Catherine had been warned against him. Princess Gagarin disliked "le beau Serge," and Catherine usually listened to her. But in her unguarded state, her better judgment deserted her. There in the Choglokov's salon, warmed by wine and the heat of her youth, the philosopher who had sworn never to give in to her passions was caught in the silken snare of courtly love.
Chapter Ten
THE MINUET OF SEDUCTION LASTED FOR SEVERAL MONTHS. Sergei advanced and Catherine retreated. She saw him nearly every day, and as often as he could he told her how he dreamed of her and longed for her. She kept him at a distance, trying to avoid being alone with him, all the while feeling the delicious tension between them, the lure of the forbidden and the dangerous promise of delights to come.
There is no hint, in Catherine's own accounts of her liaison with Sergei, that she held back from encouraging him out of fear. The climate had changed: the Choglokovs were now so impatient to see that Catherine became pregnant that they were ready to persuade her to take a lover. The empress had altered their mandate. Where before they had been watchdogs, they were now to be matchmakers. Elizabeth could no longer afford to let the realm drift toward disaster; her nephew had to have a son and heir, and if, as everyone said, he could not father one, then his wife must become pregnant by another man. The Choglokovs were to make certain that this desired outcome occurred, and soon.
Who better to play the role of lover to the grand duchess than the handsome Sergei, who had made himself so agreeable and who was evidently enamored of Catherine? Maria spoke to Catherine, urged her to put aside her scruples concerning marital fidelity and yield to Saltykov. Meanwhile Nicholas, who had been in disgrace for seducing one of the waiting women, Mademoiselle Kosheliev, had begun to flirt with Catherine himself.
Peter was complaisant; he liked Sergei, and was enough of a voyeur to enjoy watching the suave courtier pursue his wife. He was not in the least possessive, and although the succession was not a matter of complete indifference to him, how his heir was begotten apparently was. He stood by and let events unfold.
So Sergei continued his suit, and, for a time, Catherine held firm, treating Sergei with neither more nor less courtesy than anyone else, teasing him when he gave her no peace with his ceaseless declarations of love. "How do you know I don't have my heart set on someone else?" she asked him, but instead of discouraging him this only made him more urgent in his pursuit.
Summer came, and the Young Court, as the grand duke and grand duchess's circle was known, began its peripatetic rounds. Nicholas Choglokov gave a hunting party on an island in the Neva, and a select group of courtiers, including Sergei, was ferried across to spend the day in the fields. As Catherine remembered it afterwards, Sergei "seized a moment when the others were off hunting hares and approached me about his favorite subject." She listened with more patience than usual while he spun out his plan for their secret happiness, and he, noting that for once she did not raise a thousand objections, took advantage of her silence to show her how much he loved her.
For an hour and a half, isolated in their quiet refuge, Catherine listened to Sergei, while the chill wind swept up from the river and swirled around them. He begged her to let him believe that she was not entirely indifferent to him, and she, while feigning amused tolerance, was lulled to acquiescence by his words. "He pleased me," she wrote, even though she laughed at his vanity and found his ceaseless wooing somewhat wearying. Probably she was curious about love; after seven years of sham marriage, living amid sexual intrigue that seemed to touch everyone but her, reading romances and observing the unrestrained eroticism of the empress, Catherine must have yearned to be initiated into the mysteries of sexual passion.
"At heart I was convinced," she confessed in her memoirs, though she was still sufficiently in command of herself to tell Sergei to go "because such a long conversation could be suspect. He told me that he wouldn't go, unless I told him that I found him acceptable."
"Yes, yes, but go away!"
"I consider it settled then," Sergei said as he spurred his horse and rode off.
"No, no," she called out after him.
"Yes, yes," he shouted, his voice fading.
"So we parted," Catherine wrote, though it was with mixed feelings that she returned to the hunting lodge on the island to face Peter and the others. "A thousand worries filled my head that day and I was very cross with myself and discontented. I had thought that I could govern and discipline his head and my own, and now I understood that both our inclinations were difficult if not impossible to govern."
