The Romanovs

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  ‘I had in my heart an invincible desire to place all at the discretion of God,’ Alexander told Golitsyn. ‘While the council met I left for a moment, fell to my knees in my bedroom and there before the Lord made an effusion of my heart.’ The Lord answered with ‘a hard resolution of will and a kind of blazing clarity of purpose: take Paris!’ Then the Prussian General Blücher, a gnarled cavalryman who shared Alexander’s bellicosity, defeated Napoleon and was ready to advance – until he suffered a nervous breakdown and went blind, convinced he was pregnant with an elephant (fathered by a Frenchman). The advance faltered. Had a septuagenarian cavalryman pregnant with an elephant saved Napoleon?18

  Napoleon, seeking death in battle and refusing to contemplate a last stand in Paris, veered east, hoping to divert the allies. But Cossacks captured a note from him to his wife Marie-Louise revealing his plans. Talleyrand was treacherously encouraging Alexander, who discovered from intercepted letters of Paris’s governor to Napoleon that the capital was ill defended. Here the tsar was again decisive: on 11 March the allies refused the bait and turned on Paris.

  On 12 March, the Russians defeated Marshal Marmont outside Paris. Napoleon had ordered Empress Marie-Louise, his three-year-old son the king of Rome and her councillors to leave the city, but Talleyrand, seeing himself as a regent for the baby king, begged her to stay. Instead she abandoned Paris and ruined her son’s prospect of keeping the throne. On 18 March, the city surrendered. At 2 a.m., in bed at the Château de Bondy on the outskirts, Alexander was brought the act of capitulation; insouciantly he put it under his pillow and went to sleep. At dawn, he despatched his adjutant Mikhail Orlov* and then Nesselrode to Paris to seek out Talleyrand, whom Napoleon rightly described as ‘gold mixed with shit’. Defying Napoleon’s orders, he had artfully remained in Paris. He warned Alexander against assassins in the Elysée Palace and invited him to stay with him instead. When some of his German courtiers suggested destroying Paris, Alexander retorted that God had made him powerful ‘to secure peace in the world.’ He added: ‘whether in the palaces or the ruins, “Europe will sleep tonight in Paris.”’19

  ‘The imagination can hardly take in the idea of the Russians in Paris!’ exclaimed Catiche. At 11 a.m., Alexander, sporting the undress uniform of his Chevalier-Gardes, escorted by the Cossack Life Guards in scarlet tunics and blue baggy trousers, astride his horse Eclipse, a gift from Napoleon, rode into Paris, Frederick William on his left, Schwarzenberg on his right, followed by Constantine and (the newly promoted) Marshal Barclay and his Guards. The tsar exchanged banter with Paris ladies in the crowd: ‘I don’t come as an enemy,’ he said.

  ‘We’ve been awaiting you,’ they cried.

  ‘If I didn’t come sooner, it was due to French bravery,’ he replied. Then he reviewed the Guards on the Champs-Elysées.

  At 6 p.m., Alexander rode up to the Hôtel Talleyrand on rue Saint-Florentin, where he took over the first floor, Nesselrode the second, Talleyrand the entresol, while the Cossack and Preobrazhensky Guards guarded the mansion, that was now the headquarters of the Russian empire. When Napoleon offered to abdicate in favour of his son, Talleyrand and Alexander entertained the idea, but the absence of Marie-Louise and the king of Rome undermined it. At a meeting on 19 March, Alexander ‘cast a glance at Prince Schwarzenberg who agreed with a nod as did the King of Prussia’: no more Bonapartes! ‘France must be strong and great,’ he said, finally agreeing to the restoration of Louis XVIII if limited by a constitution. Alexander ‘speaks much less nonsense than I’d have believed’, Metternich reported to Francis. Next day, Talleyrand summoned the Senate, which elected him as premier and deposed the Bonapartes.

  At 3 a.m. on 24 March, Marshals Marmont, Ney and Macdonald, accompanied by Caulaincourt, arrived to persuade the tsar to back a regency for the king of Rome. Alexander distrusted the Bourbons and, if the army was still Bonapartist, he was tempted to back the king of Rome as Napoleon II. But, overnight, Marmont’s troops surrendered to the Austrians. When the marshals returned in the morning, Alexander learned that their troops were not as Bonapartist as they claimed – and reluctantly turned back to the Bourbons. ‘The emperor’, he said, ‘must abdicate unconditionally.’ As the four disappointed Bonapartists left, Alexander called Caulaincourt back to discuss what territory Napoleon should receive – Corsica, Sardinia, Corfu? Caulaincourt suggested Elba. Napoleon abdicated.

