blackmailed into acting disloyally; those whom she could rely on most were sent away at the empress's orders. Her faithful valet Timofei Yevrenev stayed on, at Elizabeth's sufferance, but each month others were dismissed, usually those to whom Catherine had become most attached, and she was forced to bear their loss in silence. Rumors and accusations abounded. Malicious people approached Catherine with stories of Peter's infidelities: Count Divier told her that Peter was in love with one of Elizabeth's maids of honor, and later that he had discarded his first love for yet another woman in the empress's inner circle. Stories reached Peter and Elizabeth that Catherine was flirting with this or that gentleman of the court, that she was arranging secret rendezvous, that she was deliberately frustrating Peter's efforts to win her affection, that she was cold and calculating and would not do what was expected of her. "Traitor" was the word whispered most often behind her back, and she knew it.

Before her marriage Catherine had been able to put aside the tensions under which she lived when in the company of young friends. Now, however, her new household mistress Madame Kraus forbade such foolishness. She was isolated, secluded for many hours at a time, kept from joining in her favorite pastimes

because the empress did not want her to take even the slightest physical risk. At least, that was the kindest interpretation of the strict rules imposed on her, and she tried to keep it in mind when she sat indoors, alone, on hot summer afternoons, wishing that she could be hunting with the rest of the royal party and missing the long rides she loved.

Every week throughout the autumn and winter there were two masked balls, one at the palace and one at the home of some prominent subject. The balls were formal, ceremonious affairs, the few guests were stiff with self-consciousness behind their masks and desperate to demonstrate their importance and their ability to follow protocol. The empress enjoyed making a grand entrance at these balls, pausing in the doorway to strike a pose in her flowing robes, with all the bejewelled Orders of the empire gleaming on her breast. Often she left the salon and returned again two or three times in the course of the evening, having changed her gown each time.

Catherine had no choice but to attend these balls, and to try to act as if she were enjoying herself, despite the dreariness of the company and her husband's tiresome flirtations. "One pretended to amuse oneself," she recalled many years later, "but deep down one was bored to death." Boredom dogged her. At a court where only half the nobles could read (the women, on the whole, being better educated than the men) and perhaps a third could write, where ignorance abounded and wit and the art of conversation were cultivated by only a few, Catherine was starved for congenial company. Once in a long while a cultivated visitor such as the Swede Count Gyllenburg would come on the scene and raise the intellectual tone. But for the most part, Catherine wrote, "there was no sense trying to talk about art or science, because everyone was uneducated. Insults passed as clever remarks."