Catherine the Great

by Robert K. Massie

  He waited through the winter, passing time with his friend the French ambassador, Philippe de Ségur. During the first week of April 1789, the capital was startled by a report that Rear Admiral Jones had attempted to rape a ten-year-old girl, the daughter of a German immigrant woman who had a dairy business. The police had been told that the girl was peddling butter when Jones’s manservant told her that his master wanted to purchase some and led her to Jones’s apartment. There, the girl said, she found her customer, whom she had never seen before, dressed in a white uniform wearing a gold star and a red ribbon. He bought some butter, locked the door, knocked her down, dragged her into his bedroom, and assaulted her. She ran home and told her mother, who went to the police. Ségur defended his friend, both at the time and later in his memoirs. He said that the young girl had called on Jones to ask whether he had any linen to mend. He said no. “She then indulged in some indecent gestures,” Ségur quotes Jones as saying. “I advised her not to enter on so vile a career, gave her some money and dismissed her.” As soon as she left his front door, the girl ripped her dress, screamed “Rape!” and threw herself into the arms of her mother, who, conveniently, was standing nearby.

  Two weeks later, Jones wrote to Potemkin that he had learned that the mother had admitted that a gentleman with decorations had given her money to tell a damaging story about the American. She confessed that her daughter was twelve, not ten, and had been seduced by Jones’s manservant three months before she visited the admiral. Further, Jones said that immediately after the alleged rape, rather than rushing home to her mother, the girl had continued peddling butter. “The charge against me is an unworthy imposture,” Jones continued to Potemkin. “Shall it be said that in Russia, a wretched woman who abandoned her husband, stole away her daughter, lives in a house of ill repute and leads a debauched, lecherous life, has found credit enough on a simple complaint unsupported by any proof to affect the honor of a general officer of reputation who has merited and received the decorations of America, France and this empire? I love women, I confess, and the pleasures that one only obtains from that sex, but to get such things by force is horrible to me. I cannot even contemplate gratifying my passions without their consent, and I give you my word as a soldier and an honest man, that if the girl in question has not passed through hands other than mine, she is still a virgin.”

  There was, however, a third version. Before talking to Ségur or writing Potemkin, Jones had informed the chief of police: “The accusation against me is false. It was invented by the mother of a depraved girl who came to my house several times and with whom I have often badine,* always giving her money, but whose virginity I have positively not taken. I thought her to be several years older than Your Excellency says she is and each time she came to my house she lent herself very willingly to do all that a man would want of her. The last time passed off like the rest and she went out appearing content and calm, and having been in no way abused. If one has checked on her being deflowered, I declare that I am not the author of it, and I shall easily prove the falseness of this assertion.” This letter was supported by affidavits from three witnesses who swore that they saw the girl leave Jones’s apartment quietly without blood, bruises, torn clothing, or tears.

  In any case, if not a crime, this encounter between a restless, lonely, middle-aged man and an underage girl was tawdry. Nobody knew exactly what had happened, but Jones was ostracized by St. Petersburg society. Ségur believed that Jones had been duped and that the prince of Nassau-Siegen was responsible. “Paul Jones is no more guilty than I,” the ambassador declared, “and a man of his rank has never suffered such humiliation through the accusation of a woman whose husband certifies that she is a pimp and whose daughter solicits the inns.” Criminal charges against Jones were dropped, but the offer of a command in the Baltic Fleet also evaporated. (This command went to Nassau-Siegen, who promptly lost a naval battle to Sweden.) In lieu of outright dismissal, Catherine granted Jones a two-year leave of absence. On June 26, she gave him her hand to kiss in a public farewell and nodded a cool “Bon voyage.”

  What remained of his life was brief and anticlimactic. Never again did he command a ship, much less a fleet. Still in his early forties, he lived alone in Paris during the first years of the French Revolution; neither Gouverneur Morris, the American minister, nor Lafayette found time to see him. He died on July 18, 1792, two weeks after his forty-fifth birthday, of nephritis and bronchial pneumonia. After his death, Gouverneur Morris refused to allot public funds for a funeral or to save Jones from a pauper’s grave. Instead, the French National Assembly, which remembered him as a hero, paid for what little was done.

