Catherine the Great & Potemkin
Page 55
Potemkin was accompanied everywhere by Tartar horsemen in regular cavalry squadrons: ‘fifty escorted the carriage at every moment’, Nassau-Siegen told his wife, ‘and the Tartars of every locality where we passed arrived from every direction so the countryside was covered in men who, running, from every direction, gave it an air of war.’ The ‘paladin’ thought it was all ‘superb’.11 Miranda also noticed how Potemkin carefully cultivated all the local Islamic muftis in each town. Serenissimus was accompanied by his court artist, Ivanov, who painted as they travelled, and music – ranging from string quartets to Ukrainian choirs – played wherever they stopped. One day Miranda found Potemkin admiring ‘a very famous pearl necklace embellished with diamonds’.12 The Venezuelan had never seen a ‘more noble or beautiful adornment in my life’. It was indeed so valuable that when it was bought from Mack, the Viennese Court jewellers, the identity of the buyer was kept secret. Even Joseph II wanted to know who had bought it. Finally Cobenzl revealed the secret to his Emperor: Potemkin was planning to present it to the Empress on her tour.13
The three travellers took tea at the English dairy run for Potemkin by Mr Henderson and his two dubious ‘nieces’, recruited by the Benthams, then headed for the vineyards of Soudak. He presented a vineyard to Nassau, who at once ordered vines from Constantinople. The soldiers they inspected impressed Miranda – the Kiev and Taurida Regiments ‘could not have been better’. Then the party visited Potemkin’s mint at the old slave-market at Kaffa, run by his Jewish merchant Zeitlin, and his new town of Theodosia.
Serenissimus occupied every night and every carriage-ride with political and artistic discussions with his companions, ranging from the virtues of Murillo to the sins of the Inquisition. The three companions in the Potemkin carriage got on well, perhaps too well, so the Prince entertained himself by provoking a row between Nassau and Miranda. Potemkin baited the Franco-German Nassau by attacking the French for their ingratitude to Russia. The Venezuelan joined in. Nassau was enraged and told Miranda that Spanish women were all prostitutes and most were infected with venereal diseases. Indeed when he met the notorious Duchess of Alba, a Spaniard immediately warned him that she was ‘infested’. This incensed Miranda, and the two argued over whose nation was more poxed. No doubt Potemkin enjoyed all this hugely and the journey passed all the more quickly.14
On the 20th, Potemkin’s party set off across the steppes back to Kherson: as usual they travelled all night through the isthmus and rested for breakfast at Perekop, where Miranda admired one of Potemkin’s new breed of lambs. It was so cold, the travellers’ faces were frozen. ‘They rubbed snow and fat on them which is the treatment used here.’ Bauer, Potemkin’s adjutant, awaited them. He had made it from Tsarskoe Selo in seven and a half days to announce that the Empress was on her way to rendezvous with Potemkin at Kiev.15
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At 11 o’clock on the freezing morning of 7 January, fourteen carriages, 124 sledges (and forty reserves) set off from Tsarskoe Selo to the sound of cannon salutes. Five hundred and sixty horses awaited them at each post. Catherine’s entourage of twenty-two consisted of her senior courtiers and Ségur, Cobenzl and Fitzherbert, the ambassadors of France, Austria and England. All were wrapped in bearskins and sable bonnets. They were accompanied by hundreds of servants, including twenty footmen, thirty washerwomen, silver polishers, apothecaries, doctors and blackamoors.
The Empress’s carriage, drawn by ten horses and lined with cushioned benches and carpets, was so cavernous that a man could stand up in it. It was a six-seater. Every seat mattered.*1 On that first day, it bore the Empress herself, ‘Redcoat’ Mamonov, Lady-in-Waiting Protosova, Master of the Horse Naryshkin, Chief Chamberlain Shuvalov and Cobenzl. The key to the bone-jolting royal travel of those days was to fight boredom without offending diplomacy. So, every other day, Shuvalov and Naryshkin swapped places with Ségur and Fitzherbert,16 whom Catherine called her ‘Pocket Ministers’.17 Each knew that they were about to witness the spectacle of a lifetime.
