Great Catherine (45 page)

None of these liaisons satisfied the empress's need for romance and undemanding sexual intimacy for long. Catherine found Zavadovsky to be jealous and demanding of her time. ("As often

as possible," she wrote him, "I am only with you, but majesty, I confess, interferes a lot.") In the beginning he "fed her passion heart and soul," as she told him, yet later on his childishness, fits of weeping and periods of aggrieved isolation ended in a permanent breach—though the broken-hearted Zavadovsky continued to function in a variety of official positions. Neither Zorich nor Rimsky-Korsakov were any more satisfactory than Zavadovsky, and by the time Catherine and Potemkin's odd menage a trois had been in operation for three years the empress must have felt robbed of her emotional peace.

She who had written with devastating self-awareness that her "heart would not willingly remain one hour without love" had not found a way to secure that love without sacrificing either power or constancy or real fulfillment. Short-term sexual consorts gave her as much pain as pleasure, it would seem, either by being unfaithful, as Rimsky-Korsakov was, or by their moodiness and immaturity, or simply because they were personally shallow. Good-looking they certainly were, yet they fell far short of offering all that Potemkin had been able to give her. It was not only that she was personally disappointed; in addition, she had to be constantly vigilant, concerned lest Potemkin, whose jealousy and possessiveness were never far below the surface, might muscle in and send away any man he perceived as a serious rival.

So she went on, loving Potemkin and relying on him, and at the same time hoping to find with another man the joys of infatuation, craving a soul mate and a helpmeet, someone she could both turn to for romantic consolation and at the same time train to share her arduous labors. In 1779 she believed she found such a man. He was Alexander Lanskoy, a twenty-three-year-old captain in the Cavalier Guard, the imperial personal bodyguard.

All the men of the Cavalier Guard were supremely good-looking, and Lanskoy was no exception. Tall and strapping in his magnificent court uniform with silver armor (one courtier described him as "a very strong man, though ill made below and without the appearance of muscularity"), the fair young man with

the poetically beautiful features captivated the empress, and renewed her hope for love and solace. In Lanskoy she believed she had found the one man who, she told Grimm, "would be the support of my old age."

Nothing was too good for her "Sashinka," as she called him. She showered him with jeweled swords and gorgeous suits of clothes embroidered in gold and silver thread, gave him estates and houses, a library, paintings and tapestries and art objects worth millions of rubles. In time, she hoped, she could begin to delegate responsibilities to him. As she aged, he would grow in maturity and competence. Theirs would be an ideal union, satisfying to them both and of benefit to Russia.

Catherine nurtured Lanskoy, tutoring him in poetry—which he had a gift for writing—and in history, teaching him to appreciate fine art and encouraging in him a love of good music and elevating reading. Their relationship was complex: she was more than old enough to be his mother, and she mothered him; he looked on her with a devotion that had much of the filial in it; she was his teacher, and he her eager student, sincerely desirous of advancing himself culturally; there was a winter-spring romance, though of a unique kind, between a powerful empress and a poor young man from the Polish provinces; presumably there was tenderness, infatuation, intimacy. And there was, hovering in the background, the empress's true consort, Potemkin, at whose suffrance the liaison continued, and whose disapprobation could end it at any time.

By and large, these complexities escaped notice. In the eyes of the courtiers, visiting dignitaries and ambassadors from the European courts, the Russian empress had become an unrestrained nymphomaniac.

Gossips vied with one another over who could embroider or invent the most outrageous story. It was said that in addition to her official favorites Catherine entertained many other men, in fleeting liaisons. It was whispered that Catherine's friend Countess Bruce took each of Catherine's potential lovers to her bed and

tested him before he was allowed to make love to the empress. Potemkin was seen as a procurer of young flesh for the insatiable empress, encouraging her in her descent into debauchery and then profiting from it since both his mistress and her lovers paid him well. Nearly as many stories swirled around Potemkin as around Catherine: that he had tried to poison Gregory Orlov, that when he began to feel threatened by Catherine's involvement with Zavadovsky he became enraged and violent and at one point threw a heavy metal candlestick at the empress's head, that his private sexual appetites were even more sordid than Catherine's.

