Great Catherine (18 page)

Much had changed since Catherine's initial encounters with the chancellor, when she first came to Russia nine years earlier. Then Bestuzhev had seen Catherine as a pawn of the pro-French faction at the imperial court, a young and dangerously precocious girl whose elevation to the rank of grand duchess he opposed. Now he saw her as an intelligent, potentially valuable political ally,

handicapped by her failure to have a child yet astute beyond her years thanks to wide reading and shrewd observation.

And the chancellor stood in need of allies. He clung to his post though the empress was at best lukewarm toward him and her current favorites, the Shuvalovs, were doing their best to maneuver him out of office. When the empress died he would need the approbation of her successor, and if Peter succeeded her then Bestuzhev would value the support of Peter's wife, who was likely to be a dominant force in the new regime. It was clear to the chancellor, as it was to the grand duchess, that they stood in need of one another; both welcomed a rapprochement.

Bestuzhev granted the benefit of his aid and protection to Catherine and Sergei, becoming "very intimate with us," as Catherine wrote, "without anyone else knowing anything." Throughout the winter, while the courtiers spent themselves at balls and masquerades, in pursuing petty rivalries and romantic intrigues (Nicholas Choglokov embarked on a dangerous attempt to seduce the ailing empress while Maria Choglokov carried on an affair with Prince Repnin), Catherine met with Bestuzhev and drew him surreptitiously into her circle.

There were many diversions that winter. Apart from the usual ice sledding and sleighing parties, toboggan races and skating on the frozen lakes and ponds, there was at least one near-fatal duel and numerous accidents. Fires broke out all over Moscow. Catherine recalled looking out the palace window and seeing three, four or even five blazes going on in different quarters of the city at the same time. The empress narrowly escaped serious injury while on one of her pilgrimages to a nearby convent. Lightning struck the main church and the ceiling fell in; fortunately Elizabeth had left the main sanctuary and was worshiping at a smaller chapel on the convent grounds at the time.

The empress developed a new interest. When one of her chamber lackeys went mad, foaming at the mouth and raging, she turned him over to Dr. Boerhave and instructed the doctor to

house him in a special room in the palace. From then on, when she heard of anyone who was similarly afflicted, she had that person brought to court and made a part of her small asylum. By the end of the winter she had quite a collection of lunatics: a major in the Semenovsky guards who confused the Shah of Persia with the deity; two other guards officers who had lost their reason; a monk—possibly a religious fanatic—who had cut off his genitals with a razor, and several others. The Semenovsky officer interested her the most, for apart from his delusion concerning the Shah he seemed quite sane. Elizabeth decided to take him out of Dr. Boerhave's care and turn him over to the priests. When the latter declared that he was possessed by a demon and performed the ritual of exorcism, the empress attended it, and was disappointed when the major, seemingly unaffected, continued to cling to his error.

Some said that the grand duke belonged in the imperial madhouse. He drank more heavily than ever, beat his servants mercilessly and lived in his own puerile world. He stayed away from Catherine, he complained about her and insulted her freely, yet he relied on her to help him administer his Holstein lands and to keep his servants in line. It irritated him, Catherine wrote, that he could not make himself obeyed even when he thrashed those who served him, while Catherine's servants carried out her commands without having to be told twice.

One day Catherine went to Peter's apartments and was struck by the sight of a huge rat hanging from a makeshift gallows erected inside a cupboard. The rat, Peter informed his wife, had committed a criminal act and, under the military code, deserved execution. It had chewed its way into one of Peter's toy fortresses and had eaten several of the tiny soldiers on parade there. The laws of war were harsh, Peter said. They demanded that the rat be captured, hanged, and left on the gallows for three days as an example to other rats who might be tempted to harm the ducal host.

Spring came, and in May Catherine was once again pregnant with Sergei Saltykov's child. With the arrival of good weather the Young Court left Moscow for Labritza, an estate some eight or nine miles away. The empress had recently given the property with its rundown stone mansion to Peter, and he had ordered a new wooden wing added to the crumbling stone of the old house. But the new addition was not yet ready, and so the guests slept in tents on the grounds.

Catherine, it seems, took only slightly more care to safeguard this pregnancy than she had her previous one. She lodged in a drafty tent, her sleep interrupted before dawn each morning by the sawing and hammering of workmen, her days spent following the hunt in an open carriage. On her return to Moscow a few weeks later she drowsed her way through the long summer days, but stayed up at night attending balls and suppers, and did not spare herself when it came to either food or recreation. As a result she was seized with sudden pains in her lower back, and when Maria Choglokov brought a midwife to examine her the midwife predicted that she would miscarry.

Once again Catherine lost her child, but this time the physical consequences were severe. The embryo was expelled, but part of the afterbirth remained, and for several weeks it was feared that Catherine might not survive. The gravity of her condition was kept from her, but she must have guessed that something was very wrong; the empress, that distant, disapproving being whom she rarely saw, suddenly appeared at her bedside with her most cherished relics in her hand and a look of concern on her jowly face.

The succession—and for a time, Catherine's life—hung in the balance, yet both Peter and Sergei stayed away, and after her initial visit so did the empress. For a time prayers were said and candles lit at the altars of Moscow's churches, but when the crisis passed and the grand duchess did not die she was left very much alone.

