Sex with the Queen (37 page)

the background and a turbaned boy fanning him with ostrich feathers.

Within five years Potemkin had built the Black Sea fleet, which he immediately turned on the Turks to utterly defeat them. He added new Muslim territories to the empire as so many jewels to Catherine’s crown. Potemkin gestured and cities sprang from empty fields, cities such as Sebastopol and Odessa.

He built a silk stocking factory, sending the first pair to Cather-ine, and planted thirty thousand vines for wine. When he prom-ised free land, oxen, and plows to settlers, hundreds of thousands of Europe’s poor and disenfranchised arrived in his new towns. Within three years the population of his territories skyrocketed from 204,000 to roughly 800,000. Respectful of ethnicity and religious beliefs, Potemkin invited priests, rabbis, and Muslim mullahs to serve at his court.

In his southern empire Potemkin indulged his taste for showmanship. At heart he was a wizard, an impresario, a ring-master of visual delights. Cannons boomed when he entered a town; maidens crowned him with garlands and strewed rose petals in his path. Wherever he traveled he was met with fire-works, pageants, military parades, and mock naval battles.

Potemkin took mistresses by the dozen, including several of his own nieces. Secure in the knowledge that she truly possessed his heart, Catherine showered gold and diamonds on his girl-friends.

Serenissimus, the Prince of Princes, as he was now known, was Russia’s most brilliant statesman since Peter the Great. But Potemkin’s string of successes sometimes brought depression in their wake. “Can any man be more happy than I am?” he asked one evening at dinner. “Everything I have ever wanted, I have; all my whims have been fulfilled as if by magic. I wanted high rank, I have it. I wanted medals, I have them. I loved gambling, I have lost vast sums. I liked giving parties, I’ve given magnificent ones; I enjoy building houses, I’ve raised palaces. . . . In a word, all my passions have been sated, I am entirely happy!”65 And then he swept all the valuable china plates on the floor, smashing them to 1 6 8

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bits, raced off to his bedroom, and locked the door. Potemkin suffered bitterly from having nothing left to want. For when dreams turn into reality, there is an empty spot where the dreams used to be, and Potemkin had no dreams left.

Meanwhile, in St. Petersburg, Catherine had to find a new fa-vorite. She started a new system in which a doctor checked out all prospective candidates for venereal disease. If the young man seemed healthy, he would then be taken to bed by Catherine’s good friend Countess Prascovya Bruce, and rated on his appear-ance, sexual technique, and the size of his penis. The
éprouveuse
as she was called, or tester, would then inform the empress of her findings. Those who passed the test were sent on to Catherine for further testing before she selected a favorite. We can imagine that many a nervous young man was too terrified to rise to the occa-sion. His entire future and that of his family were at stake, based solely on the hardness of his penis.

The first favorite to pass this barrage of tests was thirty-seven-year-old Peter Zavadovsky, whom Catherine appointed her per-sonal secretary. Handsome, dark, and courteous, Zavadovsky worked assiduously on her personal correspondence, and within a month of his arrival at the palace he was promoted to major general.

But it would take more than a Zavadovsky to make a woman forget Potemkin. A French diplomat remarked that Zavadovsky was “probably no more than an amusement.”66 But he was not as amusing as Catherine had hoped. Though he had somehow passed the sexual performance tests, once he landed the position of favorite Zavadovsky suffered from premature ejaculation.

Catherine wrote him, “You are Vesuvius itself. When you least expect it, an eruption appears. . . .”67

He was unambitious, wanting neither riches nor honors, just her love, and bemoaned the fact that in attending to affairs of state she had so little time for him. Zavadovsky threw jealous tantrums about Potemkin, and Potemkin stormed about Zavadovsky. In 1777 Potemkin informed Catherine that he would never return to court unless Zavadovsky was dismissed.

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Catherine begged him to relent. “Do not make me do anything so unfair,” she implored him. But Potemkin remained stubborn and Zavadovsky had to go.

He was devastated. “Amid hope, amid passion full of feelings, my fortunate lot has been broken like the wind, like a dream which one cannot halt; (her) love for me has vanished,” he said.68 Like Vasilchikov before him, he retired grumbling to his estates laden with gifts—four thousand serfs, eighty thousand rubles, and a silver dining service for sixteen. “You must agree, my friend,” wrote the French chargé d’affaires in St. Petersburg,

“that it’s not a bad line of work to be in here.”69 Three years later, Catherine brought Zavadovsky back to court and gave him a government position. She made him legal guardian of Count Bobrinsky, her child with Gregory Orlov.