The reputation the empress had cultivated in western Europe, that of a wise and benevolent ruler, a patron of intellectuals and philosophers, a beacon of humanitarian sentiment, was tainted by accusations of immorality and base excess. The more straitlaced rulers of the Western states were appalled and offended by the stories coming out of Russia. The English King George III, an ultra-respectable married man and father of a huge brood of children, refused to offer Potemkin the Order of the Garter when Catherine requested it—"and was shocked," his ambassador noted. The Austrian Empress Maria Theresa was as bourgeois as King George, and militantly moralistic. She had organized a Chastity Commission in her empire, and attempted to cleanse her court of adultery (a task equivalent to cleansing the Augean stables, an impossibility that only made her look ridiculous; Catherine called her "Saint Theresa"). She could hardly bring herself to utter the name of her vice-ridden counterpart in Russia, and referred to Catherine simply as "that woman." Other sovereigns made appropriately censorious noises, remarking that, at the very least, Catherine was engaging in behavior unbecoming to her high office, and particularly reprehensible in a woman.

The political climate at the imperial court seethed with intrigue, talebearing, titillating rumormongering. Believing the empress to be in the grip of her insatible passions (and many of those at court, servants and officials alike, remembered well how irrational Empress Elizabeth had been in her last decade, and saw a similar

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fit of irrationality developing in her successor), they speculated constantly on when the present favorite would fall and who would be chosen next, and spread tales of shadowy figures seen going in and out of the imperial bedchamber. Families with handsome young men tried to thrust them in the empress's path, sometimes subtly, sometimes blatantly. Gregory Orlov suggested to Princess Dashkov—now a middle-aged widow, recently returned to favor in the circle around the empress—that she ought to prepare her attractive son for a career as imperial favorite. Though the princess did not view the suggestion kindly, many another mother hoped that her son would be the one to turn Catherine's head, if only for a night or two, believing that the reward of such a dalliance would be wealth and influence.

The whispers and laughter, the deriding of the empress, whose passion for younger men made her an object of ridicule, the scramble for power kept the court in a state of churning immobility. In such a climate, and given the empress's measurable loss of respect, a coup was not impossible. People nervously watched Grand Duke Paul, and even more Potemkin, whose military authority had increased and who by 1780 commanded thousands of soldiers, wondering when either or both might make a bid for power.

In actuality The Imperturbable was in firm command. Though fully and no doubt unhappily aware of what was being said about her, she continued to live as she chose, taking heart from her happy liaison with Alexander Lanskoy. As she entered her sixth decade, new challenges beckoned. The empress was gathering her forces for the most ambitious undertaking of her astounding career.

She had decided, as she confided to a visitor to her court, "to chase the Turks out of Europe and to enthrone herself in Byzantium."

Potemkin went to work with relish carrying out his mistress's grand scheme. With a large army and an abundant store of funds at his disposal, he extended Russian influence to the south, bring-

ing in colonists and building new towns to serve as administrative centers and garrisons, spearheads of a future Russian takeover. In the Crimea, nominally independent of both Russia and the Ottoman Empire but in actuality ruled by a puppet khan whose tenure in power was dependent on Russian support, Potemkin was poised to invade the peninsula himself as soon as the empress ordered him to.

But first Catherine had to come to terms with the other power in the region: Austria. She approached Empress Maria Theresa's son and co-ruler Joseph and proposed that they meet in person to discuss issues of common concern. It was a bold suggestion, and one that revealed the extent to which the empress had taken foreign policy matters into her own hands. No longer looking to Panin for advice, she alone determined the nature of Russia's aims and the diplomatic strategies to be used to achieve them. She asked the opinions of Potemkin and her secretary Bezborodko, and weighed their views, but hers remained the primary will and the only authority. She read every ambassadorial dispatch, read and approved all correspondence, presided over every significant council meeting. The future direction of the Russian Empire was in the empress's confident hands.

