Catherine the Great

Two weeks after the wedding, the Empress sent the young married pair with the Princess of Zerbst to Czarskoe Selo. It was the month of September and the birches were turning to gold. But the bride had suddenly lost her enthusiasm for the Russian scene. For the first time she was homesick for Germany and dreaded the moment of her mother’s departure. “At that time I would have given much if I could have left the country with her.”

She was sustained, however, by a new sense of power and importance which came from having money in her pocket. This enabled her to patronize her mother by assuming her debts, for the extravagant Princess had obligations amounting to seventy thousand rubles and no idea how she was ever going to meet them. Catherine promised to pay in her mother’s stead a sum which was absurdly beyond her means, for the Empress allowed her only thirty thousand rubles a year. Lifted so suddenly from the meager circumstances of her Stettin life, the Grand Duchess had no measure for her newly acquired riches. They seemed to her limitless. Of course she was in a position to come to her mother’s assistance and she came. Even if her new husband did not love her she was a rich woman now and could afford to be generous. This was the beginning of a labyrinth of debt in which she progressively involved herself until it brought her within a few years to the verge of bankruptcy.

At the end of September the Princess of Zerbst and Fräulein Khayn set forth on their homeward journey. They were laden with presents from the Empress. Two chests filled with Chinese and Damascene stuffs accompanied the travellers; and to console the long-neglected Prince of Zerbst, his wife carried with her as gifts from the Grand Duke diamond shoe-buckles, diamond coat-buttons, and a diamond-studded dagger. The party was escorted by Catherine and Peter as far as Krasnoe-Selo, the old Red Village of the Czars, where the Princess and her daughter saw each other for the last time. “I wept a great deal,” says Catherine, “and in order not to make me still more sad my mother went away without taking leave of me.”

As soon as she arrived home, the Grand Duchess went to find her favorite maiden Maria Petrovna Shukov, to comfort her in her loneliness. But the girl had disappeared during Catherine’s absence. It developed that she had been sent away at the suggestion of the Princess of Zerbst. The Princess and the Empress had put their heads together over the unpromising status of the newly-made marriage and the banishment of Maria was the result. They remembered the part which Julie von Mengden had played in alienating the former regent, Anna Leopoldovna, from her husband, and they feared that Maria Shukov might play a similar part by increasing the estrangement between Catherine and Peter. The Grand Duchess learned then that she could never have a confidante in the future.

Anything which reminded Elisabeth of Anna Leopoldovna’s family was hateful to her. She wished to forget the deposed Regent if possible, but the wretched woman, as if to revenge herself on the Empress, had continued to increase her family at regular intervals. Four children had been born to her at Kolmogory, two of whom were sons. The Major in charge sent a faithful report of each birth to the Empress, who tore his reports to pieces. At last he sent a report which she did not tear into pieces. The prolific Anna had died in childbed. The Empress gave orders that the body of the deceased Regent should be dissected, and brought to Petersburg for burial. Accompanied by the Grand Duchess, both draped in heavy black, she attended the funeral ceremonies in the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral where the ill-starred Anna was laid to rest between her grandmother and her mother. Her grandmother was the old Czarina Prascovia Feodorovna, who had laid a curse on her daughter, and her mother was the daughter who had been cursed. The unlucky Anna weighed on Catherine’s conscience not a little.

The death of Anna occurred about nine months after the marriage of the Grand Ducal pair. The Empress gave them another month of grace while she repaired with her favorite to spend May at Czarskoe Selo. Presently she returned, advancing upon the sterile couple like a threatening Juno. She had apparently expected that the Grand Duchess would, without preliminary warning or symptoms, present her with a Romanov heir in the ninth month after marriage. Disappointed in her hopes, she took drastic measures to remedy the situation.

