1748

Catherine’s debts; measles; collapse of house at Gostilitsa; letters
from her mother; Choglokov’s a fair; summer at Oranienbaum;
Mme. Vladislavova put in charge of her entourage; Count Lestocq’s
arrest; move to Moscow for winter

On January 6, 1748, I came down with a high fever accompanied by a rash. When it passed, since there was no entertainment at court during carnival that year, the Grand Duke decided to hold masquerades in my room. He had his and my servants and my ladies wear masks and had them dance in my bedroom; he himself played the violin and danced along. This would last rather late into the night. For my part, under different pretexts of a headache or fatigue, I would lie down on a couch, but always dressed in a mask and bored to death by the insipidness of these masked balls that amused him to no end. With the arrival of Lent, four more people were removed from his service, including three pages that he liked more than the others. These frequent dismissals disturbed him, but he did not take a single step to stop them or else took steps that were so awkward that they could only make things worse.

During that winter we learned that Prince Repnin, ill as he was, would command the troops that were being sent to Bohemia to aid Queen Empress Maria Theresa.⁶⁰ This was a formal disgrace for Prince Repnin; he went there and never returned, because he died of despondency in Bohemia. It was Princess Gagarina, my maid of honor, who gave me the first inkling of this, despite all the prohibitions against allowing the least word of what was happening in the city or at court to reach us. One can see by this the real worth of such prohibitions, which are never executed rigorously, because there are too many people interested in contravening them. All those in our service and even the Choglokovs’ closest relatives sought to reduce the harshness of what was in effect a political prison, in which we were kept with great effort. Even Madame Choglokova’s own brother, Count Hendrikov, often slipped me useful and necessary information, and others too used him to get news to me, a task that he always undertook with the sincerity of a fine and upstanding man, deriding the stupid and brutal actions of his sister and brother-in-law, so that with him everyone was at ease and without any sort of suspicion, since he had never compromised or failed a living soul. He was a man of fairness, but narrow-minded, ill-mannered, and very ignorant, though solid and without malice.

One day toward noon during this same Lent, I entered the room where the ladies and gentlemen waited; the Choglokovs had not yet arrived, and while speaking to various people, I approached the door next to which stood Chamberlain Ovtsyn. He gave forth in a low voice on the boring life we were leading and, moreover, on how others had put us in the Empress’s bad graces. A few days earlier, while dining, Her Imperial Majesty had said that I was overloaded with debts, that everything I did was marked by stupidity, that I imagined myself to have great intelligence, but that I was the only one who thought this of myself, and that I deceived no one, that my complete stupidity was known to everyone, and that because of this, it was less necessary to watch out for what the Grand Duke did than what I did, and he added with tears in his eyes that he had received an order from the Empress to tell me this, but he begged me to act as if I did not know that he had told me that he had been ordered to transmit this message. I replied to him that concerning my stupidity, the fault could not be attributed to me, each person being as the good Lord created him, that with respect to my debts, it was not too astonishing that I had some, because though I had thirty thousand rubles of support, my mother had left me sixty thousand rubles of her debt to pay off; that moreover, Countess Rumiantseva had urged me to make a thousand expenditures that she regarded as indispensable, that Madame Choglokova alone was costing me seventeen thousand rubles that year, and that he himself knew the hellish amount I had to gamble with them at cards every day, that he could give this response to those from whom he had received his commission, and that otherwise, I was very angered to know that I had been put in the bad graces of Her Imperial Majesty, to whom however I had never failed to show respect, obedience, or deference, and that the more they spied upon me, the more they would be convinced of this. I promised to keep his secret as he asked and did so. I do not know if he reported what I asked him to, but believe that he did, though I did not hear any more talk on this matter, and did not seek to continue such a disagreeable conversation.

The last week of Lent, I came down with measles; I could not appear for Easter mass, and on Saturday I took communion in my room. During this illness, Madame Choglokova, although hugely pregnant, hardly ever left me and did what she could to amuse me. I had at that time a little Kalmuck girl whom I loved greatly; this child caught measles from me.

