Catherine the Great

The Princess Johanna Elisabeth of Anhalt-Zerbst wrote with gilt ink and many flourishes. Like King Frederick and every other educated person in the Germany of her times she carried on her correspondence in French. Her style was as ornate as her penmanship, for she never lacked the courage of her enthusiasms. As a finished letter-writer she lost no opportunity to display her art. When the news came that Elisabeth Petrovna had ascended the Russian throne, she at once wrote to congratulate the new Empress who might have been her sister-in-law. It was an exciting moment when the reply came back, penned by the hand of the glorious autocrat herself. Direct communication had been established between the obscure Stettin family and the imperial court of Petersburg. The enterprising Princess walked on air.

Luck favored her. She had in her possession a precious relic which the Empress wanted, a portrait of Elisabeth’s dead sister Anne. It had been painted many years before by Axel von Mardefeld, the Prussian minister to Russia. Mardefeld was a seasoned diplomat who had survived twenty years of service at the Russian court and expected to survive many more. He spared no pains to ingratiate himself with the new Empress. The portrait which he had painted of the dead Anushka gave him his opportunity. He knew that this work of art, which had strayed out of Russia, was now in the hands of a trustworthy person, the Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst. Elisabeth was as eager to secure the return of this family relic as her father would have been to import a priceless Italian Venus. At the suggestion of Mardefeld, she wrote to her “dear niece,” the Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst, and begged for the return of the picture promising to reward the sender at the earliest opportunity.

The Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst was naturally delighted to do a favor for the Empress of Russia. The portrait was sent at once: soon a messenger came posting back to Berlin bearing a return gift from the Empress. It was a miniature of Elisabeth set in diamonds worth eighteen thousand rubles. The Princess did not allow the grass to grow under her feet. She had her daughter’s portrait painted by Pesne, and the following spring Uncle August of Holstein made a journey to Petersburg to bear this offering to the Empress. Stehlin thought the workmanship was poor; he said the elderly artist had lost his skill. But Elisabeth was no connoisseur as Peter the Great had been. It was the portrait of a pleasant-looking, well-grown young woman. Her Imperial Highness did not ask for more; her feelings could supply the rest.

In the meantime Petersburg buzzed with speculation concerning the Grand Duke’s marriage. The diplomats had been taken by surprise when the Empress had produced her nephew as her heir, and they were resolved to be more alert in the matter of his marriage. Gossip spoke of several Princesses, not all of whom were real. The French Princess who figured in the rumors absolutely did not exist. In Saxony, however, there lived a real Princess who was sponsored by a strong party headed by Bestushev the Vice-Chancellor. The Princess Marianna was the daughter of August the Strong who, having more than a hundred children altogether, did not consider them as precious as if he had been the father of only five or six. He was willing to send Marianna to Russia. Besides, as King of Poland he had strong political reasons for wanting an alliance with that country. He would be delighted to marry his daughter to the Grand Duke.

Frederick of Prussia wished at all costs to prevent this alliance. It was a trying situation for him. He had two marriageable sisters with either of whom he might have filled the breach. But as a brother Frederick was too chivalrous. He belonged to one of those families whose members hate each other cordially yet cling inseparably together against all the rest of the world. The idea of sending Ulrica or Amelia to Russia filled their brother’s soul with consternation. “In order to destroy the Saxon’s project,” he wrote to Mardefeld, “propose a Princess from some old ducal house of Germany. With regard to my sisters, you know my opinion. I shall send neither of them to Russia. I wonder that the Empress does not hold to her choice of the Princess of Zerbst, since she is of the Holstein family that the Empress loves so much. Besides there are still two Princesses in Hessen-Darmstadt, one of whom is twenty and the other eighteen years of age.” Commenting on his conflict at this crisis, Frederick afterwards wrote, “Nothing was more contrary to the welfare of the state than to permit this alliance; nothing was more unnatural than to send the Princess Ulrica there. Woe to those politicians who sacrifice even their own blood to their interests and ambition.” Thus Frederick agonized while the Russian Empress kept her counsel. It appears that she never wanted Ulrica for the Grand Duke, having destined her for another rôle, the rôle that she later came to fill as Queen of Sweden.

