The Memoirs of Catherine the Great (28 page)

At Oranienbaum, everyone in our entourage, both men and women, had agreed to have outfits of the same color made for the summer: the tunic gray and the rest blue, with a black velvet collar and no other trimming. This uniformity was convenient in more than one way. There was a clash over this costume, and more particularly, over the fact that I always dressed in a riding habit and that I rode astride like a man. Having come to Peterhof for a day of court, the Empress said to Madame Choglokova that this way of riding kept me from having children and that my costume was not at all proper. When she herself rode in a man’s habit, she changed her clothes as soon as she dismounted. Madame Choglokova replied that there was no question of having children, that this could not happen without a cause and that although Their Imperial Highnesses had been married since 1745, the cause for children did not exist. Then
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Her Imperial Majesty reprimanded Madame Choglokova and told her that she held her responsible because she neglected to preach to the interested parties on this subject, and overall she displayed much ill humor, and told her that her husband was a simpleton who let himself be deceived by snot-nosed brats. Within twenty-four hours, the Choglokovs repeated all this to their confidants. Hearing the words snot-nosed brats, the brats wiped their noses, and in a special meeting held for this purpose by the brats, resolved and determined that Sergei Saltykov and Lev Naryshkin would perfectly fulfill Her Imperial Majesty’s wishes, by feigning to incur Monsieur Choglokov’s disfavor, in a ruse that he himself might not suspect. Under the pretext of a relative’s illness, they would withdraw to their houses for three weeks or a month to let the rumors die down. This was executed to the letter, and the following day they left to go confine themselves with their families for a month. For my part, I immediately changed costume, and anyway, the other had become unnecessary. The first idea for uniforms had come from what we wore on court days at Peterhof: the tunic was white, the rest green, and everything decorated with silver braid. Sergei Saltykov, who was dark, said that in this white and silver outfit he resembled a fly in milk. Otherwise, I continued to visit the Choglokovs as before, except that now I endured greater boredom. Husband and wife regretted the absence of the two principal champions of their society. I certainly did not contradict them. The illness and death of Sergei Saltykov’s mother further prolonged his absence.

Meanwhile the Empress told us to come from Oranienbaum to join her in Kronstadt, where she was going to open the canal that Peter I had begun and that had just been completed. She went ahead of us to Kronstadt. The night after she arrived was very stormy, and Her Imperial Majesty, who since her arrival had sent for us to come join her, believed that we were at sea during this storm. She was very anxious the entire night, and it seemed to her that she saw from her windows a ship struggling on the sea that could well be the yacht in which we were to cross. She turned for succor to relics that she always had beside her bed. She carried them to the window and waved them in a direction opposite that of the ship, which was in distress in the storm. She cried out several times that we were surely going to perish and that it would be her fault because, after her recent reprimand to us, we would have left immediately after the yacht’s arrival to show her our devotion. But in fact the yacht arrived only after this storm at Oranienbaum so that we did not board it until the following afternoon. We spent three days in Kronstadt, during which the blessing of the canal took place with much ceremony and water was introduced for the first time into this canal.
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In the afternoon there was a large ball. The Empress wanted to stay at Kronstadt to see the water flow out again, but she left on the third day before this could happen. This canal was not drained until my reign, when I had a steam mill built to drain it. In any case, it would have been impossible to let the water out, because the bottom of the canal was below sea level, but this was not known at the time. From Kronstadt each returned to his home. The Empress went to Peterhof and we to Oranienbaum. Monsieur Choglokov requested and obtained permission to go to one of his estates for a month. During his absence, his wife took great pains to execute the Empress’s orders to the letter. First she had several conferences with the Grand Duke’s gentleman of the bedchamber, Bressan. At Oranienbaum this man found a pretty painter’s widow, Madame Grooth. It took a few days to persuade her, with I know not what promises, and then to instruct her on what was wanted of her and what she should do. Then Bressan was charged with introducing His Imperial Highness to this young, lovely widow. I well saw that Madame Choglokova was very involved in some intrigue, but I did not know what until Sergei Saltykov finally returned from his voluntary exile and more or less informed me of the matter. Finally, after much effort Madame Choglokova achieved her objective, and when she was sure of the result, she notified the Empress that everything was going in accordance with her wishes. She hoped for great rewards for her pains, but in this she was mistaken, because she was given nothing. Nevertheless, she said that the empire owed her for it.

Immediately afterward we returned to the city. It was at this time that I persuaded the Grand Duke to break off negotiations with Denmark. I reminded him of the advice of Count de Bernis, who had already left for Vienna; he listened to me and ordered a stop to them without any agreement.

