Catherine the Great
Page 36
Next morning, leaving her deflated former lover clutching at nothing more than the promise of a return visit, Catherine set off to face a potentially tricky week at Mogilëv. Joseph had as always insisted on travelling without ceremony, and his eccentric incognito posed troubling problems of etiquette:
I don’t know how best to arrange a meeting without others present because, when I get back from mass, people will be milling all around me. To postpone it again until after dinner would be discourteous. Perhaps he could come when everyone is at mass with me, so that when I get back to my inner apartments—those before my bedroom, that is—I shall find him already there. Tell me if you find a better way, though this one seems clever enough. Since Count Rumyantsev writes that our guest doesn’t wish to dine anywhere, I can only conclude that he doesn’t even want to eat with me at the high table; I shall wait to be informed about this.65
In the event, though disconcerted to find that Joseph looked nothing like his portraits, she found him as determined to please her as she was to admire him. In spite of the weather—there had been thunder in the air since she left Polotsk and the fireworks had to be cancelled because of the rain—Chernyshëv had spared no expense to impress his guests, fetching Caterina Bonafini from St Petersburg to sing in the new theatre.66 Disappointed to find that Joseph did not know the abbé Galiani, Catherine nevertheless recognised that he was ‘clever’ and liked to talk.67 Conscious that all Europe was hanging on their every word, she teased Grimm that the emperor had said many things worth publishing that would have to remain confidential. One topic for serious discussion was elementary schooling (it was Joseph, acting on the recommendation of Abbot Felbiger, who sent Jankovich to Russia in 1782). During mass at the Catholic cathedral, however, the two monarchs behaved with characteristic irreverence, ‘laughing and talking more than we listened, with him as the cicerone and me as the gaping tourist’.68 ‘You will find him less boring than the king of Sweden, mark my words,’ Catherine assured her son.69
Though she became less respectful towards ‘Caesar’ when he proved to be a feeble general, it suited her to cast herself in a supporting role in 1780. As Harris reported from St Petersburg, ‘the amiable qualities of the emperor seem particularly calculated to suit a sovereign, who possesses the art of pleasing in so eminent a degree’.70 Alarmed by the progress of events, the Prussians redoubled their efforts to discredit Joseph in Catherine’s eyes. She was not to be taken in. ‘You would do very little justice to the character of the empress of Russia,’ Harris commented, ‘if you supposed she admitted all this trash to dwell upon her mind, or that she was not enlightened enough to see the motives of such a language.’71 The visit of the Prussian Crown Prince also backfired. Though he provided Catherine with a welcome excuse to absent herself from the Alexander Nevsky liturgy for the first time in her reign, Frederick William was otherwise a resounding flop—cold, awkward and hard to like, even when he lost 500 roubles at a single game of cards. ‘If his uncle ever went wrong in his political speculations,’ Bezborodko remarked, ‘then he should count this visit among his greatest mistakes.’72 By contrast, Count Cobenzl had found a perfect advocate for the Habsburg cause in the forty-five-year-old Prince de Ligne, a rakish cosmopolitan charmer with a penchant for the sorts of contrived witticism that Catherine loved best. Ligne, she duly reported to Grimm, was ‘one of the easiest and most agreeable beings I have ever met; he is truly original, thinks profoundly and performs follies like a child’.73
Once the death of Maria Theresa in November 1780 had removed the last major obstacle to a formal alliance between Austria and Russia, it was delayed only by a dispute over protocol. Joseph, as Holy Roman Emperor, was unable to accept Catherine’s status-conscious demand to sign first. She resolved the impasse by proposing an exchange of private letters in place of a conventional treaty. In a secret exchange in May and June 1781, each vowed to support the other in the event of a Turkish attack. As soon as the little grand dukes had recovered from their inoculation, Paul and his wife were packed off to Vienna on 19 September in an attempt to bring them round to Catherine’s way of thinking. In such a political climate, there was no further room for the disappointed advocate of the Northern System. Panin had not been taken to Mogilëv and had failed in his attempts to prevent Paul’s Grand Tour: three days after the departure of his former pupil, he was unceremoniously sacked.74
