Catherine the Great

While Fike was still quite small, her father received an unexciting promotion. Already Commander of the garrison, he was made Governor of Stettin. This change did not bring the family any nearer to the goal of the Princess’s hopes, a residence in Berlin. But it did rescue them from the commonplace house in the Domstrasse which Fike afterwards in the days of her grandeur referred to as “Greifenheim’s house.” As Governor of Stettin, her father was given quarters in the ancestral castle of the Duke of Pomerania. It was a gloomy rectangular structure surrounding a roughly-paved courtyard and including as a corner building a church with a bell-tower. Fike’s bedroom adjoined the bell-tower.

The family occupied the third story of the left wing, the Princess’s apartment being next to the entrance and her daughter’s next to the church. Two or three times a day the little girl was allowed to visit her mother. In her memoirs she describes how she ran through the long corridor but does not describe the visits. The supervision over her daughter’s education with which the Princess is credited was apparently of the slightest. She was preoccupied with other things; an unambitious husband and an invalid son gave her plenty to think about. Besides the family finances were not improved by the general’s promotion. He still clung to his parsimonious habits and was backed up by his second in command, old Bolhagen, who as under-governor lived in the Pomeranian castle and was always close at hand to help him out. “My father did almost nothing without at least asking him about it,” says Fike. It was certainly a situation which any wife would need philosophy to bear. The harassed lady was often driven to extremes. She railed at old Bolhagen that he “did not love her,” and she boxed her daughter’s ears from sheer irritation.

The two Princesses came to be familiar figures at several North German courts, for Fike after the age of eight always accompanied her mother on her travels. Had the search for a husband already begun? Probably so; the conversation at home seems to indicate as much. The Princess neglected her daughter abroad, as well as at home. This did not escape notice, and Fike occasionally had the satisfaction of having strangers, with whom she early discovered how to get on, rebuke the Princess for her maternal indifference. In this way, the Swedish Count Gyllenborg incurred the life-long gratitude of the proud, sensitive child. “When he saw,” says Fike, “how little or rather how not at all my mother occupied herself with me, he said to her that she was not right in giving me so little attention; that I was for my age a very well-developed child.”

Still another partisan was unexpectedly raised up in the person of a Catholic monk by the name of Mengden whom Fike and her mother met at the Court of Brunswick. The monk occupied himself with palmistry and prophecy, which were, by the way, forbidden by his Church. With the certainty of her tendencies, the Princess gravitated toward the sorcerer, leading by the hand the little Princess Marianna of Brunswick-Bevern to whom she had taken a great fancy. She praised the beauty of Marianna and demanded that the monk should prophesy a crown for her. “He heard,” says Fike, “how my mother praised the Princess and what she prophesied; he said to her that he saw not a single crown in the features of the Princess but that he saw at least three above my forehead.”

Fike never forgot this episode and related it more than once. She also thought it sufficiently important to mention in her memoirs thirty years later that the petted and beautiful Brunswick Princess eventually died unmarried. The plain little Fike, who was to become the apostle of enlightenment, continued always to believe in that fortune-telling monk.

Fike really owed her education to her French governess, Elisabeth Cardel, and her German tutor, Pastor Wagner. With Mademoiselle Cardel she spent her days and nights in the three small rooms beneath the bell-tower. They were Fike and Babet to each other. Babet must be the key to much that afterwards astonished the world in the Empress of Russia. But what the French governess was like it would be difficult to say. She has vanished into the limbo which is reserved for the domestic servants of the famous. Our history books, like our etiquette books, do not consider these people important. But almost any child takes her nurse or governess quite seriously and is influenced by her character regardless of the difference in their social station. The personality of the servant who cares for genius in its helpless infancy and during its stumbling childhood is a factor for biography to reckon with.

