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IN SEPTEMBER 1751, the empress assigned three young noblemen as gentlemen-in-waiting to Grand Duke Peter. One, Lev Naryshkin, came from the family that had produced Natalya Naryshkina, the mother of Peter the Great. Lev himself was an amiable, quick-witted wag whom everybody liked and no one took seriously; Catherine described him as someone who made her laugh more than anyone else in her life.
He was a born clown and if not of noble birth, he could have made a fortune as a comic actor. He was witty and had heard all the gossip. He had a wide superficial knowledge of almost everything and was able to talk continuously in technical terms on any given art or science for a quarter of an hour. At the end, neither he nor anyone could make any sense of the stream of words flowing from his mouth and everyone simply burst out laughing.
The other two were the Saltykov brothers, sons of one of the oldest and noblest families in Russia. Their father was an aide-de-camp to the empress; their mother was cherished by the empress for her devotion during Elizabeth’s seizure of the throne in 1740. Peter, the older of the brothers, was a lout whom Catherine describes as “a fool in every sense of the word. He had the stupidest face I have ever seen: a pair of big, staring eyes, a flat nose, and a gaping mouth, always half open. He was a notorious gossip and, as such, on excellent terms with the Choglokovs.”
The second Saltykov brother, Sergei, was entirely different. Sergei was handsome and ruthless; a man who was making the seduction of women his life’s purpose. He was dark-complexioned, with black eyes, of medium height, and muscular yet graceful. Constantly on the lookout for a new triumph, he always went straight to work, employing charm, promises, and persistence, in whatever combination worked. Obstacles only increased his determination. When he first noticed Catherine, he was twenty-six years old and had been married for two years to one of the empress’s ladies-in-waiting, Matriona Balk. This marriage had resulted from impulse: he had seen her on a high-flying swing at Tsarskoe Selo and her skirt, flared by the breeze, had exposed her ankles; he had proposed the following day. Now he was tired of Matriona and ready for something new. He observed how blatantly Catherine was ignored by her husband, and how obviously bored she was by the company around her. The fact that the grand duchess was closely guarded added allure; her marriage to the grand duke made the prize more glittering; and the pervasive rumor that Catherine was still a virgin made the challenge irresistible.
Catherine noticed that the young man quickly made himself an intimate of the Choglokovs. She thought this strange: “As these people were neither clever nor amiable, Saltykov must have had some secret purpose in these attentions. Certainly no man with any common sense would have been able to listen to these two arrogant, egotistical fools talking nonsense all day without having some ulterior motive.” Maria Choglokova was pregnant again and kept mostly to her room. She asked the grand duchess to visit. Catherine went and usually found Sergei Saltykov, Lev Naryshkin, and others present, along with Nicholas Choglokov. During these afternoons and evenings, Saltykov devised an ingenious way to keep Monsieur Choglokov occupied. He had discovered that this stolid, unimaginative man had a talent for writing simple poetic lyrics. Saltykov praised these lines extravagantly and asked to hear more. Thereafter, whenever the group wanted to rid itself of Choglokov’s attention, Saltykov suggested a theme and begged the flattered versifier to compose. Choglokov then would hurry to a corner of the room, sit down by the stove, and begin to write. Once started, he became so absorbed in his work that he would not rise from his seat the entire evening. His lyrics were pronounced wonderful and charming, and he kept writing new ones. Lev Naryshkin set these lyrics to music on the clavichord and sang them with him. Nobody listened and everyone else in the room was free to carry on uninterrupted conversation.
It was in this atmosphere of camaraderie and jolly skullduggery that Sergei Saltykov began his campaign. One evening, he began whispering to Catherine about love. She listened with a mixture of alarm and delight. She did not reply but did not discourage him. He persisted, and the next time she asked him tentatively what he wanted from her. He described the state of bliss he wanted to share with her. She interrupted: “And your wife, whom you married for love only two years ago? What will she say?” With a shrug, Saltykov tossed Matriona overboard. “All that glitters is not gold,” he replied, saying that he was paying a high price now for a moment of infatuation. His feelings for Catherine, he assured her, were deeper, more permanent, cast in a more precious metal.
