Catherine the Great

by Robert K. Massie

  Eventually, Father Dubyansky arrived, and he and Catherine were left alone. The black-robed priest with a long white beard sat by her bed and they talked for an hour and a half. She described to him the past and present state of her affairs, the grand duke’s behavior toward her, the Shuvalovs’ hostility, how they were poisoning the empress’s view of her, and the constant dismissal of her servants, particularly those who were most devoted to her. For these reasons, she said, she had written to the empress and begged to be sent home. She asked the priest to help her. He said he would do his best. He advised her that she should continue asking to be sent home, and he said that she would certainly not be sent away because they could not justify this dismissal in the eyes of the public. He agreed that the empress, having chosen her at a tender age, had largely abandoned her to her enemies; and said that Elizabeth would do far better to dismiss Elizabeth Vorontsova and the Shuvalovs. Moreover, he said, everyone was crying out at the Shuvalovs’ injustice in the affair of Count Bestuzhev, of whose innocence everyone was convinced. He concluded by telling Catherine that he would go immediately to the empress’s apartment, where he would sit and wait until Her Majesty awakened in order to speak to her and urge her to speed up the interview with Catherine she had promised. Meanwhile, he added, Catherine should remain in bed, which would reinforce his argument that the affliction and grief to which she was being subjected might cause her grave harm unless some remedy was found.

  The confessor kept his promise and described Catherine’s condition so vividly to Elizabeth that she summoned Alexander Shuvalov and ordered him to inquire whether the grand duchess’s health would allow her to come and talk to her the following night. Catherine told Count Shuvalov that for such a purpose she would summon all her remaining strength.

  39

  Confrontation

  ON THE EVENING of the following day—it was April 13, 1758, a week before Catherine’s twenty-ninth birthday—Alexander Shuvalov told Catherine that after midnight he would come to escort her to the empress’s apartment. At half past one, he arrived and said that the empress was ready. Catherine followed him through the halls, which seemed empty. Suddenly, she caught a glimpse of Peter ahead of her, also on his way, it seemed, toward his aunt’s apartment. Catherine had not seen him since the night she had gone to the theater by herself.

  In the empress’s apartment, Catherine found her husband already present. Approaching Elizabeth, she fell on her knees and begged to be sent home to Germany. The empress tried to make her get up, but Catherine remained on her knees. Elizabeth, appearing to Catherine to be more sad than angry, said, “Why do you wish me to send you home? Remember that you have children.” Catherine’s answer was prepared: “My children are in your hands and could not be better placed. I hope you will not abandon them.” Elizabeth asked, “How shall I explain such a step to the people?” Again, Catherine was ready: “Your Imperial Majesty will tell them, if you see fit, all the reasons that have brought upon me your displeasure, and the hatred of the grand duke.” “But how will you manage to live at your family’s home?” the empress continued. “I will do as well as I did before you did me the honor of choosing me and taking me away,” Catherine replied.

  The empress again insisted that Catherine rise; this time, Catherine obeyed. Elizabeth paced back and forth. The long room where they were meeting had three windows, between which stood two dressing tables holding the empress’s gold toilet service. Large screens had been placed in front of the windows. From the moment she entered, Catherine suspected that Ivan Shuvalov and perhaps others were hidden behind these screens; later, she learned that Ivan Shuvalov had, indeed, been there. Catherine also noticed that one of the basins on the dressing tables contained folded letters. The empress approached her and said, “God is my witness to how I wept when you were so dangerously ill on your arrival in Russia. If I had not loved you, I would not have kept you here.” Catherine thanked the empress for her kindness. She said that she would never forget these things and would always consider it the greatest of personal misfortunes that she had incurred Her Majesty’s displeasure.

  Elizabeth’s mood suddenly changed; she seemed to revert to a mental list of grievances drawn up in preparing for the interview. “You are dreadfully haughty,” she said. “You imagine that there is no one so clever as you.” Again, Catherine was ready: “If I ever had such a conceit, Madame, nothing would be more likely to destroy it than my present situation and this very conversation.”