When it got dark at 3 p.m., the carriages and sledges rushed along icy lanes through the cold winter nights illuminated by bonfires of cypresses, birch and fir, on both sides of the road, to form ‘avenues of fire brighter than daylight’. Potemkin had ordered them to be stoked night and day. The Empress tried to follow the same routine as she did in Petersburg, rising at 6 a.m., then working. She breakfasted with her ‘Pocket Ministers’ before resuming the journey at 9 a.m., halting at 2 p.m. for dinner, then travelling until 7 p.m. Everywhere there were palaces prepared for her: their stoves were so piping-hot that Ségur was ‘more alarmed at the heat…than the cold outside’. There were cards and conversation until 9 p.m., when the Empress withdrew to work until bedtime. Ségur enjoyed the experience, though none of his risqué jokes were tolerated; the melancholy Fitzherbert, feeling liverish and leaving a Russian mistress behind, was bored. He complained to Jeremy Bentham about ‘the same furniture, same victuals’: it was ‘only St Petersburg carried up and down the empire’.18 While she settled down with ‘Redcoat’ in her palace, the ambassadors were as likely to find themselves in a fetid peasant cottage as in a manorhouse.19
Heading south-west towards Kiev, the foreigners observed traditional Russia: ‘a quarter of an hour before Her Majesty comes up to them’, the peasants ‘lay themselves flat on the ground and rise again a quarter of an hour after we have passed’.20 Crowds gathered to welcome the Empress but, like Frederick the Great, she disdained their admiration: ‘They’d come out in crowds to watch a bear too.’21 The Empress passed through Potemkin’s estate, Krichev, and Jeremy Bentham saw her progress down the main street, ‘edged with branches of firs and other evergreens, and illuminated with tar barrels’.22 There were balls every day, everywhere: ‘that’s how we travel, she boasted to Grimm.23
On 29 January, she arrived at Kiev, where the Court was to reside for three months until the ice on the Dnieper melted. A ‘multitude of travellers from all parts of Europe’ awaited her – including Ligne.24 The roads to Kiev were jammed with grandees. ‘I have never in my life met with so much gaiety, so much charm and wit,’ wrote a Polish noblewoman on her way to court Catherine and Potemkin.*2 ‘Our little dinners in these squalid Jewish inns are quite exquisite…If one closes one’s eyes, one imagines oneself in Paris.’25
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Catherine received this letter from Potemkin in the Crimea: ‘Here the greenery in the meadows is starting to break through. I think the flowers are coming soon…I pray to God that this land will be lucky enough to please you, my foster-mother. That is the source of all my happiness. Goodbye, my dear Matushka.’26
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Accompanied by music and the bickering of his companions about national venereal customs, Potemkin travelled day and night, ‘at the speed of the devil’ according to Nassau, to reach Kremenchuk.27 Regardless of the vast responsibilities on his shoulders, with emperors, kings and half the courtiers in Europe converging to view his works, the Prince appeared to spend his days listening to concerts. ‘We had music and more music,’ marvelled Miranda – hornplayers one day, a Sarti oratorio the next, a Ukrainian choir, then more Boccherini quartets. But beneath the nonchalance Potemkin must have been working and biting his nails like never before. Not everything was perfect: two days after Catherine arrived in Kiev, he inspected ten squadrons of Dragoons. ‘It was horrible,’ noted Miranda. ‘PP was not very happy.’ Another squadron of Cuirassiers near Poltava was too much of a mess to be inspected at all.
As the Empress waited in Kiev, the Prince’s arrangements accelerated with the unpredictability that was his only rhythm. He ordered Nassau and Miranda to meet the Empress with him. On 4 February, after inspecting troops and attending parties, Potemkin met the exiled Moldavian Hospodar, Alexander Mavrocordato, who had just been deposed by the Turks contrary to the spirit of Kuchuk-Kainardzhi – a reminder of the rising tension between
Russia and the Sublime Porte.
