Chapter IX: Part 9

The Empress was distressed by the terrible cost of war. She discovered that it was even more expensive than diplomacy and bribery. Up to the unpleasantness with the Turks, she had managed to get her way by means of money and lively military display. But it seemed that actual warfare demanded an additional expenditure of treasure. She complained to the sculptor, Falconet, “To make war three things are necessary: money, money, money.” Yet she was always able to find the wherewithal to carry on and keep her three quarrelsome generals, Potiomkin, Suvarov, and Rumiantsov, active in the field.

She built a fleet and planned to sweep the Black Sea with it. The Russians, in spite of the efforts of Great Peter, had never become navigators, a deficiency which obliged her to import her naval officers from England. The scheme was easily carried out. The English were employable and adjustable, and all went well until the Empress had the idea, inspired from Paris by Dr. Benjamin Franklin, of adding the American naval officer, John Paul Jones, to her forces. The American hero’s exploits resounded at the moment through Europe while he himself was sojourning in Paris, rather lonely, very famous, and extremely hard up. The Empress met his terms, which were sufficiently high, for Jones was a good bargainer, and the American was soon sailing a Russian ship on the Black Sea. But luck, it seems, had deserted the little man. He not only played an undistinguished part in the Turkish wars but left Russia under the shadow of a personal scandal, invented, his defenders said, by British officers serving under Catherine who resented the presence of the colonial in the same navy with themselves. However, that may be, he earned no honorable mention in Russia and the history of that country gives no credit to John Paul Jones for helping to win the Turkish Wars.

In June, 1788, Catherine’s fleet won the battle of Otchakov. The victory made a great impression on Europe and even Frederick the Great spoke of it respectfully. Was the Empress really marching toward India? She believed that she was marching toward Constantinople at least and that the Prince of Tauris would enter the Turkish city within the year. But France and Prussia and England thought otherwise. English policy was well clarified by now and was neatly expressed in a book on Russia published by an English captain in the year 1790. “The Turks,” he said, “happily for us, are not a commercial people; we cannot do without those valuable articles which their soil produces almost spontaneously; and the Turks, like the easy possessor of a very rich mine, allow us to enrich ourselves at our pleasure. Three per cent. duty equally on all exports and imports is, with little exception, their only restriction to Europeans engaged in their trade. Would the Empress be equally moderate, if in possession of the fertile region? Believe me, she would not.”

It appeared that Europe did not wish to be cleansed of the Turks by Catherine the Great. The easy-going Mussulman with his three per cent. duty had great advantages over a Christian monarch like the Russian Empress. The representatives of Protestant Europe in Constantinople put their heads together and backed up Turkish diplomacy in the south while the King of Sweden prepared to invade Russia on the north. The Swedish invader was Gustavus III, the son of the Princess Ulrica whose gown had once been offered to Princess Fike to make her presentable at the German court. Ulrica’s son had a curious relationship with Cousin Catherine of Russia. He paid friendly visits and wrote flattering letters to her and then made war on her. As soon as the treaty was signed, he wrote and asked her to forget their differences, “like a storm that has passed.” The passing storm, however, had shaken the Empress as she had seldom been shaken. She was not prepared to carry on war on two fronts and the Swedish invasion had made the Turkish Wars no longer endurable. “If you wish to roll a stone from my heart,” she wrote to Potiomkin on the Turkish front, “if you wish to free me from a heavy nightmare, then send a courier at once to the army with instructions to begin operations immediately by sea and by land; otherwise you will drag out this war still longer and that you can wish just as little as I.”

Potiomkin was unable to make an attack or to conclude a treaty. He had reached the same state of mind which had rendered Gregory Orlov incompetent to negotiate terms with the Turks at Fokshani in 1772. Orlov’s mental inertia on that occasion had caused the first Turkish War to drag on two years longer. The history of Orlov was repeated by Potiomkin in 1791. Potiomkin’s relations with the Empress were threatened in that year as Orlov’s had been threatened in 1772. Potiomkin felt that it was time for him to go to Petersburg and dismiss “the little black boy” who seemed to be settling into his place there with an air of permanence.

As soon as Potiomkin departed from the field, Prince Repnin took command and brought the second Turkish War to a speedy close. The treaty of Jassy was signed at the end of 1791. But Potiomkin was already dead.

6

The myth about Catherine the Great relates that she had three hundred lovers. The same legend is attached to the Empress Elisabeth and the mother of Sergei Saltikov. It belongs to the Russian fable.

There is no need to speculate on the number of lovers that Catherine had; she has herself told us the facts. Besides her husband, there were twelve. After she became Empress she made no secret of her love affairs, but rather the contrary. The only place where any vagueness exists is in the beginning before the birth of Paul. Her German biographer, Gertrud Kircheisen, as well as Bilbassov, thinks that her early intimacy with Andrei Chernichev must have gone farther than she admits in her memoirs. Chernichev was banished from the court on her account and Catherine’s letters to him, discovered in later years, suggest that their relations were not merely platonic. But Catherine’s memoirs are not the only evidence we have concerning her lovers. Her confession to Potiomkin leaves him out. In this document, which has all the marks of a genuine confession, she tells Potiomkin that he is the fifth. The favorites of Catherine as Empress were a public institution and their number was certainly no secret. After Potiomkin there were seven.

