Catherine’s rapprochement with Bestuzhev-Riumin; Choglokova’s
encouragement of an a fair so Catherine can produce an heir;
Catherine’s second miscarriage; Peter’s execution of a rat;
fire destroys palace and Elizabeth’s wardrobe; Saltykov’s ruse
to court Catherine revealed by Peter
Madame Choglokova had stayed in Petersburg because she had just had her seventh child, a girl. When she had recovered, she joined us in Moscow. Here we had been lodged in a wing constructed of wood, newly built that autumn, and as water seeped from the paneling, all the apartments were amazingly damp. This wing contained two rows of five or six large rooms each; those on the street were for me, and those on the other side were for the Grand Duke. My maids and ladies-in-waiting were lodged with their servants in the room meant to serve as my dressing room, so that there were seventeen girls and women lodged in one room that had only three large windows but no other outlets except my bedroom, through which they were obliged to pass for all kinds of needs, which was inconvenient for them and for me. The first ten days after my arrival in Moscow, we were obliged to tolerate this inconvenience, whose equal I have never seen. Moreover, their dining room was one of my antechambers. I was ill upon arriving. To remedy this inconvenience I had several large partitions put up in my bedroom and by this means divided it into three. But this was of almost no help because the doors opened and closed continually, which was unavoidable. Finally on the tenth day the Empress came to see me, and seeing the continual traffic, she went into the other room and said to my ladies, “I will have you made another exit that does not go through the Grand Duchess’s bedroom.” But what did she do? She ordered that a partition be built that blocked one of this room’s windows, never mind that seventeen people lived there with difficulty. With this the room was narrowed to gain a hallway, the window on the street was opened, a stairway was built to it, and in this way my ladies were obliged to exit via the street. Toilets were placed for them under their windows. When they went to eat, they again had to walk along the street. In a word, this whole arrangement was worthless, and I know not how these seventeen women, crammed together and sometimes ill, did not come down with some putrid fever in these corridors next to my bedroom, which was so full of all kinds of vermin that I could not sleep.
Finally Madame Choglokova recovered from her confinement and arrived in Moscow, and a few days later Sergei Saltykov arrived. As Moscow is very large and everyone is very spread out there, he used this advantageous locale to conceal at court the waning of his insincere or real affection. To tell the truth, I was hurt; however, he gave me such good and worthwhile reasons that as soon as I saw him and had spoken to him, my suspicions vanished. We agreed that to reduce the number of his enemies, I would have a few remarks made to Count Bestuzhev to give him the hope that I was less hostile to him than before. I entrusted this message to a man named Bremse, who was employed in the Holstein Chancery of Monsieur Pechlin. When he was not at court, this man often went to Chancellor Count Bestuzhev’s home. He undertook this with great eagerness and told me that it had warmed the Chancellor’s heart and that he had said that he was at my disposal anytime that I judged it necessary. If he could be useful to me, he begged me to indicate a sure channel by which we could communicate with each other as we saw fit. I liked his idea and told Bremse that I would think about it. I repeated this to Sergei Saltykov, and it was immediately resolved that he himself would go to the Chancellor’s house under the pretext of a social call, since he had only just arrived. The old man received him marvelously, took him aside, and spoke to him of the inner world of our court and the stupidity of the Choglokovs, telling him, among other things, “I know that, although you are their most intimate friend, you view them as I do because you are an intelligent boy.” Then he spoke to him about me and my situation as if he lived in my room. Then he said, “In gratitude for the goodwill that the Grand Duchess deigns to show me, I am going to do her a little service, for which I think she will be grateful to me. I will make Madame Vladislavova as sweet as a lamb, and the Grand Duchess will do as she wants with her. She will see that I am not the werewolf that I have been made out to be.” Eventually Sergei Saltykov returned, delighted with this commission and this man, who personally gave him several pieces of advice that were as wise as they were useful. He became very intimate with us without a living soul knowing anything about it.
