Catherine the Great & Potemkin
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A big sapphire of 18.3/4 carats – 1500 Roubles
Two diamonds of 5.3/8 carats – 600 R
10 diamonds of 20 carats – 2200 R
15 diamonds of 14.5 carats – 912 R
78 diamonds of 14.5 carats – 725 R…56
It was not just jewels: a bill from his bankers Tepper in Warsaw lists two gold snuff-boxes engraved with diamonds, a gold watch, a golden repeater clock engraved with diamonds, a ‘souvenir-à-brilliants’, some music, eighteen pens, customs for paintings imported from Vienna, payments to a Polish agent of influence, 15,000 roubles payed to ‘the Jew Hosias’ for unnamed work, all totalling almost 30,000 roubles.57
Potemkin’s payment for all this was so hit-and-miss that it too has gone into legend. There were virtually always unpaid jewellers and craftsmen among the petitioners crowding his apartments. It was said that when a creditor arrived Potemkin used to signal to Popov: if the sign was an open hand, the merchant was paid. If it was a closed fist, he was sent away. None of them dared confront him directly at Court. But the Swiss court jeweller Fasi was said to have slipped his bill under Potemkin’s plate at the Empress’s table. Serenissimus thought it was a billet-doux and was furious when he read it. Catherine laughed and Potemkin always admired courage so he paid the bill. But, to teach the jeweller for his insolence, he delivered it in copper coins, enough to fill two rooms.58
Dinner
At about 1 p.m., the jewels were put away and the Prince’s guests arrived for dinner, the main meal in the eighteenth century, at a table set for eighteen, usually officers, visitors and his best friends of the moment, from Ségur or Ligne to Lady Craven or Samuel Bentham. Potemkin’s friendships, as we saw with Harris, were as intense as love affairs – and tended to end in disillusionment. ‘The true secret of winning his friendship’, said Ségur, ‘was not fearing him.’ When he arrived in Petersburg and called on Potemkin, Ségur was kept waiting so long that he stormed out. Next day, the Prince sent him an apology, invited him back and greeted him a gorgeous suit in which every seam was embroidered with diamonds. When Potemkin was lying in bed, depressed, he said to Ségur: ‘My dear Comte, let us lay aside all ceremony…and live like two friends.’ Once he had befriended someone, he favoured his companion above all the highest imperial grandees, as Sam Bentham discovered.59 Potemkin was a loyal friend: in private, he was caressing and warm but in public he seemed ‘haughty and arrogant’. This was probably due to that surprising shyness.60 Miranda actually saw him blush bashfully at the obsequious attention he received.61
The Prince was a master of conversation in an era when wit was especially prized. ‘Sometimes serious, sometime hilarious,’ recalled Ségur, ‘always keen to discuss some ecclesiastical question, always switching from gravity to laughter, wearing his knowledge lightly.’ Ligne said that if he wanted to charm someone, he possessed ‘the art of conquering every heart’. He was an immensely rewarding, enjoyable and impossible companion, ‘scolding or laughing, mimicking or swearing, engaged in wantonness or prayers, singing or meditating’. He could be ‘uncommonly affable or extremely savage’. But, when ‘savage’, his harshness often concealed ‘the greatest benevolence of heart’. Bentham had never known such ‘merriment’ as he did travelling in Potemkin’s carriage. The poet Derzhavin remembered Potemkin for ‘his kind heart and great generosity’.62 He was also deeply kind: ‘The more I see of his Character,’ Sam Bentham told Pole Carew, ‘the more reason I have to esteem and admire it.’63
His geniality was combined with a heartfelt humanity and care for ordinary people, especially soldiers, that was rare in the age of cannon-fodder. Ligne noticed he was ‘never vengeful, asking pardon for a pain he has inflicted, quickly repairing an injustice’. When Potemkin bought Prince Lubomirski’s estates in Poland, he ordered that ‘all the gallows…must be destroyed as soon as possible without trace’, wishing that the peasants obey him ‘through respect for their duty and not from fear of punishment’.64 His military reforms were designed to give more comfort to his troops, quite a new notion in that century, though he was also increasing their effectiveness. But his constant orders to be more lenient in punishments were unique in the Russian army: again and again, he ordered that beatings should be reduced. ‘All compulsion…must be eradicated,’ he wrote in one order. ‘Lazy ones can be forced by the stick but not more than six lashes. Every kind of compulsion…has to be eradicated.’65 His repeated orders to feed the troops with warm nourishing food, regarded by Russian generals as mollycoddling, sound absolutely modern.66
