CHAPTER TWELVE
The Swedish menace evaporated as suddenly as it had appeared after a period of rising alarm in the spring of 1790. When a courier arrived at Tsarskoye Selo on 4 May to announce the capture of an enemy man-of-war off Reval, Catherine hastily announced thanksgiving prayers: she had scarcely slept in anticipation of an adverse result.1 When Admiral Chichagov nevertheless failed to block the Swedish fleet’s course toward the Russian capital, her nerves stretched tauter still. From dawn on 23 May, ‘a terrible cannonade’ echoed all day, rattling windows from St Petersburg to the summer residence. ‘Anxiety’ was Khrapovitsky’s laconic comment.2 While Catherine tried to ease the tension by boating on the lake, the implications for the conflict on the Danube were inescapable. ‘Everyone is sick of the war,’ Zavadovsky told Field Marshal Rumyantsev on 14 June. ‘Any peace would be desirable and useful in our state of complete exhaustion.’3 Subsequent developments were even more disturbing. Although the Russian galley fleet under Prince Nassau Siegen captured seven Swedish ships of the line at Vyborg on 22 June, it proved to be a pyrrhic victory. Even as the empress was boasting about it in a letter to Potëmkin on the twenty-eighth anniversary of her coup, a disastrous encounter was taking place off Svensksund in which Nassau Siegen lost a total of sixty-four ships and more than 7300 men, most of them taken prisoner. Magnanimous as ever, Catherine refused to blame her distraught commander. ‘It was not the king of Sweden or even his fleet that defeated the prince of Nassau,’ she suggested to Grimm. ‘It was the high wind and people who thought themselves invincible out of an excess of ardour.’4 She was fortunate that Gustav III, deprived of the British subsidies that might have kept him in the war, was as keen as she was to sue for peace. At the price of Russia’s tacit abdication from further interference in Swedish politics, a settlement was reached at the small town of Verela on 3 August. ‘We have dragged one paw out of the mud,’ a relieved empress told Potëmkin. ‘When we drag the other out, we’ll sing Hallelujah.’5
While Potëmkin contemplated ways to bring the Turkish war to a triumphant conclusion–by no means a predictable outcome to pessimists such as Zavadovsky–Catherine prepared to commemorate the peace with Sweden with festivities out of all proportion to Russia’s achievements (the peace was announced with a glittering procession to the Kazan Church at the end of the Dormition Fast on 15 August and commemorated with sixteen days of celebrations beginning on the next great feast in the Orthodox calendar, the Feast of the Nativity of the Mother of God on 8 September). Meanwhile, neither Radishchev’s trial nor the exceptionally wet weather could dampen her mood. After an enjoyable summer in the company of Platon Zubov, playing cards in the Arabesque Room and strolling through the park at Tsarskoye Selo, she even managed to express enthusiasm for the annual celebrations at the Alexander Nevsky monastery, where echoes of her imperial ambitions sounded loud and clear. On 30 August, Giuseppe Sarti’s Te Deum, commissioned by Potëmkin to celebrate the fall of Ochakov and incorporating the sound of cannon fire, was sung to full orchestral accompaniment at the banquet following the consecration of Starov’s Trinity Cathedral (‘it is a pity it cannot be sung in church because of the instruments’).6 That morning, Catherine had processed with Grand Duke Paul and his sons as the silver casket containing St Alexander’s relics was borne to its ultimate resting place. Metropolitan Gavriil was assisted at the service by Bishop Innokenty of Pskov and another of the empress’s favourite prelates, the seventy-three-year-old Greek, Eugenios Voulgaris, recently retired as the first bishop of Kherson and now in the last stages of his translation of Virgil’s Aeneid into Greek (it was published in 1791–2 by the Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg).7 The day before, she had presented Gavriil with ‘an extremely fine’ emerald-studded panageia to wear round his neck alongside his pectoral cross ‘as a sign of his contribution to the building of the church’.8
As it transpired, these high spirits were only temporary. At the end of September, Baron Stedingk, the new Swedish ambassador, reported that Catherine had not been seen since ‘the day of the firework that brought the peace celebrations to an end, thank God’. Soaked by persistent rain, she had developed ‘a bad cold and was exhausted with all these fêtes, though that did not prevent her from going into her garden in the evening after the firework, so eager was she to appear at every rejoicing’.9 In fact, her colic had put her in such a bad mood that when told of the costs of the display on the meadow in front of Rastrelli’s Summer Palace, she demanded a full account from Colonel Melissino, whose pyrotechnics had ‘resembled a comic puppet show’. In this weakened state, it became a chore even to sign a decree (‘it was easier for Empress Anna: her name was shorter’), and she was irritated by all manner of setbacks, not least the slow progress of elementary education in Moscow (‘I shall have to go and live there for a year’).10 The same gallows humour was shared with Grimm once she had retired to bed to cure her cough: ‘In six weeks time I hope to read in the papers that I am at death’s door.’11 Her comedies might have been expected to lift her spirits–‘tragedies are never given at the Hermitage,’ Stedingk remarked later, ‘the empress being unable to endure the emotions of a tragedian’–but these had been playing to an increasingly select company. ‘Often there are only four or five in the audience,’ the Swede was told, ‘which drives the actors to despair.’ At larger gatherings, ‘which are very rare’, she was content with a hand of boston if there was no theatrical performance. ‘It is all over by nine o’clock. The empress goes to bed and a small company of the men dine with Mr Zubov.’12 Early in the New Year, Stedingk reported the creation of a new institution–‘middling-size Hermitages’, with a guest list of about sixty. In the first half of October, however, illness kept Catherine out of the public eye. When she appeared at Court on the morning of Maria Fëdorovna’s birthday, it was the first time she had been seen for three weeks.13
The triumphant premiere of her operatic pageant The Beginning of Oleg’s Reign on 22 October signalled a change of mood. At the large Hermitage two days later, the empress danced the polonaise and stayed up for the ball and dinner.14 For Count Nikolay Saltykov’s masked ball at the Vorontsov palace, she wore ‘a white satin dress in the Russian style’ with a ‘cocked hat à la Henri IV, decorated with a plume of white feathers and a glittering diamond solitaire’. ‘The costume was fine, simple and grand,’ reported the secretary of the Swedish embassy.15 In November, the knights of the orders of St George and St Andrew were able to celebrate with due ceremony in Catherine’s company; Princess Dashkova sat beside her at the banquet on her name day.16 Meanwhile she had resumed her efforts to charm the foreign diplomats. Invited to inspect Voltaire’s library, Stedingk and the Prussian ambassador ‘spent a part of the day, as one might say, with Voltaire himself. The remarks he scribbled in the margins of his books while he was reading perhaps paint a better picture of this extraordinary man than his works themselves. His spirit, his gaiety, his humour and his caprices appear in their true light.’17
Something of the empress’s own capacity for whimsy was revealed when she surprised her courtiers at a masquerade on 10 November. The event was a mixture between Elizabeth’s cross-dressing balls and the entertainment staged for Grand Duke Peter at Oranienbaum in 1757. Ordered in advance not to wear hooped underskirts, her guests at the Hermitage found themselves steered towards stalls manned by actors from the French theatre, who sold them (on credit) the costumes she had chosen–a mixture of Turkish, Persian and Egyptian dress, all designed for a quick change. ‘Everyone was very happy,’ Khrapovitsky commented.18 Flushed with success, Catherine became noticeably more relaxed as winter set in. ‘Her Majesty gladly speaks of education in general,’ Stedingk noted, ‘and those of her grandsons in particular.’ The voyage to the South was another favoured subject: ‘“I have never felt better than I did on that journey,” the empress said to me, “and what amused me greatly was that all the newspapers announced that I was dying.” “Fortunately, madame, the newspapers almost never tell the truth.”’19
