CHAPTER TEN

THE SEARCH FOR EMOTIONAL STABILITY 1776–1784

After her accession to the throne, Catherine spent all too little time at Oranienbaum. But had she ever gazed up from the bed in the Damask Room, she would have seen on the ceiling a painting that perfectly encapsulated the tutelary relationship she strove to establish with each of her favourites. Urania teaching a youth, by the Venetian artist Domenico Maggiotto, portrayed a bare-breasted goddess looking down at a virile young man who returns her gaze in simple trust.¹ Leonine, earnest and not very bright, Grigory Orlov had fitted the mould to perfection. ‘The apprehension of the Empress is extremely quick,’ Lord Cathcart observed in 1770, ‘that of Mr. Orloff rather slow, but very capable of judging well upon a single proposition, though not of combining many different ideas.’² Horace Walpole was typically franker: ‘Orlow talks an infinite deal of nonsense,’ he remarked during Grigory’s visit to London in 1775, ‘but parts are not necessary to a royal favourite or to an assassin.’³

Potëmkin, by contrast, demanded to be treated not as a pupil, but as an equal, and it made for heated arguments between them in the spring of 1776. ‘Sometimes,’ Catherine complained, ‘to listen to you speak one might think that I was a monster with every possible fault, and especially that of being beastly.’ It upset her that he resented her other friends, and flounced off in a temper when she refused to listen: ‘We quarrel about power, not about love. That’s the truth of it.’⁴ Potëmkin, however, had reason to be unnerved. As a sign of Catherine’s wavering affections, Rumyantsev’s protégé Peter Zavadovsky, who had worked with her on the Provincial Reform, had been promoted Adjutant General on 2 January. This was the favourite’s office, still indelibly associated with Grigory Orlov. Later that month, Orlov himself unexpectedly returned to Russia, where he promptly fell sick, creating a complicated love triangle in which only Catherine herself can have felt fully at ease. A British diplomat reported that ‘two visits, which the Empress made to the Prince during his illness, caused a very warm altercation between her and the favourite’. Amidst rumours that he had poisoned Orlov, Potëmkin’s downfall was widely predicted, although some acknowledged that this arose ‘rather from its being universally wished, than from any actual symptoms’.⁵ Meanwhile, Catherine firmly resisted his attempts to persuade her to remove Zavadovsky. Quite apart from the ‘injustice and persecution’ the dismissal would inflict on ‘an innocent man’, there was her own reputation to consider: ‘If I fulfil this request, my glory will suffer in every possible way.’⁶ Instead, her affair with Zavadovsky was publicly confirmed when he was promoted major general and granted 20,000 roubles and 1000 serfs on 28 June, the fourteenth anniversary of the empress’s accession. In an attempt to appease Potëmkin, she appealed to his vanity by presenting him with the Anichkov Palace and 100,000 roubles to decorate it as he pleased. Most of all, however, she appealed to his conscience, reassuring him that even as her passion had cooled, her friendship remained unquestioned: ‘I dare say that there is no more faithful friend than me. But what is friendship? Mutual trust, I have always thought. For my part, it is total.’⁷ There is no reason to think this insincere, but she had meant it just as much when she insisted in an earlier note that ‘the first sign of loyalty is obedience’.⁸ True equality remained beyond reach in any relationship with an absolute monarch.

Such rapid changes of scene in the empress’s bedchamber prompted persistent rumours in the autumn of 1776 that she had taken yet another lover. Rumyantsev’s name was mentioned. ‘The leading actor of the German comedy is also spoken of,’ noted the venomous French chargé, the chevalier de Corberon: ‘It wouldn’t be surprising, but I doubt it.’⁹ In the event, Zavadovsky was to remain in place until May 1777, a month before Orlov finally married his teenage cousin, Elizabeth Zinovyev. While Catherine bombarded ‘Petrushinka’ with passionate billets-doux, the stolid Ukrainian struggled to keep up his working relationship with her, sulking that she had so little time to spend on him. Increasingly conscious that Icarus was an impossible part to play, Zavadovsky discovered that politics was a topic best avoided: ‘If you had thought as much about despotism as I have,’ Catherine warned him, ‘you would not mention it much.’ Soon she was urging him to exchange his insecurity for trust and playfulness: ‘all this feeds love, which without amusement is dead, like faith without kind deeds’.¹⁰ In the end, it was he who tearfully begged the empress to release him from his misery. As Catherine told Potëmkin, ‘the whole conversation lasted less than five minutes’.¹¹ Zavadovsky would soon return to a long career at Court, forgiven and befriended like all her former lovers. For the moment, however, he retired smarting to his Ukrainian estate at Lyalichi (later rechristened Ekaterinindar–‘Catherine’s Gift’).¹² ‘Amid hope, amid passion full of feelings, my fortunate lot has been broken, like the wind, like a dream which one cannot halt; [her] love for me has vanished.’¹³

No sooner had Zavadovsky faded from the scene than a more colourful lover emerged to take his place. This was Potëmkin’s Serbian-born adjutant, Semën Zorich, a swarthy hussar sixteen years younger than Catherine. ‘What a funny creature you have introduced to me!’¹⁴Having been imprisoned by the Turks after distinguishing himself in action, Zorich seemed less likely than Zavadovsky to suffer from hypochondria. Yet it was no easier for him to cope with the mercurial presence of his patron, who remained the guiding influence in the empress’s life.¹⁵ In May 1778, when Potëmkin humiliated him by presenting a handsome young officer to Catherine on her way to the theatre at Tsarskoye Selo, Zorich could no longer control himself. ‘As soon as Her Imperial Majesty was gone, he fell upon Potemkin in a very violent manner, made use of the strongest expressions of abuse, and insisted on his fighting him.’ Irritated by such a ‘fuss about nothing’, Catherine forced the rivals to shake hands over dinner in St Petersburg, but it was only a temporary rapprochement. ‘Potemkin is determined to have him dismissed,’ reported the recently arrived British ambassador, James Harris, ‘and Zoritz is determined to cut the throat of his successor. Judge of the tenour of the whole Court from this anecdote.’¹⁶

Insensitive to the anguish the empress suffered in her search for a stable, loving relationship–she blamed her recurrent headaches on her recent bout of ‘legislomania’–Harris regarded the ‘scene of dissipation and inattention’ presented by the Court of St Petersburg as the inevitable consequence of unnatural female rule. ‘Age does not deaden the passions, they rather quicken with years: and on a closer approach I find report had magnified the eminent qualities, and diminished the foibles, of one of the greatest ladies in Europe.’¹⁷ Two years later, after Catherine had exchanged the favours of Zorich’s unfaithful successor, Ivan Rimsky-Korsakov, for those of another strapping young guards officer, Alexander Lanskoy, Corberon came to much the same conclusion:

If this sovereign were led, as she could be, by a man of genius, the greatest and best things might be achieved: but this man is not to be found, and by deluding each of her favourites, doing away with them and renewing them one by one, this woman’s successive weaknesses become innumerable and their consequences appalling. With the greatest of visions and the best of intentions, Catherine is destroying her country through her morals, ruining it by her expenditure, and will end up being judged a weak and romantic woman.¹⁸

Generally the preserve of foreigners, and provoked most often by the failure of a particular ambassador’s diplomacy at St Petersburg, such verdicts owed more to stereotypical assumptions about female rule than to the realities of Catherine’s reign. The political impact of her sex was felt less in her relationship with her favourites than in her treatment of her two grandsons. They were not, however, to be born in the way that she had originally anticipated when the pregnant Natalia was rushed back from Moscow in the summer of 1775. The grand duchess went into labour early in the morning of 10 April 1776, at the height of the crisis between Catherine and Potëmkin. At first there seemed no reason to panic, but when it emerged that the birth canal was too narrow–‘four fingers wide,’ as the watching empress subsequently described it to Frau Bielke, ‘when the baby’s shoulders measured eight’–the midwife left Natalia to writhe in agony for forty-eight hours before calling a surgeon. The unborn child, a large boy, may already have been dead before forceps were used in a vain attempt to save his mother. The cause of the obstruction, a deformation of her spine, was revealed only at the autopsy. Natalia died on 15 April, leaving Paul inconsolable for three days. Even the annual cannon salute to herald the breaking of the ice on the Neva was cancelled as a mark of respect.¹⁹ Dressed ‘very richly in white satin’, with her dead infant at her feet, the grand duchess lay in state at the Alexander Nevsky monastery, where mourners ‘might go and see them, walk up to the coffin, kiss her hand, and then walk round on the other side, but were not suffered to stop, and were obliged to go out again immediately’.²⁰ Corberon, who blamed Catherine for Natalia’s negligent treatment, noted that she ‘gave the impression of crying’ at the funeral. ‘But I give no credence to her tears: her heart is too dry.’²¹