The Empress’s choice was made. Her hesitation sprang from other causes. An obstacle had to be removed; it was the near relationship existing between the Grand Duke Peter and the Princess Fike of Zerbst. The point was referred to the Archbishop of Novgorod and the Synod, the facts of the relationship being given and the young lady’s name withheld—such was Elisabeth’s passion for secrecy. The Synod reported that the Church had no objection to the marriage; that the couple were cousins did not count since they were related on the maternal side only. Their relationship was therefore merely “the shadow of a relationship.”

Still the impatient Empress hesitated. A second obstacle deterred her. This time it was a question for physicians not clergymen to settle. Lestocq was a physician and Lestocq had serious reservations regarding the immediate marriage of the Grand Duke. Stehlin says that Lestocq advised the Empress to wait at least another year while other memoirs say that the Hanover physician told the Empress to postpone the boy’s marriage until he was twenty-one. It was plain to all observers that the boy was under-sized and under-developed for his age. The English ambassador said of him, “He looks very puny and he is not taller at fourteen than the generality of children, not remarkably small, are at ten.” The worst of it was that he did not improve in his new environment.

The Grand Duke’s vitality was low. Whenever anything went wrong, he fell ill and he recovered but slowly. The morbid relation between himself and his governor Brümmer continued unabated under the auspices of his adoring but ignorant aunt. Scenes of violence took place which made the amiable Stehlin’s hair stand on end but which he concealed from the easy-going Empress. His pupil was terrorized and browbeaten by the Prussian officer and the foolish boy had no other idea of self-defense than to fight back with blustering impotent rage. He went so far as to threaten Brümmer with his dagger. Undoubtedly the weak boy could be irritating.

Just before Christmas 1743, Peter fell desperately ill. His aunt was in a panic; death had robbed her so often. Were all her plans to be brought to naught on the eve of their bright fulfilment? She cast all caution to the winds and decided to bring the German Princess to Russia at once. Brümmer was sent to write a letter inviting the mother and daughter for a visit. Scarcely was this letter dispatched than Brümmer was sent to write another bidding the ladies to make haste. Elisabeth was off; nothing could stop her now. Her customary indolence laid aside, she summoned Brümmer again after a few days had elapsed and demanded to know whether the guests from Zerbst were not already on their way. The officer played his part between the two ladies well. To the Empress he said that the Princess of Zerbst wished only for wings to come flying to her Majesty. To the Princess of Zerbst he wrote that the invitation was due to his devoted services on behalf of the House of Holstein. He continued to bully the prospective bridegroom just as much as ever.

2

While Brümmer’s letter was traveling from Petersburg to Berlin, the Stettin family was spending Christmas in Zerbst with Uncle Johann Ludwig. There were three children at this time: Fike, Fritz and Lischen, the baby who had been named for the glorious Russian kinswoman. Christmas at Zerbst was a sober Lutheran Festival with much hymn singing in which Fike did not shine, and gifts of handiwork in which she excelled. Came Sylvesterabend, when the future can be glimpsed in candle-flames, in bits of molten lead, and similar strange messengers of fate. It was a night for Fräulein Khayn to see ghosts if she ever saw them, for a courier was riding from Berlin to Zerbst bearing destiny in the form of Brümmer’s letter.

On the morning of New Year’s day the family all went to church. When the bells began to ring the little procession emerged from the castle, two stiff old men and a frail little nine-year-old boy accompanied by their numerous women folk, among whom the youthful Sophie walked as tall as any of them. It was time that she should be married, but dowerless and plain how was she to find a husband? Fike’s thoughts were at this time fixed on her Uncle George, a younger brother of her mother’s who had been paying her court. Although the Princess of Zerbst had encouraged her brother’s suit, viewing him favorably as a bird in the hand, the melancholy George had not really asked his niece to marry him. Still, on this New Year’s day Fike’s thoughts were with her uncle as she sang out of key with the others the long, chanting hymns of the Lutheran service.

While the family sat at dinner the courier arrived. A package of letters was handed to the General who tore off the outside covering and gave a thick missive to his wife. As the Princess read, her daughter sitting next to her caught sight of the words “... with the Princess your eldest daughter.” From that moment Uncle George was forgotten. The shrewd girl guessed the contents of the twelve-page letter in her mother’s hands although nothing was said to her. Her parents shut themselves up in the library for three days with ostentatious secrecy while the rest of the household buzzed with excitement. Behind the closed doors the old General was putting up a stubborn resistance. He did not wish to send his daughter to Russia for the same reason that Frederick did not wish to send his sister there.

