Chapter III: Part 3

In Berlin, the Princess continued as formerly to neglect her daughter. Her tactlessness was illustrated by an incident described in Fike’s memoirs. “When the King of Prussia, who knew exactly the object of the journey, learned that I had arrived in Berlin, he wished without fail to see me. My mother said I was ill. Two days later he caused her to be invited to dinner with the Queen, his consort, and expressly requested her to bring me with her. My mother promised but when the time came she went alone to the court. When the King saw her he inquired about me. She replied that I was ill. Whereupon he replied that he well knew that it was not true. Then she said that I was not dressed for court, to which he answered that he would postpone the dinner for me until the next day. Finally, my mother said that I had no court dress. He ordered that one of his sisters should send me one. At last my mother saw there was no way out of it and sent me word that I should dress myself and come to the palace.”

It was late in the afternoon when Cinderella arrived. During supper she sat at the right hand of the King, who paid her elaborate eighteenth century compliments. The shy girl blushed furiously, but kept her head. It was the one and only meeting of these two great monarchs. Between the Princess of fourteen and the King of thirty-one no vital contact was made; it was an official occasion. But his flattery lingered with her always like a pleasant dream. She only hated sister Ulrica, who was too precious to be sent to Russia and whose dress the King had offered to lend her.

In the middle of January, the Princess’s coach rolled out of Berlin. Lumbering through the deep frozen ruts of the outer streets, it took a northerly direction as if homeward bound for Stettin. The snowless winter obliged the party to travel on wheels as far as Riga, while the bitter winds sweeping down from the Baltic waters made the journey a severe ordeal. They lost no time, however. Frederick had ordered fresh relays of horses at every post. No expense had been spared; were not the rubles of the Russian Empress to pay for everything? But real comfort was not procurable at any price. Few travellers, except the couriers, took the post road from Berlin to Petersburg at this time of the year. The quarters in which the party sought their night’s lodging were just endurable. “As the rooms in the stations were not heated,” the Princess wrote her husband, “we were obliged to go into the common room which was not unlike a pig-sty; the master and mistress, the house dog, the cock and the children,--children everywhere, in cradles, in beds, on the stove, on mattresses--everything was rolled together in disorder like weeds and roots. There was nothing else to be done; I ordered a bench to be brought and lay down in the middle of the room.”

In spite of the cold and discomfort, they hastened onward, through the short days and the long nights. The Princess wrote her husband about an encounter with robbers but her daughter’s description of the journey contains no reference to any adventure of this kind. More exciting for Fike was the great comet of 1744 which they saw while crossing Courland. Against the background of the long black nights and the tedium of the never-ending journey, accented by the hoof-beats of the flying horses, the comet lingered in the girl’s memory as something awful and unforgettable. The cold grew worse and worse. The ladies wore woollen masks to keep their faces from freezing. Fike’s feet succumbed to the frost and were so swollen that she had to be carried to and from the carriage. She also made herself ill drinking beer. “In these last days I had a little indigestion,” she wrote to dear Papa, “but it has had no further consequences. I was partly myself to blame because I had drunk all the beer I could find along the way. Dear Mama has put a stop to that, and I am well again.” This was priggish Fike travelling to Russia in her fifteenth year. She obeyed her dear Mama but dear Papa could understand her better about the beer.

Having said goodbye at Schwedt, the General returned to Stettin with his secret. The town marked the disappearance of his wife and daughter and rumors began to circulate. They made the Prince uncomfortable. He wrote a letter which overtook the Princess at Köslin and asked permission to announce the journey in the newspapers. But the Princess said no. “It seems to me essential that you should hold back the announcement in the newspapers of my journey until I have passed Memel. Likewise the prayers for a safe journey which you plan to have said in the churches of Zerbst must be postponed.” As far as Memel, she felt that she could manage the trip without any special aid from Providence. From Königsberg she wrote to Fike’s grandmother, who drew a yearly pension of ten thousand rubles from the Russian Empress. The aged Duchess was the only one of Sophie’s relatives who did not join the protest against the marriage. The Abbess of Quedlinburg and the Duchess of Brunswick were outraged. They heaped reproaches on the head of the General whom, without regard to justice, they made the scapegoat for his wife’s proceedings. They bombarded the Prince with long letters which reminded him of the tragic fate of Princess Charlotte who had married Alexei Petrovich and the sad plight of the Brunswick family imprisoned by Elisabeth. The Prince was harassed by Holstein and Anhalt relatives at the same time, since he had luckily remained where both sides of the family could get at him and relieve their feelings. The Princess Johanna Elisabeth was not surprised; she had not expected their support.

“I did not doubt,” she wrote to her husband, “that our journey to Moscow would stir up a storm. Religion and rivalry give the best grounds for that. But the Tante [the Abbess] as little as we would have had the power to turn aside the wise decrees of Providence. We cannot ascribe my journey here and the entire circumstance to anything else and we can be assured that the All-Wise One fulfils thereby purposes for us inscrutable.” To arguments like this the pious General had no reply. But still disturbed by memories of the unhappy marriage of Princess Charlotte, he asked his wife to stiffen the terms on Sophie’s behalf in the marriage contract. He wanted for his daughter the guarantee of a pension with a home if possible in Holstein if not in Livonia. Nothing of the kind was ever even discussed by his wife after her arrival in Russia.

