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IN THE MIDDLE of the eighteenth century, most Europeans still regarded Russia as a culturally backward, semi-Asiatic state. Catherine was determined to change this. The intellectual and artistic life of the century was dominated by France, and Catherine’s governess in Stettin had made French her second language. During her sixteen years as an isolated, embattled grand duchess, she had read many of the works of the great figures of the European Enlightenment. Of these, the writer with the greatest effect on her was François-Marie Arouet, who called himself Voltaire. In October 1763, after fifteen months on the throne, she wrote to him for the first time, declaring herself to be his ardent disciple. “Whatever style I possess, whatever powers of reasoning, have all been acquired through the reading of Voltaire,” she told him.
Voltaire was sixty-one when, in 1755, he had decided to settle down. Two imprisonments in the Bastille; voluntary exile in England; an initially euphoric sojourn at the court of Frederick of Prussia, followed by misunderstanding, estrangement, and, eventually, painful rupture; a complicated warm and cool relationship with Louis XV and Madame de Pompadour—all this was behind him. He was ready to bury himself in work and he believed that he would find a haven of tranquillity in the independent republic of Geneva, governed by a council of aristocratic Calvinists. Already a millionaire from his writing, he bought a villa with a splendid view of the lake and called it Les Délicies. Soon he was in trouble again. A number of Genevois disapproved of an article about their city in Diderot’s Encyclopedia that seemed to represent the Calvinist clergy of Geneva as rejecting the divinity of Christ. In fact, it was the mathematician and physicist Jean d’Alembert who had written these words, but Voltaire was believed to be the writer’s inspiration, and he bore the brunt of the council’s complaints. In 1758, he moved to Ferney.
It seemed a safer haven. The Château de Ferney was on French territory, but only just; Geneva was three miles away; Paris and Versailles were three hundred. Should the French authorities decide to make trouble for him again, he needed only an hour to move back across the border to Geneva, where he still had many admirers. Geneva was also the home of the publisher who was then printing Candide.
Voltaire had not moved to this new dwelling to live in idleness. Instead, he saw Ferney as well placed to be his command post for an intensification of violent intellectual combat. The philosophical wars of the Enlightenment were being fought in earnest. Louis XV had forbidden Voltaire to return to Paris. The man of letters was eager to fire back, and Ferney became the launching point for his philosophical, intellectual, political, and social fusillades. He wrote books, brochures, histories, biographies, plays, stories, treatises, poems, and over fifty thousand letters that now fill ninety-eight volumes. The Seven Years’ War had concluded, and France had lost both Canada and India to England. Voltaire rubbed salt into these wounds by denouncing war as the “great illusion.” “The victorious nation never profits from the spoils of the conquered; it pays for everything,” he said. “It suffers as much when its armies are successful as when they are defeated. Whoever wins, humanity loses.” He fired polemical salvos against Christianity, the Bible, and the Catholic Church. At one point, he considered Jesus a deluded eccentric, un fou. At the age of eighty, he rose early on a May morning and climbed a hill with a friend to see the sunrise. At the top, overwhelmed by the magnificent panorama of red and gold, he kneeled and said, “Oh, mighty God, I believe.” Then, standing up, he said to his friend, “As to Monsieur the son and Madame his mother, that is another matter!”
A further advantage to Ferney was that the most direct roads between northern and southern Europe passed through Switzerland, and these roads were traveled by many of the European intellectual and artistic brotherhood. Voltaire, in his château, was living in the geographical heart of Europe, and was therefore assured of a swarm of visitors—too many. A multitude came to see him from every quarter: German princes, French dukes, English lords, Casanova, a Cossack hetman. Many were English, to whom Voltaire spoke in their own language: the parliamentary statesman Charles James Fox, the historian Edward Gibbon, the biographer James Boswell. When uninvited people arrived, Voltaire told his servants, “Send them away. Tell them I am very sick.” Boswell begged to be allowed to stay overnight and see the patriarch in the morning; he said he would sleep in “the highest and coldest garret.” He was sent to a pleasant bedroom.