Certainly Babet Cardel was no ordinary servant; perhaps no ordinary individual. She may have been an extraordinary person. All we know of her is contained in the letters and memoirs of the pupil on whom she left her impress. She was another genteel spinster but was of a tougher-minded variety than the German aunts and lady companions who otherwise figured in Fike’s life. She never saw ghosts and she worshiped neither animals nor God too much. Without using flattery or caresses she knew how to gain and keep the affections of her pupil. Fike was a secretive child, yet she had no secrets from Babet, and this was partly because Babet was clever. Her pupil had a life-long habit of ready, off-hand scorn for stupidity.

The Cardel family were French emigrants; the father was a professor in Frankfort. Two daughters, Madeleine and Elisabeth, made their way to Stettin, where Madeleine was employed as Fike’s governess. When her pupil was nearly four Madeleine was married to an advocate named Colhard. The child made a scene at parting. “At Madame Colhard’s wedding,” say her memoirs, “I drank too much and would not go to bed without her. I bawled so loudly that they had to take me out and put me to bed with my parents.” Fike passed into the hands of Elisabeth Cardel. The two sisters were opposites: Madeleine was showy and insincere while Elisabeth was just and consistent. Madeleine “took great pains,” says her pupil, “to have me always appear before my parents in such a way that I, and she also, should please them. So it came about that I was for my years rather ‘deep.’”

Babet laid less stress on appearances and strove to counteract the superficial methods of her sister. But Fike had acquired once for all the knack of making an impression. She was a canny child, precocious in her criticism of her environment and precocious in her ability to keep her own counsel. Babet, who was something of a phrase-maker, called her an “esprit gauche.” In mature years, Fike still delighted in the title. “Mademoiselle Cardel and Herr Wagner had to deal with a perverse spirit who took all that was said to her in the opposite sense.” Oppressed by moralities and preachments, her eager, curious nature took refuge behind a smiling but critical silence. “One does not always know what children are thinking,” she says. “Children are hard to understand, especially when careful training has accustomed them to obedience and experience has made them cautious in conversations with their elders.”

Next to Elisabeth Cardel, Pastor Wagner was second in command. Fike called herself, “half Mademoiselle Cardel’s, half Pastor Wagner’s pupil.” With Pastor Wagner she studied religion, history and geography. He also taught her to write German while Monsieur Laurent, a Calvinist school-master, taught her French “calligraphy.” A French dancing-master came to the little room beside the bell-tower, placed the four-year-old child on a table and trained her in positions and steps. “This was money thrown away,” remarked the affluent Empress of Russia many years later; doubtless an echo of dear Papa’s views, hardly of dear Mama’s. For seven long years Babet, who was musical herself, struggled to teach her pupil the rudiments of singing but gave it up at last as hopeless. A music-master by the name of Roellig was called in at Zerbst but his efforts were also fruitless. A drawing teacher she never had; but somewhere along in her career she learned both carving and engraving, arts which she cultivated later in Russia. Her skill at embroidery is evidenced by rich ecclesiastical robes still preserved in Russian museums.

Fike afterwards described her teachers, always excepting Mademoiselle Cardel, as rather a poor lot. Monsieur Laurent was “an old weak-head who in his youth was but a dunce,” a Frenchman who spoke German “like a Spanish cow.” The music-master was preserved in a burlesque sketch addressed to Grimm. “About the poor devil Roellig I have never told you yet, because you know what success his lessons had. He always brought with him a creature who roared bass. He had him sing in my room; I listened to him and said to myself, ‘he roars like a bull,’ but Herr Roellig was beside himself with delight when ever this bass throat was in action.” Concerning Wagner and Cardel, she offered as her mature judgment: “I cherish absolutely no grudge against Herr Wagner, but I am convinced in my inmost soul that he was a block-head and that Mademoiselle Cardel was a clever girl.”

Fike scoffed at her education as she scoffed at her teachers. “Very early it was noticed that I had a good memory; therefore I was incessantly tormented with learning by rote. They called it training the memory; but I believe it to have been rather a weakening. At first it was Bible verses; then specially prepared pieces on the fables of La Fontaine which I had to commit to memory and repeat. If I forgot anything, I was scolded; I believe, however, it was not humanly possible to retain all that I had to memorize; also I do not think it worth the trouble. I still possess a German Bible in which all the verses which I had to learn are underlined with red ink.”