Thanks to the foresight of the Princess, none of this opposition was started until mother and daughter were safe beyond the Russian border. As far as Riga, the Princess travelled under the name of the Countess of Rheinbeck, the cognomen which Brümmer had suggested for the purpose. In Fike’s memoirs, she says that her mother assumed a fictitious name for the journey but she could no longer remember it. At Riga the travellers were met by escorts, compliments and presents. “At mid-day,” wrote the Princess, “I met Chamberlain Narishkin, whom her Imperial Majesty had placed at the head of a guard of honor that came to meet me as a mark of distinction. He brought me letters and greetings from her Majesty who overwhelmed me with honors and compliments. A quarter of a mile from the city I was met by Vice-Governor Prince Dolgorukov. We drove across the ice of the Dwina. As the carriage in which I was sitting was just beyond the end of the great bridge, the first salvo was fired from the great guns on the fortresses. I found ready to wrap us in the sleigh two splendid sables covered with gold brocade for my daughter and myself, two collars of the same fur and a coverlet of another fur, quite as beautiful.”

Wrapped in their rich sables, the travellers climbed into the long Russian sleigh, designed by Peter the Great, and flew over the snowy chaussées that led to Petersburg. On a brittle February day they arrived at the Winter Palace. The Empress and the court had gone away to Moscow. Petersburg was empty, but a small group of courtiers had remained to welcome the German guests. The Princess was more than bedazzled by the reception they gave her. “It seems as if I were in the suite of her Imperial Majesty or of some great monarch. It does not seem real that all this can happen to poor me, for whom at only a few places a drum was ever stirred and at others not even that. Here everything goes on in such magnificent and respectful style that it seemed to me then and now at the sight of the luxury surrounding me as if it all were only a dream.”

Fike’s memories of her arrival in Petersburg are appropriate to a fourteen-year-old girl. She remembered the names of the four young ladies of honor who came forward to welcome her and the names of the men they subsequently married; the fourteen elephants which the Shah of Persia had given to the Empress and which actually performed tricks in the snowy palace court-yard; the carnival and the wonderful coasting expedition led by Semion Kyrilovich Narishkin; above all she remembered and described to the last knot and ringlet the extraordinary style of hair-dressing favored by her new Russian friends. Once in the Petersburg palace, the girl promptly forgot all the hardships of the journey. Her mother, a little tired but ever busy with her pen, continued her stream of correspondence with Zerbst and Berlin. “Fike bears the fatigue better than I, yet we are both well, praise be to God. May He continue to guide and direct us.” This to her husband, the General; to King Frederick, she wrote rather less piously: “Considering the hardships of the season, the journey and the change of air, I should need to have an iron constitution to keep up my resistance. My daughter is more fortunate. Her youth supports her health and like young soldiers who scorn danger because they know nothing about it, she delights in the splendor by which she is surrounded.”

In some subtle way, the conquering spirit of the Princess of Zerbst began to fail her as soon as she arrived in Russia. It was equally evident that Fike, from the moment when Narishkin helped her with a jest into the sleigh at Riga, was swimming with the current. Not that the Princess was aware of falling behind in the race. Courageous and confident, she attacked the great task before her, her diplomatic mission from King Frederick and von Podewils. She had found everything in Petersburg just as they had said. Things had to be changed. Bestushev, the enemy of Prussia, must go. While her mother pursued these political interests, Fike was learning to stand on her own feet in a strange environment. For the first time she allowed herself the luxury of a cold-blooded judgment of the Princess’s character. It happened on the journey from Petersburg to Moscow.

“After the departure from Petersburg,” says Fike, “the sleigh in which my mother and I were traveling struck in turning against a house, whereby an iron hook became dislodged and fell, striking my mother on the head and shoulder. She insisted that she was severely hurt but outwardly there was nothing to be seen, not even a bruise. This incident delayed our journey by several hours.” In describing the accident, her mother says, “I believed myself to be wounded but I was not. The blow had struck with full strength against the fur; otherwise, without doubt, my head, neck and arm would have been crushed.” Only the costly furs given by the Empress had saved her.

With this one interruption, the train of thirty sleighs, each drawn by ten horses, dashed onward without pause. They intended to arrive in Moscow before the Grand Duke’s birthday, on the twenty-first of February. The way was prepared. Bonfires burned at night along the snowy highway. Post-stations sprang up suddenly out of the snow-drifts, ready with hot coffee and fish soup, while fresh horses stood waiting in their dugas. The excitement was intense. At four o’clock on the third day, the flying train came suddenly to a halt within seventy versts of Moscow. An envoy from the Empress met the party here with the request that they should delay their entrance into Moscow until after darkness had fallen. While they waited, the travellers arrayed themselves with as much care as possible. Fike put on a close-fitting dress of rose-colored moiré silk, trimmed with silver.

The horses were again put to the sleighs, this time sixteen instead of ten to each, and the train leaped forward. Sievers, the Empress’s envoy, seated himself beside the Princess of Zerbst, and urged the coachman forward at every breath in true Russian style. The procession drew up before the Golovin Palace at eight o’clock in the evening. It was just six weeks since the country cousins had driven with so much caution and secrecy out of the little Lutheran town of Zerbst.