Meanwhile, Madame Choglokova, who always had her favorite project in mind, which was to ensure the succession, took me aside one day and said, “Listen, I must speak to you very seriously.” I kept my eyes and ears open as one might expect. She began with a long disquisition, as was her wont, about her devotion to her husband, about her virtue, about what must and must not be done to love each other and to promote or support conjugal bonds, and then she pushed on, saying that there were sometimes situations of major consequence that should be exceptions to the rule. I let her say everything she wanted without interrupting, not knowing where she was going with this, a bit astonished, and not knowing if she was setting a trap for me or if she spoke sincerely. As I was having these private reflections, she said, “You are going to see how much I love my country and how sincere I am. I do not doubt that you fancy someone. You are free to choose between S.S. and L.N. If I am not mistaken, it is the latter.” At this I cried out, “No, no, not at all.” Then she said, “Well then, if it is not him, it is the other no doubt.” I did not say a word, and she continued, “You will see that I will not make difficulties for you.” I played dumb to the point where she scolded me many times, both in the city and eventually in the country, where we went after Easter.95
It was at or around this time that the Empress gave the estate of Liubertsy and several others fourteen or fifteen versts from Moscow to the Grand Duke. But before going to reside in these new possessions of His Imperial Highness, the Empress celebrated the anniversary of her coronation in Moscow. It was April 25. It was announced to us that she had ordered that the proceedings be conducted exactly as they had been organized on the actual day of the ceremony. We were very curious to see what would happen. The day before, she slept at the Kremlin. We stayed in the Sloboda at the wooden palace and we received the order to come to mass at the cathedral. At nine in the morning we left the wooden palace in ceremonial style with the servants proceeding on foot. We crossed all Moscow bit by bit; it was a seven-verst journey, and we stepped out in front of the church. A few moments later the Empress arrived with her cortege, the little crown on her head and the imperial mantle carried by the chamberlains as was customary. She went to sit in her usual place in the church, and as yet there was nothing in all this that was extraordinary or not done at all the other great celebrations of her reign. There was a damp cold in the church such as I have never felt in my life. I was completely blue and I froze from the cold in a court dress that left my throat uncovered. The Empress told me to put on a sable stole, but I did not have one with me. She had them bring hers, took one, and put it around her neck. I saw another one in the box; I thought that she was going to send it to me to put on, but I was mistaken. She sent it back; it seemed to me that this was a rather marked sign of ill will. Madame Choglokova, who saw that I was shivering, got from someone a silk kerchief, which I put around my neck. When the mass and the sermon were over, the Empress left the church. We prepared to follow her, but she had us told that we could return to the house. It was then that we learned that she was going to dine all alone on the throne, and in this way the ceremony would be as it was the very day of her coronation, when she had dined alone. Excluded from this meal, we returned as we had come, with great ceremony, our servants on foot, making the fourteen-verst round-trip through the city, and we were chilled to the bone and dying of hunger. The Empress had appeared to us to be in very bad humor during the mass, and we were dismissed by her no more kindly, with a very disagreeable lack of attention to say the least. At the other grand ceremonies, when she dined on the throne we had the honor of eating with her. This time she dismissed us publicly. On the way back, alone in a carriage with the Grand Duke, I told him what I thought of this; he told me that he would complain about it. Back at the palace, half dead from the cold and exhausted, I complained to Madame Choglokova about having gotten chilled. The following day there was a ball at the wooden palace. I said that I was sick and did not go.96 The Grand Duke actually had the Shuvalovs told something about this, and they replied something that satisfied him, and that was the end of it.
Around this time, we learned that Zakhar Chernyshev and Colonel Nikolai Leontiev had quarreled over gambling debts at the home of Roman Vorontsov, that they had fought with swords and that Count Zakhar Chernyshev had a serious wound to the head. It was so bad that they had not been able to transport him from Count Roman Vorontsov’s house to his own. He remained there and was doing very badly, and there was talk of trepanning97 him. I was very upset by this because I liked him a great deal. Leontiev was arrested by order of the Empress. This fight had the whole city talking because of the very numerous relations of both combatants. Leontiev was the son-in-law of Countess Rumiantseva, a very close relation of the Panins and of the Kurakins. The other man also had his relations, friends, and protectors. The whole thing had happened in Count Roman Vorontsov’s house; the wounded man was at his home. Finally, when the danger passed, the affair blew over and things went no further.