Miranda rushed to get courtier’s suits made. When he got home, he found his servant had procured him a Russian girl ‘who owes nothing in bed to the most lascivious Andalusian’. Next morning, an adjutant announced that Potemkin had left in a kibitka at 5 a.m. ‘without saying anything to anybody’. At 3 p.m., Nassau and Miranda set off in pursuit, each in their own kibitka capsule. They never caught up of course, because no one had reduced the hours of eighteenth-century travel to such a fine art as Potemkin. The snow was soft. The sledges got stuck or overturned. New horses were ordered. There were delays of hours. When Miranda arrived at the Kiev customs two days later, he found that Nassau had commandeered Potemkin’s messages – typical of that unscrupulous intriguer. ‘What a mess,’ wrote Miranda.28
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Kiev, on the right bank of the Dnieper, was a ‘Graeco-Scythian’ vision of ‘ruins, convents, churches, unfinished palaces’, an ancient Russian city fallen on hard times.29 When everyone had arrived, there were three luxurious tableaux: first, ‘the eye was astonished to see, all at one time, a sumptuous court, a conquering Empress, a rich and quarrelsome nobility, proud and luxurious princes and grandees’ and all the peoples of the Empire: Don Cossacks, Georgian princes, Kirghiz chieftains and ‘savage Kalmyks, true image of the Huns’. Ségur called it a ‘magical theatre that seemed to confuse and mix antiquity with modern times, civilization and barbarism’.30
Cobenzl’s house was like a gentleman’s club for the foreigners, though the other two ‘Pocket Ministers’ each had a little mansion of his own. There were French, Germans, lots of Poles and some Americans, including the diminutive and aptly named Lewis Littlepage, recently appointed chamberlain to Stanislas-Augustus, King of Poland. Aged twenty-five, this Virginian gentleman and friend of George Washington had fought the British at Gibraltar and Minorca, and was an enthusiastic amateur actor–producer, who staged the Polish première of the Barber of Seville at Nassau’s house. Now he became Stanislas-Augustus’ eyes at the Court of Potemkin.31 The doyen of these foreigners was the Prince de Ligne – ‘affectionate with his equals, popular with his inferiors, familiar with princes and even sovereigns, he put everyone at their ease’. Not everyone was so charmed by charm itself: Miranda found him a nauseating flatterer.32
Then there was the Court of Potemkin. That coenobite moved directly into the massive monastery of the Caves, half-church, half-fortress, a sepulchral medieval labyrinth of subterranean halls, churches with twenty-one domes, and troglodyte cells, many of them cut into the caves beneath the city. Seventy-five saints lay undecayed in silk, cool in their catacombs. When Potemkin received his courtiers there, it seemed ‘one entered an audience with the vizier of Constantinople, Baghdad or Cairo. Silence and a sort of fear ruled there.’ The Prince appeared at Court in his marshal’s uniform, clanking with medals and diamonds, laced, powdered and buckled; but at his monastery he stretched out on a divan in his favourite pelisse, thick hair uncombed, pretending to be ‘too busy playing chess to notice’ his Court of Polish princelings and Georgian tsareviches. Ségur worried he would be mocked for exposing the dignity of the King of France to such hauteur, ‘so this was the way I played it…’. When Potemkin did not even raise his eyes from the chessboard, Ségur approached him, took his leonine head in his hands, embraced him and sat down casually beside him on the sofa. In private, Serenissimus dropped his haughtiness and was his old cheerful self,33 surrounded by nieces Branicka and Skavronskaya, Nassau, Miranda and his composer Sarti, ‘dressed as a ridiculous macaroni’. He cherished his dear friend Ségur ‘like a child’.*3
Kiev became the Russian capital. Even Ligne was amazed at the sights: ‘Good Heavens! What a retinue! What noise! What a quantity of diamonds, gold stars and orders! How many chains, ribbons, turbans and red caps brimmed with furs or sharp-pointed!’34 Potemkin took his guests, Miranda and Nassau, on a roving debauch of card games, dinners and dances. The nieces were more than ever treated like grand duchesses: at Branicka’s house, where ambassadors and Russian ministers gathered, Miranda could barely believed the ‘wealth and magnificence’ of the Polish ‘kinglets’ like Potocki and Sapieha.35
On 14 February, Potemkin had Miranda presented to the Empress. She was taken with his machismo, questioning him about the Inquisition, of which he claimed to be a victim. From then on, Miranda was included in Catherine’s intimate circle as well as Potemkin’s. Soon he was rather blasé. ‘Whist with the usual people,’ he wrote. Nassau complained to his wife that the stakes were a ‘bit expensive – 200 roubles’. What did he expect if he played with the Empress and Serenissimus? Most evenings ended in relaxed decadence at Lev Naryshkin’s – just like in Petersburg.36
There was the usual fascination with Catherine’s and Potemkin’s sex lives. The ambassadors scribbled reports back to their Courts and all the travellers recorded anything they could glean. Catherine was always accompanied by Mamonov, who ‘owes his fortune to Prince Potemkin and knows it’, according to Nassau, but this did not prevent false rumours about Miranda. ‘Nothing escaped his penetration, not even the Empress of all the Russias,’ claimed a young, envious American diplomat, Stephen Sayre, ‘a mortifying declaration for me to make who was 21 months in her capital without ever making myself acquainted with the internal parts of her extensive and well known dominions.’37
The soi-disant ‘Countess’ Sevres, escorted by Mademoiselle Guibald, began the Kiev sojourn in possession of Potemkin’s ‘momentary adoration’. Then there were his two nieces, but Sevres was soon replaced as ‘favourite sultana’ by a Naryshkina,38 who was admired by Miranda at one of Naryshkin’s fêtes. The Empress dined there. ‘There were games and music with dancing.’ Catherine played whist with Potemkin, Ségur and Mamonov and then summoned Miranda to discuss the architecture of Granada. When she left as usual at 10 p.m., the real fun began. Naryshkina danced a Cossack jig then a Russian one, ‘which was more lascivious’, thought Miranda, ‘than our fandango…what a good dancer…what a soft movement of the shoulders and back! She could raise the dead!’
