Great Catherine (49 page)

Peace did come, and sooner than Catherine expected, but the treaty Russia signed with Sweden in August of 1790 did not end the empress's anxieties. The Baltic fleet had been diminished in numbers and weakened in effectiveness by Swedish fireships and incessant cannonades. Prussia continued to threaten, with British encouragement. The Turkish war dragged on, occasioning further loans and more conscription of peasants for the army—the last a worry to Catherine, for it led to unrest and, with the "French madness" in the air, could conceivably breed revolution.

Hemmed in by difficulties, and with the cold weather returning, the empress fell prey to yet another siege of debilitating illnesses. She may have had a stomach ulcer. Her entire digestive system was so erratic that she could only tolerate coffee, a few sips of wine, and hardened bread. After weeks of this austere diet she lost weight, her energy fell to a new low and she spent many unhappy days lying on her large Turkish sofa or in bed.

The endless, icy winter was very hard on Catherine. Her fits of weeping, depression, and nights of severe pain were more frequent than in the past, and she felt blocked and frustrated. Zubov, "the child," was some comfort but the only man she could truly rely on, Potemkin, was far away and in danger. Catherine admitted to feeling as if there were "a stone lying on her heart." She steeled herself against age, pain and loss, refusing to let her doctors dose her with their medicines and seeking relief in home remedies and the therapeutic effects of heat.

When at last she learned in February of 1791 that Potemkin was on his way to Petersburg, the empress roused herself and prepared

to give him a hero's greeting. But Potemkin, as often in the past, took center stage on his own. He announced that he would give a grand ball at the Tauride Palace for three thousand guests, in honor of the empress, on the occasion of her sixty-second birthday.

On the evening of April 23 Potemkin's sumptuous neoclassical mansion was grandly decorated, lit by thousands of wax candles—it was said he had bought every candle in Petersburg, and had sent to Moscow for more—and ornamented with glowing tapestries, thick carpets and costly works of art. All the servants had new liveries. The kitchens had been stocked with choice foodstuffs and the wine cellars filled with excellent vintages. Every sign of damage from the recent cannonades—the broken glass, fragments of plaster and broken ornaments—had been cleared away, leaving the magnificent house in polished, pristine splendor.

A parade of carriages entered the courtyard and guests alighted, masked and in costume. The imperial coach, painted and gilded, its wheels gleaming with diamonds, swept up to the entrance and the small, portly empress was handed out. Simply dressed, her white hair bound on top of her head, her face deeply lined but her faded blue eyes amiable and alert, she waved off all attempts at ceremony and walked slowly into the marble entrance hall.

The men bowed, the women curtseyed deeply to the old woman. Potemkin, his ample girth enclosed in vivid red, with a cloak of black lace hanging from his shoulders, came forward to kiss the empress's hand and lead her into the ballroom. An orchestra of three hundred musicians began to play, and Catherine, with all the guests following her, walked the length of the huge, high-ceilinged salon to take her seat on a raised platform and watch the dancing.

Her handsome grandson Alexander, now fourteen years old, joined four dozen couples in dancing a quadrille. His tall, well-proportioned body was set off by the diamond-studded blue costume he wore. He was fair, with a face as beautiful as a girl's

and a princely bearing. People had been saying for years that Alexander, and not Paul, would succeed the empress. On this night, as she watched the agile, graceful boy step and turn in time to the music, Catherine may have had the succession very much on her mind.

The dancing over, all the guests strolled through a long colonnade into another vast room, as huge as a domed temple, bare save for tall vases of Carrara marble. Beyond this was another immense room full of trees and flowering shrubs. The April chill was forgotten here; the warm, humid air was fragrant with the scents of exotic blossoms and marble fountains played in the blazing candlelight. At the heart of the lovely garden was an expanse of grass, from which rose a transparent obelisk whose prism-like shape refracted the light in a thousand glowing colors.

The guests marveled at the inventiveness of their host, and the ingenuity of his servants. For Potemkin had done what appeared to be the impossible: he had ordered an ice cave to be built right next to the tropical garden, so that the frigid walls of the cavern, sparkling with frost, would turn an aqueous pale green reflecting the green of the lush trees and the grass.

At supper the empress charmed all those she chatted with. "Her extreme affability does not diminish at all her dignity," wrote Count Esterhazy, who visited Russia in 1791 and spent many evenings in Catherine's company, "and those she admits to greatest familiarity with her do not dare talk to her about business, unless she broaches the subject. Her conversation is very interesting, and quite varied. When she speaks of herself, or of the events of her reign, it is with a noble modesty, which puts her above any compliments which one might be tempted to make to her."

Guests who had never before seen the empress, and who knew nothing of her beyond what they had read in European newspapers or in the growing body of satirical writings attacking her, were astonished to discover how gracious, natural and cultivated she was. Expecting a dissolute harridan, they found a voluble, intelligent old lady with an enchanting play of sweetness and

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shrewdness across her aging features. She was immensely impressive, all the more so for never being too impressed with herself.

It was late in the evening when Potemkin clapped his beringed hands and the curtain rose on his private theater. The guests trooped in to watch two new ballets—the dancers brought from France and Italy—and two comedies, followed by a choral concert and folk dancing with performers from all corners of Russia.

A never-ending banquet was spread on plates of silver and gold, wine and champagne ran freely, music played and the guests danced long into the night. Catherine became tired at around midnight, and began making her farewells. All at once a burst of choral music arrested all activity. It was a hymn of victory composed in the empress's honor.

