1756

The Seven Years’ War with Prussia begins; Elizabeth’s frequent
illness; Peter courts Mme. Teplova; Catherine’s miscarriage; her
riding lessons; Count Poniatowski, Count Horn, and her little
Bolognese dog; her quarrel with Peter over his mistresses; the Franco-
Austrian faction defeats Bestuzhev-Riumin’s Anglo-Prussian party

So began the year 1756. We took a singular pleasure in these furtive gatherings. Not a week went by without one, two, or three of them, alternating between different people’s houses, and when someone in the group was sick, we were sure to go to that person’s house. Sometimes at the theater, although we were in different loges and some of us were in the orchestra, each of us knew in a flash where to go by certain agreed-upon signs without speaking to one another, and there was never a misunderstanding among us, except that it happened twice that I had to return to the palace on foot, which meant a walk.

At the time, there were preparations for war against the King of Prussia. Under her treaty with the house of Austria, the Empress was supposed to give thirty thousand men in assistance. This was the opinion of Grand Chancellor Bestuzhev, but the house of Austria wanted Russia to assist with all its might. Count Esterhazy, the Ambassador from Vienna, schemed for this with all his might wherever he could and often through different channels. The faction opposed to Count Bestuzhev was Vice Chancellor Count Vorontsov and the Shuvalovs. At the time, England was allied with the King of Prussia and France with Austria.¹¹⁷ That was when Empress Elizabeth began to fall ill frequently. At first no one understood what this was, and they attributed it to the tapering off of her menstrual periods. The Shuvalovs often seemed distressed and deep in intrigue, heavily fawning over the Grand Duke from one moment to the next. The courtiers whispered among themselves that Her Imperial Majesty’s illness was more serious than was believed. Some called it hysteria, while others called it fainting, convulsions, or bad nerves. This lasted the entire winter of 1755 and 1756. Finally, in the spring, we learned that Marshal Apraksin was leaving to command the army that was supposed to invade Prussia. His wife came to our residence with her youngest daughter to take her leave of us. I spoke to her of the worries that I had about the Empress’s health and said that I was upset that her husband left at a time when I thought I could not expect much from the Shuvalovs, whom I regarded as my personal enemies and who were terribly angry with me because I preferred their enemies, namely the Counts Razumovsky, to them. She repeated all this to her husband, who was as happy with my inclination toward him as was Count Bestuzhev, who did not like the Shuvalovs and was allied with the Razumovskys, his son having married one of their nieces.¹¹⁸ Marshal Apraksin was able to be a useful intermediary between all the interested parties because of his daughter’s liaison with Count Peter Shuvalov.¹¹⁹ It was claimed that this liaison was known to the mother and father. In addition, I understood perfectly and saw clear as day that the Shuvalovs employed Monsieur Brockdorff more than ever to distance the Grand Duke from me as much as they could. Despite this, he instinctively trusted me even then. To a singular degree, he almost always maintained this trust, which he himself neither perceived, suspected, nor distrusted.