The most valuable part of her education was incidental to her association with Babet, “who knew everything without having learned anything; she knew all the comedies and tragedies like her five fingers and was very amusing.” Babet’s vocabulary and phrases were drawn from her reading. Often she reminded her pupil that the word “Monsieur” “never broke anyone’s jaw-bone,” a phrase which Fike assumed had been drawn from some old comedy. She read Corneille and Racine and was saturated with Molière, who consequently became the daily bread of her pupil. Her favorite authority was “common sense” which she evoked habitually. “That is not common sense,” represented a final judgment with the governess as it eventually did with the Empress. Everybody else in Fike’s early environment dealt in moral principles and religious dogmas; Babet seems to have been a realist.

The governess had friends, French emigrants like herself, intellectuals, who are to be distinguished from the simple-minded Laurent, master of calligraphy. Babet received on Sundays in the nursery a certain Monsieur de Mauclerc, a clergyman, who was remembered by Fike chiefly as the editor of a History of England written by his father-in-law, Rapin Thoiras. The Mauclerc-Thoiras circle was pro-English, which meant in those days that they were philosophers and liberals. With these fellow-exiles of hers Babet was intimate and her pupil was adopted by the group. In their circle Fike had her first experience of good conversation, which she afterwards passionately pursued as one of the main interests of her life. Here she learned to know as clever and delightful people those whom Pastor Wagner regarded as heretics. “So far as Wagner was concerned, he had nothing in common with these arch-heretics who did not understand his language; nor he, theirs.” But Fike felt herself able through language and imagination to bridge the mental chasm which yawned between her French governess and her German tutor.

2

The Princes of Anhalt-Zerbst were a pious line. Before the Reformation, one of them had been a celebrated saint. The sight of him wearing a monastic garb, emaciated by fasting and begging through the streets, had so impressed Martin Luther as a boy that it had helped to send him into a monastery. Zerbst had been close to the war with Tetzel about indulgences and the contemporary Prince of Anhalt had early ranged himself on the side of the reformer. Two hundred years before Fike was born, Luther had been intimate with the head of the house of Anhalt and had played chess with him. The passage of six generations had dimmed the worldly glory of these Princes but the heritage of piety had persisted undiminished.

Prince Christian August followed in the footsteps of his forebears. He was a rigid Protestant, one of those puritanical Lutherans, who, according to Frederick the Great, were still numerous in that day. Frederick seemed to think that the cult had declined during his reign. But the free-thinking King exaggerated the extent of his own influence, which did not reach far beyond his own round table. The pious Princes of Germany, the special creation of Dr. Martin Luther, were destined to survive many centuries. Long after Frederick was dead and buried, they continued to impress their somber personalities upon the history of Europe by marrying into all its royal families. Fike’s father was one of these somber personalities.

It was a matter of course that the daughter of Christian August should be educated by an evangelical pastor. In her little room against the church, so close that the sound of the organ came through, the parson instructed her and put her through her so-called Prüfungen. These examinations were high lights in a monotonous childhood. The reverend, black-robed gentleman did not scamp his duty like the music-master Roellig. He built himself into the very foundation of his pupil’s character. Although she ultimately decided that he was a pedant and a block-head, she never forgot his teachings. The ghost of her old teacher accompanied her to Russia where he frequently walked and talked, and never out of character. As a middle-aged Empress, she would often quote him thus: “The joys of this world, according to Herr Wagner, are not worth its pains”; or, “The world is not good for much, said the blessed Herr Wagner, because of original sin.” Or, “You say to me that the evils for which there is no remedy, can be met with peace and resignation. You learned that from your father; it is exactly the same thing that the blessed Herr Wagner, of ancient memory, used to say.” The pastor often discoursed to his pupil on the Last Judgment. Fike was so impressed with the difficulty of being saved that she began to have fits of weeping at twilight. Babet found her hiding behind the window curtains to indulge these melancholy thoughts, and induced the child to tell her the reason. Herr Wagner was forbidden to frighten Fike in the future with his sermons on the Last Judgment.