Nor did Voltaire confine himself to intellectual matters. In 1762 and during the years following, Voltaire became “the Man of Calas.” The backdrop to this affair was the persecution of Protestants in France. Protestants were excluded from public office; couples not married by a Catholic priest were considered to be living in sin; their children were considered illegitimate. In the southern and southwestern provinces of France, these laws were grimly enforced.
In March 1762, Voltaire learned that a sixty-four-year-old Protestant Huguenot, Jean Calas, a dealer in linens in Toulouse, had been executed under torture. His eldest son, suffering from depression, had committed suicide in the family’s house. The father, Jean, knowing that the law demanded that the body of a suicide be dragged naked through the streets, pelted with mud and stones, and then hanged, persuaded his family to join him in reporting a natural death. The police saw the rope marks on the son’s neck, however, and charged that Calas had murdered his son to prevent him from converting to Catholicism. A high court prescribed torture to make Calas confess. He was placed on the rack and his arms and legs were pulled from their sockets; in agony, he admitted that his son’s death was a suicide. This was not the confession the authorities wanted; they demanded that he confess to murder. Fifteen pints of water were poured down his throat; he still protested his own innocence. Another fifteen pints were forced into him; he was convinced that he was drowning, but still cried that he was innocent. He was stretched on a cross in the public square before the Toulouse cathedral. The public executioner took a heavy iron bar and crushed each of his four limbs in two places; the old man still proclaimed his innocence. He was strangled and died.
Donat Calas, the youngest of six Calas children, came to Ferney and begged Voltaire to defend his dead father’s innocence. Voltaire, appalled and infuriated by this cruelty, undertook the legal rehabilitation of the victim. For three years, from 1762 to 1765, he hired lawyers and mobilized European opinion. During the summer of 1763, he wrote Traité sur la Tolérance, which argued that Roman persecution of Christians in the early years of Christianity had now been surpassed by Christian persecution of other Christians who were “hanged, drowned, broken on the wheel, or burned for the love of God.” Eventually, Voltaire appealed to the high council of the kingdom, presided over by the king. There, eventually, Jean Calas was posthumously exonerated and his reputation rehabilitated.
This triumph was accompanied by another. Elisabeth, the daughter of Pierre Paul Sirven, a Protestant living near Toulouse, wished to convert to Catholicism and had been spirited away to a convent by a Catholic bishop. There, she ripped off her clothes and demanded to be flogged; prudently, the bishop returned her to her family. A few months later, Elisabeth disappeared. She was discovered drowned in a well. Forty-five local witnesses testified that the girl had committed suicide, but the prosecutor ordered her father’s arrest and accused him of having murdered his daughter to prevent her conversion. On March 19, 1764, Sirven and his wife were both condemned to be hanged; their two surviving daughters, one of them pregnant, were to be forced to watch. The family fled to Geneva, reached Ferney, and asked Voltaire to help them. The philosopher again took up his pen. He recruited Frederick of Prussia, Catherine of Russia, Stanislaus of Poland, and other monarchs to take up the cause. After nine years of endless argument, Sirven was acquitted. “It took two hours to condemn this man to death,” Voltaire said bitterly, “and nine years to prove his innocence.”
With Voltaire in eternal combat, his widowed niece, Mme Denis, acted as mistress of the house—and as his bedroom companion. Voltaire saw nothing wrong in sexual irregularity; he defined morality as “doing good to mankind.” In any case, it was an age of sexual irregularity, and Voltaire’s relationship with Mme Denis was straightforward. He concealed nothing; she was his mistress; he called her “my beloved.” In 1748, in the early years of their relationship (it continued until his death), he had written to her, “I shall be coming to Paris only for you.… In the meantime, I press a thousand kisses on your round breasts, on your ravishing bottom, on all your person, which has so often given me erections and plunged me into a flood of delight.”
