Secret Lives of the Tsars (19 page)

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Then there was that kind of comfortable intimacy shared by married couples. “I have some diarrhea today, but apart from that, I am well, my adored one,” the empress shared. “Do not be distressed because of my diarrhea, it cleans out the intestines.” This was ancillary evidence of a marriage, to be sure, but certainly not the language of lovebirds caught up in the anticipatory blush of a budding romance.

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Potemkin was indeed subject to fits of black despair, even when things seemed ideal. On one occasion, after his nephew commended him for his good spirits, he replied, “Could any man be happier than I? All my hopes, all my desires have been fulfilled as if by magic.” Then, after elucidating all the manifold bounty he enjoyed, Potemkin smashed a valuable plate, stormed off to his room, and locked the door behind him.

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Some of Catherine II’s biographers—including the more scholarly among them, such as John T. Alexander and Isabel de Madariaga—have dismissed this as legend (much like her supposed equine proclivities), conjured by the empress’s French detractors.

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The empress further elucidated on love, lust, and desire in her
Memoirs:
“For to tempt, and to be tempted are closely allied, and, in spite of the finest moral precepts, no sooner is feeling excited than we have gone vastly further than we are aware of. And how is it possible to prevent one’s feelings aroused I have yet to learn.… All that can be said in opposition must seem prudery quite out of harmony with the instincts of the human heart; besides, no one holds his heart in his hand, tightening or relaxing his grasp at pleasure.”

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Zavadovsky later reemerged as state secretary in Catherine’s government.

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Madame de Pompadour, chief mistress of King Louis XV of France, wielded great influence behind the scenes.

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Byron probably used the memoirs of Charles Masson, a chronicler hostile to Catherine, as his source for the term “l’Eprouveuse,” which has a near translation in French as “an apparatus formerly used to test the strength of gunpowder.”

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It was along the river route of this Crimean tour that Potemkin allegedly set up the legendary “villages” for Catherine’s edification: elaborate façades in front of which cheerful residents of the newly annexed territory supposedly stood and waved to their new monarch.

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In one of Zubov’s more glaring blunders in this capacity, he arranged the marriage of Catherine’s thirteen-year-old granddaughter Alexandra to the young king of Sweden, Gustav IV. Only he neglected to settle the vital question of religion before King Gustav came to officially court the Russian princess. The Swedes thought it essential their queen become Lutheran. The empress, on the other hand, would not countenance the girl’s conversion from Orthodoxy. It all ended in a humiliating debacle when it became apparent too late that neither side was prepared to budge on the issue.

Paul (1796–1801): “He Detests His Nation”

There is no one who does not daily remark on the disorder of his faculties.

—G
RAND
D
UCHESS
(
LATER
E
MPRESS
) M
ARIA
F
EODOROVNA

After her death in 1796, Catherine the Great was succeeded by her son Paul, whose father was either the late empress’s murdered husband, Peter III, or, more likely, her first lover, Sergei Saltykov. Though questions of paternity lingered, Paul believed he was Peter’s son and honored him accordingly—by imitation, alas, which ultimately resulted in the two emperors sharing the same ghastly fate
.

Catherine II was dead, and now it was time for her son and successor, Paul, to rectify some wrongs. Certainly he would bury with all due honor the mother he so feared and despised. But she wouldn’t be alone. The new emperor ordered that the skeletal remains of his putative father, Peter III, be disinterred from his vault at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery and, with much ceremony, carried to the Winter Palace and laid in state next to Catherine’s coffin. Thus, after thirty-four years, the husband and wife who loathed each other in life were reunited in death as their former subjects shuffled by to pay
homage. Paul was pleased with this bit of macabre handiwork, but he still had more planned. During the funeral procession that followed, he arranged for the architect of his father’s murder, the now aged and decrepit Alexis Orlov, to carry the dead emperor’s crown on a cushion, while other surviving conspirators were designated pallbearers. Then, amid the incense and solemn chants at the Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul, Catherine II and Peter III were interred together forever.

The bond between the baby Paul and his mother had been broken at a most critical time, when the infant was whisked away by Empress Elizabeth immediately after Catherine delivered him in 1754. The new mother was only allowed to see her son occasionally, and then for just the briefest visits. Paul was a child of the state, and the state, in the person of the empress, literally smothered him.

“He was kept in an excessively warm room,” Catherine wrote, “swaddled in flannel, and laid in a cradle lined with black fur; he was covered with a counterpane of pink satin, lined with wadding, and another one above it, lined with black fur. I saw him many times often lying so, with sweat running down his face and his whole body, and so it was that when he grew older, the least breath of air chilled him and made him ill. In addition, he was surrounded by a bevy of ignorant old crones, who, by dint of their senseless means of management, did him infinitely more harm than good, both physically and mentally.”