During the month of May, I had new signs of pregnancy. We went to Liubertsy, the Grand Duke’s country estate twelve or fourteen versts from Moscow. The stone house there, which had been built long ago by Prince Menshikov, was falling into ruins. We could not live in it. To remedy this, tents were set up in the courtyard. I slept in a kibitka;98 at three or four in the morning my sleep would be interrupted by ax blows and the noise made by the construction of a wooden wing to the house, which they were rushing to build two steps, so to speak, from our tents, so that we would have a place to reside the rest of the summer. The rest of the time we would go hunting or on walks. I did not ride anymore, but went around in a cabriolet. Toward the feast of St. Peter we returned to Moscow, and I felt so weary that I slept every day until noon, and it was difficult to awaken me for dinner. The feast of St. Peter was celebrated in the usual manner. I got dressed, attended mass, and went to lunch, to the ball, and to supper. On the following day, I felt pains in my lower back. Madame Choglokova sent for a midwife, and she predicted a miscarriage, which in fact I had the following night. I may have been two to three months pregnant. I was in great danger for thirteen days, and it was suspected that part of the afterbirth had not been expelled. This was kept from me. Eventually, on the thirteenth day, it came out on its own, without pains or effort. I was made to rest for six weeks in my room because of this complication, during an intolerable heat wave. The very day that I fell ill, the Empress came to see me and seemed troubled by my state. During the six weeks that I stayed in my room, I was bored to death. My only companions were Madame Choglokova, although she came rather infrequently, and a little Kalmuck girl, whom I liked because she was kind. I often cried out of boredom.
As for the Grand Duke, most of the time he was in his room, where a Ukrainian chamber valet named Karnovich, who was as much a fool as a drunk, did his best to entertain him, providing as many toys, as much wine, and other strong liquors as he could, unbeknownst to Monsieur Choglokov, who in any event was deceived and mocked by everyone. But in the Grand Duke’s secret, nocturnal bacchanals with his servants, among whom were several Kalmuck boys, the Grand Duke often found himself poorly obeyed and served, for being drunk, they did not know what they were doing and forgot that they were with their master and that this master was the Grand Duke. His Imperial Highness would resort to blows from his stick or the flat of his sword. Despite this, his entourage obeyed him badly, and more than once he came to me, complaining of his servants and begging me to make them see reason. Then I would go to his residence and would berate them, reminding them of their duties, and immediately they would straighten up. This made the Grand Duke say to me more than once, and repeat as well to Bressan, that he did not know how I dealt with his servants, that while he thrashed them and could not make himself obeyed, I obtained what I wanted with a word.
One day, when I went into His Imperial Highness’s apartment for this purpose, my eyes were struck by a large rat that he had had hanged with all the ceremony of an execution in the middle of a small room that he had had made with a partition. I asked what this meant. He said that this rat had committed a criminal act and merited the ultimate punishment according to military laws, that it had climbed atop the ramparts of a cardboard fortress on a table in this room and eaten two papier-mâché sentries standing watch on one of the bastions, and that the Grand Duke had had the criminal judged according to the laws of war. His setter had caught the rat, which had immediately been hanged as I saw it, and it would stay there exposed to the eyes of the public for three days as an example. I could not keep myself from bursting with laughter at the extreme folly of the thing, but this displeased him very much in light of the importance he gave to it. I withdrew and took refuge in my ignorance, as a woman, of military laws; nevertheless he remained angry because of my laughter. It could at least be said in the rat’s defense that it had been hanged without anyone having asked or heard its defense.
