50
A VISITOR IN PARIS
In 1717 as today, Paris was the capital and the center of everything that matters in France. But Paris, with its 500,000 citizens, was only the third largest city in Europe; both London (750,000) and Amsterdam (600,000) were larger. In relation to total national populations, Paris was even smaller. In Britain, one man in ten was a Londoner, in Holland one man in five was from Amsterdam, while in France only one Frenchman in forty lived in Paris.
To those who know it now, the Paris of 1717 seems small. The great palaces and squares which today lie in the heart of Paris—the Tuileries, the Luxembourg, the Place Vendôme, the Invalides—were then on the city’s fringes. Beyond Montparnasse were fields and pastures. The Tuileries looked through its splendid gardens to the wilder part of the Champs-Elysées rising up to the wooded hill where the Arc de Triomphe now stands. To the north, a single road ran through the meadows up to the ridge of Montmartre.
The Seine was the heart of the city. The river was not confined by its present granite quays, and along its muddy banks women did their washing, oblivious to the unpleasant odors of slaughterhouse and tannery wastes poured directly into the stream. Passing through the city, the river flowed beneath five bridges. The two most recent, the magnificent Pont Royal and the Pont Neuf, were open-sided; the others were lined by four- and five-story buildings. The Paris of wide, tree-lined boulevards did not exist; the city in 1717 was a jumble of narrow streets and four- and five-story buildings with pointed roofs. The great twin towers of Notre Dame rose above the city, but the world-famous view of the cathedral façade was unavailable because the plaza was a cluster of tiny streets crowded with buildings. Louis XIV had begun to change the face of the medieval city. Early in his reign, he had ordered the city’s fortified ramparts destroyed and boulevards planted with trees laid out where the walls had been. Only one great square, the elegant Place Royale (now Place des Vosges), had been in existence when the Sun King reached the throne. During Louis’ reign, he added the Place des Victoires, the Place Vendôme and the immense church and esplanade of the Invalides.
Each section of the city had a special flavor. The Marais attracted the aristocracy and the higher bourgeoisie. Wealthy financiers built their houses at the other end of the city, around the new Place Vendôme. Foreigners and foreign embassies preferred the quarter surrounding St. Germain des Prés, where the streets were wider and the air was said to be purer. Travelers were also advised that the best hotels were available near St. Germain des Prés, but a visitor could find a room in many private mansions; even the highest members of the aristocracy rented their top floor to a paying guest. The Latin Quarter then, as now, was for students.
During the day, the people of Paris swarmed through the streets. Pedestrians were in constant danger as horses, carriages and carts tried to thrust themselves through narrow passageways already jammed with people. The noise of iron-rimmed wheels and shouting men was deafening; the smells from human excrement dumped from the windows, from piles of manure and from the courtyards where butchers slaughtered their animals were dreadful. To reduce the noise and give traction to the wheels, as well as to maintain a modicum of cleanliness, fresh straw was laid down daily, the dirty straw being swept up and dumped in the river. To avoid the dangers and inconvenience of walking in these streets, those who could afford them used private carriages which they owned or rented by the day or month. Others used closed sedan chairs carried by two men.
The Pont Neuf and the Place Dauphine on the tip of the Ile de la Cité swarmed with itinerant vendors, quack doctors, marionette shows, stilt walkers, street singers and beggars. Pickpockets waited outside the doors of fashionable hotels to brush against unwary foreigners. It was easy to find women. The most desirable, the girls of the Opéra and the Comédie, were generally reserved for the French aristocracy, but the streets were crowded with parading prostitutes. Visitors were warned, however, that they risked their health if not their lives.
At night, the streets were relatively safe until around midnight. Paris in 1717 was the best-lighted city in Europe with 6,500 candle lamps suspended over the streets. Replaced each day and lighted at dark, the fat tapers cast a murky glow over the vicinity. But at midnight, when the candles guttered out one by one and the city was plunged into darkness, all who wished to see morning were behind a door.