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‘The big noise has arrived,’ Mozart reported to his father when Paul reached Vienna in November. ‘I have been looking about for Russian popular songs, so as to be able to play variations on them.’75 Though at first the grand duke made a poor impression, scarcely troubling to conceal his preference for Berlin, Joseph brought his visitor round by balancing a series of magnificent Court balls with a tantalising glimpse of his own working methods. He even showed the grand duke his secret correspondence with Catherine.76 After six weeks as his guests, Paul and Maria Fëdorovna moved on to Italy, travelling semi-incognito as the count and countess of the North. After visiting Venice, Rome and Naples, they reached Florence as guests of Joseph’s brother. Having been irritated by Paul’s enthusiasm for the Venetian republic—it was easy enough for such a tiny state to put its affairs in order, she told him—Catherine was relieved to learn of his admiration for Archduke Leopold’s enlightened regime in Tuscany.77 Throughout their tour, which reached its climax with an adulatory reception in Paris at the beginning of May 1782, she kept in regular touch with her children, regaling them with news of their sons’ progress in her care. No less revealing are the letters sent to a member of Paul’s entourage, Prince Kurakin, by his former tutor, which tell us much about the rhythms of life at Court over the winter of 1781–2.78
In political terms, the autumn was uneventful. Despite public expectations of changes in the wake of Panin’s dismissal, there were no civic or military promotions either on Catherine’s name day or on St Andrew’s Day. For once the empress had resisted what Bezborodko called ‘her habit of making alterations’.79 He himself proved the only exception to the rule, continuing his inexorable rise by being placed in charge of the postal service on 1 December.
Meanwhile, the empress’s ‘hermitages’ continued on Thursdays and Sundays, despite a scare in late October when a lackey discovered three intruders under some matting in a vacant room. One turned out to be a deserter from the army, another a fugitive serf from Moscow. While the third escaped the guards, Catherine ordered her two prisoners to be handed over to the police to face the criminal courts. Her concern with justice remained undimmed. In an attempt to evade the delays about which delegates to the Legislative Commission had complained, the Provincial Reform had created ‘conscience courts’. The empress boasted to Grimm in 1776 that they were already ‘working wonders’ and would prove ‘the tomb of chicanery’.80 If that was a triumph of hope over expectation, new courts were soon hard at work as far away as Bashkiria, more in the manner of modern arbitration tribunals than of the English equity courts on which they may have been based. ‘Only those with no conscience would refuse to serve in a conscience court,’ Catherine insisted to her secretary in April 1782. And again in July: ‘The conscience court is the pulse showing the morals of each province.’81 To reinforce those morals, she had promulgated a lengthy Police Ordinance on 8 April—literally a ‘statute of good order’—which not only determined the procedures and punitive powers of urban police boards, but also embodied the Cameralist conception of ‘police’ as a rational, creative force for shaping her subjects’ behaviour. To that end, police boards were provided with a characteristic instruction, ‘The Mirror of the Police’, incorporating moral injunctions reminiscent of the empress’s Russian primer: ‘do not unto others what you would not wish to be done unto you’.82
While Catherine was at work on this new statute, the Court had embarked on its usual round of formal entertainments. Panin’s dismissal had cleared the way for Potëmkin to arrange suitable marriages for his nieces in the autumn of 1781. Not that he ever rele
ased his hold over them. Count Skavronsky soon discovered that his wedding on 5 September to Catherine Engelhardt had not ended her incestuous relationship with her uncle. Alexandra, who had replaced Praskovya Bruce in the empress’s affections, was married off to the forty-nine-year-old Count Branicki as a way of staking Potëmkin’s claims in Poland.83 No banquets followed these weddings, much to the irritation of the more elderly relatives, who were displeased to find old customs ignored. As a further sign of the passing of the generations, the ageing Hofmeisterin Countess Maria Rumyantseva, who had once danced with Peter the Great, was chosen to partner little Alexander at the ball on Catherine’s name day. Rumours that the Engelhardts’ eleven-year-old sister would be made a maid of honour turned out to be false. The St George’s Day ceremony was notable mainly for Catherine’s anger when Princess Repnin was the sole Court lady to appear in chapel. Already irritated by the low turnout earlier in the month—when her maids of honour had been happy to watch the banquet for the Semënovsky officers from the gallery, but not to attend mass—Catherine instructed the Hofmarshal to fine future absentees ten roubles. In that respect, she was no different from the Empress Elizabeth.