During the court’s stay in Moscow, it happened that a court lackey went mad and even became violent. The Empress ordered her chief doctor, Boerhave, to take care of this man. He was put in a room near the apartment of Boerhave, who resided at the court. Moreover, chance had it that several people lost their minds that year. When the Empress was informed of this, she brought them to the court and had them lodged near Boerhave, so that a little insane asylum was created at court. I remember that the most important patients were a major in the Semenovsky Guards, Chaadaev, a Lieutenant Colonel Leutrum, a Major Choglokov, a monk from Ascension Monastery, who had cut off his genitals with a razor,99 and several others. Chaadaev’s madness consisted in thinking that Shah-Nadir, also known as Tahmasp Kuli Khan, the Persian usurper and tyrant, was God himself.100 When the doctors were unable to cure him of his delusion, he was put in the hands of priests; they persuaded the Empress to have him exorcised. She herself attended the ceremony, but Chaadaev remained as mad as he appeared to be. However, there were people who doubted his madness, because he was rational about all other matters but Shah-Nadir. His old friends even went to consult him about their affairs, and he gave them very sensible advice. Those who did not think him mad found the cause for this affected mania in a bad situation from which he could extricate himself only with this ruse. Since the beginning of the Empress’s reign, he had been employed in the tax service. He had been accused of misappropriation of public funds and was supposed to be tried; out of fear he acquired this fantasy that got him through the affair.
In mid-August, we returned to the country. On September 5, the Empress’s name day, she went to Ascension Monastery. While she was there, lightning struck the church. Fortunately, Her Imperial Majesty was in a chapel next to the main church. She learned of the event only because of the fright of her courtiers. However, no one was injured or killed in this accident. A short time later she returned to Moscow, where we also went from Liubertsy. Upon our return to the city, we saw the Princess of Courland kiss the Empress’s hand publicly for the permission granted her to marry Prince Georgy Khovansky. She had fallen out with her first fiancé, Peter Saltykov, who for his part immediately married Princess Solntseva.
At three in the afternoon on November 1 of that year, I was in Madame Choglokova’s apartment when her husband, Sergei Saltykov, Lev Naryshkin, and several other gentlemen of our court left the room to go to Chamberlain Shuvalov’s apartment to congratulate him on his birthday, which was that day. Madame Choglokova, Princess Gagarina, and I chatted together. After hearing some noise in a little chapel that was near the apartment where we were, we saw a couple of these gentlemen return. They told us that they had been prevented from passing through the halls of the palace because there was a fire. I immediately went into my room, and crossing an antechamber, I saw that the balustrade in the corner of the great hall was on fire. It was twenty steps from our wing. I entered my rooms and found them already full of soldiers and servants, who were removing the furniture and carrying what they could. Madame Choglokova followed me closely, and as there was nothing more to do in the house but wait for it to catch fire, Madame Choglokova and I went out. Outside the door we found the carriage of the chapel master Araya, who had come for a concert in the Grand Duke’s apartment and whom I myself warned that the house was burning. She and I got into the carriage, the street being covered in mud because of the continual rains that had fallen for a few days, and there we watched both the fire and the way in which the furniture was carried from all directions out of the house. Then I saw a singular thing. It was the astonishing number of rats and mice that descended the staircase in a line, without even really hurrying. They could not save this vast wooden house because of a lack of equipment, and because the little there was, was located precisely under the burning hall. This hall was more or less at the center of the buildings around it, all of which may have measured two or three versts in circumference. I left precisely at three, and at six no vestige of the house remained. The heat of the fire became so great that neither I nor Madame Choglokova could tolerate it anymore, and we had our carriage go into the field several hundred feet away. Finally, Monsieur Choglokov came with the Grand Duke and told us that the Empress was going to her house at Pokrovskoe and that she had ordered us to go to Monsieur Choglokov’s house, which stood on the first corner to the right of the main street of the Sloboda. We went there immediately. There was a salon in the middle of this house and four rooms on each side. It is hardly possible to be more uncomfortable than we were there. The wind blew in from all directions, the windows and doors were half rotted, the floor was split with cracks two or three inches wide. Moreover, the vermin had the run of the house. The children and servants were living there when we arrived. They were sent out, and we were lodged in this horrible house, which was devoid of furniture.
