Great Catherine (14 page)

Catherine's tears began to flow even more heavily when the chancellor announced that the empress had named Maria Choglokov to be grand mistress of her household. The two women crossed swords almost at once, though Catherine, through her tears, gave assurances that "the empress's orders were an immutable law" to her, and that she would of course be obedient to this change in her household. Conveying Elizabeth's sentiments, Maria told Catherine that she was obstinate. Catherine demanded to know what she had done to deserve that accusation, and Maria retorted tartly that she had said what she had said at the empress's orders and that was that.

It was a bad beginning, and things rapidly got worse. Maria Choglokov rarely let Catherine out of her sight, and Catherine became her prisoner. They spent hour after hour together, the

dully correct, leaden chaperon and the mercurial, energetic, clever grand duchess, who was now denied the company of her preferred companions and was forced to endure the tedium of Maria's constant corrections. Often Catherine had nothing to do but read, and she retreated gladly into her books, marking the days by the swelling of her chaperon's belly, praying that Maria would be delivered soon so that she, Catherine, could have a few days of respite from her ceaseless vigilance and harsh tongue.

Catherine was allowed to spend time with Peter, but her contact with all others was severely limited. Maria prohibited the members of Catherine's household from conversing with her. "If you say more to her than yes or no," the guardian told them individually, "I'll tell the empress that you are intriguing against her, for the intrigues of the grand duchess are well known." Fearing the empress's wrath, the people in Catherine's suite were eager to avoid giving even the appearance of disloyalty, and so they served their mistress in silence, deepening her isolation.

No one could speak to Catherine without arousing Maria's suspicions, and even brief compliments aroused her distrust. 'That winter," Catherine recalled in her memoirs, "I spent a good deal of time on my appearance. Princess Gagarin often said to me furtively, hiding from Madame Choglokov—for in her view it was a terrible crime for anyone to praise me, even in passing— that I was becoming prettier by the day." In her isolation, denied her usual recreations, Catherine spent more time in front of her mirror, and engaged a skilled hairdresser, a young Kalmuk boy, to arrange her hair twice a day. Catherine's hair was enviably thick and curled attractively around her face. Elizabeth had exempted her from having to shave her head and wear the ubiquitous black wig, and her hair flowed luxuriantly down her back—the envy of other women—and she left it unpowdered, its rich chestnut color eliciting universal admiration.

Flattery reached Catherine's ears, if only in whispers. Someone told her that the Swedish ambassador Wolfenstierna judged her to be "very lovely," which made her embarrassed when, on rare

occasions, she was allowed to address him. ("Whether from modesty or coquetry I don't know," she wrote later, "but the embarrassment was real.")

Catherine was blooming, but Maria was there to put frost on her bloom, to dampen her spirits and rein in her enthusiasms. "I'm going to make my report to the empress!" Maria announced whenever she sensed a hint of frivolity or disorder (and, as Catherine wrote, she called "everything that was not total boredom, disorder"). To induce a more serious mood, Maria enforced the empress's wish that both Catherine and Peter add to their attendance at daily mass two more religious observances: matins and vespers. And she did her best to ensure that whenever they left the royal palace, whether to attend a social event or to follow the peripatetic empress on her sojourns through the countryside, they didn't lapse into their old lighthearted ways.

Catherine remembered one particularly dismal journey, when for nearly two weeks she was stuck in a carriage with Maria and Peter and her uncle August, Johanna's wearisome, rather insipid brother who had been appointed by the empress to look after Peter's Holstein estates. (Johanna herself had departed, sent away in disgrace by Elizabeth soon after Catherine's wedding.) Uncle August was not very lively company. A short, dull-witted man who dressed shabbily and had pronounced views on the subordination of wives—views which he aired frequently for Peter's benefit—August ventured on one inconsequential topic after another. Each time, however, Maria interrupted him to say "Such discourse is displeasing to Her Majesty," or "Such a thing would not be approved of by the empress." Conversation was all but impossible, and Maria succeeded in "spreading tedium and desolation throughout our carriage," Catherine wrote.

