Catherine the Great

Over a mantelpiece in the palace of Gatchina hangs a portrait of Paul I as a boy of ten. It is the only one of his portraits which bears a resemblance to his mother. Of all the artists who painted him, this one alone seems to have caught an aspect of the Grand Duke which suggests the Empress. Fleeting it must have been, for Paul grew up to be strikingly unlike his maternal parent. He was destined to advertise by his face and figure to all the world the anonymous paternity which had produced him.

Catherine was annoyed by Paul’s appearance and disposition, inherited as they were from his father’s family. It offended her that he should turn out to be so completely a Saltikov. That her son derived so little from herself seemed a perversity of fortune. She reflected a great deal on the subject. “My God,” she burst out in one of her letters to Grimm, “why do children so often resemble their fathers when it would be better to resemble their mothers? That is not common sense; dame Nature is often a blockhead. One day I shall write a dissertation on that, which I shall dedicate to you.” She did not write the dissertation for Grimm, although dissertations in general were much in her line. She dipped into scientific research from time to time with impressive results. Her contributions to comparative philology have won recognition from scholars in that field; but her contemplated study of inheritance of characteristics was never carried out. She never got beyond posing the question, to which, however, she repeatedly returned without ever pushing onward to any kind of theory. She bred dogs and observed that they showed the same tendency as human beings in this respect. “Witness Sir Tom Anderson,” she said of her favorite hound, “all his family resembles him. The same spirit, the same taste, the same figure, the same physiognomy, the same tendency.” She was puzzled and resentful.

Catherine was estranged from her son Paul from the day of his birth. Deprived of all opportunity to express her maternal feelings by the Empress’s theft, she had no actual experience of motherhood. Painful associations clustered around the infancy of this over-precious child. Catherine had been deserted by her first lover who openly replaced her by unworthy rivals. She hated Saltikov, as she afterwards learned not to hate any of her favorites after their affair had run its course. The child whom she saw once a week in his fox-fur cradle reminded her of bitter disillusionment. As he grew older, his querulous disposition, his under-sized stature, his wizened skin, his baldness, and his ugly nose all helped to make him seem alien to his mother. He was a cringing, sickly boy of whom it was difficult to be proud. She had produced him at such a cost and he represented such an inferior triumph after all. As human material he was in the same class as Peter the Third, from which many historians have argued that Paul was Peter’s son and a genuine descendant of the Romanovs.

Catherine’s second son and her first child by Orlov, Prince Bobrinsky, also failed to inherit the genius of his mother. He was brought up under the Empress’s supervision by an Italian tutor, Admiral Ribas, and as a young man was a ne’er-do-well and a waster. His mother sent him on a tour through Europe and the gay young Prince of the Beaver-skin left a trail of debts behind him in city after city. Finally the exasperated Empress had him arrested and interned in Riga, after which history knows him no more. He was a spendthrift, like both his parents, but he had none of the mental and moral handicaps of Grand Duke Paul. After his public disgrace in Riga, he returned to Russia and led an unambitious and uneventful life. He married and left descendants in whom history takes no interest.

The chief part which Bobrinsky played in the drama of his mother’s life was to heighten the conflict which always existed between Catherine and her first-born. There was a moment in the Empress’s life when she thought of marrying Gregory Orlov but was suddenly checked in her intentions by the enemies of the Orlovs and the opposition of Panin. Count Panin, who wanted from the first to make Paul emperor, became suddenly energetic when he suspected that the Empress wished to legitimatize Bobrinsky. Even after the danger of the marriage had been averted, this bastard Prince still hovered threateningly in the background, well cared for by the Empress, his mother, a permanent object of suspicion to Count Panin and of fear to the Grand Duke Paul. This boy who trembled for his life could find no reassurance in the existence of a rival half-brother as long as he kept his health and his mother’s favor. The young Bobrinsky, like everything else in their environment, contributed to the estrangement between Catherine and her heir.

When Catherine became Empress, one of her first concerns was to provide for the education of the Grand Duke Paul. She selected no less a person for the post than d’Alembert. But the French scholar declined her invitation. The Empress would not take no for an answer; she stooped to conquer. “I know you too well for a good man,” she wrote, “to ascribe your refusal to vanity. I know that the sole motive of it is the desire for peace and leisure to cultivate letters and the friendship of those whom you esteem. But what is there in this objection? Come with all your friends. I promise both them and you every convenience and advantage that depends upon me; and perhaps you will find more liberty and ease here than in your native country. You refused the invitation of the King of Prussia, notwithstanding your obligations to him. But that Prince has no son. I admit to you that I have the education of my son so much at heart, and I think you so necessary to it, that perhaps I press you with too much earnestness. Excuse my indiscretion for the sake of its occasion; and be assured that it is my esteem for you that makes me so urgent.”

This petitioning of d’Alembert brought one of the sharpest humiliations of her life. D’Alembert steadfastly refused. Privately he uttered a sarcastic remark which travelled far. In Russia, he said, people died too easily of colic, it was better to remain in France. The Empress never forgave him this sly reference to her manifesto concerning Peter’s untimely end. A decade or more afterwards, when she was engaged in the invasion of Poland, a group of French professors living there fell into her hands and were interned at Kiev. D’Alembert, remembering his old prestige with the Empress, attempted to secure their release by sending a personal petition to the Russian Empress, but she turned a deaf ear to his intercession. The distressed scholar at last appealed to Voltaire who succeeded in getting only a cold reply from the Empress. She said that the French professors were doing very well in Russia and would stay there for the present. She implied that d’Alembert, who had thought that people died too easily of colic in this barbarous land, might now see for himself how well people could live there. The professors were being cared for and would remain interned until the Empress found leisure to release them. Their period of internment was probably not greatly prolonged by d’Alembert’s appeal.