By the end of the year, she had a new topic of conversation, widely reported in the European press. Potëmkin’s autumn advances along the Danube had been thwarted at Ismail, a 265-gun fortress on the northern bank of the river defended by an exceptionally large garrison of 35,000 Turks. But on 29 December, the favourite’s younger brother Valerian Zubov arrived in St Petersburg with news that even this seemingly impregnable stronghold had fallen. Summoned expressly for the task, Suvorov had stormed the ramparts in swirling mists in the early hours of the morning of 11 December. While six columns of men attacked the walls–built with the assistance of French military engineers, four miles in circumference and protected by moats fifty feet wide and twenty feet deep–a galley flotilla invaded from the river under the command of the Neapolitan adventurer José de Ribas.20 ‘The most horrible carnage followed,’ recalled the Comte de Damas, ‘the most unequalled butchery. It is no exaggeration to say that the gutters of the town were dyed with blood.’ Immortalised by Byron in Don Juan, the fighting took on a romantic hue from the start. ‘The walls and people of Ismail fell at the foot of Her Imperial Majesty’s throne,’ Suvorov announced to Potëmkin at the end of the day. ‘The assault was prolonged and bloody. Ismail is taken, thank God!’21 ‘We are assured that 20,000 Turks perished in this affair,’ Stedingk reported, ‘and 11,000 were taken prisoner, though the assailants numbered no more than 18,000 so they say. The Russians lost 2000 men and a further 4000 injured.’ That was almost certainly an understatement. Though the precise casualties may never be known, the Turks are thought to have lost 26,000 men and the Russians somewhere between 4000 and 8000.22
While Potëmkin had been plotting the defeat of the Sultan, Catherine had been faced with a crisis in the Court theatre. It erupted at the Hermitage on 11 February 1791 when the leading lady threw herself at the empress’s feet at the end of a performance of her latest comic opera, Fedul and his children. Once interpreted as a young lover’s struggle against the arbitrary tsarist regime, Yelizaveta Uranova’s plea to be released from the attentions of the debauched Count Bezborodko seems more likely to have been staged by the empress as a way of embarrassing Khrapovitsky and the count. Assuming that she would be distracted by the pressures of international events, Bezborodko had defied Catherine’s earlier decision to permit Uranova to marry her fiancé, the actor Silu Sandunov, who had been dismissed after demanding more money. Now it was the count’s turn to be humiliated when the empress not only granted Uranova’s petition, but reinstated Sandunov at a higher salary than before (though not quite the rate he had himself requested). The seemingly vacuous plot of Fedul and his children has been revealed by Andrey Zorin as an allegory of the transfer of the direction of the Court theatre to the sovereign from Khrapovitsky, who was removed from his position immediately after the performance. Part of Catherine’s concern lay with the lax behaviour of his voluptuous young actresses, many of whom were drawn into covert prostitution. But her earlier warning to her secretary that France had been undone by a decline in morals pointed to a significantly wider anxiety.23
Beyond the walls of her own palace, few regarded the empress as a plausible guardian of morality of any kind. Now that the storming of Ismail had reinforced the European stereotype of the Russians as a primitive people led by bloodthirsty savages, Catherine’s international rivals drew increasingly explicit parallels between her apparently insatiable appetite for imperial expansion and her notorious sexual rapaciousness. In the age of Gillray and Rowlandson, English caricaturists were in their element. The first semi-pornographic engraving to feature the empress had appeared on 24 October 1787 NS, two months after the beginning of the Turkish war. Backed by a cowering Joseph II complete with dunce’s cap, Catherine appears as ‘The Christian Amazon’ as a simian Louis XVI lobs towards her two grenades that form testicles to the phallic symbol of the Turk’s bayonet.24 The great majority of such satirical prints, however, date from the spring of 1791. One of the most explicit–‘The Imperial Stride’, published anonymously on 12 April NS–features a colossal figure of the empress with one foot in Russia and the other stretched out to Constantinople. Beneath her, ten diminished European rulers gaze up into her skirts in awe: ‘By Saint Jago,’ declares the king of Spain, ‘I’ll strip her of her fur!’ George III splutters his trademark ‘What! What! What! What a prodigious expansion!’, and the Sultan reluctantly admits that ‘The whole Turkish army wouldn’t satisfy her.’25
This sudden rash of derogatory images signalled that Anglo-Russian relations had reached an all-time low. Irritated by the Franco-Russian commercial treaty of 1787 that undermined Britain’s longstanding domination of the Russia trade, William Pitt had been further alarmed by the empress’s gains at the Turks’ expense. In January 1791, spurred on by his ambassador in Berlin, the prime minister demanded an end to the war and a return to the status quo ante by which Russia would have been forced to relinquish Ochakov, whose capture had been interpreted as a harbinger of the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire.26 In March, when Catherine refused to capitulate, Pitt threatened to send a fleet to the Baltic with Prussian support. As King Frederick William II mobilised 88,000 troops in preparation for an attack on his eastern neighbour, both Bezborodko and Potëmkin urged concessions. Catherine was clearly disturbed: ‘Anxiety about Prussia,’ Khrapovitsky recorded in his diary on 15 March. ‘It has gone on a long time. She cried.’27
As so often in her declining years, nervousness led to exhaustion and lapses in concentration. ‘The empress is not what she was,’ Stedingk reported privately to Gustav III at the end of the month. ‘Age and the inconveniences it brings render her less capable of doing business.’28But there was never anything pathetic about Catherine. ‘Angry,’ her secretary noted on 7 April, ‘obstinacy will lead to a new war.’ Since it is not always clear whose words Khrapovitsky is recording, it is hard to be sure whether this was the voice of Potëmkin, irritated by her refusal to appease the Prussians, or an expression of the empress’s own exasperation at the sabre-rattling in Whitehall and Potsdam.29 Whichever it was, Catherine held her nerve and was vindicated when British public opinion, encouraged by her ambassador, Semën Vorontsov, and her admirer, Pitt’s rival Charles James Fox, helped to force the prime minister to back down.30 On 14 September NS, William Dent’s cartoon ‘Black Carlo’s White Bust, or The Party’s Plenipo in Catherine’s Closet’ portrayed the playwright Sheridan urging Fox to visit Russia: ‘your fortune is made–she has certainly heard of your fine parts.’ Indeed she had, though not in the way the cartoonist’s innuendo implied. When the Hermitage had taken delivery of a marble bust of Fox by Joseph Nollekens, a bronze copy was placed between Demosthenes and Cicero in the Cameron Gallery at Tsarskoye Selo. There it stayed until 1793, when Fox doubly disgraced himself in the empress’s eyes by supporting the Poles and expressing sympathy for the revolution in France. At that stage, the visiting English tutor John Parkinson was told that she was prepared to sell the bust, ‘but that it was not worth while, for that she could not get thirty roubles for it’.31
According to a leading historian of international relations, the ‘Ochakov crisis’ of spring 1791 was ‘not just a clash over peace terms with Turkey or a contest of wills between Pitt and Catherine, but a wider contest between the two relatively invulnerable flank powers over which of them would lead Europe and control the balance of power’.32 For the moment, it was the Russians who were in the ascendant and they saw no reason to conceal their glee. ‘General Suvorov has been here for a fortnight,’ Stedingk reported on 14 March. ‘480 flags and regimental colours, along with several Pashas’ tails and other tokens of dignity, carried off from the Turks at Ismail and solemnly paraded on Sunday to the church in the fortress [the Peter-Paul Cathedral], constitute a eulogy to this general far more eloquent than any panegyric.’ Catherine watched the parade from the windows of the Winter Palace.33 The whole city had come to a standstill in anticipation of Potëmkin’s arrival at the end of February. On 28 April he staged his own glorification of the fall of Ismail at his new residence, later christened the Tauride Palace in his memory, complete with choruses by Derzhavin: ‘Thunder of victory, resound!’
