Sex with the Queen (32 page)

dripping with lace, diamond shoe buckles glinting in the foot-lights, diamond rings sparkling on his fingers.

But though Elizabeth took Beketov into her bed, she did not oust Shuvalov. And Razumovsky remained always gracefully lin-gering in the background. She took a fourth lover, a young man named Kachenevski, whose beautiful voice had hypnotized her when she heard him in a church choir. For a while she had four acknowledged lovers at once.

Behind each handsome face were roiling political factions and greedy family ambitions. The Shuvalov family, well aware that Beketov was the pawn of their enemy Bestuzhev, spread rumors around court of his disgusting homosexual orgies. They deliv-ered to the vain boy a jar of cosmetic ointment which, when he applied it to his delicate skin, made him break out in a rash that looked just like smallpox. Or perhaps, it was whispered, his rash was the result of some venereal disease caught only from homo-sexual activity. Their ploy paid off; he was ejected from the palace immediately.

By 1751 Elizabeth began having painful digestive problems and convulsions. Sometimes she was in such pain she would lie motionless for days, looking up at the cupids on the ceiling, ever young, ever in love, ever mocking her age and illness and loss of beauty. Reviving, she would spend hours dressing for a ball, then look in the mirror and, saddened by the sight, decide not to go.

For years it was confidently believed that Elizabeth was a dying woman. But after the most awful attacks of fainting and paralysis, she would defy the odds and recover completely. Finally, on Christmas Day 1761 Elizabeth died at the age of fifty-two, having suffered from fever and vomiting for nearly two weeks. In her last illness she turned from her more recent favorites back to her greatest love and probable husband, Alexei Razumovsky. In her last agony, her only comfort was listening to Razumovsky’s exqui-site voice, the one she had first heard thirty years before in the palace chapel, singing old Ukrainian lullabies to her. As soon as she breathed her last, her nephew Peter was proclaimed czar, and Razumovsky locked himself in his rooms and sobbed.

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C a t h e r i n e t h e G r e a t

“I Cannot Live One Day without Love”

The death of Empress Elizabeth meant that Grand Duchess Catherine was now empress consort. But as consort she possessed no power in her own right; power rested in the twitching hands of her imbecile husband, Czar Peter III. And Peter wanted nothing so much as to kill his annoying wife.

Peter had been poised to inherit the German duchy of Hol-stein and the kingdom of Sweden. He had a mania for all things German, particularly his hero Frederick the Great, and was a devout Protestant. But fate in the form of Aunt Elizabeth, em-press of Russia, decreed that he must give up Germany and Swe-den and everything dear to him and embrace a strange language, religion, and customs. The change unbalanced the sensitive child who was dragged kicking and screaming to his new domain, and whose mental health seemed to decline with each passing year.

When Catherine first met Peter, he was tiny for his age but good-looking in a vapid blond way. Within the year he caught smallpox; the fever unhinged what was left of his mind, the le-sions gouged out his skin as if they had been acid. The groom was now a disfigured giggling idiot; his nose was red and swollen, his eyes watering, his skin scabbed and mutilated. When Elizabeth announced the date of the wedding, Catherine recoiled. “I had a very great repugnance to hear the day named,” she wrote, “and it did not please me at all to hear it spoken of.”18

The elaborate church wedding was followed by a long banquet and a dance. But Empress Elizabeth, intent on getting herself an heir from this ill-matched pair, was in a hurry to get them to bed. Peter, she realized, would never be able to rule Russia. A child must be born soon to lead Russia into the future.

Ceremoniously placed in the bridal bed, Catherine waited for her groom. “Everyone had gone and I remained alone for over two hours,” she recalled, “not knowing what I had to do, whether to get up or remain in bed.” Finally, Peter came, climbed into bed, and guffawed. “How it would amuse my servants to see us 1 4 6

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here in bed together!”19 Then he fell asleep. Peter had been in-formed of the sex act only a few days before the wedding and seemed not to understand it. Catherine, who had only been told the night before of her marital duties, must have been both re-lieved and humiliated by her husband’s lack of interest.

At sixteen Catherine was ready and willing to have sex. Even as a child she gave a hint of her future intense sexuality; she would ride her pillows astride, as if they were a horse, a form of mastur-bation, we can assume, until she finally fell off in exhaustion. “I was never caught in the act, nor did anyone ever know that I trav-eled post-haste in my bed on my pillows,” she confessed in her memoirs.20

Peter often did keep his wife up all night, but instead of mak-ing love he took his toy soldiers to bed, playing until dawn, hav-ing mock battles on the covers. Sometimes he made Catherine drill for hours at night with a heavy musket over her shoulder.