This time it was Bestushev and the Empress who put their heads together. Bestushev, it will be remembered, had not favored this marriage and Elisabeth’s discontentment with its results directed her thoughts toward him. At her wits’ end, she asked him to devise a régime, a program, for the young people, which he did with spirit and enthusiasm. He gave the Empress an elaborate memorandum concerning the behaviour of the Grand Duchess and a still more elaborate memorandum concerning the behaviour of the Grand Duke. The instructions were for the use of the guardians who were to take charge of the pair. Bestushev’s document rehearsed at length the faults of the Grand Duke: his disrespectful behaviour in church; his weakness for toys and tin soldiers; his familiarity with pages and lackeys; his low language, his grimaces, his indecencies at table. In short, the Vice-Chancellor drew a picture of the Russian heir-apparent that might have been mistaken for the portrait of a child in bibs. All of its statements are confirmed by Catherine in her memoirs. The rules which he prepared for the Grand Duchess consisted entirely of prohibitions, chief of which was a ban on all private correspondence with her mother, the Princess of Zerbst. This drove the girl to underground communications in which she became at last very skilful and learned to use it for political ends.

The keystone of the new régime was the appointment of a married couple as guardians. The Choglokovs were chosen for special reasons. Maria Choglokov had married her husband for love and was known to all the court as the pattern of a faithful and devoted wife. Bestushev brought the young matron to the Grand Duchess’s apartment and introduced her as the new governess or duenna. “Immediately,” says Catherine, “I began to weep violently.” This did not help to ingratiate her governess. The atmosphere became hysterical. Catherine went to bed for a whole day and had to be bled the next morning. The Empress came and scolded angrily. Young wives who did not love their husbands always wept; Catherine’s mother had assured her that Catherine had no objection to marrying the Grand Duke; she, the Empress, had not forced her to marry him; and, finally, now that they were already married there was no use in crying about it. Thoroughly frightened at the Empress’s display of temper, Catherine murmured, “Little mother, forgive me, I am in the wrong.” She feared that the Empress would actually beat her as she did sometimes beat the ladies and gentlemen of the court.

The new duenna performed her duties well, setting the good example which the Empress had expected of her. “From 1746 until the death of her husband,” says Catherine, “who died in the year 1754, we really never saw her except pregnant or in childbed.” The Grand Duchess hated the prolific Maria and no wonder. Scarcely was the wretched Anna Leopoldovna well underground than this new and vivid reproach sprang up before her very eyes. The Kolmogory family had been at least invisible but Maria’s babies were born under her very eyes and were heralded as important public events. Bestushev wrote to Count Vorontsov in London, “In these days it has pleased her Imperial Majesty to commission Nicolai Naumovich Choglokov to journey to the Roman Emperor to congratulate him on the attainment of his high distinction; he will not, however, depart before his wife has been delivered; that is, the middle of March.” On the 14th of March Bestushev added: “In these days Maria Semionovna ... has given birth to an infant daughter. And Nicolai Naumovich will depart soon from here to Vienna.”

The Empress hoped apparently that Maria’s fertility was something which the Grand Duchess might acquire by association and imitation. Yet year after year passed by and the miracle did not happen. Catherine remained childless while Maria bore a child every year. In writing her memoirs drops of gall fall from her pen whenever she speaks of the Choglokovs. “Although he was loved so much he was not at all lovable. Of all the people in the world, he was the most puffed up and conceited; he thought himself extraordinarily beautiful and clever. He was a stupid coxcomb, arrogant and spiteful, and at the least quite as malicious as his wife, who was so not a little.” The Grand Duchess allowed herself small revenges that were not quite refined. One of her maidens had a trick of imitating with a pillow the walk of the pregnant Maria. Catherine encouraged her in this performance by peals of appreciative laughter. Her spitefulness extended itself to Maria’s sister Marfa. “How far the stupidity of this woman went is shown by the following pretty story: she was quite astonished at the cleverness of the midwife who prophesied that she would bring either a boy or a girl into the world. She could not understand whence the midwife had this knowledge.”

Madame Choglokov and her sister were Skavronskys, nieces of the Empress. They represented the stock from which Elisabeth had sprung on her mother’s side. The Skavronskys were more prominent in the Empress’s environment than the Romanov side of her family, and Catherine liked to remember that the Empress was a Skavronsky. The houses of Zerbst and Holstein, although impoverished, did not produce women as weak-witted as the Empress’s nieces. Catherine found in that comparison a satisfaction for her resentment and jealousy.