The empress certainly did not linger over her disappointment. As she explained to Voltaire on 25 June: ‘We are currently very busy recouping our losses.’²² That meant finding a new wife for Paul and there was only one serious candidate: the sixteen-year-old Princess Sophia Dorothea of Württemberg, passed over in 1773 only because she was too young. Ruthless in a crisis, Catherine bought off her existing fiancé Prince Ludwig of Hesse-Darmstadt–‘I never want to see him again,’ she told Grimm–and cunningly soured Paul’s memory of Natalia by revealing her dalliance with Andrey Razumovsky. While Field Marshal Rumyantsev and Prince Henry of Prussia, visiting St Petersburg for the second time, escorted Paul to Berlin for an audience with his hero, Frederick the Great, the empress made arrangements to welcome Sophia to Russia.²³ Having ordered twelve dresses and plenty of Dutch bedlinen, she turned her attentions to the apartments in the Winter Palace, marking out the position of new stoves on the plans and dictating a revised colour scheme for the furnishings: pink and white for the bedroom, with columns of blue glass; blue and gold for the state bedroom, with a new lit de parade and a drawing of Raphael’s loggias in the Vatican ‘which I will give you’; cushions for the sofa in the sitting room ‘in gold fabric which I shall supply’. All the rooms were to be hung with tapestries of a specified colour and type, and ‘the second ante-chamber should be decorated in stucco or artificial marble with ornaments as pretty as they are rich’.²⁴

When Paul returned with his new consort at the end of August 1776, barely four months after the death of his first wife, Catherine promptly declared herself ‘crazy’ about a girl who seemed to have everything Natalia had lacked. ‘She is exactly what I had hoped for: the figure of a nymph; the colour of lilies and roses; the finest complexion in the world; tall and broad-shouldered, yet slight.’²⁵ Whereas Natalia’s progress in the Russian language had been maddeningly slow, Sophia had already begun to master the Cyrillic alphabet in Berlin. Catherine sent a tutor to ‘lessen the task of learning’ on the journey.²⁶ She need not have worried: re-baptised Grand Duchess Maria Fëdorovna on her conversion to Orthodoxy, Sophia was to prove the most dutiful of consorts. When the empress led the couple to the altar on 26 September, Grigory Orlov held a crown above Paul’s head after the Orthodox custom. Betskoy, now in his seventies, performed the same service for the bride, his hand trembling with the effort. Why had this honour been granted to such a grizzled courtier? ‘Because bastards are lucky,’ grumbled Corberon, who left the ceremony early finding the crowded chapel uncomfortably warm. Dinner was more agreeable, and much the same in form as Catherine’s own wedding feast thirty-one years earlier. Seated between bride and groom, she dined under a canopy with Alexander and Lev Naryshkin in attendance, facing four tables for statesmen of the first four ranks and their wives:

The gallery above was packed with people and occupied by the orchestra, to whom no one listened. The famous Nolly [the violinist, Antonio Lolli, who had given four public concerts to great acclaim in the spring] played well to no purpose amidst this brouhaha and the fanfare that followed the toast to Her Imperial Majesty. The tables were narrow and served en filet; they were placed underneath the orange trees, which poked their rounded heads out over the guests and made a very fine effect.²⁷

In the tradition established by Peter the Great, there followed ten days of celebrations, including the obligatory firework display and a reprise of the opera Armida (‘I saw and heard little because I was talking,’ Corberon confessed, ‘but the music was feeble, so they say, and only one duet gave me pleasure’).²⁸ For once, such public festivities were not the prelude to personal disaster. Only mildly offended by the tone of Paul’s written instructions urging thrift, regularity and obedience, his spouse devoted herself to the difficult task of pleasing both her husband and the empress.²⁹ In time, the couple would irritate Catherine with their profligacy and her son’s eye would begin to wander. In the short term, however, his personal life proved noticeably less volatile than hers. As a waspish Harris noted in February 1778, ‘The great duke and duchess live indeed on the best terms, and offer an example they neither receive, nor can get imitated.’³⁰

By then the Court had launched into another round of lavish celebrations following the birth of the couple’s first son on 12 December 1777. Potëmkin hosted a dinner reputed to have cost 50,000 roubles and the ambassadors were invited to inspect the table decorations for Catherine’s banquet for top-ranking Russians, ‘set out with jewels to the amount of upwards of two millions sterling’.³¹ There was more to this than mere magnificence. In christening her grandson Alexander, the empress associated him with both Alexander of Macedon and St Alexander Nevsky, the medieval warrior saint adopted by Peter the Great as the protector of his new capital. As Catherine explained to Grimm, Nevsky ‘was respected by the Tatars, the republic of Novgorod submitted to him out of respect for his virtues, he gave the Swedes a good thrashing, and the title of grand duke was conferred upon him thanks to his reputation’.³² At 8 a.m. on 30 August 1778, the empress solemnly initiated the infant as a knight of the Order of St Alexander and processed in her carriage to the monastery for the annual liturgy. It was not a ritual dear to Catherine’s heart–‘You stand there like a dog,’ she had once complained to Potëmkin, ‘and no one thanks you for it’³³–but this year she had the consolation of laying the foundation stone for the massive neoclassical Trinity Cathedral commissioned from Ivan Starov in November 1774. He had set to work while the Court was in Moscow and in February 1776 Catherine had confirmed his designs with a budget of half a million roubles. For the foundation ceremony, a yellow canvas awning, emblazoned with the warrior saint’s monogram, had been stretched out above a wooden gallery, decorated by Corinthian columns, built out over the foundations. To the accompaniment of cannon and choristers, Catherine ceremonially lowered into the ground a silver shrine containing the remains of Peter the Great’s patron saint, St Andrew the First-Called, and a silver salver engraved in commemoration of the event.³⁴

Despite such symbol-laden spectacle, it was in private that the empress’s maternal instincts were finally allowed to blossom at the age of forty-eight. ‘The infant instinctively likes me,’ she boasted to Grimm, and indeed to anyone else who would listen. Gustav III, whose heir had been born not long before, was a natural target for her ideas about child rearing and soon received a detailed description of Alexander’s nursery, evidently designed to provide the cool, natural environment denied to her own son in 1754:

The balustrade prevents too many people from approaching the child at once. Care is taken to ensure that only a few of his entourage are allowed in the room at the same time, and only a couple of candles are lit in the evening so that the air around him doesn’t get stuffy. Monsieur Alexander’s bed, for he knows neither rocker nor cradle, is made of iron and has no curtains; he sleeps on a leather-covered mattress covered with a sheet. He has a pillow and his English bedspread is very light. He is not roused by ear-splitting alarms, but by the same token neither are voices lowered in his room, even when he is asleep. No sort of noise is prohibited in the corridors above and below his room. Cannon are fired from the bastions of the Admiralty, opposite his window, which has made him afraid of nothing [legend had it that this was the cause of his subsequent deafness]. Great care has been taken to ensure that the thermometers in his room do not rise above fourteen or fifteen degrees. Every morning, while his room is swept, whether it be winter or summer, he is taken to another apartment while his own windows are opened to let in fresh air.³⁵

A second grandson, Constantine, born eighteen months later, was similarly taken over, though he could never compare with Alexander in Catherine’s eyes. Dr Dimsdale was re-called to Russia to inoculate both boys at seven o’clock on the evening of 27 August 1781. She was surprised that Gustav should be so reluctant to offer his own son the same treatment: ‘If you yourself were in any danger, then it was assuredly the fault of the method by which you were inoculated.’ The king should send a doctor to St Petersburg to learn Dimsdale’s method, ‘without contradiction, the best’.³⁶