They were: Zavadovsky, her secretary, who was one of the most intellectual of her lovers and minister of public instruction under her grandson, Alexander I; Zoritch, the Serbian, who afterwards founded a school for boys in the country; Rimsky-Korsakov, a sergeant of the guards, the most beautiful and the most stupid of them all, who ordered a library to fit the shelves of his house; Lanskoy, with whom she is said to have had only platonic relations and who died in her arms; Yermalov, the “white nigger” whom Potiomkin dismissed from the palace on a day’s notice; Mamonov, a man of some ability, who married one of her court ladies and eliminated himself from office; and Plato Zubov, the young man of twenty-four who became her lover when she was sixty and lived with her until her death.

Altogether there were thirteen men with whom the Empress made, so to speak, twelve unhappy marriages. The Russians accepted her arrangements without much comment; the irregularity of her relationships did not trouble them. What did scandalize them, however, was the frequency with which she changed the incumbent of the office. She would dismiss her Adjutant General one day and install another the next day, and her fickleness seemed to increase with her years.

There were a few things which all her lovers had in common. They were tall, well-built men and graced a military uniform to perfection. It is true that so long as they remained in office as favorites they were obliged to lead an idle life and forego all active service; only sedentary occupations were possible for them. But with two or three exceptions, the men were not intellectual. The Adjutant-General’s main duty was to wear his clothes well and give his arm to the Empress. He was an officer on leave. At the age of fifty, the restless woman was capable of falling in love with a military uniform at first sight, as she did when she espied Rimsky-Korsakov among the guards at the palace gates. She was as susceptible to an imposing military figure as any German _backfisch_ was in the day before the great war abolished the temptation. The Empress was herself once a German _backfisch_ in a military garrison where her father, the Prince of Anhalt-Zerbst, was commandant. He was a tall man and a handsome one, rather silent and stupid presumably but every inch a military officer who graced his uniform. Old memories of that impressive Prince, her father, sometimes rose within her, when she beheld her favorite in all the glory of his uniform and the decorations which she had pinned upon him. No doubt the stiff old Prince had been rather splendid in his time.

Among the seven successors of Potiomkin, Sasha Lanskoy especially stands out. He was a young man of taste if not of intellect. In all the enterprises of the Empress which required artistic judgment Lanskoy had a contribution to make and made it. He was capable of enjoying her correspondence with Grimm and of being a real companion to his mistress. She was fifty-one and Lanskoy was twenty-two when he became her lover. He was a poor officer of the horse guards. Like all her favorites, he had nothing and she gave him all. For four years he flourished under her maternal care, a sensitive youth much liked and respected by those about the court. Then in June, 1784, he fell desperately ill. The physician who hastened from the city to attend him at Czarskoe Selo said that he had angina and would die. This was ten days before his death occurred. Catherine nursed him day and night, passionately fighting for his life until at last the young man died in her arms.

The Empress resolved to remain a widow. She would live without a lover and comfort herself with her little grandson Alexander. For a whole year, she moped in solitude, shutting herself up in her chamber and valiantly trying to endure her loneliness. She strove to fortify her resolution by poring over a book by a famous German hypochondriac entitled “Uber die Einsamkeit.” To Zimmermann, the author, she sent a ring and a portrait of herself, in grateful acknowledgment of his words on the solitary life. But neither the book nor her correspondence with Zimmermann was able to keep her always faithful to her vows. Her struggles to get on without a lover became more and more pathetic until after a year of sacrifice she installed Yermalov in the apartments of the favorite.

Her trial of suttee after Lanskoy’s death is often brought forward to show that Catherine at last experienced love in the true meaning of the word. But the English Ambassador who wrote after her death that she had died “a stranger to love” perhaps came nearer to the truth. The woman who had had twelve lovers never learned to love. Death overtook her while she was still trying to learn.

7

When Potiomkin came up to Petersburg in the spring to “have a tooth out,” as he said, meaning thereby to dispossess Zubov, he growled his usual thunders in advance. But the elderly Empress was infatuated with her young lover and refused to drive him forth at Potiomkin’s bidding. It was the first time that Potiomkin had felt himself wholly powerless in this situation and the disturbance within him was acute. Since bluster and threats were of no avail, though with all previous rivals they had sufficed, he fell back upon his prowess as a wooer. The Prince of Tauris would win his lady back as he had won her fifteen years before. He would turn poet and troubadour as he had been in the springtime of their love. At that time Potiomkin had been an impecunious officer who could only afford to write verses to lay at his mistress’s feet. Now he was a Prince with princely riches at his command. The Empress loved gaiety and merry-making on a grand scale. Potiomkin decided to give her such an entertainment as Petersburg had never seen, and to stake all on the outcome.