After a brief stay at the Summer Palace, we moved to the Winter Palace.
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It seemed to me that Sergei Saltykov was growing less interested, that he became distracted, and sometimes smug, arrogant, and dissolute. I was angered by this and spoke to him about it; he gave me some poor excuses and claimed that I did not understand how extremely clever his conduct was. He was right, for I found it quite strange. We were told to prepare for the journey to Moscow, which we did. We departed on December 14, 1752, from Petersburg.
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Sergei Saltykov remained there and did not come until several weeks after us. I left Petersburg with a few small signs of pregnancy. We traveled very quickly, night and day. At the last station before Moscow, the signs of pregnancy ended with painful contractions. Arriving in Moscow and seeing the turn things had taken, I suspected that I may well have had a miscarriage.

1753

Catherine’s rapprochement with Bestuzhev-Riumin; Choglokova’s
encouragement of an a fair so Catherine can produce an heir;
Catherine’s second miscarriage; Peter’s execution of a rat;
fire destroys palace and Elizabeth’s wardrobe; Saltykov’s ruse
to court Catherine revealed by Peter

Madame Choglokova had stayed in Petersburg because she had just had her seventh child, a girl. When she had recovered, she joined us in Moscow. Here we had been lodged in a wing constructed of wood, newly built that autumn, and as water seeped from the paneling, all the apartments were amazingly damp. This wing contained two rows of five or six large rooms each; those on the street were for me, and those on the other side were for the Grand Duke. My maids and ladies-in-waiting were lodged with their servants in the room meant to serve as my dressing room, so that there were seventeen girls and women lodged in one room that had only three large windows but no other outlets except my bedroom, through which they were obliged to pass for all kinds of needs, which was inconvenient for them and for me. The first ten days after my arrival in Moscow, we were obliged to tolerate this inconvenience, whose equal I have never seen. Moreover, their dining room was one of my antechambers. I was ill upon arriving. To remedy this inconvenience I had several large partitions put up in my bedroom and by this means divided it into three. But this was of almost no help because the doors opened and closed continually, which was unavoidable. Finally on the tenth day the Empress came to see me, and seeing the continual traffic, she went into the other room and said to my ladies, “I will have you made another exit that does not go through the Grand Duchess’s bedroom.” But what did she do? She ordered that a partition be built that blocked one of this room’s windows, never mind that seventeen people lived there with difficulty. With this the room was narrowed to gain a hallway, the window on the street was opened, a stairway was built to it, and in this way my ladies were obliged to exit via the street. Toilets were placed for them under their windows. When they went to eat, they again had to walk along the street. In a word, this whole arrangement was worthless, and I know not how these seventeen women, crammed together and sometimes ill, did not come down with some putrid fever in these corridors next to my bedroom, which was so full of all kinds of vermin that I could not sleep.

Finally Madame Choglokova recovered from her confinement and arrived in Moscow, and a few days later Sergei Saltykov arrived. As Moscow is very large and everyone is very spread out there, he used this advantageous locale to conceal at court the waning of his insincere or real affection. To tell the truth, I was hurt; however, he gave me such good and worthwhile reasons that as soon as I saw him and had spoken to him, my suspicions vanished. We agreed that to reduce the number of his enemies, I would have a few remarks made to Count Bestuzhev to give him the hope that I was less hostile to him than before. I entrusted this message to a man named Bremse, who was employed in the Holstein Chancery of Monsieur Pechlin. When he was not at court, this man often went to Chancellor Count Bestuzhev’s home. He undertook this with great eagerness and told me that it had warmed the Chancellor’s heart and that he had said that he was at my disposal anytime that I judged it necessary. If he could be useful to me, he begged me to indicate a sure channel by which we could communicate with each other as we saw fit. I liked his idea and told Bremse that I would think about it. I repeated this to Sergei Saltykov, and it was immediately resolved that he himself would go to the Chancellor’s house under the pretext of a social call, since he had only just arrived. The old man received him marvelously, took him aside, and spoke to him of the inner world of our court and the stupidity of the Choglokovs, telling him, among other things, “I know that, although you are their most intimate friend, you view them as I do because you are an intelligent boy.” Then he spoke to him about me and my situation as if he lived in my room. Then he said, “In gratitude for the goodwill that the Grand Duchess deigns to show me, I am going to do her a little service, for which I think she will be grateful to me. I will make Madame Vladislavova as sweet as a lamb, and the Grand Duchess will do as she wants with her. She will see that I am not the werewolf that I have been made out to be.” Eventually Sergei Saltykov returned, delighted with this commission and this man, who personally gave him several pieces of advice that were as wise as they were useful. He became very intimate with us without a living soul knowing anything about it.