At Ferney, the master usually did not appear until midday dinner. During the day, he read and wrote and then continued far into the night, allowing himself only five or six hours of sleep. He drank an ocean of coffee. He suffered from severe headaches. To help the people of his village, he built a watchmaking factory and then persuaded all of his friends in Europe to buy its products; from St. Petersburg Catherine placed an order worth thirty-nine thousand pounds. By 1777, this once small, impoverished village of forty-nine people had become a prosperous town of twelve hundred. Every Sunday, Voltaire opened the chateau for dancing. On October 4, 1777, Ferney celebrated its patron in the courtyard of his chateau with an evening of singing, dancing, and fireworks. This was the last fete held at Ferney. On February 5, 1778, Voltaire left for Paris, promising to return in six weeks. In Paris, the population, which had not seen him for twenty years, gave him an ovation whenever he appeared. Marie Antoinette asked to meet and embrace him; he could not oblige her because he was still banned from court by her husband, Louis XVI. He met and embraced Benjamin Franklin instead. He never returned to his château. On May 30, 1778, he died in Paris.
While Voltaire lived, Frederick of Prussia told him, “After your death, there will be no one to replace you”; when the philosopher was gone, the king said, “For my part, I am consoled by having lived in the age of Voltaire.” Later, Goethe added, “He governed the whole civilized world.” Catherine’s lament was more specific: it was not his wisdom she mourned; it was his gaiety. “Since Voltaire died,” she wrote to her friend Friedrich Melchior Grimm, “it seems to me that honor no longer attaches to good humor. He was the divinity of gaiety. Procure for me an edition, or rather, a complete copy of his works, to renew within me and confirm my natural love of laughter.”
After Voltaire’s death, the empress told Grimm that she intended to build a replica of the Château de Ferney in the park at Tsarskoe Selo. This “New Ferney” would become the repository of Voltaire’s library, purchased by Catherine from Mme Denis for 135,000 pounds. The books went to Russia, but the architectural project was abandoned, and the library of over six thousand volumes, annotated by Voltaire page by page in the margins, was placed in a hall of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. In the center of this space, the place of honor, was an exact copy of Houdon’s remarkable statue of Voltaire seated.
It is there today.
• • •
Voltaire was interested in Russia. In 1757, he had persuaded Empress Elizabeth to commission him to write a history of Russia under her father, Peter the Great. The first volume had been published in 1760; he was still working on the second volume when Elizabeth died and Catherine overthrew Peter III. With rumors of what had happened at Ropsha reverberating throughout Europe, Catherine thought of enlisting Voltaire to help her clear her name. One of her secretaries at the time was a native of Geneva, François-Pierre Pictet, a disciple of Voltaire’s and a former actor in the patriarch’s amateur theatricals at Les Délices. At Catherine’s request, Pictet sent a long account to Voltaire, explaining the intolerable situation in which she had found herself after her coup, and her innocence in the murder itself. Voltaire accepted this account, and brushed it aside by saying, “I know that … [Catherine] is reproached with some bagatelle about her husband, but these are family matters in which I do not mix.”
Originally, Voltaire maintained a certain reserve toward the new empress. European opinion held that she was unlikely to remain on the throne for long, and Voltaire was reluctant to plunge into an epistolary relationship with her. His reluctance increased on news of the sudden death of Ivan VI. “I believe we must moderate a little our enthusiasm for the North,” he wrote to d’Alembert. Once it was apparent that the German princess had a firm seat on the Russian throne, Voltaire began to see in her an enlightened monarch who might work to apply the principles of justice and tolerance that he proclaimed. Thereafter, their correspondence flourished, garnished with mutual flattery, until his death. Their political ideology was similar: they agreed that monarchy was the only rational form of government, provided the monarch was enlightened. “Why is almost the whole earth governed by monarchs?” Voltaire asked. “The honest answer is because men are rarely worthy of governing themselves.… Almost nothing great has ever been done in the world except by the genius and firmness of a single man combating the prejudices of the multitude.… I do not like government by the rabble.”
