Sex with the Queen (33 page)

Catherine was not alone in her infidelity. Liberated from his impotence, Peter had taken a mistress, who, if possible, was even uglier than himself. Elizabeth Vorontsova was fat and hunch-backed with disfiguring smallpox scars on her face. Worse, she was slatternly and fearless, insulting people with a gusto that made Peter whinny with laughter. Peter and his mistress would insist that Catherine and Poniatowski join them for dinner.

Catherine always played the role of good sport; but the gentle-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 9

manly Pole hated the forced dinners with his mistress, her hus-band, and his mistress.

Catherine gave birth to Poniatowski’s daughter in 1757, a sickly child who lived less than a year. Peter, though an idiot, was no fool. He went around in public commenting cheerfully, “I have no idea how my wife becomes pregnant, but I suppose I shall have to accept the child as my own.”26

In 1758 French and Austrian factions at court, fearing Ponia-towski’s pro-English sentiments, arranged with Empress Eliza-beth to have him ordered back to Poland. Tired of the intrigues at court and the embarrassing dinners with his mistress’s drool-ing husband, he was not sorry to go. Moreover, Catherine’s sex-ual demands were becoming deleterious to his health. In one of his more lucid moments, Peter described his wife as a woman

“who would squeeze all the juice out of a lemon and then throw it away.”27 Poniatowski had not been thrown away, but he didn’t have a drop of juice left when he took the road to Poland. Cather-ine cried as long and bitterly as she ever would in her life. “I sensed he was bored,” she wrote, “and it nearly broke my heart.”28

Over the years, Catherine suffered from the capricious moods of Empress Elizabeth, which swung from loving generos-ity to vicious cruelty. But the last two years of her life, sensing that Catherine, not Peter, would lead her beloved Russia into the future, Elizabeth made peace with the grand duchess. “She is a paragon of truth and justice, she is a woman of great intelli-gence,” the empress remarked, “but my nephew is a monster.”29

Looking about court for her next lover, Catherine realized her choice must fall on a Russian as foreign lovers ruffled the feathers of squawking rival diplomats. One day in the summer of 1759 the bored, frustrated grand duchess looked out of her win-dow and saw in the courtyard below a guardsman with the face of Adonis and the body of Hercules. It was love at first sight, and she sent for him immediately.

At thirty-four the magnificent Gregory Orlov was a man of action, of energy, of deeds. A few years earlier in a battle against the Prussians, Orlov, bleeding copiously from three serious wounds, had led a cavalry charge and vanquished the enemy.

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Towering head and shoulders over other men, this colossus re-portedly boasted a penis of tremendous size. He was one of five exceptional soldier brothers renowned for courage, physical strength, whoring, drunkenness, and gambling.

Unlike the smoothly seductive Saltikov or the sweetly ardent Poniatowski, Orlov was like a thundering flood, submerging everything in his path with his crashing brute force. Physically intimidating, he rolled into Catherine’s life and into her bed, and completely possessed her, body and soul. Catherine had, perhaps, always longed for a man to take her, rape her. In Orlov she finally found that.

Catherine’s choice of Orlov as her lover may not have been solely determined by his lovemaking skills. Peter disliked his wife more and more each passing day and openly expressed his hatred of her. When he became czar, he would kill her unless she moved first. Orlov and his four burly brothers were highly regarded by their regiments and could, when the time came, assist Catherine in climbing onto the throne. The grand duchess kept her love af-fair secret, smuggling Orlov into her rooms at night for sex and plotting.

In December 1761 Empress Elizabeth lay dying. For years Catherine had planned for this moment, knowing that either her husband would destroy her or she would destroy him. It was one or the other. But now, as that moment approached, Catherine was in no position to act. She was six months pregnant with Orlov’s child, ample reason for Peter to divorce her, imprison her, and murder her.

On Christmas Day Empress Elizabeth died, and Peter was proclaimed Czar Peter III. He hated Russia and now, as its leader, would do all in his power to humiliate the country he ruled and the wife who reigned beside him.