When the Empress’s efforts to import higher education for her son shattered on this embarrassing passage between herself and the French encyclopædist, she gave up all further attempts to improve on Panin’s pedagogy. Her opinion of the lazy Count as an educator was not high but it was probably as high as he deserved. Nevertheless she left him in possession of the field. “At that time,” she commented, “everybody believed that if Panin did not educate him, the Grand Duke would be lost.” Panin remained in exclusive charge as governor until Paul’s marriage took place. He continued his watchfulness even after that from his post as head of the College of Foreign Affairs until Prince Orlov died in 1783. For twenty years, Panin’s chief interest in life had been to watch and circumvent this man whom he regarded as the dangerous enemy of his Grand Duke. Panin had failed to save the Czar when he had piteously kissed his hand and pleaded and he could never forgive himself for that failure. He felt to blame for Peter’s death and was therefore obliged to hate, suspect, and persecute Gregory Orlov. After Orlov’s death he no longer had an incentive to live. The sensitive old man soon followed his arch-enemy into the grave. The Empress was bereaved at the same time of two of her oldest and nearest friends.

2

Compelled to leave Paul’s education alone, she waited impatiently for the time to marry him. She resolved to be less hasty than the Empress Elisabeth, who had married her nephew at sixteen against the doctor’s advice. Catherine waited until her son had reached the age of eighteen before she sought a wife for him. Relations between the mother and son improved considerably during Paul’s eighteenth summer. They spent the warm season together in Czarskoe Selo and the Empress for the first time made a companion of her son. A new sympathy grew up between them; the long estrangement seemed to be over at last. It is easy to account for Catherine’s new interest in Paul. Presumably she had been told that it would be safe to go ahead and marry him. The young man found himself taken to his mother’s bosom with unexpected warmth. Those who looked on thought this was the beginning of a friendliness at last between the mother and son, but the happy condition was not destined to last long. For once their interests coincided. Paul wanted a wife and his mother wanted him to marry. In all other situations of life which preceded and followed this halcyon interlude the two were ever in conflict.

The Empress surveyed with a critical eye the German supply of Princesses. Some not too powerful Prince’s daughter after her own image was the object of her search. At last she selected a mother with three daughters and invited all three sisters to Russia that the Grand Duke might choose among them. In the old days when the Russian Czarevich wished to marry a Russian princess, it was customary for the eligible damsels to seat themselves in two long rows in the Kremlin palace while the young heir passed between them, looking to right and left, until he chose his bride. This ancient custom was in the Empress’s thoughts when she invited the Landgravine of Hessen-Darmstadt to bring her three daughters to Petersburg.

Catherine was proud to be able to write to Prince Henry of Prussia, who had also planned to visit her, that his visit would have to be postponed because his apartments would be needed for the young Princesses and their mother. “I may say to you in confidence, with the indiscretion that is natural to ladies, that these apartments are destined this summer for Madame the Landgravine of Hessen-Darmstadt.” If Prince Henry then so far betrayed her confidence as to inform his royal brother, Frederick the Great, that the Empress of Russia was about to marry her son and heir, the indiscretion of the Empress would be justified. That the King of Prussia had no son was a fact she liked to dwell upon. She was always in one way or another the rival of the Prussian monarch and in becoming a parent she had outstripped him. Paul was about to continue the Romanov dynasty as his mother had done before him, while the childless old King of Potsdam, aging in solitude, could point to no such happy line of succession. Like the late Russian Empress, he was obliged to make the best of a nephew as an heir.

The Landgravine of Hessen-Darmstadt came to Petersburg with her three daughters and went away again with two of them. The betrothal and marriage were rather hasty and not particularly gay. The new Grand Duchess, re-baptized as Natalie Alexeievna, was not a vivid personality and her short life in Russia left no legends. It was an unhappy marriage from the beginning and lasted but three years, at the end of which Natalie died in childbirth. Just what happened to the young wife during these years is a story that no one has told. Paul’s complaints of Natalie show that he must have behaved very badly toward her. While this marriage lasted, his disposition took on a fixed habit of depression. Scarcely twenty years old, he succumbed to pessimistic moods from which he looked to his wife in vain to extract him. As Natalie had not the gift of lighting up his “papillons noirs,” his favorite name for them, he settled more and more stubbornly in the black depths of miserable self-pity. Frequently he wept.

No doubt his mother had her moments of anxiety because the marriage did not produce a grandchild at once. In the third year, however, the Grand Duchess became pregnant; the hopes of the Empress were at last to be realized. Catherine made preparations for the lying-in to take place in Petersburg, where Czars might be born although they might not be crowned. In the springtime of 1776, she expected the son of her son. The fatal outcome of Natalie’s lying-in was described by the Empress in one of her most characteristic letters. The swiftness and vividness of her narrative reflect the sure movement of her spirit. In this letter we see her moving through a crisis as she moved through every crisis of a life that was so extraordinarily rich in danger and risks. It mirrors that acceptance of facts which enabled her to pass through murder at Peterhof and to emerge almost unscathed by comparison with temperaments like Orlov and Panin. In Catherine’s make-up was some of that tough fibre which enabled Alexei, the head of the Orlov clan, to profit by his crimes while others far less guilty than himself did morbid penance on his behalf.