The Opéra and the Comédie were always crowded. Molière was still the favorite, but people also wanted to see Racine, Corneille and the newly fashionable Marivaux. After the theater, cafés and cabarets remained open until ten or eleven o’clock. Society flocked to the 300 new coffee houses clustered near St. Germain des Prés or the Faubourg St. Honoré, to drink tea, coffee or chocolate. For many, the best recreation was a stroll in a park or garden. The most elegant strollers favored the long Cours la Reine, a walk along the right bank of the Seine which extended from the Tuileries down the river as far as the present Place de l’Alma. This flowered walk was so popular that its use was extended into the evening by placing torches and lanterns along the path. Other gardens open to the public were the garden of the Palais Royal, the Luxembourg Gardens and the Jardin du Roi, now known as the Jardin des Plantes.
Then, as now, the most famous garden in Paris was the Jardin des Tuileries. There, in the afternoon and evening, one met the greatest personages of the kingdom, even the Regent himself, strolling along. Beyond the Tuileries lay the Champs-Elysées, flanked by symmetrical rows of trees. Here people exercised on horseback and opened the windows of their carriages to enjoy the fresh air. Still farther west, beyond the village of Passy, lay the wood later turned into the park of the Bois de Boulogne. The wood was filled with deer, which riders and dogs hunted for sport, but it was also a place where, on warm Sunday and holiday afternoons, Parisians spread themselves on the grass to picnic and sleep. The wood was also a place for love affairs, which took place inside carriages with the curtains drawn, the coachman sitting impassively atop the carriage, the reins loose, the horses peaceably munching the grass.
When the boy King left Versailles and moved back to Paris, most of the aristocracy followed, building or refurbishing its mansions (hôtels particuliers) in the fashionable section of the Marais on the eastern edge of the city, or across the river in the Faubourg St. Germain. The Hôtel Lesdiguières, in which Peter was living during his six weeks in Paris, was one of the grandest of the mansions of the Marais* with gardens spreading over a large block. Its walls, filled with sheds and stables, touched the Rue St. Antoine, and behind lay the Cerisaie, the King’s cherry orchard with rows of handsome little trees.
The Bastille stood directly adjacent to the hôtel, and its eight thin gray stone towers towered directly over the garden wall. While strolling, the Tsar had only to raise his eyes to see the legendary stronghold. In fact, the fourteenth-century fortress has been the most unjustly maligned of all the castles of France. Depicted as a grim, gigantic symbol of the oppression of the French monarchy, it was actually rather small: seventy yards long and thirty yards wide (although a dry moat with drawbridges and an outer courtyard surrounded by guard buildings made the space it occupied seem larger). The furious Paris mob which tore it down on July 14, 1789, and the happy crowds of Frenchmen who still celebrate Bastille Day every July 14, have imagined the Bastille as a mournful den where a tyrant wreaked his will on the suffering people of France. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Bastille was the most luxurious prison which has ever existed. Imprisonment there carried no dishonor. With rare exceptions, its occupants were aristocrats or gentlemen who were received and treated according to their rank. The King could order troublesome nobles put there until he or they changed an opinion. Fathers could send unruly sons to the Bastille for several months to cool their foolishness. Rooms were furnished, heated and lighted according to the means and tastes of the prisoners. A servant could be kept, and guests could be invited for dinner—Cardinal de Rohan once gave a banquet for twenty. There was competition for the more favorable rooms; those at the tops of the towers were the least desirable, being coldest in winter and hottest in summer. Nothing was required of the prisoner. He could play his guitar, read poetry, exercise in the governor’s garden and plan menus to please his guests.
Many a famous man spent time in the Bastille. The most mysterious was the Man in the Iron Mask, whose identity was ornamented by Alexandre Dumas into a twin brother of Louis XIV. Like most stories about the Bastille, this one was mostly imaginary; the famous mask was not of iron, but of black velvet, although even the governor of the Bastille was not allowed to lift it, and the prisoner died, still unknown, in 1703. During the weeks Peter spent in Paris, another famous Frenchman was locked in the Bastille, and it is possible that this prisoner looked down from a tower window into the garden of the Hôtel Lesdiguières to see the Tsar strolling among the trees. This was twenty-three-year-old François-Marie Arouet, a waspish young epigrammist whose suggestive verses about the relations between the Regent and his daughter the Duchesse de Berri had inspired the Regent to lock him up. Forty years later, using the name Voltaire, the prisoner would write a History of the Russian Empire under Peter the Great.