  Alexander realized that the Bourbons would not survive without respecting ‘the past 25 years of glory’, but on 18 May 1814 he signed a treaty with the newly arrived Louis XVIII that was foolishly generous to Napoleon, whom he insisted become the emperor of Elba. He sent his general-aide-de-camp Count Pavel Shuvalov to accompany the fallen ruler to his minuscule empire. ‘At last the great aim is achieved,’ Alexander told Catiche on 20 April. ‘Napoleon no longer tyrannizes France and Europe.’ This gigantic and triumphant enterprise of war, diplomacy and logistics – the supply of Russian armies from Moscow to Paris – was overwhelmingly Alexander’s achievement, unequalled by any Russian ruler.

  ‘Paris’, as Metternich told Wilhelmina, ‘was a vast beautiful madhouse’ in which Alexander much preferred the flashy glamour of the Bonapartes to the prudish sanctimony of the Bourbons. The tsar visited the two ex-empresses Marie-Louise and Josephine, from whom he bought Canova statues and Caravaggio paintings for the Hermitage.

  The most powerful man in Europe was magnanimous, but there was nothing modest in the conviction that he was God’s chosen. ‘The feeling that prompts me’, he explained to Catiche, ‘is the purest desire to grow morally perfect.’ He celebrated Easter with Orthodox and Catholic priests on the Place de la Concorde: ‘our spiritual triumph has reached its goal’ but ‘I was amused to see the French marshals jostle each other to kiss the Russian cross!’20

  *

  Catiche, who was revelling in her brother’s kudos – ‘to be your sister is the best passport’ – planned to meet Alexander in London. Their junket there turned out to be a comedy of Russian insolence and British boorishness. Waiting for her boat at Rotterdam, she was accosted by the duke of Clarence (the future William IV), a coarse sailor who lived with an actress. ‘The handsome sailor’, she joked, ‘is still at his tricks. I submit myself to the Creator but this only I know for sure: I shall not become Mrs Clarence.’

  Catiche stirred up trouble from the moment she arrived: her harassed minders were the Russian ambassador Christoph Lieven and his clever but meddlesome wife Dorothea. Catiche, recalled Countess Lieven,* ‘was a remarkable person’ with ‘an excessive thirst for authority and a very high opinion of herself . . . who startled and astonished the English’. In the streets of London, ‘I hear people say, Let me see the sister of Emperor Alexander the saviour of the world,’ Catiche reported to Alexander.

  When the prince regent arrived to call on her at the Pulteney Hotel, Piccadilly, the meeting was frosty. Countess Lieven was berated both by the regent – ‘Your Grand Duchess is not good-looking’ – and by the grand duchess – ‘Your Prince is ill-bred.’ The regent’s ‘boasted affability is the most licentious, the most obscene I ever heard, and I am far from being puritanical or prudish, but I vow that with him and his brothers I have often not only to get stiffly on my stiffs, but not to know what to do with ears and eyes. A brazen way of looking where eyes should never go!’

  Catiche baited the regent by befriending his estranged wife Caroline. ‘The Absurd Little Mad Thing’ was so rude that even the Lievens found her ‘unbearable’. If Catiche was demonstrating the arrogance of Romanov majesty, the British seemed keen to parade the porcine lechery of the Hanoverians, for Catiche now attracted a third of these gruesome brothers, the duke of Sussex, who sent her a proposal. ‘As she turned down husbands,’ noted Countess Lieven, ‘our Duchess took delight in taking them from others.’ She was ‘very seductive in glance and manners, an assured gait, a proud look, a bright eye and the most beautiful hair in the world’. She played havoc with the regent’s plans to marry his heiress Princess Charlotte t
o the prince of Orange. Catiche flirted brazenly with him and then introduced Charlotte to one of her Russian officers, Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, whom she would ultimately marry.

