58 
FOR ELEVEN YEARS, from 1761 to 1772, Catherine had been faithful to Gregory Orlov. She was fiercely proud of him, often praising his bravery, generosity, and loyalty to her and the crown. Although his achievements were not balanced by sparkling intelligence and his character defects included selfishness, conceit, and indolence, he still had exhibited the courage and masculine charm that had originally attracted her. Having failed to persuade her to marry him, and finding himself unable to dominate her, he found other women. Catherine suffered but looked away. In 1771, he had rehabilitated himself by his heroic behavior during the Moscow plague. Impressed, she gave him another assignment intended to enhance his prestige. The battlefield stalemate in southern Russia had led to an attempt to negotiate peace with the Turks. Catherine appointed Gregory to be Russia’s chief negotiator, and, in March 1772, he left for the Danube. As he departed, she wrote to Frau Bielcke in Hamburg, “He must appear to the Turks as an angel of peace in all his great beauty.” In the peace talks, however, his egotistical clumsiness brought him down. He insisted that Russian demands be treated as those of a conqueror and stuck to this position with such arrogance that the offended Turkish emissaries suspended negotiations. Before this denouement, his position in St. Petersburg had already collapsed. On the day he departed for the south, Catherine was told that her “angel” had begun another affair. Orlov’s reign had lasted thirteen years and she had forgiven him much—this was too much. Weary of this recurring behavior, Catherine made up her mind to end the relationship. She did not bring herself to this rupture easily, but once decided, she resolved to do it in a way that would make reconciliation impossible. She waited until he was far away.
Nikita Panin, no friend of the Orlovs and seeing the empress oscillating between rage and despair, pushed forward a replacement for Orlov, a twenty-eight-year-old Horse Guards officer, Alexander Vasilchikov. Catherine admitted, “I cannot live one day without love,” but it was hardly a question of love with this candidate. Alexander Vasilchikov appeared innocuous. He came from an old noble family; he was modest and sweet-tempered; his manners were polished; he spoke perfect French. Dining at court, Catherine noticed these qualities, along with his handsome face and beautiful black eyes. The Prussian minister noted the empress’s good humor in the young man’s presence and the corresponding nervousness of Orlov’s relatives. When Vasilchikov was presented with a gold snuffbox, his reluctance to accept intensified the donor’s desire to give him more. By August, he had become a gentleman-in-waiting; by September, a court chamberlain. Then, suddenly, the young man was installed in Orlov’s apartment in the Winter Palace, his rooms linked to Catherine’s apartment by the private stairway. He was appointed adjutant general and given a hundred thousand rubles, along with an annual salary of twelve thousand rubles; and jewels, a new wardrobe, servants, and a country estate. This remarkable ascent astonished the court, tempered by the widespread belief that once Orlov returned, Vasilchikov would not last a week.
Gregory was still waiting for negotiations to resume in the Balkans when he received an urgent message from his brother Alexis, in St. Petersburg: the empress had taken a new lover, a young Guards officer, described by Alexis as “good looking, amiable, and a complete nonentity.” Russia’s chief delegate abandoned the peace talks immediately and rushed back to St. Petersburg. On the city’s outskirts, he was abruptly halted; on Catherine’s orders he was instructed to retire to his estate at Gatchina. The pretext was that because of plague the previous year, all travelers from the south were required to pass through a period of quarantine before entering the capital. The truth was that Catherine was afraid of Gregory. She had new locks put on her doors and surrounded her apartment with loyal soldiers. Even with this added security, the slightest noise made her imagine that Orlov was coming, and she was always ready to flee. “You don’t know him,” she said. “He is capable of killing me and the Grand Duke Paul.”
From Gatchina, Gregory begged to see her. She refused but sent him messages, telling him that he must be reasonable, must go away and travel for his health. Gregory retorted that he had never felt better. She asked him to send back the jeweled miniature portrait of her which he had worn over his heart. He refused to send the portrait but returned the diamonds from the frame.