While Catherine was always concerned about the welfare of the baby snatched away from her by Elizabeth, her husband showed no such inclination. Perhaps Peter doubted whether
Paul really was his child, or, just as likely, there was little room in his disordered mind for much paternal sentiment. Indeed, the only real interest Peter ever showed in the boy was when he insisted at Paul’s birth that he receive the same financial reward his wife did when she delivered the child. (To satisfy this petulant demand, Elizabeth, her treasury nearly empty at the time, had to ask Catherine to temporarily return her bequest so the empress could pay off Peter.) Yet despite his father’s near-total indifference, it would be Peter III whom Paul would come to emulate.

Even as a boy, the future emperor was demonstrating some of Peter’s more unsettling characteristics—evidence, perhaps, that they were indeed father and son after all. He was often restless and agitated, with a mania for all things military, and possessed of a disturbing capacity for cruelty. “With the best intention in the world,” the boy’s tutor warned him, “you will make yourself thoroughly hated.”

Once, during a theatrical performance when he was ten, Paul was so outraged when some members of the audience dared applaud before he had himself indicated his reaction to the play that he asked his mother—now empress—to exile the offenders. Of course Catherine ignored this impudent demand, but she couldn’t ignore the emerging character deficits in her son that were so frighteningly reminiscent of her late, demented spouse. They left her cold.

“He is believed to be vindictive, headstrong and absolute in his ideas,” the French chargé d’affaires Sabatier de Cabre reported of Paul when he was fourteen. “It is only to be feared that by virtue of having his wings clipped, a potentially decided character may be rendered obstinate, that it may be replaced by duplicity, repressed hatred and perhaps pusillanimity, and that the high-mindedness which might have been
developed in him may be stifled at last by the terror that his mother has always inspired in him.… It is true that the Empress, who is careful of appearances so far as everything else is concerned, observes none of them in relation to her son. For him she always has the tone and manner of a sovereign, and this attitude is often combined with a coldness and neglect that disgust the young prince. She has never treated him as a mother treats her son. Therefore the Grand Duke [Paul] behaves with her as if he stood before a judge.”

Catherine II did indeed have a difficult time loving her son, who in his adolescence was becoming increasingly unstable as he seethed with suspicion and paranoia—especially toward the empress he was beginning to suspect had murdered his father. “The mere sight of her made him think of death,” wrote biographer Henri Troyat; “the breath of the tomb hung about her.” Once, after finding a few tiny shards of glass in his food, Paul, wild with fury, ran screaming through the palace and accused his mother to her face of trying to kill him. Even his appearance started to reflect his temperament. The features of the once-charming, fair-haired boy with his pert turned-up nose became grossly distorted as he grew—with thickened lips, facial tics, and flattened nostrils resembling those of a bulldog. Worst of all, Paul was beginning to pose a threat to his mother’s throne.

“This young Prince gives evidence of sinister and dangerous inclinations,” reported the French diplomat Bérenger. “A few days ago, he was asking why they had killed his father and why they had given his mother the throne that rightfully belonged to him. He added that when he grew up, he would get to the bottom of all that. People are saying … that the child allows himself too many remarks of that sort for them not to reach the ears of the Empress. Now, no one doubts that that
Princess will take all possible precautions to prevent him from putting words into action.”

Catherine hoped that marriage might divert Paul from some of his more malignant passions, and, even better, produce an heir she could mold in her own image to carry on the policies her own son seemed to despise. Accordingly, she turned to Frederick the Great (the Prussian monarch who had helped arrange her own marriage to the future Peter III) to find Paul an eligible German bride—hopefully one possessing the same qualities the empress admired so much in herself.

Frederick immediately thought of the three youngest daughters of the Landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt. But, unable to choose which one, he decided to send all three princesses to Russia for Catherine’s inspection and Paul’s approval. The grand duke was immediately taken by the eldest, Wilhelmina, who also captured the fancy of his best friend Andrei Razumovsky as he accompanied her by ship from Germany. For Wilhelmina, Paul represented the prize—future sovereignty over Russia—but his person left much lacking. “The distinction of which the heir to the throne has made her the object does not seem to be disagreeable to her,” Wilhelmina’s mother wrote to the empress, with a notable lack of enthusiasm.

Like young Princess Sophia had all those years ago, Wilhelmina was to be thoroughly Russianized, converted to Orthodoxy, and rechristened Natalia. She would also cheat on her husband with his best friend Razumovsky, although, unlike her mother-in-law, she wouldn’t wait nearly a decade to stray. And it wouldn’t be from a spouse who despised her.

Paul was in fact smitten with his bride; Catherine not so much. “The Grand Duchess loves extreme in all things,” the empress wrote to her friend Friedrich Melchoir Grimm. “She
will listen to no advice, and I see in her neither charm, nor wit, nor reason.” Natalia spent most of her time either conspiring with her husband against his mother, or carrying on with his friend. And to help facilitate those extramarital romps, the two lovers often dosed Paul with a little opium to put him to sleep, and, as the Count d’Allonville put it, “reduce their trio to a single tête-à-tete.”