As Catherine later explained to Paul and Maria Fëdorovna, ‘your children belong to you, to me, and to the state. From their earliest childhood I have made it a duty and a pleasure to take the most tender care of them.’³⁷ She aimed to nurture not only healthy boys, but also rational children of the Enlightenment. While tears were forbidden, as a sign of stubbornness or undue sensitivity, inquisitiveness was encouraged.³⁸ By the time of his fourth birthday, Alexander was already said to be ‘a determined questioner’, just like his grandmother.³⁹ He could point out Vienna, Kiev and St Petersburg on the globe and willingly devoted two or three hours a day to his ABC. ‘If he continues like this,’ Catherine boasted to his mother, ‘there is no doubt that he will be reading by the spring.’⁴⁰ Anticipating the need, she had prepared her own Russian primer to teach young people to read, a series of maxims written ‘even while legislating’ in the spring of 1780.⁴¹ ‘No child is born learned,’ the empress declared at the outset: ‘the parent’s duty is to give learning to the child.’ Then she moved on to a series of moral injunctions based on her own brand of secularised Protestantism–‘the law requires a man to love his neighbour as himself’; ‘do as you would be done by’–before concluding with a definition of citizenship highlighting her favourite virtues: obedience and exactitude. ‘Question: what is a good citizen? Answer: A good citizen is he who fulfils precisely all the duties of a citizen.’⁴²

Such ideas were soon to be given wider application in the empire thanks to the efforts of an advisory commission on education, set up in 1782 under the aegis of Paul’s old science tutor, Professor Aepinus. It was partly on his advice that Catherine adopted the Austrian model of village, urban and provincial schools, using a teaching system initially introduced in Prussian Silesia by the Augustinian abbot Johann Ignaz von Felbiger. Though Felbiger’s emphasis on rote learning was a far cry from the permissive methods advocated by Betskoy in the 1760s, it seemed better suited to the needs of a diverse multinational empire. F. I. Jankovich de Mirjevo, who had been responsible for introducing the Habsburg reforms to the predominantly Orthodox population of his native Serbia, arrived in St Petersburg on 4 September 1782. Three days later Zavadovsky was appointed to head a new Commission of National Schools. In the following year, the empress sponsored the publication of The Book On the Duties of a Man and Citizen, a textbook based on a work by Felbiger which emphasised society’s duty to obey an appropriately enlightened monarch. Pupils were to be taught to believe that ‘those who give orders know what is useful to the state, their subjects and all civil society in general, that they do not wish for anything but that which is generally recognised as useful to society’.⁴³

Not until August 1786 was a statute promulgated to put these maxims into action in schools at provincial and district level (rural schools, mentioned in earlier drafts were dropped from the final legislation). Meanwhile, although the Russian primer was also intended for a wider readership–Catherine improbably claimed that the published version sold 20,000 copies in barely a fortnight–she had eyes only for Alexander, whose progress continued to delight her. By January 1782, she claimed that he could divide the map of Russia into provinces and count to a thousand, ‘beginning with two times two’.⁴⁴ A month later, she revealed that she was compiling a suitable reader for a child who ‘seizes every [book] he finds’.⁴⁵ Catherine’s Tale of Tsarevich Khlor was the first children’s story to be written in the Russian language. Sure enough, these ‘dozen tales, wise and not so wise’ were soon judged to have had ‘an excellent effect: he reads and re-reads them and follows them afterwards; he is polite, obedient, and jolly, like Constantine; this one imitates his brother and has a very pleasant personality’.⁴⁶

Whether the grand dukes were really the paragons that their proud grandmother described, we cannot tell. Yet there is no doubt about the purpose of their education. While Alexander was being groomed to inherit the Russian throne, Constantine (as his name proclaimed) was destined for Constantinople. That was why Catherine’s Russian primer incorporated a section on the Greek alphabet and why Richard Brompton’s saccharine portrait of the two boys, completed in July 1781, depicts Alexander cutting the Gordian knot on the altar of Zeus while Constantine holds a flag topped with a victory cross (‘With this sign you will conquer’).⁴⁷ Potëmkin, who had celebrated Constantine’s birth with a stylised Greek festival at his country estate at Ozerki, wanted both boys to concentrate on Greek as the foundation of all other languages: ‘One can scarcely credit what learning and delicacy of style it has given to so many writers who are distorted in translation, not so much by the translators as by the weakness of other languages.’⁴⁸

Reporting Potëmkin’s obsession ‘with the idea of raising an Empire in the east’, Harris noted that ‘he has so far infected the Empress with these sentiments, that she has been chimerical enough to christen the new born Grand Duke, Constantine; to give him a Greek nurse, whose name was Helen, and to talk in her private society, of placing him on the throne of the Eastern Empire. In the meanwhile, she is building a town at Czarsco Zelo, to be called Constantingorod.’⁴⁹ The new town was in fact named, no less emblematically, Sofia, with a cathedral resembling Hagia Sophia visible across the great pond in an echo of the Bosphorus.⁵⁰ Though Catherine denied any expansionist ambitions, she spoke at length to Harris ‘on the ancient Greeks, of their alacrity and the superiority of their genius, and the same character being still extant in the modern ones, and of the possibility of their again becoming the first people, if properly assisted and seconded. She told me she talked this language to me as she knew my father was an admirer of the Greeks, and that she hoped I inherited his predilection.’⁵¹ James Harris senior, who had presented Catherine with a copy of his celebrated universal grammar, Hermes (1751), was indeed delighted. When his daughter-in-law sent him the Greek chorus, sung at Peterhof at the end of June 1779 to celebrate Constantine’s birth, he spent the next two years badgering his son for a copy of the score by Paisiello, one of his favourite composers.⁵²

Catherine’s so-called Greek project–a visionary plan to recreate the Byzantine empire under Russian domination, first formulated in detail between 1780 and 1782–was the logical culmination of a foreign policy whose intellectual foundations had been laid more than a decade earlier during Russia’s war against the Ottomans. Whereas the Prussian alliance (still formally in existence) had been the linchpin of Panin’s Northern System, this reorientation towards the south dictated the need for a rapprochement with Austria, a policy firmly supported by Potëmkin. So when Joseph II suggested a meeting in 1780 as an extension of his tour of Galicia, Catherine readily accepted. Her journey to Mogilëv in Belorussia would not only build bridges with her southern neighbour, but also give her the opportunity to test the impact of her Provincial Reform in lands acquired in the first partition of Poland and governed since 1775 by her old friend Zakhar Chernyshëv.⁵³

Accompanied by Alexander Lanskoy, she set off from Tsarskoye Selo supported by an entourage including her secretary, Alexander Bezborodko, the rising star of her administration, and Alexander Stroganov, who had returned from France in December 1779 talking about nothing but Paris.⁵⁴ Even such a small suite was expensive. As Elizabeth Dimsdale learned from Catherine’s apothecary, ‘at every stage they had four hundred and forty horses and twenty coaches besides other carriages’. There were fifty-two of those, drawn by animals requisitioned from some 177 provincial towns. More than 60,000 roubles had been spent on sprucing up the wooden ‘palaces’ along the route.⁵⁵

The expedition got off to a bad start at Pskov, a medieval stronghold now in terminal decline. ‘Inoculate someone with your talent for development and send him here,’ Catherine appealed to Grimm: ‘Perhaps he will be able to bring on its industry.’⁵⁶ ‘Tomorrow we move on,’ Bezborodko noted on 15 May, ‘having seen much that is not good among the nobles, merchants and others.’⁵⁷ As they advanced south-westward towards Poland, another disconcerting phenomenon was revealed at Polotsk: ‘Jesuits and Dominicans etc., and Jews all lined up on parade.’ To Catherine, the Jews looked ‘horribly filthy’ while the others made ‘an august masquerade’ to greet her ceremonial entry to the town.⁵⁸ ‘Everyone lives jumbled together here,’ she observed, unwittingly encapsulating one of the most awkward problems facing her administrators’ attempts to standardise the government of the empire: ‘Orthodox, Catholics, Uniates, Jews etc., Russians, Poles, Finns, Germans, Courlanders–there are not two people dressed the same who speak the same language correctly.’⁵⁹ Stroganov, who had started out with a terrible cold, improved after being purged in Polotsk. His ‘main task in each town’, as he explained to his son’s tutor on 20 May, was to discover from the local authorities ‘and even the simple citizens’ what their needs were, how justice was administered and about ‘the unfortunates who languish in prison’:

As soon as I have informed the empress, if the crimes are not capital, the prison doors open and her largesse is distributed to all those in genuine need. Apart from here, where the schools are on a fairly good footing thanks to the Jesuits, education is everywhere badly neglected. The empress wants to take effective measures to repair this deficiency which requires a prompt remedy.⁶⁰