‘Like all his other plans,’ remarked Catherine’s first Western biographer, this entertainment ‘was extraordinary and great. A whole month was consumed in preparations: artists of all kinds were employed; whole shops and warehouses were emptied to supply the necessaries of the occasion; several hundred persons were daily assembled in making previous rehearsals for the final execution; and each of these days was of itself a grand spectacle.’34 On the appointed evening, Catherine found herself serenaded by Potëmkin’s private orchestra as Alexander and Constantine–their very names redolent of Russia’s imperial ambitions in the South–opened the dancing with a stylish quadrille. Then the company moved to the Gobelins Room, where, amidst the tapestries, their host had prepared a typical conceit: a life-size mechanical elephant studded with emeralds and rubies. ‘The Persian who conducted him struck upon a bell, and this was the signal for another change: A curtain flew up as if by magic, and opened to view a magnificently decorated theatre, where two ballets and a dramatical piece afforded entertainment to the spectators with their extraordinary excellence.’ One of the pieces performed was a version of Nicolas Chamfort’s The Merchant of Smyrna, staged in celebration of the deliverance of Russia’s southern provinces from Turkish rule. Indeed, though the pouring rain obliged them to suspend their disbelief, Potëmkin’s guests found themselves transported throughout the evening to an exotic southern paradise, complete with luscious fruits in the brilliantly lit Winter Garden designed by his English gardener, William Gould.35 ‘Whichever way the spectator turned his eye, the magnificent illumination struck him with amazement. The walls and columns all seemed to glow with various-coloured fire: large mirrors, here and there judiciously fixed to the sides of the apartments, or made to form pyramids and grottos, multiplied the effect of this singular exhibition, and even made the whole enclosure from top to bottom, seem to be composed of sparkling stones.’36
At the centre of the entertainment, both physically and rhetorically, was Catherine herself. ‘Before her,’ Derzhavin proclaimed in a celebrated description of the event, ‘everything becomes more alive, everything takes on greater radiance…Her bright face encourages smiles, dances, charades, games. This is the image of a mother, this is a monarch surrounded by glory, love, magnificence.’37 Intended for her sixty-second birthday on Easter Monday, the entertainment was delayed only by the scale of its host’s ambition. Once he had persuaded the empress to send Suvorov to Finland on 25 April, as a way of putting pressure on the Swedes, Potëmkin could pose as the sole victor of Ismail. By the time he was ready to greet her, resplendent in his new crimson velvet tailcoat, his private party resembled a state occasion in almost every detail, down to the cockaigne for the populace in the square outside.38 For Catherine, the event brought to an end an exceptionally stressful week, in which her pleasure at the news of Pitt’s growing difficulties in Parliament was balanced by the need for preparations at Kronstadt in case the threatened British squadron materialised. She was later to pay for her excitement with an attack of the colic, but for now she celebrated her relief by staying at the Tauride Palace until two in the morning. ‘There you are, monsieur,’ she boasted to Grimm on her return to her apartments: ‘That is how we conduct ourselves in Petersburg in the midst of trouble and war and the threats of dictators.’39
In one crucial respect, Potëmkin’s entertainment missed its mark. It failed to dislodge Platon Zubov and his relations, the only prominent Russians left off the 3000-strong guest list. Diplomats heard that the empress was privately critical of the prince’s extravagance and irritated by his machinations against her favourite. Certainly his appearances at Court were few in May and June. Since Radishchev had reminded Catherine of the damage that Potëmkin’s reputation for corruption could do, a measure of hesitation was understandable. But it was never enough to rupture the trust between them. As Isabel de Madariaga puts it, ‘there was a solidity in the link between the two which could be ruffled, but not broken by a Zubov’.40
That was just as well, since before Potëmkin left for the South on 24 July, he and Catherine had to agree on their response to the latest developments in Warsaw. The Poles had already taken advantage of the Russo-Turkish war to operate free from Russian influence through the sovereign Diet that began its four-year term in 1788.41 On 3 May 1791 NS, the week before the entertainment at the Tauride Palace, King Stanislaw August and a group of royalist conspirators, acting in temporary alliance with Ignacy Potocki and the Patriot Party, forced through the Diet a new constitution promising a major overhaul of the Polish political system. By abolishing the liberum veto, by which a single objection could de-rail proposed legislation, they sought to replace Poland’s anarchic ‘republic of nobles’ with a more orderly bi-cameral legislature backed by executive royal authority (‘Experience has taught us that the neglect of this essential part of government has overwhelmed Poland with disasters’).42 The Constitution of 3 May was doubly offensive to Catherine: not only did it threaten the prospect of a permanently stronger Western neighbour, but to a sovereign unable to distinguish between electoral reform and revolutionary Jacobinism, it seemed to signal the advance of the French contagion towards the borders of her own empire. For as long as the Turkish war continued, there could be no question of direct intervention against the Poles. So the empress satisfied herself by signalling her determination to overthrow the new constitution in the name of the old order. ‘This,’ Paul Schroeder has suggested, ‘was a serious, middle-of-the-road kind of programme for dealing with the Polish problem, stabilising Central and Eastern Europe, and making the European system work–about as good a one as the eighteenth century could offer.’ And it had the further advantage of leaving open two more radical options for the future: once the new constitution had been pushed aside, Poland could either be preserved as a Russian satellite or partitioned once more by a Russian-dominated coalition.43
Events in Poland obliged Catherine to cast her eye towards France with new urgency. Not long after Louis XVI’s abortive flight to Varennes in June 1791, she made a secret loan of 500,000 roubles ‘for use in French affairs’.44 Yet much as she might urge Sweden, Prussia and Austria to intervene against the Revolution, her aim was always to embroil them while retaining a free hand (not until 1798 did Russia join the anti-French coalition, with disastrous results for Tsar Paul). As the leading French émigré Count Valentin Esterhazy discovered, Catherine’s methods were at once more subtle and less risky. Soon after arriving in St Petersburg at the end of August, the count was entertained to dinner by Alexander Stroganov, an old acquaintance from Paris:
There were thirty of us. I ate several Russian dishes, sterlet soup, mushroom paté and other nourishing ragouts which are good when they are prepared by good cooks, excepting, however, an iced soup which was detestable and a drink whose name I have forgotten, made with flour, which was no better.45