When they stopped for the night, the chaperon's censorship of their conversation continued; the travelers were not even allowed to discuss the inconveniences caused by their flooded tents and the freezing weather. Day after day the dreariness continued, with Maria harassing the servants and alienating everyone. Catherine

tried to sleep as much as possible, both during the day and in the evenings, to avoid her vexing husband, her boring uncle and the everpresent, funereal Maria.

Once they arrived at their destination, and were installed in a country house, the scene brightened somewhat. Prince and Princess Repnin, who were not insensitive to the excesses of the overbearing Madame Choglokov, steered Catherine away from her as often as they could and led her to softer and more affectionate companions, among them Countess Shuvalov and Madame Ismailof, the empress's most sympathetic waiting women. For her part, Maria was distracted by the card games that went on from morning until night in the antechamber of the imperial bedroom. There was, Catherine recalled, a "crazy furor" at court for games of chance that season, and Maria was an avid participant who became very angry when she lost. She became immersed in her cards, and forgot to supervise Catherine closely— though even so Catherine did not dare to stray out of her sight.

The tyranny of Maria Choglokov, along with the empress's oft-repeated threats to disinherit Peter, drew Peter and Catherine together, despite the radical differences in their temperaments.

"Never did two personalities resemble one another as little as ours," Catherine wrote, recalling her early years of marriage. "We had different tastes, our way of thinking and understanding things was so dissimilar that we could never have reached agreement on anything had I not compromised."

There were times when Peter sought Catherine out, and talked over with her whatever was bothering him, but only when he was in distress. ("He was often in distress," she remembered, "because he was quite a coward at heart and he had a weak understanding.") When the empress scolded him, or sent away the valets who were his favorite drinking companions, he crumpled inwardly and went in search of his ever-indulgent wife, who humored him and treated him like a petted child.

"He knew or sensed that I was the only person he could talk to without risking committing a crime by saying the least thing. I

saw what his situation was like and I took pity on him. I tried to give him consolation." Though she was frequently bored by his visits, Catherine covered her boredom with an agreeable facade, even when he stayed for hours and wore her out with his incessant talk of styles of epaulets and artillery maneuvers and punishments for disobedient soldiers.

"He talked of military details, minutiae really, and never could come to the end of them," Catherine wrote in her memoirs. "He never sat down, and perpetually walked or paced, with very large steps, from one corner of the room to another, so that it was hard work keeping up with him." But keep up with him she did, even on long afternoons when her head was splitting, or her teeth aching, knowing that for the moment she was his only friend and talking to her his only permitted form of amusement. Sometimes, after hours of pacing and prattling, Peter's energy flagged and he agreed to sit down and read. Catherine got out her current book—the letters of Madame de Sevigne was among her favorites—and Peter found an adventure novel or a story about highwaymen to help him pass the time. "

Many times Catherine submitted to her husband's whim and let him turn her into a soldier, giving her a musket and making her stand sentinel at the door of his room with the heavy gun on her shoulder for hours at a stretch. She stood there, a tall, slim girl in a silken gown, doing her best not to slump though the musket gouged a dent in her shoulder and her feet and legs were tired from hours of immobility, until Peter decided that she had served long enough and allowed her to leave her post.

But her training did not end there. He taught her to march and countermarch, to obey field commands and take orders like a veteran. "Thanks to his pains," she wrote, "I still know how to do the complete musket exercise with as much precision as the most seasoned grenadier."

Every summer Peter and Catherine stayed for a time at Ora-nienbaum, the magnificent estate near Peterhof just outside of Petersburg which the empress had given them as a summer resi-

son

dence. There the grand duke had an opportunity to bring his military fantasies to life on a larger scale, with Catherine observing from the sidelines. All the household servants—maids, sweepers, cooks, turnspits, valets, chamberlains, pages—were assembled into a regiment, along with the gardeners, grooms and huntsmen. Each became a soldier, and was issued a uniform of sorts and a musket. Peter drilled his troops every day, rain or shine, calling out commands in his high voice and threatening to punish the disobedient. The mansion itself became a guard house, its lower floor a guard room where the troops passed their days when they were not on parade. At midday the mock soldiers had to eat at the mess and in the evening, still wearing their makeshift uniforms, they had to attend balls devised by Peter, where Catherine and a half-dozen of the women of her suite and Peter's waited to dance with them.