There was no difficulty in persuading courtiers to attend the theatre. Molière’s Georges Dandin was given on the main court stage on 2 November, a week after being performed in the Hermitage. Catherine did not attend the revival of Paisiello’s I filosofi immaginari, one of the few operas she had enjoyed. ‘It is full of sublime follies,’ she wrote after the first performance in 1779: ‘you can’t imagine what this musician does to gain the attention of organs which are the least sensitive to music and those organs are mine’.84 She was happier now with Ablesimov’s comic opera The Miller-Sorcerer, Cheat and Matchmaker, a byproduct of the increased interest in the peasant question provoked by Pugachëv. Derived from Rousseau’s Le devin du village, this overtly folksy piece had been the most popular work in the Russian repertoire for two years by the time it was given at the Hermitage on 21 October.85 That same month, a new public theatre opened opposite the Summer Garden for performances of Russian tragedy. As Picart reported to Kurakin:
The theatre is built in the new style, hitherto completely unknown in this country. The stage is very wide and high, whereas the hall for the spectators is made of three-quarters of a circle. There are no boxes, but apart from the benches in the stalls, there are three balconies, one above the other and running around the auditorium without interruption. The paintings are very beautiful and the view excellent when, on entering, you see the audience, sitting, as in ancient times, in an amphitheatre. Apart from the main entrance there are six more very roomy exits, built in such a way that the public can get out in a matter of minutes in case of fire. Everyone is very pleased with this exceptional and spacious new place of entertainment, which they owe to General Betskoy.86
Though the autumn of 1781 was one of the warmest in living memory, winter finally set in with a vengeance at the end of November. In the following week, it was so cold that Catherine had to close the imperial theatres and cancel her gatherings at the Hermitage. On 20 December, two coachmen were found dead in more than thirty degrees of frost. Nor was this the final trick that the weather had up its sleeve. Within a week of an unseasonal thaw in mid-January, the Court apothecary had dispensed medicine to more than 500 victims of a flu epidemic. Catherine herself succumbed at the end of the month, bringing the Court to a standstill for several days. Though she felt well enough on 3 February to attend her annual lunch with Stroganov, who had returned from Siberia in December with two ancient silver vases, dug up from his own salt mines, she did not linger long.87 Yet any thoughts of a permanent slowdown in middle age were soon dispelled. At Peterhof to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of her accession to the throne in June, she had lost none of her energy, as she emphasised to Grimm:
Would you like to know what I did the day I arrived here? I ran like a hare and at 11 o’clock, I duly went to mass, as if it were a Sunday. Then I gave an audience to M. de la Torre, whom I count among my old acquaintances, and to M. de la Hererra and Count Lacy, and then to the minister of Saxony. After that, I walked the length of the garden to the quayside in search of my lunch with M. Betskoy. After lunch, I took a launch to the admiralty; there I took some tar and gave three strokes of the hammer to each of two new 100-gun vessels that I had ordered to be built; then I got onto a ship with 74 guns which I ordered to be launched into the water once I was aboard. It took us towards the bridge over the Neva. There, having dropped anchor, we disembarked and got back into the launch to return to the admiralty, where we walked across to find a carriage to take us to the Master of the Horse’s country estate [Leventhal on the Peterhof road]. Having walked through his woods and his promenades, we dined and then arrived here at half-past midnight. So what do you say of a day like that? Wasn’t it packed? I assure you that everyone apart from me was exhausted.88