They were received on the stairway by the Prince von Hessen-Homberg, General Adjutant of the Empress, who conducted them to their chambers. Scarcely had they laid aside their heavy sables when the Grand Duke came running into their room, unable longer to control his impatience to see them. At ten o’clock Lestocq appeared with greeting and a summons from the Empress. Attended by the Prince von Hessen-Homberg and the Grand Duke, the two Princesses made their way to the Empress’s reception room. As they passed from room to room, the court ladies and gentlemen were presented and bowed low to them. “It is impossible to say how all those present stared at these Germans from head to foot,” wrote the Princess to her husband. Yet those musty old aunts at Quedlinburg who opposed the journey would have wished the Princess of Zerbst to forego this triumph.

The Empress advanced to her threshold to meet them. “She allowed me,” exulted the Princess, “scarcely time to take off my gloves and embraced me, I must say, with tenderness.” In rhetorical French, the Princess delivered an address of gratitude for all the Empress had done for the Holstein-Gottorp family. The Empress replied that her own blood was not more dear to her than that of the Princess and that all she had done was nothing in comparison with what she intended to do. It was a meeting of Greek with Greek. Fike was at last presented and embraced. The Empress invited the company to be seated, but, since she herself was too excited to sit down, nobody else could do so. The reception lasted for half an hour. At one point the Empress abruptly left the room to conceal the tears she was obliged to shed. They were called forth by the strong resemblance between the Princess Johanna Elisabeth and her deceased brother once betrothed to the Empress Elisabeth. Fike’s memoirs say nothing of these tears, although her mother was much affected by them.

Fike preserved for us, however, the appearance of the Empress at this time: “More than anything else, I was astonished by her great height,” she says. “I must say one could not behold her for the first time without astonishment at her beauty and her majesty. She was tall and, though rather stout, it did not detract, as no lack of freedom was noticeable in her movements. Her head was very beautiful. On this day she wore an enormous hoop-skirt, which she loved to do when she made a grand toilette and which she only did when she showed herself in public. Her dress was of shimmering silver taffeta trimmed with gold lace; she wore a black feather on her head standing upright a little to one side with many diamonds in a coiffure of her own hair.” The young girl in the rose-colored moiré frock never forgot the picture.

The next morning, the Princess and her daughter were summoned to the audience chamber by the Empress. “A few moments later, the Empress in grand attire came from her dressing-room. She wore a brown dress embroidered in silver and quite, that is as far as head, neck and waist were concerned, covered with jewels.” She presented the ribbon and star of Saint Catherine to her guests. Then she passed on to mass. When they next saw her, she was on her way to confession; the next time, to communion. A few days later, on her way to the Troitsky Monastery, she came to say farewell “in a long-sleeved gown of black velvet adorned with all the Russian orders; that is, the order of Saint Andrew as a scarf, of Saint Alexander about the neck, and of Saint Catherine on the left side.” There seemed no possible limit to all this grandeur. Elisabeth had ten thousand dresses and five thousand pairs of shoes.

But Fike, her mother’s own child, was not over-awed. She expanded in an atmosphere where ostentation was the rule. With precocious tact, which she owed either to her own glands or to Babet Cardel but scarcely to her mother, she established herself securely in this glittering and treacherous environment.

4

Prince Christian August had given his daughter a book as a parting gift. It was a treatise by a professor at Halle which discussed at tedious length the differences between religious creeds. He had prepared to go with this book a memorandum of instructions for his daughter’s use. It was headed: “Pro Memoria, so ich meiner gemahlen mitgegeben.” Somewhere along the route, how attentively can be imagined, Fike had read this document, and had written one of her primmest letters to dear Papa thanking him for his “gracious instructions.” The first half of the memorandum was taken up with religious counsel and the second half with her future marriage. The General’s style is an awkward contrast to the fluent preciosity of his wife. He addressed his daughter in the third person and outlined her future duties thus:

“Next to the Empress, her Majesty, she has to respect the Grand Duke above all as her Lord, Father, and Sovereign; and withal to win by care and tenderness at every opportunity his confidence and love. Her Lord and His will are to be preferred to all the pleasures and treasures of the world; and do nothing which he dislikes or which causes him only a little pain; and still less to insist on her own will.

“Never to enter into familiarity or badinage, but always have respect as much as possible.

“To regard the domestics and favorites of her Lord with a gracious mien; not to demand the services of her Lord but ever to respond to the favor and love of her Lord.

“To speak with no one alone in the audience chamber and to conduct herself always according to etiquette there.

“To detest and avoid playing cards for high stakes, which is a mark of avarice and self-interest.

“To take charge herself of the pocket money which may be given her, to guard it and to pay it out gradually to a servant on an account, in order that she may not submit herself to the trusteeship of a governess; to employ it for her use and pleasure, and with it to do good, in order that she may win for herself and not for others instead of her the love and inclination of her dependents.

“To intercede for no one, because one may not understand the laws and a one-sided report cannot be trusted, and the side discriminated against becomes a disgruntled enemy; and he whom one helps out with such intercessions forgets the good deed and goes and sins again.