Before coming to Paris, Peter had made a list of everything he wanted to see, and the list was long. Once the welcoming ceremonies were over, he asked the Regent that all protocol be dispensed with; he wanted to be free to visit whatever he liked. Subject to his insistence that the Tsar be always escorted by the Marshal de Tessè or some other member of the court, and that Peter allow himself to be accompanied by a bodyguard of eight soldiers of the royal guard whenever he went out, the Regent agreed.
Peter began his sightseeing by rising at four a.m. on May 12 and walking in the early light down the Rue St. Antoine to visit the Place Royale and see the sun reflected in the great windows which looked down on the royal parade ground. That same day, he visited the Place des Victoires and the Place Vendôme. The next day, he crossed to the Left Bank and visited the Observatory, the factory of the Gobelins, famous for tapestries, and the Jardin des Plantes, which had over 2,500 species. In the days that followed, he visited the shops of artisans of every kind, examining everything and asking questions. One morning at six a.m., he was in the Grand Gallery of the Louvre, where the Marshal de Villars showed him the enormous models of Vauban’s great fortresses which guarded the frontiers of France.* Then, leaving the Louvre, he walked in the Tuileries Garden, where the usual crowd of strollers had been asked to leave.
A few days later, Peter visited the vast hospital and barracks of the Invalides, where 4,000 disabled soldiers were housed and cared for. He tasted the soldiers’ soup and wine, drank to their health, clapped them on their backs and called them his “comrades.” At the Invalides, he admired the famous dome of the church, recently completed, towering 345 feet and considered to be the marvel of Paris. Peter sought out interesting people. He met the refugee Prince Rakoczy, the Hungarian leader who had rebelled against the Hapsburg Emperor and whom Peter had once proposed to make King of Poland. He dined with the Marshal d’Estrées, who came for him at eight one morning and talked to him the entire day about the French navy. He visited the house of the director of the Post Office, who was a collector of all kinds of curiosities and inventions. He spent an entire morning at the Mint and watched a new goldpiece being struck. When it was taken and placed, still warm, in Peter’s hand, he saw to his surprise that on the coin were his own face and the inscription “Petrus Alexievitz, Tzar, Mag. Russ. Imperat.” He was solemnly received at the Sorbonne, where a group of Catholic theologians gave him a plan for the reunion of the Eastern and Western churches (Peter took it back with him to Russia, where he ordered his Russian bishops to study it and give him an opinion). He visited the Academy of Science, and on December 22, 1717, six months after his departure from Paris, the Tsar was formally elected a member of the Academy.
As Paris began to see him frequently, reports and impressions circulated rapidly. “He was a very tall man,” wrote Saint-Simon,
well proportioned, rather thin with a roundish face, a broad forehead and handsome, sharply defined eyebrows, a short, but not-too-short nose, large at the end. His lips were rather thick, his complexion a ruddy brown, fine black eyes, large, lively and piercing, and well apart. When he wished, his look was majestic and gracious, at other times it was fierce and severe. He had a nervous, twitching smile which did not come often, but which contorted his face and his whole expression and inspired fear. That lasted but a moment, accompanied by a wild and terrible look, and passed away as quickly. His whole air showed his intellect, his reflection and his greatness, and did not lack a certain grace. He wore only a linen collar, a round brown wig without powder which did not touch his shoulders, a brown tight-fitting coat, plain with gold buttons, a waistcoat, breeches, stockings, and no gloves or cuffs. He wore the star of his order on his coat and the ribbon underneath; his coat was often quite unbuttoned, his hat was always on a table and never on his head even out of doors. With all this simplicity, and in whatever bad carriage or company he might be, one could not fail to perceive the air of greatness that was natural to him.
Peter’s visiting was conducted at a headlong pace. Only when he had a bout of fever and was forced to cancel a dinner with the Regent did the Tsar briefly slow down. The poor Marshal de Tessè and the eight French bodyguards did their best to keep up, often with no success. Peter’s combination of curiosity and impetuosity, along with his disdain for majesty, astonished the French. Every action was precipitous. He wanted to be free to go from place to place in the city without ceremony; therefore, he often took a rented carriage or even a hackney cab instead of waiting for the royal carriage assigned to him. More than once, a French visitor who called on a member of the Russian party at the Hôtel Lesdiguières came to the door to find his carriage gone. The Tsar, striding out of the house, would jump into the first carriage he saw and calmly drive away. Often, he escaped in this manner from the Marshal de Tessè and his soldiers.
