Her letter to Grimm complete, the empress turned to another of her interests and read for a while. She wore spectacles and also used a large magnifying glass to read. ("Our sight has been blunted by long service to the state," she liked to tell people, using the imperial "we.") She enjoyed reading classic French plays, and was avid for anything to do with ancient languages, particularly languages spoken within the borders of her empire. She liked astronomy. She once idly asked Grimm whether, "when the material of which the planets are made was detached from the sun," the sun was diminished in size. To the end of her life she went on reading about law, and legal philosophy, though other preoccupations tended to push such reflective reading aside.
Her intense hatred for the Jacobins, the Paris radicals who had taken command of the political changes in France, became stronger every year. With their lust for egalitarianism the Jacobins had presided over the Terror, that orgy of carnage during which thousands of innocent people had been guillotined. The Jacobins had ordered the executions of Louis XVI and his wife, and were keeping their only son in a dank prison. The Jacobins, Catherine believed, were out to change the world, they wanted to kill all monarchs and all aristocrats everywhere. In her view they were rabid dogs who ought to be shot, poisoned, exterminated.
Pausing in her studies, Catherine got up from her desk and walked to the window, opening it long enough to toss handfuls of bread crumbs to the ravens perched on the icy ledge outside. The cold bit into her face and hands, and she quickly closed the window again. Then, sighing, she rang the little bell that sat on her desk to summon her chamberlain Zotov.
For the next several hours she talked with her secretaries and with the chief of police, who gave her the latest information about suspected Jacobin subversives in Moscow and Petersburg, suspected assassins, and other criminals. She was so anxious to prevent any radical French ideas from gaining a foothold in her domains that she forbade the sale of revolutionary calendars (which did away with the traditional names of the months and substituted poetic, naturalistic names) and of red hats such as the Jacobins wore.
Last of all Count Zubov was ushered in, the chamberlain bowing low to him and all others giving way before his authority. He wore a silk frock coat sewn with large sequins along all the seams, white satin trousers and green boots. His pet monkey trailed along behind him, now climbing on him, now jumping from bed to desk to cupboard.
No longer the gentle, grateful young guardsman, Zubov had become a major figure in Catherine's government, a lieutenant-general, with his own chancery and his own staff of clerks and officials. Zubov had learned a great deal since taking over Mamo-nov's post; he had assumed most of Potemkin's former powers, along with Potemkin's former apartments in the palace. Because of his influence, and his perceived hold over the empress, Zubov was widely condemned for his "uncommon hauteur."
The courtiers had hated Potemkin, but they had been forced to acknowledge his idiosyncratic genius. Zubov, by contrast, they regarded as contemptible without possessing any countervailing merit at all. He was dull, thick-witted and boorish. The empress, foolishly besotted with him, called him brilliant, and heaped on him responsibilities far beyond his capacity. ("I am doing a great service to the state by educating young men," she told one official, who passed along her comment to others later with a knowing laugh.)
In truth Zubov was a hardworking but plodding civil servant, who, according to one relatively clear-sighted overserver, "tortured himself with his struggles over documents, having neither the quickness of mind nor the capacity of understanding which alone could move such a terrific burden." He was a novice, encumbered with a master's tasks. Too often he failed to live up to Catherine's overly high expectations. Still, he had more than enough power to make others cringe, and he defended himself ably against all attacks.
At noon Catherine's elderly hairdresser entered the room. He swiftly combed out the empress's thinning white hair, twisting it into a simple knot with a few small curls behind the ears. The empress's four maids, all of them older than she was, prepared her toilette. One handed her a cup so that she could rinse out her mouth. Her teeth were gone, and her mouth and jaw had gone slack, coarsening her appearance somewhat. Yet the whiteness of her hair, and her relatively unlined face and pink complexion gave her a pleasing appearance.