For the moment, he had fallen out with Countess Vorontsova and was in love with Madame Teplova, a niece of the Razumovskys. When he wanted to see the latter, he consulted me on how to decorate the room and showed me that to please the lady more he had filled the room with rifles, grenadiers’ hats, swords, and bandoliers, so that it had the air of an arsenal. I let him do as he wished and went my way. In addition, he also brought a little German singer, whom he supported and who was named Leonore, to have supper with him in the evening. It was the Princess of Courland who had put the Grand Duke on bad terms with Countess Vorontsova. To tell the truth, I do not quite know how. At the time, the Princess of Courland played a special role at court. To begin with, she was then a girl of around thirty years old, small, ugly, and hunchbacked, as I have already said. She had been able to arrange for herself the protection of the Empress’s confessor and of several of Her Imperial Majesty’s old ladies-in-waiting, so that she got away with everything she did. She lived with Her Imperial Majesty’s maids of honor. They were under the iron rule of a Madame Schmidt, who was the wife of a court trumpeter. This Madame Schmidt was of Finnish nationality, prodigiously large and stout. Moreover, she was a formidable woman who had retained perfectly the coarse peasant manner of her former station. Nevertheless, she played a role at court and was under the immediate protection of the Empress’s old German, Finnish, and Swedish ladies-in-waiting and consequently under that of Marshal of the Court Sievers, who was himself Finnish and who had married the daughter of Madame Kruse, the sister of one of the most beloved ladies, as I have already said. Madame Schmidt ruled the domestic affairs in the residence of the maids of honor with more strictness than intelligence, but never appeared at court. In public, the Princess of Courland was at their head, and Madame Schmidt had tacitly entrusted their conduct at court to her. In their residence, they all lived in a row of rooms that led at one end to that of Madame Schmidt and at the other to that of the Princess of Courland. They were two, three, and four to a room, each with a screen around her bed and all the rooms with exits only into one another. At first glance it therefore seemed that with this arrangement the apartment of the maids of honor was impenetrable because one could enter it only by passing through the room of either Madame Schmidt or the Princess of Courland. But Madame Schmidt was often ill with indigestion from all the greasy patties and other delicacies that the relatives of these maidens sent her. Consequently there remained only the passage through the Princess of Courland’s room. Malicious gossip had it that to pass through here into the other rooms, it was necessary to pay a toll one way or another. What could be verified about this was that the Princess of Courland arranged and broke the engagements of the Empress’s maids of honor, promised and unpromised them over several years as she saw fit. I have the story of the toll from the mouths of several people, among others Lev Naryshkin and Count Buturlin, which they themselves claimed did not in their case have to be paid in money. The love affair between the Grand Duke and Madame Teplova lasted until we went to the country. Here it was interrupted because His Imperial Highness found that this woman was intolerable during the summer, when she claimed that since he was unable to see her, he should write to her once or twice a week. To engage him in this correspondence, she began by writing him a four-page letter. As soon as he received it he came into my room with a very irritated look, holding Madame Teplova’s letter in his hand, and with vehemence and in an angry tone said rather loudly, “Imagine, she writes me a full four-page letter and claims that I should read it and, what is more, respond, I who have to go drill” (he had again had his troops from Holstein come), “then eat dinner, then shoot, then watch the rehearsal for an opera and the ballet that the cadets are going to dance in. I will tell her very firmly that I do not have the time, and if she gets upset, I will break off with her until winter.” I replied that this was surely the easiest path. I think that the traits I am disclosing are characteristic of him and therefore not out of place.

Here is the crux of how the cadets appeared at Oranienbaum. In the spring of 1756, the Shuvalovs believed that they had found a very diplomatic way to detach the Grand Duke from his Holstein troops by persuading the Empress to give His Imperial Highness command of the cadet infantry corps, which at the time was the only cadet corps that existed. Melgunov, the intimate friend and confidant of Ivan Ivanovich Shuvalov, had been placed under the Grand Duke. This man was married to one of the Empress’s German maids of honor and favorites. Thus the Shuvalovs had one of their most devoted intimates in the Grand Duke’s entourage, able to speak to him at all hours. Under the pretext of the Oranienbaum opera ballets, a hundred cadets were thus brought there, and Monsieur Melgunov and the officers attached to the corps, who were his closest intimates, came with them. These were so many spies for Shuvalov.

Among the instructors who came to Oranienbaum with the cadets was their riding master Zimmermann, who was said to be the best horseman in Russia at that time. As my supposed pregnancy of the previous autumn had disappeared, I decided to take formal lessons from Zimmermann to handle my horse properly. I spoke of this to the Grand Duke, who made no objections to it. For a while now all the old rules introduced by the Choglokovs had been neglected, forgotten, or ignored by Alexander Shuvalov, who in any case did not enjoy any or even a little respect. We made fun of him, his wife, his daughter, and his son-in-law practically in their presence.¹²⁰ They invited this because one never saw more horrible, petty people. Madame Shuvalova had received from me the epithet “pillar of salt.” She was thin, small, and rigid. Her miserliness was perceptible in her dress. Her skirts were always too tight and one panel fewer than was necessary and than those of the other ladies. Her daughter, Countess Golovkina, dressed in the same manner. Their headwear and their cuffs were meager and always smacked of stinginess. Although these were very rich people and comfortably off, their taste ran to everything that was small and constrained, which painted a true picture of their minds. As soon as I began to take formal lessons in horseback riding, I again gave myself passionately to this exercise. I awoke at six in the morning, dressed in a man’s outfit, and went into my garden. There I had had an outdoor area prepared that served as my riding ground. I made such rapid progress that Zimmermann often ran to me from the center of this manège with a tear in his eye and kissed me on the boot with an uncontrollable enthusiasm. Other times he declared, “Never in my life have I had a student do me so much honor and make such progress in so little time.” At these lessons only my old surgeon, Guyon, a lady-in-waiting, and some servants were present. As I had put much effort into my lessons, which I took every morning except Sundays, Zimmermann rewarded my labors with silver spurs, which he gave me according to the riding school custom. After three weeks, I was familiar with all the riding styles, and toward autumn, Zimmermann had a steeplechaser brought that he wanted me to ride. But the day before I was to ride it, we received the order to return to the city. The outing was therefore postponed until the following spring.