The relationship between an ambitious, politically powerful woman and the most celebrated writer of the age became one of mutual benefit. Both were mindful that they were playing before an immense, influential audience. Catherine recognized that a letter to Voltaire, which could be passed along to his friends, was potentially a message to the intelligentsia of Europe. For Voltaire, what could be more flattering than to have another ruling sovereign become his royal disciple? He addressed her as “the Semiramis of the North,” “Saint Catherine,” and “Our Lady of St. Petersburg.” In return, she showered him with sable pelisses and jeweled snuffboxes, and sent diamonds to Madame Denis. But it was a relationship that thrived on distance; despite the intimacy of their correspondence, the empress and the patriarch never met. Near the end of his life, when Voltaire was toying with the idea of paying Saint Catherine his personal respects, this appeared to be the last thing she wanted. Perhaps nervous about exposing her country or herself to Voltaire’s analytical eye, she wrote urgently to Grimm, “For God’s sake, try to persuade the octogenarian to stay at home. What should he do here? He would either die here or on the road from cold, weariness and bad roads. Tell him that Catau is best seen from a distance.”
Even before she first wrote to Voltaire in 1763, Catherine had reached out to another towering Enlightenment figure, Denis Diderot. Diderot, born in a small town near Dijon in 1713, was as warmhearted as Voltaire was cynical, as rough-hewn as Voltaire was sophisticated and polished, and retained though life the innocence of a child and the enthusiasms of adolescence. According to Catherine, Diderot was “in certain ways … a hundred, in others not yet ten.” Intending as a boy to become a priest, he attended a Jesuit school for seven years (his brother became a priest) and the University of Paris, and became a translator of English books into French. Increasingly, he was fascinated by the whole universe of knowledge: mathematics, biology, chemistry, physics, anatomy, Latin, Greek, history, literature, art, politics, and philosophy. As a young man, he had rejected the biblical God as a monster of cruelty and the Catholic Church as a fountainhead of ignorance. He saw nature, which, he noted, made no distinction between good and evil, as the only permanent reality. He was arrested and imprisoned. Released, he became the founder and chief editor of the new Encyclopedia, “the bible of the enlightened.” Working with d’Alembert, he brought out the first volume in June 1751; ten more volumes were to follow. The philosophy of the Encylopedia was humanistic; man was placed in nature; he was equipped with reason to make his way. The importance of scientific knowledge, the dignity of human labor were stressed. For denouncing “the myths of the Catholic church,” his license to publish was revoked. This negative attention enormously stimulated desire to acquire and read each of the eleven volumes as it was published.
From the first, Voltaire praised and encouraged. To d’Alembert he wrote, “You and M. Diderot are accomplishing a work which will be the glory of France and the shame of those who persecute you. Of eloquent philosophers, I recognize only you and him.” Six years later, when the project was again in trouble, Voltaire urged, “Go on, brave Diderot, intrepid d’Alembert. Fall upon the knaves, destroy their empty declamations, their miserable sophistries, their historical lies, their contradictions and absurdities beyond number.”
One of those closely watching these developments was the new empress of Russia. Soon after her accession, and aware of the influence of Diderot and d’Alembert, Catherine set about winning their support. In August 1762, two months after she took the throne, the difficulties of publishing the Encyclopedia in France provided her with an opportunity. She offered to have all subsequent volumes printed in Riga, the westernmost city in her empire. But her offer came too soon after the death of Peter III at Ropsha, and the editors of the Encyclopedia were wary of trusting their work to a ruler whose tenure seemed uncertain. Ultimately, the French government, learning what Catherine had offered, relented and authorized continued publication in France.
