Great Catherine (2 page)

But it was not enough to train her limbs; her intellect too had to be carefully straitjacketed, lest it grow in awkward directions. Babette Cardel remarked that Sophie had an "esprit gauche"—an eccentric and highly individual turn of mind. She was opinionated and contrary, and she "resisted all resistance," as she herself put it later, remembering what she had been like at five and six. Sophie had "a perverse spirit which took all that was said to her in the opposite sense," and in an age when all children, and most especially little girls, were expected to be obedient and submissive, her "perverse spirit" presented her teachers with a challenge.

Besides Babette, who knew how to govern the young princess with reason and gentleness, Sophie had a German teacher, a French dancing-master, a music teacher and a Calvinist schoolmaster who taught her calligraphy. The schoolmaster she dismissed as "an old weak-head who had been an idiot in his youth," and the unfortunate music teacher, "the poor devil Roel-lig," as she called him when she remembered him later, made himself ridiculous by going into raptures over the booming tones of a bass singer he always brought with him to her lessons who "roared like a bull." Having no ear for music herself, Sophie envied those who did, but had no respect for Roellig or the other inferior provincial pedants who were put in charge of her.

Toward Herr Wagner, however, who taught her religion— along with a smattering of history and geography—Sophie had more complicated feelings. Herr Wagner was an army pastor who saw it as his duty to impress on the flighty, cheerful princess the seriousness of life, the wickedness of the world and the dread of hell. He presented her with a large German Bible with hundreds

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of verses underlined in red ink and told her to memorize them. Hour after hour she sat with the book on her knees, repeating to herself phrases about the wages of sin and the mighty armor of God and the heart as "deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked." Messages about grace and mercy were mixed in her child's awareness with visions of torment and divine vengeance— and in fact the vengeance of the Lord may well have become confused with the vengeance of Herr Wagner, for when Sophie stumbled over a word or forgot a verse, he punished her harshly and conveyed a degree of disapproval that made her feel not only that she had failed but that she was well nigh worthless.

Tragedy, evil and sin were Herr Wagner's themes, and he did his best to implant in Sophie a lively sense of pessimism toward earthly life and a lively fear of the Last Judgment, when God would mete out a terrible retribution to those who had not gained his mercy. Sophie took Pastor Wagner's messages very seriously indeed, and wept bitterly and privately over her shortcomings. When it came to the logic of history, however, and the teachings in the Book of Genesis about the creation of the world, her curiosity and natural argumentativeness outstripped her piety.

She argued with her instructor "heatedly and in a very opinionated way" about how unjust she felt it was for God to damn all those who lived before the birth of Christ. What of those wise philosophers of antiquity, Plato and Socrates and Aristotle, whose sagacity had been prized for several millennia? she asked. Was not God deficient in fairness in condemning them? Herr Wagner quoted chapter and verse, but Sophie continued to defend Aristotle and Plato. Finally the pastor went to Babette and demanded that she give Sophie a good beating to make her see the truth and obey her elders.

Babette gently explained to Sophie that it was not appropriate for a child to express a contrary opinion to an older authority such as Herr Wagner, and told her to submit to his view. But before long teacher and pupil were at odds again. This time Sophie wanted to know what came before the biblical creation.

"Chaos," Herr Wagner announced with what he hoped was finality. But what was chaos, Sophie demanded, and would not be satisfied with what he told her.

Exasperated beyond endurance, and no doubt angry at Babette for refusing to beat the recalcitrant princess, Herr Wagner once again threw up his hands and called in the governess, whose intervention restored peace until the next point of debate arose, over the unfamiliar word "circumcision." Sophie naturally wanted to know what it was, and Herr Wagner was naturally reluctant to tell her. Babette too told her to stop asking, though it took all her art to persuade the persistent child to be content with ignorance, and it was not lost on Sophie that Babette found the situation amusing.

Herr Wagner's examinations were nearly as terrifying as the Last Judgment. "I was horribly, persecutorially questioned," Sophie remembered years afterward. Worst of all was the burden of having to learn by heart what seemed an infinite number of Bible verses as well as long passages of poetry. To help her concentrate on what she was learning, at the age of seven all her toys and dolls were taken away. (She didn't miss them much; she preferred the active rough-and-tumble games the boys played and had never liked dolls, amusing herself at odd moments by playing with her hands or folding a handkerchief into fanciful shapes.) "I believe it was not humanly possible to retain all that I had to memorize," she recalled many years later. "Also I do not think it worth the trouble."

The strain on her nerves was great; eventually she began to despair. When autumn came, and the days grew very short in the far northern town of Stettin, and the mournful chapel bells tolled at twilight, she took to hiding behind the hangings and crying as though her heart would break. The tears were for her sins, and for the errors she made when she recited her lessons, and the love she missed. Babette found her in her hiding place, got her to admit at least some of what was troubling her, and went to the pastor to complain. She told him that his methods were making Sophie

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overly melancholy and frightened about the future, and asked him to be less severe. Neither Babette nor anyone else addressed the more serious problem that was troubling Sophie: the knowledge that her mother did not love her, and her resentment of the crippled, pampered Wilhelm, who, in her view, often deserved the slaps and blows that she received.