“Especially to enter into no affairs of government in order not to irritate the Senate.”

At fifteen Fike was not mature enough to appreciate the irony of this document and probably she never came to be. The abject submissiveness which her father thought appropriate to her status as a wife had certainly never been exemplified by her vivacious mother. She must have been aware that her father played a minor part in the family life at Stettin and at Zerbst, but it was a condition in her little world which from sheer familiarity seemed only natural. What could be more normal than that the man of the family should be kept in leading strings? Few girls in her situation would have contrasted her father’s theories with his actions and Fike certainly did not.

Frederick the Great always kept the delusion that he had played the chief rôle in this German-Russian marriage. But he over-estimated his actual part. If Elisabeth had found it necessary to spirit the young Princess away against his royal will she would have done so. Since it was not necessary she welcomed his timely and useful aid. At the right moment Frederick promoted Prince Christian August to the post of Field Marshal, and after Fike had gone to Russia he helped to reconcile her father to her conversion. “My good Prince of Zerbst was very restive on this point,” he wrote. “I had a great deal of trouble in overcoming his religious scruples. He responded to all my representations with: ‘Meine Tochter nicht Griechisch werden!’” His struggles died away gradually under the tactful treatment of his free-thinking King who persuaded him that Greek and Lutheran were the same. “Lutherisch-Griechisch, Griechisch-Lutherisch, das gehet an,” the submissive General repeated. If the King of Prussia said so what else could a Prussian officer reply?

The marriage was made by three women. It was begun by the Princess of Zerbst and the Empress of Russia and carried through by the fifteen-year-old Fike who took charge of the campaign herself when her mother’s tactics failed. None of the men-folk who might have been expected to influence the situation did so. Those like Lestocq and the Prince of Zerbst who offered contrary advice were over-ridden. The others were permitted to play the part of benevolent bystanders.

V

FIKE BECOMES CATHERINE

“My daughter,” wrote Fike’s father, “is already so well grounded in her religion that she knows the principles of the true redeeming faith, and that no one can win or attain it by his own works, vows or the words of the saints, but that all must proceed alone from the merit of Christ, the Son of God. Whatever resembles this faith she can herself prove and accept; the other not.... To compel or persuade my daughter to accept a strange religion in which she herself finds errors is never to be advised.... And rather eventually to give up the regency than to suffer offense in her conscience.”

These solemn words made a deep impression on the girl. The admonitions which related to her marriage, the Empress, and the Senate were not so serious. She felt herself able to cope with these concrete forces but the abstraction called conscience is a more terrifying thing. “I beseech you,” she wrote, replying to her father in his own vein, “to be assured that your admonitions and precepts will be forever implanted within my heart, as is the seed-corn of our holy religion in my soul. I pray God to give me the strength which I need to withstand the temptations to which I shall be subjected. Through the prayers of your Highness and of my dear mother, God will grant me this grace which my youth and weakness cannot give.”

Fike still believed when she penned these lines that she would be acceptable in Russia as an Evangelical Grand Duchess. In common with her God-fearing father she put her trust in the precedent supplied by the Grand Duchess Charlotte. Their trust was misplaced. Peter the Great was liberal in religious matters, but his daughter was orthodox. Peter did not himself go to church and took pleasure in exposing the sham miracles of the wonder-working Virgins of Russia who were able to shed real tears before their worshippers. His daughter did not inherit his skeptical spirit. She was loyal to the Russian Church and a lover of miracles. Her mother’s will provided that no one should occupy the Russian throne who did not profess the orthodox faith. Fike perceived the finality of this at once. “From my entrance into the empire,” she said, “I had been firmly convinced that the heavenly crown could not be separated from the earthly one.” On the threshold of her new life she was plunged into a conflict with her conscience. She wrestled with temptation and the scars of her struggle remained with her through life.

“The change of religion,” wrote Mardefeld to King Frederick, “gives the Princess infinite pain and her tears flow abundantly when she is alone with persons of whom she is not suspicious. Nevertheless ambition is gaining finally the upper hand.” Remembering the religious conflict of his own youth, Frederick was alarmed. But he put his faith in the Princess Johanna Elisabeth. “It only remains, Madame, for me to beg you to overcome the repugnance of your daughter for the Greek Church, after which you will have crowned your work.”

Fike was converted by Simon Todorsky. Having studied four years at the University of Halle, at that time a hot-bed of theology, he knew the language of Luther well. What was more to the point in dealing with the young person from Zerbst, Todorsky was familiar with the subtleties of higher criticism which the intellectuals of Halle had recently invented. These were things of which good Pastor Wagner, who, after all, was only an army chaplain, had never even dreamed. With the assistance of Todorsky’s hair-splitting, Fike was able to see that there was very little real difference between the Lutheran and the Greek Church. If only her father had not continued to harry her conscience. “Thou shouldest not take this trial frivolously,” he wrote, “must search thyself with care whether thou art really in thy heart inspired by inclination; or whether, perhaps, without thy being aware of it, the marks of favor shown thee by the Empress and other high-placed persons have influenced thee in that direction. We human beings often see only that which is before our eyes. But God in His infinite justice searches the heart and our secret motives, and manifests accordingly to us His mercy.”