“On the 10th of April,” wrote Catherine to Grimm, “at four o’clock in the morning, my son came to find me because his wife perceived the pains of confinement. I leaped out of bed and ran to her. I found her much tormented but nothing beyond the ordinary. Time and patience would end the affair. A mid-wife and a skilful surgeon aided her.... Monday passed in waiting and in a similar condition, very disturbing.... The doctors’ conference produced no new expedients or assuagement. On Tuesday they demanded my physician and an old accoucheur to renew their consultation.... They decided to save the mother, as the infant was probably dead; instruments were employed; a combination of unfortunate circumstances, occasioned by malformation and divers accidents, made all that human science could do on Wednesday useless. On Thursday the Grand Duchess received the sacrament. Prince Henry suggested his physician; he was admitted but he agreed with his confrères. On Thursday the Princess gave up the ghost at five o’clock in the evening. Today she has been cut open in the presence of thirteen physicians and surgeons who found that it was a unique and irremediable case....

“Twenty-four hours before the death of the Grand Duchess, I sent to ask Prince Henry, for my own relief, to take charge of the Grand Duke. He came and has not left him since. He endures his profound chagrin with composure but today he has taken a fever. Since the death of his wife, I have picked him up and brought him here [Czarskoe Selo].

“Imagine me, who am tearful by temperament; I have seen someone die without shedding a tear. I said to myself: If you cry, the others will sob; if you sob, the others will swoon; and everybody will lose their heads and be at their wits’ end; all of which will be irresponsible....”

While the widowed Grand Duke still lay in ruins, his mother set about finding a new wife for him. She has been reproached for her unseemly haste in the matter. Brückner says critically that even while Natalie was dying, the Empress’s thoughts were occupied with a second marriage for her son. Of this there is not the least doubt. Three years of marriage had ended in a still-birth; much time had been lost already and the business-like Empress saw no reason for losing any more. She had maternal and imperial interests at stake, and match-making was a chore like any other, something to be done with as little delay as possible. It was apparent that the Grand Duke, who had gone to pieces in the crisis and who developed a fever afterwards, was unable to do anything on his own behalf. He had no more initiative to bring to the making of a second marriage than he had brought to the first. He would have to be inducted into matrimony once again.

Catherine took counsel with Prince Henry of Prussia, who happened to be in Petersburg at this dismal time. The death of Natalie made it impossible for the Empress to entertain her guest with the same elaborate festivities with which his former sojourn had been celebrated. Prince Henry protested that he was not at all bored, which the apologetic hostess refused to believe. But the melancholy and oppressed younger brother of Frederick the Great was more at home in the midst of tragedy and misfortune than in the gaiety and abandon of a Russian masquerade. In a court that mourned for the dead Natalie, he was at ease. He had a contribution to make. A second wife for Paul was to be brought from Germany and the Prince was asked to arrange the match. It seems that he approved of the Empress’s choice.

One reason that Catherine was already occupied with the thought of marrying her son while his wife lay dying was that she had long wished she had chosen another Princess instead. Three years before, when making her first survey of the field, she had considered the Princess Sophie von Württemberg and had passed her over because she was too young. Time had remedied this difficulty but had substituted another. Sophie had recently become engaged and was shortly to be married to the hereditary Prince of Hesse-Darmstadt. This young man was well known in Russia and disliked by the Empress. He was a brother of Paul’s first wife and had come to Russia to make his career there in Catherine’s army. But after a couple of years she sent him home to his father. “God help him,” she wrote; “he is better off there than in Moscow.” This annoying young man had then engaged himself to Sophie of Württemberg and the betrothal presented a serious obstacle to Catherine’s plans. There was nothing for the Empress to do but to buy him off. Apparently he was able to drive a pretty sharp bargain for he received, as a compensation for his disappointment, a pension for life. “On condition,” the Empress wrote peevishly, “that I shall never see or hear from him again.”

This delicate matter was arranged through the agency of Prince Henry, on whom Catherine at this time leaned heavily. She trusted all the details to the solemn silent Prussian. She even consented that her son should leave home under Henry’s tutelage to court his bride in a foreign land. So far as the Grand Duke was concerned, the opportunity to visit Prussia gave him the greatest thrill of his courtship and furnished a strong incentive to marriage. He was already in love with Prussia and the Prussian King in imitation of the ex-Czar, Peter III.

Accompanied by Prince Henry, he was allowed to make a pilgrimage to the land of his ideals and to sue in person for the hand of his bride. Whatever Sophie’s feelings may have been when she first saw this ugly little man, she dutifully accepted him and made no fuss about it. The Princess was a tall blonde girl, in stature not unlike the late Empress Elisabeth, but German and spiessbürgerlich to her finger-tips. She was and remained all her days an incurable Philistine.

As soon as Paul returned from Germany, the Empress began to expedite the marriage. “The Princess is yet to come,” she wrote to Grimm, “and we shall have her here within ten days. As soon as we have her, we shall proceed with her conversion. To convince her, it ought to take about fifteen days I think. I do not know how long will be necessary to teach her to read intelligibly and correctly the confession of faith in Russian. But the faster this can be hurried through, the better it will be. To accelerate all that, M. Pastukov has gone to Memel to teach her the alphabet and the confession en route; conviction will follow afterwards. You see by this we are foresighted and cautious and this conversion and confession of faith travels by post. Eight days from this act, I fix the wedding. If you wish to dance at it, you will have to hasten.” The tall Princess Sophie was converted according to Catherine’s schedule and became the Grand Duchess Marie Feodorovna.

