Chapter II: Part 2

With her governess, Fike read Molière’s plays in which various forms of hypocrisy and hysteria are exposed and satirized. Through Babet’s eyes, which had been opened by Molière, she viewed the cases of illness about her. “You must know,” she afterwards wrote in a letter to Grimm, “that Mademoiselle Cardel made me mistrustful toward all physicians and medicine in general.” It remained a pet life-long prejudice. Whenever, as Empress, she summoned a physician for a post, she usually prefaced her appointment with the remark that she had no confidence in his profession. She never lost a chance to criticize its pretensions. “Tell me now,” she wrote, “why does the most Christian King assemble all the charlatans to talk of their charlatanry? Does he believe in the physicians?”

Her prejudice was of course not consistent. Babet Cardel, the scorner of physicians, had never been able to cure her pupil of tone-deafness. The Empress was sometimes plaintive about her lack and wondered wistfully whether the physicians might not succeed where the teachers had failed. “All that depends on the organization, does it not? Mine is faulty. I long to hear and enjoy music, but in vain do I try. It is noise and that is all. I long to send to your society of medicine a prize for him who will invent an effective remedy against insensibility to the sounds of harmony.”

Fike was herself a healthy child. She remembered only one attack of illness in her Stettin years. Her recollection of this experience gives us a picture of her home, its gloomy pieties and its crude superstitions; above all, its wounded family pride due to the lameness of the one bright hope of the house, the future Prince of Anhalt.

“It was the custom,” says Fike, “to kneel down every evening and morning to say our morning and evening prayer. One evening as I was praying on my knees, I fell to coughing so violently, that the strain caused me to fall upon my left side, while sharp pains almost took away my breath. Some one sprang to me and I was put to bed where I remained three weeks. I lay always on the left side and had a cough, stitches and fever. There was no proper doctor in the neighborhood. They gave me remedies, but Heaven knows of what they consisted. Finally, after much suffering, I was able to get up. When I was dressed it was seen that I had taken on the form of a Z: my right shoulder was higher than the left, the backbone had a zig-zag line, and the left shoulder was hollow. My women and those of my mother who were taken into consultation, decided to call my parents’ attention to it.

“The first thing done in the emergency was to command the strictest silence about my condition. My parents were unhappy that one of their children should be lame, the other deformed. Finally, after several experts had been consulted with the greatest secrecy, it was decided to seek out a skillful man who knew how to heal dislocations. The search was vain, for they had a horror of calling in the only person who had this kind of skill, because he was the executioner of the place. They hesitated a long while, but finally decided to fetch him secretly. Only Babet and a chamber-maid were taken into confidence. The man examined me and ordered that every morning a girl, before she had eaten, should rub with spittle first the shoulder and then the spine. Then he himself prepared a kind of jacket which I was never to remove by day or night except to change my linen. He came every other day early in the morning to examine me further. Besides this he had me wear a large black ribbon which went around my neck, passed over the shoulder and the right arm, and was fastened in the back. In short, I know not whether I had no tendency to become crooked or whether these methods were effective. In any case, after a year and a half of such treatment, hope for my health was restored. I did not lay aside the uncomfortable jacket until I was ten or eleven years old.”

Fike’s inflammation of the lungs befell her at the age of seven. It coincided with her period of deepest pity, her melancholy absorption in the Last Judgment. She had been saturated with bigotry by the conscientious long-faced Wagner. On her knees in prayer she was struck down with a prolonged and serious illness. It was not an experience which the seven-year-old sinner could ever forget, especially when as a consequence she was obliged to wear for four long years an uncomfortable strait-jacket designed by the local hangman. Pneumonia and the Day of Judgment were welded in her mind. Having recovered from this illness, she resumed her position as the healthy child of the family. Not until she was fifteen years old did she fall ill again. This was on the threshold of her Russian career when an attack of pneumonia almost killed her while she was preparing to leave the Lutheran church and adopt the Greek faith. It was not easy for the daughter of Christian August and a descendant of the Anhalt Princes to become a turncoat in the matter of religion.

III

RUSSIA

The long line of Russian monarchs have all belonged to three houses: the house of Rurik, the house of Romanov, and the house which was founded by the Princess of Zerbst, half German and half Russian. The house of Rurik and the house of Romanov culminated respectively in the titanic figures of the Terrible Ivan and the Great Peter. After them, the Ruriks and the Romanovs seemed to fall away as if exhausted by the effort into a swift decline. The super-Czars were followed by a twilight of feeble heirs who opened the way for usurpers and women. Interlopers like Boris Gudunov and Sophie of Zerbst found it easy to dispose of the descendants of these Great and Terrible fathers.

It appears that tyrants are usually under somebody’s thumb. They are given to having favorites and to being ruled by them. Ivan was influenced by the monk Sylvester and Peter by the pastry-cook Menshikov. Neither was engaged in what is usually regarded as a red-blooded masculine occupation, but they were powerful men through their influence on their protectors who were autocrats. It is commonly said of Peter that he sacrificed his son for the sake of the new Russia which he had created, because Alexei was inimical to his father’s work. Menshikov played a large objective part and no doubt a larger psychological one in the torture and death of the miserable Czarevich. Similarly, Ivan the Terrible followed the advice of his favorites in browbeating the son whom he finally slew. “Give the son in his youth no power,” said the monk Sylvester. “Break him with the rod; he will not die but only grow stronger.”

