Great Catherine

by Erickson, Carolly, 1943-

  Every summer Peter and Catherine stayed for a time at Ora-nienbaum, the magnificent estate near Peterhof just outside of Petersburg which the empress had given them as a summer residence. There the grand duke had an opportunity to bring his military fantasies to life on a larger scale, with Catherine observing from the sidelines. All the household servants—maids, sweepers, cooks, turnspits, valets, chamberlains, pages—were assembled into a regiment, along with the gardeners, grooms and huntsmen. Each became a soldier, and was issued a uniform of sorts and a musket. Peter drilled his troops every day, rain or shine, calling out commands in his high voice and threatening to punish the disobedient. The mansion itself became a guard house, its lower floor a guard room where the troops passed their days when they were not on parade. At midday the mock soldiers had to eat at the mess and in the evening, still wearing their makeshift uniforms, they had to attend balls devised by Peter, where Catherine and a half-dozen of the women of her suite and Peter's waited to dance with them.

  At these balls, Catherine wrote, "among the women, there were only me, Madame Choglokov, Princess Repnin, my three waiting women, and my chamber women. So the ball was very thinly populated and badly arranged. The men were harassed and in a bad humor because of their continuing military exercises."

  Everyone fumed, grew irritated, bored and restless. All except Peter—who was in his element.

  But Peter had in mind even more ambitious schemes. While pacing the floor in her room he shared with Catherine his vision of building a fanciful monastery where they and their servants and courtiers could live, dressing as monks and nuns in plain habits of coarse brown cloth. They would need little in the simple life he envisioned, only the most basic foodstuffs, which they could fetch themselves, riding on donkeys to the nearest farm.

  It was a dream of simplicity, peace and ease, the dream of a troubled young man besieged by the opulence and hothouse atmosphere of his aunt's brilliant court. Like Marie Antoinette a generation later, Peter yearned for authenticity amid artificiality. Antoinette built her rustic refuge on the grounds of the palace of Versailles. Peter, however, could not muster the tenacity to build his, though he kept Catherine busy drawing sketches for the building itself. Or perhaps he was tenacious, but in the end was thwarted by the implacable empress.

  By the time she and Peter had been married for two years, Catherine felt that she had earned a good deal of affection and trust from him. He came to her in tears when he felt bereft, he sought her out when the empress chided him, he looked to her for consolation. It was to Catherine that Peter confided that his great love, a Mademoiselle Lapushkin, had been snatched from him when her mother was exiled to Siberia. It had been Mademoiselle Lapushkin that he had wanted to marry, losing her had broken his youthful heart. But he had resigned himself to marrying Sophie, because she was his cousin, she had German blood—a great benefit in his eyes—and besides, he liked her.

  Touched at times by Peter's ingenuousness and candor, and full of pity for him, Catherine felt an unmistakable tenderness toward her peculiar husband, though it was more maternal than wifely. She endured his mistreatment, and was tolerant of his whims, she encouraged his love of music (he had a good ear, and Prince Repnin engaged violin teachers for him), she played billiards with his chamberlains while he drank and disported himself in an adjacent room with his serving men. She sat patiently while he put on plays in his marionette theater ("the spectacle was the most insipid thing in the world," she later wrote), and conspired with his valets to bring him meat to eat during Lent, when he was supposed to be eating only mushrooms and fish.

  Despite the tensions inherent in her situation, her worries over her unconsummated marriage, the constant scrutiny of her chaperon and of Madame Kraus, and the anxiety caused her by the empress's increasing disapproval, Catherine managed to find times of quiet domesticity and fleeting intimacy with Peter. Once in a while a troupe of young people, among them Count Pierre Divier, Alexander Galitzyn, Alexander Trubetskoy, Sergei Saltykov, and Pierre Repnin, Prince Repnin's nephew, would come bounding into her apartments, led by Peter, flushed with wine and in high spirits. There would be an impromptu party, with none of the guests over thirty years old. The wine flowed freely, Catherine joined happily in the games and horseplay and dancing, and she and Peter both were able to forget for a few hours the burdens that weighed on them and the responsibilities that they were failing to fulfill.