Yet even Stroganov’s hospitality paled into insignificance alongside Catherine’s determination to woo the émigrés. ‘I work on the feelings of everyone of that ilk who falls into my hands,’ she admitted to Grimm. ‘I do not know in what state they return, but I cover them with fur as far as I can, and I tell them to seek their plans and their measures in the conduct of Henri IV.’ Catherine knew full well that Louis XVI was no Henri IV. Still, treating Esterhazy ‘entirely without ceremony’, she thought he seemed ‘fairly pleased’ with her. In fact, he was bowled over. After Catherine had shown off her paintings during the interval at his first ‘small Hermitage’, the astonished count told his wife that it was the sort of tour he might have taken ‘at the country estate of a private individual who was kind enough to show me round his house’.46 Formal occasions were stunning in a different way. ‘The empress was in white,’ Esterhazy reported after chapel one Sunday, ‘with a sky-blue, sleeveless Russian robe and a broad, blue sash, tied in front of her skirt. She wore gauze on her head and a pendant with two enormous diamonds, diamond clusters in each ear and a pretty bracelet.’ On the twenty-ninth anniversary of Catherine’s coronation, he kissed her hand and dined at the house of Count Osterman, the vice chancellor, with a hundred others at the Court’s expense. That night, more than a thousand carriages were ranged across the square for the dress ball at the Winter Palace.47
Behind the façade, Catherine was deeply troubled. Although the summer had brought good news from the Danube, where the Turks, weakened by the fall of Ismail, had sued for peace in the wake of defeats inflicted by Prince Nikolay Repnin, the preliminary treaty agreed at Jassy on 1 August was unsatisfactory. Despite securing the swathe of land between the Bug and the Dnieper, including Ochakov, Repnin had conceded the Turkish demand that the conquered territory should remain unfortified, and also agreed to an eight-month armistice which Potëmkin regarded as no more than a ruse to postpone the final treaty, thereby hampering Russia intervention in Poland.48 Worse was to come when the prince contracted a fatal fever while trying to negotiate a better settlement. News of his illness reached the empress at the end of August and fluctuating reports of his health left her increasingly agitated. ‘My true friend Prince Grigory Aleksandrovich,’ she wrote on 16 September. ‘I have received your letters of 29 August and 6 September. The first greatly cheered me, since I could see you were better, whereas the second only made me more anxious, seeing that for four days you had an uninterrupted fever and a headache. I beg God to give you strength…I, thank God, am well, and the colic has completely gone, which I put down to the girdle and the Hungarian wine you recommended.’ At the end of the month, she sent him a little fur coat and a homily: ‘For Christ’s sake, if need be, take whatever the doctors prescribe to bring you relief. And after taking it I beg you to avoid any food and drink that might counteract the medicine.’49 (The prince’s appetite exceeded even his disdain for the medical profession: ‘his ordinary breakfast was the greater part of a smoke-dried goose from Hamburgh’ washed down by ‘a prodigious quantity of wine and Dantzick-liqueurs’.)50 On 3 October, Catherine was in tears on hearing that he had been given the last rites. Still hoping against hope, she wrote a final note of encouragement, reassuring him that his physicians were sure he was improving. Potëmkin never saw it. On 4 October, he confessed that he could no longer bear his suffering. Next day, the man with whom she had shared more than any other was laid out on the road to Jassy and died in a coma soon after his fifty-second birthday.51
‘Between you and me,’ Esterhazy confided to his wife not long afterwards, ‘I believe the empress has not missed Potëmkin much. He rather abused the sway he had over her and I am assured that she received complaints against him every day.’52 This was the voice of the prince’s enemies, led by Repnin and the governor of Alexander’s Young Court, Count Nikolay Saltykov, who had drawn General Suvorov into their ambit by arranging protection at Court for his daughter, a pupil at the Smolny Institute. Anxious not to be associated too publicly with critics of his late patron, Suvorov claimed that his conscience was clear ‘before God and my Great Empress’. Even so, he privately described Bezborodko, who had replaced Potëmkin in the peace negotiations at Jassy, as ‘wise, like the deceased, only less treacherous’.53
In fact, though conscious of the mistrust he inspired, Catherine never lost her faith in her ‘pupil, friend and almost idol’. So devastated was she by Potëmkin’s death that her doctors insisted she be bled as soon as she heard the news on the afternoon of 12 October. Sleepless with grief, she poured out her feelings to Grimm in the early hours of the following morning, telling him of the ‘bludgeoning blow’ her mind had just sustained:
You can have no idea of my state of affliction! He combined an excellent heart with a rare understanding and an extraordinary breadth of spirit; his views were always great and magnanimous; he was very humane, full of knowledge, singularly loveable, and his ideas were always original; no other man had his gift for bons mots and apt remarks; his military genius during this war must have been striking, because he never missed a blow on land or sea. No one in the world was less easily led than he; he also had a particular talent for knowing how to use the people around him. In a word, he was a statesman in both counsel and action; he was passionately and zealously attached to me; scolding and getting angry when he believed I might have done better; with age and experience he was correcting his faults…But his rarest quality was a courage of heart, mind and soul which set him completely apart from the rest of humanity, and which meant that we understood each other perfectly and could allow those who understood less to babble as much as they liked. I regard Prince Potëmkin as a very great man, who did not fulfil half of what was in his grasp.54
It took almost year to settle the prince’s affairs. On 20 August 1792, Catherine signed a decree at Tsarskoye Selo paying his testators a total of 2,611,144 roubles and 1 kopeck for his property and possessions. The Tauride Palace, built mainly at her own expense for almost 400,000 roubles between 1782 and 1790, was valued at more than twice as much, mostly on the basis of alterations made in the last summer of Potëmkin’s life. His art collection, purchased from the Duchess of Kingston among others, included paintings by Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Rubens, van Dyck, Murillo, Poussin and Watteau. His library amounted to some 1065 foreign-language titles, many in multiple volumes, and 106 in Russian. She gave the books he had purchased from Eugenios Voulgaris, including nearly 150 Greek works dating from the early sixteenth century, to the Department of Public Welfare in Yekaterinoslav (Potëmkin’s plans for a university there had never borne fruit). Among his jewels and treasures, valued at well over a million roubles in total, were a diamond ring set in pink foil (20,000 r), two marble vases (10,000 r), 176 porcelain vases, urns and dolls (17,600 r), sixty-five hunting horns (1500 r), a large mahogany organ (3460 r); a lacquered commode, mounted in bronze (4000 r) and another decorated with gilded mirrors (2500 r); a bronze oak tree covered with mechanical birds (11,000 r); four pieces of topaz, one of which weighed almost 500 lbs (2300 r); and no fewer than seventy-three of his trademark pearl-encrusted kaftans (13,505 r). By comparison, the white marble bust of Her Majesty was a mere bagatelle at 1000 roubles.55