After Easter we went to the Summer Palace, and from there at the end of May for Ascension to Count Razumovsky’s at Gostilitsa; on the twenty-third of the same month, the Empress had brought there Ambassador of the Imperial Court Baron von Bretlach, who was leaving for Vienna. He spent the evening there and had supper with the Empress. This evening meal ended quite late at night, and we returned to the little house in which we were lodged after sunrise. This little wooden house was situated on a small rise and next to the sleigh runs. The location of this little house had pleased us the winter that we had gone to Gostilitsa for the Grand Master of the Hunt’s birthday, and to please us he had lodged us there this time as well. It had three stories; the upper one had a staircase, a salon, and three small rooms. We slept in one, the Grand Duke dressed in another, and Madame Kruse occupied the third; below were lodged the Choglokovs, my maids of honor, and my ladies-in-waiting. Upon returning from supper, everyone went to bed. Around six in the morning, a sergeant of the guards named Levashov arrived from Oranienbaum to speak with Choglokov about the buildings that were being constructed there. Finding everyone asleep in the house, he sat down next to the sentry, and heard creaking noises that aroused his suspicions. The sentry told him that these creaking sounds had occurred several times since he had been on duty. Levashov got up and ran outside the house. He saw that large blocks of stone underneath the house were breaking off. He ran to awaken Choglokov and told him that the house’s foundation was giving way and that he had to try to evacuate everyone who was inside. Choglokov put on a bathrobe and ran upstairs, where finding the doors— which had glass panes—locked, he broke the locks. Thus he arrived in the little room where we slept, and drawing the curtain, he awoke us and told us to get up as quickly as possible and to get out because the house’s foundation was giving way. The Grand Duke leaped from the bed, took his bathrobe, and fled. I told Choglokov that I was going to follow him, and he left. I dressed in haste; while dressing myself I remembered that Madame Kruse was sleeping in the other room and went to wake her up. As she slept deeply, I succeeded with difficulty in waking her up and then making her understand that we had to leave the house. I helped her get dressed, and when she was ready, we moved beyond the threshold and entered the salon, but at the moment that we set foot there, there was a tremendous tremor, accompanied by a sound like that of a ship being launched from the shipyard. Madame Kruse and I fell to the floor; as we fell, Levashov entered through the door of the staircase facing us. He lifted me off the floor and carried me out of the room. I happened to glance at the sleigh run. It had been level with the third floor; it was no longer there but at least an arshin higher.⁶¹ Arriving with me at the main staircase by which he had ascended, Levashov could no longer find it. It had collapsed, but several people had climbed onto the rubble. Levashov handed me to the nearest person, who handed me to the next, and so from one set of hands to another, I arrived at the foot of the staircase in the vestibule, and from there I was carried out of the house and into a field. There I found the Grand Duke in his bathrobe. Once out of the house, I began to look at what was happening around it, and I saw that several people were walking out covered in blood and that others were being carried. Among the most seriously wounded was Princess Gagarina, my maid of honor. She had wanted to escape from the house like the others, and while she passed through a room attached to hers, a collapsing stove fell on a screen, which knocked her onto a bed that was in the room. Several bricks fell on her head and seriously wounded her and a girl who was escaping with her. On this lower floor there was also a little kitchen where several servants slept, three of whom were killed by the fireplace’s collapse. This was nothing in comparison to what had happened between the house’s foundation and the ground floor. Sixteen workers assigned to the sleigh run slept there, and all had been crushed by the building’s collapse.

The cause for all this was that the house had been built hastily in the autumn. It had four courses of limestone blocks for the foundation; on the ground floor the architect had placed twelve beams to serve as pillars in the vestibule. He had had to leave for Ukraine, and when he left, he told the steward of Gostilitsa to allow no one to touch these twelve beams until his return. Despite the architect’s prohibition, when the steward learned that we were to stay in this little house, he could not wait to have these twelve beams knocked down, since they disfigured the vestibule. With the coming of the spring thaw, everything settled on the four limestone courses, which slid in different directions, and the building itself slid against a rise that held it up. I escaped with a few bruises and a great scare, for which I was bled. The scare had been so great for everyone that during the next four months, every door that was closed with even a little force caused us to tremble. When the initial fright had passed that day, the Empress, who was staying in another house, called us to her residence, and as she wanted to make light of the accident, everyone tried to discount the danger and some even saw none. My own shock displeased her greatly and she hardly spoke to me. The Grand Master of the Hunt wept and despaired, he spoke of killing himself with a pistol; apparently he was prevented from this, because he did not do it, and on the following day we returned to Petersburg and after several weeks returned to the Summer Palace.