Inside the Hôtel Lesdiguières, Verton, one of the royal maîtres d’hôtel assigned to running the Tsar’s kitchen and table, was doing his best to feed Peter and his Russians. Verton was a man of spirit, good cheer and self-possession, and before long Peter and all his party liked him enormously. Through Verton and others, stories filtered out as to what went on at this Russian table in the French capital. Wrote Saint-Simon:
What he [Peter] drinks and eats in two regular meals is incredible, without adding what he swallowed of beer, lemonade and other drinks between meals. As for his suite, they drank even more: a bottle or two of beer at least, and sometimes more of wine, and liquors after the end of the meal. This was normal for every meal. He ate at eleven o’clock in the morning, and eight o’clock at night.
Peter’s relations with the Regent were excellent, in part because it amused Philippe to make himself agreeable. One night, the two men went together to the Opéra, where they sat alone in the front row of the royal box in full view of the audience. During the performance, Peter became thirsty and asked for a glass of beer. A large goblet was brought on a saucer, and the Regent stood up, took it and himself presented it to the Tsar. Peter accepted the glass with a smile and a nod, drank the beer and put the goblet back on the saucer. Then Philippe, still standing, placed a napkin on a plate and presented it to the Tsar. Peter, still without rising, used it to dry his mouth and mustache and replaced it. Throughout the performance, with the Regent of France acting like a servant, the audience watched in fascination. During the fourth act, Peter wearied and left the box to go to supper, declining Philippe’s offer to escort him and insisting that his host remain until the end.
Everywhere, the Tsar was received with respect. Most members of the royal family and ranking aristocracy were excited by his presence among them and determined to meet him, among them the current first lady of France, “Madame,” the Regent’s mother, a bosomy, gossipy German lady of sixty-five. The Regent brought the Tsar to her one day after first showing his guest the palace and gardens at St. Cloud. “Madame” received her visitor at the Palais Royal, where she lived with her son, and the lady was charmed. “Received a great visit today, that of my hero, the Tsar,” she wrote. “I find that he has very good manners … and is not in the least affected. He has much judgment. He speaks bad German, but still makes himself understood without trouble and talks very freely. He is polite-toward everyone and is much liked.”
Not to be outdone by her grandmother, the Regent’s scandalous daughter, the Duchesse de Berri, sent her compliments to Peter and asked whether he would visit her. Peter agreed and came to the Luxembourg Palace and afterward walked in the Luxembourg Gardens. But disputes over etiquette prevented him from seeing some of the great ladies of Paris. Several Princes of the Blood refused to call on Peter unless he promised to return the calls and meet their wives. Peter found this petty and absurd and simply refused. He preferred, in any case, to visit people of merit rather than people of blood.
On May 24, two weeks after his first visit to the Tuileries, Peter returned to visit the King. He arrived at an early hour before the boy was awake, so Marshal de Villeroy took him to see the French crown jewels. Peter found them more numerous and more beautiful than he had expected, although he said he did not know much about jewels. In fact, he told Villeroy, he was not much interested in objects, no matter how beautiful or valuable, which had no practical utility. From there, he went to see the King, who was just coming to find him in Marshal de Villeroy’s apartments. This was purposely done so that their meeting would be not a formal visit but seemingly by chance. Meeting Peter in an office, the King held in his hand a roll of paper which he gave to the Tsar, telling him that it was a map of his dominions. Louis’ politeness charmed Peter, who treated the boy with a skillful blend of affection and royal respect.
Villeroy, writing to Madame de Maintenon, had the same impression: “I cannot express to you the dignity, the grace and the politeness with which the King received the visit of the Tsar. But I must tell you that this Prince, said to be barbarous, is not so at all. He displayed sentiments of grandeur and generosity which we never expected.”
That night, Peter drove to Versailles, where the royal apartments had been prepared for him. His Russian companions, given rooms nearby, had brought from Paris a collection of young women, who were installed in the former chambers of the puritanical Madame de Maintenon. Reported Saint-Simon: “Blouin, Governor of Versailles, was extremely scandalized to see thus profaned this temple of prudery.”
