The Memoirs of Catherine the Great

by Catherine the Great

  Around this time, my chamber valet, Timofei Evreinov, gave me a letter from his former comrade Andrei Chernyshev, who had finally been freed and was passing near Moscow to go to the regiment in which he had been placed as a lieutenant. I treated this letter as I had the last one, and I sent him everything that he asked of me, and said not a word about it to the Grand Duke or any living soul.

  In the spring the Empress had us come to Perova, where we spent a few days with her at Count Razumovsky’s home.66 The Grand Duke and Monsieur Choglokov hunted almost daily in the woods with the master of the house. I read in my room, or else Madame Choglokova, when she was not playing cards, would keep me company out of boredom. She complained a great deal about the ennui that reigned in that house and about her husband’s continual hunts; he had become a passionate huntsman since he had been given a very beautiful English greyhound in Moscow. I learned from others that her husband was the laughingstock of all the other huntsmen and that he imagined and was made to believe that his Circe (this was his dog’s name) caught all the hares that were taken. In general, Monsieur Choglokov was quite ready to believe that everything that belonged to him was of a rare beauty and goodness. His wife, his children, his servants, his house, his food, his horses, his dogs—everything that he owned, though it was all very mediocre, was part of his self-love, and belonging to him, became incomparable in his eyes.

  One day at Perova I was seized by a headache so violent that I do not remember having had a comparable one in my life. The extreme pain gave me violent nausea, I vomited several times, and even footsteps in my room increased my pain. I remained in this state almost twenty-four hours and finally fell asleep. The following day I felt only weakness. Madame Choglokova took all possible care of me during this violent attack; in general my attendants, though placed around me by surely the most marked wickedness, within a very short time felt an involuntary benevolence for me, and when they were neither prompted nor newly incited, they acted against the principles of those who had employed them, and allowed themselves to follow the inclination that drew them toward me, or rather, toward the sympathy that I inspired in them. They never found me either sulky or bad-tempered, but always ready to respond to their smallest overtures. In all this my joyful manner served me very well, for all these Arguses were often amused by the remarks I made to them and gradually cheered up despite themselves.

  At Perova the Empress came down with a new attack of colic. She had herself transported to Moscow and we slowly proceeded to the palace that is only four versts from there. This attack did not last, and a short while later the Empress made a pilgrimage to Trinity Monastery.67 Her Imperial Majesty wanted to do these sixty versts on foot, and to this end she went to her house in Pokrovskoe. We took the road to the monastery and set up in a very small country house called Raiova that belonged to Madame Choglokova on that road, eleven versts from Moscow. The entire lodging consisted of a small salon in the middle of the house and two very small rooms to either side; our whole entourage was placed in tents pitched around the house. The Grand Duke had one tent there. I occupied one little room, Madame Vladislavova the other; the Choglokovs were in the other rooms. We took meals in the salon. The Empress did three or four versts on foot, then rested a few days. This trip lasted almost the entire summer. We went hunting every afternoon.

  When the Empress arrived at Taininskoe, which almost faces Raiova on the other side of the main road to Trinity Monastery, the Hetman Count Razumovsky, the younger brother of the favorite, who was living in his country home Petrovskoe, which was on the Petersburg road on the other side of Moscow, decided to come every day to our residence at Raiova. He was quite cheerful and about our age. We liked him very much; since he was the brother of the favorite, the Choglokovs received him readily into their home. His regular visits continued the entire summer, and we always saw him with joy. He dined and supped with us and after supper returned again to his estate; consequently he covered forty or fifty versts every day. About twenty years later, I one day decided to ask him what could have made him come like that to share the boredom and insipidness of our stay at Raiova back then, while his own house teemed daily with the best company then in Moscow. He replied to me without hesitating, “Love.” “But my God,” I said, “with whom could you have been in love at our place?” “With whom?” he asked. “With you.” I burst out laughing because my whole life I had never suspected it. Besides, he had been married for many years to a rich heiress from the Naryshkin family, whom the Empress had made him marry somewhat against his will, but with whom he seemed to get along well. Besides, it was known that all the prettiest ladies of the court and city fought for his attention, and he truly was a handsome man, very pleasant and with an original mind, and he had incomparably more intelligence than his brother, who nevertheless equaled him in beauty, and surpassed him in generosity and kindness.68 These two brothers were the best-loved favorites that I ever saw.