Within five months after the death of his first wife, Paul was married again. His second wife was a healthy, phlegmatic woman. He was almost happy. “Wherever my wife goes,” he wrote to Prince Henry, “she has the gift of spreading gaiety and ease, and she has the art not only of dissipating my black moods but of giving me back again the disposition I had almost lost during the last three unhappy years.”

Paul’s second marriage was probably the best marriage that could possibly have been made for him. The fair tall wife called up pleasant memories of the devoted nurse who had run to the fox-fur cradle every time the baby in it cried. Marie Feodorovna was complacent and domestic; she loved her flower garden and she loved the proprieties. Paul lived many pious uneventful years with her and the Philistine pair often sat in judgment on the life of the Empress. Nowhere in Europe was the light woman on the Russian throne so severely condemned as she was by her son and his virtuous wife. Marie Feodorovna was like the heroine of a Gartenlaube story and a long and stormy life in Russia never succeeded in making her anything else. She was a sentimental German to the last.

Catherine gave them the village of Pavlovsk for a residence. Here Paul built a little palace and Marie laid out her flower garden. After the death of Prince Orlov, Catherine purchased Gatchina for them. It was a place of evil memories for Paul, the scene of Orlov’s final insanity and death. The ghost of Peter the Third had walked there and had carried off to judgment the guilty soul of Gregory Orlov. These uncanny memories meant nothing to the Empress but they had an unhealthy influence on her son. He shut himself up in Gatchina away from all the world and expressed himself in the development of the place. To this day it reflects his personality as Czarskoe Selo reflects the personality of his mother. In Gatchina he played with his military passions and his mysticism. He tried to make himself as much as possible like Peter III, whose ghost walked with him through the endless corridors.

3

Catherine was forty-eight when her first grandson was born. She called him Alexander, as she said, a “pompous name.” In 1777, her ambitious imagination ranged over the southern part of her dominions wherever Alexander the Great had passed and where he first met the Scythians. Catherine was just then entering upon her great dream of empire, the dream which dominated the rest of her life. She needed children and children’s children to carry on the vast work she had planned. The dutiful Marie responded by producing two sons within a short space of time. Alexander was followed by Constantine, for the Empress loved resounding names. Catherine’s joy in these infants was unbounded. She had borne five children but had never nursed one of them. At last her time had come. She took possession of the little new-born creatures and sent the mother back to Pavlovsk, childless. She re-enacted to the last detail the crime of Empress Elisabeth against herself.

In a lyrical letter to Grimm, she announced the birth of her first grandson. But when she spoke of Alexander’s future her rapturous tone fell to a pensive strain. “Aber, mein Gott, was wird aus dem Jungen werden?” She fell back as she rarely did into her native German. “I console myself with Boyle and the father of Tristram Shandy, who was of the opinion that a name is an influence that matters.... Do you think his examples from the family prove anything? His choice of them embarrasses sometimes. His examples only show, to speak the gospel according to the venerable Pastor Wagner, that it is the naturel which counts. But where to find that! Is it at the bottom of the pack of a good constitution?... It is a pity that fairies have gone out of fashion; they would give an infant all that one wished. I should have made them beautiful presents and I should have whispered in their ears: Mesdames, naturel, just a little bit of naturel and experience will then do all the rest.”

The interests of a grandmother did not distract her attention from the events of the fast spinning world. As its happenings sped past, like a flying factory belt, she invariably registered the passage of episodes which concerned her. Even the christening of Alexander did not obscure the defeat of General Burgoyne in America. “Monsieur Alexander was baptized the day before yesterday,” she wrote, “and everyone is doing well, except the English, who hang their heads to their stomachs since the deplorable adventure of General Burgoyne. He should gnaw his fingers after the fashion of Prince Potiomkin; that sets the blood in circulation. If that of the Parliament of Great Britain remains calm now I call them plodding nags....” She was scornful of George III who was evidently going to allow the American colonies to slip through his fingers. His grandchildren might lose America at the same time that her own might enter Constantinople. That is, they would if naturel led them in that direction. Her magnificent dreams for Alexander alternated with an uncertain mood which usually brought on an attack of the German language. “Aber, mein Gott, was wird aus dem Jungen werden?”

Having appropriated her two grandsons in this unceremonious fashion, Catherine’s cupidity seemed for the time satisfied. Marie Feodorovna came up to the Petersburg palace at regular intervals and bore her children there. It turned out that granddaughters were not wanted in Catherine’s nursery and the young mother was allowed to take her girl babies back to Pavlovsk and educate them herself. Catherine thought the little Princesses beautiful and charming but she was content to give them lovely Greek names and send them home with Mama. Alexander and Constantine, however, were ardently studied, ardently educated and ardently sewed for.

The Empress designed a garment for Alexander of which she was extremely proud. She boasted that the King of Sweden and the Prince of Prussia had heard of it and had borrowed the pattern for their own little boys. The picture which she drew and sent abroad vindicated her boast of its simplicity. “Nowhere,” she explains, “is there any ligature, and the child scarcely knows that he is being dressed. The arms and legs go into the garment at the same time and lo! all is finished. It is a stroke of genius on my part, this habit.” Her letters were filled with the sayings and doings of her darling. She gave a catalogue of his achievements at the age of four. He could write, spell, draw, use a spade, shoulder arms, and mount a horse; he could make twenty playthings out of one and ask endless questions. The other day he had asked whether there were human beings in the moon and whether he had been born in the moon or on the earth. “I do not know,” said Grandmamma fervently, “but there is a kind of profundity which springs up in the head of this little monkey.”