The maids brought in her day-dress, a flowing white underskirt, a dark apron, and wide pleated sleeves. She preferred dark gray or mauve aprons, and wore them each day as a kind of uniform. Wearing the same thing every day made for efficiency— her entire toilette occupied about ten minutes—and Catherine had always believed in efficiency. Her time, she once told Zavadov-sky, belonged "not to herself, but to the empire." She had no right to squander hours on her appearance when her subjects' needs came first.
After a light meal, sparing her delicate stomach, the empress drove out in her carriage. She greeted all those she passed with a nod and a friendly "Good day," and smiled benignly when people called out blessings on her. When the weather was severe she spent her afternoons indoors, reading or doing embroidery with the help of her spectacles and magnifying glass, or listening to Zubov read her the foreign newspapers.
She laughed at the frequent accounts in the foreign press of her "secret and obscene life." The Catherine depicted by hostile journalists was a man-hungry demon, insatiably sexual and avid for ever stronger thrills and outlandishly exotic sensations. Pornographic stories of her excesses abounded. Her needs were said to be so great that no man could satisfy them; only a stallion was big enough to fill her. Once Voltaire had called her "the Semiramis of the North." Now, in revolutionary, antimonarchist Paris, she was known as "the Messalina of the North," after the voraciously sexual wife of the Roman Emperor Claudius.
Once she had cared very much what the English and French journalists thought of her. She had coveted a reputation as a humane and enlightened monarch, the embodiment of all that was rational, tolerant and benign. Now, with France in the hands of petty regicides and all Europe in ferment, she gave up her hopes for a glorious name. She did not like her subjects to refer to her as "Catherine the Great" (an honorific meant to echo Peter the Great, her idol), though she had once seriously suggested to Voltaire many years earlier that he ought to write a book on "The Age of Catherine II." Still, the older she became, the more the title "Great" dogged her.
It worried her, this sweeping epithet with its solemn, heroic connotations. She had never aimed for exaltation; a baroque-style Apotheosis of Catherine was hardly her preferred self-image— indeed pretention and self-styled grandeur invariably made her laugh. When the Petersburg nobles tried to confer on their empress the title "the Great, Most Wise Mother of the Fatherland," she ordered them to desist. 'This is absolutely my will," she insisted. To Grimm she noted, referring to herself, "not everyone likes flattery."
One of the worst things about personal exaltation, in Catherine's view, was that it led to false expectations. The Prince de Ligne confessed to her, after they had become friends, that when he first came to Russia he expected Catherine to be "a large woman, stiff as a poker, who spoke only in short sentences and who demanded perpetual admiration." He was very relieved to discover that she was nothing like that. Far from being large, stiff and aloof she was of modest height, warm and full of chatter.
Still, formal public occasions took their toll on her. "When I enter a room," she told de Ligne, "I produce the same effect as Medusa's head." Embarrassment and constraint were the inevitable harbingers of monarchy; Catherine was used to causing discomfort by her presence, then having to thaw the frozen faces and draw out the timorous, withdrawn guests who stood painfully in awe, not so much of her as of the majesty she represented.
To her intimates, Catherine remained all her life a voluble, pleasure-loving and entertaining companion who liked to do animal imitations and who occasionally, after announcing that she would perform "the music of the spheres," sang for her guests in a hilariously off-key contralto, adding to the effect by miming "all
the solemn self-complacent airs and grimaces of musicians." Her piece de resistance was a "cat concert," in which she purred and growled ludicrously, adding "half-comic, half-sentimental" words to the animal sounds, then suddenly "spitting like a cat in a passion, with her back up." The great Catherine disappeared, leaving only a hissing, clawing alley cat.
Once the ice broke the Neva rose rapidly that spring, and toward the end of April it overflowed its granite banks and spread out over the city. People said the flood was a portent of evil let loose upon the world; great and tragic events would soon befall Russia.
In fact dramatic events were occurring on Russia's doorstep. Polish rebels led by Thadeus Kosciuszko massacred the Russian garrison at Warsaw and, denouncing the tyranny of Catherine and the Prussian King Frederick William, drove thousands of Russians into panicked flight. Hundreds were killed.