  Toward the feast of Saint Peter, the Empress told us to join her in Bratovshina. We went there immediately. Because I had spent all spring and part of the summer either hunting or else constantly outdoors, the house at Raiova being so small that we would spend most of the day in the surrounding woods, I arrived in Bratovshina overly sunburned and flushed. Upon seeing me, the Empress exclaimed at my redness and told me that she would send me a rinse to get rid of my sunburn. Indeed, she immediately sent me a vial with a liquid composed of lemon, egg white, and eau de vie from France. She ordered my ladies to learn the ingredients and proportions needed to make it. After a few days my burn disappeared, and since then I have always used this rinse and have given it to several people for use in similar circumstances. When the skin is overheated, I know of no better remedy. It also works for what is called in Russian лuшeŭ, in German flechten, and I do not recall for the moment the name in French, and which is nothing but an inflammation that makes the skin crack.†

  We spent the feast of Saint Peter at Trinity Monastery, and as there was nothing for the Grand Duke to do that afternoon, he decided to hold a ball in his room, where, however, there were only himself and two of his valets, and two ladies that I had with me, one of whom was more than fifty years old. From the monastery, the Empress went to Taininskoe, and we went once again to Raiova, where we led the same life as before.

  We stayed there until mid-August, when the Empress made a journey to Sophino, sixty or seventy versts from Moscow. We camped there. The day following our arrival at this place, we went to her tent; there we found her scolding the man who was in charge of this land. She had gone there to hunt and not found any hares. The man was pale and trembling, and there was no insult that she did not hurl at him; she was really furious. Seeing us approach to kiss her hand, she kissed us as usual, then continued to scold her man; in her anger she would attack whomever upset her or was present. She grew angrier by degrees and spoke with great volubility. Among other things, she began to say that she was very familiar with land management, and that the reign of Empress Anna had taught her about it, that having little, she knew how to avoid expenditures, that if she had had debts, she would have been afraid of damning herself, that if she had died with debts, no one would have paid them and that her soul would have gone to hell, which she did not want; that for this reason, when she was at home and when duty permitted, she wore very simple clothes, a white taffeta on top and cheap black cloth beneath, by which she saved money, and that she was not interested in wearing rich dresses in the country or while traveling. Now all this was aimed at me; I had on a dress of lilac and silver. I considered myself warned. This disquisition, which is what it was, to which no one replied a single word, seeing her red and burning with fury, lasted a good forty-five minutes. Finally one of her fools named Aksakov silenced her: he entered and brought her a little porcupine, which he presented to her in his hat. She approached him to look at it, and as soon as she had seen it, she let out a piercing cry and said that it looked like a mouse and fled as fast as she could into her tent because sh
e was mortally afraid of mice. We did not see her again; she dined in her tent, went hunting in the afternoon, and took the Grand Duke with her, and as for me, I was ordered to return with Madame Choglokova to Moscow, where the Grand Duke returned a few hours after me, since the hunt had been short because of the very strong wind that day.

  One Sunday the Empress had us come to Taininskoe from Raiova, to which we had returned, and we had the honor of dining there at the table with Her Imperial Majesty.69 She was alone at the end of the table, the Grand Duke to her right, I to her left, across from him; next to the Grand Duke was Marshal Buturlin, next to me Countess Shuvalova. The table was very long and narrow, the Grand Duke thus seated between the Empress and Marshal Buturlin, and with the help of the Marshal, who did not dislike alcohol, he drank so much that he got blind drunk, no longer knew what he was saying or doing, slurred his words, and made for such an unpleasant sight that tears came to my eyes, for I hid or disguised as much as possible what was reprehensible in him. The Empress was grateful for my sensitivity and left the table sooner than usual. His Imperial Highness was supposed to go hunting that afternoon with Count Razumovsky. He stayed at Taininskoe and I returned to Raiova.