The Prince had built a magnificent palace near the court of his Empress. He had adorned it with the richest materials of the South. His oriental furnishings and treasures would have inspired the great Alexander himself with envy. In a vast room strewn with Persian rugs, his guests dined from Persian glass and golden dishes of Russian workmanship. Potiomkin’s cook was a person wholly different from the botchers whom the Empress employed in her kitchen. His cook was famous for making the best sterlet soup in Russia, and his master had been known to send a military officer two thousand versts to fetch him a tureen of it. In short, the Prince’s table was such a table as had never before been spread in Russia and probably never since. He used his military officers to fetch and carry for his cook. They brought oysters from Riga, melons from Astrakhan, and grapes from the Crimea. The first oranges ever eaten in Russia were served on Potiomkin’s table. Even Frederick the Great, who was one of the great epicures of his age, envied the dinners of the Prince of Tauris.

The festival of the despairing lover surpassed anything he had ever done before. His resources were strained to the uttermost. He gave a series of dinners, balls, pageants, arranged around the Empress as the central figure, whose grandeur astonished the court. His food and fireworks were an experience for the most blasé of the Russian nobility. The magnificence of his effects mounted from day to day, as the strain of his effort also increased. He was fighting for his life.

For the Empress also the strain was frightful. She endured it as long as she could and then mercifully swung the axe which was to end his struggles. One morning she sent for her host and thanked him expressly for his entertainment of the evening before. She referred to it as a farewell feast and spoke regretfully of his departure for the front which she assumed was immediately necessary. Potiomkin understood. He had lost his last throw.

He left for the South in a mood of the blackest depression. He told his friends that he would never return. As soon as he arrived in camp at Jassy, he fell ill with a fever. His niece, the faithful Sashinka Branicky, was with him and nursed him. What the doctors prescribed Potiomkin would not do; all that they forbade, he instantly demanded. He insisted on eating like a gourmand. In every way he acted like a man determined not to live. His last meal was like the repast of a condemned man on the morning of his execution. He ate a quantity of salt pork, raw beets, a goose and still another fowl, all of which he washed down with Crimean wine and Russian _kwass_. He is said to have died from over-eating while in a fever; but he had really died before he left Petersburg. He was scarcely a living man when he arrived at Jassy.

After this orgiastic meal, his bed became intolerable to him. He demanded to be taken from Jassy to Nikolaev, as he said, for a change of air. With his niece in the kibitka beside him, the dying man drove westward. Gradually his strength faded and his raging temperature subsided. The attendants were obliged to take him from the carriage and lay him on a rug at the roadside. There beside the dusty chaussée, in the arms of Sashinka, he expired. He had gone the way of Gregory Orlov, but had gone more directly. His Little Mother, his Matushka, had killed her last man.

When the Empress heard of Potiomkin’s death, she fainted three times. Once upon a time she had written to Potiomkin, “Without thee, I am without hands.” This proved to be true. With Plato Zubov’s hands, she could never work the same, for Plato’s hands worked alone for their master. The last years of Catherine’s reign were years of disappointment, unwisdom, and failure. Her glory had passed when Potiomkin died by the roadside. In destroying him, she had struck a fatal blow at herself.

XI

CATHERINE BECOMES A GRANDMOTHER

Over a mantelpiece in the palace of Gatchina hangs a portrait of Paul I as a boy of ten. It is the only one of his portraits which bears a resemblance to his mother. Of all the artists who painted him, this one alone seems to have caught an aspect of the Grand Duke which suggests the Empress. Fleeting it must have been, for Paul grew up to be strikingly unlike his maternal parent. He was destined to advertise by his face and figure to all the world the anonymous paternity which had produced him.

Catherine was annoyed by Paul’s appearance and disposition, inherited as they were from his father’s family. It offended her that he should turn out to be so completely a Saltikov. That her son derived so little from herself seemed a perversity of fortune. She reflected a great deal on the subject. “My God,” she burst out in one of her letters to Grimm, “why do children so often resemble their fathers when it would be better to resemble their mothers? That is not common sense; dame Nature is often a blockhead. One day I shall write a dissertation on that, which I shall dedicate to you.” She did not write the dissertation for Grimm, although dissertations in general were much in her line. She dipped into scientific research from time to time with impressive results. Her contributions to comparative philology have won recognition from scholars in that field; but her contemplated study of inheritance of characteristics was never carried out. She never got beyond posing the question, to which, however, she repeatedly returned without ever pushing onward to any kind of theory. She bred dogs and observed that they showed the same tendency as human beings in this respect. “Witness Sir Tom Anderson,” she said of her favorite hound, “all his family resembles him. The same spirit, the same taste, the same figure, the same physiognomy, the same tendency.” She was puzzled and resentful.

Catherine was estranged from her son Paul from the day of his birth. Deprived of all opportunity to express her maternal feelings by the Empress’s theft, she had no actual experience of motherhood. Painful associations clustered around the infancy of this over-precious child. Catherine had been deserted by her first lover who openly replaced her by unworthy rivals. She hated Saltikov, as she afterwards learned not to hate any of her favorites after their affair had run its course. The child whom she saw once a week in his fox-fur cradle reminded her of bitter disillusionment. As he grew older, his querulous disposition, his under-sized stature, his wizened skin, his baldness, and his ugly nose all helped to make him seem alien to his mother. He was a cringing, sickly boy of whom it was difficult to be proud. She had produced him at such a cost and he represented such an inferior triumph after all. As human material he was in the same class as Peter the Third, from which many historians have argued that Paul was Peter’s son and a genuine descendant of the Romanovs.