At lunch on 21 May, Zakhar Chernyshëv brought out the treasured silver service presented to him as Governor General after the Provincial Reform. That evening he threw a ball for 500 guests: ‘I should never finish if I named them all,’ Catherine boasted to Paul and Maria Fëdorovna.⁶¹ Next morning, she was up early for the sixty-mile drive to Sennoye, where she realised that the emperor had already beaten her in the mock race for Mogilëv: ‘When he learned that I had lopped off four days from my schedule to overtake him, he ran night and day and overtook me by two days.’⁶² Suppressing the urge to join him immediately, Catherine stuck to her schedule. On 23 May she drove through a landscape resembling one of her favourite English gardens to meet Field Marshal Rumyantsev at Shklov, the estate to which Zorich had retired to dispense hospitality on a heroic scale. Guests came from as far away as the two capitals to act in his theatre and there was always a place at his table for ‘Frenchmen, Italians, Germans, Serbs, Greeks, Moldavians, Turks–in a word, every kind of riff-raff and tramp’.⁶³ To greet this exceptional vagrant, he had built his own triumphal arch, where he formally welcomed the empress at 6 p.m. But Zorich’s day had passed. Catherine may never even have set eyes on the Saxon dinner service on which he was said to have spent 50,000 roubles since she retired early to write to her ‘loving friend’, Potëmkin. Leaving her entourage to indulge themselves (and their host) at Zorich’s ball and banquet, she drifted off to sleep to the sound of fireworks exploding on an obelisk inside the house and music from a Jewish band dressed in Turkish costume.⁶⁴

Next morning, leaving her deflated former lover clutching at nothing more than the promise of a return visit, Catherine set off to face a potentially tricky week at Mogilëv. Joseph had as always insisted on travelling without ceremony, and his eccentric incognito posed troubling problems of etiquette:

I don’t know how best to arrange a meeting without others present because, when I get back from mass, people will be milling all around me. To postpone it again until after dinner would be discourteous. Perhaps he could come when everyone is at mass with me, so that when I get back to my inner apartments–those before my bedroom, that is–I shall find him already there. Tell me if you find a better way, though this one seems clever enough. Since Count Rumyantsev writes that our guest doesn’t wish to dine anywhere, I can only conclude that he doesn’t even want to eat with me at the high table; I shall wait to be informed about this.⁶⁵

In the event, though disconcerted to find that Joseph looked nothing like his portraits, she found him as determined to please her as she was to admire him. In spite of the weather–there had been thunder in the air since she left Polotsk and the fireworks had to be cancelled because of the rain–Chernyshëv had spared no expense to impress his guests, fetching Caterina Bonafini from St Petersburg to sing in the new theatre.⁶⁶ Disappointed to find that Joseph did not know the abbé Galiani, Catherine nevertheless recognised that he was ‘clever’ and liked to talk.⁶⁷ Conscious that all Europe was hanging on their every word, she teased Grimm that the emperor had said many things worth publishing that would have to remain confidential. One topic for serious discussion was elementary schooling (it was Joseph, acting on the recommendation of Abbot Felbiger, who sent Jankovich to Russia in 1782). During mass at the Catholic cathedral, however, the two monarchs behaved with characteristic irreverence, ‘laughing and talking more than we listened, with him as the cicerone and me as the gaping tourist’.⁶⁸ ‘You will find him less boring than the king of Sweden, mark my words,’ Catherine assured her son.⁶⁹

Though she became less respectful towards ‘Caesar’ when he proved to be a feeble general, it suited her to cast herself in a supporting role in 1780. As Harris reported from St Petersburg, ‘the amiable qualities of the emperor seem particularly calculated to suit a sovereign, who possesses the art of pleasing in so eminent a degree’.⁷⁰ Alarmed by the progress of events, the Prussians redoubled their efforts to discredit Joseph in Catherine’s eyes. She was not to be taken in. ‘You would do very little justice to the character of the empress of Russia,’ Harris commented, ‘if you supposed she admitted all this trash to dwell upon her mind, or that she was not enlightened enough to see the motives of such a language.’⁷¹ The visit of the Prussian Crown Prince also backfired. Though he provided Catherine with a welcome excuse to absent herself from the Alexander Nevsky liturgy for the first time in her reign, Frederick William was otherwise a resounding flop–cold, awkward and hard to like, even when he lost 500 roubles at a single game of cards. ‘If his uncle ever went wrong in his political speculations,’ Bezborodko remarked, ‘then he should count this visit among his greatest mistakes.’⁷² By contrast, Count Cobenzl had found a perfect advocate for the Habsburg cause in the forty-five-year-old Prince de Ligne, a rakish cosmopolitan charmer with a penchant for the sorts of contrived witticism that Catherine loved best. Ligne, she duly reported to Grimm, was ‘one of the easiest and most agreeable beings I have ever met; he is truly original, thinks profoundly and performs follies like a child’.⁷³

Once the death of Maria Theresa in November 1780 had removed the last major obstacle to a formal alliance between Austria and Russia, it was delayed only by a dispute over protocol. Joseph, as Holy Roman Emperor, was unable to accept Catherine’s status-conscious demand to sign first. She resolved the impasse by proposing an exchange of private letters in place of a conventional treaty. In a secret exchange in May and June 1781, each vowed to support the other in the event of a Turkish attack. As soon as the little grand dukes had recovered from their inoculation, Paul and his wife were packed off to Vienna on 19 September in an attempt to bring them round to Catherine’s way of thinking. In such a political climate, there was no further room for the disappointed advocate of the Northern System. Panin had not been taken to Mogilëv and had failed in his attempts to prevent Paul’s Grand Tour: three days after the departure of his former pupil, he was unceremoniously sacked.⁷⁴

‘The big noise has arrived,’ Mozart reported to his father when Paul reached Vienna in November. ‘I have been looking about for Russian popular songs, so as to be able to play variations on them.’⁷⁵ Though at first the grand duke made a poor impression, scarcely troubling to conceal his preference for Berlin, Joseph brought his visitor round by balancing a series of magnificent Court balls with a tantalising glimpse of his own working methods. He even showed the grand duke his secret correspondence with Catherine.⁷⁶ After six weeks as his guests, Paul and Maria Fëdorovna moved on to Italy, travelling semi-incognito as the count and countess of the North. After visiting Venice, Rome and Naples, they reached Florence as guests of Joseph’s brother. Having been irritated by Paul’s enthusiasm for the Venetian republic–it was easy enough for such a tiny state to put its affairs in order, she told him–Catherine was relieved to learn of his admiration for Archduke Leopold’s enlightened regime in Tuscany.⁷⁷ Throughout their tour, which reached its climax with an adulatory reception in Paris at the beginning of May 1782, she kept in regular touch with her children, regaling them with news of their sons’ progress in her care. No less revealing are the letters sent to a member of Paul’s entourage, Prince Kurakin, by his former tutor, which tell us much about the rhythms of life at Court over the winter of 1781–2.⁷⁸

In political terms, the autumn was uneventful. Despite public expectations of changes in the wake of Panin’s dismissal, there were no civic or military promotions either on Catherine’s name day or on St Andrew’s Day. For once the empress had resisted what Bezborodko called ‘her habit of making alterations’.⁷⁹ He himself proved the only exception to the rule, continuing his inexorable rise by being placed in charge of the postal service on 1 December.

Meanwhile, the empress’s ‘hermitages’ continued on Thursdays and Sundays, despite a scare in late October when a lackey discovered three intruders under some matting in a vacant room. One turned out to be a deserter from the army, another a fugitive serf from Moscow. While the third escaped the guards, Catherine ordered her two prisoners to be handed over to the police to face the criminal courts. Her concern with justice remained undimmed. In an attempt to evade the delays about which delegates to the Legislative Commission had complained, the Provincial Reform had created ‘conscience courts’. The empress boasted to Grimm in 1776 that they were already ‘working wonders’ and would prove ‘the tomb of chicanery’.⁸⁰ If that was a triumph of hope over expectation, new courts were soon hard at work as far away as Bashkiria, more in the manner of modern arbitration tribunals than of the English equity courts on which they may have been based. ‘Only those with no conscience would refuse to serve in a conscience court,’ Catherine insisted to her secretary in April 1782. And again in July: ‘The conscience court is the pulse showing the morals of each province.’⁸¹ To reinforce those morals, she had promulgated a lengthy Police Ordinance on 8 April–literally a ‘statute of good order’–which not only determined the procedures and punitive powers of urban police boards, but also embodied the Cameralist conception of ‘police’ as a rational, creative force for shaping her subjects’ behaviour. To that end, police boards were provided with a characteristic instruction, ‘The Mirror of the Police’, incorporating moral injunctions reminiscent of the empress’s Russian primer: ‘do not unto others what you would not wish to be done unto you’.⁸²

While Catherine was at work on this new statute, the Court had embarked on its usual round of formal entertainments. Panin’s dismissal had cleared the way for Potëmkin to arrange suitable marriages for his nieces in the autumn of 1781. Not that he ever released his hold over them. Count Skavronsky soon discovered that his wedding on 5 September to Catherine Engelhardt had not ended her incestuous relationship with her uncle. Alexandra, who had replaced Praskovya Bruce in the empress’s affections, was married off to the forty-nine-year-old Count Branicki as a way of staking Potëmkin’s claims in Poland.⁸³ No banquets followed these weddings, much to the irritation of the more elderly relatives, who were displeased to find old customs ignored. As a further sign of the passing of the generations, the ageing Hofmeisterin Countess Maria Rumyantseva, who had once danced with Peter the Great, was chosen to partner little Alexander at the ball on Catherine’s name day. Rumours that the Engelhardts’ eleven-year-old sister would be made a maid of honour turned out to be false. The St George’s Day ceremony was notable mainly for Catherine’s anger when Princess Repnin was the sole Court lady to appear in chapel. Already irritated by the low turnout earlier in the month–when her maids of honour had been happy to watch the banquet for the Semënovsky officers from the gallery, but not to attend mass–Catherine instructed the Hofmarshal to fine future absentees ten roubles. In that respect, she was no different from the Empress Elizabeth.