As the awful shades of Judgment Day closed about her, Fike fell ill. Once before in childhood she had succumbed to an attack of religious terror complicated by pneumonia. In Russia she repeated the experience. “The physicians ascribe the disease,” wrote her mother, “to the inflaming of the blood caused by the hard journey.” For twenty-seven days the child hovered between life and death. In unconsciousness and delirium she made the decision which her father had urged her to weigh so carefully. Believing that Fike might die, the Princess suggested that a Lutheran clergyman should be called to her bedside. But the sick girl said, coming for a moment to consciousness, “Why? Call Simon Todorsky rather. I would like to speak with him.” It was a triumph of diplomacy, anyway presence of mind which was to carry Fike through every crisis of her life.

During her convalescence, Fike resumed her lessons with the Russian priest, a fact which her mother carefully concealed from the Prince of Zerbst. As soon as she was able to hold a pen, she wrote a stiff respectful letter to her father asking permission to change her religion. She sent her greetings to Uncle Johann Ludwig and promised to write to him by the next post. “My hand is still very weak,” she said, “so that I cannot do it to-day.” The two old Puritans at Zerbst with their white wigs and pious ways were vastly important to Fike although nobody else felt that they had to be conciliated.

In after years, when she had become Catherine the Great, Fike made light of the whole business of conversion. When her daughter-in-law had to go through the same experience, she spoke of it merely as a routine chore. “As soon as we have her here we shall go about the conversion. In order to convince her, we shall need about fourteen days. How much time will be needed to teach her to read the confession of faith correctly and distinctly in Russian, I do not know.” The fourteen days were taken from Fike’s own experience; it was after two weeks of Todorsky’s hair-splitting dogma that she had succumbed to pneumonia and the temptings of ambition. Though she could speak of her conversion so casually in after life it had almost killed her at the time. The great crimes of which she was accused as Empress made less impression on her conscience. As Catherine the Great she identified herself with Henri le Grand of France, that brilliant wayward monarch who changed his religion for the sake of a crown. It was only one of many ways in which she tried to justify her departure from her father’s church.

On the twenty-eighth of June, pale from a three days’ fast, Fike was confirmed and re-christened. The Empress had a gown made for her exactly like her own, of red _gros de Tour_ worked with silver. Her godmother was the aged Abbess of the Novodeviche Convent, bowed with years and steeped in sanctity. The Empress with her fondness for tableaux, had arranged all. Krazny, the gorgeous red so beloved by the Russians, dominated the scene. Kneeling on a big square cushion, the convert recited the creed in a clear unfaltering voice. She had learned it, she says, “by heart, like a parrot.” Indeed she had learned it twice, for Simon Todorsky, the priest, had taught her the Ukrainian pronounciation, and Basil Adadurov, the tutor, had taught her the Russian. For the public ceremony she chose the Russian. As her clear young voice rang out in the first response, the tears of the assembled company gushed forth. Fike maintained her self-control, which gave an impression of deep sincerity and religious fervor and was much praised. “Her bearing from the moment when she first entered the church,” wrote her mother, “and throughout the entire ceremony was so full of nobility and dignity that I should have admired her had she not been to me that which she is.”

Standing before her in embroidered and bejewelled robes, the Archbishop of Novgorod intoned: “Wherefore art thou come to the Holy Orthodox Church of God and what seekest thou from her?” And Fike recited in stereo-typed phrases a long melodious creed, in which among other things she professed: “I believe and confess that faith alone is not sufficient for our justification, but that good works also which proceed from faith and charity, withal as badges of Christ are necessary to salvation; without the same faith is dead according to the testimony of holy writ....

“I believe and confess that the pictures of Christ and the mother of God, the Virgin Mary, as those of other saints should be preserved and should be duly venerated, but should not be worshipped.”

Fike’s mother sent an enthusiastic but discreet description of the ceremony to her spouse. It was a detail to her that her daughter’s name had been changed, but the girl’s father and her aunts would probably be hurt. The name Sophie was a good Russian name, none better, but it happened to be that of the rebellious sister whom Peter the Great had locked up in a convent. Therefore Elisabeth hated it. So Fike was baptized Catherine Alexeievna for Elisabeth’s mother and Sophie Auguste Friedrike ceased to exist. The Princess of Zerbst broke the news to her husband as tactfully as possible. “In order to seal publicly such a confirmation,” she wrote, “a name is added; our daughter will be Catherine and the Alexeievna follows the custom of the country and means daughter of August; for the name August, according to the dialect here, can not be rendered other than Alexei.” The Princess of Zerbst had taken lessons in the Russian language to please the Empress but her progress had not been so great. It is possible that she believed that August and Alexei were the same in Russian though probably she knew better. In any case her little fiction would scarcely be discovered by the German General. The rumblings from Zerbst and Stettin died down. The Prince was pleased because his daughter was a Grand Duchess and addressed her by this sonorous title. The Princess continued to call her daughter Fike and carped at her husband for adopting the title of Grand Duchess. “Fike will think that you no longer love her,” she wrote. But the Prince continued to be respectful. As his daughter had once trusted him to understand her weakness for beer he now trusted her to understand his weakness for etiquette. He was swaggering for them both.