Catherine immediately concluded that the Jacobin plague had infected Poland, a conclusion strengthened when she learned that the rebels were declaring all men equal and advocating the freeing of the Polish serfs. Fearing that France might move in to shore up the rebel army, Catherine began to contemplate the final incorporation of Polish territory into her own realm (she had seized the Polish Ukraine, Minsk and Vilnius the previous year, while Prussia gained Torun and Danzig as compensation for supporting Russia diplomatically).
Catherine's territorial aggrandizement at the expense of the Poles was an offense to the newly emerging consciousness of national identity in Poland. With hindsight, the eradication of Polish sovereignty has seemed to Catherine's modern critics an act of barbarism out of keeping with her vaunted enlightened values. Yet politically, Poland had been unstable for at least a generation. And in 1794, with the Terror in full spate in France and treacherous Jacobins assumed to be behind every uprising, the crushing of a dangerously radical state on Russia's border seemed to Catherine's contemporaries prudent, even laudatory.
Warsaw surrendered to the superior Russian army late in October of 1794, and over the following months Russia absorbed Courland and what had been Polish Lithuania into her empire. King Stanislaus Poniatowski abdicated, and entered private life. If he saw Catherine, or attempted to see her, no surviving document records their encounter, though he did take up residence in Petersburg.
Through the months of the Polish crisis Catherine tried to bring Zubov forward as a statesman, but despite her aggressive sponsorship he impressed no one. She spent hours writing out summaries of the European situation for him, condensing her years of experience into pages of advice and maxims, but though Zubov pored over the material, he emerged from reading it little wiser than before.
Privately Catherine was increasingly aware that she could not rely on Zubov as she had once relied on Potemkin, and the realization must have been wounding. The entire burden of decision-making, giving orders and delegating tasks large and small fell on her. In one day alone, she told Grimm, so much mail and so many dispatches arrived—including numerous packets of books—that it took nine large tables to contain their heaped excess. To spare her red-rimmed, tired eyes, now subject to recurrent infections, Catherine had various officials read the mail to her. It took three days, reading twelve hours a day, to get through the mountain of words. And still Catherine found time to do a bit of research on the history of Armenia, from a book lent to her by General Popov.
The tyranny of work bound the empress and robbed her of her time, her moods, her preferences and pleasures. She tried to save an hour or so each day for her grandchildren, especially Alexander, now seventeen and married to a German princess. Con-stantine, Alexandra, "la belle Helene," Maria and six-year-old Catherine tagged after their grandmother on her promenades through the palace gardens, though often the walks came to a sudden halt when the empress felt severe pains in her legs. Early in 1795 another baby, Anne, was born to the grand duchess and in the same year the toddler Olga, only two and a half, succumbed to a rare malady that accelerated her growth until she became deformed and repulsive and then carried her off after weeks of acute suffering.
The succession was an ongoing concern. The empress knew that she could not go on ruling for too much longer, her infirmities were crowding in on her and before long she would have to hand over her power. Many people at her court believed that Paul would never reign, but whether Catherine made a will, or tried to take specific steps to exclude Paul from the succession, are unknown.
Certainly Paul felt slighted, and showed his extreme discontent in outbursts of violent rage and a constant expression of sour disgust. All he had contributed to the future of the Russian Empire was his fertility, he remarked dourly to an acquaintance. He may well have been envious of his handsome, favored eldest son, though he was careful not to display any hostility toward Alexander in the empress's presence. It became Paul's personal campaign to vindicate and avenge his putative father Peter III, and he vowed that, once Catherine was dead, Peter would no longer be a forgotten figure or a subject of scandal.