2

Her memoirs describe a nine-years’ purgatory of mental and physical suffering. She says but little of her attitude toward the Grand Duke but that little is significant. When the Empress accused her of not loving him, she spoke the truth, for Catherine says herself that, as a protection against jealousy she schooled herself to be indifferent toward her husband.

Peter, who had all the pride which goes with a weak personality, tried to console himself in the usual way. He became a good deal of a ladies’ man. In tender glances and in compliments he was not at all backward; he could give an excellent imitation of a young man in love. His pose was so good that it deceived his aunt and humiliated his wife. He became better and better at it. Finally he entered into a relationship with Elisabeth Vorontsov who came to be regarded as a real mistress. Catherine knew that Peter was incompetent to have a physical relationship but she realized that others did not know it. As Peter’s affectations grew his actual condition became worse. Nor did the stony indifference of his wife help to make bad matters any better. On the contrary, it helped to make them worse. The Grand Duke crystallized into a little manikin incapable of feelings of any kind.

Catherine’s life was full of illness and hypochondria. A catalogue of her ailments can be made up from her reminiscences. She fills up pages with stories of headaches, toothaches, insomnia, influenza and measles. She describes these afflictions with a serious attention to detail which she scarcely achieved in describing the Turkish Wars of her later years. She says impressively that her colds were so severe that she used twelve pocket-handkerchiefs a day. At one time her physician thought she had tuberculosis. He ordered her to bed and put her on a diet of ass’s milk. She suffered from a consuming fear of smallpox and every time anything went wrong with her she believed herself stricken. Once it turned out only to be measles, but her spots, she assures us, were as large as rubles. All of her illnesses and afflictions during those years were the worst that could be suffered and survived.

The story of her skull-bones has a dramatic climax and a happy ending. “During this entire year,” says the heroine, “I suffered continually from headache and sleeplessness. Madame Kruse brought me as a so-called medicine a glass of Hungarian wine after I lay in bed, which I was supposed to drink regularly every evening. I refused this remedy for sleeplessness and Frau Kruse drank it in my stead and to my health. After I had returned to the city, I complained to Dr. Boerhaave of my sufferings. He was a very sympathetic man; he also knew the kind of life I lived and knew my relation to my husband as well as to my environment. He bade me show him my head some morning before my hair was dressed and carefully he went over the skull. Finally he said that, although I was seventeen years old, my head had the formation of a six-year-old child; that I must be very careful and never allow the upper part of my skull to get cold; in short, the bones of my head had never yet closed up. He believed that the bones would only close up when I had reached the age of twenty-five or twenty-six and that this was the cause of my headaches. I followed his advice and it was a fact that the separation between the skull-bones disappeared only when I was twenty-five or twenty-six years old as he had prophesied.”

This happy cure of Catherine’s skull coincided with the birth of her first child which occurred when she was halfway between twenty-five and twenty-six. Apparently her physician was also something of a fortune-teller who could read the future, predict events, and give accurate dates.

Catherine pictures her experience with toothache and tooth-pulling with more than Russian realism. Twenty-five years after she had lost a tooth, she could seat herself at her writing table and recall in fancy the painful moment when her physician and her surgeon and a male assistant had removed it. After the operation was completed it was discovered that the Grand Duchess had lost a piece of jaw-bone “as large as a ten-sous piece.” The surgeon wished to examine the wound but the patient would not allow him to touch her. “I learned then,” she says, “that the pain which one suffers often creates hatred toward the one who causes it.” In the midst of her absorption in her tragedies, Catherine was capable of flashes of psychological insight.

“My situation was really not to be laughed at,” she says. “I stood completely isolated among all the people there. Meantime I had accustomed myself to it; the reading of good books and my cheerful turn of temperament helped me easily over the situation. Besides I had a presentiment of future destiny which gave me courage to bear all that I had to bear and to endure daily unpleasantries from more than one side. Already I wept much less when I was alone than in the first years.”

The Empress had given Oranienbaum to Peter for a summer residence. Here the young people led a comparatively free life. Catherine used her freedom to go duck-hunting, rising at three o’clock in the morning to pursue her sport. With one old man for an attendant, she sometimes took a boat and followed her game far out into the open waters of the Finnish gulf. As she roamed about alone in the white light of the summer dawn, her romantic musings were mingled with ambitious thoughts. “At that time I read only romances which heated my phantasy, of which verily I had no need.” She wore men’s clothes on her shooting expeditions, as Elisabeth had once done before she became Empress. But her thoughts were occupied far more than Elisabeth’s had ever been with thoughts of the crown and the succession.