Later, Catherine described the path along which she was being led:
He was twenty-six years old and, by birth and many other qualities, a distinguished gentleman. He knew how to conceal his faults, the greatest of which were a love of intrigue and lack of principles. These failings were not clear to me at the time. I saw him almost every day, always in the presence of the court and I made no change in my behavior. I treated him as I treated everyone else.
At first, she fended him off. She told herself that the emotion she was feeling was pity. How sad it was that this handsome young man, caught up in a bad marriage, now was offering to risk everything for her, knowing that she was inaccessible, that she was a grand duchess and the wife of the heir to the throne.
Unfortunately, I could not help listening to him. He was handsome as the dawn and certainly had no equal on this score at the Imperial Court, and still less at ours. Nor was he lacking in that polish of knowledge, manners, and style which are the qualities of society, especially of the court.
She saw him every day. She suggested that he was wasting his time. “How do you know that my heart does not belong to someone else?” she asked. She was a poor actress, and Saltykov, knowing the dialogue of lovemaking, took none of her objections seriously. Later, all Catherine could say was, “I held out all of the spring and part of the summer.”
On a summer day in 1752, Choglokov invited Catherine, Peter, and their young court to a hunting party on his island in the Neva River. On arriving, most of the party mounted horses and rode off after the dogs in pursuit of hares. Saltykov waited until the others were out of sight and then rode up alongside Catherine, and, as she put it, “began again on his favorite subject.” Here, now without having to lower his voice, he described the pleasures of a secret love affair. Catherine remained silent. He begged her to allow him at least to hope that he had a chance. She managed to retort that he could hope whatever he pleased; she could not control his thoughts. He compared himself to other young men at court and asked whether he was not the one she preferred. Or, if not, who was it? She shook her head wordlessly but said later, “I had to admit that he pleased me.” After an hour and a half of this minuet, an old routine for Saltykov, Catherine told him to leave because such a lengthy private conversation would arouse suspicions. Saltykov said he would not go until she consented. “Yes, yes, but go away,” she replied. “It is settled, then. I have your word,” he said and spurred his horse. She called after him, “No, no!” “Yes, yes!” he shouted and galloped away.
That evening, the hunting party returned to Choglokov’s house on the island for supper. During the meal, a strong westerly gale pushed the sea from the Gulf of Finland into the Neva River delta and soon the entire, low-lying island was covered by several feet of water. Choglokov’s guests were marooned in his house until three in the morning. Saltykov used this time to repeat to Catherine that heaven itself was favoring his suit because the storm was permitting him to go on seeing her for a longer time. “He already believed himself triumphant,” she wrote later. “But it was not at all the same for me. A thousand worries troubled me. I had thought that I would be able to govern both his passion and mine, but now I realized that this was going to be difficult and perhaps impossible.” It was impossible. Soon after—sometime in August or September 1752—Sergei Saltykov achieved his goal.
No one knew of their affair, but Peter made an accurate guess. “Sergei Saltykov and my wife are deceiving Choglokov,” he told the lady-in-waiting he was pursuing at the moment. “They make him believe anything they want and laugh behind his back.” Peter himself did not mind being cuckolded; he saw it as a joke on the foolish Choglokov. More important, neither the empress nor Madame Choglokova was aware of Catherine’s new relationship. That summer at Peterhof and Oranienbaum, Catherine went riding every day. Now worrying less about appearances, she had stopped trying to deceive the empress and always rode astride like a man. Watching her one day, Elizabeth had said to Madame Choglokova that it was riding this way that prevented the grand duchess from conceiving children. Boldly, Madame Choglokova replied that riding had nothing to do with the fact that Catherine had no children; that children, after all, could not appear “without something happening first,” and that although the grand ducal couple had been married for seven years, “nothing had happened yet.” Confronted by this statement—which she still refused entirely to believe—Elizabeth burst out angrily at Madame Choglokova for not persuading the couple to do their duty.