Of all the murders which have disfigured the family-life of Russian rulers, these two are perhaps the most revolting and at the same time the most romantic. As themes they have intrigued the imaginations of painters and dramatists. Ivan and Peter were primitive fathers who recalled an age in which their deed would have been regarded as blood-sacrifice and not as crime. They brought the practice of ritual murder down into modern history. The inheritors of a dark tradition, they helped to carry on a bad example for the future. Homicide in one form or another, in family quarrels and palace-revolutions, was never far away from the royal family of Russia. In all the struggles around the dynasties and against them, violence has survived into modern times as a Russian folk-way.

Peter the Great was a miracle of energy. He was a madman, who built and destroyed with demonic power. If we knew the source of his phenomenal energy, we should know one of the profoundest secrets of human nature. Whence came his amazing drive, his mysterious complexities, his staggering contradictions, his power nevertheless of being always at one with himself in the supreme act of authority? We are forced to believe that his enormous stature played some part in his psychological complexity. He was six feet and seven inches tall, with the flashing eyes of a magician and the soft lips of a woman. Memories of the Norsemen and of Rurik the Viking who was the first ruler of Russia, were dear to him. They urged him to the sea and to a life-long struggle to procure for Russia adventurous outlets to the sea. He dreamed of a campaign to India; as Rurik the Norseman had come to rule over Russia, so Peter the Russian would one day come to rule over India. Through his work, Europe and Asia would be united. He died without realizing this magnificent dream but left it as a heritage for the greatest of the women autocrats who came after him.

As the youngest son of old Alexis Michaelovich and his girl-wife, Natalie Narishkin, Peter had at first little prospect of inheriting the crown. But the death of his step-brother Feodor elevated Peter and his half-brother Ivan to a double throne. The throne, which was literally a double one built for two Czars, is still to be seen in the Kremlin. Behind the seat of Ivan is a concealed opening through which Sophie Alexeievna, who was regent for six years, was accustomed to whisper responses to the weak-witted Ivan. The high-spirited Peter soon tired of a situation which enabled his sister to rule Russia from behind the scenes. At the age of seventeen, already a physical giant, he secured from his brother a voluntary abdication and forced his domineering sister into a convent. His hatred for Sophie was as intense as was his love for his mother, the beautiful young widow who spent her life among the colored shadows of the Kremlin. His victory over Sophie gave Peter his first taste of violence. Then came the revolt of the Streltsi, in which the ambitious Sophie shared. Hastening home from Europe, Peter executed the conspirators before his sister’s convent window. With his own hands, he severed their heads from their bodies. This was his first actual taste of blood.

After his return home, Peter found his first wife, Eudoxia, too dull and too orthodox. She was sent to languish with shorn locks in a convent, while Peter began a new life with his good-natured concubine, Catherine I, who had been a camp-follower in her time but was soon to become an Empress and deign to let Princes kiss her hand. Peter shared her favors with his best friend Menshikov, a practice not uncommon in mediæval friendships. To Catherine and Menshikov Peter remained loyal for the rest of his life. All his aberrations were in the nature of orgies from which he always returned to his permanent favorites. “He was a real artist in lust,” said Admiral Villebois; “and, though hard-working, he abandoned himself from time to time to attacks of amorous frenzy in which age and sex mattered little to him.”

2

The history of morals in Russia differs from the history of morals in the rest of Europe. This was once pointed out by Catherine the Great in a letter to Sénac de Meilhan: “Every stranger who writes of Russia ignores the ancient cast of its manners and morals and by this he misleads himself many and many a time.” The woman who made this comment on Russian life was born and brought up under the concentrated influence of the German Reformation. Her early education taught her to appreciate the difference.

The religious, political, and economic development of Russia has been unique and the development of morals has been equally so. The introduction of Christianity in the eleventh century was accompanied by no great revolutionary upheaval. The Greek Church with its bejewelled priests was assimilated by the Russians with suspicious ease. Religious persecution, notwithstanding the Raskolnik burnings, never went so far in Russia as it did in Western Europe. The Russian did not tremble before an awful God but made a household pet of him, hanging the icon in the corner of the best room and surrounding it with family portraits. As late as the seventeenth century, a serious European scholar published a work on the subject: Are the Russians Christians? They had accepted the Christian symbols and imbued them with the pagan spirit.

In Russia religion remained a passion play. The people slumbered on in their mediæval idolatry while the rest of Europe struggled through an age of passionate protestantism. The rise of private property in the west, which was logically bound up with the monogamous inheriting family, had no corresponding period in Russia. The break-up of the psychology of communism which came with the growth of private property in Western Europe, had no survival value among the Russians. The peasants continued to hold their land in common and pagan habits survived within the church.

Standards of conduct which derived from the Greeks were in good odor all the way down through the eighteenth century. This is especially true with regard to sexual relationships. That curious and fascinating chapter in the history of European morals which deals with the rise of romantic love had no duplicate in the history of Russia. There was never any Russian Sir Galahad. The Byzantine Madonna never attained the prestige of her Italian sister. She had an oriental cast of features slightly suggestive of the queen of the playing cards. Her dark beauty betrayed her Greek and rather pagan origin. Besides she belonged to a cloistered sex which spent its life in terems, those semi-oriental apartments in which the women and children were secluded and which differed from harems only in that the Russians were not polygamous.