Or rather, her right hand; her left one was becoming weakened and tender from repeated attacks of rheumatism. She wrapped it warmly against the late spring chill when she set off in May of 1780 on a month-long journey through the newly reformed western provinces of her empire. She was eager to discover at close range how the new regulations she had put in place were working, and to this end she sent investigators on ahead to each of the towns she intended to visit, ordering them to inquire about the functioning of the schools and hospitals, the courts and tax offices so that when she arrived she would know what to expect.

Rain spoiled the elaborate ceremonies prepared for the empress's arrival in the provincial towns. The roads were knee-deep in mud, and muddy streams ran along the cobbled streets and through the gaily decorated squares. Forlorn bands played

on, dripping and sloshing water with each step; damp dignitaries stood under rain-soaked canopies to deliver speeches of welcome, while hundreds of people congregated wherever the empress went, following her coach, waiting outside banqueting houses or mansions where she went to dine, standing for hours under dark, weeping skies while she attended parties and balls.

Ignoring the rain and the flooded roads that delayed her progress from town to town, Catherine beamed appreciatively at those who came to gawk at her and received the speeches and rituals of homage with gracious words of thanks. She was gratified at her reception, and even more gratified to hear that great and far-reaching changes had taken place in the towns. Her investigators painted a glowing picture of improved commercial life and greater general prosperity, more efficient administration and a more law-abiding populace. The good news and thronging crowds more than compensated for the rain and chill winds that made the empress's swollen hand hurt; she looked forward to the climax of her tour, her meeting with the Austrian Archduke Joseph at the town of Mogilev.

Afterwards, Catherine recalled the day of her meeting with Archduke Joseph as "the best and most memorable day of my life." They spent the entire day and evening together, and Catherine wrote to Grimm that Joseph "didn't seem to be bored. I found him to be very knowledgeable," she added. "He loves to talk and talks very well." Joseph was in fact a man after Catherine's own heart—well informed, blunt, candid, utterly lacking in pretension and unafraid of facing unpleasant truths.

Empress and future emperor met as equals, each wielding great power (for Maria Theresa, elderly and ill, had conceded very substantial authority to her son and co-ruler), each able to survey Europe from a lofty eminence and make decisions as to its future. For Catherine this must have been a heady experience, being closeted with her fellow-sovereign, two crowned heads together, communing about the satisfactions and impediments of ruling large and tumultuous empires.

Catherine and Joseph had much in common: both were simple, even austere in their personal styles (Joseph liked to tour the European capitals incognito, as "Count Falkenstein," accompanied by only a single servant); both were well read, opinionated, and garrulous; both were liberal and inclined to follow the principles of Montesquieu and Voltaire; both were considered eccentric—-Joseph could be sharp, tactless and curmudgeonly on occasion, and contemptuous of his high-born peers—and both took pride in their singularity and even, one suspects, in the gossip their eccentricity gave rise to.

They attended a comic opera together, and talked throughout the performance, Joseph making observations that Catherine thought "worthy of being printed." They went together to a Catholic mass sung by the bishop of Mogilev, and laughed and joked throughout the ceremony in the most irreligious way. "We talked about everything in the world," Catherine told Grimm with evident delight. "He knows everything." She preferred to let the man take the lead, and Joseph led easily, though he was eleven years her junior; with pleasure she listened, fascinated, as he trotted out his views and aired his prejudices—many of which she shared.

"If I tried to summarize his virtues I would never come to the end," she told Grimm. "He is the most solidly intelligent, profound, and learned man I know."

Joseph, for his part, was favorably impressed by the witty, commonsensical empress about whom he had heard so much. "Her spirit, her high-mindedness, her bravery, her pleasing conversation have to be experienced to be appreciated," he wrote in a letter to his mother. He approved of her, and his approval was not lightly given. Yet he saw through her. She was self-centered, and vain of her looks and feminine appeal. She had not the knack of diplomacy, she could not disguise her obsession with conquering the Ottomans. She brought up her "Greek Project" again and again, always, tacitly or overtly, soliciting Austrian participation. Even when she showed Joseph portraits of her small grandsons,