Catherine’s second son and her first child by Orlov, Prince Bobrinsky, also failed to inherit the genius of his mother. He was brought up under the Empress’s supervision by an Italian tutor, Admiral Ribas, and as a young man was a ne’er-do-well and a waster. His mother sent him on a tour through Europe and the gay young Prince of the Beaver-skin left a trail of debts behind him in city after city. Finally the exasperated Empress had him arrested and interned in Riga, after which history knows him no more. He was a spendthrift, like both his parents, but he had none of the mental and moral handicaps of Grand Duke Paul. After his public disgrace in Riga, he returned to Russia and led an unambitious and uneventful life. He married and left descendants in whom history takes no interest.

The chief part which Bobrinsky played in the drama of his mother’s life was to heighten the conflict which always existed between Catherine and her first-born. There was a moment in the Empress’s life when she thought of marrying Gregory Orlov but was suddenly checked in her intentions by the enemies of the Orlovs and the opposition of Panin. Count Panin, who wanted from the first to make Paul emperor, became suddenly energetic when he suspected that the Empress wished to legitimatize Bobrinsky. Even after the danger of the marriage had been averted, this bastard Prince still hovered threateningly in the background, well cared for by the Empress, his mother, a permanent object of suspicion to Count Panin and of fear to the Grand Duke Paul. This boy who trembled for his life could find no reassurance in the existence of a rival half-brother as long as he kept his health and his mother’s favor. The young Bobrinsky, like everything else in their environment, contributed to the estrangement between Catherine and her heir.

When Catherine became Empress, one of her first concerns was to provide for the education of the Grand Duke Paul. She selected no less a person for the post than d’Alembert. But the French scholar declined her invitation. The Empress would not take no for an answer; she stooped to conquer. “I know you too well for a good man,” she wrote, “to ascribe your refusal to vanity. I know that the sole motive of it is the desire for peace and leisure to cultivate letters and the friendship of those whom you esteem. But what is there in this objection? Come with all your friends. I promise both them and you every convenience and advantage that depends upon me; and perhaps you will find more liberty and ease here than in your native country. You refused the invitation of the King of Prussia, notwithstanding your obligations to him. But that Prince has no son. I admit to you that I have the education of my son so much at heart, and I think you so necessary to it, that perhaps I press you with too much earnestness. Excuse my indiscretion for the sake of its occasion; and be assured that it is my esteem for you that makes me so urgent.”

This petitioning of d’Alembert brought one of the sharpest humiliations of her life. D’Alembert steadfastly refused. Privately he uttered a sarcastic remark which travelled far. In Russia, he said, people died too easily of colic, it was better to remain in France. The Empress never forgave him this sly reference to her manifesto concerning Peter’s untimely end. A decade or more afterwards, when she was engaged in the invasion of Poland, a group of French professors living there fell into her hands and were interned at Kiev. D’Alembert, remembering his old prestige with the Empress, attempted to secure their release by sending a personal petition to the Russian Empress, but she turned a deaf ear to his intercession. The distressed scholar at last appealed to Voltaire who succeeded in getting only a cold reply from the Empress. She said that the French professors were doing very well in Russia and would stay there for the present. She implied that d’Alembert, who had thought that people died too easily of colic in this barbarous land, might now see for himself how well people could live there. The professors were being cared for and would remain interned until the Empress found leisure to release them. Their period of internment was probably not greatly prolonged by d’Alembert’s appeal.

When the Empress’s efforts to import higher education for her son shattered on this embarrassing passage between herself and the French encyclopædist, she gave up all further attempts to improve on Panin’s pedagogy. Her opinion of the lazy Count as an educator was not high but it was probably as high as he deserved. Nevertheless she left him in possession of the field. “At that time,” she commented, “everybody believed that if Panin did not educate him, the Grand Duke would be lost.” Panin remained in exclusive charge as governor until Paul’s marriage took place. He continued his watchfulness even after that from his post as head of the College of Foreign Affairs until Prince Orlov died in 1783. For twenty years, Panin’s chief interest in life had been to watch and circumvent this man whom he regarded as the dangerous enemy of his Grand Duke. Panin had failed to save the Czar when he had piteously kissed his hand and pleaded and he could never forgive himself for that failure. He felt to blame for Peter’s death and was therefore obliged to hate, suspect, and persecute Gregory Orlov. After Orlov’s death he no longer had an incentive to live. The sensitive old man soon followed his arch-enemy into the grave. The Empress was bereaved at the same time of two of her oldest and nearest friends.

2

Compelled to leave Paul’s education alone, she waited impatiently for the time to marry him. She resolved to be less hasty than the Empress Elisabeth, who had married her nephew at sixteen against the doctor’s advice. Catherine waited until her son had reached the age of eighteen before she sought a wife for him. Relations between the mother and son improved considerably during Paul’s eighteenth summer. They spent the warm season together in Czarskoe Selo and the Empress for the first time made a companion of her son. A new sympathy grew up between them; the long estrangement seemed to be over at last. It is easy to account for Catherine’s new interest in Paul. Presumably she had been told that it would be safe to go ahead and marry him. The young man found himself taken to his mother’s bosom with unexpected warmth. Those who looked on thought this was the beginning of a friendliness at last between the mother and son, but the happy condition was not destined to last long. For once their interests coincided. Paul wanted a wife and his mother wanted him to marry. In all other situations of life which preceded and followed this halcyon interlude the two were ever in conflict.

