The Memoirs of Catherine the Great (35 page)

A few days after this banquet, we returned to the city, where we went to reside in the Summer Palace. Here Count Alexander Shuvalov came to tell me one evening that the Empress was in his wife’s room and was summoning me there to speak with her as I had desired the previous winter. I immediately went to Count and Countess Shuvalov’s apartment, which was at the end of my apartment. I found the Empress there alone. After I had kissed her hand and she had kissed me as was her custom, she did me the honor of telling me that having learned that I wished to speak with her, she had come today to learn what I wanted to say. Now, at that time it had been eight months and more since my conversation with Alexander Shuvalov about Brockdorff. I replied to Her Imperial Majesty that the previous winter, seeing Monsieur Brockdorff ’s conduct, I had believed it indispensable to speak about it with Count Alexander Shuvalov, so that he could inform Her Imperial Majesty. He had asked me if he could quote me, and I had said to him that if Her Imperial Majesty wished it, I would repeat to her myself everything I had said and knew. Then I recounted the story of d’Elendsheim as it had happened. She appeared to listen to me with great coldness, then asked me for details about the Grand Duke’s private life and his entourage. With the greatest truthfulness I told her everything I knew. When I gave her several details concerning the affairs of Holstein that made her see that I knew them quite well, she said, “You seem well-informed about this country.” I replied simply that it was not difficult to be informed, the Grand Duke having ordered me to learn about it. I saw from the Empress’s face that this confession made an unpleasant impression on her. In general she seemed to me to be extremely reserved the entire conversation, during which she questioned me so as to make me speak and hardly said a word, so that this interview seemed to me more a kind of interrogation on her part than a confidential conversation. Finally she dismissed me as coldly as she had received me, and I was perplexed by my audience, which Alexander Shuvalov suggested I keep very secret, and I promised him this. In any case there was nothing to boast about. Back in my apartment, I attributed the Empress’s coldness to the antipathy that the Shuvalovs had provoked in her against me, about which I had long been warned. We will see later the detestable use, if I may say so, that she was persuaded to make of this conversation between her and me.

Sometime later we learned that Marshal Apraksin, far from taking advantage of his successes after the capture of Memel and the victory at the battle of Gross Jägerndorf and advancing, withdrew with such speed that this retreat resembled a rout because he discarded and burned his equipment and spiked his cannons. Nobody understood the reasons for this operation. Even his friends did not know how to defend him, and as a result people looked for the hidden motives. Although I myself do not know exactly how to explain the Marshal’s precipitous and incoherent retreat, having never seen him again, nevertheless I think that the cause could have been that he received quite precise news about the Empress’s health, which was going from bad to worse, from his daughter, Princess Kurakina, still linked by politics though not by inclination to Peter Shuvalov; from his son-in-law, Prince Kurakin; and from his friends and relatives. At the time most people had begun to believe that every month she was regularly having very strong convulsions, that these convulsions visibly weakened her organs, and that after each convulsion she was in such a state of weakness, diminished mental ability, and abnormal drowsiness for two, three, or four days that during this time no one could talk or discuss anything at all with her. Marshal Apraksin, perhaps believing that the danger was more pressing than it was, had not judged it the right moment to drive farther into Prussia, but had believed he should fall back to be nearer the Russian border under the pretext of a lack of provisions, foreseeing that in the event of the Empress’s death this war would end immediately. It is difficult to justify Marshal Apraksin’s actions, but such may have been his views, especially since he believed himself needed in Russia, as I said earlier in discussing his departure. Count Bestuzhev sent Stambke to tell me about the way Marshal Apraksin had conducted himself; the Imperial Ambassador and the French Ambassador were complaining loudly about it. Bestuzhev begged me to write the Marshal as his friend and to join my entreaties to his own to make him turn his march around and put an end to a retreat that his enemies were interpreting in an odious and sinister way. I did indeed write a letter to Marshal Apraksin in which I warned him of the harmful rumors in Petersburg and how his friends had had great trouble in defending the speed of his retreat, begging him to turn his march around and to fulfill the orders he had from the government. Grand Chancellor Count Bestuzhev sent him this letter. Marshal Apraksin did not reply to me.