  A century passed. In 1899, the American ambassador to France, Horace Porter, used his own money to search for Jones’s body. It was found in a lead coffin, under a pavement, in an obscure cemetery outside Paris. When Theodore Roosevelt was president and creating a great American navy became one of his passions, he sent four American armored cruisers to Cherbourg to carry Jones back across the Atlantic to his adopted country. In 1913, 121 years after his death, the body of John Paul Jones, proclaimed to be the father of the United States Navy, was placed in a marble sarcophagus in the crypt of the U.S. Naval Academy chapel. Since then, every midshipman has been taught Jones’s words, whether they were exactly his words or not: “I have not yet begun to fight.”

  By the summer of 1791, the Russian army had forced the Turks to the peace table. In the treaty concluded at Jassy in Moldavia in December 1791, Catherine’s greatest goals were not achieved: the Turks kept Constantinople, and the crescent remained atop the Haigia Sophia; there was no Greek empire for Grand Duke Constantine. Still, Catherine gained much. The Turks formally ceded the Crimea, the mouth of the Dnieper with Ochakov, and the territory between the Bug and the Dniester rivers, making the Dniester Russia’s western frontier. Formal acquisition by treaty of the naval base at Sebastopol and Turkish acceptance of the fleet based there provided Russia with a permanent naval presence on the Black Sea. The subsequent development of the commercial port of Odessa provided an outlet for the export of large quantities of Russian wheat.

  The second Turkish war had been Potemkin’s war; he had borne responsibility for strategy, command, and logistics. Catherine had sustained him. She was the more stable, avoiding his alternating moods of optimism and pessimism, his doubts, fears, and occasional despair. Neither could have achieved victory without the other. When military operations were over, Potemkin turned the negotiations at Jassy over to others and headed back to St. Petersburg, where Catherine was preparing a conqueror’s welcome. Even as he traveled north, however, Potemkin was worried. For the first time in seventeen years, Catherine had acquired a new favorite of whom he vehemently disapproved: a handsome young man named Platon Zubov. Poorly educated, he was vain and greedy for wealth, estates, honors, and titles, not only for himself but also for his father and his three brothers; all soon became counts. The most prominent men of the court and the empire began lining up to humble themselves at his morning levee. When the doors to his reception room opened, they were likely to reveal Zubov stretched out in a lounge chair before his mirror, having his hair dressed and powdered. He could be wearing a silk colored frock coat sewn with jewels, white satin trousers, and green ankle-length boots. Conspicuously ignoring the ministers, generals, courtiers, foreigners, and petitioners who stood motionless and silent before him, he paid attention only to his pet monkey. When, with a gesture, the master cued the creature’s performance, it leaped across the furniture, hung from the chandeliers, and finally jumped onto a visitor’s shoulder to pull off his wig or muss his hair. When Zubov laughed, everyone laughed.

  Potemkin knew that he and Zubov would now be competing for the empress’s confidence. So far, he had remained foremost; Catherine consulted him on everything; she told him that if war were to break out in Poland, he was to take supreme command of the Russian army. Nevertheless, he was uneasy. “Zub” means “tooth” in Russian. As his carriage rolled n
orth to the capital, Potemkin repeatedly reminded himself, “I must pull out the tooth.”

  Arriving in St. Petersburg on February 28, 1791, Potemkin quickly demonstrated that his character had not changed. When Kyril Razumovsky called to tell him that he was giving a ball in Potemkin’s honor, Potemkin met his visitor wearing a tattered dressing gown and nothing underneath. Razumovsky good-naturedly retaliated a few days later by publicly receiving the prince wearing a nightgown with a nightcap on his head. Potemkin laughed and embraced his host.

  He turned to the problem of Zubov, which, he believed, had to be solved as much to shield Catherine as for his own reasons. He saw that he could no longer use his political power as he had done with Yermolov; if this young man were to be displaced, it must be done more subtly. The best approach, he concluded, would be to re-create the aura of their old romance. Surprisingly, he partially succeeded. In a letter to Grimm on May 21, Catherine spoke of Potemkin with the same enthusiasm that she had years before.