Alarmed, Madame Choglokova began a determined effort to see that the empress’s wishes were obeyed. First, the governess conferred with one of the grand duke’s valets, a Frenchman named Bressan. Bressan recommended that Peter be placed in the intimate company of an attractive, sexually experienced woman who was also his social inferior. Madame Choglokova agreed, and Bressan located a young widow, Madame Groot, whose late husband, a Stuttgart painter named L. F. Groot, was one of the Western artists brought to Russia by Elizabeth. It took time to explain to Madame Groot what was desired of her and to persuade her to comply. Once the teacher had accepted this assignment, Bressan introduced her to her pupil. And thereafter, in an atmosphere of music, wine, pleasantries—and, on her part, perseverance—Peter’s sexual initiation was managed.
Peter’s success with Madame Groot meant that the widow had managed to overcome any inhibitions he might have felt regarding his own appearance. If, in fact, he had also been afflicted by phimosis, this problem, too, must have been resolved by the passage of time. Or there is another story, told by the French diplomat Jean-Henri Castéra, who first presented the phimosis theory in his biography of Catherine. According to Castéra, once Saltykov had succeeded in his seduction of Catherine, he became uneasy about the potential danger of being the lover of a woman known to be a virgin and whose husband was the heir to the throne. Suppose the wife became pregnant; where would that put him? He decided to protect himself. During an all-male dinner at which the grand duke was the guest of honor, Saltykov steered the conversation around to the pleasures of sex. Peter, thoroughly drunk, admitted that he had never enjoyed these sensations. Whereupon—the story goes—Saltykov, Lev Naryshkin, and others present begged the grand duke to submit, then and there, to corrective surgery. His head spinning, Peter stammered consent. A doctor and a surgeon, already standing by, were brought in, and the operation was performed immediately. Once the incisions had healed, and after Madame Groot had finished her private lessons, the grand duke was ready to become a complete husband. And thereafter, if Peter’s wife became pregnant, who could say that Sergei Saltykov was responsible?
As it happened, Saltykov’s worries were unnecessary. Madame Choglokova, having carried out the empress’s command with respect to Peter, was already turning to the problem of Catherine, whom the governess supposed still to be a virgin. There was no certainty that Peter’s success in embracing Madame Groot would ensure the same success with Catherine. And even if he managed the physical act, there was no guarantee that this would result in a conception. More certainty was required. Perhaps, even, a more reliable male.
Understanding the wide latitude of the imperial command she had been given, Madame Choglokova took Catherine aside one day and said, “I must speak to you very seriously.” The conversation that followed astonished Catherine.
Madame Choglokova began in her usual way with a long preamble about her attachment to her husband, her own virtue and prudence, and what was necessary and not necessary for ensuring mutual love and facilitating conjugal relations. But then, in midstream, she reversed course and said that there were sometimes situations in which a higher interest demanded an exception to these rules; where one’s patriotic duty to one’s country took precedence over duty to one’s husband. I let her talk without interruption, having no idea what she was driving at, and uncertain whether she was setting a trap for me. While I was deliberating, she said, “I do not doubt that in your heart you have a preference for one man over another. I leave you to choose between Sergei Saltykov and Lev Naryshkin. If I am not mistaken, it is the latter.” To this, I cried out, “No, no, not at all.” “Well, then,” Madame Choglokova said, “if it is not Naryshkin, it can only be Saltykov.”
Catherine remained silent, and the governess continued, “You will see that I shall not put difficulties in your way.” Madame Choglokova was as good as her word. Thereafter she and her husband stood aside when Sergei Saltykov entered Catherine’s bedroom.