Before Zavadovsky’s dismissal, Potemkin decided that
he
would select Catherine’s lovers, those who would not foment against him, those who would serve as his creatures. The success-ful candidate would offer an abundance of physical beauty and a corresponding lack of brains. A German courtier told Frederick the Great that Potemkin chose them “expressly to have neither talent nor the means to take direct influence.”70

The day Zavadovsky left, his successor, Peter Yoritz, moved into his apartments. The new lover boasted a splendid physique and fiery temperament but was illiterate. He remained in favor ten months and then the empress told a visiting Potemkin, “Last night I was in love with him; today I can’t stand him anymore.”71

The spurned suitor was appeased with a life pension, several rich estates, and seven thousand serfs.

Catherine celebrated her fiftieth birthday in 1779 with ban-quets, fireworks, and sighs. Her youth was now vanished beyond any pretense. She felt girlish only during the sex act when, in a passionate tangle of arms and legs and hard thrusts, she could feel youth, feel passion, forget her corpulent aging body. And when she did look in the mirror, did she truly believe she saw a woman who could still inspire love and lust? A woman for whom men would rage and fight, even if she had not worn a crown?

Yes, she was old and heavy and wrinkled but there was something 1 7 0

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special there still, wasn’t there? A gleam in the eye, a flash of a smile, something still magical that rose above mere physical beauty?
Wasn’t there?

Potemkin quickly found a successor to Yoritz. This time he chose an elegant fellow with chiseled Greek features who resem-bled a young Apollo. Twenty-four-year-old Ivan Korsakov played the violin and sang love songs to Catherine for hours. In June 1778 the British ambassador wrote, “Potemkin, who has more cunning than any man living, has introduced Korsakov at a critical moment. . . .”72

Korsakov, knowing he was out of his league intellectually, de-cided to impress courtiers with his new library. The bookseller asked, “What books would His Lordship wish to possess?” To which the startled young man replied, “Oh, you know, big vol-umes on the bottom shelves and small ones on the top, like the Empress has.”73

But the new lover, who had been tested by Madame Bruce and received excellent grades, was far more interested in the trim and subtle
éprouveuse
than in the gross and hungry empress. One day after a year with Korsakov, the empress found the two of them together in bed. Both were requested to leave St. Petersburg.

Potemkin already had another one waiting in the wings.

Alexander Lanskoy was a twenty-four-year-old guardsman from an impoverished but noble family. Charming, handsome, and incredibly tall, he was incredulous to hear that Prince Potemkin had plucked him from obscurity and appointed him his new aide-de-camp. Potemkin had been aware of Korsakov’s affair with Madame Bruce well before the empress found out, and rather than relinquishing the position to a rival faction, he de-cided to groom Lanskoy in advance and slide him in at the right moment. When Catherine, dejected at her lover’s infidelity, turned to Potemkin for sympathy, he introduced her to Lan-skoy, who was overcome with love for her. Catherine, for her part, was delighted at finding a young man who would be the support of her old age.

Within weeks Alexander Lanskoy was promoted to general and became the empress’s personal aide-de-camp. The young man e i g h t e e n t h - c e n t u r y r u s s i a 1 7 1

who had only five shirts to his name suddenly found himself with one hundred thousand rubles to spend on his wardrobe, and seven million rubles in gifts. Though not possessed of the physi-cal stamina of Catherine’s other lovers, Lanskoy aroused her maternal instincts. Modest and gentle, he was truly devoted to her and refused to take part in political intrigues. He enjoyed helping Catherine lay out gardens and design buildings.

Catherine was grateful to have the sympathetic Lanskoy with her when Gregory Orlov, the powerful lover who had given her the crown, was stricken by insanity. He had married his teenage cousin and brought her to court in 1778. Catherine had gener-ously welcomed the girl, given her a splendid toilet set, and made her a lady-in-waiting. But his wife’s early death from consump-tion in 1781 threw Orlov into madness. His brothers had to physically force him away from her tomb where he had remained for days, sobbing, refusing to eat or sleep.