I do not recall exactly, but it seems to me that it was around this time that Chevalier Sacromoso arrived in Russia. It had been a long time since a Knight of Malta had come to Russia, and generally we saw very few foreigners come to Petersburg. His arrival was therefore a kind of event. He was treated in the best possible manner and taken to see all of the most remarkable things in Petersburg, and in Kronstadt a distinguished naval officer was named to accompany him; this was Monsieur Poliansky, then a captain of a warship and since named admiral. He was presented to us; while he kissed my hand, Sacromoso slipped a very tiny note into my hand and said to me in a very low voice, “This is from Madame your mother.” I was almost overcome with fright at what he had just done. I was dying from fear that someone might have seen him and above all the Choglokovs, who were very near. Nevertheless I took the note and slipped it into my glove; no one noticed. Back in my room, I found in this rolled-up note, which informed me that a response was expected through an Italian musician who was coming to the Grand Duke’s concert, another note that was in fact from my mother, who, anxious about my involuntary silence, asked me the reason for it and wanted to know my situation. I responded to my mother and informed her of what she wanted to know. I told her that I had been forbidden to write to her or anyone else, under the pretext that it was not fitting for a Grand Duchess of Russia to write any letters other than those composed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to which I only had to affix my signature, that I should never say what should be written, because the Ministry knew better than I what was proper to include, and that Monsieur Olsufiev had almost been charged with a crime because I had sent him a few lines that I had asked him to insert in a letter to my mother. I informed her about several other things that she asked me about. I rolled up my note in the same manner as that which I had received and waited impatiently for the moment when I could dispose of it. At the first concert held at the Grand Duke’s residence, I made a tour of the orchestra and stopped behind the chair of the cellist d’Ologlio, who was the man who had been indicated to me. When he saw me stop behind his chair, he pretended to take his handkerchief from his coat pocket and in this manner opened the pocket wide, into which I slipped my note without seeming to and then went off in the other direction and no one suspected anything. During his stay in Petersburg, Sacromoso slipped me two or three other notes on the same subjects, and my responses were given in the same way, and no one ever found out. From the Summer Palace we went to Peterhof, which was then being rebuilt.

We were housed on the upper floor of Peter I’s old building, which was still standing. Here, out of boredom, the Grand Duke began to play two-handed ombre with me every afternoon; when I won he would get angry, and when I lost he would demand payment immediately. I did not have a cent, so he began to play hazard with me. I remember that one day his night bonnet served as our marker for ten thousand rubles. But when he would lose, at the end of the game he would become furious and was capable of sulking for several days; I was in no way comfortable with this game.

During the stay at Peterhof, from our windows that looked out on the garden toward the sea, we saw that Monsieur and Madame Choglokov were constantly coming and going from the palace on the hill toward that of Monplaisir by the water, in which the Empress was then living. This intrigued us and Madame Kruse. In order to learn the reason for these frequent comings and goings, Madame Kruse went to the residence of her sister, who was the Empress’s first lady-in-waiting. She returned beaming, having learned that all these trips were occurring because the Empress had learned that Monsieur Choglokov was having an affair with one of my maids of honor, Mademoiselle Kosheleva, and that she was pregnant. The Empress had sent for Madame Choglokova and had told her that her husband was deceiving her, whereas she loved this husband madly, that she had been blind to the point that she had had this girl, the good friend of her husband, live with her and that if she wanted to separate from her husband immediately, she would do something that did not displease the Empress, who had not looked with pleasure in the first place upon Madame Choglokova’s marriage with her husband. The Empress flatly declared to her that she did not want her husband to remain with us, that she would dismiss him and leave the position to his wife. At first the wife denied her husband’s passion to the Empress and claimed that this was a slander, but Her Imperial Majesty, while speaking to the wife, had also had the young woman questioned. She had divulged everything completely, which made the wife furious with her husband. She returned to her house and blasted her husband with insults; he fell to his knees and begged her pardon and used all of his power over her to calm her down. Their brood of children helped them to patch up their relationship, which however was hardly any more honest thereafter. Apart in love, they were united by interest. The wife pardoned her husband, went to the Empress’s residence, and told her that she had forgiven her husband everything, and she wished to stay with him out of love for her children. On her knees she begged the Empress not to dismiss her husband from the court in shame, that this would dishonor her, and would overwhelm her with sorrow. In the end, she behaved on this occasion with as much firmness as generosity, and her sorrow moreover was so real that she disarmed the Empress’s anger. She did more. She brought her husband before Her Imperial Majesty, scolded him severely, and then kneeled with him at the Empress’s feet and begged her to pardon her husband out of regard for her and her six children, whose father he was. All these different scenes lasted five or six days, and we learned almost hour by hour what had occurred, because we were less watched during this period and because everyone hoped to see these people dismissed. But the conclusion did not at all meet the expectations that we had formed, because only the maiden was dismissed, and returned to her uncle, Grand Marshal of the Court Shepelev, and the Choglokovs remained, less proud, however, than they had been before. The day was chosen when we would go to Oranienbaum, and while we departed in one direction, the maiden was sent off in the other.