The Empress surveyed with a critical eye the German supply of Princesses. Some not too powerful Prince’s daughter after her own image was the object of her search. At last she selected a mother with three daughters and invited all three sisters to Russia that the Grand Duke might choose among them. In the old days when the Russian Czarevich wished to marry a Russian princess, it was customary for the eligible damsels to seat themselves in two long rows in the Kremlin palace while the young heir passed between them, looking to right and left, until he chose his bride. This ancient custom was in the Empress’s thoughts when she invited the Landgravine of Hessen-Darmstadt to bring her three daughters to Petersburg.

Catherine was proud to be able to write to Prince Henry of Prussia, who had also planned to visit her, that his visit would have to be postponed because his apartments would be needed for the young Princesses and their mother. “I may say to you in confidence, with the indiscretion that is natural to ladies, that these apartments are destined this summer for Madame the Landgravine of Hessen-Darmstadt.” If Prince Henry then so far betrayed her confidence as to inform his royal brother, Frederick the Great, that the Empress of Russia was about to marry her son and heir, the indiscretion of the Empress would be justified. That the King of Prussia had no son was a fact she liked to dwell upon. She was always in one way or another the rival of the Prussian monarch and in becoming a parent she had outstripped him. Paul was about to continue the Romanov dynasty as his mother had done before him, while the childless old King of Potsdam, aging in solitude, could point to no such happy line of succession. Like the late Russian Empress, he was obliged to make the best of a nephew as an heir.

The Landgravine of Hessen-Darmstadt came to Petersburg with her three daughters and went away again with two of them. The betrothal and marriage were rather hasty and not particularly gay. The new Grand Duchess, re-baptized as Natalie Alexeievna, was not a vivid personality and her short life in Russia left no legends. It was an unhappy marriage from the beginning and lasted but three years, at the end of which Natalie died in childbirth. Just what happened to the young wife during these years is a story that no one has told. Paul’s complaints of Natalie show that he must have behaved very badly toward her. While this marriage lasted, his disposition took on a fixed habit of depression. Scarcely twenty years old, he succumbed to pessimistic moods from which he looked to his wife in vain to extract him. As Natalie had not the gift of lighting up his “papillons noirs,” his favorite name for them, he settled more and more stubbornly in the black depths of miserable self-pity. Frequently he wept.

No doubt his mother had her moments of anxiety because the marriage did not produce a grandchild at once. In the third year, however, the Grand Duchess became pregnant; the hopes of the Empress were at last to be realized. Catherine made preparations for the lying-in to take place in Petersburg, where Czars might be born although they might not be crowned. In the springtime of 1776, she expected the son of her son. The fatal outcome of Natalie’s lying-in was described by the Empress in one of her most characteristic letters. The swiftness and vividness of her narrative reflect the sure movement of her spirit. In this letter we see her moving through a crisis as she moved through every crisis of a life that was so extraordinarily rich in danger and risks. It mirrors that acceptance of facts which enabled her to pass through murder at Peterhof and to emerge almost unscathed by comparison with temperaments like Orlov and Panin. In Catherine’s make-up was some of that tough fibre which enabled Alexei, the head of the Orlov clan, to profit by his crimes while others far less guilty than himself did morbid penance on his behalf.

“On the 10th of April,” wrote Catherine to Grimm, “at four o’clock in the morning, my son came to find me because his wife perceived the pains of confinement. I leaped out of bed and ran to her. I found her much tormented but nothing beyond the ordinary. Time and patience would end the affair. A mid-wife and a skilful surgeon aided her.... Monday passed in waiting and in a similar condition, very disturbing.... The doctors’ conference produced no new expedients or assuagement. On Tuesday they demanded my physician and an old _accoucheur_ to renew their consultation.... They decided to save the mother, as the infant was probably dead; instruments were employed; a combination of unfortunate circumstances, occasioned by malformation and divers accidents, made all that human science could do on Wednesday useless. On Thursday the Grand Duchess received the sacrament. Prince Henry suggested his physician; he was admitted but he agreed with his confrères. On Thursday the Princess gave up the ghost at five o’clock in the evening. Today she has been cut open in the presence of thirteen physicians and surgeons who found that it was a unique and irremediable case....

“Twenty-four hours before the death of the Grand Duchess, I sent to ask Prince Henry, for my own relief, to take charge of the Grand Duke. He came and has not left him since. He endures his profound chagrin with composure but today he has taken a fever. Since the death of his wife, I have picked him up and brought him here [Czarskoe Selo].

“Imagine me, who am tearful by temperament; I have seen someone die without shedding a tear. I said to myself: If you cry, the others will sob; if you sob, the others will swoon; and everybody will lose their heads and be at their wits’ end; all of which will be irresponsible....”