The pastor was the faithful representative of the Princess’s father. He was dear Papa’s man. The Prince of Anhalt, always on the march, could rest easy in the thought that his daughter was being firmly grounded in the doctrine of her fathers. In addition to her daily lessons with Herr Wagner, who was after all merely an army chaplain, she had higher religious education from the Lutheran pastor at Brunswick. By the time she was fourteen, the Prince could well afford to congratulate himself, as he did, on the thoroughness of his daughter’s religious foundation.

Yet Fike did not swallow Wagner whole; she argued with him. She declared it unjust that Marcus Aurelius and other heroes of antiquity should be damned because they had not known salvation. The pastor proved by chapter and verse that they were damned, but his pupil stubbornly defended her point. Babet Cardel was called in by the irate pedagogue and the governess patched up a peace between them. A second argument arose on the subject of chaos. Chaos, said the teacher, is what went before the world. “But what is Chaos?” demanded the pupil. And again Babet had to intervene and make peace. It was the same way with circumcision which the pastor refused to explain. Babet’s tact was once more called into service and order restored. It appears that Babet was not allowed to use the rod. Only dear Mama could do that. But a quick box on the ears was more in Mama’s manner.

Fike was conscious of solid obstacles in her world. If she had been a boy her life would have been different. She would one day have ruled over Anhalt-Zerbst instead of Fritz. But girls do not reign. In Fike’s home, however, everything was ruled by women. The Princess Johanna Elisabeth managed her husband and smacked her daughter. As between Babet Cardel and Pastor Wagner, it was always Babet who decided things and gave orders to the pastor. If Mama had been a Prussian General, even under the close-fisted Frederick William who wore a short coat because he was too stingy to buy cloth for a long one, she would not have been content with the small pay and inferior post of the Prince, her husband. The Princess was proud and ambitious. But she had obvious faults as a tactitian; her nerves and quick temper sometimes betrayed her. Babet, who ruled by common sense and reason, was a better diplomatist. Fike had to admire Babet since she herself invariably succumbed to Babet’s methods.

An old German Baroness who lived in the Stettin household says this of Fike’s childhood: “Princess Sophie was born, grew up, and was educated under my eyes. I witnessed her school instruction and her progress and I helped her to pack her trunks before her departure (for Russia). I enjoyed her confidence to a degree that entitled me to believe that I knew her better than anybody else. Yet I had no idea that she was destined to attain so much fame. In her youth I noticed in her a serious, calculating and cold personality, which was as far removed from anything distinguished or brilliant as it was from error, eccentricity and frivolity. In a word, I thought her just an ordinary person.”

If the Princess of Zerbst did not make much of her daughter, it is not likely that one of her women would have held a different opinion. Probably the young girl was sufficiently commonplace. It remained for circumstances to make her into the unique and powerful personality that she came to be. For the rest, it is true that at all stages of her life she was more cool and calculating than she was eccentric and frivolous. To this extent the Baroness was right.

3

Fike grew up in an atmosphere of illness. The first misfortune of the kind which befell the family was when her mother lay nineteen weeks in bed after her birth. The Princess had a delicate constitution. In letters which are still preserved in the archives at Moscow in a binding of pink plush lined with blue silk, she complains of the “vapours” and the “crampe d’estomac” as afflictions from which she habitually suffered. She could not endure blood-letting either for herself or her children, and since this was the only resource of the doctors of those days she was not a good patient.

Two daughters of the house died in infancy and two sons developed into invalids. The elder had a genuine affliction, a dislocated hip, which obliged him to walk with a crutch. The poor boy was dosed incessantly and sent to the baths at Teplitz and Karlsbad but all in vain. The best physicians in Germany were consulted but were never able to diagnose his case until after his death, when he was “dissected.” His invalidism made a profound impression on his sister. It was an expense which the family could ill afford and it made the mother over-precious to her second son, who, although he was not really delicate, was also sent around to baths in search of health. The strain of the expense was long remembered by Fike, who, as we have seen, sent the first money she ever owned to pay for her brother’s sojourn at the Homburg baths.