In 1765, Catherine made a grand gesture to Diderot that became the talk of Europe. Three children had been born to Diderot and his wife, and all three had died. Then, when Madame Diderot was forty-three, a fourth child was born, a daughter, Marie Angélique. Diderot idolized this little girl and treasured the time he spent with her. He knew that he must provide for her dowry. But he had no money; everything had gone into the Encyclopedia. He decided to sell his only valuable possession, his library. Catherine heard about his decision from Diderot’s friend, her ambassador to France and Holland, Prince Dmitry Golitsyn. Diderot had asked fifteen thousand pounds for his books. Catherine offered sixteen thousand but attached a condition: the books should remain in Diderot’s possession for his lifetime. “It would be cruel to separate a scholar from his books,” she explained. Diderot thus became—without either he or his books leaving Paris—Catherine’s librarian. For this service, she paid him a salary of a thousand pounds a year. The following year, when the salary was forgotten and went unpaid, an embarrassed Catherine sent Diderot fifty thousand pounds—to cover fifty years in advance, she said.
The empress’s purchase of Diderot’s library captured the imagination of literary Europe. Diderot, astonished, wrote to his benefactress: “Great princess, I prostrate myself at your feet. I reach out my arms to you, I would speak to you, but my soul faints, my mind grows cloudy.… Oh, Catherine, be sure that you do not reign more powerfully in Petersburg than in Paris.” Voltaire joined in: “Diderot, d’Alembert and I—we are three who would build you altars.… Would one ever have suspected fifty years ago that one day the Scythians [Russians] would so nobly recompense in Paris the virtue, science, and philosophy that are treated so shamefully among us.” From Grimm: “Thirty years of labor have not brought Diderot the slightest recompense. It has pleased the Empress of Russia to pay the debt of France.” Catherine’s response was, “I never thought that buying Diderot’s library would bring me so many compliments.”
There was, no doubt, a larger purpose behind her generosity. If so, the gift achieved its objective: Europeans now believed that there were things in the east other than snow and wolves. Diderot threw himself into the task of recruiting artistic and architectural talent for Catherine. His house was turned into an employment agency on her behalf. Writers, artists, scientists, architects, and engineers swarmed to solicit appointments in St. Petersburg.
In 1773, Diderot, who hated to travel and had never before left France, summoned the resolution to embark on the journey to Russia that he felt he owed to Catherine. He was sixty years old, subject to stomach cramps and drafts of cold air, and he was afraid of Russian food. The prospect of crossing Europe to reach a country famous for violence and freezing temperatures was daunting; nevertheless, he felt an obligation to thank his benefactress in person. In May 1773, he set out. He got only as far as The Hague, where he halted for three months to rest with his friend Prince Dmitry Golitsyn.
With autumn approaching, the philosopher set out on the second stage of his journey. Huddled and coughing in a post chaise, he hoped to reach his destination before extreme cold arrived. Unfortunately, it was snowing in the Russian capital when he arrived on October 8, and he collapsed into bed. The day after his arrival he was awakened by the pealing of bells and the booming of cannon celebrating the wedding of the nineteen-year-old heir to the throne, Grand Duke Paul, to Princess Wilhelmina of Hesse-Darmstadt. Diderot, indifferent to ceremonials, avoided the festivities; this inclination was reinforced by his having nothing to wear other than plain black clothes and by his having left his wig behind somewhere during his journey.
Catherine warmly welcomed the famous editor of the Encyclopedia. The man she saw before her possessed a “high brow receding on a half-bald head; large rustic ears and a big bent nose, firm mouth … [and] brown eyes, heavy and sad, as if recalling unrecallable errors, or realizing the indestructibility of superstition, or noting the high birth rate of simpletons.” The empress had her guest inducted into the Russian Academy of Sciences and then began a series of conversations in her private study. “M. Diderot,” she told him at their first meeting, “you see this door by which you have entered. That door will be opened to you every day between three and five in the afternoon.” Diderot was charmed by her simplicity and the complete informality of their long, intimate sessions. Catherine would sit on a sofa, sometimes with a piece of needlework in her hands, and her guest would take his place in a comfortable armchair opposite her. Diderot, completely at ease, talked interminably, contradicted her, shouted, gesticulated, and called her “my good lady.” The empress laughed at his exuberance and familiarities. He took her hands, shook her arm, and tapped her legs in making his points. “Your Diderot is an extraordinary man,” Catherine wrote to Mme Geoffrin. “I emerge from interviews with him with my thighs bruised and quite black. I have been obliged to put a table between us to protect myself and my limbs.”