Sometimes for as much as thirteen hours a day she rode horseback. It was an exercise which she passionately loved. Whenever she touches on the subject of her skill as a rider, her vanity gets entirely out of hand. Her prowess was such that her riding master wept tears of enthusiasm and, speechless with joy, could only run to kiss her riding-boot. The actress in blue velvet whom little Fike had seen at the age of three could hardly have expected more! Catherine’s horseback riding soon became another source of conflict between herself and the Empress. She preferred to ride astride and the Empress feared that this might be the reason why she had no children. The Empress forbade the practice and Catherine did not dare to disobey her openly. But she had an English saddle made with a movable pommel, so that she could ride either sidewise or astride. When safely out of sight of the Empress and her nasty Skavronsky relations, she rode as she pleased.

3

In Bestushev and his drastic Instructions, Elisabeth had exhausted her last resource of discipline. But her disappointment and chagrin caused her to continue in a thousand petty ways to harass the Grand Ducal pair. They were kept on a nursery régime of liberties. Neither of them was allowed to leave the house even for a drive without the express permission of the Empress. She regulated their slightest movements, ordering them from the Winter Palace to the Summer Palace or from Petersburg to Oranienbaum without a moment’s notice. Sometimes she allowed them to form a part of her entourage when she took a journey. Catherine complains, however, that the Empress always omitted her from her hunting parties, although she knew how passionately the Grand Duchess loved to ride and shoot. On the other hand the Empress always remembered to include her in her religious pilgrimages.

Catherine describes Elisabeth’s excursions in a rather critical spirit. There was for instance a trip to Reval when she had to sleep in a kitchen where bread was being baked and where the ovens sent out a terrible heat. Sometimes the Empress’s party spent the night in tents and Catherine recalls rather scornfully those forlorn occasions when storms came on and the wind blew out the torches and the rain soaked the finery of the courtiers. Once they went to visit a Wonder-working Virgin in a holy cloister but she could not possibly be seen because the boards on which she was painted were covered with black filth. In this carping spirit Catherine described the Empress’s best shows, and yet she felt surprised and injured because the Empress did not like her. “Her dislike of me,” she said, “has increased from year to year, although my entire aim has been to please her in everything. The Grand Duke is a witness that I have done everything to persuade him also to do this. My respect, my obedience in all that she has wished, has been carried to the uttermost limit to which a human being can carry it.” Yet the Empress called her, “Ochen upriany,” very stubborn, and refused to see her for weeks and months at a time.

During the second spring following her marriage, Catherine received the news of her father’s death. The Prince had died of a stroke of apoplexy. Catherine wept so violently and long that the doctors came and bled her. Still she wept on. The Empress grew impatient and finally sent word through Madame Choglokov that Catherine should dry her tears. “My father had been no King, and the loss was not so great.... But to the credit of her Majesty, I cannot believe that the woman said to me what she had been commanded to say, for that did not exactly show goodness of heart!” Catherine was allowed to wear mourning for only six weeks and was limited to mere black silk instead of crêpe. “I must confess,” writes Catherine, “that to-day (twenty-five years later) I cannot think of it without rebellion in my heart.”

The Empress’s irritation made her variable temper more variable than ever. She grew more restless and eccentric. Every day she had the furniture shifted in her apartments. Her people were left waiting hours and days for orders which she delayed for mere whims. Once the Grand Duchess remained sitting upright on a chair fully dressed for early mass while the hours slowly passed from four o’clock in the morning to three o’clock in the afternoon. The Empress had summoned her to go to church but had changed her mind at the last moment and gone to the bath instead.

The wishes of the young court were never consulted, even formally, about anything. A favorite attendant would vanish overnight and be heard of next in Astrakhan, Orenburg or Kazan whither he had been banished. Always, Catherine says, the exiles passed first through the court called the Secret Chancellary, a form of inquisition which was the terror and horror of Russia at the time. One day the Grand Duke’s Holstein servants were suddenly sent back to Germany without warning, and he was left alone with Russians whom he detested. Another day Catherine’s attendant, Madame Kruse, who happened also to be a Holsteiner, was suddenly dismissed and replaced by Madame Vladislav, who was a Russian. The Empress had apparently hit upon the forlorn hope that it might be German influence which kept the young couple sterile.

