23 
IN MOSCOW at the beginning of 1749, it appeared to Catherine that Monsieur Choglokov remained intimate with the chancellor, Count Bestuzhev. They were constantly together, and, to hear Choglokov talk, “one would have thought that he was Bestuzhev’s closest adviser.” For Catherine, this was hard to believe, because “Count Bestuzhev had too much intelligence to allow himself to be guided by an arrogant fool like Choglokov.” In August, whatever intimacy existed abruptly ceased.
Catherine was certain that something Peter had said was responsible. After the affair of Maria Kosheleva’s pregnancy, Choglokov had become less flagrantly offensive to the young court. He knew that the empress continued to bear him a grudge; his relationship with his wife had deteriorated; and he sank into depression. One day, Peter, drunk, met Count Bestuzhev, himself tipsy. In this encounter, Peter complained to Bestuzhev that Choglokov was always rude to him. Bestuzhev replied, “Choglokov is a conceited fool with a swollen head, but leave it in my hands. I will see to it.” When Peter told Catherine about this conversation, she warned him that if Choglokov heard what Bestuzhev had said, he would never forgive the chancellor. Nevertheless, Peter decided that he could win over Choglokov by confiding in him how he had been described by Bestuzhev. The opportunity soon presented itself.
Soon after, Bestuzhev invited Choglokov to dinner. Choglokov grimly accepted, but remained silent during the meal. Bestuzhev, himself half-drunk after dinner, tried to talk to his guest, but found him unapproachable. Bestuzhev lost his temper and the conversation became heated. Choglokov reproached Bestuzhev for having criticized him to Peter. Bestuzhev rebuked Choglokov for his adventure with Maria Kosheleva and reminded his guest of the support he, Bestuzhev, had given him in surviving this scandal. Choglokov, the last person to listen to anything critical about himself, flew into another rage and decided that he had been unforgivably insulted. General Stepan Apraksin, Bestuzhev’s lieutenant, who was present, tried to make peace, but Choglokov became even more belligerent. Feeling that his services were uniquely valuable; that, whatever he did, everyone would run after him, he swore that he would never again set foot in Bestuzhev’s house. From that day on, Choglokov and Bestuzhev were bitter enemies.
With his jailors quarreling, Peter should have been cheerful. Instead, during the autumn of 1749, Catherine found him in a state of intense anxiety. He had stopped training his hunting dogs and he came into her room many times a day with a distracted, even frightened, look. “As he could never keep what was bothering him to himself for long, and had no one to confide in but me, I waited patiently for him to tell what the problem was. At last, he told me and I found the matter more serious than I had supposed.”
Through the summer in and around Moscow, Peter had spent most of his time hunting. Choglokov had acquired two packs of dogs, one of Russian dogs, the other of foreign dogs. Choglokov managed the Russian pack and Peter assumed responsibility for the foreign pack. He took charge in minute detail, going frequently to his pack’s kennel or having his huntsmen come to talk to him about the pack’s condition and needs. Peter became intimate with these men, eating and drinking as well as hunting with them.
At this time, the Butirsky Regiment was stationed in Moscow. In this regiment there was a headstrong lieutenant named Yakov Baturin, a gambler, deeply in debt. Peter’s huntsmen lived near the regimental camp. One day, one of the huntsmen told Peter that he had met an officer who expressed great devotion for the grand duke and who had said that, with the exception of the senior officers, his entire regiment agreed with him. Peter, flattered, wanted more details. Eventually, Baturin asked the huntsman to arrange a meeting between himself and the grand duke during a hunt. Unwilling at first, Peter eventually agreed. On the day arranged, Baturin waited in an isolated spot in the forest. When Peter appeared on horseback, Baturin fell to his knees, swearing to recognize no other master and to do whatever the grand duke commanded. Peter later told Catherine that on hearing this oath, he was alarmed and, fearing connection to any sort of plot, had spurred his horse, leaving the other man on his knees in the woods. He also said that none of the huntsmen had heard what Baturin had said. Since then, Peter claimed, he and his huntsmen had had no contact with Baturin. Peter had since learned that Baturin had been arrested for interrogation. Peter feared that his huntsman or even he himself might have been compromised. His fear increased when a number of the huntsmen were, in fact, arrested.
Catherine attempted to calm her husband, telling him that if he had not entered into any discussion beyond what he had told her, then guilty as Baturin might be, she did not believe that anyone could find much to criticize in what he, Peter, had done except the imprudence of speaking to an unknown man in the woods. She could not say whether her husband was telling the truth; in fact, she believed that he was playing down the extent of the discussions. Sometime later, Peter came to tell her that some of his huntsmen had been released and that they had told him that no one had mentioned his name. This reassured him, and there was no more discussion of the matter. Baturin was put on the rack and found guilty. Catherine learned later that he had admitted to planning to kill the empress, set fire to the palace, and, amid this confusion, place the grand duke on the throne. He was sentenced to spend the rest of his life in the Schlüsselburg Fortress. In 1770, during Catherine’s reign, he tried to escape, was recaptured, and was sent to the Kamchatka Peninsula, on the Pacific. He escaped again and eventually was killed in a petty fracas on the island of Formosa.
That autumn, Catherine developed another severe toothache accompanied by another high fever. Her bedroom adjoined Peter’s apartment, and she suffered from the racket made by his violin and his dogs. “He would not have sacrificed these amusements even if he had known they were killing me.” she said. “I therefore succeeded in getting Madame Choglokova’s consent to having my bed moved out of reach of the dreadful sounds. The [new] room had windows on three sides and there were fierce drafts but they were preferable to my husband’s noise.”
On December 15, 1749, the court’s year in Moscow came to an end and Catherine and Peter left for St. Petersburg, traveling in an open sleigh. During the journey, Catherine’s toothache returned. Despite her pain, Peter would not agree to have the sleigh closed. Instead, grudgingly, he allowed her to draw a little curtain of green taffeta to protect herself from the icy wind blowing directly into her face. When they finally reached Tsarskoe Selo, on the outskirts of St. Petersburg, she was in agony. As soon as she arrived, Catherine sent for the empress’s chief physician, Dr. Boerhave, and begged him to extract the tooth that had been tormenting her for five months. With extreme reluctance, Boerhave consented. He sent for the French surgeon Monsieur Guyon to do the extraction. Catherine sat on the floor with Boerhave on her right and Choglokov on her left, holding her hands. Then, Guyon came from behind, reached around, and twisted the tooth with his pliers. As he wrenched and pulled, Catherine felt that her jawbone was breaking. “I have never in my life felt anything like the pain of that moment,” she said. Instantly, Boerhave shouted at Guyon, “Clumsy fool!” and having been handed the tooth, he said, “It is just as I feared. This is why I did not want this tooth to be pulled.” Guyon, in pulling the tooth, “had pulled out a piece of my lower jaw, to which the tooth had been attached. At this moment, the empress came into the room and, seeing me suffer so terribly, she wept. I was put to bed and was in great pain for four weeks, not leaving my room until the middle of January. Even then, on the lower part of my cheek, I still had in the form of blue and yellow bruises, the imprint of Guyon’s five fingers.”