The seclusion of women continued to exist after the acceptance of Christianity and Madonna-worship. It explains why romantic love did not flower in Russia with the beginning of the Christian centuries. While the Russians raised altars to the wonder-working virgin they continued to build churches to masculine saints who reigned in pairs. Saint Peter and Saint Paul were enshrined together; Saint Boris and Saint Gleb, Saint Kyril and Saint Method were their Russian counterparts, just as the two Czars Peter and Ivan were enthroned together. The romantic value which the Russians attached to brotherly love is seen in the way in which large families of brothers clung together after marriage with the same degree of loyalty and dependence. It colors the myths and legends of the country. Masson relates the following: “It is singular enough that in the same countries that were said to have been inhabited by a society of women (Amazons) who proscribed all men, a society of Zaporogue Cossacks have dwelt, who would not suffer a single woman among them, recruiting their forces solely by carrying away youths from the neighboring lands. This barbarous republic was destroyed by Potiomkin, and they who composed it were distributed in the different armies and among the other Cossacks.” That such a myth could still persist and be believed in the Russia of the eighteenth century is not surprising when we remember that, prior to this century, all the visible political and social life of the country was, as in ancient Greek, carried on exclusively by men.

It was Peter the Great who changed all this. With his usual way of regimenting everybody, he commanded the women to come out of their terems and take part in society. But just as the Russian men clung to their beloved beards when Peter commanded them to shave, so the women clung to their precious privacy. Peter brooked no nonsense: he shaved the men by force and sent the military officers to fetch the women to balls and dinner parties. The ladies, however, showed courage. They resisted emancipation bravely all through Peter’s reign and for a long time afterward. It was not until a generation later, during the reign of the Empress Elisabeth, that the Russian women assimilated the idea and began to enjoy the free life which Peter’s ukas had unlocked for them.

3

After the death of the great Czar a woman sat for the first time on the throne of Russia. The autocrat who had killed his son because he was incompetent to rule left his country to a woman who could neither read nor write. Good-natured, tawdry, and illiterate, the second wife of Peter the Great became Catherine I, autocrat of all the Russias. She ushered in a regiment of women. For three-quarters of a century Russia was ruled by women monarchs. Except for the brief reigns of Peter II and Peter III, the eighteenth century was dominated by three women autocrats, Anna Ivanovna, Elisabeth Petrovna, and Catherine Alexeievna. Russians, priests and peasants alike, who had been brought up to believe such proverbs as: “A chicken is not a bird, nor is a woman human” and “The more you beat the wife the better tastes the borstch,” were obliged to bow the knee three times in succession to autocrats in skirts. Among the Raskolniks were consistent fanatics who had to be knouted because they refused to take the oath of allegiance to women.

Catherine I, who had eleven children, was survived by only two of them: the melancholy Anne, married for a strip of sea-coast, and the frivolous Elisabeth, who remained unwed. The Empress left a will bequeathing the crown to the twelve-year-old son of the murdered Alexei. But the boy died of the smallpox after a brief reign of two years, and another Empress ascended the throne. His successor was Anna Ivanovna, daughter of the weak-witted Ivan, who had “of his own free will” surrendered the crown to Peter the Great. Ivan’s daughter, who had been considerably Germanized since leaving her Russian terem to become a Duchess of Courland, was now enthroned as supreme autocrat. She was the first of the two Annas, both unbeautiful and unpopular.

Having no children, she adopted a niece, Anna Leopoldovna, the daughter of a favorite sister. Her niece was married to Prince Anthony Ulrich of Brunswick, a poor shadow of a man whom she much disliked and by whom she was much disliked in return. Nevertheless, they had a large family of children, the first of whom was destined to become the infant Czar, Ivan VI. Scarcely was this child born when Empress Anna died, leaving the regency for the infant Czar in the hands of Bühren, her favorite. The mother of Ivanushka did not long submit to this arrangement. She contrived to send Bühren to Siberia and had herself made regent in his place.

Anna Leopoldovna was a recluse and a sloven. She left the government to her minister, and reverted to the old terem life, spending her days in dishabille with her favorite, Julie von Mengden and Julie’s numerous female relations. Her neglected husband was more neglected than ever. The Regent became more and more invisible; her retirement, more and more obsessional. She only went forth on moonlit nights to take the air. Ivanushka was shown to the public from a balcony on state occasions, when for instance the Persian Ambassadors brought the first elephants to Moscow. As the Imperial family withdrew from sight, gossip about them ran faster and faster. The Regent was only living as women had formerly always lived in the Russian terems, but her way of life was now regarded as reprehensible and scandalous. Julie von Mengden, her favorite, was after all a harmless, unambitious person but she became a popular bogy. Anna Leopoldovna was unable to reign because she was too shy to show herself. One of the duties of her office was what Catherine the Great called “representation” and she neglected it. Consequently she lasted only one year.