After her confirmation, Catherine Alexeievna followed the Empress from cloister to cloister, for Elisabeth had come to spend more and more of her time as a pious pilgrim. She had apartments in the Troitsky Monastery where she sometimes lived with her court. The Abbot of Troitsky and the Bishops of Moscow and Petersburg accompanied her everywhere. With her three priests, she appeared in the box at the opera and even at masquerade balls. The young Grand Duchess could not imagine good Pastor Wagner in the rôle of polite escort and cavalier. Her new church had undreamed-of possibilities of romance. Kiev, which she visited with her aunt, seemed a kind of orthodox Arabian Nights. “Here as in all cities which we had touched since Moscow,” she wrote, “the clergy of Kiev came to meet us. As soon as the church banners were visible, we left the carriages and entered the city on foot behind the cross. The Empress betook herself to the Petchersky Cloister and entered the church containing the wonder-working portrait of the Holy Virgin said to have been painted by Saint Lukas. Never in my whole life have I been so impressed as by the magnificent splendor of the church, in which all the saints’ pictures were covered with gold, silver and jewels....”

“Toward the end of our stay in Kiev, the Empress visited with us a monastery where a comedy was to be played. The performance began at seven in the evening. We had to go through the church to reach the theatre. The play consisted really of several plays: there were prologues, ballets, a piece in which Marcus Aurelius had his favorite hanged, a battle in which Cossacks fought with the Poles, a fishing scene on the Dnieper, and choruses without number. The Empress held out until about two o’clock in the morning; then she sent to ask whether it would not end soon. The answer came back that only half of the performance had been given but if her Majesty so ordered they would stop at once. She replied that they should finish soon; they begged only for permission to burn some fire-works....”

Such was Christianity in Russia: images covered with gold and silver, pieces about a pagan named Marcus Aurelius, and outbursts of fire-works. As the pupil of Pastor Wagner, and the daughter of her father, Catherine could not fail to realize that these things proceeded from Satan and from Satan alone. She knew though she dared not admit it that they were idolatrous. And yet she reveled in them. Dr. Martin Luther had thrown an ink-stand at the Devil when he put his head through the window. Every true Christian knew the Evil One on sight and made short shrift of him. The Prince of Zerbst, her father, had once encountered him. It was during a visit of the Prince at Rome that the Pope had tempted him to become a Catholic. But the Prince had not yielded to the blandishments of anti-Christ because, like the heroic Doctor Luther, he recognized the Wicked One in spite of his pompous disguise. The Prince of Zerbst returned to his army and his church unharmed. As a matter of fact it is doubtful whether he had ever seen Rome and still more doubtful whether the Pope had paid any attention to an obscure German Protestant. But legend is as good as history if the legend is believed, and the Prince’s daughter had been brought up to admire this heroic steadfastness of her father’s. Of course the Russian Church was like the Lutheran and not the Roman, as Father Todorsky had explained to her and as she had explained to dear Papa. Catherine Alexeievna, however, rebaptized in the Greek faith, found it tactful to conceal a great deal from her father about her new faith and the things the Russians did in the name of their religion.

2

The Empress’s attachment to the young Princess had been strengthened by her illness, while the two elder women had been alienated from each other. When Catherine fell ill the Empress was sojourning in her Troitsky retreat. The court physician rushed to the sick girl’s aid and prepared to bleed her. To their astonishment the Princess of Zerbst forbade the operation. She had always been panicky about blood-letting, and she stubbornly refused to have her daughter bled. The doctors were outraged. They sent a messenger in haste to their Empress who could not believe her ears. She ordered her carriage and her favorite and posted to Moscow.

Arriving after candle-light, Elisabeth and Razumovsky entered the sick-room and found the patient unconscious. The Empress seated herself on the side of the bed, took the girl in her arms, and told the doctors to go ahead. The mother was summarily excluded from the room and Lestocq bolted the door. During her illness, Catherine was bled sixteen times, often as much as four times a day. Her mother’s opposition was set down by the court as showing a lack of natural maternal affection. The Empress praised the girl’s courage and presented her with a pair of ear-rings and a necklace worth twenty-five thousand rubles. She removed the Princess of Zerbst as head nurse and put the Countess Rumiantsov in her place. The chasm between the mother and daughter was broadening.

Though hurt by all these slights, the Princess of Zerbst could not learn by experience. The climax of her tactlessness came at Easter. Catherine had a piece of blue and silver brocade which Uncle Johann Ludwig had given to her in parting, a rich fabric woven by one of the looms of Zerbst. Her mother coveted the piece and at last sent a messenger to ask for it outright. Catherine resigned her treasure reluctantly, which the Countess Rumiantsov, who acted as spy as well as nurse, observed and reported to the Empress. Elisabeth forthwith sent two gorgeous lengths of stuff to the convalescent girl and openly expressed her opinion of this thoughtless mother. Before they had been in Russia two months, Catherine had won an ally in the Empress while her mother had created in her a bitter enemy.