While the widowed Grand Duke still lay in ruins, his mother set about finding a new wife for him. She has been reproached for her unseemly haste in the matter. Brückner says critically that even while Natalie was dying, the Empress’s thoughts were occupied with a second marriage for her son. Of this there is not the least doubt. Three years of marriage had ended in a still-birth; much time had been lost already and the business-like Empress saw no reason for losing any more. She had maternal and imperial interests at stake, and match-making was a chore like any other, something to be done with as little delay as possible. It was apparent that the Grand Duke, who had gone to pieces in the crisis and who developed a fever afterwards, was unable to do anything on his own behalf. He had no more initiative to bring to the making of a second marriage than he had brought to the first. He would have to be inducted into matrimony once again.

Catherine took counsel with Prince Henry of Prussia, who happened to be in Petersburg at this dismal time. The death of Natalie made it impossible for the Empress to entertain her guest with the same elaborate festivities with which his former sojourn had been celebrated. Prince Henry protested that he was not at all bored, which the apologetic hostess refused to believe. But the melancholy and oppressed younger brother of Frederick the Great was more at home in the midst of tragedy and misfortune than in the gaiety and abandon of a Russian masquerade. In a court that mourned for the dead Natalie, he was at ease. He had a contribution to make. A second wife for Paul was to be brought from Germany and the Prince was asked to arrange the match. It seems that he approved of the Empress’s choice.

One reason that Catherine was already occupied with the thought of marrying her son while his wife lay dying was that she had long wished she had chosen another Princess instead. Three years before, when making her first survey of the field, she had considered the Princess Sophie von Württemberg and had passed her over because she was too young. Time had remedied this difficulty but had substituted another. Sophie had recently become engaged and was shortly to be married to the hereditary Prince of Hesse-Darmstadt. This young man was well known in Russia and disliked by the Empress. He was a brother of Paul’s first wife and had come to Russia to make his career there in Catherine’s army. But after a couple of years she sent him home to his father. “God help him,” she wrote; “he is better off there than in Moscow.” This annoying young man had then engaged himself to Sophie of Württemberg and the betrothal presented a serious obstacle to Catherine’s plans. There was nothing for the Empress to do but to buy him off. Apparently he was able to drive a pretty sharp bargain for he received, as a compensation for his disappointment, a pension for life. “On condition,” the Empress wrote peevishly, “that I shall never see or hear from him again.”

This delicate matter was arranged through the agency of Prince Henry, on whom Catherine at this time leaned heavily. She trusted all the details to the solemn silent Prussian. She even consented that her son should leave home under Henry’s tutelage to court his bride in a foreign land. So far as the Grand Duke was concerned, the opportunity to visit Prussia gave him the greatest thrill of his courtship and furnished a strong incentive to marriage. He was already in love with Prussia and the Prussian King in imitation of the ex-Czar, Peter III.

Accompanied by Prince Henry, he was allowed to make a pilgrimage to the land of his ideals and to sue in person for the hand of his bride. Whatever Sophie’s feelings may have been when she first saw this ugly little man, she dutifully accepted him and made no fuss about it. The Princess was a tall blonde girl, in stature not unlike the late Empress Elisabeth, but German and _spiessbürgerlich_ to her finger-tips. She was and remained all her days an incurable Philistine.

As soon as Paul returned from Germany, the Empress began to expedite the marriage. “The Princess is yet to come,” she wrote to Grimm, “and we shall have her here within ten days. As soon as we have her, we shall proceed with her conversion. To convince her, it ought to take about fifteen days I think. I do not know how long will be necessary to teach her to read intelligibly and correctly the confession of faith in Russian. But the faster this can be hurried through, the better it will be. To accelerate all that, M. Pastukov has gone to Memel to teach her the alphabet and the confession en route; conviction will follow afterwards. You see by this we are foresighted and cautious and this conversion and confession of faith travels by post. Eight days from this act, I fix the wedding. If you wish to dance at it, you will have to hasten.” The tall Princess Sophie was converted according to Catherine’s schedule and became the Grand Duchess Marie Feodorovna.

Within five months after the death of his first wife, Paul was married again. His second wife was a healthy, phlegmatic woman. He was almost happy. “Wherever _my wife_ goes,” he wrote to Prince Henry, “she has the gift of spreading gaiety and ease, and she has the art not only of dissipating my black moods but of giving me back again the disposition I had almost lost during the last three unhappy years.”

Paul’s second marriage was probably the best marriage that could possibly have been made for him. The fair tall wife called up pleasant memories of the devoted nurse who had run to the fox-fur cradle every time the baby in it cried. Marie Feodorovna was complacent and domestic; she loved her flower garden and she loved the proprieties. Paul lived many pious uneventful years with her and the Philistine pair often sat in judgment on the life of the Empress. Nowhere in Europe was the light woman on the Russian throne so severely condemned as she was by her son and his virtuous wife. Marie Feodorovna was like the heroine of a Gartenlaube story and a long and stormy life in Russia never succeeded in making her anything else. She was a sentimental German to the last.

Catherine gave them the village of Pavlovsk for a residence. Here Paul built a little palace and Marie laid out her flower garden. After the death of Prince Orlov, Catherine purchased Gatchina for them. It was a place of evil memories for Paul, the scene of Orlov’s final insanity and death. The ghost of Peter the Third had walked there and had carried off to judgment the guilty soul of Gregory Orlov. These uncanny memories meant nothing to the Empress but they had an unhealthy influence on her son. He shut himself up in Gatchina away from all the world and expressed himself in the development of the place. To this day it reflects his personality as Czarskoe Selo reflects the personality of his mother. In Gatchina he played with his military passions and his mysticism. He tried to make himself as much as possible like Peter III, whose ghost walked with him through the endless corridors.