The elements too were wayward. As the company was eating supper the wind increased, and a storm blew in from the Baltic. The waters rose, the entire island was flooded and the lower floor of the hunting lodge was inundated, waves lapping at the staircase. Servants and masters alike were forced to take refuge in the upper story and wait for the storm to die down—which it finally did toward dawn.
Sergei, stranded with his beloved, was exultant. "The heavens themselves are favorable!" he declared, and strutted gleefully among the bedraggled courtiers, the image of the triumphant lover. The meaning of his elation was not lost on Peter, who commented to his valet soon afterward that Sergei and Catherine were "fooling Choglokov" and carrying on behind his back. Peter's current love was Catherine's waiting woman Martha Shafirov, and it could not have escaped his shrewd notice—as it did Catherine's—that Sergei was carrying on more than one intrigue, pursuing both Peter's wife and Martha's sister Anna at the same time.
Sergei Saltykov's seduction of Grand Duchess Catherine was not merely tolerated but welcomed. The Choglokovs, realizing that Catherine might soon become pregnant with her lover's child, took steps to ensure that the child could be passed off as legitimate. To silence the rumors that Peter was still a virgin, Maria found an accommodating widow, Madame de Groot, who taught him what he needed to know. Peter's initiation into sex was publicized, and the stage was set for Catherine to ensure the succession.
Some time in the fall of 1752 Catherine conceived a child. Her memoirs are silent about these early months of her affair with Sergei—who was almost certainly the child's father. Whether love brought her elation, fulfillment, anguish, or perhaps disillusionment we cannot know. She did record that Sergei did not prove to be a steadfast, devoted lover; he was at times moody and distracted, he was only sporadically attentive to her (his romantic attentions were after all divided, as Catherine was later to discover), and his arrogance and conceit annoyed her. When she told him so he spouted a stream of persiflage and, drawing himself up to his full aristocratic height, accused her of failing to understand him. She was, after all, only a minor German princess by birth while he was a highborn Russian nobleman.
In mid-December the empress ordered the court to travel from Petersburg to Moscow. Catherine prepared to make the journey, but Sergei stayed behind with Maria Choglokov, who had just given birth and would not be fit to travel for several more weeks. Catherine had reason to suspect that she herself was pregnant, but decided to risk the rough roads to Moscow anyway. The going was hard, the road was cratered with deep ruts and jutting rocks. Instead of taking an easy pace, the drivers whipped the horses to a gallop and sped onward, day and night. Catherine was violently shaken and jostled, and when the traveling party reached the last coaching station before the capital she was seized with cramping pains. She lost the child.
Her recovery was lonely and uncomfortable. Lodged in Moscow in a new and carelessly built wing of the Golovin Palace, where the scuffling of rats kept her awake at night and water dripped ceaselessly down the panelled walls, making the rooms steamy with humidity, she tried to console herself for her loss and to think kindly of her absent lover. When Sergei at last arrived from Petersburg, he avoided her. Moscow was a large city, Sergei told Catherine; he had many friends and relatives to see there, and they lived at great distances from one another. Sergei was practiced at dissimulation, and he succeeded in throwing Catherine into confusion. "To tell the truth," she wr
ote in her memoirs, "I was afflicted, but he gave me such good and plausible reasons that when I saw him and spoke to him my dire thoughts vanished."
Having just suffered a miscarriage, and aware, however much she tried to deny it to herself, that her lover's ardor was cooling, Catherine suffered through the dark winter days, ordering screens put up in the room she shared with her seventeen waiting women in order to create at least an illusion of privacy. She read, she endured Peter's unwelcome intrusions and complaints, she watched the rats scurry in and out of the worm-eaten wainscot-ting and waited for Sergei's occasional visits.
She knew that she was more vulnerable than ever, now that she had—albeit for the best of reasons—betrayed her marriage vows. She needed a protector, and turned to the aging Chancellor Bestuzhev.
Much had changed since Catherine's initial encounters with the chancellor, when she first came to Russia nine years earlier. Then Bestuzhev had seen Catherine as a pawn of the pro-French faction at the imperial court, a young and dangerously precocious girl whose elevation to the rank of grand duchess he opposed. Now he saw her as an intelligent, potentially valuable political ally, handicapped by her failure to have a child yet astute beyond her years thanks to wide reading and shrewd observation.