Once the war with the Turks had finally been settled at the peace of Jassy in January 1792, Catherine herself planned to spend more time at the Tauride Palace. Though at first she was conscious of the shade of her late partner, it was convenient, as she grew less mobile, to have everything on one level, right down to the pond for the summer sanctification ceremonies. ‘This palace is the height of fashion,’ she boasted to Grimm in 1794, ‘since it is all on the ground floor, with a large and beautiful garden, right in the middle of the barracks on the bank of the Neva, the cavalry to the right, the artillery to the left, and the Preobrazhensky [Guards] behind the garden. There is nowhere better for the spring and autumn.’56 Designed by Ivan Starov in the restrained neoclassical style she had come to prefer, there was nothing modest about the palace’s dimensions: as an English visitor remarked in 1790, its apartments were as ‘immense’ as Potëmkin himself.57 The colonnade hall in which he had entertained the empress in April 1791 was reputed to be the largest in Europe. The prince had dined in the semicircular bow at one end while his orchestra played at the other; the empress preferred to eat in the centre of the room.58 From there she could see into Gould’s Winter Garden, beyond the temple containing Fëdor Shubin’s statue of Catherine the Legislatrix. Having lost none of her enthusiasm for building, she commissioned a Palladian villa for Gould in the palace grounds in 1793.59 But before she herself could embark on long periods of residence there, the palace required significant restoration. In January 1793, Catherine approved a long list of repairs to be completed by 20 March. The wooden partitions erected in her private apartments the year before were to be strengthened; beams were to be replaced ‘in all those places where danger is most foreseen’; the porcelain stoves were to be stripped to their foundations so that the panels behind them could be replaced in brick to prevent a conflagration; and all ‘doubtful places’ near the theatre were to be reinforced. Further work, including a safety inspection of the cupola, was planned for the summer while the Court was at Tsarskoye Selo.60
The structural deficiencies that Catherine strove to correct at the Tauride Palace were not so different from the ones she mocked in her description of Elizabeth’s draughty residences in the final version of her memoir, written in 1794. But this was a text designed to highlight contrasts rather than similarities between the two eras. In later life Catherine liked to boast how much more orderly her own Court had become by comparison with the chaos she had experienced as a grand duchess (failures of protocol on the part of her officials were treated with corresponding severity).61 Modelled on Plutarch’s Lives, her memoirs pursued the same theme in more subtle form. Platon Zubov had been obliged to construe Plutarch with her while waiting for news from the Danube in the spring of 1790, when they translated his biographies of Alcibiades and Coriolanus (‘it fortifies my soul’). After that, the author first recommended to her by Count Gyllenborg in Hamburg was never far from her mind (in February 1796, an eighteen-volume edition of his works was among her last purchases for her library at Tsarskoye Selo).62 Plutarch’s pairing of lives of the great men of ancient Greece with those of ancient Rome suggested to Catherine a way of comparing herself with her murdered husband. Like her classical mentor, she concentrated primarily on questions of character and personal virtue, implying that she, and not Peter III, was the worthier successor to Elizabeth.63
Unable to read her confidential memoirs, contemporaries struggled to match Catherine’s claims to orderliness with the reality of Russia in the early 1790s. Though it came as no surprise at the end of a degenerative illness that had rendered him ‘useless for four years’, the death of Prince Vyazemsky on 8 January 1793 significantly destabilised her regime. ‘You can’t imagine what a state he’s in,’ Catherine had warned Zubov after seeing her ailing Senate Procurator in 1792. ‘As he says himself, he neither eats nor sleeps. His heart races almost continually; his head is so weak that it drops on his shoulder when he sits down; seated in his chair, he rocks from side to side out of feebleness; he says that every movement is unbearable and that fresh air leaves him breathless.’64Such was the nature of Russia’s patronage system that Vyazemsky’s demise signalled far more than the loss of a single experienced administrator. Between the onset of the prince’s illness in 1791 and his death, nearly half the empire’s senior provincial offices changed hands. The political implications of this merry-go-round were all the more unsettling because Catherine’s reforms had left provincial bodies responsible for many of her government’s most important functions. And among her newly appointed provincial governors and their staff were men who had begun to wonder where the new centre of gravity would lie in the absence of Vyazemsky and Potëmkin.65
If some of them understandably looked sidelong towards Gatchina, where Grand Duke Paul was waiting impatiently in the wings, the one thing that united most prominent courtiers and officials was the conviction that Platon Zubov was unsuited to fill the void. Since an age gap of thirty-eight years between the empress and her favourite was bound to excite comment, John Parkinson found the Russian capital alive with prurient gossip in 1792–3. This was the atmosphere in which the fabulist Ivan Krylov could venture to publish (anonymously) suggestive verses about ‘The dying coquette’ that owed something to the libertine tradition of pornographic journalism rampant in late eighteenth-century France.66 But if Catherine’s increasingly desperate search for comfort and companionship threatened to desacralise the monarchy, Zubov’s inflated ambitions were even more damaging to her reputation. While she tirelessly advertised his virtues to Grimm, St Petersburg remained unconvinced. Ivan Shuvalov, the leading influence behind Russia’s cultural efflorescence in the late 1750s, had shown what could be done by an intelligent favourite operating under the aegis of an ailing empress. Zubov was a mere cipher by comparison. Here was an avaricious upstart who had achieved nothing and yet pretended to everything. Making a pun on ‘zub’, the Russian word for tooth, Potëmkin had likened Catherine’s latest protégé to an irritating molar that ought to be removed. Released from his rivalry with Potëmkin, whose enemy Saltykov became Zubov’s firmest ally at Court, the new favourite interfered in both domestic and foreign policy, relentlessly acquiring offices in the army and New Russia in a vain attempt to inherit the master’s mantle. On the day before her sixty-seventh birthday in 1796, Catherine rewarded his service to the state with 100,000 roubles; in January 1792, she had given him his own chancery; he even held his own elaborate lever in his palace apartments. ‘This Zeuboff has the character of being an active little man,’ Parkinson remarked, ‘who however behaves with no small degree of hauteur, which in a person from the dust as he is gives no small offence.’67