  Or Peter came alone to Catherine's rooms, bringing a gift or a game for them to play. He once brought her a wriggling black puppy, only six months old. "It was the most amazing little beast I ever saw," she remembered, for it liked to walk on its hind legs and dance absurdly around the room. Her servants fell in love with it, and named it Ivan Ivanovich. They dressed it in mobcaps, shawls and skirts and watched with delight while it pranced and jumped.

  Such scenes were rare, however, and became rarer with each passing month, while occasions of abuse and humiliation increased. Peter gave Catherine much more discomfort and pain than pleasure, keeping a dozen of his hunting dogs confined next to her bedroom so that their revolting smell made her gag all night long, quarreling with her and threatening her, tormenting her with his infatuations—no longer confined to the ladies in waiting, but now including middle-aged women old enough to be his mother—and flaunting his amours before the whole court, causing the gentlewomen to smile behind their fans or shake their heads in pity when Catherine walked by. He even occasionally struck Catherine when other forms of torment failed to elicit a satisfying response, though he did this most often after a long evening spent with the bottle.

  Peter's drinking was at best a source of embarrassment, at worst a menace. He drank at the empress's table, he drank at balls and suppers and concerts, he drank with his menials, and when they lost their wits to such an extent that they treated him as one of themselves, he beat them. He drank in secret, in private, and hid his bottles in old cupboards and behind screens. He liked to goriding when tipsy through the Preobrazhensky woods on one of his fine horses, wearing the uniform of a Prussian general. Immense crowds gathered to watch him, hoping to catch a glimpse of their future emperor, only to be repelled by the sight of him, swaying from side to side on his horse, grimacing and twitching like an idiot.

  Though he had made his best effort, Prince Repnin had not succeeded in taming the grand duke and making him into something resembling a polished, cultivated nobleman. Bestuzhev and the empress were not satisfied. Another guardian had to be found.

  Maria Choglokov's husband, Nicholas, who had joined Peter's household with the rank of chamberlain some months earlier, was now appointed to be his guardian. Handsome in a heavy, ponderous way, and tremendously proud of having married the empress's cousin, Nicholas Choglokov strutted through Peter's apartments, his cuffs dripping with lace and his shoe buckles gleaming with diamonds, making empty remarks and imagining that they were received with admiration, his one decoration— the Order of the White Eagle—conspicuously displayed on his puffed-up chest.

  "He thought himself extremely handsome and witty," Catherine wrote. "In fact he was conceited, foolish, full of self-importance, disdainful and at least as malicious as his wife." Choglokov imagined that Peter could be controlled by sheer brute force, and in fact he succeeded in making himself feared. But Peter, who was far cleverer than his new guardian, continued to find ways to get around him and, at nineteen, was too old to be tamed.

  Life went on as before, with Maria keeping Catherine in tow and Nicholas issuing orders to Peter, both Choglokovs making themselves universally disliked. Yet their joint efforts were in vain. For all their vigilance, smothering and brute coercion, they had not been able to bring closer the empress's greatly desired goal: that Catherine should become pregnant.

  The seasons came and went, the court moved from Moscow to Petersburg, and from Petersburg to Moscow again. During one lull between official celebrations Peter planned a diversion, a masquerade ball, to be held in Catherine's apartments even though Catherin
e was feverish and had a severe headache. He ordered his long-suffering servants and Catherine's servants to put on costumes and masks, and made them dance around the sofa on which she reclined while he scratched away on the violin. He too danced, carried away by his own playing and exhilarated at having created a miniature, toylike world, a court ball in microcosm.

  But Catherine, who had put on a masquerade costume to placate her husband, stayed where she was on her sofa, too ill and dispirited to join in. She was weary of her role as playmate and nursemaid, weary of serving as Peter's whipping boy and scapegoat while struggling to keep her dignity as grand duchess.

  She had recently been wounded to the quick when news arrived from Anhalt-Zerbst that her beloved father, Christian August, was dead. The news upset her far more than anyone around her had anticipated it would. Christian August, that upright, limited but honest princeling, as remote in temperament and character from the eccentric Russians as his principality was from the Russian Empire, was no longer there for Catherine to turn to. Johanna had been gone for many months, and Maria no longer allowed Catherine even to write to her. Now her father too was denied her, not by her malicious guardian but by an unkind fate.