Meanwhile, we saw the Empress’s director general of construction, General Fermor, leave Petersburg and take his leave of us. We were told that he was departing to take a post in the army. He had formerly been the quartermaster general for Marshal Münnich. General Fermor’s first request was to retain the brigadiers Riazanov and Mordvinov, his employees or superintendents of construction, and with them he left for the army. They were military men who had done almost nothing but execute building contracts. As soon as he arrived, he was ordered to take command from Marshal Apraksin, who was recalled, and when he returned, he found an order at Triruki to remain there and await the Empress’s orders. These were a long time in coming because his friends, his daughter, and Peter Shuvalov did everything in the world they could, moving heaven and earth, to calm the Empress’s anger, which had been fomented by the Vorontsovs, Count Buturlin, Ivan Shuvalov, and others, who were pushed by the ambassadors from the courts of Versailles and Vienna to bring Apraksin to trial. Finally a commission was named to investigate him. After the first interrogation, Marshal Apraksin was seized by a bout of apoplexy, from which he died within about twenty-four hours.
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General Lieven must certainly have been involved in this trial as well. He was Apraksin’s friend and confidant. I would have been grieved even more at this because Lieven was very sincerely devoted to me. But whatever friendship I felt for Lieven and Apraksin, I can swear that I was perfectly unaware of the reason for their conduct, and of their conduct itself, although some tried to spread the rumor that it was to please the Grand Duke and myself that they had retreated instead of advancing. At times Lieven made quite singular shows of his devotion to me. For example, one day when the Ambassador from the Viennese court, Count Esterhazy, was giving a masquerade, which the Empress and the entire court attended, Lieven saw me cross the room and said to his neighbor, who at that moment was Count Poniatowski, “There is a woman for whom an honest man would suffer a few blows of the knout without regret.” I heard this anecdote from Count Poniatowski himself, since made King of Poland.
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1758

Lev Naryshkin forsakes Catherine for her enemies; Prince Charles
of Saxony visits Russia; Catherine’s pregnancy; her elaborate party
for Peter; her punishment of Naryshkin; Russian losses against
Prussia; Elizabeth’s convulsions; birth and baptism of Anna

As soon as General Fermor had taken command, he hastened to carry out his instructions to advance, which were precise, for despite the harsh weather he seized Königsberg, which capitulated and sent deputies to him on January 18, 1758.
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During that winter I suddenly noticed a great change in Lev Naryshkin’s behavior. He started to become uncivil and crude. He came to see me only reluctantly and made remarks that showed that someone was filling his head with ill will against me, his sister-in-law, his sister, Count Poniatowski, and all those in my circle. I learned that he was almost always at Monsieur Ivan Shuvalov’s home and I easily guessed that he was being turned against me to punish me because I had prevented him from marrying Mademoiselle Khitrova, and they would surely do everything to elicit indiscretions from him that could become harmful to me. His sister-in-law, his sister, and his brother were as angry with him as I was, and he literally behaved like a fool and willingly offended us as much as he could, and did this while I was furnishing, at my expense, the house where he was supposed to live after his marriage. Everyone accused him of ingratitude, while he said that he did not have a self-serving nature. In short, he had no reason to complain in any way, and people saw clearly that he served as an instrument for those who had taken control of him. He paid his respects to the Grand Duke more regularly than ever and amused him as much as he could and urged him more and more to do what he knew I disapproved of. Sometimes he carried his incivility to the point that when I spoke to him he would not reply to me. To this day I do not know what bee he had in his bonnet, when I had literally showered him with presents and friendship, along with all his family, ever since I had known them. I think that he also took to cajoling the Grand Duke because of the advice of the Shuvalovs, who told him that the Grand Duke’s favor for him would always be more valuable than mine because the Empress and Grand Duke disapproved of me, that neither liked me, that he would undermine his prospects if he did not disassociate himself from me, that as soon as the Empress was dead the Grand Duke would put me in a convent, and other similar remarks, which the Shuvalovs made and were reported to me. Moreover, they raised the prospect of his receiving the Order of St. Anna as a token of the Grand Duke’s esteem for him. With the help of these arguments and promises, they had all the little betrayals they wanted from this weak and feckless mind, and they pushed him as far as they wanted him to go, and even further, although at times he had small pangs of regret. As we will see later, at the time, he applied himself as much as he could to distancing the Grand Duke from me, so that the Grand Duke ignored me almost without interruption and was again on familiar terms with Countess Vorontsova.