The three principals—Catherine, Peter, and Sergei—found themselves in a complicated situation. She loved a man who had sworn he loved her, and who, thrusting aside seven years of virginal marriage, was teaching her about physical love. She had a husband who had not touched her since their marriage, who still did not desire her, who was aware of her lover, and thought it was all a titillating joke. Sergei considered Peter’s inclusion a necessary alibi.
Catherine should have been happy, but something in Sergei Saltykov’s attitude was changing. In the autumn, when the court moved back to the Winter Palace, he seemed restless; his passion seemed to be waning. When she reproached him, he emphasized the need for caution, explaining that, if she gave it more thought, she would understand the wisdom and prudence of his behavior.
Catherine and Peter departed from St. Petersburg in December 1752 and followed the empress and the court to Moscow. Catherine was already feeling signs of pregnancy. The sleigh traveled night and day, and at the last relay station before Moscow, Catherine suffered violent contractions and heavy bleeding. It was a miscarriage. Soon after, Sergei Saltykov arrived in Moscow, but his attitude remained distant. Nevertheless, he repeated the reasons for his 'margin-top:24.0pt;margin-right:0cm;margin-bottom: 0cm;margin-left:0cm;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align:justify;line-height:14.4pt'>Reassured and hoping to please, Catherine agreed to a political proposal from Saltykov. He asked that she reach out on his behalf and request Chancellor Bestuzhev to help him advance his career. It was not easy for Catherine to agree. For seven years, she had considered the chancellor her most powerful enemy in Russia. He had subjected her to provocation and humiliation; he was behind the campaign against her mother; it was he who had assigned the watchdog Choglokovs; he was the author of the ban on her writing or receiving personal letters. Catherine had never publicly protested; she had carefully avoided alignment with any faction at court; she believed that her own uncertain position dictated that her best course was to cultivate friendships in all directions; she had not seemed interested in political maneuvering. Her priority had been to erase her Prussian identity by enthusiastically adopting every characteristically Russian trait. Now, influenced by her love for the man who had made her pregnant, and frightened by her fear of losing him, she put these considerations aside and did what he asked.
Her first step was to send Count Bestuzhev “a few words that would allow him to believe that I was less hostile to him than before.” She was surprised by the chancellor’s reaction. He was delighted by her overture and declared that he was at the grand duchess’s disposal. He asked that she indicate a safe channel by which they might communicate. On hearing this news, Saltykov, impatient, decided to visit the chancellor immediately under the pretext of a social call. The old man received him warmly, took him aside, and spoke to him of the inner world of the court, stressing particularly the stupidity of the Choglokovs. “I know that you can see through them as well as I do because you are a sensible young man,” Bestuzhev said. Then he spoke of Catherine: “In gratitude for the good will that the grand duchess has shown me, I am going to do her a little service for which I think she will thank me. I will make Madame Vladislavova as gentle as a lamb for her and the grand duchess will be able to do as she pleases. She will see that I am not the ogre she thinks I am.” At a stroke, Catherine had transformed the enemy she had feared for many years. This powerful man was now offering to support her and, in the bargain, Saltykov. “He gave him [Saltykov] a good deal of advice which was as useful as it was wise,” she said. “All this made him very intimate with us, without any living soul being the wiser.”
The new alliance offered advantages to both sides. Despite the humiliations Bestuzhev had heaped on her and her family, Catherine recognized the chancellor’s intelligence and administrative skill. This could be useful to her as well as to Saltykov. From Bestuzhev’s perspective, Catherine’s offer of reconciliation came at an unusually opportune time. The rise of Elizabeth’s new favorite, Ivan Shuvalov, was undermining the chancellor’s position. The new favorite was not simply amiable and indolent, as Razumovsky had been. Shuvalov was intelligent, ambitious, and strongly pro-French, and he was actively securing influential positions in government for his uncles and cousins. In addition, Bestuzhev worried about Elizabeth’s health. Her illnesses had become more frequent and required ever-lengthening periods of recovery. If—or rather, when—the empress died, Peter would inherit the throne. This was Peter who worshipped Frederick of Prussia; Peter who hated the Austrian alliance, the bedrock of the chancellor’s diplomacy; and Peter who was quite prepared to sacrifice the interests of the Russian empire to those of tiny, insignificant Holstein. Bestuzhev had long realized that Catherine was far more intelligent than her husband and that she was as sympathetic to Russian interests as Peter was indifferent or hostile. To have Catherine as an ally would mean buttressing his position at the moment and perhaps adding greater strength for the future. When Catherine suggested that they work together, he was quick to agree.