At these balls, Catherine wrote, "among the women, there were only me, Madame Choglokov, Princess Repnin, my three waiting women, and my chamber women. So the ball was very thinly populated and badly arranged. The men were harassed and in a bad humor because of their continuing military exercises."

Everyone fumed, grew irritated, bored and restless. All except Peter—who was in his element.

But Peter had in mind even more ambitious schemes. While pacing the floor in her room he shared with Catherine his vision of building a fanciful monastery where they and their servants and courtiers could live, dressing as monks and nuns in plain habits of coarse brown cloth. They would need little in the simple life he envisioned, only the most basic foodstuffs, which they could fetch themselves, riding on donkeys to the nearest farm.

It was a dream of simplicity, peace and ease, the dream of a troubled young man besieged by the opulence and hothouse atmosphere of his aunt's brilliant court. Like Marie Antoinette a generation later, Peter yearned for authenticity amid artificiality. Antoinette built her rustic refuge on the grounds of the palace of Versailles. Peter, however, could not muster the tenacity to build

his, though he kept Catherine busy drawing sketches for the building itself. Or perhaps he was tenacious, but in the end was thwarted by the implacable empress.

By the time she and Peter had been married for two years, Catherine felt that she had earned a good deal of affection and trust from him. He came to her in tears when he felt bereft, he sought her out when the empress chided him, he looked to her for consolation. It was to Catherine that Peter confided that his great love, a Mademoiselle Lapushkin, had been snatched from him when her mother was exiled to Siberia. It had been Mademoiselle Lapushkin that he had wanted to marry, losing her had broken his youthful heart. But he had resigned himself to marrying Sophie, because she was his cousin, she had German blood—a great benefit in his eyes—and besides, he liked her.

Touched at times by Peter's ingenuousness and candor, and full of pity for him, Catherine felt an unmistakable tenderness toward her peculiar husband, though it was more maternal than wifely. She endured his mistreatment, and was tolerant of his whims, she encouraged his love of music (he had a good ear, and Prince Repnin engaged violin teachers for him), she played billiards with his chamberlains while he drank and disported himself in an adjacent room with his serving men. She sat patiently while he put on plays in his marionette theater ("the spectacle was the most insipid thing in the world," she later wrote), and conspired with his valets to bring him meat to eat during Lent, when he was supposed to be eating only mushrooms and fish.

Despite the tensions inherent in her situation, her worries over her unconsummated marriage, the constant scrutiny of her chaperon and of Madame Kraus, and the anxiety caused her by the empress's increasing disapproval, Catherine managed to find times of quiet domesticity and fleeting intimacy with Peter. Once in a while a troupe of young people, among them Count Pierre Divier, Alexander Galitzyn, Alexander Trubetskoy, Sergei Saltykov, and Pierre Repnin, Prince Repnin's nephew, would come bounding into her apartments, led by Peter, flushed with wine

and in high spirits. There would be an impromptu party, with none of the guests over thirty years old. The wine flowed freely, Catherine joined happily in the games and horseplay and dancing, and she and Peter both were able to forget for a few hours the burdens that weighed on them and the responsibilities that they were failing to fulfill.

Or Peter came alone to Catherine's rooms, bringing a gift or a game for them to play. He once brought her a wriggling black puppy, only six months old. "It was the most amazing little beast I ever saw," she remembered, for it liked to walk on its hind legs and dance absurdly around the room. Her servants fell in love with it, and named it Ivan Ivanovich. They dressed it in mobcaps, shawls and skirts and watched with delight while it pranced and jumped.

Such scenes were rare, however, and became rarer with each passing month, while occasions of abuse and humiliation increased. Peter gave Catherine much more discomfort and pain than pleasure, keeping a dozen of his hunting dogs confined next to her bedroom so that their revolting smell made her gag all night long, quarreling with her and threatening her, tormenting her with his infatuations—no longer confined to the ladies in waiting, but now including middle-aged women old enough to be his mother—and flaunting his amours before the whole court, causing the gentlewomen to smile behind their fans or shake their heads in pity when Catherine walked by. He even occasionally struck Catherine when other forms of torment failed to elicit a satisfying response, though he did this most often after a long evening spent with the bottle.