4

In the meantime Elisabeth Petrovna had been living her own life in her own way. Having signed her dying mother’s will, for Catherine I could not read or write, she retired to private life apparently without regret and left the crown to her half-brother, Peter II. The Empress Anna who followed Peter was as ugly as Elisabeth was beautiful. From jealousy she drove the debonair Princess away from the capital. Elisabeth lived in the country and shared the life of the peasants. She had a profound liking for low company and could not avoid being picturesque. In the company of her lover Shubin, she took part in all the peasant festivals. She loved to wear men’s clothes and for years wore nothing else. Her tall figure and radiant beauty were at their best in masculine attire. When she was obliged as Empress to return to skirts again, she introduced a fashion at court of balls called “metamorphoses,” where all the women were obliged to dress as men and all the men as women. The metamorphoses were not popular with the diplomats who tangled themselves hopelessly in their skirts while the Empress marched about gracefully and happily in her velvet breeches.

Elisabeth was born under the most auspicious circumstances. Her birthday coincided with the victory of Pultava. When Peter came swaggering back to Moscow he was met by the announcement of the birth of a daughter at Kolomenskoe. The great Czar cut short the victory celebration in the Kremlin in order to post away to see his babe. It was his eighth child and a girl, but Peter was never blasé.

Elisabeth was a pampered darling. Even as an infant she was a show child and a prize beauty. Her portrait in the nude, suggesting the babyhood of Venus, is one of the art treasures of the Petersburg collection. This much admired work of art may have contributed to that lack of modesty for which she was celebrated afterward. Her father’s exotic taste expressed itself in the rich Spanish costumes which formed her everyday wear, and in the pets such as monkeys and parrots which he gave her. The child was affectionate but not intellectual. She liked to sing and dance and amuse herself. The only book she ever read was the Bible. Her gayety was tempered by a melancholy which grew on her as she advanced in years. The approach of these attacks was marked by an excess of piety to which she completely abandoned herself. She prayed for hours at a time, fasted with enthusiasm, and made long pilgrimages on foot to the musty shrines of miracle-working saints. Her religious orgies alternated with periods of abandonment to frivolity and self-indulgence. She astonished the world by these apparent contradictions. It seemed paradoxical that she should at one and the same time be so immoral and so religious. As she reveled in the follies and gayeties of Butter Week, so she reveled in the rituals and mummeries of the Greek Church. She was fully as religious as her brother Alexei, whose orthodoxy had so infuriated Peter the Great that he put him to the torture.

Elisabeth was, also like Alexei, intensely Russian. Although her mother had been a foreigner and a Lutheran, and her father had been as much of a Dutchman as he could make himself, Lisanka was pure Slav. It is true that she preferred Petersburg to Moscow as a residence, and that she built the great Winter Palace there in the manner of Versailles and not of Kolomenskoe. In this respect and in her politics she followed in the footsteps of her father. But her personal way of life was exceedingly Russian and somewhat provincial. She loved luxury and show as much as did Peter himself, but she was at heart a home-keeping body with a fondness for the folk-ways of her country. Her life among the peasants had helped to make her so. Among her lovers were no foreigners. Shubin, Voshinsky, Buturlin, Razumovsky, and Shuvalov--there were only five in fact though tradition makes them three hundred--were all Russians. The two Annas were given to German favorites who were inclined to be ambitious and efficient. Elisabeth’s lovers were an easy-going lot who did not exploit their position. She, on her side, loved them for their _beaux yeux_ and not for their ability or distinction. She kept a sergeant, a hostler, a page, and a chorister in turn. Perhaps the French Duke who once refused her hand felt more than ever justified in his decision when he heard that the beautiful daughter of Peter the Great had consoled herself with such simple and lowly persons.

Elisabeth adored her family. The child who was painted in the nude and paraded in Spanish finery before an admiring world was her father’s pet and plaything. For her sake Peter decided to make her mother his legal wife and to crown her as Empress. The girl was still in her ’teens when her father and mother died and her sister Anne married and went to a foreign country. From this time on her nostalgia for these family ties never left her. Loyalty to them was the mainspring of her life.

Elisabeth’s mother had a German physician whose name was Lestocq. He was born in Hanover and was one of the many German doctors whom Peter the Great brought to Russia. From the year 1713 he was attached to Catherine’s family. Elisabeth therefore inherited him from her mother and allowed herself to be led by him, which Lestocq was not loth to do. He liked to pull the strings of political intrigue to gratify his sense of power. It was he who finally persuaded Elisabeth to dispossess the Regent and her infant son and seize the crown for herself. The Grand Duchess was now thirty-two years old. She had no more real desire to be Empress than her mother had had before her, but Lestocq was an energetic manager. He induced her at last to act by telling her stories about the torture and the convent that awaited her at the hands of Regent Anna. He also offered her sound French money that Versailles was ready to invest in a Petersburg revolution.

Elisabeth’s imagination was no doubt stimulated by recent events in Austria. In October, 1740, Charles VI died and named his daughter as his successor. If Maria Theresa had become an Empress why should not Elisabeth Petrovna? No Pragmatic Sanction was needed in Russia where two Empresses had already occupied the throne. If Europe was going to ask questions, Elisabeth could produce her mother’s will which she herself had signed. The testament read: “If the Grand Duke (Peter II) should die without heirs, the right to ascend the throne shall pass after him to the Czarevna with her descendants, after her to the Czarevna Elisabeth with her descendants, after her to the Grand Duchess; whereby masculine heirs shall have at all times preference over feminine. But never at any time shall anyone rule over the Russian Empire who does not belong to the Greek Church or who wears already another crown.” The Czarevna Anna had left a son in Kiel, but he was a Lutheran. The will in question had been declared illegal by Empress Anna but was now restored to legality by Empress Elisabeth who thought it best to have a document to justify what she intended to do anyway.