In May 1753, five months after her miscarriage, Catherine was pregnant again. She spent several weeks at a country estate near Moscow, where she restricted herself to walks and gentle carriage rides. By the time she returned to Moscow, she was so overcome by drowsiness that she slept until noon and it was difficult to wake her for midday dinner. On June 28, she felt pain in her lower back. The midwife was summoned, shook her head, and predicted another miscarriage. The following night, the prediction came true. “I must have been pregnant two or three months,” she conjectured. “For thirteen days, my life was in danger and it was suspected that part of the after-birth had not been expelled. Finally, on the thirteenth day, it came out without pain or effort.”
Peter spent most of this time in his own room, where his servants kept him supplied not only with military toys but with alcohol. During these days, the grand duke often found himself ignored and even flagrantly disobeyed by his servants, they being as drunk as he. Angry, Peter would strike about him with his stick or the flat of his sword, but his entourage dodged and laughed. After Catherine’s recovery, Peter asked her to make them behave. “When this happened,” she said, “I would go to his rooms and scold them, reminding them of their place and their duties. They always resumed their proper places. This made the grand duke say to me that he did not understand how I managed his servants; he flogged them, but could not make himself obeyed, while I obtained what I wanted with a single word.”
Moscow, the largest city of eighteenth-century Russia, was built primarily of wood. Palaces, mansions, houses, and hovels were constructed of logs and planks, sometimes carved and painted to give the appearance of stone, with windows, porches, and gables of many shapes and bright colors. Nevertheless, because they were built in haste, they were often uncomfortable; doors and windows did not shut, stairs wobbled, sometimes whole buildings swayed.
Worst of all was the scourge of fire. Through the icy Russian winters, palaces and houses alike were heated by tall tile stoves standing in the corners of the rooms, rising from floor to ceiling. Often the stoves were old, the tiles had cracked, rooms filled with smoke, the air became unbreathable, and headaches and swollen red eyes afflicted everyone. Sometimes sparks popped through the cracks and alighted on the wooden walls behind. In winter, which lasted for many months, with primitive stoves blazing in every house, a spark could create an inferno. Caught by the wind, flames from one burning house leaped from the roof to the next, reducing entire streets to ashes. To Muscovites the sight of a burning house with firemen struggling to localize the fire by hastily tearing down other buildings in its path was part of daily life. “No one had ever seen more fires in Moscow than in 1753 and 1754,” Catherine wrote. “More than once from the windows of my apartment, I saw two, three, four and five fires at a time burning in different parts of the city.”
On a November afternoon in 1753, Catherine and Madame Choglokova were together in the Golovin Palace when they heard shouting. The building, constructed entirely of wood, was on fire. It was already too late to save the huge structure. Catherine, hurrying to her room, saw that the stairway in the corner of the grand reception hall was already in flames. In her own apartment, she found a crowd of soldiers and servants carrying and dragging away furniture. She and Madame Choglokova could not help. Retreating to the street, deep in mud from heavy rain, they found the carriage of the choirmaster, who was coming to attend one of Peter’s concerts. Both women scrambled into his carriage. They sat and watched the fire until the heat became too great and the carriage was forced to move. Before leaving, however, Catherine saw an extraordinary sight: “An astonishing number of rats and mice were coming down the staircase in a single, orderly line without even appearing to hurry.” Eventually, Choglokov arrived and told them that the empress had ordered the young couple to move into his house. It was “a terrible place.” Catherine said, “There was no furniture, the wind blew through it on all sides, the windows and doors were half rotten, the floor was split open with cracks, and there were vermin everywhere. Even so, we were better off than the Choglokov children and servants who were living there when we arrived and were expelled to make room for us.”