In the morning, the Tsar rose early. His escort at Versailles, the Duc d’Antin, going to find him, discovered that the Tsar had already walked among the clipped hedges and stylized flower beds of the palace gardens and was at that moment rowing a boat on the Grand Canal. That day, Peter inspected all of Versailles, including the great fountains which had been the Sun King’s special pride, and the pink marble Trianon. Regarding the great palace itself with its small central château of Louis XIII and the monumental wings added by Louis XIV, Peter declared that it seemed to him “a pigeon with the wings of an eagle.” Leaving Versailles, he returned to Paris in time to see the Whitsunday procession the following morning. Tessè took him to Notre Dame, where, beneath the great rose windows of the cathedral, Peter observed a mass being celebrated by Cardinal de Noailles.
A visit to Fontainebleau, the other majestic royal château outside Paris, was less successful. The Tsar’s host, the Comte de Toulouse, one of Louis XIV’s legitimized bastards by Madame de Montespan, urged him to go on a stag hunt, and Peter agreed. For Frenchmen of blood, the chase was the noblest of outdoor sports. They swept through the forests with sword or spear in hand, their horses hurtling fallen trees and streams at a mad gallop, following the sounds of the baying dogs and hunting horns, until the pursued stag or wolf or wild boar turned at bay and was pulled down in a bloody melee among the moss and ferns of the virgin forest. Peter had no stomach for this kind of thing, and, unused to the breakneck pace of the riders, he nearly fell off. He returned to the château angry and humiliated, swearing that he did not understand the sport, did not like it and found it too violent. He refused to dine with the Count, instead eating only with three members of his Russian suite. Soon after, he left Fontainebleau.
Returning to Paris by boat down the Seine, he glided past the lovely château of Choisy and asked to visit it. By chance, he met its owner, the Princesse de Conti, one of the Princesses of the Blood whom etiquette had barred from meeting him before. Arriving in Paris, Peter was so pleased to be once more on the water that, instead of disembarking on the eastern edge of the city and returning directly to the Hôtel Lesdiguières, he ordered the boatmen to continue downstream so that he could float under all the five bridges of Paris.
On June 3, Peter returned to Versailles to sleep in the Trianon and to spend several nights at Marly, the country pavilion which Louis XIV had built to escape the ponderous etiquette of Versailles. While staying there, Peter drove to St. Cyr to visit Louis XIV’s widow, Madame de Maintenon, in the convent she had established, and to which she had retired after the King’s death. Everyone was surprised when the Tsar expressed a wish to see her. “She has much merit,” he explained. “She has rendered great service to the King and nation.”
Not surprisingly, the elderly woman was enormously flattered at the prospect of a visit from the man about whom all Paris was talking. “The Tsar … seems to me a very great man since he has inquired about me,” she wrote before his visit. To conceal her age and put on her best appearance, she received the Tsar at twilight, sitting in her bed with all the curtains drawn except one which let in a single shaft of light. When Peter entered, he went straight to the windows and dramatically opened the curtains to let in the light. Then, he pulled back the curtains around her canopy bed, sat down at the end of the bed and silently looked at her. According to Saint-Simon (who was not present), the silence continued with neither saying a word until Peter rose and left. “I know that she must have been greatly astonished and even more humiliated, but the Sun King is no more,” Saint-Simon wrote. From a sister of the convent, there is a kinder version, according to which Peter asked Madame what her illness was. “Old age,” she replied. She then asked him why he had come to see her. “I came to see everything of note that France contains,” he answered. At this, it was reported, a ray of her former beauty lighted up her face.
It was not until the very end of Peter’s visit to Paris that Saint-Simon met the Tsar in person:
I entered the garden where the Tsar was walking. The Marshal de Tessé, who saw me from afar, came to me, expecting to present me to the Tsar. I begged him not to do it and not to notice me in his presence because I wished to observe him at my leisure … and get a good look at him, which I would not be able to do if I was known.… With this precaution, I satisfied my curiosity completely at my leisure. I found him rather affable, but behaving always as if he were everywhere the master. He walked into an office where D’Antin showed him different maps and several documents on which he asked several questions. It was there that I saw the tic of which I have spoken. I asked Tessé if this happened often; he said several times a day, especially when he did not take care to control it.