In the meantime the foreign offices of Prussia, France and Sweden were leaning hard on the Princess of Zerbst to whom they looked for aid in forming an alliance with Russia. The Princess was fascinated by her political mission and did not realize that her mismanagement of her daughter’s affairs failed to help the cause of Prussia with the Empress. The Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Bestushev, favored an alliance with Austria against Prussia. He called the King of Prussia “predatory” and the King of Prussia called Bestushev “corrupt.” History has shown that both gentlemen were correct.

Bestushev’s influence with Elisabeth was supreme because he had been a protégé of her father’s. At fifteen he had been sent abroad and educated by Peter the Great. He then entered the diplomatic service and lived for twenty years or more in western Europe. Bestushev was one of the most versatile and gifted Russians of his day. His name was known throughout Europe as the inventor of a medicine called Bestushev’s Drops, which was popularly regarded both as an elixir of life and also as a healing dose for hysterical ladies. When Catherine the Great ascended the throne, she bought the formula for Bestushev’s Drops and published it as a benefaction to the human race. With all her scorn of doctors she had great respect for Bestushev’s Drops. She used them always in her own family.

Bestushev’s researches in the black arts had other consequences. He employed in the department of foreign affairs a German by the name of Goldbach, who tampered scientifically with mail. In such matters the Russians supplied the will but they usually employed a German to do the deed. Goldbach opened the French Ambassador’s letters and read there a great deal that was not intended for the eyes of the Empress of Russia. He therefore laid the correspondence before Elisabeth who read that she was frivolous and indolent and that her chief interest in life was in changing her costume four or five times a day. She furthermore learned of the secret correspondence going on between the King of Prussia and the Princess of Zerbst and of the strong influence which the Princess was supposed to wield upon herself. It would be mild to say that the Empress was angry. Bestushev’s method of gaining his end was simple and successful.

The Empress struck at once. She ordered the French Ambassador to leave Moscow within twenty-four hours and to make for Riga without even touching Petersburg. It was the same Chetardie who had provided French money for her revolution, but he went at once. It was a famous exit. Bestushev continued quietly to mix the cards. He was now after the head of the meddling Princess of Zerbst.

At Troitsky the Empress and her train occupied a suite of pleasant chambers with low ceilings, English clocks, and Dutch stoves. She had domestic tastes and warm affections and satisfied in this retreat her desire for a quiet family life. Here and at Monplaisir, where she had a summer kitchen in which she cooked with her own hands, she lived her happiest moments. The cosy family atmosphere was interrupted by a painful explosion which took place between the Empress and the Princess of Zerbst after Bestushev had pulled the strings quietly to this end.

The Empress and her guests had just arrived from Moscow. The Empress had made the journey on foot, leaving the others to overtake her in carriages. The entire party entered the gates in the form of a procession, which first turned into the Cathedral for mass and afterward became a sort of English house-party in which affairs of state and sociability were indiscriminately mixed. “After the midday meal,” Catherine says, “when the Grand Duke had come to our chambers, the Empress entered unexpectedly and commanded my mother to follow her into the next room. Count Lestocq went in with them. Awaiting my mother’s return, I seated myself with the Grand Duke upon the window ledge, and we chatted. The conversation in the closed room lasted a long time.”

The first to appear was Count Lestocq who, assuming his best German manners, said to the young girl, “There is nothing left for you but to pack your things; you will start at once on your home-ward journey.” Lestocq did not waste courtesy on fallen favorites, but he was not always shrewd enough to know who had fallen and who had not. Then the Empress appeared at the door. For a moment her imposing figure towered beneath the low ceiling, her blue eyes flashing with anger. Behind her appeared the culprit, the Princess of Zerbst, her eyes red with weeping. The two young people hastily sprang down from the high window-seat and stood in attitudes of respect. The impulsive Elisabeth laughed, kissed the boy and girl who were to make up to her for the romantic marriage she had missed, and passed quickly out of the room. Lestocq’s prophecy was not fulfilled. The Princess and her daughter were not sent home.

Frederick the Great was to feel the effects of this family quarrel in the Seven Years War. Elisabeth’s dislike of the Prussian King was greatly strengthened by the explosion at Troitsky. The Princess of Zerbst she never forgave. Mardefeld, the Prussian minister, was allowed to linger for a time, but when the Princess of Zerbst returned to Germany, the Empress demanded Mardefeld’s recall. She hit upon the humiliating device of requiring the Princess herself to go to the King of Prussia and deliver the message requesting his minister’s recall. The Prussian Ambassador, who had survived twenty years at the Russian court and had landed on his feet after two palace revolutions, was finally wrecked by his alliance with the Princess of Zerbst. Frederick the Great lost substantially then and afterward by enlisting the diplomacy of Catherine’s mother. He did not forget it.

3

In all her difficulties, Catherine could look for no support from her natural protector and future consort. If she had been an average girl, the defective Peter would still have been a child beside her. But she was far from being an ordinary girl. The fifteen-year-old Princess was more than a match for the two adult women who fancied they were leading her. To steer her course between the Empress and her mother took all her attention at first. For a time she disregarded the Grand Duke as a factor in the situation.