At Oranienbaum that year we lodged in the wings to the right and left of the small main building. The adventure at Gostilitsa had been so frightening that the ceilings and floors were examined in all the houses of the court, after which those in need of it were repaired. Here is the life that I led at that time at Oranienbaum. I arose at three in the morning and dressed myself from head to foot in a man’s outfit. An old huntsman in my service was already waiting for me with some rifles; there was a fishing skiff close by on the shore. We crossed the garden on foot, rifles on our shoulders, and he, I, a pointer, and the fisherman who guided us got in the skiff, and I went to shoot ducks in the reeds that bordered the sea on either side of the Oranienbaum canal, which stretches two versts into the sea. We often went out beyond the canal and consequently were sometimes caught in rough weather on the open sea in the skiff. The Grand Duke would come there an hour or two after us because he always needed breakfast, and God knows what else he dragged along with him. If he met us, we went along together, if not, then each went shooting and hunting on his own. At ten o’clock and sometimes later I returned and dressed for dinner; after dinner we rested and in the evening the Grand Duke had a concert or else we went horseback riding. After about a week of leading this life, I felt quite overheated and drowsy; I understood that I needed rest and fasting. For twenty-four hours I ate nothing and drank only cold water, and for two nights slept as much as I could, after which I again led the same life and felt quite well. I remember that at that time I read Brantôme’s memoirs, which I greatly enjoyed; before this I had read the life of Henry IV by Péréfixe.⁶²

Toward autumn, we returned to the city and were told that we would go to Moscow during the winter. Madame Kruse came to tell me that I had to increase my stock of linen for this journey. I attended to the details of my linens, and Madame Kruse pretended to amuse me by having the linen cut in my room, to instruct me, she said, in how many chemises could be produced from one piece of cloth. This lesson or entertainment apparently displeased Madame Choglokova, who was in a worse mood than ever since the discovery of her husband’s infidelity. I do not know what she went to tell the Empress, but it happened that one afternoon she came to tell me that the Empress was dismissing Madame Kruse from my service, that she was going to retire to the house of Chamberlain Sievers, her son-in-law, and the next day she brought me Madame Vladislavova to take her place.

She was a big woman who appeared to have a nice figure and whose lively physiognomy pleased me at first sight. I consulted my oracle, Timofei Evreinov, on this choice, and he told me that this woman, whom I had never seen before, was the mother-in-law of Count Bestuzhev’s head clerk, the Counselor Pugovishnikov, that she lacked neither intelligence nor gaiety, but that she was said to be very crafty and that I should watch how she conducted herself and above all not show her too much trust. Her name was Praskovia Nikitichna. She got off to a very good start; she was sociable, loved to talk, spoke and told stories with intelligence, knew all the anecdotes of past and present times by heart, knew four or five generations of all the families, had the genealogies of everyone’s fathers, mothers, grandfathers, grandmothers, and paternal and maternal great-grandparents fixed in her memory, and no one informed me more about what had happened in Russia over the past hundred years than she. This woman’s intelligence and appearance rather pleased me, and when I was bored, I got her talking, which she was always willing to do. I discovered without difficulty that she very often disapproved of the words and deeds of the Choglokovs, but as she also very often went to the Empress’s apartment and nobody knew at all why, everyone was suspicious of her to a certain extent, not knowing how the most innocent actions or remarks would be interpreted.

From the Summer Palace we moved to the Winter Palace. Here we were presented with Madame La Tour Launais, who had been in the Empress’s service since her early youth and had followed Princess Anna Petrovna, eldest daughter of Peter I, when she had left Russia with her husband, the Duke of Holstein, during the reign of Emperor Peter II.⁶³ After the death of this Princess, Madame Launais had returned to France, and soon thereafter she had returned to Russia either to settle there or else to journey back after obtaining several favors from the Empress. Madame Launais hoped that because of her longstanding acquaintance she would return to the Empress’s favor and intimacy, but she was sorely mistaken. Everyone conspired together to exclude her. In the first days after her arrival, I foresaw what would happen and here is why. One evening there was gambling in the Empress’s apartment, with Her Imperial Majesty coming and going from one room to another and not settling anywhere, as was her custom. Madame Launais, apparently believing that she was showing her respect, followed everywhere she went. Seeing this, Madame Choglokova said to me, “Look at how this woman follows the Empress everywhere, but this will not last long. This habit of running after her will soon be broken.” I took her at her word, and in fact Madame Launais began to be excluded and then was sent back to France with some presents.