After six weeks in Paris, the visit was now coming to a close. He revisited the Observatory, climbed the tower of Notre Dame and went to a hospital to watch a cataract operation. In the Champs-Elysées, he sat on horseback and reviewed two regiments of the elite Maison du Roi, both cavalry and musketeers, but the heat and dust and enormous crowd were so great that Peter, who loved soldiers, scarcely looked at them and left the review early.
There was a round of farewell calls. On Friday, June 18, the Regent came early to the Hôtel Lesdiguières to bid the Tsar goodbye. Once again, he spoke privately to Peter with only Kurakin present to interpret. The Tsar returned for a third visit to the Tuileries to take his leave of Louis XV. The visit was informal, as Peter had insisted it be. Once again, Saint-Simon was charmed: ‘One could not show more spirit, more grace and tenderness for the King than the Tsar displayed on all these occasions, and the next day when the King went to the Hôtel Lesdiguières to wish the Tsar a good trip, once again everything passed with great charm and gentleness.”
On all sides, the visit was now acclaimed a triumph. Saint-Simon, who had seen the Sun King on his throne, described the lasting impression the Tsar had made:
This was a monarch who compelled admiration for his extreme curiosity about everything that had any bearing on his views of government, commerce, education, police methods, etc. His interests embraced each detail capable of practical application and disdained nothing. His intelligence was most marked; in his appreciation of merit, he showed great perception and a most lively understanding, everywhere displaying extensive knowledge and a lively flow of ideas. In character, he was an extraordinary combination: he assumed majesty at its most regal, most proud, most unbending; yet, once his supremacy had been granted, his demeanor was infinitely gracious and full of discriminating courtesy. Everywhere and at all times he was the master, but with degrees of familiarity according to a person’s rank. He had a friendly approach which one associated with freedom, but he was not exempt from a strong imprint of his country’s past. Thus his manners were abrupt, even violent, his wishes unpredictable, brooking no delay and no opposition. His table manners were crude, and those of his staff still less elegant. He was determined to be free and independent in all that he wished to do or see.…
One might go on forever describing this truly great man with his remarkable character and rare variety of extraordinary talents. They will make him a monarch worthy of profound admiration for countless years, despite the large flaws in his own education and his country’s lack of culture and civilization. Such was the reputation he gained everywhere in France, where he was considered a veritable prodigy.
On Sunday afternoon, June 20, Peter left Paris quietly and unescorted. Traveling eastward through France, he stopped at Rheims, where he visited the cathedral and was shown the missal on which for centuries the kings of France had sworn their coronation oaths. To the astonishment of the French priests present, Peter was able to read to them the mysterious characters with which the missal was inscribed. The language was old church Slavonic; in all probability, the missal had been brought to France in the eleventh century by the Kievan princess Anna Yaroslavna, who married King Louis I and became Queen of France.*
Although Peter left Shafirov, Dolgoruky and Tolstoy behind in Paris to negotiate with the French, the visit bore no diplomatic fruit beyond a meaningless treaty of friendship. The Regent was interested in the Tsar’s proposal of an alliance between France and Russia, but the Abbé Dubois remained actively hostile to the idea. By now, the antagonism between King George I of England and Tsar Peter was too great to permit a treaty with both; Dubois chose England over Russia. Indeed, the hopelessness of Peter’s case was later confirmed by Tessè, who revealed that throughout the negotiations with the Russians, Dubois had secretly disclosed everything to the English. “The government,” Tessè later admitted, “had no intention other than to amuse the Tsar as long as he stayed without concluding anything.” With the idea of an alliance discarded, the marriage which was to have been its seal was also dropped. Peter’s daughter Elizabeth remained in Russia to rule as empress for twenty years, and Louis XV eventually married the daughter of Charles XII’s puppet King of Poland, Stanislaus Leszczynski.
As he traveled again through the French countryside, Peter remarked, as he had on his way to Paris, on the poverty of the French peasants. The comparison between the luxury he found in the capital and what he saw outside surprised him and he wondered aloud to his friends how long this system could last.