“At the express and particular command of her Imperial Highness,” said Brümmer’s letter, “I have to inform you, Madame, that the Empress wishes that your Highness accompanied by the Princess your eldest daughter, shall come hither as soon as possible and without loss of time and repair to whatever place the Imperial Court at the moment may be. Your Highness is too clever not to understand the true meaning of the impatience of the Empress to see you here as well as the Princess your daughter of whom report has said so much that is lovely. There are times when the voice of the world is not other than the voice of God.

“At the same time our incomparable Monarch has expressly charged me to inform your Highness that his Highness, your consort, shall under no circumstances come with you. Her Majesty has very important reasons for wishing it so. A word from your Highness will, I believe, be all that is necessary to fulfill the will of our divine Empress.” Brümmer enclosed an order for ten thousand rubles payable in Berlin and another credit for two thousand rubles payable in Petersburg.

A second courier arrived two hours later bringing a letter from King Frederick who, like Brümmer, took all the credit for the invitation, urged the need of secrecy, and repeated the injunction of the Empress about leaving the General at home. Elisabeth Petrovna guessed that Fike’s father would be a hindrance to her plans. She had bought off the guardian of Karl Peter Ulrich by transferring to him the boy’s own claim to the Swedish throne. In the same canny spirit, she limited her dealings to the mother of the bride whom she wanted for the Grand Duke and excluded the girl’s father from any share in the negotiations. Having put the General firmly in his place she left it to his over-lord, the King of Prussia, to keep him there. Even had the Prince been a man of aggressive character, which he certainly was not, his hands could not have been tied more effectively.

Three days sufficed to demolish the General’s resistance. On the fourth of January, the Princess Johanna Elisabeth penned her replies to the letters. Her correspondence with Elisabeth has unfortunately been lost; the Empress was notoriously careless with letters. In her answer to Frederick the Princess declared her intention of bowing to the will of Providence and of following the instructions of the Empress to the last detail excepting one. “I understand completely the necessity for secrecy which your Majesty has recommended. Yet for various reasons, which can be more easily understood than written, I have been obliged to initiate the Prince, whose discretion I will guarantee, into the secret. I hope thereby to have merited no reproach.” She had really considered the possibility of taking Fike off to Russia without her father’s knowledge.

Preparations for the journey were simple. The trousseau of the German Princess consisted of little more than a traveling apprentice might have carried in his bundle. Three dresses, a dozen chemises, and as many handkerchiefs were all that Fike had to pack for that mid-winter journey. The Baroness von Prinzen who afterwards said in her memoirs that she had helped Catherine the Great to pack her trunks for Russia rather overstated the case. The packing of Fike’s trunks must have been a simple matter. It was a source of life-long chagrin to her that she came to Russia without a bridal chest. Her mother at least had had that. She had no bed-linen of her own and was obliged to use her mother’s sheets. No deeper humiliation for a German bride can be imagined. Even as an old woman Fike could not forget it. It was something which she had always to make up. Because she had come without sheets to Russia she was obliged to put through the Partition of Poland.

On the 10th of January, 1744, Fike’s mother set forth, ostensibly for the Berlin Carnival. The party consisted of the General, who was to accompany them as far as Schwedt, the Princess and her daughter, two attendant Fräuleins, an officer named Lattorf, and a cook. They made their first stop in Berlin. The Princess hastened to an audience with the King and Minister von Podewils who invested her with the responsibility of furthering the Prussian cause with the Russian Empress.

In Berlin, the Princess continued as formerly to neglect her daughter. Her tactlessness was illustrated by an incident described in Fike’s memoirs. “When the King of Prussia, who knew exactly the object of the journey, learned that I had arrived in Berlin, he wished without fail to see me. My mother said I was ill. Two days later he caused her to be invited to dinner with the Queen, his consort, and expressly requested her to bring me with her. My mother promised but when the time came she went alone to the court. When the King saw her he inquired about me. She replied that I was ill. Whereupon he replied that he well knew that it was not true. Then she said that I was not dressed for court, to which he answered that he would postpone the dinner for me until the next day. Finally, my mother said that I had no court dress. He ordered that one of his sisters should send me one. At last my mother saw there was no way out of it and sent me word that I should dress myself and come to the palace.”