The second day of my stay in this house, I learned what a Kalmuck nose is. The little girl whom I had in my service told me as I awoke, while pointing at her nose, “I have a hazelnut in here.” I touched her on the nose and found nothing, but the whole morning this child kept repeating that she had a hazelnut in her nose. She was a child of four or five. No one knew what she meant by saying she had a hazelnut in her nose. Around noon, she fell while running and bumped her head against the table, which made her cry, and while crying she pulled out her handkerchief and blew her nose. As she wiped it, the hazelnut fell out of her nose, which I myself saw, and at this I understood that a hazelnut, which could not fit into any European nose without one noticing it, could fit in the cavity of a Kalmuck nose, which is sunk into the head between two fat cheeks.
Our clothes and everything we needed had stayed in the mud in front of the burned palace and were brought to us that night and the following day. What pained me most were my books. At the time, I was finishing the fourth volume of Bayle’s Dictionnaire.101 I had devoted two years to it. Every six months I finished a volume, and from this, one can imagine in what solitude I spent my life. Finally they were brought to me. Among my clothes were those of Countess Shuvalova. Out of curiosity Madame Vladislavova showed me this woman’s underskirts, which were all lined in back with leather because ever since her first confinement she had been incontinent, and the odor of urine permeated all her underskirts. I sent them back to their owner as quickly as possible.
In that fire, the Empress lost everything in her immense wardrobe that had been brought to Moscow. She did me the honor of telling me that she had lost four thousand outfits and that of all of them, she regretted losing only the one made of the cloth I had given her, which I had received from my mother. She lost other precious things too in the fire, among them a bowl covered with engraved stones that Count Rumiantsev had bought in Constantinople for eight thousand ducats. All these possessions had been placed in a room above the hall in which the fire had started. This hall served as the entrance hall to the palace’s great hall. At ten in the morning the stokers had come to heat this entrance hall. After putting the wood in the stove, they lit it as usual. This done, the room filled with smoke. They thought that it was escaping through a few imperceptible holes in the stove and began to cover the spaces between the stove tiles with clay. The smoke grew thicker, and they began to look for cracks in the stove; not finding any, they realized that the crack was inside the apartment’s walls, which were only made of wood. They went to look for some water and extinguished the fire in the stove. But as the smoke grew thicker, it filled the antechamber, where there was a sentry from the horse guards. Thinking he would suffocate, and not daring to budge from his post, he broke a window and began to shout, but when he saw that no one heard him or came to his aid, he shot his rifle out the window. This shot was heard in the main guardhouse opposite the palace. Guards ran to him and upon entering found thick smoke everywhere, from which they pulled the sentry. The stokers were put under arrest. They had believed that they could extinguish the fire or else prevent the smoke from spreading without warning anyone. They had struggled earnestly for five hours. This fire led to a discovery by Monsieur Choglokov. In his apartment, the Grand Duke had many very large dressers. When they were carried from his room, a few open or badly closed drawers revealed their contents to the spectators. Incredibly, these drawers contained nothing but a huge number of wine and hard liquor bottles. They served as His Imperial Highness’s wine cellar. Choglokov spoke to me about this. I told him that I was unaware of this situation, and I was telling the truth. I knew nothing of it, but very often, almost daily, I saw the Grand Duke drunk.
After the fire, we stayed at the Choglokovs’ house for about six weeks, and when we went out we would often pass a wooden house, situated in a garden near the Saltykov bridge, which belonged to the Empress and was called the bishop’s house because the Empress had bought it from a bishop. We decided to ask the Empress, unbeknownst to the Choglokovs, to allow us to reside in this house, which seemed to us and was said to be more livable than the one we were in. Finally, after many exchanges, we received permission to go live in the bishop’s house. It was a very old wooden house without a view. It was built over a stone cellar and as a result was more elevated than the one we had just left, which had only a ground floor. The stoves were so old that when they were lit, one could see the fire in the furnace, so numerous were its cracks, and smoke filled the rooms. We all had headaches and sore eyes. We risked being burned alive in this house. There was only one wooden staircase, and the windows were high. Fire did in fact break out there two or three times during our stay, but they were extinguished. I came down with a sore throat and a very high fever. The same day that I fell ill, Monsieur de Bretlach, who had returned to Russia to represent the Viennese court, was supposed to come and have a farewell supper at our house, and he found me with red, swollen eyes. He thought that I had been crying, and he was not mistaken. The boredom, illness, and discomfort, both physical and mental, of my situation had made me very melancholy all day long. I had spent the day alone with Madame Choglokova, waiting for visitors who had not come. She repeatedly said, See how they abandon us. Her husband was dining out and had taken everyone with him. Despite all of Sergei Saltykov’s promises to slip away from this luncheon, he only returned with Choglokov. All this put me in a foul mood.