  As the two women were talking, Catherine noticed that Peter was whispering to Alexander Shuvalov. Elizabeth saw this too and walked over to them. Catherine could not hear what the three of them were saying until her husband raised his voice and cried out, “She is dreadfully spiteful and very obstinate.” Catherine, realizing that she was the subject, said to Peter, “If you are speaking of me, I am glad to tell you in the presence of Her Imperial Majesty that I am indeed spiteful to people who advise you to inflict injustice, and that I have become obstinate because I have seen that, by yielding, I have gained nothing but your hostility.” Peter appealed to his aunt: “Your Majesty can see how malicious she is by what she is saying.” But Catherine’s words were making a different impression on the empress. Catherine saw as the conversation progressed that, although Elizabeth had been advised—or had resolved—to be severe with her, the empress’s attitude was wavering.

  For a while, Elizabeth continued to criticize. “You meddle in many things that do not concern you. How could you, for instance, presume to send orders to General Apraksin?” Catherine replied, “I, Madame? Send orders? Never has such an idea entered my head.”

  “How can you deny it?” Elizabeth said. “Your letters are there in the basin.” She pointed to them. “You know that you were forbidden to write.”

  Catherine knew that she must admit to something. “It is true that I transgressed in this respect and I beg Your Majesty’s forgiveness. But as my letters are there, these three letters will prove to Your Majesty that I never sent him any orders. In one of them, I told him what was being said of his behavior.”

  Elizabeth interrupted, “And why did you write this to him?”

  Catherine replied, “Because I took an interest in the general, whom I liked very much. I begged him to follow your orders. The two other letters contain only congratulations on the birth of his son and New Year’s greetings.”

  “Bestuzhev says there were many others,” Elizabeth said.

  “If Bestuzhev says this, he lies,” Catherine responded.

  “Well, then,” the empress said, “since he is lying about you, I will have him put to torture.” Catherine replied that, as sovereign, she could do what she liked, but that she, Catherine, had never written more than those three letters to Apraksin.

  Elizabeth walked up and down the room, sometimes silent, sometimes addressing herself to Catherine, sometimes to her nephew or Count Shuvalov. “The grand duke showed much bitterness towards me, seeking to anger the empress against me,” Catherine wrote in her Memoirs. “But because he went about this stupidly and displayed more passion than justice, he failed. She listened with a kind of involuntary approval to my responses to my husband’s remarks. His behavior became so objectionable that the empress came up to me and said in a low voice, ‘I have many more things to say to you, but I do not want to make things worse between the two of you than they are already.’ ” Seeing this sign of goodwill, Catherine whispered back, “And I, too, find it difficult to speak, in spite of my great desire to tell you all that is in my mind and heart.” Elizabeth nodded and dismissed everyone, saying that it was very late. It was three o’clock in the morning.

  Peter left first, then Catherine, followed by Shuvalov. Just as the count reached the door, the empress called him back. Catherine returned to her rooms and had started to undress when there was a knock on her door. It was Alexander Shuvalov. “He told me that the empress had spoken to him for some time, and had instructed him to tell me not to worry too much, and that she wou
ld have another conversation with me, alone and soon.” She curtsied to Count Shuvalov and asked him to thank Her Imperial Majesty, and to hurry the moment of the second conversation. He told her not to speak of this to anyone, especially the grand duke.

  Catherine was certain now that she would not be sent away. While waiting for the promised second interview, she kept mostly to her room. From time to time, she reminded Count Shuvalov that she was anxious to have her fate decided. On April 21, 1758, her twenty-ninth birthday, she was having dinner alone in her room when the empress sent word that she was drinking to Catherine’s health. Catherine sent back her gratitude. When Peter learned of the empress’s message, he sent a similar greeting. Poniatowski reported that the French ambassador, the Marquis de l’Hôpital, had spoken admiringly of her determination, and said that her resolution not to leave her apartment could only turn to her advantage. Catherine, taking l’Hôpital’s remark as the treacherous praise of an enemy, decided to do the opposite. One Sunday, when no one was expecting it, she dressed and left her apartment. When she entered the anterooms where the ladies- and gentlemen-in-waiting of the young court were assembled, she saw their astonishment at seeing her. When Peter arrived, he was equally surprised. He came up and spoke to her briefly.