There was no difficulty in persuading courtiers to attend the theatre. Molière’s Georges Dandin was given on the main court stage on 2 November, a week after being performed in the Hermitage. Catherine did not attend the revival of Paisiello’s I filosofi immaginari, one of the few operas she had enjoyed. ‘It is full of sublime follies,’ she wrote after the first performance in 1779: ‘you can’t imagine what this musician does to gain the attention of organs which are the least sensitive to music and those organs are mine’.⁸⁴ She was happier now with Ablesimov’s comic opera The Miller-Sorcerer, Cheat and Matchmaker, a byproduct of the increased interest in the peasant question provoked by Pugachëv. Derived from Rousseau’s Le devin du village, this overtly folksy piece had been the most popular work in the Russian repertoire for two years by the time it was given at the Hermitage on 21 October.⁸⁵ That same month, a new public theatre opened opposite the Summer Garden for performances of Russian tragedy. As Picart reported to Kurakin:

The theatre is built in the new style, hitherto completely unknown in this country. The stage is very wide and high, whereas the hall for the spectators is made of three-quarters of a circle. There are no boxes, but apart from the benches in the stalls, there are three balconies, one above the other and running around the auditorium without interruption. The paintings are very beautiful and the view excellent when, on entering, you see the audience, sitting, as in ancient times, in an amphitheatre. Apart from the main entrance there are six more very roomy exits, built in such a way that the public can get out in a matter of minutes in case of fire. Everyone is very pleased with this exceptional and spacious new place of entertainment, which they owe to General Betskoy.⁸⁶

Though the autumn of 1781 was one of the warmest in living memory, winter finally set in with a vengeance at the end of November. In the following week, it was so cold that Catherine had to close the imperial theatres and cancel her gatherings at the Hermitage. On 20 December, two coachmen were found dead in more than thirty degrees of frost. Nor was this the final trick that the weather had up its sleeve. Within a week of an unseasonal thaw in mid-January, the Court apothecary had dispensed medicine to more than 500 victims of a flu epidemic. Catherine herself succumbed at the end of the month, bringing the Court to a standstill for several days. Though she felt well enough on 3 February to attend her annual lunch with Stroganov, who had returned from Siberia in December with two ancient silver vases, dug up from his own salt mines, she did not linger long.⁸⁷ Yet any thoughts of a permanent slowdown in middle age were soon dispelled. At Peterhof to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of her accession to the throne in June, she had lost none of her energy, as she emphasised to Grimm:

Would you like to know what I did the day I arrived here? I ran like a hare and at 11 o’clock, I duly went to mass, as if it were a Sunday. Then I gave an audience to M. de la Torre, whom I count among my old acquaintances, and to M. de la Hererra and Count Lacy, and then to the minister of Saxony. After that, I walked the length of the garden to the quayside in search of my lunch with M. Betskoy. After lunch, I took a launch to the admiralty; there I took some tar and gave three strokes of the hammer to each of two new 100-gun vessels that I had ordered to be built; then I got onto a ship with 74 guns which I ordered to be launched into the water once I was aboard. It took us towards the bridge over the Neva. There, having dropped anchor, we disembarked and got back into the launch to return to the admiralty, where we walked across to find a carriage to take us to the Master of the Horse’s country estate [Leventhal on the Peterhof road]. Having walked through his woods and his promenades, we dined and then arrived here at half-past midnight. So what do you say of a day like that? Wasn’t it packed? I assure you that everyone apart from me was exhausted.⁸⁸

As if to symbolise her indomitable drive, Catherine finally unveiled Falconet’s statue of Peter the Great on 7 August 1782, a hundred years after his accession to the throne. Only the clergy were absent, perhaps still smarting that the Church had been unable to register its objections to the superhuman figure, twice as big as the tsar himself.⁸⁹ ‘From Catherine II to Peter I’ was the lapidary motto, inscribed in Latin on the west-facing side of the pedestal and in Russian on the side facing east. Harris grasped the unspoken comparison immediately: ‘I could not avoid, during this ceremony, reflecting how impossible it was that any successor of Her Imperial Majesty who might, in some future day, erect a statue in commemoration of her great actions, ever should be so much superior to her, as she herself is superior to Peter the Great, both in the art of governing, and in that of making her people respected and happy.’⁹⁰

If Tsar Peter remained the single most powerful symbol of Russia’s superhuman potential, then the great flood of 1777 had offered a salutary reminder of the fragility of man’s triumph over nature. Woken by a gale at five o’clock on the morning of 10 September, Catherine gazed out from the Hermitage onto a scene resembling ‘the destruction of Jerusalem’.⁹¹ Rising almost eleven feet above its normal level, the swollen Neva had dumped a fleet of merchant vessels onto the embankment, leaving a forest of tangled masts prey to scavengers for timber. It subsequently emerged that the storm had felled hundreds of trees at both the Summer Palace and Peterhof; the Winter Palace cellars were flooded and its roof damaged; and dozens of the capital’s grandest buildings were severely disfigured.⁹² Though her first thought had been to summon her sentries to safety, more than a hundred of Catherine’s subjects lost their lives that night. ‘Where am I going to put the 100 gaolbirds taken prisoner by the water?’ she mused to Potëmkin. ‘In the House of Quarantine, I say, but I don’t know whether it is strong enough. The canals are alive, and fifteen faithful soldiers have sunk into them.’⁹³

Even as it overflowed, the river was gradually being enclosed by granite embankments designed by Georg Veldten. Begun in 1763, this extraordinary project had reached the Summer Garden by 1770 but was still incomplete in 1777. Four years later, as her carriage snaked between the boulders littering the English Embankment, Elizabeth Dimsdale expressed a common prejudice by doubting that it would ever be finished: ‘the Russians are with great truth remarked to begin things with great spirit and for a little time go on very rapidly, then leave for some other object’.⁹⁴ She did Catherine an injustice. In January 1780, the empress had charged General Bauer with dredging and redecorating the Fontanka with a budget of 2,372,650 roubles, payable in ten annual instalments. By 1787, much of the canal had been clad in stone under her watchful eye, despite a disconcerting demonstration by 400 peasant labourers, protesting against the miseries imposed on them by the merchant contractor.⁹⁵ Ultimately, only the Admiralty wharf interrupted an elegant promenade stretching ten feet above the normal water line for several miles along the left bank of the Neva. Widely admired as ‘one of the most sumptuous ornaments of the city’, the embankment was praised by foreign visitors as a ‘grand work, which, in regard to utility and magnificence’ could not ‘be paralleled except among the ruins of ancient Rome’.⁹⁶

Classical models were no less prominent in Catherine’s mind in planning the redesign of Tsarskoye Selo, where she had advertised her intention ‘to summarise the age of the Caesars, the Augustuses, the Ciceros and such patrons as Maecenas and to create a building where it would be possible to find all these people in one’.⁹⁷ In 1773, she had hoped that Charles-Louis Clérisseau would draw on his long residence in Rome to design a classical maison du jardin, but he disappointed her by proposing a gargantuan structure on the scale of Bazhenov’s abortive plans for the Moscow Kremlin.⁹⁸ The architect ultimately entrusted with her dreams was Charles Cameron, a barely tested Londoner of Scottish descent who came to Russia to make his fortune in 1779. Over the next few years, Cameron and a small army of Russian and Scottish labourers created an elegant neoclassical gallery above the Roman baths on which he had written a treatise. ‘To drive you wild, monsieur le chevalier,’ Catherine boasted to Grimm in 1786, ‘I have to tell you that you will no longer be able to find me here after dinner, because apart from seven rooms garnished in jasper, agate, and real and artificial marble, and a garden right at the door of my apartments, I have an immense colonnade which also leads to this garden and which ends in a flight of stairs leading straight to the lake. So, search for me after that, if you can!’⁹⁹