Paul had not involved himself directly in choosing a bride for Alexander, and when early in 1796 Constantine was married to Julia of Saxe-Coburg his father remained in the background, leaving the matchmaking to the empress. The same situation prevailed when Paul's oldest daughter, thirteen-year-old Alexandra, was courted via meetings of diplomats by the young King of Sweden, Gustavus IV. (The groom-to-be's father, Catherine's old enemy Gustavus III, had been assassinated several years earlier.) Alexandra, a very pretty, very clever girl in her grandmother's estimation, had not been Gustavus's first choice, but Catherine had made up her mind that Alexandra should be Queen of Sweden, and had threatened and cajoled until the Swedes capitulated. The seventeen-year-old king, accompanied by his uncle, who served as regent, and an entourage of several hundred servants, arrived in Petersburg in mid-August of 1796, ready to discuss the final arrangements for the wedding.
Catherine was eager for all to go well. Though she could barely walk now on her badly swollen legs, and could no longer climb stairs at all, she attended the ball held to welcome the Swedes and admired the blond, blue-eyed Gustavus, finding him to be quite satisfactory despite a certain shyness and awkwardness in society.
Gustavus and Alexandra appeared to get on well, and by September preparations for the wedding were under way. However, it appeared that the Lutheran Swedes expected the Orthodox Russian princess to convert. Catherine, who had abandoned her own Lutheran unbringing and embraced Orthodoxy when she married the Russian grand duke, would not permit Alexandra to do the opposite. Russia was a far greater, far more important power than Sweden, after all; Alexandra would be marrying down. Furthermore, Catherine would give Sweden a large subsidy when the marriage negotiations were complete. She ought not to have to compromise on the question of Alexandra's creed.
Weeks passed, and the discussions reached an impasse. Catherine became imperious. The Swedes remained intractable. There was one ray of hope. Gustavus seemed kind-hearted enough to be willing to allow Alexandra to practice her Orthodox faith in private—and with this shadow of an assurance Catherine proposed that a formal ceremony of betrothal take place, with the Orthodox clergy presiding.
The fragile compromise buoyed Catherine's spirits enormously. She felt her old powers returning, she began to envision great things. Alexandra would marry Gustavus, keeping her religious beliefs intact. The Swedes, now firm allies of Russia, would guard the Baltic while the Russian armies would dash across Europe to conquer France and restore the Bourbon monarchy. Catherine would become the Savior of Europe, the destroyer of the dreaded Jacobins. A heroine greater than all previous heroines. The iron age, the eighteenth century, would become in truth the Century of Catherine II.
Feeling invincible, Catherine received Gustavus's representative Count Markov. The count presented her with a formal letter from the young king in which he stated his final position on the subject of Alexandra's religion. He would not agree in writing to her retaining Orthodox worship, Gustavus said, but he was willing to make an informal oral prom
ise to that effect.
Catherine was astonished. She turned beet red. Her mouth dropped open and one side of her face suddenly sagged, her mouth twisting grotesquely. Her servants rushed forward in concern, yet there was little they could do but watch in alarm while their mistress slowly revived. It was several minutes before her high color abated and she was able to speak.
She had suffered a stroke. Her women told the footmen, who told the chamberlains, who spread the terrible news throughout the palace. Within an hour all Petersburg knew of the empress's affliction. She was very ill. Another stroke might come at any time. She might not last a day, a week. Surely the end was near.
The guards regiments were put in readiness for an imminent change of reigns. Frightened courtiers met in secret to make plans for how to handle the crisis of the empress's death, which they felt must come soon. Factions formed, strategies were plotted. Zubov, terrified about his future, wrung his hands and said his prayers.
The empress, recovering from her attack, felt dizzy and groggy, yet she was determined to carry on with her plans. The betrothal ceremony that was to unite Alexandra and Gustavus was not canceled, despite Gustavus's intractability. Catherine wanted to see Alexandra betrothed, to assure herself that she had not been bested.
On the appointed evening, September 11, the courtiers gathered at six o'clock in the throne room. Catherine made her way slowly to her throne, her obesity draped in brocade. The glittering stars of three Orders gleamed on her chest. On her head was a small crown. Something in her gait, and the swift, sudden shifts between pallor and ruddiness in her sunken cheeks betrayed her recent severe illness. Alexandra, uneasy but smiling and arrayed in bridal robes, sat beside her grandmother, awaiting her husband-to-be.
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