Great Catherine (23 page)

Chapter Fourteen

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PETER HAD FOUND THE LOVE OF HIS LIFE. TlRED OF SEDUCING worldly singers, promiscuous court ladies and innocent young serving girls, he found a soul mate in Elizabeth Vorontzov, the foulest and ugliest of Catherine's waiting women, and gave her his heart.

Even as a child Elizabeth had been singularly unattractive. When brought to court at the age of eleven as a maid of honor to Catherine, she had offended the eyes of the other women. Lame, squint-eyed and graceless, she developed into a blowsy, buxom girl who belonged on a farm and not amid the fine stuffs and marble halls of the palace. Fair skin was prized, but Elizabeth's was swarthy and coarse, and when after a few years in Catherine's service she contracted smallpox, her complexion was splattered with the marks of the pox and with lingering clumps of angry red scars that quite disfigured her. Only her high birth—she was the niece of Michael Vorontzov, ally of the Shuvalovs and Bestu-zhev's rival in the imperial cabinet—protected her from being sent away from court. Elizabeth Vorontzov was not only ugly, she was gauche and ill-mannered. Her insolence and loudmouthed ranting drove everyone away and disrupted dinners and parties. She learned to swagger and swear like a soldier, and attacked anyone who tried to correct or restrain her. By the time she

reached young womanhood she had become a brash, vulgar hoyden who rarely bathed and who punctuated her bursts of verbal abuse with generous sprays of spittle.

Peter saw in Elizabeth a kindred spirit. Like him, she was spoiled, undisciplined and ill-tempered—and physically unattractive. Like him, she enjoyed drinking and had the manners of a raucous barmaid. She invariably disturbed and upset people, just as he did. Peter had always preferred low company to the decorous, often brittle courtiers with their polished manners. It amused him to watch Elizabeth's rudeness collide with the finely honed civility of Catherine and her ladies. Indeed he found in the brassy, provocative eighteen-year-old Elizabeth the perfect foil for all that he disliked about the imperial court—and the perfect mistress with which to insult his wife.

Peter was in need of distractions. His worst nightmare had come true: Russia had gone to war against his idol Frederick the Great, and had actually won a major victory against the Prussians at Gross Jagerndorf He wept, not only for the humiliation of the Prussians but because he was convinced that, had he not come to Russia, he would be a general in Frederick's army, a military hero and a leader of men. He tried in vain to ignore the disturbing probability that Russia would win the war, taking out his frustration and anger on the elite Russian guards units, whose members he snubbed and insulted, praising Frederick within their hearing and wearing a conspicuously large ring with Frederick's picture on it.

Privately, Peter compensated for his inability to take part in the war on the Prussian side by bolstering his military persona. His rooms, which had been cluttered with toy soldiers defending miniature fortresses, now became arsenals stocked with muskets, swords and pistols. Every summer his Holstein troops overran Oranienbaum in growing numbers, attracting hordes of camp-followers from Petersburg and turning the palace grounds into an open-air military camp complete with taverns and whorehouses. Hosting feasts for these boisterous guests was among Peter's chief

pleasures; he and Elizabeth Vorontzov presided over long trestle tables where the wine flowed freely and entertainment was offered by singers and dancers from Peter's own opera company.

When the Holsteiners returned home in the fall, Peter continued to surround himself with military men, having none but common soldiers serve him in his chamber, and going nowhere without his coterie of two dozen Holstein officers, headed by the offensive Brockdorff Brockdorff and Catherine were more than ever at odds. According to Catherine, who gave her husband and all his low-life companions a wide berth and retired to her apartments when their coarseness was at its loudest and most unruly, Brockdorff was a magnet for adventurers and tavern scum from all over, Germans and Petersburgers both, men who "had no faith, obeyed no law, did nothing but drink, eat, smoke and talk crude nonsense."

Without Catherine's influence to restrain him, Peter let his imagination fly, and began telling stories about how, as a boy in Kiel, hardly out of childhood, he had been sent by his father to fight bands of murderous gypsies and had vanquished them in mighty combats. In his darker moods, he went to Ivan Shuvalov and begged him to persuade Elizabeth to let him go abroad for a while, until the painful conflict with Prussia was over. When she refused, he began drinking more heavily than ever, and stumbled about the palace shouting wild threats in slurred German.

Poniatowski, who returned to the Russian court in January of 1757, looked on Peter as a farcical bumpkin too far gone in his cups to be taken very seriously. The Shuvalovs too laughed at the grand duke behind his back, dismissing him as a hopeless inebriate who could not live long. But Catherine, who was only too aware of the atmosphere of "extreme dissipation" in which her husband lived, was wary of him nonetheless. The empress hovered between life and death; every few months she had a relapse, which sent the entire court into a panic and unleashed a fresh scramble for influence with the Young Court. Peter could become emperor at any time. And Catherine knew, through her

son

spies, that Peter had confided to the new British ambassador Lord Keith that he intended to divorce her and marry his mistress.

Peter had a plan, of that she was certain. He no longer looked to her for information, advice, consolation in times of crisis. His visits to her rooms were far less frequent than they had been, and although he appeared to be affable toward Poniatowski, liking the multilingual Pole because he could converse with him and confide his troubles to him in German, Catherine was suspicious of this surface congeniality. She was convinced that Peter was only biding his time, waiting until the empress was out of the way before he rid himself of her. The strident Elizabeth Vorontzov and her ambitious uncle were now giving the grand duke all the advice he craved, telling him to send his meddling wife away and make Elizabeth his consort.

On one point at least Peter needed no advice. He knew well, as Catherine did, that the church not only permitted divorce, it provided another convenient option to husbands desiring to disentangle themselves from unwanted marital unions. An irksome wife could be sent to a convent, where, with or without her consent, she would be immured with other rejected women—and wives who had run away from their husbands to the safe haven of the church. There she would be stripped of all that had bound her to the world, her possessions taken away, her head shaved, her body swathed in somber black. Never again to see her children or her other relatives, she would spend her life among those dead to the world like herself, without hope of rejoining the living.

Every time Catherine encountered the foul Elizabeth Vorontzov, or heard Peter carrying on with his low-life intimates, she shuddered. Peter was nearly always irritable with her, and though she knew that at least some of his irritability was the result of his being heartsick over the Prussian losses on the battlefield, she could not help but be aware that his attitude toward her had changed, probably permanently. In all likelihood, while Peter lived she could never again count on being safe from humiliation and the enduring threat of harm.

The triumphant Catherine leading her troops against Peter III in June 1702.

Engraving by Cockerel', from a portrait by Vigilius Ericksen.

Photograph courtesy or Hulton Deutsch.

Medal struck to

commemorate the accession

of Catherine II

Photograph courtesy of

Hulton Deutsch.

Sergei Saltykov, Catherine s

first lover and father of Paul I.

Photograph courtesy of

Hulton Deutsch.

Peter III. Engraving from a painting by G. C. Grooth. Pnotograpn courtesy or Hulton Deutscn.

German Glass commemorating a

Russian victory over the Turks.

Photograph by Ivor J. Mazure, Dealer

in Russian Antiques, London.

Medal struck to commemorate Alexis Or/ov s victory over the Turkish fleet at Chesme. Photograph courtesy or Hulton Deutsch.