The exposure of the corrupt Court banker in 1791 symbolised the cracks that had begun to open up in Catherine’s administration. Living in style on the English Line as the scion of a prominent shipbuilding family, Richard Sutherland had acquired a reputation for wheeler-dealing that led Catherine to trust him with her finances and invest him, as she had Dr Dimsdale, as a baron of the Russian empire in 1788. Three years later, when she began to hear complaints about his activities, Derzhavin, whom Zubov had helped to appoint as one of her secretaries, was ordered to investigate. Frustrated to discover that almost all the leading figures in the government were as indebted to Sutherland as he was himself, Derzhavin was unable to complete his inquiry before the banker died on 4 October 1791, the day before Potëmkin. Nevertheless, a further probe in the following spring revealed that he had embezzled more than 2 million roubles. The prince, who had been borrowing from Sutherland since 1783, owed 800,000; Zubov’s influential protégé, Arkady Morkov, owed 42,000; Vyazemsky and Grand Duke Paul were also deeply in debt. Infuriated by her son’s behaviour, Catherine had no option but to order the treasury to absorb the largest debts.68
A different investigation was begun in the following year when Nikolay Novikov again fell under suspicion. After the raids on his shops in 1787, the cautious publisher had issued very few radical occult books and spent more time at his family estate at Avdotino, forty miles east of Moscow. But since his efforts at famine relief were combined with a determination to improve the profitability of the estate, critics accused him of using Masonic philanthropy as a smokescreen for the exploitation of his peasants. Though Catherine initially wanted Novikov to defend himself against such charges in a court of law, the Governor General of Moscow, Prince Prozorovsky, persuaded her to have him sent under armed guard to the fortress at Schlüsselburg. There he was questioned by the widely feared prosecutor Sheshkovsky and sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment on 1 August 1792. Although the interrogation was based on twelve points raised by the empress herself, her motivation remains uncertain. Was it pressure from the Holy Synod that inclined her to make an example of this Rosicrucian heretic? Was it his links with the Prussian-based Masons who surrounded Grand Duke Paul? Why was it that Novikov, rather than his many collaborators, was singled out for persecution?69
In the absence of definitive answers to such questions, Novikov’s arrest and imprisonment seem best interpreted as part of a wider pattern of increasingly visceral (and increasingly erratic) responses to the challenges of the revolutionary era. It was not an easy time for Europe’s sovereigns. Joseph II had died in 1790; his brother, Leopold II, unexpectedly followed him to the grave two years later. Within less than a month, Catherine was horrified to learn that Gustav III of Sweden had been shot by a disgruntled aristocrat at a masked ball on 5 March 1792 (the incident inspired Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera). Small as her respect for Louis XVI had been, she was completely disconcerted by his execution on 21 January 1793NS–by a macabre coincidence, the anniversary of the execution of Pugachëv in 1775. After retiring to bed, Catherine remained out of the public eye until 1 February, when she emerged to proclaim six weeks of mourning at Court. All relations with the revolutionary regime in Paris were broken off.70
The empress’s inveterate English critic Horace Walpole was sure that the wrong monarch had died:
Oh! that Catherine Slay-Czar had been Queen of France in the room of Antoinette–I do not say it would have been any security for her husband’s life; but it would have saved thousands and thousands of other lives, and preserved the late new, amiable and disinterested Constitution of Poland–Well, that Fury of the North has barefaced her own hypocrisy–She pretended to give a code of laws to her ruffians, and to emancipate their slaves; and now plunges the poor Poles again into vassalage under a vile system.71
Although the Polish question remained in most respects as complex as ever–not least as a result of the confessional heterogeneity of some parts of the population72–there was one sense in which Catherine’s options had been simplified by Potëmkin’s demise. By the end of his life, there were almost a quarter of a million people on his Polish estates around Śmila, on the River Dnieper, which he was widely suspected of wanting to transform into a feudal principality. After his death, Catherine could pursue his ambitions for a further partition without fear of a rival power base.73Having signalled her intention to intervene in Poland in February 1792, she seized her chance in May when a group of Polish reactionaries, with Russian support, appealed to her to restore Polish liberties at the Confederation of Targowica, a town in eastern Poland. As many as 100,000 Russian troops soon overwhelmed the Polish resistance that helped to justify their intervention. Now the way was open for a second partition, shared between Russia and Prussia. ‘My part is sung,’ wrote Catherine to Rumyantsev when the Prussian alliance was sealed in November, ‘It is an example of how it is not impossible to attain an end and to succeed if one really wills it.’74 Handicapped by the French declaration of war in August 1792, the Austrians, having unwisely consented to Prussian gains in Poland in the false hope of exchanging Belgium for Bavaria, were left to seek compensation from France by the deal agreed in January 1793 which gave Russia most of eastern Poland and a further 3 million subjects, including, for the first time, a significant number of Jews.75 Now that Stanislaw August’s dreams of autonomy had been shattered, the final dismemberment of his kingdom could not be long postponed. When Tadeusz Kościusko led an insurrection against the Russian plenipotentiary in March 1794, all three eastern powers combined to suppress it. Initially delayed by the threat of another war with the Turks, Catherine sent Suvorov into Poland in August. On 4 November, he stormed Praga, a suburb of Warsaw, butchering between 13,000 and 20,000 Poles. After that, Zavadovsky predicted to Rumyantsev that ‘the impending partition’ would be straightforward enough: ‘Our neighbours, in their current exhaustion, are in no state to swagger.’76 So it proved. On 24 December 1794, the third partition removed the name of Poland from the map of Europe, giving the Russians 120,000 square kilometres of new territory, by comparison with 48,000 for Prussia and 47,000 for Austria. In celebration, Catherine granted 107,000 Polish serfs to her closest advisers, 13,199 of them to Platon Zubov.77
Though the empress never totally rejected French ideas–a luxurious edition of Bayle’s Dictionary, which she had first read at the beginning of the 1750s, was on the list with Plutarch among her last orders from Johann Weitbrecht, the leading bookseller in St Petersburg–she did little to conceal her growing pessimism.78 Faced with revolutionary death threats from France in April 1792, she complained to Grimm that ‘it is apparently a good thing to assassinate people at the end of the eighteenth century, and I am told that it is Voltaire who preached this. See how they dare to cast calumnies on people: I think Voltaire would rather stay where he is buried than find himself in the company of Mirabeau’. By February 1794, however, she told Grimm that he had been right to distance himself from the philosophes, whose work had ‘served only to destroy’. In April she went further: ‘I remembered yesterday something you have said to me more than once: that this century has been a century of preparation.’ Now that preparation seemed only to have led to ‘filth’ of every kind, with the prospect of ‘calamities without end and innumerable wretched people’.79 In such a climate, the moderate Russian writers whose careers Catherine had done so much to foster found themselves under increasing suspicion. A year after the assassination of Louis XVI, even Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar was removed from the bookshops because it dealt with regicide. Catherine’s last significant piece of legislation was the edict of 11 October 1796 which revoked the right of individuals to operate private presses, granted in 1783. Anxious as she had been to propagate improving ideas, an empress obsessed with obedience not only baulked at the growth of independent publishing but was unable to conceive of an orderly system of censorship for the private presses. Twelve of the sixteen closed overnight. Whereas 320 secular books had been published in Russia in 1796, only 212 appeared in the first year of Tsar Paul’s reign, the lowest total since 1777.80