In the shadow of this wonderful brother, Constantine was obliged to make such headway as he could. There was less than eighteen months’ difference in age between the two boys and in many respects they were treated like twins. They had two low chairs exactly alike in Grandmamma’s boudoir and the model garment of her invention was always made up in pairs. In their education, however, certain distinctions were observed. Alexander, the future Czar, was brought up on the English plan as far as possible. This, to the Empress, meant fresh air and liberal ideals and she saw to it that Alexander was nourished on these things from his earliest infancy. Constantine showed from the beginning a strong repugnance to fresh air. The unregenerate infant annoyed his grandmother greatly by “burying his nose in the linen and shutting out the air.” She gave him a Greek nurse and surrounded him with Greek attendants in order that he should begin life speaking this language only. Constantine was brought up to be King of Greece, where a salubrious climate would enable him to hold his head up and breathe the fresh air like a man. This younger brother of Alexander was destined never to be King of Greece or King of anything, least of all himself. The intensity of his secondary part deprived him of all aggressiveness in infancy, saddled him with an irascible temper, and cast him for an utterly passive rôle in life.

Alexander idolized his grandmother while Constantine hated her. “Do you know,” Constantine said to the Swedish Prince when he met him in the palace of his grandmother, “that you are in the house of the greatest whore in Europe?”

Catherine had been obliged by circumstances to refrain from interfering in the education of her own son. Her attempt to import D’Alembert from France had failed and she had allowed matters to proceed as they had started under the guidance of Panin. But she was not satisfied with the results and hoped to do much better for her two grandsons. She wrote an extensive Instruction for the guidance of their teachers, producing this time a far more original piece of work than her famous message to the commission on a code of laws. It contained common sense and insight only occasionally darkened by the author’s well-known prejudices. She counselled those in charge of young children to avoid scolding them and to cultivate a gentle attitude in order that they should learn not to fear people. The spirit of Babet Cardel, the spirit of common sense, expressed itself repeatedly in Catherine’s pedagogy. Her prejudice appeared in a flat prohibition against the arts for which she herself had no understanding. “The Grand Dukes are to be taught neither poetry or music; because it would occupy too much of their time to attain excellence in either....”

Whatever latent talent the two boys may have had in the creative arts was never encouraged to express itself. Grandmother’s repressions were too strong. Alexander might have learned to sing like a bird if he had had another Babet Cardel to teach him and if his devoted but jealous grandmother had not cut him off from every opportunity to learn. She succeeded in transmitting her own tone-deafness to him in an aggravated form.

Alexander was as his name indicated destined for a military career; Catherine pictured him as the conqueror of Constantinople at least. But she loathed the idea of what she called Prussian corporalism. The imitation battles of Peter the Third and her son Paul, their drilling and dragooning, their manœuvring and parading struck her as unwarlike. She preferred the looser methods of her Russian generals, Suvarov, Rumiantsov, Potiomkin. Her grandson was to be a conqueror of the Russian school. In any case, however, he must operate with big guns and tolerate the noise they made. A worry had grown up in her mind around this matter of big guns. General Potiomkin, leader of her forces against the Turks, had a terrible handicap. When the sound of firing came to him in his encampment behind the lines, he trembled in his Russian boots. The Empress knew this well; indeed far too many people knew it well and the idiosyncrasy ill became the chief of the Russian army. If Potiomkin failed to take Constantinople, it would probably be due to this mysterious weakness of his. Mysterious it was, for Potiomkin was really no coward.

If Constantinople held out against Potiomkin, the conquest would remain for Alexander. It was imperative that the young Grand Duke should have no fear of guns. His grandmother decided to prevent the possibility of such a disaster by habituating the child in early life to the sound. She had him systematically exposed to the noise of cannon in the hope that the early experience would inoculate him against this unmanly fear as vaccination had made him immune from the terror of smallpox. Her experiment with the cannon did not work as well as her experiment with vaccination. The boy, it is true, grew up without fear of the noise of guns firing; but that was partly because his deafness prevented him from hearing them. Alexander the First was merely hard of hearing. The explanation usually given is that his disability was acquired from being forced by his grandmother to listen to gun practice in his childhood.

Another feature in Catherine’s pedagogy which throws a light on her character concerns the subject of sex and reproduction. She was as rigid with her grandsons as she had been with the young ladies at Smolny. She thought it was better not to call their attention to such things too early. Just as the Smolny pupils had produced Voltaire’s plays with the passages about love cut out, so her grandsons were expected to study science and omit the subject of reproduction. Their tutors were instructed to keep them in strict ignorance about all that related to the relation of the sexes. “Her great modesty in this respect,” says Masson, “appears strikingly contrasted with other parts of her character.... The celebrated Pallas was giving the Princes a short course of botany in their garden near Pavlovsk; but the explanation of Linnæus’s system of the sexes gave them the first ideas of those of human nature and led them to put a number of very amusing questions with great naïveté. This alarmed their governors; Pallas was requested to avoid entering into further particulars; and the course of botany was even broken off.”