  When one looks at the Prince-Marshal Potemkin, one must say that his victories, his successes, beautify him. He has returned to us from the army as handsome as the day, as gay as a lark, as brilliant as a star, more witty than ever, no longer biting his nails, giving feasts every day, and behaving as a host with a polish and courtesy by which everybody is enchanted.

  Potemkin’s success was incomplete, however. It was obvious that Catherine wanted her relationship with Zubov to continue. The competition between the two men became a standoff: Potemkin openly displayed his contempt for Zubov, who, in return, smiled and bided his time. Meanwhile, when Potemkin’s bills came due, Catherine paid them, instructing the treasury that it was to treat Prince Potemkin’s expenses as if they were her own.

  Potemkin tried to distract himself by giving and attending receptions, dinners, and balls. The evening that surpassed anything ever seen in Russia occurred on April 28, 1791, at Potemkin’s Tauride Palace. Three thousand guests had been invited; all were present when the empress arrived. The prince was at the door, wearing a scarlet tailcoat with solid gold buttons, each button encasing a large solitaire diamond. Once the empress was seated, twenty-four couples, including Catherine’s two grandsons, Alexander and Constantine, entered to dance a quadrille. Afterward, the host led his guest through the rooms of the palace. In one, poets were reciting verse; in another, a choir was singing; in still another, a French comedy was being performed.

  At the end of the evening, following a ball and an extravagant supper, Catherine and Potemkin withdrew alone to the winter garden to walk between the fountains and marble statues. When they spoke, he mentioned Zubov; she did not reply. Catherine stayed until two in the morning, later than she had ever remained at a party. Escorted to the door by Potemkin, she stopped to thank him. They said goodbye. Overwhelmed, he threw himself at her feet; when he looked up, both were in tears. After she left, Potemkin stood quietly for a few minutes, then walked alone to his room.

  At five o’clock in the morning on July 24, 1791, Potemkin left Tsarskoe Selo for the last time. He was already tired, and the journey to the south further exhausted him. He was still deeply unhappy about Zubov, and, as if Catherine did not realize how much she was wounding him, she continued to fill her letters with talk of her young lover: “The child sends his greetings.… The child thinks that you are more intelligent … and far more amusing and pleasant than all those who surround you.” Years later, when both Potemkin and Catherine were dead, “the child” revealed his true feelings about his rival: “I could not remove him from my path, and it was essential to remove him because the empress always met his wishes halfway and simply feared him as though he were an exacting husband. She loved only me, but she often pointed to Potemkin as an example for me to follow. It is his fault that I am not twice as rich as I am.”

  Sunk in melancholy, Potemkin began by traveling slowly—the jolting of the carriage was painful—then, suddenly, he demanded speed. Hurtling down dusty roads and through towns and villages, he reached Jassy only eight days after leaving the Neva. The journey drained his declining strength; on arriving, he wrote to Catherine that he felt the the touch of the hand of death. His illness showed symptoms of the malaria that had infected him in the Crimea in 1783. Traveling south, he refused to take quinine and other medicines prescribed by the three doctors accompanying him; like Catherine, he was convinced that the best way to recover from illness was to let the body itself solve the problem. Instead of dieting, as the doctors recommended, he ate huge meals and drank heavily. To ward off pain, he wrapped his head in wet towels. When he reached Jassy, his staff sent for his niece, Sashenka Branitsky, hoping that she could persuade him to be reasonable and accept treatment. She hurried from Poland. In the middle of September, he had an attack of fever and shivered uncontrollably for twelve hours. He wrote to Catherine, “Please send me a Chinese dressing gown. I badly need one.” The Russian ambassador in Vienna, Andrei Razumovsky, wrote suggesting that he send “the first pianist and one of the best composers in Germany” to soothe him. The offer was made and the composer accepted, but Potemkin did not have time to respond and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart did not make the journey.