  "They let me cry for eight days as much as I wanted," Catherine wrote in her memoirs, recalling the painful time after she learned of her father's death, "but at the end of the eight days Madame Choglokov came to tell me that I had cried enough, that the empress ordered me to end my tears, that my father was not a king."

  She answered, through her tears, that even though he was not of royal rank he was still her father, and she grieved for him. Maria was adamant.

  "It is not appropriate for a grand duchess to cry longer than eight days for a father who was not a king," she insisted, and ordered Catherine to end the isolation she had imposed on herself and re-enter court society. She was allowed to wear mourning, but only for six weeks; after that she would have to conduct herself as if her loss had never happened.

  During her weeks of mourning the chancellor stirred up trouble by having one of his servants spread a false tale about Catherine. According to the rumor, the grand duchess had been insulted when she did not receive formal letters of condolence from all the foreign ambassadors at Elizabeth's court. The story put Catherine in a bad light, making her seem haughty and arrogant. When the empress heard it she summoned Maria and ordered her to scold Catherine, and the latter, spent with grieving, had somehow to muster the stamina to defend herself. She was able to expose the tale—and the talebearer—and in the end the empress saw that she had been deceived.

  But the damage was done, and even though the lying servant came to Catherine and apologized, it was too late to assuage the injury. And in any case, Bestuzhev and his petty incursions were pinpricks compared to the deep sorrow that now assailed Catherine and weighed her down. The bulwark of her childhood, her father, the narrow, upright soldier who had always told the truth and done his duty manfully, and who had hesitated to send her so far away from home, was no longer there to run to. In the throes of her grief Catherine must have reflected that her late father had been everything that the perfidious, treacherous court of Empress Elizabeth was not: straightforward, blunt, authentic. How she must have longed for his bluff yet comforting presence as she reclined on her sofa, drained and disheartened, watching her reckless husband cavort like one demented at his make-believe ball.

  Chapter Nine

  I WAS NEVER WITHOUT A BOOK, NEVER WITHOUT SORROW, but always without happiness." So Catherine described her life as she ended her teens and entered her early twenties. "My situation was assuredly not among the most happy; I was as it were isolated from the world of the court. However, I had grown used to it." She had her reading, and books were her salvation, forming her mind and fortifying her temperament. She had her health, despite bouts of depression and hypochondria and long hours spent in unheated churches from which she returned frozen and miserable, "blue as a plum." Her sense of the absurd bubbled up at the oddest times, often in the midst of the most crushing sadness, and observers often saw merriment in her untamed blue eyes.

  Quicksilver shifts of mood, from playfulness to sober concentration to the most poignant grief, allowed Catherine to adapt to the bizarre emotional polarities in her environment, and gradually the world began to seem less bleak. By 1750, when she was twenty-one, she was aware that she was crying less than in previous years, and that her "cheerful humor" served her well. "I am a philosopher as much as I can be," she wrote in a letter to Johanna—a forbidden letter, which had to be smuggled out of Russia—"and I will not give in to my passions."

  Day to day she continued to be trapped in a stifling round of dreary encounters with dull people, spending her mornings reading and studying, reading more while her hair was dressed by Timofei Ievrenef or one of the other servants, paying a brief visit to Peter or receiving one from him—gritting her teeth all the while, and wishing it were over—and then, at eleven-thirty, dressing for the public part of the day. In her antechamber were her maids of honor and the decorative, often shallow men whom the empress placed in her suite as "cavaliers in service." Catherine sought out Princess Gagarin, who was witty and amusing, but was gracious to the others, even though their companionship was far from scintillating through the course of the long midday meal. Maria and Nicholas Choglokov presided over the dinner table, "taking great pains to ensure that the conversation didn't stray" and squelching all entertaining diversions; frequently Peter upset all the diners by starting an argument or provoking the Choglo-kovs with some outrageous prank.