The following day, their clothes and other belongings, collected from the mud where they had been sitting in front of the smoldering ruin of the palace, were brought to them. Catherine was overjoyed to find most of her small library delivered to her undamaged. What had affected Catherine most in the disaster was the thought of losing her books; she had just finished the fourth volume of Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique, and these volumes were returned to her. It was the empress who suffered the heaviest personal loss in the fire. All of that part of Elizabeth’s enormous wardrobe that she had brought with her to Moscow went up in flames. She told Catherine that four thousand dresses had been destroyed and that, of them all, she most regretted losing the one made from the Parisian fabric that Catherine had received from her mother and had given to her.
Peter also suffered a heavy—and embarrassing—loss in the fire. The grand duke’s apartment had been furnished with an abnormal number of large chests of drawers. As these were being carried out of the building, some of the drawers, unlocked or badly closed, had slid open and dumped their contents onto the floor. The chests contained nothing but bottles of wine and liquor. The cupboards had served as Peter’s private wine cellar.
When Catherine and Peter were moved to another of the empress’s palaces, Madame Choglokova, offering various excuses, remained with her children in her own house. The truth was that this mother of seven, famously virtuous and supposedly devoted to her husband, had fallen in love with Prince Peter Repnin. Her meetings with the prince were secret, but, feeling that she needed a discreet confidante, and that Catherine was the only person she could trust, she showed the grand duchess the letters she had received from her lover. When Nicholas Choglokov became suspicious and questioned Catherine, she pretended ignorance.
By February 1754, Catherine was pregnant for the third time. Not long after, on Easter Day, Nicholas Choglokov began suffering severe stomach pains. Nothing seemed to help. That week, Peter went riding, but Catherine remained at home, unwilling to risk the pregnancy. She was alone in her room when Choglokov sent for her and asked her to come see him. Stretched on his bed, he greeted her by unleashing a torrent of complaints against his wife. He said that she was involved in adultery with Prince Repnin, who, during Carnival, had tried to sneak into their house dressed as a clown. As he was about to provide more details, Maria Choglokova entered the room. Then, in Catherine’s presence, the husband heaped more blame on his wife, accusing her of adultery and of deserting him in his sickness. Maria Choglokova was anything but repentant. She told her husband that for years she had loved him too much; that she had suffered when he was unfaithful to her; that now neither he nor anyone else could reproach her. She concluded that he was not the spouse who should be complaining; it was she. In this argument, both husband and wife continually appealed to Catherine as a witness and judge. Catherine remained silent.
Choglokov’s illness grew worse. On April 21, the doctors declared him beyond hope of recovery. The empress had the sick man carried to his own house for fear he would die in the palace, which she considered bad luck. Catherine found herself surprisingly upset by Nicholas Choglokov’s condition. “He was dying just at a time when, after many years of trouble and pain, we had succeeded in making him not only less unkind and malicious, but even tractable. As for his wife, she was now sincerely attached to me, and she had changed from a harsh and spiteful guardian into a loyal friend.”
Choglokov died on the afternoon of April 25. During the last days of her husband’s illness, Maria Choglokova was also ill and confined to bed in another part of the house. Sergei Saltykov and Lev Naryshkin happened to be in her room at the moment of Choglokov’s death. The windows were open and a bird flew in and perched on a cornice opposite Madame Choglokova’s bed. She saw it and said, “I am certain that my husband has just died. Please send someone to find out.” Told that he was indeed dead, she declared that the bird had been her husband’s soul. People told her that it was an ordinary bird and that it had flown away. She remained convinced that her husband’s soul had come to find her.