As this letter shows, Rastrelli’s Baroque interiors were also transformed in these years. Once the main staircase had been moved in 1778 from the southern end of the palace to the centre where it now stands, Catherine had the southern wing converted into a series of cool, neoclassical rooms, no longer extant. Cameron produced at least three variations for the décor of the Lyon room, ultimately said to have cost 201,250 roubles, or £40,250, not including the lapis lazuli. Measuring thirty-six by thirty-two feet, the room was twenty-eight feet high and took its name from the French silks hanging between twelve mirrors, thirteen feet long by four feet wide. It was almost complete by the time the Court returned to St Petersburg at the end of September 1781. Three further apartments were already finished: the Chinese room, decorated ‘with prodigious fine China jarrs’; the Arabesque room, where Catherine was to enjoy countless games of cards and chess; and her tiny study, which appeared to Elizabeth Dimsdale ‘like an enchanted place, the sides of it inlaid with foil red and green so that it dazzled ones eyes to look at it’.¹⁰⁰Equally delighted by Cameron’s ‘superlative’ interiors, the ever-competitive empress announced to Grimm that ‘no one has seen anything to match them: I can tell you that I have done nothing but look at them for the last nine weeks’.¹⁰¹ Paul’s departure for Vienna allowed Cameron to start on his northern part of the palace, between the staircase and the chapel. ‘Every Sunday I pass your apartments,’ Catherine reported to Maria Fëdorovna shortly after her fifty-third birthday in 1782, ‘which currently have neither windows nor doors and are full of workmen.’¹⁰²

The grand duchess was even keener to hear of progress at the new palace at nearby Pavlovsk, the estate presented to the heir on the birth of his first son. There was still snow on the ground when Catherine made an impromptu visit on 29 April, much to the alarm of the steward, who had only recently taken delivery of 3.5 million bricks. Catching up with the empress while she was still inside the house, he accompanied her on a characteristically demanding tour of the park:

From the ruin Her Majesty wanted to go down to the right of the temple where the paths are not yet made…I prayed M. Nelidinsky to go by a better path but Her Majesty wished to continue…Before arriving [at the cascade] she asked several questions about the water, which I had to answer as no one could explain it sufficiently to Her Majesty. She stopped a moment at the cascade, and passed to the chalet, asking me questions from time to time. She sat a moment at the chalet and asked me several questions about the colonnade then took the path to the edge of the garden.¹⁰³

‘Building is a devilish thing,’ Catherine confessed to Grimm in one of her periodic excursions into her native German. ‘It devours money, and the more one builds, the more one wants to go on. It is a sickness, like drinking, and a sort of habit.’¹⁰⁴ So powerful was that habit that it was not only her favourite summer palace that she had ‘turned upside down, so to speak’:

You wouldn’t recognise my bedroom here in town…I used to have a niche: I have it no longer. My bed is facing the windows and, so that I don’t have the light in my eyes, there is a mirror facing the windows at the foot of the bed, under which is a canopy that barely covers the bed. On both sides of the bed, I have some banquettes which go around the alcove. It’s charming, and this invention by your humble servant is currently being adopted in all the houses in Petersburg. Besides, my bed is not at all in the imperial style: it has only curtains.¹⁰⁵

Much more in the imperial style was the empress’s growing art collection. When Potëmkin first took Corberon to the Hermitage in January 1776, he found ‘a lot of pictures, badly displayed’:

The gallery is too narrow; there is not enough space to see them and the windows don’t reach high enough, or rather, they descend too low. These are ordinary casements, unlike those in the gallery at Kassel. Here I noticed, with sorrow, Greuze’s Paralytic: it has lost its colour and its effect; it is diminished now.¹⁰⁶

The answer was to build a bigger gallery–the Large Hermitage–and to keep on making acquisitions to fill it. Catherine’s most significant purchase in these years was from the bankrupt descendants of Sir Robert Walpole at Houghton Hall, where a formal portrait of the empress, offered in part exchange, still dominates the saloon. The Walpole collection, which included Rembrandt’s Abraham and Isaac, was so important that John Wilkes had proposed to Parliament that it be purchased from public funds as the basis for a new National Gallery. George Walpole, the third earl, had other ideas. As Horace Walpole reported in December 1778, ‘the mad master’ had ‘sent his final demand of forty-five thousand pounds to the Empress of Russia’. In the end, she paid £40,555 in a sale negotiated by her ambassador in London. ‘Russia is sacking our palaces and museums,’ moaned Josiah Wedgwood.¹⁰⁷

Despite her support for the Imperial Academy of Arts at St Petersburg, Russian painters scarcely figured in her collection. For the lucky neoclassical artists who impressed her foreign agents–Grimm in Paris and Johann Friedrich Reiffenstein in Rome–Catherine’s patronage offered a potential bonanza. Anton Raphael Mengs was already approaching the end of a life of service to the Courts of Dresden and Madrid when she first expressed interest in his work in 1776. By the time Perseus and Andromeda (1777) arrived in the Hermitage, shortly after the departure of Joseph II, he had been dead for a year. ‘The fever takes hold of me, too, when I think of the state Mengs is in,’ Catherine told Grimm during the artist’s final illness. ‘I hope all the great men of our century are not destined to die before the year 1780.’¹⁰⁸ Clérisseau, whose drawings of Rome arrived in the same consignment as the Mengs, was still very much alive, having recovered from his earlier embarrassment to trade so openly on the empress’s fondness for his work that a scandal erupted when Paul inadvertently snubbed him in Paris.¹⁰⁹ It was there that Alexander Stroganov showed off the bust of Catherine commissioned from Jean-Antoine Houdon. She herself had ordered a bust of Voltaire, whose death in 1778 at the beginning of her infatuation for Rimsky-Korsakov had made her feel ‘a very great contempt for all the things of this world’.¹¹⁰ All Europe echoed Jeremy Bentham’s mock awe at her well-publicised aspiration to build a replica of Ferney: ‘Kitty you will find is going to erect a monument to him, in the middle of Petersburgh and to have a model of his house in her park at Czarskozelo.’¹¹¹ In the end, she settled for buying his library for the Hermitage. It arrived in 1779, seven years before Diderot’s books finally made their way to St Petersburg, to be placed in the care of A. I. Luzhkov, still not thirty, who had translated the Encyclopédie article on ‘political economy’ for Catherine’s Society of Translators.¹¹² Yet by no means all her purchases pleased her. Returning to town with the newly inoculated grand dukes in September 1781, shortly after their parents’ departure for Vienna, Catherine complained to Grimm about the latest delivery from Rome. It was if the rain had somehow obscured her vision:

To my great astonishment, except for the Mengs and a few other trifles, all the rest, except for the Raphael loggias, are nasty daubs: I have told Martinelli, the painter who takes care of my gallery, to choose [the best] and send the daubs to auction for the benefit of the civic hospital. Heavens above! It is incredible how the divine one [Reiffenstein] has allowed himself to go wrong this time: I beg you to ask him expressly to buy no more from Monsieur Jenkins. It is scandalous to pass off such banalities under the name of this or the other painter. My guests at the Hermitage were ashamed to go in there ahead of me.¹¹³

Some reasonably assumed that there must be no end to Catherine’s resources. When a French craftsman set his price in 1776 for a writing desk to commemorate the victory at Chesme, Grimm thought the sum ‘so ridiculous’ that he expected the deal to be cancelled. Yet, as he later explained to the French foreign minister, ‘it turned out otherwise. The empress, who likes to encourage artists in extraordinary projects–and who perhaps intended this escritoire as a mark of her munificence–ordered me to have it done.’¹¹⁴ In reality, even Catherine’s budget was overstretched. In 1778, she had her ambassador in Paris commission a 744-piece Sèvres service. (It was a gift for ‘my dear, beloved Prince Potëmkin, but so that it should be all the finer, I have said that it is for me’.) Each plate was priced at 242 livres, the sugar bowls at 1410 livres, and the liqueur decanter at 2236 livres, making a grand total of 328,188 livres (roughly 41,000 roubles at the rate of exchange given by Bentham in June 1778). But when it emerged in the following year that the full amount had not been paid, part of the service was held back in compensation and it was not until 1857 that officials acting on behalf of her youngest grandson, Nicholas I, acquired the missing pieces.¹¹⁵ The tension between ambition and economy remained unresolved in many of Catherine’s commissions. No one was to learn this sooner than Giacomo Quarenghi, one of two Italians recommended by Grimm in 1779 when the empress complained that Rinaldi and her other architects were ‘too old, or too blind, or too slow, or too lazy, or too young, or too slothful, or too much the grand seigneur, or too rich, or too respectable, or too stale’.¹¹⁶ Having been ordered to design new bronze doors for her bedroom at Tsarskoye Selo in 1784, Quarenghi warned Betskoy that ‘although Her Majesty desires that these doors should be as sumptuous as possible, if Your Excellency finds the price rising too high, bronze could be used only for the locks and the doorframes’.¹¹⁷ Most of his subsequent designs were supplied with alternative specifications, allowing for variations in cost.