  The afternoon was devoted to more reading, walking in the gardens or whiling away time with Princess Gagarin and Maria Choglokov. Maria had softened considerably toward Catherine and now cultivated her friendship. The princess was lively and could follow the course of Catherine's agile mind, but she was constantly reminding Catherine of her predicament. Princess Gagarin had another drawback: she was avid for luxury and the hothouse society of Moscow and Petersburg, while Catherine preferred the country with its simplicity and peace and its opportunities for recreation.

  When evening came Catherine had supper with the same group of courtiers who had bored her at dinner, after which she went to her apartments and read until she retired. Peter still came to her bed, often quite drunk, occasionally antagonistic and abusive. But he never tried to make love to her, and she was growing more and more certain that he was unable to. Adept though he was at humiliating her by his infatuations, she was convinced that he was incapable of physical love, at least for the present, and this made his incessant amours hollow, even grotesque.

  There was an element of farce in his intense passion for the tiny, hunchbacked Duchess of Courland, Elizabeth's chief maid of honor, in 1750. With her small distorted body, dark complexion and heavy German accent, the duchess was hardly a beauty and could not compare to the tall, robust Catherine whose dazzling white skin and slender grace were much admired. Yet Peter, as Catherine had observed for years, was never put off by physical deformity—in this he reminded Catherine of her uncle Adolf, King of Sweden, who "never had a mistress who wasn't hunchbacked or one-eyed or lame"—and he was so enamored of the duchess that he dogged her footsteps, fixed his gaze on her and praised her to the skies, especially when Catherine was there to hear him.

  Catherine did her best to shrug off her husband's remorseless insults but admitted in her memoirs that they began to undermine her vanity and her sense of self. That the misshapen, monstrous little Duchess of Courland should be preferred to her seemed an outrage, and though she tossed her head and tried to ignore Peter's goads—and her own servants' expressions of shock and anger on her behalf—she could not help but feel wounded. Meanwhile Peter, not content with one love object, carried on a second flirtation when the hunchbacked duchess was out of sight. He cornered a young Greek maid ("as pretty as a heart," Catherine thought) in a room adjacent to Catherine's bedchamber and remained closeted with her there for the whole of one day and part of the night, q
uite aware that Catherine lay in her bed on the other side of the thin wall, tossing with fever and hearing every sound they made.

  'This was a passing attachment," Catherine wrote later, "and didn't go beyond the eyes." She got over her fever, Peter got over the Greek maid and the Duchess of Courland, and life went on. Catherine became "very cheery," laughing at her Finnish servant Catherine Voinova who put a cushion under her skirt and waddied heavily through the room in a convincing imitation of the ever-pregnant Maria Choglokov. Catherine herself developed her gift for mimicry and made everyone, even the self-important Nicholas Choglokov, laugh when she snuffled like a pig and screeched like an owl. Her noisy antics drew a crowd, she warmed to the applause and carried on even more noisily. Maria Choglokov's brother-in-law, Count Hendrikov, who had been away from court for a year, remarked on the change in the grand duchess and told her that her performance "quite turned his head." Starved for approval, Catherine took the compliment to heart and repeated it for days afterward.

  Catherine's exuberant physicality helped to buoy her spirits. Though pent up over the long winter months, except for toboggan rides and indoor games, in the summer she was able to exercise her muscles and vent her energies in a variety of pastimes. No longer subject to the close scrutiny of the empress, who for the most part followed her own pursuits and only fitfully intruded into Catherine's life, she was able to go riding as often and for as long as she liked, sometimes spending all day galloping across the fields.

  "I was passionately fond of riding and I was indefatigable," Catherine wrote, recalling her early twenties. Her hypochondria retreated, she woke each day eager for sport. She liked to hunt hares at Nicholas Choglokov's estate near Moscow, galloping at full tilt along the edge of the swampy meadows in pursuit of her prey. She had her tailor make her silk riding habits with crystal buttons, and with them she wore a black hat trimmed with diamonds. The costume did not wear well; the silk wilted and cracked when it rained, and became faded when exposed to the hot sun. The tailor complained that new riding habits were always being demanded of him, and chided the grand duchess, but nothing could make Catherine give up her glorious hours in the saddle.