  On the way, I came down with a terrible toothache. The weather began to get cold and humid, and there was almost nothing at Raiova except a roof. The brother of Madame Choglokova, Count Hendrikov, who was chamberlain in my service, proposed to his sister to heal me on the spot. I agreed to undergo his remedy, which did not seem to be anything at all, or rather perfect quackery. He immediately went into another room and brought out a very small roll of paper, which he told me to chew with the sore tooth. Hardly had I done what he had suggested than the pains in my tooth became so strong that I had to lie down in bed; I came down with a bad fever that was so high I became delirious. Frightened by my state and attributing it to her brother’s cure, Madame Choglokova scolded him severely. She did not leave my bed during the night; she sent word to the Empress that her house at Raiova was in no way fitting for someone who was as gravely ill as I seemed to her, and she carried on so much that the following day I was brought back to Moscow very sick. I was in bed ten or twelve days, and the pain in my tooth came back every afternoon at the same time.

  At the beginning of September, the Empress went to Ascension Monastery, where we were ordered to go for her name day. On that day, she named Monsieur Ivan Ivanovich Shuvalov gentleman of the bedchamber. This was an event at court; everyone whispered that he was a new favorite. I rejoiced at his promotion because when he was a page, I had noticed him as a person of promising diligence; one always found him with a book in hand. Back from this excursion, I fell ill with a terrible sore throat and high fever; the Empress came to see me during this illness. I had hardly begun to get better and was still very weak, when Her Imperial Majesty through Madame Choglokova ordered me to put the headdress on Countess Rumiantseva’s niece and attend her wedding to Monsieur Alexander Naryshkin, who afterward became the Grand Cupbearer. Madame Choglokova, who saw that I was just barely convalescing, was a bit pained when she told me of this compliment; it did not bring me much pleasure, because I saw clearly that my health and perhaps my life concerned others very little. I spoke about it in this way with Madame Vladislavova, who seemed to me as little pleased as I was by this order, given without consideration or attention. I gathered my strength, and on the day of the wedding, the bride was brought into my room; I crowned her with diamonds, and when this was done, she was taken to the court church to be married.70 For my part, I was made to go in the company of Madame Choglokova and my court to the Naryshkin’s house. Now, in Moscow we were staying in the palace at the end of the German Sloboda. To get to the Naryshkin’s house, one had to cross all of Moscow and cover at least seven versts. This was in October toward nine in the evening; it was freezing enough to crack stone, and the layer of ice was such that one could only advance with very small steps. It took me at least two and a half hours on the path both going and coming, and there was not a single man, nor a single horse in my entourage, that did not fall at least once. Finally arriving at Kazansky Church, near the gate known as Trinity, we encountered another problem. In this church, the sister of Ivan Ivanovich Shuvalov, who had been crowned by the Empress while I was putting the headdress on Mademoiselle Rumiantseva, was being married at the same time, and a whole tangle of carriages was at this gate.71 We would stop with each step, then the falling would begin again, since no horse was shod for the ice. Finally we arrived, not however in the best of moods. We waited a very long time for the newlyweds, who had endured more or less the same accidents as we had. The Grand Duke accompanied the young couple, then we continued to wait for the Empress. Finally we went to the banquet; after dinner we performed a few rounds of ceremonial dance in the room, then were told to lead the newlyweds to their apartment. To do this, we had to traverse several rather cold hallways, climb several staircases, which were no less cold, then pass through long galleries hastily constructed from wet planks, from which water dripped everywhere. Finally reaching the apartment, we sat at a table covered with desserts; we stayed only to toast the health of the newlyweds, then conducted the bride to the bedroom, and we departed to return home. The following evening we had to return there. Who would have believed that rather than harm my health, this ordeal in no way impeded my convalescence? The next day, I was better than I had been the day before.

  At the beginning of winter, I saw that the Grand Duke was in a very anxious state. I did not know why this was; he no longer trained his pack of hunting dogs; he came into my room twenty times a day with a very pained air, and was dreamy and distracted. He bought himself some German books, but what books? One set consisted of Lutheran prayer books, and the other of the history and trials of several highway robbers, who had been hanged or broken on the wheel. He read all this by turns when he was not playing the violin. Since he usually could not keep what was bothering him to himself for long, and he could tell no one but me, I waited patiently for him to talk about it. One day he finally revealed to me what was tormenting him. I found that the thing was infinitely more serious than I had supposed.