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Catherine was forty-eight when her first grandson was born. She called him Alexander, as she said, a “pompous name.” In 1777, her ambitious imagination ranged over the southern part of her dominions wherever Alexander the Great had passed and where he first met the Scythians. Catherine was just then entering upon her great dream of empire, the dream which dominated the rest of her life. She needed children and children’s children to carry on the vast work she had planned. The dutiful Marie responded by producing two sons within a short space of time. Alexander was followed by Constantine, for the Empress loved resounding names. Catherine’s joy in these infants was unbounded. She had borne five children but had never nursed one of them. At last her time had come. She took possession of the little new-born creatures and sent the mother back to Pavlovsk, childless. She re-enacted to the last detail the crime of Empress Elisabeth against herself.

In a lyrical letter to Grimm, she announced the birth of her first grandson. But when she spoke of Alexander’s future her rapturous tone fell to a pensive strain. “Aber, mein Gott, was wird aus dem Jungen werden?” She fell back as she rarely did into her native German. “I console myself with Boyle and the father of Tristram Shandy, who was of the opinion that a name is an influence that matters.... Do you think his examples from the family prove anything? His choice of them embarrasses sometimes. His examples only show, to speak the gospel according to the venerable Pastor Wagner, that it is the _naturel_ which counts. But where to find that! Is it at the bottom of the pack of a good constitution?... It is a pity that fairies have gone out of fashion; they would give an infant all that one wished. I should have made them beautiful presents and I should have whispered in their ears: Mesdames, _naturel_, just a little bit of _naturel_ and experience will then do all the rest.”

The interests of a grandmother did not distract her attention from the events of the fast spinning world. As its happenings sped past, like a flying factory belt, she invariably registered the passage of episodes which concerned her. Even the christening of Alexander did not obscure the defeat of General Burgoyne in America. “Monsieur Alexander was baptized the day before yesterday,” she wrote, “and everyone is doing well, except the English, who hang their heads to their stomachs since the deplorable adventure of General Burgoyne. He should gnaw his fingers after the fashion of Prince Potiomkin; that sets the blood in circulation. If that of the Parliament of Great Britain remains calm now I call them plodding nags....” She was scornful of George III who was evidently going to allow the American colonies to slip through his fingers. His grandchildren might lose America at the same time that her own might enter Constantinople. That is, they would if _naturel_ led them in that direction. Her magnificent dreams for Alexander alternated with an uncertain mood which usually brought on an attack of the German language. “Aber, mein Gott, was wird aus dem Jungen werden?”

Having appropriated her two grandsons in this unceremonious fashion, Catherine’s cupidity seemed for the time satisfied. Marie Feodorovna came up to the Petersburg palace at regular intervals and bore her children there. It turned out that granddaughters were not wanted in Catherine’s nursery and the young mother was allowed to take her girl babies back to Pavlovsk and educate them herself. Catherine thought the little Princesses beautiful and charming but she was content to give them lovely Greek names and send them home with Mama. Alexander and Constantine, however, were ardently studied, ardently educated and ardently sewed for.

The Empress designed a garment for Alexander of which she was extremely proud. She boasted that the King of Sweden and the Prince of Prussia had heard of it and had borrowed the pattern for their own little boys. The picture which she drew and sent abroad vindicated her boast of its simplicity. “Nowhere,” she explains, “is there any ligature, and the child scarcely knows that he is being dressed. The arms and legs go into the garment at the same time and lo! all is finished. It is a stroke of genius on my part, this habit.” Her letters were filled with the sayings and doings of her darling. She gave a catalogue of his achievements at the age of four. He could write, spell, draw, use a spade, shoulder arms, and mount a horse; he could make twenty playthings out of one and ask endless questions. The other day he had asked whether there were human beings in the moon and whether he had been born in the moon or on the earth. “I do not know,” said Grandmamma fervently, “but there is a kind of profundity which springs up in the head of this little monkey.”

In the shadow of this wonderful brother, Constantine was obliged to make such headway as he could. There was less than eighteen months’ difference in age between the two boys and in many respects they were treated like twins. They had two low chairs exactly alike in Grandmamma’s boudoir and the model garment of her invention was always made up in pairs. In their education, however, certain distinctions were observed. Alexander, the future Czar, was brought up on the English plan as far as possible. This, to the Empress, meant fresh air and liberal ideals and she saw to it that Alexander was nourished on these things from his earliest infancy. Constantine showed from the beginning a strong repugnance to fresh air. The unregenerate infant annoyed his grandmother greatly by “burying his nose in the linen and shutting out the air.” She gave him a Greek nurse and surrounded him with Greek attendants in order that he should begin life speaking this language only. Constantine was brought up to be King of Greece, where a salubrious climate would enable him to hold his head up and breathe the fresh air like a man. This younger brother of Alexander was destined never to be King of Greece or King of anything, least of all himself. The intensity of his secondary part deprived him of all aggressiveness in infancy, saddled him with an irascible temper, and cast him for an utterly passive rôle in life.