"During my six weeks of enforced rest," Catherine wrote in her memoirs, "I died of boredom. I had only Maria, and she came rarely, and a little Kalmuk, whom I loved, because she was amiable. I often cried from boredom." The days were unbearably hot, the nights fretful. Ill and full of ennui, in pain a good deal of the time, Catherine craved relief, stimulation, attention. She may have felt keenly the loss of contact with her mother, who following the death of Christian August had gone to live in Paris. She was forbidden to communicate with Johanna, but once in a long while she managed to find a traveler who would carry a letter to her in secret, and occasionally a visitor from the West smuggled in a reply. A year earlier, in 1752, Johanna had managed to send Catherine several lengths of rich fabric from Paris, but Maria had confiscated them immediately—leaving Catherine speechless with anger—and had sent them to the empress.

By fall 1753 Catherine was out of bed and restored to health, but her spirits were no brighter. She had failed twice to carry a child to term, and at great cost in security and peace of mind. She had let the callous Sergei toy with her emotions, trusting him and then discovering that he was unreliable, moody and at times alarmingly cool. The game of courtly love was proving to be sordid and anguishing, bruising to the heart and damaging to the ego. Yet Catherine had to continue to play it, she had no choice. There had to be an heir, and Sergei had to provide it.

Catherine was sitting in the Choglokov's salon in the Golovin Palace one chilly afternoon in November when she heard shouting in the corridor outside. Sergei and Leon Naryshkin burst in, yelling that a wing of the palace was on fire.

Catherine jumped up and ran to her own rooms, where her servants were rushing to remove as many of the furnishings as they could. Thick choking smoke was rapidly filling the hallways and anterooms, and the balustrade of the grand staircase, only twenty feet from Catherine's apartments, was already on fire. Room after room was consumed, flames devoured the rotting wood and made a terrible searing heat. As Catherine watched,

thousands of black rats and gray mice filed in orderly fashion down the staircase and out to the safety of the courtyard.

Maria Choglokov and Catherine picked their way among the rats and mice and ran out of the palace, taking refuge in a carriage belonging to the Spanish singing master while they watched the terrible destruction. It had been raining for days, and the palace courtyard was ankle-deep in mud. Coughing servants struggling under the weight of trunks, boxes, beds and piles of linen staggered out into the open air and dropped their burdens into the mire, grateful to be out of danger. Catherine watched her domestics salvage her clothes, her jewels, a few of her desks and tables. She was worried about her books. For two years she had been reading Bayle's Dictionary, that monument to irreverence and sharply reasoned skepticism written in the last years of the previous century, and had been savoring each entry as she had once savored the astringent rationalism of Babette Cardel. She possessed four volumes of the dictionary, and feared to lose them to the flames. To her delight, her servants brought her the beloved books unscathed, and she felt immense relief.

Much was saved, but much more was lost. Paintings, hangings, priceless plate, furniture of inlaid wood and marble, jewel-studded gowns and untold finery fed the hungry blaze, until the entire palace was consumed. Peter's lackeys managed to save some of his chests of uniforms and trunks full of toy soldiers. His dozens of cupboards, stuffed full of empty wine and liqueur bottles, now lay in heaps exposed to the rain, their doors ajar to reveal the grand duke's private horde.

For three hours the flames burned high. The empress, who had been in another palace when the fire began, hurried back to survey the damage and supervise the vain attempt to extinguish it. "With all the coolness of mind imaginable," wrote one who saw her there, Elizabeth gave orders, clutching her relics and icons and praying for divine intervention. Her prayers were in vain. Most of her valuables were reduced to ashes, and it would be months, perhaps years, before they could be replaced.

Night fell but the orange glow of the fire made a false twilight that lingered in the vicinity of the palace for many hours. As each blackened timber collapsed, showers of red sparks rose into the dimness, until of the once splendid structure nothing but charred embers remained. The sharp stink of burned wood hung in the air, acrid and pungent, clinging to the clothes and hair and faces of those who had escaped the fire as they went about the task of salvaging what they could from the ruins. While they worked, the rats and mice swarmed in chattering hordes over the sodden goods in the courtyard.

For Catherine, her spirits low and her energies depleted, the burning of the royal palace may have symbolized a larger tragedy. She had been in Russia for nine years, and in all that time she had achieved little. Like the great palace, her life was in a state of collapse, her marriage a farce, her affair with Sergei Saltykov a betrayal of the love that still eluded her, her attempts at motherhood a disaster. As she watched the massive structure burn, she must have been tempted to see in the blazing destruction the wreckage of all her hopes.

Chapter Eleven

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SIX WEEKS AFTER FIRE DESTROYED THE GoLOVIN PALACE IN November of 1753, Empress Elizabeth presided over a grand New Year's banquet at a new palace she had had built in the interim. She had ordered workmen to take the great wooden beams from three other mansions and use them to erect a suite of apartments into which she moved in the last days of the old year. Moscow carpenters were accustomed to building rapidly; when the empress commanded, they obeyed. The structure was raised, walls of fresh green wood fitted into place, stoves installed, kitchens and storerooms constructed, furnishings brought in. By New Year's Day the palace was fit for holding court, and the empress sat in state under the royal canopy, her plump figure glittering with jewels, with Peter and Catherine beside her.

Elizabeth was "very cheerful and garrulous" on that afternoon, Catherine recalled in her memoirs. Though she had been suffering from a bad cough and had largely lost her appetite, she managed to conceal her illness, and looked better than she had in some time. She could no longer dance a minuet without having to lie down and rest for a long time afterwards, and climbing stairs had become too much for her. Special lifts were constructed that took her from one floor of her palaces to another, and when she visited the mansions of her wealthiest subjects, these had to be

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fitted out with mechanical devices to haul her from the entry hall up to the ballroom. But as long as she remained seated, the weakness in her legs was not apparent, and on this New Year's Day it was easy to forget that only recently her life had been despaired of and preparations had been made for an imminent change of reigns.