And the chancellor stood in need of allies. He clung to his post though the empress was at best lukewarm toward him and her current favorites, the Shuvalovs, were doing their best to maneuver him out of office. When the empress died he would need the approbation of her successor, and if Peter succeeded her then Bestuzhev would value the support of Peter's wife, who was likely to be a dominant force in the new regime. It was clear to the chancellor, as it was to the grand duchess, that they stood in need of one another; both welcomed a rapprochement.
Bestuzhev granted the benefit of his aid and protection to Catherine and Sergei, becoming "very intimate with us," as Catherine wrote, "without anyone else knowing anything." Throughout the winter, while the courtiers spent themselves at balls and masquerades, in pursuing petty rivalries and romantic intrigues (Nicholas Choglokov embarked on a dangerous attempt to seduce the ailing empress while Maria Choglokov carried on an affair with Prince Repnin), Catherine met with Bestuzhev and drew him surreptitiously into her circle.
There were many diversions that winter. Apart from the usual ice sledding and sleighing parties, toboggan races and skating on the frozen lakes and ponds, there was at least one near-fatal duel and numerous accidents. Fires broke out all over Moscow. Catherine recalled looking out the palace window and seeing three, four or even five blazes going on in different quarters of the city at the same time. The empress narrowly escaped serious injury while on one of her pilgrimages to a nearby convent. Lightning struck the main church and the ceiling fell in; fortunately Elizabeth had left the main sanctuary and was worshiping at a smaller chapel on the convent grounds at the time.
The empress developed a new interest. When one of her chamber lackeys went mad, foaming at the mouth and raging, she turned him over to Dr. Boerhave and instructed the doctor to house him in a special room in the palace. From then on, when she heard of anyone who was similarly afflicted, she had that person brought to court and made a part of her small asylum. By the end of the winter she had quite a collection of lunatics: a major in the Semenovsky guards who confused the Shah of Persia with the deity; two other guards officers who had lost their reason; a monk—possibly a religious fanatic—who had cut off his genitals with a razor, and several others. The Semenovsky officer interested her the most, for apart from his delusion concerning the Shah he seemed quite sane. Elizabeth decided to take him out of Dr. Boerhave's care and turn him over to the priests. When the latter declared that he was possessed by a demon and performed the ritual of exorcism, the empress attended it, and was disappointed when the major, seemingly unaffected, continued to cling to his error.
Some said that the grand duke belonged in the imperial madhouse. He drank more heavily than ever, beat his servants mercilessly and lived in his own puerile world. He stayed away from Catherine, he complained about her and insulted her freely, yet he relied on her to help him administer his Holstein lands and to keep his servants in line. It irritated him, Catherine wrote, that he could not make himself obeyed even when he thrashed those who served him, while Catherine's servants carried out her commands without having to be told twice.
One day Catherine went to Peter's apartments and was struck by the sight of a huge rat hanging from a makeshift gallows erected inside a cupboard. The rat, Peter informed his wife, had committed a criminal act and, under the military code, deserved execution. It had chewed its way into one of Peter's toy fortresses and had eaten several of the tiny soldiers on parade there. The laws of war were harsh, Peter said. They demanded that the rat be captured, hanged, and left on the gallows for three days as an example to other rats who might be tempted to harm the ducal host.
Spring came, and in May Catherine was once again pregnant with Sergei Saltykov's child. With the arrival of good weather the Young Court left Moscow for Labritza, an estate some eight or nine miles away. The empress had recently given the property with its rundown stone mansion to Peter, and he had ordered a new wooden wing added to the crumbling stone of the old house. But the new addition was not yet ready, and so the guests slept in tents on the grounds.
Catherine, it seems, took only slightly more care to safeguard this pregnancy than she had her previous one. She lodged in a drafty tent, her sleep interrupted before dawn each morning by the sawing and hammering of workmen, her days spent following the hunt in an open carriage. On her return to Moscow a few weeks later she drowsed her way through the long summer days, but stayed up at night attending balls and suppers, and did not spare herself when it came to either food or recreation. As a result she was seized with sudden pains in her lower back, and when Maria Choglokov brought a midwife to examine her the midwife predicted that she would miscarry.