That winter, Count Lestocq and Mademoiselle Mengden, the Empress’s maid of honor, were married. Her Imperial Majesty and the entire court attended the wedding, and she did the newlyweds the honor of going to their home. One might have thought that they enjoyed the greatest favor, but one or two months later, their luck changed. One evening, while we were gambling in the Empress’s apartment, I saw Count Lestocq there. I approached him. He said to me in a low voice, “Do not come near me. I am a man under suspicion.” I thought he was joking; I asked him what he meant to say by this. He replied, “I repeat to you very seriously that you must not come near me, because I am a man under suspicion whom you should flee.” I saw that he looked completely different and was extremely flushed. I thought he was drunk, and I went off in the other direction. This happened on a Friday. On Sunday morning, while doing my hair, Timofei Evreinov said to me, “Do you know that last night Count Lestocq and his wife were arrested and taken to the fortress as state criminals?” No one knew why, but it was learned that General Stepan Apraksin and Alexander Shuvalov had been named as commissioners for this affair.⁶⁴

The court’s departure for Moscow was fixed for December 16. The Chernyshevs had been transferred from the fortress to one of the Empress’s houses, called Smolny Dvorets. The eldest of the three brothers got his guards drunk on several occasions and then went around the city to his friends’ houses. One day a Finnish wardrobe girl of mine who was engaged to a court servant, a relative of Evreinov, brought me a letter from Andrei Chernyshev, in which he begged several things of me. This girl had seen him at her fiancé’s house, where they had spent the evening together. I did not know where to put this letter when I received it; I did not want to burn it, in order to remember what he asked me. For a long time I had been forbidden from writing even to my mother. Through this girl, I purchased a silver pen and a writing case. During the day, I had the letter in my pocket; when I undressed, I stuffed it under my garter into my stocking, and before going to bed, I pulled it from there and put it in my sleeve. Finally I responded, and I sent him what he had requested by the same channel to which he had entrusted his letter, and I chose a propitious moment to burn the letter that had given me such great worries.

Toward the middle of December, we left for Moscow. The Grand Duke and I were in a large sleigh, the gentlemen in our service riding in front. During the day, the Grand Duke would ride in a town sleigh with Choglokov and I would stay in the large sleigh that we never closed, and I conversed with those who were seated in front. I remember that Chamberlain Prince Alexander Iurievich Trubetskoi recounted to me at this time how Count Lestocq, a prisoner at the fortress, had wanted to let himself die of hunger the first eleven days of his detention, but had been forced to eat. He had been accused of taking ten thousand rubles from the King of Prussia to support his interests and of poisoning a certain Oettinger, who could have testified against him. He was tortured and then exiled to Siberia. On this journey, the Empress passed us at Tver, and since the horses and provisions that had been prepared for us were taken for her entourage, we spent twenty-four hours at Tver without horses and food. We were very hungry; toward evening, Choglokov got us a roasted sterlet, which we found delicious. We left during the night and arrived in Moscow two or three days before Christmas.

The first thing that we learned there was that the chamberlain of our court, Prince Alexander Mikhailovich Golitsyn, had received at the moment of our departure from Petersburg the order to go to Hamburg as Russian minister with a salary of four thousand rubles. This was seen as yet another exile. His sister-in-law Princess Gagarina, who was in our service, cried a great deal about this, and we were all very sorry.

In Moscow, we occupied the apartment that I had had with my mother in 1744. To get to the large church from the court, we had to go around the house by carriage. On Christmas Day it was twenty-eight or twenty-nine degrees below zero; we were going to take the carriage to mass and were already on the staircase landing when we were told on behalf of the Empress that we were excused from going to mass that day because of the excessively cold weather. It is true that it nipped our noses. I was obliged to remain in my room during my first stay in Moscow because of the excessive number of pimples that had broken out on my face; I was scared to death of being scarred. I sent for Doctor Boerhave, who gave me sedatives and all kinds of things to clear up these pimples. Finally when nothing had worked, he said to me one day, “I am going to give you something that will really get rid of them.” Out of his pocket he drew a little flask of oil of talc and told me to put a drop in a cup of water and wash my face with this from time to time, every week, for example. The oil of talc did indeed clean my face, and after ten days I was able to appear in public.