Catherine’s new woman, Prascovia Nikitichna Vladislav, made an important contribution to her education. Prascovia was about fifty and her gossip about the Russian grandees and their families went back to the time of Peter the Great. Catherine was fascinated by these histories which gave her the orientation in Russia that she needed. Peter would not listen to Prascovia. He was homesick for Holstein and as the German group which once surrounded him grew less and less and finally disappeared completely, his Heimweh increased. The last to go was Baron Lestocq, who was imprisoned for five years in the Fortress of Saint Peter and Saint Paul and finally banished to Uglitch. The Empress was done with Germans for all time.

Catherine seemed to forget very easily the old friends of her mother’s party and to pass on quickly to an alliance with the Russians. In time she found herself and Bestushev, the official enemy of that party, on the same side and even united in their political schemes. She had an elasticity of temperament which was her one salvation in her trying circumstances. For there is no denying they were intensely trying. “For eighteen years,” she writes, “I have led a life from which ten others would have gone insane and twenty in my place would have died of melancholy.”

The petty persecutions of the Empress were the only thing that drew the young couple together. When Catherine was scolded by her duenna, Peter flared up in her defence. In return, Catherine gave Peter advice and comfort when he fled to her in terror at the threats of the Empress and his governors. But Catherine found his fears excessive; with a certain detachment and objectivity she recognized that they were beyond the ordinary and uncontrollable. She wondered at this trait at first and yet sympathized with him; but later on when other things had come between them, her wonder changed to scorn. Her story of the Grand Duke and his abhorrence of the Russian bath shows that she early appreciated the dangers into which the young man’s stubbornness was leading him.

During the first week of Lent, the Empress ordered Catherine and Peter to go to the steam bath, as a part of the regular preparation for communion. The Grand Duke excitedly refused. He would not enter the bath; he had never been there before and it was a ridiculous ceremony anyhow to which he attached no significance. Besides, the bath was harmful and would make him ill. “He did not wish to die; his life was his most precious possession. The Empress could never force him to the point of going there.” To all this Madame Choglokov replied with equal heat. She threatened the young man with the fortress of Saint Peter and Saint Paul and reminded him that the son of Peter the Great had perished from disobedience. “Much of this,” Catherine reflected, watching Madame Choglokov, “comes from herself but much is from the Empress. I came to the conclusion that the threat of the fortress must have come from the monarch and I saw in it a sign of her strong resentment against the Grand Duke.”

The mischief-making Maria reported all this back to the Empress, whose wrath flared out in her usual strong language: “Very good; if he is so disobedient toward me, I will not kiss his damned hand any more.” This was faithfully carried back to the Grand Duke who said, “That depends on herself. But I will never go into the bath. I cannot bear the heat.” The Empress kept her word and her nephew kept his. Yet she never gave up the attempt to force him into the bath. He was not again threatened with the fortress, but he always felt the threat lurking in the background. The quarrel made a great impression on the Grand Duchess who tells of it at length in her memoirs. She regarded it correctly as a symptom of something extreme in his character, but she could not understand it. Her common sense was baffled by the behaviour of a youth who feared the Russian bath more than he feared imprisonment in a fortress. In his obstinacy and excitement, Peter gave various reasons for refusing to obey the Empress but he scarcely gave the real one. The Russian bath was a social affair, participated in by naked men and women. The custom, a mere everyday fact in Russia, was regarded with horror in Germany and the rest of Europe. The young Grand Duke was still a German and, without being clearly aware of why he felt that way, he dreaded the exposure and found it unendurable. Imprisonment was a trifle by comparison. The Grand Duchess took this hurdle as she took others in her new life. She had been brought up a puritan and a protestant. But she no longer lived in Zerbst; she lived in Russia and did as the Russians did. The Grand Duke continued to dwell in an imaginary Holstein of his own which was as different as possible from the Russia which lay around him.