Once again Catherine lost her child, but this time the physical consequences were severe. The embryo was expelled, but part of the afterbirth remained, and for several weeks it was feared that Catherine might not survive. The gravity of her condition was kept from her, but she must have guessed that something was very wrong; the empress, that distant, disapproving being whom she rarely saw, suddenly appeared at her bedside with her most cherished relics in her hand and a look of concern on her jowly face.
The succession—and for a time, Catherine's life—hung in the balance, yet both Peter and Sergei stayed away, and after her initial visit so did the empress. For a time prayers were said and candles lit at the altars of Moscow's churches, but when the crisis passed and the grand duchess did not die she was left very much alone.
"During my six weeks of enforced rest," Catherine wrote in her memoirs, "I died of boredom. I had only Maria, and she came rarely, and a little Kalmuk, whom I loved, because she was amiable. I often cried from boredom." The days were unbearably hot, the nights fretful. Ill and full of ennui, in pain a good deal of the time, Catherine craved relief, stimulation, attention. She may have felt keenly the loss of contact with her mother, who following the death of Christian August had gone to live in Paris. She was forbidden to communicate with Johanna, but once in a long while she managed to find a traveler who would carry a letter to her in secret, and occasionally a visitor from the West smuggled in a reply. A year earlier, in 1752, Johanna had managed to send Catherine several lengths of rich fabric from Paris, but Maria had confiscated them immediately—leaving Catherine speechless with anger—and had sent them to the empress.
By fall 1753 Catherine was out of bed and restored to health, but her spirits were no brighter. She had failed twice to carry a child to term, and at great cost in security and peace of mind. She had let the callous Sergei toy with her emotions, trusting him and then discovering that he was unreliable, moody and at times alarmingly cool. The game of courtly love was proving to be sordid and anguishing, bruising to the heart and damaging to the ego. Yet Catherine had to continue
to play it, she had no choice. There had to be an heir, and Sergei had to provide it.
Catherine was sitting in the Choglokov's salon in the Golovin Palace one chilly afternoon in November when she heard shouting in the corridor outside. Sergei and Leon Naryshkin burst in, yelling that a wing of the palace was on fire.
Catherine jumped up and ran to her own rooms, where her servants were rushing to remove as many of the furnishings as they could. Thick choking smoke was rapidly filling the hallways and anterooms, and the balustrade of the grand staircase, only twenty feet from Catherine's apartments, was already on fire. Room after room was consumed, flames devoured the rotting wood and made a terrible searing heat. As Catherine watched, thousands of black rats and gray mice filed in orderly fashion down the staircase and out to the safety of the courtyard.
Maria Choglokov and Catherine picked their way among the rats and mice and ran out of the palace, taking refuge in a carriage belonging to the Spanish singing master while they watched the terrible destruction. It had been raining for days, and the palace courtyard was ankle-deep in mud. Coughing servants struggling under the weight of trunks, boxes, beds and piles of linen staggered out into the open air and dropped their burdens into the mire, grateful to be out of danger. Catherine watched her domestics salvage her clothes, her jewels, a few of her desks and tables. She was worried about her books. For two years she had been reading Bayle's Dictionary, that monument to irreverence and sharply reasoned skepticism written in the last years of the previous century, and had been savoring each entry as she had once savored the astringent rationalism of Babette Cardel. She possessed four volumes of the dictionary, and feared to lose them to the flames. To her delight, her servants brought her the beloved books unscathed, and she felt immense relief.
Much was saved, but much more was lost. Paintings, hangings, priceless plate, furniture of inlaid wood and marble, jewel-studded gowns and untold finery fed the hungry blaze, until the entire palace was consumed. Peter's lackeys managed to save some of his chests of uniforms and trunks full of toy soldiers. His dozens of cupboards, stuffed full of empty wine and liqueur bottles, now lay in heaps exposed to the rain, their doors ajar to reveal the grand duke's private horde.
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