Serenissimus evidently shared Miranda’s admiration for her resurrectory talents for he spent ‘an hour tête-à-tête with Mademoiselle M. Nari…to persuade her of some political affair’. Miranda could hear her ‘giving sights’ and exclaiming ‘if that was true!’ to Potemkin’s stories.39 A dubious source also claimed that Potemkin pounced on Zakhar Chernyshev’s daughter right outside Catherine’s rooms.*4 The girl screamed, waking up Catherine. This is unlikely since he was hardly short of female company.40
The Prince’s entourage, including Miranda and Nassau, lodged with him at the Monastery – but none behaved like monks. Kiev buzzed with merriment – a bonanza for the whores of the Ukraine. Miranda and Kiselev, one of Potemkin’s adjutants, ‘went to the house of a Jewish woman of Polish descent who had very good girls and offered the best tonight’, but when they returned after the afternoon at Field-Marshal Rumiantsev-Zadunaisky’s, ‘I only found a very average Polish woman.’ Miranda was surprised that even the girls in Ukrainian provinces wore French fashions: ‘God damn it! How far has hellish Gallic frivolity contaminated the human race?’ There was such competition for Kiev’s overworked horizontales between different courtiers that, just as Miranda and Potemkin’s adjutant turned up, Catherine’s young chamberlains arrived in force and hogged all the girls. Miranda was furious: he took his pleasures seriously. Finally he found his Polish-Jewish procuress, but, when he tried to explain to the pander what services Kiselev desired, the Russian officer too became angry. ‘Oh, how difficult it is for men to act liberally in matters of love and sexual preference!’, grumbled Miranda. The two Lotharios had better luck a few days later at a house with an eighteen-year-old courtesan and her maid. Kiselev tackled the maid. Miranda ‘tried to conquer the mistress who in the end agreed on three ducats (she wanted ten)’. He stayed happily ‘with my nymph in bed…she was very good and I enjoyed it’, but perhaps
not as much as he wished: ‘she did not let me put it in’. Early next morning: ‘Holy Thursday. We attended a solemn mass in the Church of Pechersky with the Empress present…’. Such, from Polish-Jewish trolls to solemn imperial mass, was life in Kiev.41
There was seething intrigue behind the pleasure-seeking. The ambassadors tried to learn what was really happening, but ‘political secrets remained concealed between Catherine, Prince Potemkin and Count Bezborodko’. When Ségur announced that in faraway Paris Louis XVI had called the fatal Assembly of Notables, the first step towards the French Revolution, the Empress congratulated him. ‘Everybody’s mind was secretly stirred up by liberal sentiments, the desire for reform.’ Catherine and Potemkin talked reform but understood the ominous signs in Paris. ‘We’re not impressed,’ Catherine told Grimm, promising that Potemkin would send him some ‘Dervish music’.42
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Icy realities were manifested in the presence there of the richest and most restless of Poland’s overmighty ‘kinglets’. ‘Half Poland is here,’ Catherine told Grimm. The Empress was in the process of arranging to meet her ex-lover from the 1750s, King Stanislas-Augustus of Poland. Potemkin decided to see him first in order to discuss the agenda for the summit with Catherine. Serenissimus was continuing to cultivate Poland as a personal insurance policy as well as increasingly conducting Russian policy there. He had that special Smolensk szlachta sympathy for Poland from his childhood, but his two immediate aims were to build up a personal position as a Polish magnate and to win Polish support for the coming war against the Turks.