Peter trained a pack of hounds to drill, and when he wasn’t beat-ing them, he kept them locked up in Catherine’s closet where they urinated all over her clothes. “It was amid this stench,”

Catherine reported, “that we slept.”21

The empress surrounded Catherine with strict chaperones to ensure the future heir would be Peter’s, a prince of Romanov blood. But after seven years, Catherine still remained a virgin.

Like Louis XVI of France, Peter suffered from phimosis, a con-dition in which a long flap of foreskin prevented intercourse.

Circumcision was the only remedy, but Peter refused.

The disgruntled empress, realizing any heir would be better than no heir at all, relaxed her vigilance and encouraged Catherine to take a lover, the darkly dashing Sergei Saltikov. The twenty-six-year-old was a born seducer, vain and sleek, the kind of man who, reeking of cheap cologne, sneaked up back stair-cases. Debonair and well-built, Saltikov was everything Cather-ine’s skinny, pale, obnoxious husband was not. When encouraged to relieve the twenty-three-year-old grand duchess of her unwanted virginity, Sergei accepted the mission with alacrity.

When Catherine became pregnant, Empress Elizabeth ordered e i g h t e e n t h - c e n t u r y r u s s i a 1 4 7

Peter’s friends to get him drunk and hold him down as the doc-tor, who had been waiting in the wings, was brought in to per-form a circumcision. When the czarevitch had healed, Catherine was forced to swallow her revulsion and seduce him. Much to Elizabeth’s chagrin, Catherine had two miscarriages in quick succession before becoming pregnant a third time with the fu-ture Czar Paul I, who was born in 1754.

As Empress Elizabeth cooed over the cradle, a court lady coolly remarked how dark the child’s complexion was, compared with Peter’s paleness. “Hold your tongue, you bitch,” the em-press roared. “I know what you mean. You want to insinuate he is a bastard but if he is, he is not the first one that has been in my family.”22

After the birth Saltikov was sent on diplomatic missions to various European courts, and word got back to Catherine that he talked of her as a triumph, even as he seduced other court ladies.

Not only had she been casually tossed aside by her first lover, but Catherine had no contact with her infant son, who was being raised by Elizabeth.

Worst of all, she knew that her husband’s mind was becoming completely unglued. One night he came late to their room and attacked her with a sword. Thinking fast, Catherine gamely sug-gested that he give her a sword, too, so they could duel. He walked away and she slumped against the wall, thinking how close she had come to being killed.

Lonely and sexually frustrated, Catherine cast about for a new lover. He was provided by the British ambassador, Sir Charles Hanbury-Williams, who had in his suite a handsome young Pol-ish count. At twenty-three, Stanislaus Poniatowski was thought-ful and sensitive and offered the startling advantage of having attended the major salons of Paris.

Hoping to further relations between Russia and England, Sir Charles brought the blond, hazel-eyed Poniatowski to Russia with the sole intention of landing him either in the bed of Em-press Elizabeth or Grand Duchess Catherine. Eager to advance the fallen fortunes of his family in Poland, Poniatowski allowed himself to become a sexual pawn in the hands of Sir Charles.

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When Sir Charles introduced the young Pole to Catherine, he noticed how she never took her eyes off him. One observer said the grand duchess had the look “of a wild beast tracking down its prey.”23

The English ambassador worked assiduously to get the two into bed together. Though Poniatowski enjoyed flirting with the grand duchess, whom he found achingly attractive, he was terri-fied that an affair would send him to Siberia. Catherine had to seduce a professed virgin and, after a while, began to despair.

How to get this fearful young man into bed? A good friend of hers came to the rescue and one night brought Poniatowski to the entrance of her private apartments. As Poniatowski wrote in his memoirs years later, he found the door half open, and inside Catherine was waiting for him in “a simple white gown trimmed with lace and pink ribbons, and looking so enticing as to make one forget the very existence of Siberia.”24

One day when Poniatowski and several courtiers made a for-mal visit to Catherine, her little dog gave the love affair away.

The dog, who detested strangers, came prancing up to Ponia-towski, tail wagging, then turned to the others and barked fero-ciously. The courtiers eyed each other meaningfully and tried not to laugh. The Swedish ambassador pulled Poniatowski aside and said, “My friend, there can be nothing more treacherous than a small dog; the first thing I used to do with a woman I loved was to be sure and give her one, and it was through them that I learnt if someone was more favored than myself. It is an infalli-ble test. As you see, the dog wanted to eat me up, as he did not know me, but he went mad with joy on seeing
you
again, for it is clear that this is not the first time you have met.”25