It was late in the afternoon when Cinderella arrived. During supper she sat at the right hand of the King, who paid her elaborate eighteenth century compliments. The shy girl blushed furiously, but kept her head. It was the one and only meeting of these two great monarchs. Between the Princess of fourteen and the King of thirty-one no vital contact was made; it was an official occasion. But his flattery lingered with her always like a pleasant dream. She only hated sister Ulrica, who was too precious to be sent to Russia and whose dress the King had offered to lend her.

In the middle of January, the Princess’s coach rolled out of Berlin. Lumbering through the deep frozen ruts of the outer streets, it took a northerly direction as if homeward bound for Stettin. The snowless winter obliged the party to travel on wheels as far as Riga, while the bitter winds sweeping down from the Baltic waters made the journey a severe ordeal. They lost no time, however. Frederick had ordered fresh relays of horses at every post. No expense had been spared; were not the rubles of the Russian Empress to pay for everything? But real comfort was not procurable at any price. Few travellers, except the couriers, took the post road from Berlin to Petersburg at this time of the year. The quarters in which the party sought their night’s lodging were just endurable. “As the rooms in the stations were not heated,” the Princess wrote her husband, “we were obliged to go into the common room which was not unlike a pig-sty; the master and mistress, the house dog, the cock and the children,—children everywhere, in cradles, in beds, on the stove, on mattresses—everything was rolled together in disorder like weeds and roots. There was nothing else to be done; I ordered a bench to be brought and lay down in the middle of the room.”

In spite of the cold and discomfort, they hastened onward, through the short days and the long nights. The Princess wrote her husband about an encounter with robbers but her daughter’s description of the journey contains no reference to any adventure of this kind. More exciting for Fike was the great comet of 1744 which they saw while crossing Courland. Against the background of the long black nights and the tedium of the never-ending journey, accented by the hoof-beats of the flying horses, the comet lingered in the girl’s memory as something awful and unforgettable. The cold grew worse and worse. The ladies wore woollen masks to keep their faces from freezing. Fike’s feet succumbed to the frost and were so swollen that she had to be carried to and from the carriage. She also made herself ill drinking beer. “In these last days I had a little indigestion,” she wrote to dear Papa, “but it has had no further consequences. I was partly myself to blame because I had drunk all the beer I could find along the way. Dear Mama has put a stop to that, and I am well again.” This was priggish Fike travelling to Russia in her fifteenth year. She obeyed her dear Mama but dear Papa could understand her better about the beer.

Having said goodbye at Schwedt, the General returned to Stettin with his secret. The town marked the disappearance of his wife and daughter and rumors began to circulate. They made the Prince uncomfortable. He wrote a letter which overtook the Princess at Köslin and asked permission to announce the journey in the newspapers. But the Princess said no. “It seems to me essential that you should hold back the announcement in the newspapers of my journey until I have passed Memel. Likewise the prayers for a safe journey which you plan to have said in the churches of Zerbst must be postponed.” As far as Memel, she felt that she could manage the trip without any special aid from Providence. From Königsberg she wrote to Fike’s grandmother, who drew a yearly pension of ten thousand rubles from the Russian Empress. The aged Duchess was the only one of Sophie’s relatives who did not join the protest against the marriage. The Abbess of Quedlinburg and the Duchess of Brunswick were outraged. They heaped reproaches on the head of the General whom, without regard to justice, they made the scapegoat for his wife’s proceedings. They bombarded the Prince with long letters which reminded him of the tragic fate of Princess Charlotte who had married Alexei Petrovich and the sad plight of the Brunswick family imprisoned by Elisabeth. The Prince was harassed by Holstein and Anhalt relatives at the same time, since he had luckily remained where both sides of the family could get at him and relieve their feelings. The Princess Johanna Elisabeth was not surprised; she had not expected their support.