She stood in the large entrance hall to listen, and as the rich voices blended, rising together to end in a triumphant crescendo, she must have felt deeply moved. For once she may have allowed herself to reflect on all that she had achieved in her sixty-two years, and on the will and unbreakable spirit that had sustained her through adversity, the sturdy body that resurged each time illness struck, the fine, discriminating mind that had guided her empire to greatness. On that night, Catherine must, for a moment at least, have put her customary modesty aside and let herself feel very proud.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

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CATHERINE SAT AT HER WORKTABLE IN HER BEDROOM, wearing her dressing gown of heavy white silk, a white crepe cap covering her hair. She was absorbed in writing a letter to Grimm, dipping her quill again and again into the pot of thick ink. It was cold in the room; outside the window the streets were hidden under deep piled snow and ice crusted thickly on the windowpanes. The snow and oppressive cold reminded Catherine of another February day long before, and she put her thoughts about it into her letter.

"Fifty years ago today I arrived in Moscow," she told her correspondent. "I do not believe there are ten people here who remember that day." She listed those she recalled meeting as a girl of fifteen, newly arrived in Russia: Ivan Betsky, who had become her mother's lover, now worn out and nearly blind, his wits failing; Countess Matushkin, ten years older than Catherine, now a spry old woman who had recently remarried; the jokey Leon Naryshkin, master of silliness, who had been making Catherine laugh for half a century; one of the ancient, bent waiting-women. She ran out of names. "These, my friend, are the most convincing proof of old age."

She would soon be sixty-five. Over and over again the European newspapers had announced her death. She herself had

prepared a memorandum—a sort of will—to guide those around her in the event of her demise. It instructed them to lay out her corpse in a white gown, with a golden crown on her cold brow bearing the name Ekaterina. They were to mourn for only six months, "the shorter the better," and the mourning was not to interfere with festivals or other traditional observances. Catherine had no wish to cast a pall on anyone's good times.

She continued her letter in a lighter vein. "In spite of everything," she told Grimm, "I am as eager as a five-year-old child to play blind man's buff, and the young people, my grandchildren and great-grandchildren, say that their games are never so merry as when I play with them. In a word, I am their merrymaker."

Catherine had seven grandchildren, the youngest barely two years old, and she managed, despite a painful rheumatic knee and the increasing unwieldiness of her body, to romp with them and keep them running and laughing with excitement. Something young, warm and lively was always with her, either a grandchild or two or a dog or a pet squirrel. People noticed that she did not like to be alone. When Zubov was with her, he was often accompanied by his pet monkey—though unkind observers told one another that Zubov himself was the real monkey, the silly pet of the empress's old age.

Catherine told Grimm about her current writing project, something she knew few people would ever care about but which kept her active mind stimulated during the long dark hours of winter. She was doing research on Russian medieval history, specifically on the later fourteenth century. She loved deciphering old documents, and in recent years her interests had become more and more antiquarian. And as she herself was now an antique, she had taken to writing and rewriting her memoirs. In all, she wrote the story of her early life seven times, always breaking off her account in the last years of the reign of Elizabeth. Telling and retelling the story of her early years was both satisfying and cathartic, though it entailed reliving, if only in memory, the horrors of her marriage to Peter and her years of fear and anguish under the capricious

empress who had chosen her as Peter's wife and brought her to Russia.

Catherine's scholarly bent served her well and even brought her comfort, for in the process of rewriting her memoirs she came across documents that helped her to understand why things had happened as they did. Once, searching through the palace archives, she came across an old trunk full of papers, covered with dust and half eaten by rats. Methodically she went through the contents. The papers had been written in the 1740s, and they concerned her, albeit peripherally. She read on and on, and the more she read the better able she was to perceive, with hindsight, why the empress had been so suspicious, what factions she feared and why the succession so preoccupied her. Catherine's newfound insights were incorporated into the last versions of her memoirs.

Her letter to Grimm complete, the empress turned to another of her interests and read for a while. She wore spectacles and also used a large magnifying glass to read. ("Our sight has been blunted by long service to the state," she liked to tell people, using the imperial "we.") She enjoyed reading classic French plays, and was avid for anything to do with ancient languages, particularly languages spoken within the borders of her empire. She liked astronomy. She once idly asked Grimm whether, "when the material of which the planets are made was detached from the sun," the sun was diminished in size. To the end of her life she went on reading about law, and legal philosophy, though other preoccupations tended to push such reflective reading aside.

Her intense hatred for the Jacobins, the Paris radicals who had taken command of the political changes in France, became stronger every year. With their lust for egalitarianism the Jacobins had presided over the Terror, that orgy of carnage during which thousands of innocent people had been guillotined. The Jacobins had ordered the executions of Louis XVI and his wife, and were keeping their only son in a dank prison. The Jacobins, Catherine believed, were out to change the world, they wanted to kill all

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monarchs and all aristocrats everywhere. In her view they were rabid dogs who ought to be shot, poisoned, exterminated.

Pausing in her studies, Catherine got up from her desk and walked to the window, opening it long enough to toss handfuls of bread crumbs to the ravens perched on the icy ledge outside. The cold bit into her face and hands, and she quickly closed the window again. Then, sighing, she rang the little bell that sat on her desk to summon her chamberlain Zotov.

For the next several hours she talked with her secretaries and with the chief of police, who gave her the latest information about suspected Jacobin subversives in Moscow and Petersburg, suspected assassins, and other criminals. She was so anxious to prevent any radical French ideas from gaining a foothold in her domains that she forbade the sale of revolutionary calendars (which did away with the traditional names of the months and substituted poetic, naturalistic names) and of red hats such as the Jacobins wore.