Alexander idolized his grandmother while Constantine hated her. “Do you know,” Constantine said to the Swedish Prince when he met him in the palace of his grandmother, “that you are in the house of the greatest whore in Europe?”

Catherine had been obliged by circumstances to refrain from interfering in the education of her own son. Her attempt to import D’Alembert from France had failed and she had allowed matters to proceed as they had started under the guidance of Panin. But she was not satisfied with the results and hoped to do much better for her two grandsons. She wrote an extensive Instruction for the guidance of their teachers, producing this time a far more original piece of work than her famous message to the commission on a code of laws. It contained common sense and insight only occasionally darkened by the author’s well-known prejudices. She counselled those in charge of young children to avoid scolding them and to cultivate a gentle attitude in order that they should learn not to fear people. The spirit of Babet Cardel, the spirit of common sense, expressed itself repeatedly in Catherine’s pedagogy. Her prejudice appeared in a flat prohibition against the arts for which she herself had no understanding. “The Grand Dukes are to be taught neither poetry or music; because it would occupy too much of their time to attain excellence in either....”

Whatever latent talent the two boys may have had in the creative arts was never encouraged to express itself. Grandmother’s repressions were too strong. Alexander might have learned to sing like a bird if he had had another Babet Cardel to teach him and if his devoted but jealous grandmother had not cut him off from every opportunity to learn. She succeeded in transmitting her own tone-deafness to him in an aggravated form.

Alexander was as his name indicated destined for a military career; Catherine pictured him as the conqueror of Constantinople at least. But she loathed the idea of what she called Prussian corporalism. The imitation battles of Peter the Third and her son Paul, their drilling and dragooning, their manœuvring and parading struck her as unwarlike. She preferred the looser methods of her Russian generals, Suvarov, Rumiantsov, Potiomkin. Her grandson was to be a conqueror of the Russian school. In any case, however, he must operate with big guns and tolerate the noise they made. A worry had grown up in her mind around this matter of big guns. General Potiomkin, leader of her forces against the Turks, had a terrible handicap. When the sound of firing came to him in his encampment behind the lines, he trembled in his Russian boots. The Empress knew this well; indeed far too many people knew it well and the idiosyncrasy ill became the chief of the Russian army. If Potiomkin failed to take Constantinople, it would probably be due to this mysterious weakness of his. Mysterious it was, for Potiomkin was really no coward.

If Constantinople held out against Potiomkin, the conquest would remain for Alexander. It was imperative that the young Grand Duke should have no fear of guns. His grandmother decided to prevent the possibility of such a disaster by habituating the child in early life to the sound. She had him systematically exposed to the noise of cannon in the hope that the early experience would inoculate him against this unmanly fear as vaccination had made him immune from the terror of smallpox. Her experiment with the cannon did not work as well as her experiment with vaccination. The boy, it is true, grew up without fear of the noise of guns firing; but that was partly because his deafness prevented him from hearing them. Alexander the First was merely hard of hearing. The explanation usually given is that his disability was acquired from being forced by his grandmother to listen to gun practice in his childhood.

Another feature in Catherine’s pedagogy which throws a light on her character concerns the subject of sex and reproduction. She was as rigid with her grandsons as she had been with the young ladies at Smolny. She thought it was better not to call their attention to such things too early. Just as the Smolny pupils had produced Voltaire’s plays with the passages about love cut out, so her grandsons were expected to study science and omit the subject of reproduction. Their tutors were instructed to keep them in strict ignorance about all that related to the relation of the sexes. “Her great modesty in this respect,” says Masson, “appears strikingly contrasted with other parts of her character.... The celebrated Pallas was giving the Princes a short course of botany in their garden near Pavlovsk; but the explanation of Linnæus’s system of the sexes gave them the first ideas of those of human nature and led them to put a number of very amusing questions with great naïveté. This alarmed their governors; Pallas was requested to avoid entering into further particulars; and the course of botany was even broken off.”

The Empress, who was devoted to science, who loved the study of comets and philology, who strove industriously to wipe out superstition with knowledge, went so far as to interrupt a course of botany for prudish reasons. The modesty for which she was so often admired but which would be more accurately called prudery was doubtless present in her make-up. Her efforts to preserve the innocence of her grandsons did not have the happy result which she hoped for. As she had been eager to have grandchildren, she was also eager to have great-grandchildren. Her hopes were destined to disappointment. She married both of her grandsons at an early age but neither of them had descendants. Their marriages were not happy and remained childless. The outcome was not according to their grandmother’s scheme. Not for this did she bring them up in ignorance of sex and sacrifice the course in botany to preserve their innocence. Their sterility was a bitter disappointment to her. Paul’s youngest son, the only one she had left to be educated by his mother, carried on the dynasty that she had founded. From the Empress’s own point of view, Nicholas, who was brought up by her Philistine daughter-in-law, was a greater success in life than his two elder brothers whom she had so carefully reared. Perhaps she had worked too hard on the training of her precious young. A more casual upbringing might have produced happier results for her own purposes, which included first of all the production of progeny.

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