During this summer Count Poniatowski went to make a tour of Poland, from which he returned with his diplomatic credentials as minister from the King of Poland. Before leaving he came to Oranienbaum to take leave of us. He was in the company of Count Horn, whom the King of Sweden had sent to Russia under the pretext of announcing the death of his mother, my grandmother, to Petersburg so as to protect the Count from the persecutions of the French faction, called the Hats, against the Russian faction, the Caps.¹²¹ This persecution became so great in Sweden that at the Diet of 1756, almost all the leaders of the Russian faction had their heads cut off. Count Horn himself told me that if he had not come to Petersburg, he would certainly have joined them. Count Poniatowski and Count Horn stayed at Oranienbaum for two days. The first day, the Grand Duke treated them very well, but on the second they bored him because he had a huntsman’s wedding on his mind, where he wanted to go drink, and when he saw that Counts Poniatowski and Horn were staying, he walked out on them, and it was I who stayed to honor our guests and show them around. After lunch, I took the group that had stayed with me and was not very large to see the Grand Duke’s and my private apartments. When we arrived in my study, a little Bolognese dog that I owned ran up to us and began to bark loudly at Count Horn, but when it noticed Count Poniatowski, I thought the dog would go mad with joy. As the study was very small, no one saw this except Lev Naryshkin, his sister-in-law, and I, but Count Horn was not deceived, and while crossing the apartment to return to the salon, Count Horn grabbed Count Poniatowski by the coat and said to him, “My friend, there is no worse traitor than a little Bolognese dog. The first thing I always did with the women I loved was give them one, and it was from these dogs that I always knew if there was someone more favored than I. This rule is sure and certain. You see, the dog wanted to eat me, whom it did not know, whereas it only rejoiced when it saw you again, for this is surely not the first time it has seen you here.” For his part, Count Poniatowski treated all this as nonsense, but could not dissuade him. Count Horn only replied to him, “Fear not. You are dealing with a discreet man.” The following day they left. Count Horn said that when he went so far as to fall in love, it was always with three women at once. He put this into practice before our eyes in Petersburg, where he courted three of the Empress’s maids of honor at the same time.

Count Poniatowski left two days later for his country. During his absence, the English Ambassador, Sir Williams, told me through Lev Naryshkin that Grand Chancellor Bestuzhev was mounting a conspiracy so that Count Poniatowski’s nomination would not go through, and that it was through Williams that Bestuzhev had attempted to dissuade Count Brühl, at the time minister and favorite of the King of Poland, from this nomination. Williams had taken care not to fulfill this commission, although he had not declined it, for fear that the Grand Chancellor would give it to someone else who would have carried it out more conscientiously perhaps, and in this way would have undermined Williams’s friend, who hoped above all to return to Russia. Sir Williams suspected that Count Bestuzhev, who for a long while had had the Saxon and Polish ministers at his disposal, wanted to nominate someone from among his closest henchmen for this position. However, Count Poniatowski obtained it and returned toward winter as the envoy from Poland, and the Saxon mission remained under the immediate direction of Count Bestuzhev.