It had cost Catherine more than 7 million roubles to keep Khan Shagin Girey on the Crimean throne since 1774 and by the end of the decade she was beginning to question the value of her investment. The revolt that broke out in the khanate in the winter of 1780–81 threatened to topple her handsome puppet altogether. By May 1782, he had been forced to flee to the Russian port of Kerch, at the mouth of the Sea of Azov. After Potëmkin had been sent to quell the rebellion on 1 September, Catherine outlined the clearest statement so far of the ‘Greek Project’ in a letter to Joseph II contemplating joint Austro-Russian action to deliver Europe from the Turk. But there was no hope of achieving her grandest ambitions just yet. Though her partner returned from the Crimea in late October convinced of the need for outright annexation–diplomats noticed that he was now a man with a mission–Catherine remained hesitant, anxious about the reaction of rival powers. She was brought round to his way of thinking in the spring of 1783. So long as France and Britain were paralysed by the War of American Independence, Russia had little to fear. The preliminary peace the two powers had signed in January was an added incentive not to delay. On 8 April, the empress issued a manifesto signalling her intention to annexe the strategically significant peninsula. That same month, her partner returned to the South, exasperating her this time by his prevarication. ‘I expected that the Crimea would be occupied by the middle of May,’ she complained, ‘and now here we are in the middle of July and I know nothing more about it than the Pope in Rome.’¹¹⁸

She did not have long to wait. Five days before this impatient letter was written, Potëmkin had already secured the prize. As usual, his jubilation was soon followed by physical collapse, prompting renewed anxieties in Catherine’s heart. It was to be November before he returned to St Petersburg. There, far from receiving a hero’s welcome, he found that his triumphs had merely intensified his rivals’ jealousies. Their resentments seemed to affect the empress, who treated him with unanticipated coolness. From then on, he was to spend more and more time in the South. On 2 February 1784, Catherine appointed him Governor General of the new province of the Tauride, incorporating the former Crimean khanate. The tensions between her and the prince were partially resolved by a division of spoils which made him the effective ruler of some of the most productive lands in her empire.

No sooner had this crucial relationship been resolved than another old friendship, potentially no less difficult to handle, was reignited. After a long period of residence in Europe, during which her son had studied at the University of Edinburgh, Princess Dashkova returned to St Petersburg. Her reception at Tsarskoye Selo on 10 July 1782 marked the beginning of a renaissance at Court that lasted, with varying degress of intensity, for the remainder of the decade.¹¹⁹ On 24 January 1783 Dashkova was unexpectedly named as director of the Academy of Sciences in succession to the ineffectual Sergey Domashnëv. As Isabel de Madariaga has written, ‘it was a tribute to Catherine’s perception and to her disregard for current prejudices, that she appointed a woman to take charge of an institution regarded as a male preserve. It was also a way of keeping a busybody busy.’¹²⁰ Lacking nothing in nerve and determination, Dashkova set to work with her customary tactless vim. Led into the hall by the mathematician Leonhard Euler, the most distinguished scientist to work in eighteenth-century Russia, then in the final year of his life, she presided over her first meeting less than a week after her appointment. It took all the organisational ability she could muster to tackle the Academy’s mounting debts, revitalise its publishing activity, organise public lectures and reform its creaking administration.¹²¹ Impressed by the rapid results, Catherine appointed her later in the year to preside over a new Russian Academy tasked with producing a dictionary of the Russian language (its first six volumes were published between 1789 and 1794). It was in Dashkova’s new journal, The Companion of Lovers of Russian Literature(1783–4), that the empress published her first essays on Russian history, a subject that was to remain a more or less constant preoccupation for the rest of her life. But it was too much to hope that Dashkova’s return would be trouble free. It was not long before her ambitions for her son put her at loggerheads with Alexander Lanskoy.

En route to Mogilëv in 1780, Cobenzl had reassured Joseph II that Lanskoy belonged to ‘that species of favourite, who are frequently subject to change, have no influence on affairs, and who limit themselves to making their fortune and that of all those who belong to them’.¹²² The twenty-two-year-old major general certainly relished the trappings of office, strutting about at Court ‘dressed most magnificently with a shoulder knot of fine brilliant diamonds’. True to form, he ‘leapt like a hind’ when he learned that Gustav III planned to invest him with the Grand Cross of the Order of the Polar Star.¹²³ To Catherine, however, the dashing young Sashinka was no mere trinket. Her relationship with him was the closest she came to repeating her experience with Grigory Orlov, except that Lanskoy lacked Orlov’s streak of ruthless courage and both she and Potëmkin always treated him like a child in a gilded cage.

After Catherine’s roller-coaster ride with Potëmkin–‘the leading nail-biter in the universe’¹²⁴–life with Sasha Lanskoy must have seemed reassuringly undemanding. It was certainly less competitive. Catherine’s illegitimate son, Aleksey Bobrinsky, who paid regular visits to the Winter Palace during his time at the Cadet Corps, caught the prevailing balance of power in a note on a game of billiards in 1782: ‘She won the game, then started another one and began to win again. She told me to finish the game for her, and I won it.’¹²⁵ Dashkova recalled a scene in which a petulant favourite allegedly tried to deter the empress from giving her a treasured bust he regarded as his own: ‘“But this bust is mine,” exclaimed Lanskoy in protest. “It belongs to me.”’¹²⁶ Sasha, however, was a ‘golden individual’, accustomed to such ‘sacrifices’. It was presumably easier to regard them with equanimity when Quarenghi was not only designing a house for him at Sofia, but also working on a grandiose palace at Velë, the estate Catherine had bought for him in Pskov province. Sent there to plan the park, the Scot James Meader, who had designed the English Park at Peterhof, found that ‘the spot where the gardens are to be is very fine laid & planted by nature so that it only wants a little polishing & planting to complete it’.¹²⁷ Lanskoy was just as keen to share the empress’s passion for engraved gemstones. She tried to stimulate his literary interests, too. As the sceptical French chargé noted in September 1780, ‘He has just been bought a library for 10,000 roubles, which he certainly will not read.’¹²⁸

Lanskoy’s support was more emotional than intellectual. As she approached her mid-fifties, Catherine faced the loss of some of her closest companions. When she learned of General Bauer’s fatal illness in the autumn of 1782, she complained to Dr Rogerson that ‘there was scarcely a doctor who knew how to cure even the bite of a bed-bug’. Bauer’s death on 11 February prompted ‘great floods of tears for many days’.¹²⁹ Though the carnival continued all around her–3130 nobles and merchants attended the masked ball at the Winter Palace on 17 February–it was almost three weeks before the empress could bear to break the news to Grimm, a sure sign of the depression which often afflicted her at times of personal despair.¹³⁰ Before making her annual confession at the end of the first week of the Great Fast, she quipped bleakly to her souffre-douleur that the ‘bovine medics’ had seen off ‘yet another person who has been close to me for thirty-three years’. Only Monsieur Tom, a favourite greyhound, was safe–‘he who has no use for any doctor’.¹³¹ At the end of March, Panin, who had had ‘one foot in the grave’ since his sacking in 1781, finally breathed his last. And worse was to come. Since the autumn, the empress had been nursing Grigory Orlov, whose descent into insanity after the death of his wife disturbed all who witnessed it. ‘One cannot see him in this state without pity,’ Zavadovsky admitted.¹³² Refusing to have her patient confined, Catherine tended him with unfailing compassion. ‘His wild and incoherent discourse ever affect her to tears,’ Harris learned, ‘and discompose her so entirely, that for the remainder of the day she can enjoy neither pleasure nor business.’¹³³ Though the end, when it came in Moscow on 11 April, was a blessed release, it was no less shocking for that. On hearing the news at Tsarskoye Selo just before her fifty-fourth birthday, Catherine confessed ‘the most acute affliction’ to Grimm. In Orlov, she had lost ‘a friend and the man to whom I have the greatest obligations in the world…General Lanskoy is tearing himself apart to help me bear my grief, but that makes me melt even more.’¹³⁴ ‘It has been a black year for me,’ she admitted to Potëmkin when Field Marshal Golitsyn went to his grave in October: ‘It seems that whoever falls into Rogerson’s hands is already a dead man.’¹³⁵