Their conversations roamed widely. With some idea of the topic likely to be discussed, Diderot prepared notes and memoranda, which he then read to the empress; after this preliminary, they both spoke freely. He put before her his views on tolerance, the legislative process, the value of competition in commerce, divorce (which he favored in cases of intellectual incompatibility), and gambling. He begged her to provide Russia with a permanent law of succession. He urged her to introduce the study of anatomy in girls’ schools to make the young women better wives and mothers, and help them thwart the wiles of seducers.
The cordiality of their relationship encouraged Diderot to hope that he had found a ruler willing to apply the principles of the Enlightenment to her government. He believed that it would be easier to reform Russia than France, since Russia seemed a blank new page on which history had written nothing. He gave his views on the education of Grand Duke Paul: after serving as a statesman’s apprentice in the different administrative colleges, the young man should travel all over Russia, accompanied by economists, geologists, and jurists, to familiarize himself with different aspects of the country he would someday rule. Then, after getting his wife pregnant to ensure the succession, he should visit Germany, England, Italy, and France.
If Diderot had confined himself to specific suggestions, he might have had more specific impact. But, having edited a massive encyclopedia that attempted to include the totality of knowledge, Diderot conceived himself as an authority and therefore a suitable adviser on every aspect of human life, culture, and government. He considered it his duty to instruct the empress on the way to govern her empire. He cited examples from the Greeks and Romans, and urged her to reform Russian institutions while she still could. He urged the establishment of an English-style parliament. He subjected Catherine to a questionnaire containing eighty-eight items, including the quality of tar supplied by each province, the cultivation of grapes, the organization of veterinary schools, the number of monks and nuns in Russia, the number and condition of Jews living in the empire, and the relations between master and serf.
If Diderot’s irrepressibility made Catherine laugh, his probing questions probably discomfited her. Listening to him, she eventually decided that her learned, garrulous guest had no sense of the reality of Russia. “Monsieur Diderot,” she finally said to him,
I have listened with the greatest pleasure to all the inspirations of your brilliant mind. But all your grand principles, which I understand very well, would do splendidly in books and very badly in practice. In your plans for reform, you are forgetting the difference between our two positions: you work only on paper which accepts anything, is smooth and flexible and offers no obstacles either to your imagination or your pen, while I, poor empress, work on human skin, which is far more sensitive and touchy.
Eventually, however, Diderot realized that the empress did not intend to put into practice any of the advice he had been preaching for so many weeks, and the glow of their first conversations began to fade. His own worsening health, his loneliness in an alien court, the open hostility of courtiers jealous of his easy access to the sovereign, all contributed to Diderot’s increasing desire to return home. He had seen much of Catherine but almost nothing of Russia. When he spoke of departing, she did not urge him to stay. He had been her guest for five months, and she had sat with him for sixty afternoons. He was the only one of the philosophes she was ever to meet.
Diderot left Russia on March 4, 1774. He had been dreading the return journey, and, to ease his passage, Catherine provided him with a specially constructed carriage in which he could lie down. When she said goodbye, she handed him a ring, a fur, and three bags containing a thousand rubles each. The journey was more difficult than he had feared. The ice was breaking on the rivers along the Baltic coast, and, as his carriage was crossing the river Dvina, the ice cracked and the carriage began to sink. The old man was pulled free, but the horses were drowned, and three-quarters of his baggage was lost. He wound up with a high fever. Eventually, he made it back to The Hague and recuperated in Prince Golitsyn’s care.