Sometime before leaving Oranienbaum, we saw the Prince and Princess Golitsyna arrive, accompanied by Monsieur Betskoi. They were going abroad for their health, especially Betskoi, who needed distraction from the profound grief he still felt over the death of the Princess of Hessen-Hamburg, née Princess Trubetskaia, mother of Princess Golitsyna, who had been born from the first marriage of the Princess of Hessen with the Hospodar of Walachia, Prince Kantemir.¹²² As Princess Golitsyna and Betskoi were old acquaintances, I tried to receive them at Oranienbaum as best I could, and after we walked around quite a while, Princess Golitsyna and I got into a cabriolet, which I drove myself, and we went for a ride in the environs of Oranienbaum. Along the way, Princess Golitsyna, who was quite odd and very narrow-minded, began to make remarks by which she gave me to understand that she believed that I had a grudge against her. I told her that I had none and did not know what this grudge could be about, never having argued with her over anything. At this, she said she was worried that Count Poniatowski had lowered her in my esteem. I almost fell off my seat at these words and replied to her that she was absolutely imagining this and that he was not even in a position to discredit her with me, since he had left a long while ago and I knew him only by sight and as a stranger. I did not know where she got this idea. Back at my house, I called for Lev Naryshkin and recounted this conversation, which to me seemed as stupid as it was impertinent and indiscreet. He replied that the previous winter Princess Golitsyna had moved heaven and earth to woo Count Poniatowski, that out of politeness and so as not to slight her, he had been somewhat attentive toward her. She had made all sorts of advances toward him, and as one might imagine, he had not responded much because she was old, ugly, stupid, foolish, and almost crazy. Seeing that he barely responded to her ardor, she had apparently formed a suspicion that he was still with Lev and his sister-in-law and at their house.

During Princess Golitsyna’s short stay at Oranienbaum, I had a terrible quarrel with the Grand Duke about my maids of honor. I remarked that they were always either confidantes or mistresses of the Grand Duke and that on numerous occasions they had neglected their duty as well as the regard and respect they owed me. One afternoon I went to their apartment and reproached them for their conduct, reminded them of their duty and what they owed me, and said that if they continued, I would complain to the Empress. A few were alarmed, others were angered, and others cried. But as soon as I had left, they could not wait to repeat to the Grand Duke what had just occurred in their room. His Imperial Highness became furious and immediately ran to my apartment. As he entered he began by saying that I had become impossible to live with, that every day I was becoming prouder and haughtier, that I was asking for respect and regard from the maids of honor and was spoiling their life, that they cried rivers all day long, that they were well-born girls whom I treated like servants and that if I complained about them to the Empress, he would complain about me, my pride, my arrogance, my cruelty, and God knows what else he said to me. I listened not without irritation myself, and replied that he could say all he liked about me, that if the affair were to be brought before Madame his aunt, she would easily judge it most reasonable to dismiss the girls who misbehaved, who by their gossip put her nephew and niece on bad terms, and that assuredly Her Imperial Majesty, to reestablish peace and union between him and me, and to avoid hearing repeatedly about our disagreements, could make no other decision but that one, and that she would do this without fail. At this he softened his tone and, because he was very suspicious, imagined that I knew more of the Empress’s intentions regarding these girls than I let on, and that they truly could be dismissed over this matter. He said, “Tell me then, do you know something about this? Are people talking about it?” I replied to him that if the matter came to the point of being brought before the Empress, I did not doubt that she would dispose of it in a very decisive manner. He began to pace around the room, reflecting on this, and calmed down, then left sulking only a little more than usual. That same evening I recounted word for word to those maids who seemed the most sensible to me the scene that their imprudent tattling had earned me, which put them on their guard against taking things to such an extreme that they might become the victims.

During the autumn we returned to the city. A short while later, Sir Williams returned to England on leave.¹²³ He had failed to achieve his objective in Russia. The day following his audience with the Empress, he had proposed a treaty of alliance between Russia and England. Count Bestuzhev had the permission and the power to conclude this treaty, and indeed, the treaty was signed by the Grand Chancellor and the Ambassador, who was overjoyed with his success. The following day, Count Bestuzhev informed him in a note of Russia’s participation in the agreement signed at Versailles between France and Austria.¹²⁴ This was a great blow to the English Ambassador, who had been outwitted and deceived in this affair by the Grand Chancellor, or so it seemed. But at the time, Count Bestuzhev himself was no longer able to do as he pleased. His enemies began to gain the upper hand over him, and they intrigued, or rather others intrigued around them, to draw them into the Franco-Austrian faction, which they were very inclined to join. The Shuvalovs and above all Ivan Ivanovich fervently loved France and everything that came from there, and were supported by Vice Chancellor Count Vorontsov. For this service, Louis XV had furnished the mansion that Vorontsov had just built in Petersburg with old furniture that had begun to bore the Marquise de Pompadour, his mistress, and that she had therefore sold at a profit to the King, her lover. Aside from profit, the Vice Chancellor had another motive, which was to discredit his rival Count Bestuzhev and seize his position. As for Peter Shuvalov, he was planning to establish a monopoly in Russian tobacco and sell it in France. Toward the end of the year, Count Poniatowski returned to Petersburg as a minister of the King of Poland.¹²⁵