With her governess, Fike read Molière’s plays in which various forms of hypocrisy and hysteria are exposed and satirized. Through Babet’s eyes, which had been opened by Molière, she viewed the cases of illness about her. “You must know,” she afterwards wrote in a letter to Grimm, “that Mademoiselle Cardel made me mistrustful toward all physicians and medicine in general.” It remained a pet life-long prejudice. Whenever, as Empress, she summoned a physician for a post, she usually prefaced her appointment with the remark that she had no confidence in his profession. She never lost a chance to criticize its pretensions. “Tell me now,” she wrote, “why does the most Christian King assemble all the charlatans to talk of their charlatanry? Does he believe in the physicians?”

Her prejudice was of course not consistent. Babet Cardel, the scorner of physicians, had never been able to cure her pupil of tone-deafness. The Empress was sometimes plaintive about her lack and wondered wistfully whether the physicians might not succeed where the teachers had failed. “All that depends on the organization, does it not? Mine is faulty. I long to hear and enjoy music, but in vain do I try. It is noise and that is all. I long to send to your society of medicine a prize for him who will invent an effective remedy against insensibility to the sounds of harmony.”

Fike was herself a healthy child. She remembered only one attack of illness in her Stettin years. Her recollection of this experience gives us a picture of her home, its gloomy pieties and its crude superstitions; above all, its wounded family pride due to the lameness of the one bright hope of the house, the future Prince of Anhalt.

“It was the custom,” says Fike, “to kneel down every evening and morning to say our morning and evening prayer. One evening as I was praying on my knees, I fell to coughing so violently, that the strain caused me to fall upon my left side, while sharp pains almost took away my breath. Some one sprang to me and I was put to bed where I remained three weeks. I lay always on the left side and had a cough, stitches and fever. There was no proper doctor in the neighborhood. They gave me remedies, but Heaven knows of what they consisted. Finally, after much suffering, I was able to get up. When I was dressed it was seen that I had taken on the form of a Z: my right shoulder was higher than the left, the backbone had a zig-zag line, and the left shoulder was hollow. My women and those of my mother who were taken into consultation, decided to call my parents’ attention to it.

“The first thing done in the emergency was to command the strictest silence about my condition. My parents were unhappy that one of their children should be lame, the other deformed. Finally, after several experts had been consulted with the greatest secrecy, it was decided to seek out a skillful man who knew how to heal dislocations. The search was vain, for they had a horror of calling in the only person who had this kind of skill, because he was the executioner of the place. They hesitated a long while, but finally decided to fetch him secretly. Only Babet and a chamber-maid were taken into confidence. The man examined me and ordered that every morning a girl, before she had eaten, should rub with spittle first the shoulder and then the spine. Then he himself prepared a kind of jacket which I was never to remove by day or night except to change my linen. He came every other day early in the morning to examine me further. Besides this he had me wear a large black ribbon which went around my neck, passed over the shoulder and the right arm, and was fastened in the back. In short, I know not whether I had no tendency to become crooked or whether these methods were effective. In any case, after a year and a half of such treatment, hope for my health was restored. I did not lay aside the uncomfortable jacket until I was ten or eleven years old.”

Fike’s inflammation of the lungs befell her at the age of seven. It coincided with her period of deepest pity, her melancholy absorption in the Last Judgment. She had been saturated with bigotry by the conscientious long-faced Wagner. On her knees in prayer she was struck down with a prolonged and serious illness. It was not an experience which the seven-year-old sinner could ever forget, especially when as a consequence she was obliged to wear for four long years an uncomfortable strait-jacket designed by the local hangman. Pneumonia and the Day of Judgment were welded in her mind. Having recovered from this illness, she resumed her position as the healthy child of the family. Not until she was fifteen years old did she fall ill again. This was on the threshold of her Russian career when an attack of pneumonia almost killed her while she was preparing to leave the Lutheran church and adopt the Greek faith. It was not easy for the daughter of Christian August and a descendant of the Anhalt Princes to become a turncoat in the matter of religion.