  At the end of May, Alexander* arrived in Piccadilly to be mobbed by an admiring crowd. He was not impressed by the regent. ‘A poor prince,’ he commented, and outraged him by consorting with the Whig opposition. In society, ‘he was the full young man, a fine waltzer, gallant to women though confining himself to young ones. Surrounded and flattered, his conquests were as manifold as his gallantries.’21

  On his way back to Russia, he was met by delegates from Petersburg who offered him the title ‘Alexander the Blessed’, which he refused. Arriving in Petersburg on 13 July, he prayed at Kazan Cathedral – ‘penetrated by humility’, observed Golitsyn, ‘he attributed everything, the victory to the Lord’. After a year and a half away from Russia, he appointed a German and a Greek, Nesselrode and Capo d’Istria, as joint foreign ministers,† but he was now exhausted. He delegated power at home to the despised Arakcheev.

  Alexander was estranged from his wife Elizabeth, while his ‘adored marriage’ with Maria Naryshkina was ending bitterly for moral reasons because, as Alexander explained to Catiche, ‘people think she’s the obstacle to a rapprochement with my wife’ and ‘she doesn’t want my nation to have a wrong to reproach me with. I love her too much to make her act against her conviction.’ Alexander was sorry that ‘the happiness of fourteen years of union will be sacrificed to our duties’. When he discovered that she was actually in love with someone else, he was hurt by ‘this person after all she has done’. Signing off to Catiche at the end of ‘the relationship where I put my life’s happiness’, he declared, ‘I’m about to depart for Vienna.’

  On 13 September 1814, Alexander was greeted by Emperor Francis outside Vienna, where in perhaps the most self-indulgent international junket of all history, a congress of two emperors, five kings, 209 reigning princes, about 20,000 officials, from marshals and ministers to clerks and spies, and just about every gold-digger, mountebank and prostitute in Europe, maybe 100,000 in all, bargained, blackmailed and fornicated their way through banquets and balls, to reshape a continent after twenty years of war.

  Alexander moved into the Hofburg Palace, while two ambitious women manoeuvred themselves into the centre of the action by renting neighbouring apartments in the Palm Palace.

  Wilhelmina de Sagan, already Metternich’s mistress, possessed ‘noble and regular features, a superb figure, the bearing of a goddess’ – and a mind trained in history and philosophy. Corrupted by ‘the frightening immorality’ of her childhood, seduced by her mother’s lover, her promiscuity now drove Metternich to distraction. ‘She sins seven times a day,’ he groused, ‘and loves as often as others dine.’*

  Across a corridor in the Palm Palace lived Princess Katya Bagration, daughter of Potemkin’s niece Katinka and widow of the hero of Borodino. Settling in Vienna, she had hooked Metternich, who fathered her daughter Clementine. ‘She was as beautiful as an angel, bright, the liveliest of the beauties of Petersburg,’ recalled Langeron. Katya showed off her figure in diaphanous dresses – hence her nickname ‘the Naked Angel’. In Vienna, her alabaster skin and erotic specialities won her the soubriquet ‘the White Pussycat’. Naturally the two vamps loathed each other. Metternich’s police chief Baron Hager called Bagration’s side of the Palm Palace ‘the Russian Camp’, Wilhelmina’s ‘the Austrian Camp’.

  As soon as he arrived, Alexander summoned Castlereagh and Metternich. The latter exulted that ‘He knows nothing of what I want and I know exactly what he wants.’ While Talleyrand exploited the bickering to restore French prestige, Metternich retreated every night to Wilhelmina’s apartment. Across the landing, there was a commotion when Princess Bagration’s bell was rung in the middle of the night. Opening her door in a state of undress, the White Pussycat welcomed the tsar, who stayed, the secret police reported, three hours.

  Alexander aimed to create a larger Polish kingdom* with himself as king that the other powers rightly saw as a Russian satellite, a fear happily exploited by Talleyrand. ‘I conquered the Duchy [of Warsaw],’ Alexander bragged, arguing that Russia had suffered more than anyone. He hoped to repay Prussia by demolishing Napoleon’s ally, Saxony. When Talleyrand argued, Alexander warned, ‘If the King of Saxony won’t abdicate he’ll be packed off to Russia – he’ll die there!’ His sinister threats, sounding more like Stalin than Alexander the Blessed, perturbed his allies.