From Catherine’s perspective, the visit had been less than a success. Diderot’s ideas did not constitute a practical program for Russia; a noble, idealistic philosophe was not a practical politician or administrator. Once physically recovered, Diderot, however, decided that his visit had been a triumph. From Paris, he wrote to Catherine, “Now you sit beside Caesar, your friend [Joseph of Austria], and a little above Frederick [of Prussia,] your dangerous neighbor.”
Diderot’s exuberant stories about his long stay with Catherine so irritated Voltaire that he became sick with jealousy. For months, he had not received a single letter from St. Petersburg; clearly Catherine had rejected him for another. On August 9, 1774, four months after Diderot left Russia, Voltaire was unable to stand it any longer:
Madame:
I am positively in disgrace at your court. Your Imperial Majesty has jilted me for Diderot, or for Grimm, or for some other favorite. You have no consideration for my advanced age. All well and good if Your Majesty were a French coquette; but how can a victorious, law-giving empress be so inconstant.… I am trying to find crimes I have committed that would justify your indifference. I see that indeed there is no passion that does not end. This thought would cause me to die of chagrin, were I not already so near to dying of old age.
Signed,
He whom you have forsaken,
your admirer, your old Russian of Ferney
Catherine answered lightly: “Live, Monsieur, and let us be reconciled, for in any case there is no cause for quarrel between us.… You are so good a Russian that you could not be the enemy of Catherine.” Appeased, Voltaire declared that he acknowledged defeat and “returned to her in chains.”
Voltaire had exercised the greatest intellectual influence on Catherine, and Diderot was the only one of the major philosophes she actually met, but it was in Friedrich Melchoir Grimm that the empress found a lifelong friend. Born a Lutheran in Regensburg in 1723 and educated in Leipzig, Grimm traveled to Paris to make his career. He made his way through the literary salons and became an intimate friend of Diderot’s. In 1754, he took over the Correspondance Littéraire, an exclusive fortnightly cultural newsletter, reporting from Paris on books, poetry, the theater, painting, and sculpture. The fifteen or so subscribers, all crowned heads or princes of the Holy Roman Empire, received their copies through their embassies in Paris, thus avoiding censorship and enabling Grimm to write freely. Once on the throne, Catherine became a subscriber, but her personal acquaintance with Grimm had to wait until September 1773, when he arrived in St. Petersburg—a month before Diderot—for the wedding of Grand Duke Paul to Princess Wilhelmina of Hesse-Darmstadt. Grimm was present as part of the escort for the bride.
Catherine knew Grimm by his reputation and through his newsletter. Six years older than Catherine, he shared many of her characteristics: German origin, French education, ambition, cosmopolitan interests, love of literature, passion for gossip. Beyond these, Grimm may also have appealed to Catherine because of his sound common sense, his discretion combined with wit, and his quiet charm. From September 1773 to April 1774, he was frequently received in private by Catherine in the same kind of setting as Diderot. She invited him to remain in St. Petersburg and go into her service, but he declined, citing his age, ignorance of the Russian language, and unfamiliarity with the Russian court. Nevertheless, when he left for Italy in April, they began a correspondence that continued until Catherine’s last letter in 1796, a month before her death. He returned to St. Petersburg in September 1776 and stayed almost a year, during which time she asked him to head a new commission on public schools. Again, he declined, although he later agreed to serve as her official cultural agent in Paris, managing her artistic and intellectual interests and contacts.
Catherine’s friendship with Grimm became one of the most important relationships in her life. He functioned as a confidant and a sounding board—even a safety valve—in whom she had complete trust. She wrote to him with freedom; she could speak frankly of her personal life, including her thoughts about her lovers. Except for her son, Paul, and, later, her grandchildren, she had no family, and to Grimm alone she could pour out her thoughts and feelings as she might have done with a fond uncle or an older brother.