Catherine the Great

by Robert K. Massie

  The fall was sudden and steep. What had happened? What crime had the fifteen-year-old girl whose one thought was to please everyone, particularly the empress, committed? Catherine checked and found that she was in debt for two thousand rubles. The sum was absurd, in view of Elizabeth’s own extravagance and generosity, and the reprimand was an obvious excuse to cloak another grievance. It was true that Catherine had spent freely. She had sent money to her father to help pay expenses for her brother. She had spent money on herself. Arriving in Russia with only four dresses and a dozen chemises in her trunk, and taking her place at a court where women changed clothes three times a day, she had used some of her allowance to create a wardrobe. But the greater part had been spent showering presents on her mother, her ladies-in-waiting, and even on Peter himself. She had discovered that the most effective way of pacifying her mother’s temper and of stopping the constant bickering between Johanna and Peter was to give them both presents. She had realized that in this court, gifts could win her friends. She had noticed, too, that most of the people around her did not object to receiving gifts. Accordingly, eager to find favor, she saw no reason to scorn this simple, blatant method. In a few months, she had learned not only the language but also the customs of Russia.

  This sudden blow from the empress was difficult for her to understand and accept. It revealed to her the two faces of the empress, a woman who, alternately and with no warning, charmed and intimidated. Afterward, when Catherine remembered that evening, she also remembered the lesson it had taught: that in dealing with a massive ego such as Elizabeth’s, all other women at court had to beware of succeeding too well. She worked hard to reingratiate herself with her patron. And Elizabeth, when her fit of jealousy subsided, relented and eventually forgot the incident.

  11

  Smallpox

  IN NOVEMBER, while the court was still in Moscow, Peter came down with measles and, since Catherine had never had the disease, all contact between the two was forbidden. During his illness, Catherine was told, Peter “was uncontrollable in his whims and passions.” Confined to his room and neglected by his tutors, he spent his time ordering his servants, dwarfs, and gentlemen-in-waiting to march and countermarch in parade ground drill around his bed. When, after six weeks of convalescence, Catherine saw him again, “he confided his childish pranks to me and it was not my business to restrain him; I let him do and say what he wished.” Peter was pleased by her attitude. He felt no romantic attraction for her, but she was his comrade and the only person to whom he dared speak freely.

  Toward the end of December 1744, when Peter recovered from the measles, the empress decided that the court should leave Moscow and return to St. Petersburg. A heavy snowfall lay over the city, and the temperature was bitterly cold. Catherine and Johanna were to travel together with two ladies-in-waiting; Peter was in another sledge with Brümmer and a tutor. As the women were taking their seats, the empress, who was traveling separately, leaned in and tucked Catherine’s furs tightly around her; then, worried that these still might be insufficient against the cold, she wrapped her own magnificent ermine cloak over Catherine’s shoulders.

  Four days later, between the towns of Tver and Novgorod, Catherine and Peter’s little procession halted for the night at the village of Khotilovo. That evening, Peter began to shiver; then he fainted and was put to bed. The next day, when Catherine and Johanna went to see him, Brümmer stopped them in the doorway. The grand duke, he said, had developed a high fever during the night, and spots—symptoms of smallpox—had appeared on his face. Johanna turned pale. Terrified of the disease that had killed her brother, she instantly pulled Catherine away from the door, ordered their sledge, and left immediately for St. Petersburg, leaving Peter to be cared for by Brümmer and the two ladies-in-waiting. A courier galloped ahead to inform the empress, who had already reached the capital. As soon as Elizabeth was told, she ordered her sledge and, with the horses under the lash, raced back toward Khotilovo. The two sledges, Catherine’s and Elizabeth’s, hurtling across the snow in opposite directions, met in the middle of the night on the road. They stopped and Johanna told Elizabeth what she knew. The empress listened, nodded, then gave the signal to proceed. As the horses pounded forward, Elizabeth stared into blackness—not just the blackness of the night outside, but also the blackness of the future of her dynasty if Peter should die.

  But it was more than self-interest that drove the empress to behave as she did once she reached Khotilovo. On arriving, she seated herself by the patient’s bed and declared that she would care for her nephew herself. She was to remain at Peter’s side for six weeks, rarely lying down, hardly changing her clothes. Elizabeth, who had seemed to care for nothing as much as the preservation of her beauty, now took on all the menial duties of a sick nurse. Dismissing the risk of smallpox and consequent disfigurement, she hovered over the bed where her nephew lay. This was the same warm, maternal impulse that had compelled her to sit by Catherine’s bedside when the little German princess collapsed with pneumonia. While Peter slept, she sent couriers galloping with messages to the one person who, she believed, fully shared her affection and fears.

  In St. Petersburg, Catherine waited anxiously for news. Could the grand duke, just recovered from measles, survive this more ominous disease? Catherine’s anxiety was genuine; although she found Peter childish and often irritating, she had accepted her fiancé. There was, of course, more to it than that; she was anxious for her own future. If Peter died, her life would change. Her position at court, all the honors heaped upon her, were bestowed on the wife of the future tsar. Already in St. Petersburg, certain courtiers, foreseeing the death of the grand duke, were turning away from her. Powerless to do anything else, she wrote respectful, affectionate letters to Elizabeth, asking about Peter’s health. The letters, in Russian, were drafted by her teacher, then copied by Catherine in her own hand into Russian. Elizabeth, who may or may not have known this, was touched.