  On May 23, 1758, almost six weeks after the meeting with Elizabeth, Alexander Shuvalov told Catherine that she should ask the empress, through him, for permission to see her children that afternoon. Afterward, Shuvalov said, she would have her second, long-promised private audience with the monarch. Catherine did as she was told and formally asked permission to see her two children. Shuvalov said that she could visit them at three o’clock. Catherine was punctual and remained with her children until Shuvalov arrived to tell her that the empress was ready. Catherine found Elizabeth alone; this time there were no screens. Catherine expressed her gratitude, and Elizabeth said, “I expect you to answer truthfully all the questions I shall ask you.” Catherine promised that Elizabeth would hear nothing but the exact truth and that there was nothing she wanted more than to open her heart without reservation. Elizabeth asked if there really had been no more than three letters written to Apraksin. Catherine swore that there were only three. “Then,” Catherine wrote, “she asked for details about the grand duke’s mode of life.”

  At this climactic moment, Catherine’s memoirs suddenly and inexplicably conclude. Her life continued for another thirty-eight years, and the rest of her story is told by her letters, political writings, official documents, and by other people—friends, enemies, and a multitude of observers, But no part of this story is more remarkable than Stanislaus Poniatowski’s description of the episodes involving Catherine and himself that followed in the summer of 1758.

  40

  A Ménage à Quatre

  STANISLAUS PONIATOWSKI did not leave Russia and Catherine. He resisted departure by feigning illness, sometimes spending the entire day in bed. In the summer of 1758, when the young court moved to Oranienbaum, Poniatowski was with Elizabeth’s court at Peterhof, a few miles away. At night, disguised in his blond wig, he visited Catherine at Oranienbaum, where she received him in her separate, private pavilion.

  Peter, absorbed with Elizabeth Vorontsova, never interfered in Poniatowski’s affair with his wife. An intervention was always a possibility, but when this happened, it was by chance. In July 1758, as Poniatowski told the story in his memoirs, the Shuvalovs and the French ambassador were pressing the empress to send him home, and the Polish government was insisting that he return. He knew that soon he would have to comply.

  The knowledge that I would have to leave made my frequent nocturnal visits to Oranienbaum even more frequent. The good luck that always accompanied me during these visits made me lose all sense of danger. On July 6, I took a small closed carriage whose driver did not know me. That night—although there is no real night in northern Russia during the period of the White Nights—we unfortunately met the grand duke and his entourage, all of them half-drunk, on a road in the woods near Oranienbaum. My driver was halted and asked who was in the carriage. He replied, “a tailor” and we were allowed to proceed. But Elizabeth Vorontsova, who was with him, began making sarcastic remarks about “the tailor” which put the grand duke in a bad humor. The result was that as I was leaving, after spending a few hours with the grand duchess, I was assaulted by three men holding drawn sabers. They seized me by the collar like a thief and dragged me to the grand duke who, recognizing me, simply ordered my escorts to follow him and bring me along. They led me down a path to the sea and I thought my last hour had come. But we turned into a pavilion where the grand duke asked me bluntly whether I had slept with his wife. I said, “No.”

  “Tell me the truth,” Peter said to Poniatowski, “because, if you do, then everything will be arranged. If not, you will go through some bad moments.”

  “I cannot say that I have done something I have not done,” Poniatowski lied.

  Peter went into another room to consult with Brockdorff. Returning, he said, “Since you refuse to talk, you will stay here until further orders.” He left and stationed a guard at the door. After two hours, Alexander Shuvalov appeared. Shuvalov, his face twitching, asked for an explanation. Instead of responding directly, Poniatowski took another approach: “I am sure you will understand, Count, that it is important to the honor of your court, as well as of myself, that all this should end as quickly as possible, and that you should get me out of here promptly.”