  The tsar himself was determined to play the lead in the pageant of Vienna. Slapping marshals’ backs saying ‘we soldiers’ and mocking Metternich as a civilian, he was never out of high-collared, embroidered uniform. But the fashion for skin-tight breeches was now a challenge for the fattening imperial buttocks, which led to tantrums. ‘I found him today trying on eight or nine pairs of hussars’ breeches,’ wrote one of his ministers, ‘and inconsolable to find them all too tight or too short.’ He was so cross, he sent to Petersburg for a pair of breeches that would fit. To tighten his skin, this metrosexual thirty-five-year-old rubbed his face daily with a block of ice. He flirted compulsively with the beauties of Vienna: his chat-up routine started with mournful reflections on the end of his relationship with Maria Naryshkina who ‘had broken my heart and still makes it bleed every day’. But Alexander was often crudely direct: at a ball, he told Countess Szechenyi, whose husband had gone off to dance, ‘Your husband seems to have left you. It would be a great pleasure to occupy his place for a while.’

  ‘Does Your Majesty take me for a province?’ replied the countess in the best bon mot of the Congress. At a public masked ball, an outraged girl told the unmasked but pesky emperor that he was an oaf. ‘Alexander was thunderstruck.’

  ‘What are politics, if not women?’ reflected Talleyrand. At Princess Bagration’s, informers reported how Alexander jealously cross-examined her about her feelings for Metternich, who was tormented by the possibility that his mistress across the landing, Wilhelmina, would return to her favourite lover Prince Alfred Windischgrätz – or, much worse, succumb to Alexander. First Windischgrätz turned up. ‘With friends, one counts the days,’ Wilhelmina told him. ‘With you, I count the nights and I don’t want to miss a single one.’ She dumped Metternich.

  The partying was so excessive that the prince de Ligne, that relentless socialite now seventy-nine years old, punned that ‘Le Congrès ne marche pas, il danse.’ Alexander ‘dances almost continually’, wrote Friedrich Gentz, Metternich’s secretary, ‘a magnet for women’. His whores were procured by the Northern Lovelace, Chernyshev, who also handled his affair with Madame Bethmann of Frankfurt. The police agents reported that he was making regular calls on a Petersburg banker’s wife Madame Schwartz, who told one informer that, sexually, Alexander preferred bourgeois ladies to aristocrats. It may be that he simply found them more discreet than grandes dames. Meanwhile the thirty-five-year-old Empress Elizabeth rekindled with her ex-lover Czartoryski, who begged her to divorce and marry him. Elizabeth already longed to go home to Baden, but Alexander refused. Meanwhile Catiche fought off suitors and fell for the married Crown Prince Wilhelm of Württemberg.

  After years of war, Vienna became an erotic Ronde. Like his brother, Constantine, who had imported a French mistress, called on Princess Bagration. The police reported that the White Pussycat accepted not just Constantine but Catiche’s Württemberger. Metternich’s agents could barely keep up with her assignations – they said her apartment was becoming a royal bordello. Rarely have police files been so entertaining.

  The Russians were said to be the worst-behaved visitors. On 9 November, Police Agent D reported that Alexander’s courtiers, ‘not content with treating the Hofburg like a pigsty, are behaving very badly and constantly bringing in harlots’. Vienna overflowed with such an embarrassing bounty of easily available sex that the streets seemed to swim with eager peasant-girls, a supply that was as inexhaustible as it was irresistible. One of Alexander’s officers blamed the girl
s: ‘It is impossible not to mention the unbelievable depravity of the female sex of the lower orders.’ The police agents reported that the maladies galantes – VD – were raging.

  The Congress was getting bad-tempered. Alexander’s petulance was tormenting his courtiers. While the tsar ‘was endlessly charming to all foreigners’, recalled one of his entourage, he ‘was not the same towards us, giving the impression our manners lagged those of Europeans. He was curt with us.’* He danced so much at one ball that he fainted and retired to bed for a few days.

  Frustrated that he was not getting his way on Poland, Alexander was driving the coalition apart. On 11 October, after a row with Metternich, he went to visit Princess Bagration in the Palm Palace, but at the top of the stairs, instead of turning left, he turned right and called on Wilhelmina with whom he spent several hours. Vienna was agog, Princess Bagration indignant, Metternich heartbroken. Wilhelmina longed to get her daughter Vava out of Russia. Alexander used this to humiliate Metternich. Then, through an anonymous note, Alexander offered Metternich £100,000 and the restoration of Wilhelmina’s favours – in return for Poland. ‘I’m not surprised at anything any more when it comes to that man,’ Metternich wrote to Wilhelmina. ‘I’m quite ill. My body has been affected.’