The revolution was not as costly as a modern theatrical revue, with which the old palace revolutions in Russia had much in common. Elisabeth Petrovna came to the city for the winter and kept open house in a little palace on the Field of Mars. While the Regent remained invisible in the Winter Palace, Elisabeth went abroad early and late and smiled upon the population. She visited the guards in the barracks, stood godmother to their children and gambled away her French money to them. On fine days she sped through the snowy streets of Petersburg, a shining Snegurotchka, with guardsmen perched on the rear of her sleigh. The apathetic Regent bestirred herself sufficiently to reprove Elisabeth for her improprieties. But Elisabeth knew that her mother had not become Empress by observing the proprieties nor had Peter the Great much regard for formalities. Her mother’s own daughter, Elisabeth had a way with soldiers which she now used for political ends. The guardsmen adored her.

Though Peter the Great had been feared and hated in his lifetime, he had now been dead long enough to become a popular idol. His youngest and his favorite daughter had only to stretch out her hand to collect the interest on his popularity. Elisabeth’s revolution was easy, so easy that the foreign diplomats were shocked. They reported to their home offices that a purse of money, a cask of wine, and a handful of soldiers had done it all. Elisabeth’s revolution was regarded as an illustration of the political indifference and supineness of the Russian people; but, as Bilbassov has touchily but convincingly pointed out, the revolution of 1741 was easy because it fulfilled the popular wish. The unlovely Annas had had their day and the turn of the gracious Elisabeth had come. Thirty-two, unmarried, and childless--she prolonged her beloved dynasty through a kind of political Indian Summer.

On the 5th of December, 1741, Lestocq decided that the time for action had come. Elisabeth left her palace at midnight, and, accompanied by Lestocq and Vorontsov, was whirled away in her sleigh to midnight mass. After the litany, she again entered her sleigh and sped to the barracks of the Preobrazhensky regiment. While three hundred guardsmen were silently getting into line, she disappeared into her dressing-room and arrayed herself as if for a première. Presently she appeared before the soldiers in full military regalia, a shirt of mail over her shoulders and a spontoon in her hand. If Peter the Great had fancied himself a Viking, his daughter fancied herself a Brunnhilde. Russia had had Empresses before Elisabeth, but she was the first to seize the throne in masculine attire. She set the fashion for the Empress who came after her.

In the dense black cold of a December night in Petersburg, the soldiers took the oath of allegiance under their breaths. Elisabeth in her coat of mail placed herself at the head of her warriors and marched to the winter palace, where the sleepy Anna, though scarcely more sleepy than usual, and the shivering Anthony Ulrich were hustled into their clothes at the point of the sword. One hopes at least that the von Mengden sisters bore themselves with spirit during the invasion; nothing of the kind was to be expected of the feeble Brunswick pair. The Regent and her household were removed by the guards to the palace on the Field of Mars which Elisabeth had just abandoned, while Elisabeth remained in the imperial chambers.

_From a painting by Repin_]

The baby Ivan, asleep in his cradle, was awakened by a tall shining figure in a coat of mail. Elisabeth kissed him and cried over him. The childless woman found it hard to let him go when the soldiers carried him away.

5

Almost the first act of the new Empress was to select her successor. Her choice was hastily made and precipitately executed. The indolent woman, who usually had to be prodded into action by her advisers, showed great energy and decision in this matter. She dispatched a messenger secretly to Kiel and brought her nephew, Karl Peter Ulrich, to Petersburg. She told her intentions to nobody until she had the boy safe in her keeping. He was inducted into the Greek Church, proclaimed heir to the throne with summary haste. The determined Empress worked the priests over-time to bring this about. To make the step irrevocable and cut off all possibility of retreat for the boy, she liquidated his well-founded claim to the Swedish throne. She made it a condition of the Russian-Swedish treaty that the former guardian of her nephew, Adolph Friedrich of Holstein, should be nominated in her nephew’s place as heir-apparent of the Swedish crown. By these measures, Karl Peter Ulrich was cut off from his Swedish expectations and became Grand Duke Peter Feodorovich, a good Romanov name that was supposed to wipe out the taint of his Lutheran past.

Elisabeth had proclaimed her nephew heir without consulting the Privy Council or the Senate. She did not even ask advice of the nobles who had led her party and supported her revolution. The gentlemen thus overlooked were irritated and everybody was mystified by her driving haste. The diplomats were obliged to find reasons for her behavior, and there were many near at hand. Her sister’s son was her competitor for the throne and if his claims were backed by France and Sweden they might prove dangerous. As Grand Duke of Russia he was in the hands of his aunt. It was also seriously suggested that the pious Empress wished to bring another soul into the Greek Church and that she wished to find a good excuse for not marrying.

Her devotion to the dead Anushka was a real factor, but there was something more. Her behavior was a good deal like that of a pathological kidnapper. She cried over little Ivan in his cradle but she had let him go. Peter was never to escape. In her several kidnappings, for this was only the first, she always maintained an appearance of reasonableness. The considerations of state which she invented to justify her abduction of her nephew and her nephew’s heir were merely convenient excuses for the satisfaction of her desire for children.