Her account of their relationship shows that they met like children, without any thought of a more mature relationship. “The Grand Duke appeared to rejoice at my arrival. In the first days he was very complaisant toward me.” During her illness, his good will continued. “During my sickness the Grand Duke had shown me much attention. When I became better he continued this. I seemed to please him; but I can neither say that he pleased me nor displeased me. I only knew how to obey and my mother had to marry me.” The boy gave her his confidence, chattering like a child about everything that came into his head. He confided to her his former love for Princess Lapukin whom the Empress had banished from the court and whose place had been taken by Catherine herself. The girl, who was passionately proud, could not understand that these were the outpourings of a fragile sexless boy. She only saw that her lover was indifferent and pretended to the others that she did not see it.

“When the fair weather came we moved over into the Summer Palace. Here the visits of the Grand Duke grew less frequent. I must say this lack of attention and his coldness so to speak on the eve of our wedding did not exactly incline me in his favor. The nearer the time came, the less could I hide from myself the possibility that my marriage might be very unhappy. But I had too much pride and too much self-respect to allow the world to suspect that I thought myself unloved. I regarded myself too highly to believe that I was contemptible. The Grand Duke had a somewhat free manner with the ladies-in-waiting of the Empress which did not exactly please me, but I restrained myself from speaking about it and no one knew my deepest feelings. I tried to distract myself by romping in my chamber with my maidens.”

The Grand Duchess did not understand that the Grand Duke’s attachments to other ladies was as childish and unvirile as his attachment to herself. She says in her memoirs that at this time she scarcely knew the difference between the sexes. But jealousy was an old familiar feeling. Far back among the dim memories of her Stettin childhood was the shadow of a dreadful day when a baby brother had upset her world. She did not like those memories. “I should have been the most unhappy creature in the world if I had allowed myself to be carried away by feelings of tenderness for him,” she says of the Grand Duke. “He would have ill-repaid me and I should have died of jealousy, which would have done nobody any good. So I tried to control myself in order that I might not be jealous of a man that did not love me. But in order not to be jealous there was only one means: not to love him.”

The Grand Duchess grew high-strung and nervous. It was not the first time that she had failed to meet the requirements of an important situation. Born a girl, she had disappointed her parents’ hopes of the succession at Anhalt-Zerbst. Lacking beauty, she had not been attractive to suitors. And now that her future husband did not love her, she had to reassure herself that she was not “contemptible.” Under the stress of bruised self-feeling, she became capricious and masterful with her maidens. Covering the floor of her room with mattresses, she had all eight of them sleep in her room. Another time she led the damsels out for a midnight walk through the gardens of Peterhof for which they were all roundly scolded. Like a Sultana she divided the custody of her possessions among them, entrusting her jewels to one, her laces to another, her linen to another and so on. She cut her front hair short, wore it in a kind of frizzled bang and ordered her girls to do the same. Some of them wept and pleaded but the Grand Duchess had issued a ukas. She would not be moved. Peter the Great had not relented when old men wept and begged to be allowed to keep their beards. Let Maria Petrovna, the Skorodov sisters, and the two dwarfs dry their tears and order in the barber at once to cut off their hair exactly like the Grand Duchess.... In addition to her elaborate hair-dressing, Catherine had taken on the habit of painting her face.

4

The Empress arranged the marriage for her two adopted children as if they had been puppets or ballet dancers. No such marriage had ever been seen in Russia except perhaps the famous ice festival in the reign of Anna Ivanovna, when Prince Galitsin married his Lilliputian bride. To satisfy a whim of their Empress the couple had been escorted to an illuminated ice-palace on the Neva and put upon a bed made of ice. Fortunately for Catherine and Peter they were to be married in mid-summer. The date was originally set for July the first, but was postponed twice. Not until late in August was everything finally ready. All summer long the Empress was so taken up with preparations that she suspended all affairs of state. Her own ministers and the foreign ambassadors had nothing to do but play cards and drive in the Nevsky Prospect.

For months in advance the fashionable world was busy providing itself with “the richest clothes possible” since nothing less was specified by the ukas issued by the Empress. Bales of silk, velvet, and brocade were constantly arriving from England and Germany, for the Russians were no weavers. The English ambassador wrote home complaining of the Empress’s neglect of official business when he might have better congratulated his country on the increased importation of English goods in Russia. From German looms came the heavy cloth-of-silver from which Catherine’s wedding gown was made. It was a rigid structure with a bodice shaped over a wooden form, to which was suspended a train more than three yards long. The fabric was spun silver and the whole thing weighed upon her like a suit of armor.

Clad in this unyielding garment and bearing on her head a ponderous crown of jewels the Grand Duchess spent a miserable day. She held out bravely during the wedding ceremony in the church of Our Lady of Kazan and throughout the state repast in the Winter Palace afterwards. But just before the ball began, she humbled her pride and begged to have the crown removed for a few minutes. The Empress, who thought this might bring bad luck, reluctantly consented.

The wedding was a triumph for Elisabeth’s maternal pride. She ordered every detail of the ceremony with jealous tyranny, not omitting to command the bride to take a bath the evening before. Early next morning she sent for Catherine to come to her chamber to be robed in state. There ensued a heated argument between the Empress and the barber concerning the bride’s style of hair-dressing. Catherine sat before the mirror and seemed to take no part. There was not a rift on this day in her good relations with the Empress. A supreme satisfaction in the great event united them completely.