Finally, a few days later, we were allowed to go to Liubertsy. Here we believed ourselves in paradise. The house was completely new and quite well furnished. We danced every evening, and our entire court was assembled there. During one of these balls, we saw the Grand Duke earnestly speaking into Monsieur Choglokov’s ear for a long time, after which the latter appeared upset, distracted, and more withdrawn and sullen than usual. Seeing this, and because Choglokov gave him an especially cold shoulder, Sergei Saltykov went to sit with Mademoiselle Marfa Shafirova and tried to find out from her the reason for this unusual intimacy between the Grand Duke and Choglokov. She told him that she did not know, but that she suspected what it might be because the Grand Duke had said to her several times, “Sergei Saltykov and my wife are utterly deceiving Choglokov. Choglokov is in love with the Grand Duchess, and she cannot stand him. Sergei Saltykov is Choglokov’s confidant. He makes Choglokov think that he is lobbying my wife on his behalf, when instead he is wooing her for himself, and she is happy to tolerate Sergei Saltykov, who is amusing. She uses him to deceive Choglokov as she pleases, and deep down she is toying with them both. I must open this poor devil Choglokov’s eyes because I pity him. I must tell him the truth and then he will see who is his true friend, my wife or I.” As soon as Sergei Saltykov learned of this dangerous talk and the scandal that could follow from it, he repeated it to me and then went to sit with Choglokov and asked him what was wrong. At first Choglokov did not want to explain and did nothing but sigh. Then he began to moan about how difficult it was to find faithful friends. Finally Sergei Saltykov brought him round and extracted a confession from him about the conversation that he had just had with the Grand Duke. Certainly one could not have predicted what they had said to each other unless one had been told. His Imperial Highness had poured forth solemn declarations of friendship to Choglokov, telling him that it was only in life’s most demanding situations that one could distinguish true from false friends. To prove the sincerity of his friendship, he was going to give him striking proof of his honesty. He knew without doubt that Choglokov was in love with me. He said that he did not condemn him for this, that I might well seem loveable to him, and that we are not the masters of our hearts. But he had to warn him that he chose his confidants poorly, that Choglokov might well believe that Sergei Saltykov was his friend, and that he was wooing me on Choglokov’s behalf, while Saltykov acted only for himself, and the Grand Duke suspected him of being Choglokov’s rival, and that for my part, I was deceiving both Saltykov and Choglokov, but that if he, Choglokov, wanted to follow the Grand Duke’s advice and confide in him, then he would see that he, the Grand Duke, was his true and only friend. Monsieur Choglokov thanked the Grand Duke profusely for his friendship and protestations of friendship, but deep down he considered the rest a chimera of the Grand Duke’s imagination. It is easy to believe that in any case Choglokov did not care to have a confidant who was by nature and character equally feckless and useless. Once Choglokov had said all this, Sergei Saltykov had little trouble in reestablishing calm and tranquility in his mind, since Choglokov was not accustomed to attaching much importance or paying much attention to the discourse of a man who had no judgment and was known for it. When I learned of all this, I admit that I was outraged with the Grand Duke. And in order to prevent him from repeating this accusation, I made him understand that I was not unaware of what had occurred between him and Choglokov. He blushed, said not a word, and went away and ignored me, and the matter ended there.
Back in Moscow, we were moved from the bishop’s house into the apartments of what was called the Empress’s summer house, which had not caught fire. The Empress had had new apartments built in the space of six weeks. To this end, beams had been removed from the house at Perova, from that of Count Hendrikov, and from the house of the princes of Georgia, and transported there. She finally moved in toward the new year.