In spite of Elisabeth’s much heralded reputation as a voluptuary, it is impossible to find any authentic traces of her children. Her mother’s illegitimate offspring and those of Catherine the Great are a matter of common knowledge. But no tradition remains to account for those of Elisabeth. Did she actually have no children or did she dispose of them so completely that not even a rumor of their existence came through? It seems hardly consistent with her character as we know it that she should have been so sensitive to public opinion as to have drowned them. In any case she had all the symptoms of a woman who had been disappointed in maternity. Romantic and sentimental about all family ties, she had mourned her lost lover for twenty-five years and cherished a feeling of widowhood. When the Grand Duke was confirmed in the palace chapel, Elisabeth threw herself upon the ground and burst into a flood of tears.

6

Three years after the Empress had adopted Peter, she sent an envoy to Kiel to find out something about the lad. The results of the investigation were not what any modern child-placing agency would call encouraging.

His mother died three months after his birth. The boy’s father, a cruel, sickly little man, neglected his son as he had neglected his wife. He died early, leaving Peter fully orphaned at the age of ten. The lad was brought up by a Swedish governor named Brümmer who achieved such bad results that he was accused of having intentionally destroyed the boy’s character. The Russians, Bestushev and Panin, believed that Brümmer, after discovering that Peter was to be the heir to the Russian throne and not the Swedish, took pains to corrupt his mind and disposition. “But I have always doubted this abomination,” says Catherine, “my opinion is that the unsuccessful education of Peter III is to be traced to a combination of unfortunate circumstances.”

The boy’s endowment was poor; there had been stupid Romanovs before him. Many excuses have been suggested for his inability to learn. He was taught Russian and Swedish alternately because he had pretensions to both crowns, and as a result he learned neither. But many children learn two languages whether alternately or simultaneously. Another excuse for his shortcomings relates that the Rector of the Kiel Grammar School who undertook to teach him Latin employed such tactless methods that Peter learned only to hate all study. When he arrived in Moscow at the age of fourteen he knew nothing at all. The Empress, whose standards were certainly not very high, was much disturbed by his ignorance and hastened to give him a tutor.

Stehlin was a forerunner of the best modern teachers of the feeble-minded. He used concrete materials as much as possible, borrowing from the art gallery coins and medals, picture books, globes and models. As the Grand Duke was literally unable to sit still, Stehlin walked up and down the room with him. For three years the patient man kept it up, although his unconventional teaching was often ridiculed. The scholars thought him a jester instead of a teacher. Nevertheless Stehlin seems to have been the only one in the Grand Duke’s environment who made any attempt to handle the boy intelligently and sympathetically. Peter learned little or nothing, it is true, but he remained on friendly terms with his preceptor. The mischief had been done long before Stehlin had a chance at him. Spoiled by his nurses, Peter had been handed over at seven to brutal Holstein officers who subjected him to a military régime. At fourteen he was passionately fond of military drill but had no more endurance than a baby. To play with toy soldiers was his idea of manœuvres.

Brümmer, his Swedish governor, was a hard-boiled cavalry officer. Stehlin said of Brümmer that he might be fit to train horses but he was not fit to educate a human being. In order to harden his pupil, he tortured him. His favorite punishments were to deprive the boy of his meals, to beat him with a riding-whip, to make him kneel with naked skin upon dry peas. The victim responded as might be expected. He was timid and antagonistic, cowardly and boastful. He only made friends with the meanest of the servants, those whom he was allowed to strike, and he tortured his pet animals. By the time he was brought to Russia to become its future Czar he was an institution case.

Life had been made too hard for Peter. His instinct of survival had been undermined. He frequently fell ill and with every attack it was thought that he was going to die. The grandson of Great Peter, that miracle of human energy, had no energy at all. He was just a stupid little boy who was destined never to grow up.

IV

SHE GOES TO RUSSIA

The Princess Johanna Elisabeth of Anhalt-Zerbst wrote with gilt ink and many flourishes. Like King Frederick and every other educated person in the Germany of her times she carried on her correspondence in French. Her style was as ornate as her penmanship, for she never lacked the courage of her enthusiasms. As a finished letter-writer she lost no opportunity to display her art. When the news came that Elisabeth Petrovna had ascended the Russian throne, she at once wrote to congratulate the new Empress who might have been her sister-in-law. It was an exciting moment when the reply came back, penned by the hand of the glorious autocrat herself. Direct communication had been established between the obscure Stettin family and the imperial court of Petersburg. The enterprising Princess walked on air.

Luck favored her. She had in her possession a precious relic which the Empress wanted, a portrait of Elisabeth’s dead sister Anne. It had been painted many years before by Axel von Mardefeld, the Prussian minister to Russia. Mardefeld was a seasoned diplomat who had survived twenty years of service at the Russian court and expected to survive many more. He spared no pains to ingratiate himself with the new Empress. The portrait which he had painted of the dead Anushka gave him his opportunity. He knew that this work of art, which had strayed out of Russia, was now in the hands of a trustworthy person, the Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst. Elisabeth was as eager to secure the return of this family relic as her father would have been to import a priceless Italian Venus. At the suggestion of Mardefeld, she wrote to her “dear niece,” the Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst, and begged for the return of the picture promising to reward the sender at the earliest opportunity.

The Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst was naturally delighted to do a favor for the Empress of Russia. The portrait was sent at once: soon a messenger came posting back to Berlin bearing a return gift from the Empress. It was a miniature of Elisabeth set in diamonds worth eighteen thousand rubles. The Princess did not allow the grass to grow under her feet. She had her daughter’s portrait painted by Pesne, and the following spring Uncle August of Holstein made a journey to Petersburg to bear this offering to the Empress. Stehlin thought the workmanship was poor; he said the elderly artist had lost his skill. But Elisabeth was no connoisseur as Peter the Great had been. It was the portrait of a pleasant-looking, well-grown young woman. Her Imperial Highness did not ask for more; her feelings could supply the rest.

In the meantime Petersburg buzzed with speculation concerning the Grand Duke’s marriage. The diplomats had been taken by surprise when the Empress had produced her nephew as her heir, and they were resolved to be more alert in the matter of his marriage. Gossip spoke of several Princesses, not all of whom were real. The French Princess who figured in the rumors absolutely did not exist. In Saxony, however, there lived a real Princess who was sponsored by a strong party headed by Bestushev the Vice-Chancellor. The Princess Marianna was the daughter of August the Strong who, having more than a hundred children altogether, did not consider them as precious as if he had been the father of only five or six. He was willing to send Marianna to Russia. Besides, as King of Poland he had strong political reasons for wanting an alliance with that country. He would be delighted to marry his daughter to the Grand Duke.

Frederick of Prussia wished at all costs to prevent this alliance. It was a trying situation for him. He had two marriageable sisters with either of whom he might have filled the breach. But as a brother Frederick was too chivalrous. He belonged to one of those families whose members hate each other cordially yet cling inseparably together against all the rest of the world. The idea of sending Ulrica or Amelia to Russia filled their brother’s soul with consternation. “In order to destroy the Saxon’s project,” he wrote to Mardefeld, “propose a Princess from some old ducal house of Germany. With regard to my sisters, you know my opinion. I shall send neither of them to Russia. I wonder that the Empress does not hold to her choice of the Princess of Zerbst, since she is of the Holstein family that the Empress loves so much. Besides there are still two Princesses in Hessen-Darmstadt, one of whom is twenty and the other eighteen years of age.” Commenting on his conflict at this crisis, Frederick afterwards wrote, “Nothing was more contrary to the welfare of the state than to permit this alliance; nothing was more unnatural than to send the Princess Ulrica there. Woe to those politicians who sacrifice even their own blood to their interests and ambition.” Thus Frederick agonized while the Russian Empress kept her counsel. It appears that she never wanted Ulrica for the Grand Duke, having destined her for another rôle, the rôle that she later came to fill as Queen of Sweden.

The Empress’s choice was made. Her hesitation sprang from other causes. An obstacle had to be removed; it was the near relationship existing between the Grand Duke Peter and the Princess Fike of Zerbst. The point was referred to the Archbishop of Novgorod and the Synod, the facts of the relationship being given and the young lady’s name withheld--such was Elisabeth’s passion for secrecy. The Synod reported that the Church had no objection to the marriage; that the couple were cousins did not count since they were related on the maternal side only. Their relationship was therefore merely “the shadow of a relationship.”

Still the impatient Empress hesitated. A second obstacle deterred her. This time it was a question for physicians not clergymen to settle. Lestocq was a physician and Lestocq had serious reservations regarding the immediate marriage of the Grand Duke. Stehlin says that Lestocq advised the Empress to wait at least another year while other memoirs say that the Hanover physician told the Empress to postpone the boy’s marriage until he was twenty-one. It was plain to all observers that the boy was under-sized and under-developed for his age. The English ambassador said of him, “He looks very puny and he is not taller at fourteen than the generality of children, not remarkably small, are at ten.” The worst of it was that he did not improve in his new environment.

The Grand Duke’s vitality was low. Whenever anything went wrong, he fell ill and he recovered but slowly. The morbid relation between himself and his governor Brümmer continued unabated under the auspices of his adoring but ignorant aunt. Scenes of violence took place which made the amiable Stehlin’s hair stand on end but which he concealed from the easy-going Empress. His pupil was terrorized and browbeaten by the Prussian officer and the foolish boy had no other idea of self-defense than to fight back with blustering impotent rage. He went so far as to threaten Brümmer with his dagger. Undoubtedly the weak boy could be irritating.

Just before Christmas 1743, Peter fell desperately ill. His aunt was in a panic; death had robbed her so often. Were all her plans to be brought to naught on the eve of their bright fulfilment? She cast all caution to the winds and decided to bring the German Princess to Russia at once. Brümmer was sent to write a letter inviting the mother and daughter for a visit. Scarcely was this letter dispatched than Brümmer was sent to write another bidding the ladies to make haste. Elisabeth was off; nothing could stop her now. Her customary indolence laid aside, she summoned Brümmer again after a few days had elapsed and demanded to know whether the guests from Zerbst were not already on their way. The officer played his part between the two ladies well. To the Empress he said that the Princess of Zerbst wished only for wings to come flying to her Majesty. To the Princess of Zerbst he wrote that the invitation was due to his devoted services on behalf of the House of Holstein. He continued to bully the prospective bridegroom just as much as ever.