‘He was neither vindictive nor rancorous yet everybody was afraid of him,’67 recalled the memoirist Wiegel, who believed that this explained the ambiguous attitude to Potemkin. His very tolerance and good nature confused the Russians. ‘The way he looked at people, his movements, it seemed, said to all those around him “You’re not worth my anger.” His lack of severity and indulgence clearly originated from his unlimited disdain.’68
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Dinner was served at about 1.30 p.m. and even if there were only a total of sixteen guests, as when Lady Craven attended such an event at the Taurida, the sixty-strong horn orchestra played during the meal.69 The Prince was a notorious Epicurean and trencherman – Shcherbatov called him ‘the omnipotent glutton’.70 As political tensions rose, he must have eaten for comfort or as a locomotive consumes coal. He never lost his taste for simple peasant food, yet he also served caviar from the Caspian, smoked goose from Hamburg, cucumbers from Nizhny Novgorod, pastries from Kaluga, oysters from the Baltic, melons and oranges from Astrakhan and China, figs from Provence. He loved pain doux de Savoie71 for dessert and expected to eat his favourite dish, sterlet soup from the Caspian, made with the young sturgeon fish, wherever he was. Soon after his arrival in St Petersburg in 1780, Reginald Pole Carew attended ‘an ordinary’ dinner at Potemkin’s and listed the ‘exquisite and rare dishes’: ‘remarkable, fine white veal from Archangel, a joint of delicious mutton from Little Bokhara, a suckling pig from Poland, conserves from Persia, caviar from the Caspian’.72 All was cooked by Ballez,*5 his French chef de cuisine.73
Serenissimus also appreciated wine, not just his own from Soudak in the Crimea, but, as Carew Pole recorded,74 from all the ‘Ports of Europe and the Grecian isles, the Cape and the borders of the Don’. No toast was complete without champagne.75 If a Russian ambassador in southern Europe, like Skavronsky in Naples, wanted to win favour, he sent a Classical column – and some barrels of wine.76
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One day, at the height of his fortunes, Serenissimus sat down to dinner. He was very cheerful, playing the fool until towards the end of the meal when he became quiet. He started biting his nails. Guests and servants waited to see what he would say. Finally, he asked:
Can any man be more happy than I am? Everything I have ever wanted, I have; all my whims have been fulfilled as if by magic. I wanted high rank, I have it; I wanted medals, I have them; I loved gambling, I have lost vast sums; I liked giving parties, I’ve given magnificent ones; I enjoy building houses, I’ve raised palaces; I liked buying estates, I have many; I adore diamonds and beautiful things – no individual in Europe owns rarer or more exquisite stones. In a word, all my passions have been sated. I am entirely happy!
At this, the Prince swept the priceless china plates on to the floor, smashed them all, stormed off to his bedroom and locked himself inside.
Potemkin suffered from his own surfeit of everything: he regarded himself as ‘fortune’s child’; indeed he often used the phrase. But sometimes the scale of his success seemed to disgust him. Perhaps this was deeply Russian: he was ashamed of his vast power and proud of his turbulent soul, repulsed by the cold machinery of state, proud of his boundless capacity for suffering and self-abasement in which the greatness of the Russian character resides. His appetites for fame, fortune and pleasure were insatiable – yet they did not make him happy. Only ma
ssive accomplishment, whether in statesmanship or battle, aesthetic beauty, in music or art, or the serenity of religious mysticism, seemed to excuse the obscenity of mere power.77
Once he called for his adjutant and ordered coffee. Someone rushed out to get it. Then he asked again. Another courier was despatched. Finally he ordered it again and again, almost in a frenzy. But when it arrived he said, ‘It’s unnecessary. I only wanted to wait for something but now I’ve been deprived even of that pleasure.’78
Afternoon: The Lover’s Hour
The afternoon was traditionally the ‘lovers’ hour’ in Russia, like the Gallic cinq-à-sept or the Spanish siesta. There must have been much coming and going of closed carriages and ladies’ maids bringing billets-doux to Potemkin’s house. Still more married women were now sending him love letters, begging to see him. One of them always hailed him: ‘Hello, my unique friend!’ These unpublished notes, handwritten in an argot of French and Russian but always unsigned and undated, fill an entire section of the archive. ‘I have not been able to give you pleasure because I’ve had no time, you left so quickly,’ wrote another in a big girlish hand. This was repeated in all the love letters. When the same woman wrote again, she declared, ‘I wait with the most tender impatience the moment when I can come to kiss you. While waiting, I do it in my imagination and with equal tenderness.’