The Empress, who was devoted to science, who loved the study of comets and philology, who strove industriously to wipe out superstition with knowledge, went so far as to interrupt a course of botany for prudish reasons. The modesty for which she was so often admired but which would be more accurately called prudery was doubtless present in her make-up. Her efforts to preserve the innocence of her grandsons did not have the happy result which she hoped for. As she had been eager to have grandchildren, she was also eager to have great-grandchildren. Her hopes were destined to disappointment. She married both of her grandsons at an early age but neither of them had descendants. Their marriages were not happy and remained childless. The outcome was not according to their grandmother’s scheme. Not for this did she bring them up in ignorance of sex and sacrifice the course in botany to preserve their innocence. Their sterility was a bitter disappointment to her. Paul’s youngest son, the only one she had left to be educated by his mother, carried on the dynasty that she had founded. From the Empress’s own point of view, Nicholas, who was brought up by her Philistine daughter-in-law, was a greater success in life than his two elder brothers whom she had so carefully reared. Perhaps she had worked too hard on the training of her precious young. A more casual upbringing might have produced happier results for her own purposes, which included first of all the production of progeny.

4

While the Empress was educating Paul’s children at the court, Paul was living in strict retirement at Pavlovsk and Gatchina. He complained bitterly of his exclusion from active life. “You tax me with my hypochondria and black moods,” he wrote to Prince Henry. “It may be so.... But the inaction to which I am condemned makes the part excusable.” Two years after his second marriage, which had lifted his spirits temporarily, he was again writing to Prince Henry, “Permit me to write you often, my heart has need to unburden itself, especially in the sad life that I lead.” After abruptly closing his letter, he adds, “My tears prevent me from continuing.”

Paul was not yet twenty-five years of age when he was writing in this despondent strain. He was already the victim of pessimism and melancholy, any intensification of which might lead him beyond the bounds of mental health. Brückner says that Paul was eccentric in his behavior, his moods, and his ideas from the very cradle. In middle age he was called insane. Paul’s wife, Marie Feodorovna, considered him so. “There is no one,” she wrote, “who does not every day remark the disorder of his faculties.” For years before the Empress died, it was reported throughout Europe that her son was mad.

Here was an extraordinary coincidence. If Paul was not the son of Peter the Third as had been whispered at the time of Paul’s birth, whence came the similarity in their morbid tendencies? The unfortunate Grand Duke seemed to be following in the footsteps of the late Czar. Peter certainly had a severe mental twist with passionate preferences and prejudices which the Grand Duke imitated. In his sequestered life at Gatchina he cultivated the personal habits and tastes of the murdered Peter. He professed, for instance, the same partiality for Frederick the Great and accomplished what Peter had longed for but had never attained: he saw the Prussian idol in the flesh. When Paul and his wife made the grand tour of Europe in 1781, they visited Frederick in Berlin. It was a memorable meeting for several reasons. Frederick the Great for the first time in many years had a new suit made—new throughout. It was a great concession from the Potsdam recluse and miser, an eloquent testimonial of respect for the painted lady of Petersburg who was, incidentally, not so friendly toward Prussia as she once had been. The King’s new clothes were the talk of Berlin.

As a topic of conversation, they were only superseded by the Hamlet story. A special production of Hamlet had been announced in the Grand Duke’s honor but the director of the theatre withdrew the piece at the last moment as inappropriate for the occasion. The public was agog with curiosity and the sensitive self-pitying Paul became the focus of an over-wrought and over-acted romance of public sympathy. For several days Paul’s picture of his own tragedy hung before the German public; Berlin saw him as a Russian Hamlet whose father had been a martyr partly for his love of Prussia. All this was extremely bad for the melancholy Grand Duke, for whom any picturesque enhancement of his misfortunes added an element of danger to that already inherent in his habitual brooding. The comparison with Hamlet was grateful to him for every reason, but most of all for the reason that Hamlet was his father’s own son. If the public identified Paul with Hamlet, it meant that they accepted him as the son of Peter the Third. This aspect of the drama represented something that Paul was obliged to believe. To doubt it meant for him unendurable suffering, to be escaped at every cost.

As a baby in the cradle, Paul was a sensitive creature, starting and trembling at every sound. He was devotedly nursed by the Empress Elisabeth and oppressed by her hysteria. After her death he was dependent on Panin, a man who dreamed dreams and made no effort to realize them. Panin’s tutelage was not a course in courage and Paul’s situation especially required it. He was constantly in fear of being poisoned, in fear of being found out for a bastard, in fear of losing his claim to the throne of the Romanovs. His relations with his mother were always unsympathetic and after his second marriage they became unfriendly. Paul had no interest in politics and ascribed his indifference to the selfishness of the Empress who jealously excluded him from any participation in affairs of state. But he was far too shy and impractical by temperament to engage in politics in any form; to organize, to compromise, to adjust means to ends were not within his capacity.

He was, on the other hand, profoundly attracted by the mystical movements of his age. By this method he became connected with the protestant religions of Europe, an alliance which was not consistent with his future position as head of the Greek Church. It will be remembered that Peter the Third could never wholly abandon the religion of his native Holstein and remained to the end hostile to Russian orthodoxy. Paul developed the same tendency to ally himself with strange and rebellious faiths. He became a Freemason, a Martinist, and a Knight of Malta. The Eighteenth Century was prolific in mystic cults at the same time that it took its place in history as the age of enlightenment. As Catherine the Great was identified with all the movements for enlightenment, her son was identified with all the forms of obscurantism which flourished side by side with the new rationalism. Catherine was displeased with Paul’s alliance with black magic and prided herself on being free from any leanings toward superstition. When she was a very old woman, her latent credulity burst out; but her lapse at the eleventh hour need not deprive her of her position as one of the shining leaders of the age of reason. Paul always belonged in the other camp, the camp of the credulous, by virtue of his temperament. He might have found a kind of peace there if destiny had not called him to play an active part in life.