Although the empress’s view of the Enlightenment had undergone a marked transformation since her patronage of Voltaire and Diderot in the 1760s, little in her daily routine had changed. Sitting in her study every morning, she continued to dispatch business just as she had done throughout her reign. One of her secretaries’ jobs was to process the petitions submitted in her name. Of the 1920 submitted to the chancellery directed by Dimitry Troshchinsky and Adrian Gribovsky between January 1795 and 4 November 1796, two thirds (1036) were from nobles. Merchants (119) constituted the next largest group; 85 came from non-noble officials and army officers; 66 were from peasants, 46 from foreigners and 12 from the empress’s own Court servants. Of the noble petitions, the greatest number (147) concerned disputes over estates, with 56 more to do with squabbles over land. Few such documents reached the empress as a result of the draconian legislation against false petitions and official attempts to limit their number–on her trip to the South in 1787, the archbishop of Yekaterinoslav had strictly forbidden his clergy from daring to appeal to her directly (they were not to go near the palace, still less lurk outside her windows).81 Of those petitions she scrutinised, however, a fair number seem to have received a positive response: of the 133 requests for aid in these two years, 74 were granted and so were 48 of the 61 requests for pensions.82
Another of her secretaries’ functions was to dispense her largesse as Catherine allocated funds from the Closet and other sources to favoured friends and advisers. As a sop for Zubov’s inexorable rise, Bezborodko received 50,000 roubles from the postal taxes on New Year’s Day 1795, with a pension of 10,000. On 18 April, another 50,000 was sent to Suvorov in Warsaw. (When he stayed at the Tauride Palace later in the year, wandering about in various states of undress, the empress thought him ‘a very strange individual. He is very erudite, and naturally very talented, but infinitely eccentric, in ways which do him no good.’) There were the customary Easter presents for courtiers and servants, mostly in the form of new uniforms and dresses at a cost of 21,900 roubles (by 1796, the price had risen to 25,300 roubles). Property had always been one of the empress’s greatest gifts. In January, she bought Count Osterman’s house on Millionnaya for 150,000 roubles and gave it to Prince Repnin; in April she paid 160,000 roubles for Andrey Shuvalov’s house on the Moika and presented it to Alexandra Branicka, furnished and fitted out with new mirrors from Potëmkin’s glassworks. Foreign dignitaries were given more intricate treasures. In July she sent a snuffbox with her portrait on it, valued at 11,656 roubles, to Prime Minister Pitt; the Austrian foreign minister Baron Thugut received another worth 14,000 roubles in September. Aleksey Orlov had been sent a more personalised gift in July: ‘I would have put in it snuff from tobacco grown in my own garden, for I take no other, but I was worried that it would dry out on the journey.’ Meanwhile she had paid for the transport of a Herschel telescope, presented to her by George III, and given another 3229 roubles to Ivan Kulibin, the inventor from Nizhny Novgorod to whom she had first been introduced on the Volga cruise in 1767. Fëdor Shubin received 3000 roubles for a waxwork of Joseph II. 83
For an ageing empress, the length and frequency of Orthodox services was an increasing irritation, especially in Lent when she might spend up to eight hours a day in the palace chapel.84 The Church nevertheless had its uses as a bastion against revolutionary excess: ‘for my part,’ Catherine proclaimed tongue in cheek to Grimm in February 1794, ‘I propose that all the Protestant powers should embrace the Greek religion to preserve themselves against this irreligious, immoral, anarchical, evil and diabolical plague, the enemy of throne and altar. It is the sole apostolic and truly Christian [faith]’.85 In the circumstances, it was all the more important to continue to make lavish donations as a public expression of her religious commitment. In 1790, she commissioned two sets of liturgical plate from Iver Buch, the son of a Danish goldsmith who had worked in Russia since 1776. Each set was studded with diamonds from the treasury and ‘antique stones’ from her own collection in the Hermitage. While one was sent to the Dormition Cathedral in Moscow, the other was presented to the Trinity Cathedral at the Alexander Nevsky monastery at the annual celebrations on 30 August 1791.86 Further internal gilding there, costing over 24,000 roubles, was paid for by February 1795, and in May of that year she spent another 90,000 roubles on marble to rebuild the ageing Kazan Church.87
Although the upkeep of the palaces constituted another drain on the imperial purse–in June 1795, 68,193 roubles had to be set aside to repair General Bauer’s water-supply system at Tsarskoye Selo–Catherine was as usual more parsimonious with her own accommodation.88The secretary with responsibility for the royal residences was Suvorov’s old comrade Peter Turchaninov, ‘a little slip of a man, and so addicted to bowing and scraping that he only seemed half as high as he was’.89 In preparation for the empress’s visit to Tsarskoye Selo after Easter 1795, he instructed the Court administration on 8 April to furnish the Chinese pagodas with curtains and leather chairs. Twelve days later came a characteristic amplification: ‘1) do not make fringes and tassels for the curtains; 2) only hang the smallest icons; 3) mirrors at 25 roubles each; 4) use old dressing-tables and commodes and buy only what cannot be supplied from these; 5) black leather chairs are much cheaper, on no account purchase any armchairs; 6) also use old stone wash-basins’. ‘Listen,’ Catherine once told Grimm, ‘the thing I like least in the world is to speak about finances.’ Still, she was anxious that the Court had been running a 2-million-rouble deficit on an annual turnover of 3 million since 1789. Caution even came through in the autumn preparations for Constantine’s wedding to Princess Juliana Henrietta of Sachsen-Coburg. The upper floor of the Marble Palace was to be furnished for the empress and several guests, but only ‘for the shortest possible time’ so that everything could be taken ‘back to where it belongs’. Even so, 118,528 roubles were set aside over the course of 1796 and 1797 to convert new Winter Palace apartments for the groom.90