Toward spring of that year, word spread that Prince Charles of Saxony, son of King August III of Poland, was going to come to Petersburg. This did not please the Grand Duke for various reasons, the chief one being that he feared this visit would inconvenience him because he did not want the life that he had arranged for himself to be in the least disturbed. The second reason was that the House of Saxony was aligned against the King of Prussia. The third reason may have been that he feared to lose out in comparison.
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He was being very modest, to say the least, because this poor Prince of Saxony was nothing without his title and had no education at all. Except for hunting and dancing, he knew nothing, and he told me himself that he had never held a book in his hands in his life, except for prayer books given to him by the Queen, his mother, who was a very sanctimonious Princess.
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Prince Charles of Saxony indeed arrived on April 5 of that year in St. Petersburg, where he was received with much ceremony and a great display of magnificence and splendor. His entourage was very large. Many Poles and Saxons accompanied him, among whom were a Lubomirski, a Potocki, Pizarc, Count Rzewuski, who was called “The Handsome,” two Princes Sulkowski, a Count Sapieha, the Count Branicki, since made Grand General, a Count Einsiedel, and many others whose names I no longer remember. He had a kind of assistant tutor with him, named Lachinal, who managed his conduct and his correspondence. The Prince of Saxony was lodged in Chamberlain Ivan Shuvalov’s recently finished house, into which the master of the house had poured all his taste, despite which the house was tasteless and quite ugly, though very richly appointed. There were many paintings, but most were copies. One room had been decorated with chinar wood, but since chinar does not shine, it had been covered with varnish, from which it became yellow, but an unpleasant yellow that made the room look ugly. To remedy this the room was covered in a very heavy and richly carved wood painted silver. The exterior of the house was imposing, but was so heavily decorated that its ornamentation resembled ruffles of Alençon lace. Count Ivan Chernyshev was named to attend Prince Charles of Saxony, and he was served and provided everything at the expense of the court and waited on by the court servants. The night before Prince Charles came to our residence, I came down with such severe colic and diarrhea that I had to go to the toilet more than thirty times. Despite this and the fever that seized me, I dressed the following day to receive the Prince of Saxony. He was taken to the Empress’s residence around two in the afternoon, and after leaving her, he was brought to my residence, where the Grand Duke was supposed to enter a moment after him. For this meeting, three armchairs had been placed against the same wall. The one in the middle was for me, the one to my right for the Grand Duke, and the one to my left for the Prince of Saxony. It was I who led the conversation because the Grand Duke hardly wanted to speak and Prince Charles was not talkative. Finally, after half a quarter hour of conversation, Prince Charles rose to present his immense entourage to us. I believe he had more than twenty people with him to whom that day were added the envoy from Poland and that of Saxony, who resided at the Russian court with their employees. After a half hour of conversation, the Prince left, and I undressed to get in bed, where I remained for three or four days with a very high fever, after which I had new signs of pregnancy.

At the end of April we went to Oranienbaum.
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Before our departure we learned that Prince Charles of Saxony would join the Russian army as a volunteer. Before leaving for the army, he went with the Empress to Peterhof and was feted there and in the city. We did not attend these festivities, but stayed at our country house, where he took leave of us on July 4. The Grand Duke was almost always very ill-tempered with me, and I knew of no other reason for this than that I would receive neither Monsieur Brockdorff nor Countess Elizabeth Vorontsova, who again had become the favorite of his harem. I decided to throw a party for His Imperial Highness in my garden at Oranienbaum in order to calm his anger, if this were possible. Any party was always appreciated by His Imperial Highness. Therefore, in a remote spot I had an Italian architect, Antonio Rinaldi, whom I had in my service at the time, build a large wooden cart on which one could place an orchestra of sixty musicians and singers. I had verses composed by the court’s Italian poet and music by the choirmaster Araya. We placed decorative illuminations in the garden’s grand avenue, which we hid behind a curtain, across from which the dinner table was set up. At dusk on July 17, His Imperial Highness, everyone at Oranienbaum, and numerous spectators from Kronstadt and Petersburg went to the garden, which they found illuminated. We sat at the table, and after the first course the curtain that hid the grand avenue was raised and we saw arriving in the distance the rolling orchestra, pulled by twenty oxen decorated with garlands and surrounded by all the male and female dancers I was able to find. The avenue was illuminated so brightly that one could see everything in it. When the cart stopped, chance had it that the moon hung precisely over the cart, which made an admirable impression and greatly astonished the whole company. Moreover, the weather was the finest it could have been. Everyone jumped up from the table to enjoy the beauty of the symphony and the spectacle up close. When it was over the curtain was lowered and we returned to the table for the second course. At the end of this we heard trumpets and drums, and a mountebank cried out, “Gentlemen and ladies, come, come see me, you will find in my booths free lottery tickets.” On either side of the large curtain, two small curtains were raised and we saw two brightly lit booths, one of which distributed free tickets for the porcelain lottery, which this booth contained, and the other tickets for flowers, ribbons, fans, combs, purses, gloves, sword knots, and other finery of that sort.
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When the booths were empty we went to eat dessert, after which we danced until six in the morning. To top it all off, no scheming or ill will interfered with my party, and His Imperial Highness and everyone else were ecstatic and did nothing but praise the Grand Duchess and her party. Indeed, I had spared no expense. My wine was found delicious, my banquet the best possible, everything was at my own expense, and the banquet cost me between ten and fifteen thousand rubles. Note that I had only thirty thousand per year. But this party ended up costing me much more dearly because on July 17, having gone out in a cabriolet with Madame Naryshkina to see the preparations, when I wanted to get out of the cabriolet and my foot was already on the step, the horse jerked and made me fall to the ground on my knees; I was four or five months pregnant.
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I acted as if nothing had happened and stayed until the end of the party, doing the honors. Nevertheless I greatly feared a miscarriage. However, nothing happened to me and I got off with a scare. For several days, the Grand Duke, all those in his entourage, all his Holsteiners, and even my fiercest enemies did not stop singing praises for me and my party. There was neither a friend nor an enemy who had not taken away some bauble to remember me by, and at this party, which had been masked, there were a great many people of all stations and the company in the garden was very mixed. Among others there were, moreover, many women who did not appear at court, and in my presence all these women boasted and displayed my gifts, which were basically trifles, for I think that there were not any that cost more than a hundred rubles. But they were given by me, and people were very happy to say, “This was given to me by Her Imperial Highness, the Grand Duchess. She is kindness itself, she gave presents to everyone, she is charming, she looked at me affably with a laugh on her face. She took pleasure in having us dance, eat, and promenade. She found seats for all those who had no place to sit. She wanted us to see what there was to see. She was joyful.” In short, on that day people discovered qualities in me that they had not known I possessed, and thus I disarmed my enemies. This was my goal, but it did not last long, as we will see later.