From Rheims, Peter went slowly down the Meuse by boat, first to Namur and Liège and then to the health resort of Spa. This region, now part of Belgium, was then divided between Holland and the Hapsburg Empire, and along the route both Dutch and imperial officials in the river towns competed to pay him honor. Peter remained at Spa for five weeks, drinking the waters and taking a cure. Catherine still waited for him in Amsterdam, and his letters to her suggest his impatience and fatigue:
Yesterday, I received your letter of the 11th in which you write of the illness of our daughters [Anne and Elizabeth both had smallpox] and that the first, thank God, is getting better while the other has taken to her bed, about which Alexander Danilovich also writes me. But your changed style has made me very sad, as the bringer of this letter will tell you. For your letter was very differently written from usual. God grant we can hear the same about Anushka as about Lisenka. When you write for me to come quickly and that you are very lonesome, I believe you. The bringer of this will tell you how lonely I am without you and I can say that except those days when I was in Versailles and Marly twelve days ago, I have had no great pleasure. But here I must stay some days and when I finish drinking the water I will start that very day, for there are only seven hours by land and five days by water. God grant to see you in joy which I wish from all my heart.
P.S. I received this morning the glad news that Anushka is better and therefore began to drink the water more joyously.
Soon after, he wrote again:
I congratulate you on this triumphal day of the Russian resurrection [it was the anniversary of Poltava], only I am sorry that we celebrate apart, as well as tomorrow’s day of the Holy Apostle, the name day of your old man [Peter himself] and the boy [their son Peter Petrovich]. God grant that these days pass quickly and that I can be with you sooner. The water, thank God, acts well and I hope to finish the cure in a week from St. Peter’s day. Today I put on for the first time your camisole and drank your health, but only very little, because it is forbidden.
P.S. [after acknowledging a letter and two bottles of vodka] You write that you sent little because I drank little at the waters, which is true. I do not drink altogether more than five times a day and spirits only once or twice, and not always, partly because it is strong, and partly because it is scarce. I think it is very tiresome that we are so near and cannot see each other. God grant soon. On finishing this, I drink once again to your health.
While at Spa, the Tsar sat for the Dutch painter, Karl Moor, and this painting and the one Kneller had done almost two decades before became the Tsar’s favorite portraits of himself.
On July 25, Peter began an eight-day boat journey down the Meuse (in Holland, the Maas), and finally, on August 2, he was reunited with Catherine in Amsterdam. He remained in Holland for a month and on September 2, he departed Amsterdam and Holland for the last time, traveling up the Rhine to Nimwegen, Cleves and Wesel and then on to Berlin. Along the way, he left Catherine behind to follow him. They often separated on the road like this, because it was difficult to find enough horses to service both their suites and also simply because she did not like to travel as rapidly as her husband.
Two days after Peter’s arrival, Catherine caught up with him in Berlin. It was her first visit to the Prussian capital, and although by now Peter was familiar, his wife was an object of much curiosity. But Catherine was well received and dinners and balls were given in her honor, so that she and Peter departed for Russia in good spirits. By October, the Tsar was back in St. Petersburg. There, Peter had to face the climax of a personal and political tragedy which ran deeper than any other in his reign.
* Many of the splendid mansions of the Marais still stand, but the Hôtel Lesdiguières has disappeared. In 1866, its grounds were pierced when the engineer Baron Georges Haussmann, then driving his broad boulevards through Paris at the command of Emperor Napoleon III, laid the Boulevard Henri IV through the hôtel garden. Thereafter, the mansion survived only a few years and was torn down in 1877. Today, there remains only a plaque commemorating Peter’s visit on the wall above No. 10 Rue de la Cerisaie. Across the street at No. 11, in a house which was standing there during Peter’s visit, the author lived for three of the years he was writing this book.
* These astonishing exact-scale models, created by order of Louis XIV, including mountains, rivers and details of cities as well as of the fortifications, were gigantic, some as large as 900 square feet. Considered secrets of war, they were kept under guard in the Grand Gallery of the Louvre until 1777, when they were transported to the top floor of the Invalides. There, they have remained for 200 years and can be seen today by anyone willing to climb the stairs.
* It required some sacrifice for a princess of Kiev to leave her native city, then at the height of its civilization, to marry into the cruder culture of France. The relative levels of their cultures are suggested by the fact that Anna could read and write and signed her name to the marriage document, whereas Louis I could only scrawl an X.