Catherine, her pregnancy hidden in a loose and fashionable sack gown, was the first to swear allegiance to the new czar, pros-trating herself on the floor before him. She sat vigil with Eliza-beth’s corpse in the church, day and night, while Peter publicly insulted the memory of his aunt by not saying a single prayer at her bier, joking with her ladies-in-waiting and emitting his own e i g h t e e n t h - c e n t u r y r u s s i a 1 5 1

shrill raucous cackles over the corpse. He seemed to think the funeral procession was a colossal joke, and instead of keeping pace behind the coffin as chief mourner, lagged behind and then rushed to catch up, throwing the whole procession into disor-der. Russians were scandalized at the behavior of their new em-peror and contrasted Peter’s behavior with the respectful decorum of Empress Catherine.

Worse than his behavior at the funeral, Peter immediately concluded the Seven Years’ War against his hero, Frederick the Great of Prussia, who had been beaten into a corner by valiant Russian soldiers. Peter returned to an astonished Frederick all the territories Russia had won with the blood of its fighting men.

He wore a huge ring with a portrait of Frederick, whom he called

“the king, my master.”30 Peter ordered the elite Preobrazhensky regiment to wear new uniforms modeled on those of King Fred-erick’s guards. Russian soldiers were aghast to find that their new emperor was a skinny heel-clicking weakling wearing an enemy uniform and barking drill orders in German.

Equally threatening to Russians were Peter’s edicts to seize church properties, rid the churches of all icons except those rep-resenting Christ and the Virgin, and force Orthodox priests to dress like Lutheran ministers. Within weeks of his accession, he had alienated the army and the church, which together formed the keystone of support crucial to any reign.

Peter treated his mistress Elizabeth Vorontsova as the reign-ing empress and went out of his way to publicly humiliate Catherine. Vorontsova’s behavior had become even more shock-ing now that her lover was emperor. A German visitor reported,

“She swore like a trooper, had a squint, stank, and spat when she talked.”31 Catherine scathingly referred to her as “Madame de Pompadour,” advertising the difference between the coarse slat-tern of Peter III and the graceful mistress of Louis XV. When Peter became drunk, he boasted that he would divorce Cather-ine, marry and crown his mistress, and declare Catherine’s son Paul a bastard. With Orlov’s help, Catherine made sure that these boasts were repeated in every barracks in St. Petersburg.

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cretly while living a few rooms down the hall from her husband.

One of her devoted servants, Vasily Skourin, knowing that Peter loved to watch buildings burn, set fire to his own house as Catherine went into labor. Peter raced across town to see the fire and for hours stared as if hypnotized by the golden orange flames licking the walls, the black smoke curling to the sky. He listened intently to the crackle and sizzle of burning wood and shrieked with joy when the beams crashed down.

While the emperor was indulging his passion for pyromania, the empress gave birth to her lover’s son. A trusted lady-in-waiting smuggled the baby out of the palace wrapped in a beaver skin, which resulted in the surname given him—Bobrinsky—a derivation of the Russian word for beaver. Peter, living in his hazy world of Prussian drill maneuvers and pyromania, never knew that his wife had even been pregnant.

In an effort to support his master, the king of Prussia, Peter decided to join his attack on Denmark. Russian troops were fu-rious to learn that they would be fighting for their sworn enemy Frederick the Great. Moreover, the emperor, whose idea of mil-itary valor was beating helpless animals and trembling servants, decided he would lead his men personally, dressed in a Prussian uniform. Peter’s antics played directly into the hands of the Orlov brothers, who were winning over followers in their regi-ments eager to proclaim Catherine empress.

To prepare for his journey to Denmark, Peter set out for the palace of Oranienbaum several miles outside of St. Petersburg, which he transformed into an army camp. He ordered Catherine to move to the nearby palace of Peterhof, where he planned to join her to celebrate his name day on June 29, the Feast of St.

Peter. But Catherine heard that the emperor was setting her up to have her arrested the evening after the celebration.

Catherine, who kept up a friendly correspondence with Poni-atowski in Poland, wrote him, “It was six o’clock in the morning of June 28, and I was fast asleep when Alexis Orlov came into my room and woke me up by telling me in the calmest manner that I must get dressed and come with him to St. Petersburg, where the army was ready to proclaim me their empress.”32

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