Though Constantine’s wedding had to be postponed when the bride was struck down by toothache, it went ahead in February 1796 with all the customary banquets, balls and fireworks. ‘So far I am very well,’ Catherine reported to Grimm in the middle of the whirl, after being told that she seemed as merry as a lark: ‘and that is a very good compliment I have been given at the age of sixty-seven’.91 Alexander had already married the fourteen-year-old Princess Louise of Baden-Durlach in September 1793 (‘everyone said that it was two angels who were betrothed’).92 The empress had always revelled in the preparations for such nuptials, and these were especially important as they seemed to presage a happy and glorious future for the two boys she had brought up as her own. Other family news was less welcome. She scarcely troubled to conceal her disappointment when Maria Fëdorovna gave birth to another girl, Olga, on 11 July 1792. Fretting that a clutch of expensive grand duchesses would be left on the shelf, the empress resented everything from the costs of their upkeep (from jewels for the newborn child down to the single rouble given to each of the palace sentries) to the complications their birthdays and name days would bring to an over-crowded Court calendar. Even so, she was distraught when Olga died less than three years later. While teething, the child had ‘developed such a hunger that she wanted to eat all the time,’ Catherine explained to Grimm on 16 January 1795. ‘After sixteen weeks of suffering and a slow consumptive fever came 24 hours of terrible agony.’ Four days later, dressed in deep mourning, the empress braved the cold to travel to the funeral at the Alexander Nevsky monastery, accompanied in her carriage by her two eldest granddaughters Alexandra and Yelena. Though it was greeted by rejoicings at Court, the birth on 7 January of a sixth granddaughter, Anna, was scant compensation.93 Not until her last grandchild, the future Nicholas I, came into the world on 25 June 1796, did the prospects for the dynasty seem to improve. ‘His brothers will prove to be dwarfs before this colossus,’ Catherine boasted to Grimm: ‘his hands are only a bit smaller than my own.’94
By then her own horizons were already shrinking. ‘I am old, too,’ she had confessed as she grieved for Potëmkin in October 1791.95 Six months later, Khrapovitsky found among her papers an undated will in her own hand, specifying various burial grounds depending on her place of death. Should it occur at Tsarskoye Selo, she wanted to be interred (alongside the unmentioned Alexander Lanskoy) in the cemetery at Sofia; if she died in St Petersburg, then she must be buried in the Alexander Nevsky monastery. Its Trinity Cathedral, as a later note made clear, had been ‘built by me’: there was no mention of the imperial necropolis at the Peter-Paul Cathedral, indelibly associated with Peter the Great. ‘Lay out my corpse dressed in white, with a golden crown on my head, and on it inscribe my Christian name. Mourning dress is to be worn for six months, and no longer: the shorter the better.’96 Increasingly conscious of the passage of time, she observed mordantly to Grimm in February 1794, the fiftieth anniversary of her arrival in Russia, that there were now barely a dozen people who could remember the event, one of whom was Lev Naryshkin, who denied it for fear of appearing aged, and another Ivan Shuvalov, ‘who scarcely leaves his house as a result of his decrepitude’.97 That same month, William Gould told John Parkinson that ‘though the empress looks very well when made up, she appears very much otherwise in dishabille, indeed with strong symptoms of old age’.98 In public, Catherine wore ‘a great deal of rouge, for she was still desirous to prevent the impressions of time from being visible on her face’.99 In the relative privacy of her own apartments, she received ambassadors in a simple white negligee, using spectacles and a magnifying glass for reading. Her hair was worn low, a simple old-fashioned style, with curls behind the ears.100 It was an image of vulnerability soon to be attacked by her Western detractors. In his controversial Secret Memoirs of Russia, published in Paris soon after her death, Charles Masson described the allegedly toothless empress as ‘fat to the point of deformity’, mocking her faith in a Greek client of Zubov, the piratical Colonel Lambro-Kochoni, who prescribed seawater for the ulcers that disfigured her legs.101
Though the infirmities of old age had done nothing to dull her mind–in addition to her memoirs, she was still at work on a history of Russia in the last years of her life–they made it harder for Catherine to cope with the stresses of Court ceremonial. The arrival in August 1796 of a 140-strong Swedish delegation was bound to take its toll. Led by the duke of Sudermania, the brother of the late Gustav III, the Swedes had come to secure the betrothal of the empress’s eldest granddaughter, Alexandra, to the uncrowned Gustav IV. All the magnificence of the Russian Court was laid out to impress the young king, but on 11 September, when the ceremony was due to take place, he refused to appear, objecting to Catherine’s insistence on a written guarantee that Alexandra would be allowed to practise the Orthodox faith in Lutheran Sweden. Whether or not the empress suffered the mild seizure rumoured by one contemporary, she was irritated and exhausted by such a public failure.102 Although she summoned the energy to celebrate the thirty-fourth anniversary of her coronation at a ball in the St George’s Hall of the Winter Palace, the throne room completed by Quarenghi in 1792, public appearances were now infrequent. At lunch in the Diamond Room on Friday 31 October, Arkady Morkov, the negotiator who had struggled in vain to satisfy the Swedes, sat beside companions of much longer standing. Catherine had known Ivan Shuvalov even before he became Elizabeth’s favourite in 1749; the Marshal of her Court, Prince Fëdor Baryatinsky, had guarded her husband at Ropsha on the fateful night in 1762 when Peter III was assassinated; soon afterwards, the faithful Anna Protasova had joined the Court ladies at the behest of Aleksey Orlov (according to Countess Golovina, she was nicknamed ‘la reine’, because she was as dusky as the queen of Tahiti). Later that evening, these intimates were joined at the Hermitage by the empress’s grandsons and granddaughters, as the empress watched a French comedy incognito in the presence of her Court and the whole generalitet.103
That, it transpired, was the last entry in the Court journals for Catherine’s reign. The end, when it came, took everyone by surprise. On the morning of Wednesday 5 November, she settled down to her papers after her customary morning coffee. But when the duty chamberlain arrived sometime after nine, he found her palpitating body, barely conscious, on the floor of the neighbouring dressing room. Despite his efforts to revive her, she lapsed into a coma from which she never recovered. Six men were required to lift her into the bedroom, where Dr Rogerson, having diagnosed a stroke, tried in vain to bring her round. Soon Catherine’s confessor was summoned; Metropolitan Gavriil arrived that afternoon. Tended by Protasova and Maria Perekusikhina, their sovereign was vomiting so much blood that it was only when the flow briefly abated that she could be given communion and anointed with holy oil. Count Nikolay Zubov was sent to Gatchina to fetch Grand Duke Paul, who had dreamed the night before of being visited by a mysterious, unknown force. Though he rushed to take charge at the Winter Palace, there was little he could do. Informed at dawn next morning that all hope was lost, he ordered that Catherine be given the last rites. Now he could only watch and wait as his mother’s pulse gradually faded. Not until a quarter to ten on the evening of 6 November 1796 did the most famous woman in Europe finally breathe her last.104