“I did not doubt,” she wrote to her husband, “that our journey to Moscow would stir up a storm. Religion and rivalry give the best grounds for that. But the Tante [the Abbess] as little as we would have had the power to turn aside the wise decrees of Providence. We cannot ascribe my journey here and the entire circumstance to anything else and we can be assured that the All-Wise One fulfils thereby purposes for us inscrutable.” To arguments like this the pious General had no reply. But still disturbed by memories of the unhappy marriage of Princess Charlotte, he asked his wife to stiffen the terms on Sophie’s behalf in the marriage contract. He wanted for his daughter the guarantee of a pension with a home if possible in Holstein if not in Livonia. Nothing of the kind was ever even discussed by his wife after her arrival in Russia.

Thanks to the foresight of the Princess, none of this opposition was started until mother and daughter were safe beyond the Russian border. As far as Riga, the Princess travelled under the name of the Countess of Rheinbeck, the cognomen which Brümmer had suggested for the purpose. In Fike’s memoirs, she says that her mother assumed a fictitious name for the journey but she could no longer remember it. At Riga the travellers were met by escorts, compliments and presents. “At mid-day,” wrote the Princess, “I met Chamberlain Narishkin, whom her Imperial Majesty had placed at the head of a guard of honor that came to meet me as a mark of distinction. He brought me letters and greetings from her Majesty who overwhelmed me with honors and compliments. A quarter of a mile from the city I was met by Vice-Governor Prince Dolgorukov. We drove across the ice of the Dwina. As the carriage in which I was sitting was just beyond the end of the great bridge, the first salvo was fired from the great guns on the fortresses. I found ready to wrap us in the sleigh two splendid sables covered with gold brocade for my daughter and myself, two collars of the same fur and a coverlet of another fur, quite as beautiful.”

Wrapped in their rich sables, the travellers climbed into the long Russian sleigh, designed by Peter the Great, and flew over the snowy chaussées that led to Petersburg. On a brittle February day they arrived at the Winter Palace. The Empress and the court had gone away to Moscow. Petersburg was empty, but a small group of courtiers had remained to welcome the German guests. The Princess was more than bedazzled by the reception they gave her. “It seems as if I were in the suite of her Imperial Majesty or of some great monarch. It does not seem real that all this can happen to poor me, for whom at only a few places a drum was ever stirred and at others not even that. Here everything goes on in such magnificent and respectful style that it seemed to me then and now at the sight of the luxury surrounding me as if it all were only a dream.”

Fike’s memories of her arrival in Petersburg are appropriate to a fourteen-year-old girl. She remembered the names of the four young ladies of honor who came forward to welcome her and the names of the men they subsequently married; the fourteen elephants which the Shah of Persia had given to the Empress and which actually performed tricks in the snowy palace court-yard; the carnival and the wonderful coasting expedition led by Semion Kyrilovich Narishkin; above all she remembered and described to the last knot and ringlet the extraordinary style of hair-dressing favored by her new Russian friends. Once in the Petersburg palace, the girl promptly forgot all the hardships of the journey. Her mother, a little tired but ever busy with her pen, continued her stream of correspondence with Zerbst and Berlin. “Fike bears the fatigue better than I, yet we are both well, praise be to God. May He continue to guide and direct us.” This to her husband, the General; to King Frederick, she wrote rather less piously: “Considering the hardships of the season, the journey and the change of air, I should need to have an iron constitution to keep up my resistance. My daughter is more fortunate. Her youth supports her health and like young soldiers who scorn danger because they know nothing about it, she delights in the splendor by which she is surrounded.”

In some subtle way, the conquering spirit of the Princess of Zerbst began to fail her as soon as she arrived in Russia. It was equally evident that Fike, from the moment when Narishkin helped her with a jest into the sleigh at Riga, was swimming with the current. Not that the Princess was aware of falling behind in the race. Courageous and confident, she attacked the great task before her, her diplomatic mission from King Frederick and von Podewils. She had found everything in Petersburg just as they had said. Things had to be changed. Bestushev, the enemy of Prussia, must go. While her mother pursued these political interests, Fike was learning to stand on her own feet in a strange environment. For the first time she allowed herself the luxury of a cold-blooded judgment of the Princess’s character. It happened on the journey from Petersburg to Moscow.