  During almost the entire summer, at least during our stay at Raiova and on the way to Trinity Monastery, I had hardly seen the Grand Duke except at meals and in bed. He came to bed after I had fallen asleep and got up before I awoke; he had passed the rest of the time almost entirely with hunting or with preparations for the hunt. Under the pretext of amusing the Grand Duke, Choglokov had obtained two packs of dogs from the Grand Master of the Hunt, the one of Russian dogs, and the other of French and German dogs, attached to which was an old French whipper-in, a boy from Courland, and a German. As Monsieur Choglokov had taken upon himself to run the Russian pack, His Imperial Highness took over management of the foreign pack, for which Choglokov cared not at all. Each of them managed in great detail everything regarding his enterprise. Consequently, His Imperial Highness himself went continuously to his pack’s kennel or else the huntsmen came to his residence to inform him of the state of the pack, of its conditions and needs, and to speak frankly, he worked his way into the company of these people, eating and drinking with them; on the hunt he was always in their midst.

  At that time the Butirsky regiment was in Moscow. In this regiment there was a lieutenant named Iakov Baturin, who was deeply in debt, a gambler, and known as a very bad fellow, and at the same time a very resolute man. I do not know by what chance or how this man became acquainted with the huntsmen of the French pack, but I believe that the one and the other had their quarters in or near the village of Mutishcha or Alexeevsky. Eventually it happened that the huntsmen told the Grand Duke that there was a lieutenant of the Butirsky regiment whom they knew who showed a great devotion to His Imperial Highness and who said that the entire regiment felt the same. The Grand Duke listened to this story with self-satisfaction, wanting to know from his huntsmen details about the regiment. He was told many bad things about the leaders and many good things about the
subordinates. Finally Baturin, still acting through the huntsmen, asked to be presented to the Grand Duke during the hunt. At first the Grand Duke was not entirely willing to do this, but eventually he consented. One thing led to another, and one day while the Grand Duke was hunting, Baturin waited in an isolated spot. Upon seeing him, Baturin fell to his knees swearing that he recognized no other master but him and would do all that he ordered. The Grand Duke told me that he, the Grand Duke, hearing this oath pronounced, was frightened by it and that he spurred his horse on and left the other man on his knees in the woods, and that the huntsmen who had introduced him had not heard what Baturin had said. The Grand Duke claimed that he had not had other contacts with this man, and that he had even warned the huntsmen to be careful lest this man bring them harm. His present worries arose from the fact that the huntsmen had come to tell him that Baturin had been arrested and transferred to Preobrazhenskoe, site of the Secret Chancery, which had jurisdiction over crimes against the state. His Imperial Highness trembled for the huntsmen and greatly feared being compromised. As for the huntsmen, his fears were soon realized, for he learned a few days later that they had been arrested and taken to Preobrazhenskoe. I tried to quell his anguish, telling him that if he had truly not entered into any discussion with that man other than what he was telling me, as guilty as the other man might be, I did not believe that one could find much to criticize in what he had done, and it seemed to me at most an imprudence to have fallen in with such bad company. I cannot say if he was telling me the truth; I have reason to believe that he played down what the discussions had been because to me personally he pronounced only a few short remarks on this affair rather reluctantly. However, the excessive fear that he felt could also have produced the same effect on him. Sometime later, he told me that the huntsmen had been released, but ordered across the border, and that they had let him know that they had not mentioned his name, which made him jump with joy; calm returned to his spirit, and there was no more talk of this affair. As for Ioasaf Baturin, he was found utterly guilty. I neither read nor witnessed his case, but I have since learned that he was planning nothing less than to kill the Empress, set fire to the palace, and by this horror and in this chaos, to carry the Grand Duke to the throne. After being tortured, he was condemned to spend the rest of his days at Shlusselburg locked in the fortress and during my reign, having tried to break out of prison, he was sent to Kamchatka, from which he escaped with Beniovsky, and he was killed while pillaging on the Island of Formosa in the Pacific Ocean.72