Serenissimus’ whims and moods tormented his mistresses. ‘You’re rendering me mad with love,’ wrote one. His restlessness and long departures to the south made him unobtainably attractive: ‘I’m so angry at being prevented from [having] the pleasure of embracing you,’ wrote one girl. ‘Don’t forget that I beg you to be persuaded that I am involved only with you!’ But it seemed that Potemkin had soon forgotten that. ‘Don’t forget me,’ she beseeched him later. ‘You have forgotten.’ Yet another declared melodramatically that ‘if I didn’t live in the hope of being loved by you, I would give myself to Death’. Finally, driven to the edge by Potemkin’s impossible lack of commitment, the girls had to retreat and become friends again: ‘I don’t want to recall the past and I forget all except that I loved you and that suffices to wish sincerely for your happiness…Adieu, mon Prince.’79
He was accustomed to languish on his divan surrounded by women like a sultan, though he called his harem ‘the hen-run’. He always enjoyed the company of women and saw no need to restrain his ‘Epicurean appetites’.80 Diplomats always called his maîtresse en titre ‘sultana-in-chief’. But he behaved ‘nobly’ to his mistresses, according to Samoilov, who had reason to know since his wife was probably one of them: his affairs were always questions of passion, not merely vanity, ‘as they are for many famous people’.81 His subordinates knew they had to keep their wives at a distance if they wanted to preserve their virtue. Potemkin’s ‘wandering and capricious glance sometimes stopped, or better to say, slid, upon my mother’s good-looking face’, recalled Wiegel. One day, a ‘fool’ in his entourage told him that Wiegel’s mother had the most exquisite feet. ‘Indeed,’ said Potemkin, ‘I hadn’t noticed. Some time I’ll call her over and ask her to show me them without stockings.’ Wiegel’s father quickly despatched her to their estates.82
If Potemkin was bored, he often went over to the palace of Catherine’s buffoonish friend, the Master of Horse, Lev Naryshkin, where eating, drinking and dancing went on all day and night. Potemkin treated it like his private club – he usually sat in his own special alcove – as it was the ideal place to meet high-born married mistresses. ‘It was the foyer of all pleasure,’ wrote Ségur, ‘the rendezvous of all the lovers because, in the midst of so many happy people, secret trysts were 100 times easier than at balls or salons where etiquette reigned.’ The Prince relaxed there, sometimes in silence, sometimes ‘very cheerful, chatting to women, he who never talked to anyone’. Potemkin, whom ‘one hardly saw anywhere else’, was drawn by the Naryshkin daughters, with whom he was ‘always’ in ‘tête-à-tête’. He seemed to work his way through the Naryshkin girls: ‘he consoles himself for the absence of his niece with Madame de Solugub, daughter of Madame Naryshkina’, reported Cobenzl to his Emperor. Ivan Solugub was one of his generals. All his officers had to endure his conquests both on the battlefield and in their own households.83
The Prince still dominated the lives of all his nieces and insisted on running their households whenever possible. His ‘angel of fleshly delights’, Katinka Skavronskaya, was inconveniently visiting her operatic husband in Naples, but we can follow her movements across Europe by Potemkin’s instructions to his bankers to pay for her expenses. When she passed through Vienna, even Emperor Joseph had to entertain84 ‘your kitten’, as Catherine tolerantly called her.85 By 1786, Katinka was ‘more beautiful than ever’, according to that connoisseur Cobenzl, and always ‘favourite sultana-in-chief’ of her uncle’s harem.86
The spirited Sashenka Branicka was as imperious as her uncle: they were always arguing, even though they were closest of all. In 1788, Serenissimus tried to remove Mademoiselle Guibald from one of the Engelhardt households. Guibald was the Frenchwoman in Potemkin’s entourage who had supposedly stolen Harris’s letter and became a companion for the nieces and a seraglio-manageress for the Prince. Branicka refused to dismiss her, so he wrote to insist because Guibald ‘wants my niece to remain a child for ever’. We do not know which niece was being discussed, but all were married by then. Branicka evidently reassured the French lady, which made Potemkin furious: ‘I’m master of my house and I want what I wish. I don’t understand how Countess Branicka dared to calm her against my will…’. The Prince believed that ‘my exalted station confers benefits on my relatives; they owe me everything and they’d be in a paltry state without me…’. He stated simply: ‘There are a lot of reasons but the main one is that I wish it to be so.’87