4

Elisabeth’s capriciousness increased. Having changed her furniture and everything else in her environment that could be changed, at last she changed her favorite. The easy-going Razumovsky was displaced and relegated with honors and riches to private life. There is a tradition that the Count had been secretly married to Elisabeth. Whether this be true or not does not matter much. The time had come for him to go. The discarded lover retired to the Anitchkov Palace which the Empress had built for him and where he dreamed away his life for another twenty years. Razumovsky was a charming decoration on the early reign of Elisabeth Petrovna. He was wholly impractical and without ambition of any kind, a poetic indolent Ukrainian. He was loyal to his mistress to the end and devoted to her successor, Catherine the Great.

Ivan Ivanovich Shuvalov, the new favorite, was a cousin. As the Empress grew older she suffered increasingly from melancholy which she strove to lighten by drawing the circle of relatives closer around her. Ivan Ivanovich was ably supported in his new duties by his family. He had a sister, a cheerful person whom the Empress relied upon to rescue her from low spirits. He had besides two brothers who guarded him on both flanks and reaped a rich harvest of monopolies. The Shuvalov brothers were ambitious and grasping as the Razumovskys had never been. Their advent made a great difference at court, for the Empress, who became more indolent and fantastic every day, gave more and more power to the Shuvalovs. She had failed in her dearest scheme: her nephew and successor, the Grand Duke Peter, had no heir.

With the year 1750 the problem of an heir seemed to grow desperate. In the Grand Ducal camp a realistic view was growing up. It was represented chiefly by Madame Vladislav, Catherine’s lady-in-waiting, and by the mother of young Sergei Saltikov, a young chamberlain of the Grand Duke. Slowly the idea took shape without anybody’s expressing it that the Grand Duchess might, by merely transgressing her marriage vows, redeem the situation. By some means this idea was insinuated into the heads of the stupid Choglokovs who afterwards thought they had invented it. Maria Choglokov suggested it to Catherine; put it to her, so to speak, as her patriotic duty. It seems rather odd that all of them had been so slow in coming to this plan. Apparently Catherine would have gone on indefinitely in the dilemma if the older married women had not finally suggested a way out.

Catherine wrote two accounts of her affair with Sergei Saltikov. One was set down only three or four years after it was over, and the other she wrote in her old age. The old lady’s story is a lively romance, portraying an ardent courtship, a horseback ride, a lonely island, and an importunate lover. The young woman’s story is less romantic and more political. She says in this version: “Madame Choglokov used all possible arts of persuasion to seduce me. This and the attractiveness and talents of him for whom she spoke would have found less resistance in another than in me. It is really true that I was distinguished by discretion and exemplary innocence.”

Sergei Saltikov was a merry and irresponsible youth without ulterior ambitions. His relations with the Grand Duchess began in the year 1752, In December of that year the Grand Duchess reported miscarriage. The following July the same misfortune befell her. She seemed doomed to bad luck and delay. Not until the 20th of September, 1754, did she actually become a mother. On that date she bore a son. “There was inexpressible joy over it,” is her laconic comment. It was about this time, according to her memoirs, that her skull-bones closed up.

Whether the Empress was aware of the intrigue between Catherine and Sergei Saltikov we do not know. We do know, however, that with the year 1754 her attitude toward the young count underwent a decided change. Choglokov and his wife saw great possibilities for the future, hoping to reap the credit for the new and gratifying turn of events. When the Empress began to turn a friendly gaze upon the young court, Choglokov lost his head and tried to woo her. Catherine admits that she and her mischievous Sergei encouraged this indiscretion which invited dangers unforeseen by their inexperience and youth. The brothers Shuvalov were strongly intrenched and were ready to make short shrift of any rival. At a masquerade ball, the softened Empress encouraged Choglokov with tender glances. Ivan Ivanovich, the favorite, saw them and his clan closed in around her, at once, and insidiously. In the end Choglokov was insulted by the Empress in public. “She called him,” says Catherine, “in a public conversation at dinner a blockhead and a traitor, which he so took to heart that he fell into the jaundice. Kandoid, the Shuvalov’s man, was called in, and, as he had long known that the patient was an enemy of theirs, believed that he would do them a favor by murdering him. At least all the doctors who were called in during his last days maintained that he had been treated like a creature whom one wished to kill. Four days after his death his wife was told that she could remain in Moscow.... I believe that Saltikov would have been banished at that time too if I had not been pregnant and they had not feared to afflict me with this grief.”