  Oppressed by the humid air of Jassy, he twice drove out seeking country air, only to give up and come back. In St. Petersburg, Catherine waited for messages and letters and asked Countess Branitsky to write to her every day. On Potemkin’s behalf, Catherine reversed her position on doctors and medicines. “Take that which in the doctors’ estimation will give you relief; and having taken it, I beg you also to save yourself from food and drink that opposes the medicine.” With this support, Sashenka and the doctors finally persuaded the sick man to take medicine. For a few days he seemed better. Then, shivering and sleeplessness returned. Saying that he was “burning up,” he demanded more wet towels, drank cold liquids, and had bottles of eau de cologne poured over his head. He asked that all windows be opened and, when that failed to cool him, insisted on being carried into the garden. Every day, he asked repeatedly whether any messages had come from the empress; when a new letter arrived, he wept and read it, then reread it and kissed it repeatedly. When state documents were brought and read to him, he could barely scribble his signature at the bottom. It was clear that he was dying; Potemkin himself realized this. He refused to take quinine. “I’m not going to recover. I have been ill for a long time … God’s will be done. Pray for my soul and do not forget me when I am gone. I never wished anybody any harm. To make people happy has always been my desire. I am not a bad man and not the evil genius of our mother, the Empress Catherine, as has been said.” He asked for the Last Sacrament, and once it had been given, he relaxed. A courier from Moscow brought another letter from Catherine, a fur coat, and the silk dressing gown he had asked for. He cried. He said to Sashenka, “Tell me frankly, do you think I shall recover?” She assured him that he would. He took her hands and caressed them. “Good hands,” he said. “They have often soothed me.”

  Gradually, the passionate, ambitious man, still only fifty-two, became calm; those around him watched him dying in serenity. He begged everyone to forgive him for any pain he might have caused them. They must promise to convey to the empress his humblest gratitude for everything she had done for him. When a new message arrived from her he wept. He agreed to try quinine but could not hold it down. He began to faint; he was conscious only half the time; he felt that he was suffocating. He wrote to Catherine, “Matushka, oh how sick I am!” He asked to be moved from Jassy to Nikolaev; its cooler air might do him good. On the day he started out on the journey, he dictated a note to Catherine: “Your most gracious Majesty. I have no more strength to endure my torments. My only remaining salvation is to leave this town and I have ordered myself be taken to Nikolaev. I do not know what is to become of me.”

  At eight on the morning of October 4, he was carried to his carriage. He went a few miles and said that he could not breathe. The carriage stopped. Carried into a house, he fell asleep. After three hours’ rest, he tal
ked cheerfully until midnight. He tried to sleep again but could not. At daybreak, he asked that the journey resume. The procession had gone only seven miles when he ordered it to stop. “This will be enough,” he said. “There is no point in going on. Take me out of the carriage and put me down. I want to die in the field.” A Persian carpet was unrolled on the grass. Potemkin was placed on it and covered with the silk gown Catherine had sent him. Everyone searched for a gold coin to close his eye in the Orthodox fashion, but no gold coin was found. An escorting Cossack offered a copper five-kopeck piece and with this his eye was covered. At midday on Sunday, October 5, 1791, he died. A message went to the empress: “His Serene Highness the prince is no longer on this earth.”

  At five in the evening on October 12, a courier bringing the news reached the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. Catherine collapsed. “Now I have no one left on whom I can rely,” she cried. “How can anybody replace Potemkin? Everything will be different now. He was a true nobleman.” The days passed and her secretary could only report: “Tears and despair … tears … more tears.”

  69

  Art, Architecture, and the Bronze Horseman

  THE FOUNDATION of the superb collection of art in St. Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum today was laid by Catherine only a year after she reached the throne. In 1763, she learned that a collection of 225 paintings accumulated by a Polish art dealer in Berlin who regularly supplied pictures to Frederick II had not been paid for. The dealer had been buying and holding the paintings for the king’s Potsdam palace, Sans Souci, but Frederick had decided that he could not afford them. His finances, personal and national, had been ravaged by the cost of the Seven Years’ War, and the need to pay his army and to begin reconstruction of his devastated country took precedence over the purchase of paintings for his palace walls. The art dealer was, therefore, deeply in debt and urgently needed a customer. Catherine stepped forward and, without serious bargaining, bought the entire collection.