Evening
At about 10.30 p.m., when the Empress retired with her favourite, Potemkin, who usually spent the early evening in attendance, whether at the Little Hermitage or at a ball, received his ‘pink ticket’. His real day, as it were, was just beginning. He woke up at night, his most creative hours. One could define absolutism as the power to overrule even the laws of time. Potemkin paid no attention to the clock and his subordinates had to do the same: he was an insomniac, said Ligne, ‘constantly lying down, but never sleeping whether day or night’.88
Night
Sir James Harris experienced the Prince’s nocturnal habits: ‘His hours for eating and sleeping are uncertain and we were frequently airing in the rain in an open carriage at midnight.’89 There is no more Potemkinish scene than that.
Potemkin was relentlessly curious and was always asking questions, teasing and provoking his companions, discussing religion, politics, art and sex – ‘the biggest questioner in the world’. His questions reminded Richelieu of ‘a bee, which with the help of the flowers, whose pollen it sucks, creates an exquisite substance’. In this case the ‘honey’ was Potemkin’s racy and pungent conversation, aided by a flawless memory and a whimsical imagination.90
Everyone who met Potemkin and even those who loathed him had to admit that he was gifted with admirable mental equipment: ‘Potemkin joined the gift of prodigious memory with that of natural, lively, quick mind…’.91 Ligne thought he had ‘natural abilities, an excellent memory, much elevation of soul; malice without the design of injuring, artifice without craft, a happy mixture of caprices’, concluding that he had ‘the talent of guessing what he is ignorant of and a consummate knowledge of mankind’. Not every Westerner liked Potemkin: Sir John Sinclair called him ‘a worthless and dangerous character’, but even he thought Potemkin had ‘great abilities’.92 His more intelligent Russian opponents agreed: Simon Vorontsov believed the Prince had ‘lots of intelligence, intrigue and credit’ but lacked ‘knowledge, application and virtue’.93
Ségur was often astonished by Potemkin’s knowledge ‘not only of politics but travellers, savants, writers, artists and even artisans’. All those who
knew him acclaimed his ‘vast erudition on antiquities’. His travelling companion in the south, Miranda, was amazed by his knowledge of architecture, art and music. ‘It seems this man of so much intelligence and prodigious memory also wanted to study sciences and arts in depth and that he has achieved this to some extent,’ wrote the Venezuelan after they had discussed the music of Hayden and Boccherini, the paintings of Murillo and the writings of Chappe d’Auteroche – he turned out to be profoundly knowledgeable on all of them.94 It was no wonder that Damas owed ‘the most instructive and agreeable moments of my life’ to the ‘strange’ Prince.95
His knowledge of Russian history was equally impressive. ‘Thanks for your chronology, it’s the best part in my Russian history,’ wrote Catherine about her Notes on Russian History, with which he helped her. The partners loved history. ‘I’ve spent years researching this subject,’ Catherine told Seinac de Meilhan, the French official and writer. ‘I’ve always loved to read things no one else reads. I’ve only found one man who has the same taste – that’s Marshal Prince Potemkin.’96 Here was another pleasure they shared. When the translator of the History of Armenia, one of Potemkin’s pet subjects, was hanged by the Turks, ‘Prince Potemkin’, joked Catherine to Grimm, ‘was very angry about it.’97
He always wanted to set up his own printing press, and Jeremy Bentham tried to help him find one.98 Just before the war started, Potemkin at last acquired his press, which was to follow him around throughout the war, printing political journals and classics in Russian, French, Latin and Greek, as well as his own compositions.99