At last the midwife declared that the moment was at hand. The Empress, who occupied adjoining chambers, was summoned from her bed at two o’clock in the morning. She swept upon the scene in a mantle of blue satin, for the room was cold with the chill of a late September dawn. At noonday the child was born. The Empress waited only for the midwife to bathe and swaddle the infant. Then she called the priest and had him christened Paul. This was the name of the first child born to her mother and Peter the Great, a bastard son who had died at the age of three. Commanding the midwife to carry the child in front of her, the Empress retired to her own apartments where she arranged a nursery and cared for him with her own hands. If he whimpered she ran to him at once; her devotion became the subject of wide comment and general praise. It gave rise to the rumor that the child was actually Elisabeth’s own and not Catherine’s at all. The Empress was not displeased with the rumor; there were moments in her last years, years given over to vapors and moods, when she almost believed the myth herself. That she had done violence to the young mother in kidnapping her child never entered her head. She asked Maria Theresa of Austria, that prolific mother whom she had always envied, to be godmother to her child. Austria should realize that Russia also had an heir.

5

Very little is known of the father of Paul. The unhappy life of Catherine’s son and his final insanity have set many writers and historians at work discussing his heredity. But they always have assumed that his father was Peter III and that his grandfather was Peter the Great. If this were true, the deficiencies of Catherine’s son would be easy to explain, for heredity on the Romanov side left much to be desired. Peter the Great had a weak-witted brother and Peter III had a mental twist. But all this has nothing to do with Paul, who was not a Romanov but a Saltikov.

We must rely upon Catherine’s memoirs for the little that we know about the Saltikovs. Sergei and Peter were brothers in the service of the Grand Duke. Their father was the General Saltikov who had welcomed Catherine and her mother in Riga on their way to Russia. The mother of the Saltikov brothers had been a Princess Galitsin and a loyal helper of the Empress Elisabeth when Elisabeth seized the throne. The tradition is that Maria Saltikov had squandered her virtue for Elisabeth’s cause. However this may have been, the Empress was devoted to this lady and attached her two sons to the court of the Grand Duke. Sergei was a great favorite of Peter’s and often slept with him. At the time when Maria Saltikov promoted the affair between her son and the Grand Duchess she was a confirmed invalid, but she seems to have kept her initiative and energy to the last. As she had helped her Empress gain a throne she now stood ready to help her gain an heir for it.

Sergei Saltikov was a typical ne’er-do-well. Catherine tried to make the most of her lover in her memoirs but not a great deal could be made of him. He was a merry fellow, a brunet, who said of himself when he was once attired in a silver costume that he looked “like a fly in the milk.” Catherine says of him that he “was beautiful as the day; no one could compare with him, even in the great court, still less in our own. He was not without spirit and possessed those charming manners which one acquires from living in the world of fashion and especially at the court. In the year 1752 he was twenty-six years old. His birth and other qualities made him an outstanding personality. He had his faults, which he knew how to conceal; his greatest faults were a tendency to intrigue and a lack of strong principles. This however was unknown to me at that time.”

She then passes on to his brother Peter, whom she presents in quite a different light. Peter “was a fool in the fullest sense of the word, and had the most stupid physiognomy that I have ever seen in my life: great leaden eyes, a turned-up nose, a mouth always half open. Besides he was a terrible tattle-tale.” Evidently Peter was no credit to the Saltikov family. Yet he happened to be the uncle of her son.

It was afterwards said of Paul, when he became Paul I of Russia, that his physiognomy with its turned-up nose was considered even by himself too ugly to be imprinted on his coins; and that when the crowds of Paris gathered to look at him they cried out, “My God, how ugly he is!” His looks, we might fairly conclude, were a gift which the bad fairies of heredity had borrowed from Uncle Peter. There were other disadvantages which the bad fairies doubtless took from the Saltikov family, for Paul was afflicted in several ways which always remained a puzzle to his mother.