2

While Brümmer’s letter was traveling from Petersburg to Berlin, the Stettin family was spending Christmas in Zerbst with Uncle Johann Ludwig. There were three children at this time: Fike, Fritz and Lischen, the baby who had been named for the glorious Russian kinswoman. Christmas at Zerbst was a sober Lutheran Festival with much hymn singing in which Fike did not shine, and gifts of handiwork in which she excelled. Came Sylvesterabend, when the future can be glimpsed in candle-flames, in bits of molten lead, and similar strange messengers of fate. It was a night for Fräulein Khayn to see ghosts if she ever saw them, for a courier was riding from Berlin to Zerbst bearing destiny in the form of Brümmer’s letter.

On the morning of New Year’s day the family all went to church. When the bells began to ring the little procession emerged from the castle, two stiff old men and a frail little nine-year-old boy accompanied by their numerous women folk, among whom the youthful Sophie walked as tall as any of them. It was time that she should be married, but dowerless and plain how was she to find a husband? Fike’s thoughts were at this time fixed on her Uncle George, a younger brother of her mother’s who had been paying her court. Although the Princess of Zerbst had encouraged her brother’s suit, viewing him favorably as a bird in the hand, the melancholy George had not really asked his niece to marry him. Still, on this New Year’s day Fike’s thoughts were with her uncle as she sang out of key with the others the long, chanting hymns of the Lutheran service.

While the family sat at dinner the courier arrived. A package of letters was handed to the General who tore off the outside covering and gave a thick missive to his wife. As the Princess read, her daughter sitting next to her caught sight of the words “... with the Princess your eldest daughter.” From that moment Uncle George was forgotten. The shrewd girl guessed the contents of the twelve-page letter in her mother’s hands although nothing was said to her. Her parents shut themselves up in the library for three days with ostentatious secrecy while the rest of the household buzzed with excitement. Behind the closed doors the old General was putting up a stubborn resistance. He did not wish to send his daughter to Russia for the same reason that Frederick did not wish to send his sister there.

“At the express and particular command of her Imperial Highness,” said Brümmer’s letter, “I have to inform you, Madame, that the Empress wishes that your Highness accompanied by the Princess your eldest daughter, shall come hither as soon as possible and without loss of time and repair to whatever place the Imperial Court at the moment may be. Your Highness is too clever not to understand the true meaning of the impatience of the Empress to see you here as well as the Princess your daughter of whom report has said so much that is lovely. There are times when the voice of the world is not other than the voice of God.

“At the same time our incomparable Monarch has expressly charged me to inform your Highness that his Highness, your consort, shall under no circumstances come with you. Her Majesty has very important reasons for wishing it so. A word from your Highness will, I believe, be all that is necessary to fulfill the will of our divine Empress.” Brümmer enclosed an order for ten thousand rubles payable in Berlin and another credit for two thousand rubles payable in Petersburg.

A second courier arrived two hours later bringing a letter from King Frederick who, like Brümmer, took all the credit for the invitation, urged the need of secrecy, and repeated the injunction of the Empress about leaving the General at home. Elisabeth Petrovna guessed that Fike’s father would be a hindrance to her plans. She had bought off the guardian of Karl Peter Ulrich by transferring to him the boy’s own claim to the Swedish throne. In the same canny spirit, she limited her dealings to the mother of the bride whom she wanted for the Grand Duke and excluded the girl’s father from any share in the negotiations. Having put the General firmly in his place she left it to his over-lord, the King of Prussia, to keep him there. Even had the Prince been a man of aggressive character, which he certainly was not, his hands could not have been tied more effectively.

Three days sufficed to demolish the General’s resistance. On the fourth of January, the Princess Johanna Elisabeth penned her replies to the letters. Her correspondence with Elisabeth has unfortunately been lost; the Empress was notoriously careless with letters. In her answer to Frederick the Princess declared her intention of bowing to the will of Providence and of following the instructions of the Empress to the last detail excepting one. “I understand completely the necessity for secrecy which your Majesty has recommended. Yet for various reasons, which can be more easily understood than written, I have been obliged to initiate the Prince, whose discretion I will guarantee, into the secret. I hope thereby to have merited no reproach.” She had really considered the possibility of taking Fike off to Russia without her father’s knowledge.

Preparations for the journey were simple. The trousseau of the German Princess consisted of little more than a traveling apprentice might have carried in his bundle. Three dresses, a dozen chemises, and as many handkerchiefs were all that Fike had to pack for that mid-winter journey. The Baroness von Prinzen who afterwards said in her memoirs that she had helped Catherine the Great to pack her trunks for Russia rather overstated the case. The packing of Fike’s trunks must have been a simple matter. It was a source of life-long chagrin to her that she came to Russia without a bridal chest. Her mother at least had had that. She had no bed-linen of her own and was obliged to use her mother’s sheets. No deeper humiliation for a German bride can be imagined. Even as an old woman Fike could not forget it. It was something which she had always to make up. Because she had come without sheets to Russia she was obliged to put through the Partition of Poland.

On the 10th of January, 1744, Fike’s mother set forth, ostensibly for the Berlin Carnival. The party consisted of the General, who was to accompany them as far as Schwedt, the Princess and her daughter, two attendant Fräuleins, an officer named Lattorf, and a cook. They made their first stop in Berlin. The Princess hastened to an audience with the King and Minister von Podewils who invested her with the responsibility of furthering the Prussian cause with the Russian Empress.