  Realizing that a scandal of unknown dimensions was looming, Shuvalov agreed and said he would arrange it. He came back an hour later and told Poniatowski that a carriage was ready to take him back to Peterhof. The carriage was so shabby that, at six in the morning, and at a short distance from Peterhof, Poniatowski got out and walked to the palace, wrapped in his cloak, with the brim of his hat pulled down over his eyes and ears; he thought this would arouse less suspicion than if he arrived in the disreputable vehicle in which he had just traveled. Reaching the building where his room was on the ground floor, he decided not to enter by the door; there was a chance of meeting someone. The windows were open to the summer night and Poniatowski climbed through the one he thought was his. He found myself in the room of his neighbor, General Roniker, who was shaving. The two stared at each other, then both burst out laughing. “Do not ask where I come from or why I arrive by the window,” Poniatowski said, “but, as a good compatriot, swear you will never mention it.” Roniker swore.

  The next two days were uncomfortable for Catherine’s lover. Within twenty-four hours, his adventure was known to the whole court. Everyone expected that Poniatowski would be required to leave the country immediately. Catherine’s only hope of postponing her lover’s departure was to placate her husband. Setting aside her pride, she approached Elizabeth Vorontsova, who was delighted to have the proud grand duchess before her as a supplicant. Soon, Catherine managed to send Poniatowski a note saying that she had succeeded in conciliating her husband’s mistress, who would, in turn, appease the grand duke. This suggested to Poniatowski an approach that might make it possible for him to stay in Russia a little longer. At a court ball at Peterhof, he danced with Elizabeth Vorontsova, and while they performed a minuet, he whispered to her, “You know that you have it in your power to make several people very happy.” Vorontsova, seeing a further opportunity to place the grand duchess under obligation, smiled and said, “Come to the Mon Plaisir villa tonight an hour after midnight.”

  At the appointed hour and place, Poniatowski met his new benefactress, who invited him in. “And there was the grand duke, very gay, welcoming me in a friendly and familiar way,” Poniatowski wrote later. “Are you not a great fool not to have been frank with me from the beginning?” Peter said. “If you had, none of this mess would have happened.”

  Poniatowski accepted Peter’s reproof, and, changing the subject, expressed his admiration for the perfect discipline of the grand duke’s Holstein soldiers, guarding the palace. Peter was so pleased by this compliment th
at, after a quarter of an hour, he said, “Well, now that we are such good friends, I find there is someone missing here.” He went to his wife’s room, pulled her out of bed, leaving her only time to put a loose robe over her nightgown and a pair of slippers on her bare feet. Then he brought her in, pointed at Poniatowski, and said, “Well, here he is! Now I hope everyone will be pleased with me.” Catherine, imperturbable, responded by saying to her husband, “The only thing missing is that you should write to the vice chancellor, Count Vorontsov, to arrange the prompt return of our friend to Russia.” Peter, enormously pleased with himself and his role in this scene, sat down and wrote the note. Then, he handed it to Elizabeth Vorontsova to countersign.

  “Afterwards,” Poniatowski wrote, “we all sat down, laughing and chattering and frolicking around a small fountain in the room as though we had not a care in the world. We did not separate until four in the morning. Mad as it may seem, I swear that this is the exact truth. Next day, everyone’s attitude towards me was much nicer. Ivan Shuvalov spoke to me pleasantly. So did Vice Chancellor Vorontsov.”

  Not only did this amiability continue; it was enhanced by Peter himself. “The grand duke made me repeat my visit to Oranienbaum four times,” Poniatowski said. “I arrived in the evening, walked up an unused staircase to the grand duchess’s room, where I found the grand duchess, the grand duke and his mistress. We had supper together, after which he took his mistress away, saying to us, ‘Well, my children, you do not need me any more, I think.’ And I was able to stay as long as I liked.”