“After the departure from Petersburg,” says Fike, “the sleigh in which my mother and I were traveling struck in turning against a house, whereby an iron hook became dislodged and fell, striking my mother on the head and shoulder. She insisted that she was severely hurt but outwardly there was nothing to be seen, not even a bruise. This incident delayed our journey by several hours.” In describing the accident, her mother says, “I believed myself to be wounded but I was not. The blow had struck with full strength against the fur; otherwise, without doubt, my head, neck and arm would have been crushed.” Only the costly furs given by the Empress had saved her.

With this one interruption, the train of thirty sleighs, each drawn by ten horses, dashed onward without pause. They intended to arrive in Moscow before the Grand Duke’s birthday, on the twenty-first of February. The way was prepared. Bonfires burned at night along the snowy highway. Post-stations sprang up suddenly out of the snow-drifts, ready with hot coffee and fish soup, while fresh horses stood waiting in their dugas. The excitement was intense. At four o’clock on the third day, the flying train came suddenly to a halt within seventy versts of Moscow. An envoy from the Empress met the party here with the request that they should delay their entrance into Moscow until after darkness had fallen. While they waited, the travellers arrayed themselves with as much care as possible. Fike put on a close-fitting dress of rose-colored moiré silk, trimmed with silver.

The horses were again put to the sleighs, this time sixteen instead of ten to each, and the train leaped forward. Sievers, the Empress’s envoy, seated himself beside the Princess of Zerbst, and urged the coachman forward at every breath in true Russian style. The procession drew up before the Golovin Palace at eight o’clock in the evening. It was just six weeks since the country cousins had driven with so much caution and secrecy out of the little Lutheran town of Zerbst.

They were received on the stairway by the Prince von Hessen-Homberg, General Adjutant of the Empress, who conducted them to their chambers. Scarcely had they laid aside their heavy sables when the Grand Duke came running into their room, unable longer to control his impatience to see them. At ten o’clock Lestocq appeared with greeting and a summons from the Empress. Attended by the Prince von Hessen-Homberg and the Grand Duke, the two Princesses made their way to the Empress’s reception room. As they passed from room to room, the court ladies and gentlemen were presented and bowed low to them. “It is impossible to say how all those present stared at these Germans from head to foot,” wrote the Princess to her husband. Yet those musty old aunts at Quedlinburg who opposed the journey would have wished the Princess of Zerbst to forego this triumph.

The Empress advanced to her threshold to meet them. “She allowed me,” exulted the Princess, “scarcely time to take off my gloves and embraced me, I must say, with tenderness.” In rhetorical French, the Princess delivered an address of gratitude for all the Empress had done for the Holstein-Gottorp family. The Empress replied that her own blood was not more dear to her than that of the Princess and that all she had done was nothing in comparison with what she intended to do. It was a meeting of Greek with Greek. Fike was at last presented and embraced. The Empress invited the company to be seated, but, since she herself was too excited to sit down, nobody else could do so. The reception lasted for half an hour. At one point the Empress abruptly left the room to conceal the tears she was obliged to shed. They were called forth by the strong resemblance between the Princess Johanna Elisabeth and her deceased brother once betrothed to the Empress Elisabeth. Fike’s memoirs say nothing of these tears, although her mother was much affected by them.

Fike preserved for us, however, the appearance of the Empress at this time: “More than anything else, I was astonished by her great height,” she says. “I must say one could not behold her for the first time without astonishment at her beauty and her majesty. She was tall and, though rather stout, it did not detract, as no lack of freedom was noticeable in her movements. Her head was very beautiful. On this day she wore an enormous hoop-skirt, which she loved to do when she made a grand toilette and which she only did when she showed herself in public. Her dress was of shimmering silver taffeta trimmed with gold lace; she wore a black feather on her head standing upright a little to one side with many diamonds in a coiffure of her own hair.” The young girl in the rose-colored moiré frock never forgot the picture.

The next morning, the Princess and her daughter were summoned to the audience chamber by the Empress. “A few moments later, the Empress in grand attire came from her dressing-room. She wore a brown dress embroidered in silver and quite, that is as far as head, neck and waist were concerned, covered with jewels.” She presented the ribbon and star of Saint Catherine to her guests. Then she passed on to mass. When they next saw her, she was on her way to confession; the next time, to communion. A few days later, on her way to the Troitsky Monastery, she came to say farewell “in a long-sleeved gown of black velvet adorned with all the Russian orders; that is, the order of Saint Andrew as a scarf, of Saint Alexander about the neck, and of Saint Catherine on the left side.” There seemed no possible limit to all this grandeur. Elisabeth had ten thousand dresses and five thousand pairs of shoes.