After he became Czar his morbid ideas waxed and led him into many grotesque and extreme acts. Like Hamlet, he thought his first duty was to avenge his father. Although Peter had been dead for more than thirty years, he had the grave opened, the corpse exposed to public view, and an impressive funeral acted out. The Czar had been buried in the Alexander Nevsky monastery, while all the other Czars of Russia after Peter the Great had been buried in the Fortress of Saint Peter and Saint Paul. An elaborate funeral procession transported the dead Peter from his old to his new resting-place. As the sarcophagus was borne along the Nevsky Prospect, Alexei Orlov followed immediately after as chief mourner. This was the crown of Paul’s revenge, to expose the murderer to the condemnation of the world.

Gregory Orlov was dead but fortunately for Paul’s mad drama his brother remained to play the sinister rôle which Paul had invented for him. What the aged Orlov thought of as he trudged along behind the corpse of the man he had struck down thirty-four years ago is matter for speculation. From what we know of Alexei’s character, he was probably not occupied with remorseful thoughts. Perhaps he was thinking of the strong fish-soup with which he was going to revive his weak old legs when the Czar’s fine funeral was over. Perhaps he was thinking that Paul was as mad as Peter had been, and wondering at the coincidence.

The resemblance between the fate of Catherine’s husband and her son was carried out to the end. As Emperor, Paul’s morbid suspicions increased and his reprisals against those whom he suspected aroused fear and hatred on every hand. His dread of persecution called forth actual persecution where none had formerly existed. Soon a conspiracy began to take shape among his enemies, headed by the Zubov brothers, Plato and Valerian. The last chapter of Peter’s history was repeated. After a brief reign of only four years, Paul was murdered one night by a band of conspirators who said that he was a dangerous lunatic and had to be put out of the way. There is every reason to suppose that his son and successor, Alexander the First, was aware of the conspiracy against his father’s life, and more definitely aware than Catherine had been when Peter had been assassinated at Ropsha. One of the things which Alexander had learned from his extraordinary grandmother was to overlook a murder which could not be prevented and make the best of the consequences. In both cases the consequences entitled them to ascend the throne over the dead body of their predecessors.

5

Catherine the Great loved to write. She rose at six o’clock every morning and occupied herself with literary work during the three hours or so which intervened before her Russian servants began to rub their sleepy eyes. She had Spartan methods of awakening herself. First she washed her face and ears with ice; then she drank five cups of the strongest coffee ever brewed. She sat down beside her candle with her pen and wrote in a large free flowing hand, instructions, correspondence, memoirs, fables, histories, comedies. Her output was voluminous. She did not wait to finish one piece before she began another, and the first remained forever unfinished. Everything she wrote is a fragment. She wrote her memoirs in the 70’s, and then wrote them all over again in the 90’s. She set down a fragment of autobiography for Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, another for Poniatovsky, and another for Potiomkin. She was not meticulous as to the kind of paper and such things, as may be seen from her notes in the Russian archives which are scribbled literally on scraps of paper, anything which came to hand. Her mind shook itself out loosely in the track of a swiftly moving pen.

Whatever she wrote was closely related to the affairs of the day. It was addressed to some particular person or based on some concrete experience. The evolution of her literary expression can be roughly traced like this: during her thirties, she wrote on political subjects and matters of state; during her forties, she wrote her memoirs and corresponded with Voltaire and Grimm; during her fifties, she wrote allegories, chronicles, and comedies; and in her sixties, she turned to reminiscences again, producing the version of her life which she wanted posterity to read. She grew less and less abstract as the years went by.

After the birth of her two grandsons, the Empress had an outburst of imaginative writing. For several years she addressed all her writings to the little Grand Dukes. “The Legend of the Czarevich Chlor” was written for Alexander when he was five years old. Her Russian history, which fills two volumes, pictures a primitive age with appropriate simplicity. She moralizes scarcely at all, for the lives of the Knazia Veliki do not point the right kind of moral.

Catherine’s little histories are a narrative of constant wars between the Russians and the Greeks; swift and vivid sketches of nomadic princes and large families of brothers warring against each other for a heritage. The story of Princess Olga who went to Constantinople and was there baptized is told enthusiastically and at length. Olga tried to convert her son but he would not be converted because he said the other men would not like it. She had to wait until her grandson, whom she reared, grew to manhood before she could make her influence felt. It was her grandson who Christianized Russia.

This legend was very popular with Catherine and her grandson Alexander. With her globes, the Empress showed the little boy how the hordes of the Genghis Khan had passed across the lands of Russia and where the Scythians had met the Greeks. These lessons made her intimacy with little Alexander the happiest of her life. She collected her writings into a so-called Library for the Grand Dukes. To be sure, the projected Library was never completed; nor was the history of Russia brought down beyond the thirteenth century. So far as her Russian history was concerned, it was a pity that the author left only a fragment. She had a gift for lively compact narrative and the reader feels a distinct disappointment when the story breaks off suddenly before the arrival of the Tartars.