  Meanwhile, Johanna continued to create trouble. The empress had assigned Catherine a suite of four rooms in the Winter Palace; these rooms were separated from the four rooms assigned to her mother. Johanna’s rooms were of the same size, furnished with the same furniture, and the same fabric of blue and red cloth; the only difference was that Catherine’s were to the right of a stairway and Johanna’s to the left. Nevertheless, when Johanna discovered the arrangement, she complained. Her daughter’s rooms were grander than hers, she said. Furthermore, why was Catherine being separated from her at all? She had not proposed it; she had not approved it. When Catherine told her mother that the separation had been ordered and the rooms specifically assigned by the empress, who did not want her to share her mother’s quarters, Johanna’s indignation mounted. She regarded this new arrangement as a form of criticism of her conduct at court and of her influence on her daughter. Unable to direct her anger at Elizabeth, Johanna poured it out on Catherine. She picked constant quarrels “and was on such bad terms with everybody that she no longer joined us for meals but had them served in her apartment.” Catherine confessed, however, that the separation “was very much to my liking. I was not at all at ease in my mother’s rooms and had no good opinion of the group of intimate friends which she gathered around herself.”

  Catherine’s separation from her mother and her careful avoidance of her mother’s friends meant that there were areas of Johanna’s life of which her daughter had little knowledge. The nature and extent of Johanna’s relationship with Count Betskoy was one of these. Catherine was aware that her mother was fond of Betskoy and saw him constantly, and that many people at court, including the empress, believed that the relationship had become too intimate. Of the rumors that Johanna had become pregnant by Betskoy, Catherine says nothing in her Memoirs. She does, however, tell this story:

  One morning, Johanna’s German chambermaid rushed into Catherine’s room to say that her mother had fainted. Catherine ran to her mother’s room and found Johanna, pale but conscious, lying on a mattress on the fl
oor. Catherine asked what had happened. Johanna said that she had asked to be bled and that the surgeon had been clumsy. “He had not succeeded with two veins on her arms and then had tried to open two on her feet” and failed again. She had fainted. Catherine knew that Johanna was afraid of bloodletting and had violently opposed it as treatment for her own pneumonia; she did not understand why her mother had wanted it done now to herself—or as treatment for what illness. Johanna, becoming hysterical, refused to answer further questions and began to scream. She accused her daughter of caring nothing about her and then “she ordered me to go.”

  Here, Catherine ends her account, hinting at what had happened. Johanna offered a flimsy excuse that she had contracted a sudden, unspecified illness. It is unlikely that this particular woman would ever ask to be bled. There is the accusation of gross surgical incompetence to explain heavy bleeding. There is the placement of a titled patient on a mattress on the floor rather than on a bed, suggesting that Johanna had suddenly staggered and collapsed. There is Johanna’s rage and hysteria when confronting her daughter. And, finally, in the days that followed, there is the absence of any further symptoms of the illness that this surgical bleeding might have been intended to cure or alleviate. A possible explanation of this sequence is that Johanna had suffered a miscarriage.

  Not long after this episode, Johanna suffered another blow. From Zerbst came the news that her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, Catherine’s younger sister, had died suddenly. Johanna had been away from home for over a year. In his letters, her husband had repeatedly asked her to come home. Always, she replied that her primary obligation was to shepherd and oversee the brilliant marriage being offered to her eldest daughter.

  Eventually, a message from the empress at Khotilovo reached Catherine:

  Your Highness, my very dear niece, I am infinitely obliged to Your Highness for your agreeable messages. I have delayed replying to them because I could not reassure you with regard to the health of His Highness, the Grand Duke. Now this day, I can assure you that, to our joy, God be Praised, we may hope for his recovery. He has come back to us.

  On reading this letter, Catherine’s natural cheerfulness returned, and that evening she went to a ball. When she appeared, the whole room crowded around her; the news had spread that the danger was over, the grand duke was recovering. Relieved, Catherine saw the Moscow days repeat themselves: every evening a ball or masquerade; every evening another triumph.

  In the midst of this whirlwind, the Swedish diplomat Count Adolf Gyllenborg arrived in St. Petersburg. He came as an official envoy to announce the marriage of the new crown prince of Sweden, Adolphus Frederick of Holstein (Johanna’s brother and Catherine’s uncle) to Princess Louisa Ulrika, sister of Frederick II of Prussia. It was Catherine’s second encounter with Gyllenborg; they had met five years before at her grandmother’s house in Hamburg, when she was ten. It was then that she had so impressed him with her precocious intelligence that he had advised her mother to pay her more attention.