But Fike, her mother’s own child, was not over-awed. She expanded in an atmosphere where ostentation was the rule. With precocious tact, which she owed either to her own glands or to Babet Cardel but scarcely to her mother, she established herself securely in this glittering and treacherous environment.

4

Prince Christian August had given his daughter a book as a parting gift. It was a treatise by a professor at Halle which discussed at tedious length the differences between religious creeds. He had prepared to go with this book a memorandum of instructions for his daughter’s use. It was headed: “Pro Memoria, so ich meiner gemahlen mitgegeben.” Somewhere along the route, how attentively can be imagined, Fike had read this document, and had written one of her primmest letters to dear Papa thanking him for his “gracious instructions.” The first half of the memorandum was taken up with religious counsel and the second half with her future marriage. The General’s style is an awkward contrast to the fluent preciosity of his wife. He addressed his daughter in the third person and outlined her future duties thus:

“Next to the Empress, her Majesty, she has to respect the Grand Duke above all as her Lord, Father, and Sovereign; and withal to win by care and tenderness at every opportunity his confidence and love. Her Lord and His will are to be preferred to all the pleasures and treasures of the world; and do nothing which he dislikes or which causes him only a little pain; and still less to insist on her own will.

“Never to enter into familiarity or badinage, but always have respect as much as possible.

“To regard the domestics and favorites of her Lord with a gracious mien; not to demand the services of her Lord but ever to respond to the favor and love of her Lord.

“To speak with no one alone in the audience chamber and to conduct herself always according to etiquette there.

“To detest and avoid playing cards for high stakes, which is a mark of avarice and self-interest.

“To take charge herself of the pocket money which may be given her, to guard it and to pay it out gradually to a servant on an account, in order that she may not submit herself to the trusteeship of a governess; to employ it for her use and pleasure, and with it to do good, in order that she may win for herself and not for others instead of her the love and inclination of her dependents.

“To intercede for no one, because one may not understand the laws and a one-sided report cannot be trusted, and the side discriminated against becomes a disgruntled enemy; and he whom one helps out with such intercessions forgets the good deed and goes and sins again.

“Especially to enter into no affairs of government in order not to irritate the Senate.”

At fifteen Fike was not mature enough to appreciate the irony of this document and probably she never came to be. The abject submissiveness which her father thought appropriate to her status as a wife had certainly never been exemplified by her vivacious mother. She must have been aware that her father played a minor part in the family life at Stettin and at Zerbst, but it was a condition in her little world which from sheer familiarity seemed only natural. What could be more normal than that the man of the family should be kept in leading strings? Few girls in her situation would have contrasted her father’s theories with his actions and Fike certainly did not.

Frederick the Great always kept the delusion that he had played the chief rôle in this German-Russian marriage. But he over-estimated his actual part. If Elisabeth had found it necessary to spirit the young Princess away against his royal will she would have done so. Since it was not necessary she welcomed his timely and useful aid. At the right moment Frederick promoted Prince Christian August to the post of Field Marshal, and after Fike had gone to Russia he helped to reconcile her father to her conversion. “My good Prince of Zerbst was very restive on this point,” he wrote. “I had a great deal of trouble in overcoming his religious scruples. He responded to all my representations with: ‘Meine Tochter nicht Griechisch werden!’” His struggles died away gradually under the tactful treatment of his free-thinking King who persuaded him that Greek and Lutheran were the same. “Lutherisch-Griechisch, Griechisch-Lutherisch, das gehet an,” the submissive General repeated. If the King of Prussia said so what else could a Prussian officer reply?

The marriage was made by three women. It was begun by the Princess of Zerbst and the Empress of Russia and carried through by the fifteen-year-old Fike who took charge of the campaign herself when her mother’s tactics failed. None of the men-folk who might have been expected to influence the situation did so. Those like Lestocq and the Prince of Zerbst who offered contrary advice were over-ridden. The others were permitted to play the part of benevolent bystanders.