Her faithfulness to history is easy to explain. The artist had found a new love. She had suddenly discovered comedy. The Empress had taken to writing plays in the manner of Molière. An anecdote often told to show the affection existing between Alexander and his grandmother tells how the boy, at the age of eight, gave a performance of a five-act comedy composed by Catherine. In the deeper layers of her memory the works of Molière had been lying long unnoticed. Suddenly the latent memories so long bedded there in forgetfulness and silence began to germinate. At about the same age which Monsieur Alexander had now grown to be, Catherine had once fed upon the plays of Molière because her governess, Babet Cardel, had known them all by heart. As she sat teaching her eight-year-old grandson, the tastes and interests of that age in her own life began to stir and assert themselves within her. Catherine was not content as Babet had been to give her pupil ready-made comedies however masterly. She preferred to compose comedies herself for Alexander. Promptly she fell to work and swiftly were her plays completed. This time there were no fragments; the brevity of the product was exactly suited to her temperament. She wrote seven pieces in one year, and then abandoned the field altogether, perhaps because the Turkish Wars became too engrossing.

Her comedies all deal with one subject in the same manner. They are satires on the sentimental and superstitious traits of human nature. Her titles show how faithfully she adhered to her theme. The Charlatan, The Dupe, The Siberian Shaman, Family Discord Through False Suspicions, No Good Without Evil were the most popular. Their plots and characters show that the author is something of a psychologist and a good deal of a satirist. It is noticeable that the weaknesses which she especially satirizes are characteristic of the behavior of her son Paul.

At the time when Catherine wrote her comedies there was no longer any pretense of sympathy between the mother and son. The disintegration of Paul’s character had progressed so far that he had withdrawn himself from all the world except those whom his mother called charlatans and shamans. The Empress identified her son with all superstitious folk and castigated the whole tribe in her comedies. She rarely mentioned Paul directly in her memoirs and her correspondence. In the intimate family history which fills her letters to Grimm, his name never occurs. Her hatred found an outlet in her satirical comedies. Here she indirectly exposed his notorious weaknesses and held them up to ridicule. She despised his character as she despised his looks. Paul resembled the Calmuck type in physique and countenance. Short of stature and snub-nosed as he was, his mother could not look at him without being reminded of the Saltikov side of his heredity. Anyone who reads through her literary works will be struck by the number of times the Empress refers to the ghastly ugliness of the Calmuck type. She could not get away from it.

The comedies of Catherine the Great were regarded as a great contribution to the campaign against obscurantism. She stepped forth as the Saint George of enlightenment striking down the dragon of superstition. Her satire was leveled against the Martinists, the Freemasons, and the Alchemists; she battered at all groups and organizations that had a secret understanding and talked mysteriously about the problems of life and death. Fortunately for her interest, which had no great tolerance for abstractions, a flesh-and-blood antagonist was raised up to stimulate and increase her energies. The famous Cagliostro decided to make a visit to Petersburg, believing that Catherine the Great would favor his cult. But he had reckoned without his Empress. Catherine was never tired of abusing him, both during and after his sojourn in Russia. When he was imprisoned in France in connection with the affair of the diamond necklace, she exulted in the most unbecoming manner. Some of her strongest and least lady-like language was poured out on the head of the talented magician, whom, by the way, she had never even seen. To Grimm, she wrote, “I have read the memoir of Cagliostro which you have sent me and if I had not been already persuaded that he was a French charlatan, his memoir would have convinced me. He is a rogue and blackguard and he ought to be hanged.”

She was so greatly interested in this man that it must have cost her a great effort to deny him an audience during his stay in Russia. “M. Cagliostro,” she wrote, “arrived here at a very favorable moment for him, at a time when many lodges of Freemasons, infatuated with the principles of Swedenborg, desired with all their power to see spirits. They therefore ran to Cagliostro who said that he was in possession of all the secrets of Doctor Falk, intimate friend of Duke Richelieu, who had once sacrificed to him in the very midst of Vienna a black goat.... M. Cagliostro then produced his marvellous secrets of healing. He pretended to draw quick-silver from a gouty foot and was caught in the act of pouring a teaspoonful of mercury into the water into which he was going to put the gouty member....

“Later on, racked by debts, he took refuge in the cellar of Monsieur Yelagin ... where he drank all the wine, champagne, and English beer that he could get.... Monsieur Yelagin, annoyed by his brother rat in the cellar and by the thought of all the wine, and beer ... gave him an old invalide to accompany him as far as Milan. This is the history of Cagliostro in which there is nothing exceptionally marvellous. I have never seen him near or far,—nor have I had any temptation to do so, for I do not love charlatans. I assure you that Rogerson thinks of Cagliostro as much or less than Noah’s Ark. Prince Orlov, contrary to his custom, has not made much of Cagliostro. He makes fun of him as of those who from mere curiosity run to see him, and he has contributed but little to change into wine the water of the shameless partisans of this poor devil. But since the more stupid and ignorant the charlatans are the more impression they create in the great cities, it is to be supposed that Cagliostro will be in his element in Paris....”

From the vehemence of the Empress’s condemnation, one suspects that she did not state a fact when she declared that she had no temptation to see him. And she was far from having finished with the subject. Two of her comedies, The Liar and The Dupe, were based on Cagliostro’s visit, and The Siberian Shaman was inspired, though not avowedly, by the same theme. Several of her plays were a great success when produced in Petersburg, and The Liar and The Dupe took in more than twenty thousand roubles. The public was titivated by the Empress’s satire and intrigued by the timeliness of her literary attack on the most notorious character in Europe.

No one asked the Grand Duke Paul and his consort, the Gartenlaube lady of Pavlovsk, what they thought of the Empress’s dramatic efforts. No one asked Paul and Marie about anything. The Empress overlooked them completely. Whenever she referred to her successor, the reference was to her grandson. “Monsieur Alexander will finish this and that,” she would write. “Not in my time, but in that of Monsieur Alexander.” She tried to forget the existence of the Grand Duke Paul.