After four weeks in “quarantine,” Orlov suddenly reappeared in society, behaving as though nothing had happened. He pretended not to notice that Vasilchikov was attending to duties that had been his; he even indulged in his own brand of humor by making friends with the new favorite, praising him loudly and joking about himself. It was Vasilchikov who blushed with embarrassment when, at night in the presence of the entire court, including Orlov, the empress gave him her arm to escort her to her apartment. No one knew how to react. Before long, Orlov realized that the pretty-faced “nonentity” had triumphed. He knew that Catherine was not in love; that she had taken this young man for the same reason he collected mistresses: a need for a companion who would be always available and submissive. Realizing that his own position was becoming ridiculous, he requested permission to travel. Catherine agreed without uttering a word of recrimination. Indeed, before he left, Orlov allowed himself to be awarded a trove of additional rubles and was given the right to use the title of Prince of the Holy Roman Empire.
Gregory Orlov’s departure brought peace to court, but for Catherine it was a peace paid for with boredom. Vasilchikov was handsome, but his intellect and personality were so limited as to make conversation impossible. Catherine, wearied by a day of administering her empire, wanted to be intellectually stimulated, amused, and distracted in her hours of relaxation. Vasilchikov had none of these skills, and she soon realized that she had linked herself to a bore incapable of saying anything interesting or funny. He did his best. He was attentive, dutiful, well meaning, and decorative. Nothing helped; she found him increasingly, and then unendurably, boring. Later favorites, picked out by the empress for their physical appearance, had to be acclaimed for their superior mental qualities—or, at least, for the speed with which they were learning. Vasilchikov possessed neither these aptitudes nor prospects. The twenty-two months of his tenure as favorite witnessed some of the most traumatic, challenging, anxiety-producing events of Catherine’s reign: the partition of Poland, war with Turkey, the Pugachev rebellion. She needed someone to talk to who could offer support and consolation, if not useful political or military advice. That Vasilchikov was unable to provide anything of this kind was obvious to everyone.
Thus Vasilchikov, not Orlov, had turned out to be the primary victim of this boudoir upheaval, and no one knew better than the wretched favorite himself. He was sufficiently sensitive to realize that he bored his mistress and that he was viewed as only a stopgap. His shy, sweet temper, which had been one of his assets, turned peevish and sour. His description of his life with the empress is the wail of an abandoned child:
I was nothing more to her than a kind of male cocotte, and was treated as such. I was not allowed to receive guests or go out. If I made a request for myself or anyone else, she did not reply. When I wished to have the Order of St. Anne, I spoke to the empress about it. The next day I found a thirty thousand ruble banknote in my pocket. In this way, she always stopped my mouth and sent me to my room. She never condescended to discuss with me any matters that lay close to my heart.
Catherine kept him on because, having made the unfortunate choice of this obscure young guardsman, she thought it would be cruel to dismiss him for faults for which he was not responsible. Finally, however, when she could endure him no longer, she wrote to Potemkin, “Tell Panin that he must send Vasilchikov away somewhere for a cure. I feel suffocated by him and he complains of pains in his chest. Later he could be appointed envoy somewhere as ambassador—somewhere where there is not too much work to do. He is a bore. I burned my fingers and I shall never do it again.”
Although Vasilchikov’s performance in the role of favorite was probably the weakest of any of Catherine’s lovers, she accepted most of the blame. He was a sudden replacement, installed when she was angry at the frequently and flagrantly unfaithful Gregory. “It was a random choice,” she admitted later, “made out of desperation. I was more heartbroken at that time than I can say.”
The hapless Vasilchikov departed, generously pensioned for his efforts and good intentions. He retired to a large country estate near Moscow—a gift from the empress. Over the years, he aged into a quiet country gentleman, ignored and mostly forgotten by his sovereign. Once he had gone, she replaced mediocrity with genius and boredom with intellectual fireworks. She sent for Potemkin.