As if to symbolise her indomitable drive, Catherine finally unveiled Falconet’s statue of Peter the Great on 7 August 1782, a hundred years after his accession to the throne. Only the clergy were absent, perhaps still smarting that the Church had been unable to register its objections to the superhuman figure, twice as big as the tsar himself.89 ‘From Catherine II to Peter I’ was the lapidary motto, inscribed in Latin on the west-facing side of the pedestal and in Russian on the side facing east. Harris grasped the unspoken comparison immediately: ‘I could not avoid, during this ceremony, reflecting how impossible it was that any successor of Her Imperial Majesty who might, in some future day, erect a statue in commemoration of her great actions, ever should be so much superior to her, as she herself is superior to Peter the Great, both in the art of governing, and in that of making her people respected and happy.’90
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If Tsar Peter remained the single most powerful symbol of Russia’s superhuman potential, then the great flood of 1777 had offered a salutary reminder of the fragility of man’s triumph over nature. Woken by a gale at five o’clock on the morning of 10 September, Catherine gazed out from the Hermitage onto a scene resembling ‘the destruction of Jerusalem’.91 Rising almost eleven feet above its normal level, the swollen Neva had dumped a fleet of merchant vessels onto the embankment, leaving a forest of tangled masts prey to scavengers for timber. It subsequently emerged that the storm had felled hundreds of trees at both the Summer Palace and Peterhof; the Winter Palace cellars were flooded and its roof damaged; and dozens of the capital’s grandest buildings were severely disfigured.92 Though her first thought had been to summon her sentries to safety, more than a hundred of Catherine’s subjects lost their lives that night. ‘Where am I going to put the 100 gaolbirds taken prisoner by the water?’ she mused to Potëmkin. ‘In the House of Quarantine, I say, but I don’t know whether it is strong enough. The canals are alive, and fifteen faithful soldiers have sunk into them.’93
Even as it overflowed, the river was gradually being enclosed by granite embankments designed by Georg Veldten. Begun in 1763, this extraordinary project had reached the Summer Garden by 1770 but was still incomplete in 1777. Four years later, as her carriage snaked between the boulders littering the English Embankment, Elizabeth Dimsdale expressed a common prejudice by doubting that it would ever be finished: ‘the Russians are with great truth remarked to begin things with great spirit and for a little time go on very rapidly, then leave for some other object’.94 She did Catherine an injustice. In January 1780, the empress had charged General Bauer with dredging and redecorating the Fontanka with a budget of 2,372,650 roubles, payable in ten annual instalments. By 1787, much of the canal had been clad in stone under her watchful eye, despite a disconcerting demonstration by 400 peasant labourers, protesting against the miseries imposed on them by the merchant contractor.95 Ultimately, only the Admiralty wharf interrupted an elegant promenade stretching ten feet above the normal water line for several miles along the left bank of the Neva. Widely admired as ‘one of the most sumptuous ornaments of the city’, the embankment
was praised by foreign visitors as a ‘grand work, which, in regard to utility and magnificence’ could not ‘be paralleled except among the ruins of ancient Rome’.96
Classical models were no less prominent in Catherine’s mind in planning the redesign of Tsarskoye Selo, where she had advertised her intention ‘to summarise the age of the Caesars, the Augustuses, the Ciceros and such patrons as Maecenas and to create a building where it would be possible to find all these people in one’.97 In 1773, she had hoped that Charles-Louis Clérisseau would draw on his long residence in Rome to design a classical maison du jardin, but he disappointed her by proposing a gargantuan structure on the scale of Bazhenov’s abortive plans for the Moscow Kremlin.98 The architect ultimately entrusted with her dreams was Charles Cameron, a barely tested Londoner of Scottish descent who came to Russia to make his fortune in 1779. Over the next few years, Cameron and a small army of Russian and Scottish labourers created an elegant neoclassical gallery above the Roman baths on which he had written a treatise. ‘To drive you wild, monsieur le chevalier,’ Catherine boasted to Grimm in 1786, ‘I have to tell you that you will no longer be able to find me here after dinner, because apart from seven rooms garnished in jasper, agate, and real and artificial marble, and a garden right at the door of my apartments, I have an immense colonnade which also leads to this garden and which ends in a flight of stairs leading straight to the lake. So, search for me after that, if you can!’99