After this party Lev Naryshkin again began to visit me. One day, wanting to use my study, I found him there impertinently lying on a couch and singing a song that made no sense. Seeing this, I left, closing the door behind me, and I immediately went to find his sister-in-law, to whom I said that we had to go get a good handful of nettles and whip this man who had behaved with such insolence toward us for so long, so as to teach him respect. His sister-in-law agreed heartily and we immediately had sturdy sticks wrapped in nettles brought to us. We were accompanied by a widow, Tatiana Iurevna, who was among my ladies, and all three of us went to my study, where we found Lev Naryshkin singing his song at the top of his lungs. When he saw us he tried to escape, and we gave him so many blows with our nettle sticks that his legs, hands, and face swelled up for two or three days, so that on the following day he could not go to Peterhof with us for a day of court, but was obliged to remain in his room. Moreover, he took care to keep quiet about what had just happened to him because we assured him that at the slightest impolite act, or if he gave us any reason to complain about him, we would recommence the same operation, seeing as this was the only way to get through to him. All this was treated as a pure joke and without anger, but our man felt it sufficiently to remember it and did not invite it again, at least not to the degree that he had previously.

In the month of August, we learned at Oranienbaum that on the fourteenth of August the battle of Zorndorf had occurred, one of the bloodiest of the century; each side counted more than twenty thousand men killed and lost. Our loss among officers was considerable and numbered more than twelve hundred. We were told that this battle was a victory for us, but it was whispered that the loss was equal on both sides, that for three days neither of the two armies had dared to claim victory, and that finally on the third day the King of Prussia in his camp, and Count Fermor on the battlefield, had both had the Te Deum sung. The Empress’s sorrow and the city’s consternation were great when we learned all the details of that bloody day, on which many people lost family, friends, and acquaintances. For a long time one heard only laments. Many generals were killed, wounded, or taken prisoner. Eventually it was conceded that Count Fermor’s conduct had been anything but skillful and military. The army detested him and had no confidence in him. The court recalled him, and General Count Peter Saltykov was named to command the army in Prussia in General Fermor’s place. To this end, Count Saltykov was brought from Ukraine, where he was in command, and in the meantime command of the army was given to General Frolov-Bagreev, but with a secret order to do nothing without Lieutenant Generals Count Rumiantsev and Prince Alexander Golitsyn, the brother-in-law of Rumiantsev. The accusation was made that Rumiantsev had been a short distance from the battlefield with a corps of ten thousand men on heights from which he heard the cannonade, and that it had been up to him to make the attack more decisive by advancing against the rear of the Prussian army while it was engaged with ours. Count Rumiantsev did not do this, and when his brother-in-law Prince Golitsyn came to his camp after the battle and recounted to him the butchery that had occurred, Rumiantsev took it very badly, said all kinds of harsh things to him and afterward did not want to see him, treating him like a coward, which however, Prince Golitsyn was not. The entire army is more convinced of the courage of the latter than that of Count Rumiantsev, despite his present glory and his victories.