The one loss for which nothing had prepared her was the death of Lanskoy himself. In her mind, at least, everything seemed set fair for a long and happy future. Plunged into ‘the most acute grief’ by her bereavement, she made one of her frankest admissions to Grimm:

I thought I myself would die as a result of the irreparable loss I sustained, just eight days ago, of my best friend. I hoped that he would be my support in my old age: he applied himself, he profited, he acquired all my tastes. This was a young man whom I brought up myself, who was grateful, sweet and honest. He shared my troubles when I had them and rejoiced in my happiness. In a word, I have the misfortune to tell you, sobbing as I am, that General Lanskoy is no more.¹³⁶

Not yet twenty-six, Lanskoy died of what was probably diphtheria on Tuesday 25 June 1784. The tragedy rapidly became the stuff of legend. Following a raucous dinner in 1792 at which the guests cracked crude jokes about the empress’s insatiable sexual appetite, John Parkinson, an Oxford don conducting a young English nobleman on the Grand Tour, wrote a ‘Note on Lanskoy’ that gives a fine sense of the fecundity of the Petersburg rumour-mill in the last years of Catherine’s life:

It is certain that after his death his legs dropped off. The stench was also insufferable. The boy who gave him his coffee disappeared or died I believe the day after. All these circumstances lead [one] to suppose that he was poisoned. The Empress was inconsolable for his loss. No person but her faithful valet de chambre was suffered to approach her. Grief and the loss of sleep occasioned some spots to appear on her breasts which led her to fancy that she had caught the putrid fever of which they made her believe that L[anskoy] died. For four months afterwards, she kept herself shut up at Peterhoff. Her first reappearance was on occasion of the Polish Deputies; which gave Nariskin occasion to say ‘A plague on these Polish Deputies, I have not sat down to one of these murderous dinners before for an age.’¹³⁷

Apparently inspired by Quarenghi, and demonstrably inaccurate in almost every respect, such a tissue of invention tells us little about the events of summer 1784. Yet, along with Princess Dashkova’s claim that Lanskoy’s ‘stomach burst open’ after his death, it has helped to prompt some impossibly romanticised accounts of the favourite’s demise.¹³⁸ His corpse, it is alleged, was left to rot in the heat of the summer because Catherine could not bear to see it buried for more than a month.¹³⁹ The truth is more prosaic, but none the less touching for that.

The favourite’s lifeless body was taken from the palace at Tsarskoye Selo to the house Quarenghi had designed for him in Sofia. From there it was borne ‘with due honour’ to Cameron’s new cathedral on the morning of Thursday 27 June and immediately interred in the neighbouring cemetery following a funeral service conducted by Metropolitan Gavriil.¹⁴⁰ Bezborodko’s attempts not to trouble the empress with the details were thwarted by typically persistent questioning which, as he pointed out, ‘only made her grief the greater’. Catherine did not attend, having been confined to her apartments since Sunday. She, too, had developed alarming symptoms–a sore throat and a high fever–which prompted Dr Rogerson to draw two cups of ‘extremely inflamed’ blood on the day of the funeral. By then, he decided, she was out of danger. Prescribing salt to relieve the indigestion that had prevented her from sleeping, he confidently predicted a full recovery.¹⁴¹ In physical terms, he was right. Emotionally, however, Catherine took longer to recuperate. She shunned most visitors. Sasha’s mother, who arrived in response to the empress’s letter of condolence in the hope of securing her family’s favour, was deflected onto a lady-in-waiting.¹⁴² Though Catherine could hardly refuse to receive Paul and his wife on Paul’s name day, the audience was brief and the subdued celebrations went ahead without her. Servants were confined to their everyday livery and the customary salute, music and toasts were all cancelled as a mark of respect.¹⁴³

Soon the wider implications of the crisis were on everyone’s lips. Princess Dashkova would scarcely mourn the favourite, observed her younger sister: ‘They hated one another.’¹⁴⁴ Personalities were scarcely the point, countered Alexander Vorontsov. Even those who had no connection with Lanskoy must regret his passing when they learned of its impact on Catherine: ‘The preservation of the empress is too interesting to us all.’¹⁴⁵ Riding to the rescue from Kremenchug, Potëmkin arrived at Tsarskoye Selo on 10 July, having covered 760 miles in barely a week. He and Fëdor Orlov went straight to comfort their bereaved sovereign. On the following Sunday, they were joined briefly by Bruce, Osterman, Kirill Razumovsky, Ivan Chernyshëv and Lev Naryshkin. Catherine was persuaded to ride out in her carriage with a favourite lady-in-waiting, Maria Perekusikhina, but not even such close friends could draw her out of her self-imposed seclusion. She continued to dine alone, seeing few apart from Bezborodko, Potëmkin, Orlov and her confessor. Though she received further brief visits from Paul and Maria Fëdorovna, she avoided the traditional rituals during the Dormition Fast. By 18 August, she felt well enough to write a jocular letter to the Prince de Ligne, explaining (without mentioning Lanskoy) that she had immersed herself in work on her universal etymological dictionary. Anticipating Ligne’s next visit to Russia, she teased him about his son’s abortive flight in the Montgolfier balloon that tore open in mid-air on 19 January:

If you arrive here by balloon, my Prince, I shall reconcile myself to this fine invention, which I have banned for fear of increasing the danger of fire among the wooden buildings of which we have too many in our territories. The crash of the balloon at Lyon has not caused this new method of travel to be believed in here.¹⁴⁶

Yet it was one thing to joke to a friend, another to face her Court. While the feast of St Alexander Nevsky on 30 August brought a welcome opportunity to see her elder grandson, the annual celebrations, transferred from the monastery to Tsarskoye Selo, were conducted in her absence. To deepen her misery, a courier arrived from Moscow next day to announce the death of Zakhar Chernyshëv. At the time of their dalliance in 1751, Catherine had been unable to imagine paradise without her dashing cavalier; now he had got there before her. ¹⁴⁷

Having initially intended to remain in the country until 10 September, she returned to town five days early, travelling in a simple two-seater with a favourite lady-in-waiting, Anna Protasova, and sleeping in the Hermitage. The rooms she had occupied with Lanskoy carried too many memories, and it was not until the following spring that she returned to her usual Winter Palace apartments. Looking back, Catherine remembered the summer of 1784 as a perpetual series of battles to recover her equilibrium: ‘one to be fought, one to be won, one to be lost.’¹⁴⁸ Only on 8 September did she finally summon the courage to appear in public on the feast of the Nativity of the Virgin. After mass, she endured a lengthy hand-kissing ceremony before retiring to the Hermitage for lunch with Potëmkin, a handful of friends, and Prince Repnin, who had come to request her permission to take his sick daughter abroad.¹⁴⁹ ‘In truth,’ Catherine confessed to Grimm, ‘it was such a big effort that on returning to my bedroom, I felt so exhausted that anyone else would have fainted, something which has never happened to me in my life.’ ‘If you want to know my true state,’ she continued a fortnight later:

I will tell you that for three months from yesterday I have been inconsolable over the irreparable loss I have sustained, that the sole improvement is that I have got used to human faces again, that otherwise my heart still bleeds just as it did at that first moment, that I do my duty and try to do it well, but that my grief is extreme, and such as I have never felt in my life, and it is now three months that I have been in this cruel situation, suffering like the damned.¹⁵⁰

Count Cobenzl was more interested in the political consequences of such ‘immoderate grief’. Mercifully for a supporter of the Austrian alliance, they had proved to be minimal. For all Catherine’s emotional turbulence, the direction of her government had remained firm:

There has been not a single sort of discord within the Court. On the contrary, I believe that there have been few epochs where there has been so much unity and so little jealousy between the people to whom the management of affairs is entrusted. There is no question of a new favourite, and many people are beginning to believe that there won’t be one. If the health of the Empress is not altered by this change, it will certainly do more good than harm.¹⁵¹