Meanwhile, Madame Choglokova, who always had her favorite project in mind, which was to ensure the succession, took me aside one day and said, “Listen, I must speak to you very seriously.” I kept my eyes and ears open as one might expect. She began with a long disquisition, as was her wont, about her devotion to her husband, about her virtue, about what must and must not be done to love each other and to promote or support conjugal bonds, and then she pushed on, saying that there were sometimes situations of major consequence that should be exceptions to the rule. I let her say everything she wanted without interrupting, not knowing where she was going with this, a bit astonished, and not knowing if she was setting a trap for me or if she spoke sincerely. As I was having these private reflections, she said, “You are going to see how much I love my country and how sincere I am. I do not doubt that you fancy someone. You are free to choose between S.S. and L.N. If I am not mistaken, it is the latter.” At this I cried out, “No, no, not at all.” Then she said, “Well then, if it is not him, it is the other no doubt.” I did not say a word, and she continued, “You will see that I will not make difficulties for you.” I played dumb to the point where she scolded me many times, both in the city and eventually in the country, where we went after Easter.
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It was at or around this time that the Empress gave the estate of Liubertsy and several others fourteen or fifteen versts from Moscow to the Grand Duke. But before going to reside in these new possessions of His Imperial Highness, the Empress celebrated the anniversary of her coronation in Moscow. It was April 25. It was announced to us that she had ordered that the proceedings be conducted exactly as they had been organized on the actual day of the ceremony. We were very curious to see what would happen. The day before, she slept at the Kremlin. We stayed in the Sloboda at the wooden palace and we received the order to come to mass at the cathedral. At nine in the morning we left the wooden palace in ceremonial style with the servants proceeding on foot. We crossed all Moscow bit by bit; it was a seven-verst journey, and we stepped out in front of the church. A few moments later the Empress arrived with her cortege, the little crown on her head and the imperial mantle carried by the chamberlains as was customary. She went to sit in her usual place in the church, and as yet there was nothing in all this that was extraordinary or not done at all the other great celebrations of her reign. There was a damp cold in the church such as I have never felt in my life. I was completely blue and I froze from the cold in a court dress that left my throat uncovered. The Empress told me to put on a sable stole, but I did not have one with me. She had them bring hers, took one, and put it around her neck. I saw another one in the box; I thought that she was going to send it to me to put on, but I was mistaken. She sent it back; it seemed to me that this was a rather marked sign of ill will. Madame Choglokova, who saw that I was shivering, got from someone a silk kerchief, which I put around my neck. When the mass and the sermon were over, the Empress left the church. We prepared to follow her, but she had us told that we could return to the house. It was then that we learned that she was going to dine all alone on the throne, and in this way the ceremony would be as it was the very day of her coronation, when she had dined alone. Excluded from this meal, we returned as we had come, with great ceremony, our servants on foot, making the fourteen-verst round-trip through the city, and we were chilled to the bone and dying of hunger. The Empress had appeared to us to be in very bad humor during the mass, and we were dismissed by her no more kindly, with a very disagreeable lack of attention to say the least. At the other grand ceremonies, when she dined on the throne we had the honor of eating with her. This time she dismissed us publicly. On the way back, alone in a carriage with the Grand Duke, I told him what I thought of this; he told me that he would complain about it. Back at the palace, half dead from the cold and exhausted, I complained to Madame Choglokova about having gotten chilled. The following day there was a ball at the wooden palace. I said that I was sick and did not go.
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The Grand Duke actually had the Shuvalovs told something about this, and they replied something that satisfied him, and that was the end of it.

Around this time, we learned that Zakhar Chernyshev and Colonel Nikolai Leontiev had quarreled over gambling debts at the home of Roman Vorontsov, that they had fought with swords and that Count Zakhar Chernyshev had a serious wound to the head. It was so bad that they had not been able to transport him from Count Roman Vorontsov’s house to his own. He remained there and was doing very badly, and there was talk of trepanning
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him. I was very upset by this because I liked him a great deal. Leontiev was arrested by order of the Empress. This fight had the whole city talking because of the very numerous relations of both combatants. Leontiev was the son-in-law of Countess Rumiantseva, a very close relation of the Panins and of the Kurakins. The other man also had his relations, friends, and protectors. The whole thing had happened in Count Roman Vorontsov’s house; the wounded man was at his home. Finally, when the danger passed, the affair blew over and things went no further.