Inwardly Sophie was in despair, but outwardly she shone— when in the presence of others. Her brash cheerfulness, her innate tendency to "chatter on boldly and endlessly" in adult company, her striking intelligence combined to make a strong impression on those outside her family circle. She became accustomed to being praised for her cleverness. When her mother took Sophie to Brunswick to visit her great-grandmother the duchess, she was coaxed into reciting the long dramatic pieces she had memorized, and was stroked and complimented so that she came to see herself as unusual. "I heard it said so often that I was smart, that I was a big girl now, that I really believed it." King Frederick William, who had had his first taste of Sophie's precocity when she was four, continued to encounter her as she grew older and followed her progress, asking after her whenever he was in Stettin or when Christian August went to Berlin.

When the princess was eight, Johanna took her to Berlin for the first time. They stayed for several months, and Sophie went to court, dressed like a miniature lady in a gown with a long train. Her spine no longer zigzagged down her back, her shoulders were level and she held her proud little head straight as she passed through the halls of the royal palace—which, in truth, was less grand than her great-grandmother's establishment at Brunswick. The king renewed his acquaintance with her, and the queen invited her to dine with her and Crown Prince Frederick, then a young man of twenty-five. Both were charmed by her and impressed with her, and Frederick, who like Sophie possessed an outstanding intellect and a spirit of questioning, was to remember her well.

That her eight-year-old daughter should eclipse her was irksome to Johanna, in whose rather limited understanding girls had value only insofar as they were beautiful—or at least reasonably attractive. Sophie, Johanna thought, was ugly, and no matter how intelligent she was, her ugliness could not be disguised. Johanna did not broadcast her opinion outside the family circle, but her sensitive daughter was well aware of it. Besides, Sophie was growing up in a social environment where a woman's value was determined by her beauty. Everyone knew that ugly little girls grew up to be plain women, and plain women did not find husbands. They languished in their parents' houses, or in convents where they lived in secluded luxury, not taking religious vows but boarding with the nuns in their own well-appointed apartments. Every family, including Sophie's, had several of these unfortunates in it, superfluous women for whom no other place could be found. In Johanna's view, Sophie was in danger of growing up to be one of them.

Highly intelligent, pleasing, but plain: such was the verdict on Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst. The child did what was expected of her, observed her world through her large, bright eyes, asked a thousand questions, and awaited her chance to shine.

Chapter Two

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FROM THE AGE OF EIGHT ON, SOPHIE SPENT LESS AND LESS time in the cold and dreary backwater of Stettin and more and more time at the active, vital courts of Brunswick and Berlin. Johanna joined her grandmother's court for three or four months each year, and spent the long northern winter in Berlin, and she took Sophie with her.

Christian August did not object to his wife's being away for months at a time. He was now in his fifties, she in her mid-twenties; they were dissimilar in personality, he serious and austere, and liking solitude, she witty and vivacious and teasing, at her best when surrounded by admiring friends. Johanna, her daughter recalled years later, was considered to be the more intelligent of the two, but Christian August "was a man of rectitude, and solid judgment," acquainted with many subjects because of his wide reading. He and Johanna cannot have been very good company for one another. Christian August was beginning to age, his circulation was poor and he could not have kept up with the ceaseless round of hunting parties and balls and promenades that court society demanded.

So Johanna went off with Sophie and the other children, and took her place among the minor notables surrounding King Frederick William, reminding herself that, though her husband was

only a very obscure prince, she herself came from a family closely allied to royalty. Her great-grandfather was Frederick III, King of Denmark, her late father had been Prince Bishop of Lubeck and her cousin Karl Frederick was married to Anna, daughter of Emperor Peter the Great of Russia. Karl's son and namesake, nine-year-old Karl Ulrich, was heir to the thrones of Sweden and Russia. Johanna's late brother Karl August had been betrothed to Peter the Great's younger daughter Elizabeth, but had died on the eve of his wedding.

To be sure, Johanna's royal connections had not brought her wealth, and she had married beneath her. She was only the fourth daughter of the prince bishop, among the least significant of his twelve children, and apparently estranged from her own mother for reasons history does not record. Yet she had hope that her own children would do better than she had. Possibly because she had not succeeded in advancing herself very far, Johanna was intensely ambitious for her children. If boldness and pride could push them to the forefront of society, then push she would. She consulted mediums and fortune-tellers in hopes of discovering what lay in store for each of them, though when it came to the homely little Sophie, Johanna was inclined to wince at her prospects, no matter what any self-professed visionary said.

Among the other children at the court of Brunswick was little Princess Marianne of Brunswick-Bevern, whose attractive features bore in them the promise of beauty. Johanna liked her and singled her out for praise. Now, there's a little girl who'll win a crown one day, she said, or words to that effect—in the hearing of the ill-favored Sophie. Also within earshot was a clairvoyant monk, a member of the entourage of the Prince Bishop of Corbie. The monk hastened to correct Johanna's prediction, telling her that he saw no crowns in Marianne's future but that there were three crowns visible over Sophie's head.

Sophie treasured that brief triumph, and connected it with another fragment of information that had come to her from her father's mentor and friend Bolhagen, who had lived in close

proximity to the family since before Sophie was born and had spent a good deal of time with the children. Once when Bolhagen was reading the newspaper he told the children about a notice he saw there concerning the forthcoming marriage of Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha with the eldest son of King George II of England. "Well now," he remarked, "that Princess Augusta was much less well brought up than ours; she isn't a bit pretty, and there she is destined to become the Queen of England. Who knows what our princess will become?"

German princesses were in demand at foreign courts. There seemed to be an inexhaustible supply of them, and if they did not bring large dowries, at least their fathers were too unimportant to drive hard bargains with prospective bridegrooms. Many European ruling houses sent representatives to the German courts to examine their princesses in person, and to request portraits to carry back home with them.