  As Catherine described their second encounter:

  He was a man of great intelligence, who was no longer young [Gyllenborg then was thirty-two].… He noticed that I accepted without protest all the intrigues and customs of the court and it seemed to him that I was showing less intelligence in Petersburg than he had given me credit for in Hamburg. He told me one day that he was surprised by the prodigious change that had taken place in me. “How is it,” he said, “that your character, so vigorous and strong in Hamburg, has allowed itself to deteriorate. You busy yourself now only with superficialities, with luxury and pleasure. You must recover the natural inclination of your mind. Your genius is destined for great achievements and you are wasting yourself on trifles. I would wager that you have not read a book since you have been in Russia.”

  I told him of the hours I spent in my room, reading. He said that a philosopher of fifteen was too young yet for self-knowledge and that I was surrounded by so many pitfalls that I would stumble unless my soul was of an utterly superior metal; that I should nourish it with the best possible reading. He recommended Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, a life of Cicero, and The Causes of the Grandeur and Decline of the Roman Republic by Montesquieu. I promised to read them and actually did look for them. I found the life of Cicero in German and read a few pages; then I was brought the Montesquieu. When I began to read, it caused me to reflect, but I could not read it straight through because it made me yawn and I tossed it aside.…

  I was not able to find Plutarch’s Lives; I read it only two years later.

  To prove to Gyllenborg that she was not superficial, Catherine composed an essay about herself, “so that he would see whether I knew myself or not.” The next day, she wrote and handed to Gyllenborg an essay titled “Portrait of a Fifteen-Year-Old Philosopher.” He was impressed and returned it with a dozen pages of comments, mostly favorable. “I read his remarks again and again, many times; I impressed them on my consciousness and resolved to follow his advice. In addition, there was something else surprising: one day, while conversing with me, he allowed the following sentence to slip out: ‘What a pity that you will marry!’ I wanted to find out what he meant, but he would not tell me.”

  Early in February, Peter was finally well enough to travel, and the empress brought him back to St. Petersburg. Catherine went to meet them in a reception hall of the Winter Palace. It was after four in the afternoon and the light was failing; they met, Catherine says, in “semi-darkness.” Until that moment, absence and anxiety had softened Catherine’s image of the man she was to marry. Peter had never been handsome, but he had possessed a certain nondescript, inoffensive blandness. Sometimes he wore a surly grin, sometimes a slight smile that might be inane or could be merely shy. Overall, his appearance had not been not wholly displeasing. Catherine was eager to see him.

  The figure now standing before her in the gloom was quite different; it filled her “almost with terror.… His face was practically unrecognizable.” It was ravaged, swollen and pitted with still unhealed pockmarks. It was evident that he would be deeply scarred. His head had been shaved, and the enormous wig he was wearing made him appear even more terrifying. Despite the poor light, Catherine was unable to mask her horror; later, she described her future husband as “hideous.” As she stood there, “he came up to me and asked, ‘Do you recognize me?’ ” Summoning her courage, she stammered congratulations on his recovery, then fled to her apartment, where she collapsed.

  Catherine was not a simple, romantic young woman. The empress, nevertheless, worried about her reaction to her nephew’s appearance. Fearing that the girl might impulsively reject so appalling-looking a future spouse and ask her parents to withdraw their consent to the match, Elizabeth redoubled her show of affection. On February 10, Peter’s seventeenth birthday, with her nephew still in no condition to appear in public, the empress invited Catherine to dine with her alone. During the meal, she complimented Catherine on her letters in Russian, spoke to her in Russian, praised her pronunciation, and told her that she was becoming a handsome young woman.

  Elizabeth’s efforts were gratifying to Catherine, but unnecessary. Catherine had no intention of breaking her engagement. Not for a moment, whatever her fiancé’s appearance, did she think of returning to Germany. There was one promise to which Catherine was faithful throughout her life, one commitment on which she would never renege: this was to her own ambition. She had come not to marry a face, handsome or hideous, but to marry the heir to an empire.

  Peter was more affected emotionally and psychologically than Catherine by what smallpox had done to him. But once the disease had done its damage, the fault in behavior lay with Catherine. Her initial reaction was natural enough; most young women would shrink from seeing horrible disfigurement, and probably few would possess the self-control to disguise their feelings. In this case, however, if the relationship was going to surmount this challenge and continue successfully, the moment of meeting demanded something more than Catherine
was able to give. And this was something she could not summon: a warm, unrestrained affection, the kind of spontaneous tenderness that came naturally to Empress Elizabeth.

  Peter was distressed to feel himself physically repulsive to his fiancée. At the moment they met in the dimly lit hall, Peter was able to read her thoughts in her eyes and voice. Thereafter, he believed himself “hideous” and therefore unlovable. This new sense of inferiority reinforced feelings that had afflicted him all his life. Throughout his bleak and lonely childhood, Peter had never had an intimate friend. Now, just as the cousin he was being forced to marry was becoming a comrade, a shocking ugliness had been added to the list of his disadvantages. When he had asked, “Do you recognize me?” Peter had revealed his anxiety about the effect his changed appearance would have on her. That was precisely the moment that Catherine had unknowingly failed him. Had she managed to give him a compassionate smile and a word of affection, it might have ensured some kind of amicable future. The smile was not given; the word not spoken. The frightened young man saw his trusted playmate shuddering at the sight of him; he knew that he was, in her word, “hideous.”