During the month of May, I had new signs of pregnancy. We went to Liubertsy, the Grand Duke’s country estate twelve or fourteen versts from Moscow. The stone house there, which had been built long ago by Prince Menshikov, was falling into ruins. We could not live in it. To remedy this, tents were set up in the courtyard. I slept in a kibitka;
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at three or four in the morning my sleep would be interrupted by ax blows and the noise made by the construction of a wooden wing to the house, which they were rushing to build two steps, so to speak, from our tents, so that we would have a place to reside the rest of the summer. The rest of the time we would go hunting or on walks. I did not ride anymore, but went around in a cabriolet. Toward the feast of St. Peter we returned to Moscow, and I felt so weary that I slept every day until noon, and it was difficult to awaken me for dinner. The feast of St. Peter was celebrated in the usual manner. I got dressed, attended mass, and went to lunch, to the ball, and to supper. On the following day, I felt pains in my lower back. Madame Choglokova sent for a midwife, and she predicted a miscarriage, which in fact I had the following night. I may have been two to three months pregnant. I was in great danger for thirteen days, and it was suspected that part of the afterbirth had not been expelled. This was kept from me. Eventually, on the thirteenth day, it came out on its own, without pains or effort. I was made to rest for six weeks in my room because of this complication, during an intolerable heat wave. The very day that I fell ill, the Empress came to see me and seemed troubled by my state. During the six weeks that I stayed in my room, I was bored to death. My only companions were Madame Choglokova, although she came rather infrequently, and a little Kalmuck girl, whom I liked because she was kind. I often cried out of boredom.

As for the Grand Duke, most of the time he was in his room, where a Ukrainian chamber valet named Karnovich, who was as much a fool as a drunk, did his best to entertain him, providing as many toys, as much wine, and other strong liquors as he could, unbeknownst to Monsieur Choglokov, who in any event was deceived and mocked by everyone. But in the Grand Duke’s secret, nocturnal bacchanals with his servants, among whom were several Kalmuck boys, the Grand Duke often found himself poorly obeyed and served, for being drunk, they did not know what they were doing and forgot that they were with their master and that this master was the Grand Duke. His Imperial Highness would resort to blows from his stick or the flat of his sword. Despite this, his entourage obeyed him badly, and more than once he came to me, complaining of his servants and begging me to make them see reason. Then I would go to his residence and would berate them, reminding them of their duties, and immediately they would straighten up. This made the Grand Duke say to me more than once, and repeat as well to Bressan, that he did not know how I dealt with his servants, that while he thrashed them and could not make himself obeyed, I obtained what I wanted with a word.

One day, when I went into His Imperial Highness’s apartment for this purpose, my eyes were struck by a large rat that he had had hanged with all the ceremony of an execution in the middle of a small room that he had had made with a partition. I asked what this meant. He said that this rat had committed a criminal act and merited the ultimate punishment according to military laws, that it had climbed atop the ramparts of a cardboard fortress on a table in this room and eaten two papier-mâché sentries standing watch on one of the bastions, and that the Grand Duke had had the criminal judged according to the laws of war. His setter had caught the rat, which had immediately been hanged as I saw it, and it would stay there exposed to the eyes of the public for three days as an example. I could not keep myself from bursting with laughter at the extreme folly of the thing, but this displeased him very much in light of the importance he gave to it. I withdrew and took refuge in my ignorance, as a woman, of military laws; nevertheless he remained angry because of my laughter. It could at least be said in the rat’s defense that it had been hanged without anyone having asked or heard its defense.

During the court’s stay in Moscow, it happened that a court lackey went mad and even became violent. The Empress ordered her chief doctor, Boerhave, to take care of this man. He was put in a room near the apartment of Boerhave, who resided at the court. Moreover, chance had it that several people lost their minds that year. When the Empress was informed of this, she brought them to the court and had them lodged near Boerhave, so that a little insane asylum was created at court. I remember that the most important patients were a major in the Semenovsky Guards, Chaadaev, a Lieutenant Colonel Leutrum, a Major Choglokov, a monk from Ascension Monastery, who had cut off his genitals with a razor,
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and several others. Chaadaev’s madness consisted in thinking that Shah-Nadir, also known as Tahmasp Kuli Khan, the Persian usurper and tyrant, was God himself.
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When the doctors were unable to cure him of his delusion, he was put in the hands of priests; they persuaded the Empress to have him exorcised. She herself attended the ceremony, but Chaadaev remained as mad as he appeared to be. However, there were people who doubted his madness, because he was rational about all other matters but Shah-Nadir. His old friends even went to consult him about their affairs, and he gave them very sensible advice. Those who did not think him mad found the cause for this affected mania in a bad situation from which he could extricate himself only with this ruse. Since the beginning of the Empress’s reign, he had been employed in the tax service. He had been accused of misappropriation of public funds and was supposed to be tried; out of fear he acquired this fantasy that got him through the affair.