The Memoirs of Catherine the Great (23 page)

1750

Peter’s confidantes, the Princess of Courland and the Countess
Vorontsova; his refusal to take baths; his accident with a whip;
Holstein oysters; his negotiations over Holstein with Denmark;
Mme. d’Arnim’s challenge to Catherine’s skill on horseback;
court masquerades; Elizabeth’s new favorite; Catherine’s English
spaniel; her simple ball dress

The first day of that year, wanting my hair done, I saw my young hairdresser, a Kalmuck whom I had raised, exceedingly flushed and with a heavy look in his eyes. I asked him what was wrong; he told me that he had a severe headache and was very hot. I dismissed him, telling him to go to bed because he truly was exhausted. He went away, and that evening I was told that he had just shown signs of smallpox. I escaped with only the fear that I had of catching smallpox, for I did not come down with it, although he had combed my hair.

The Empress spent much of carnival at Tsarskoe Selo. Petersburg was almost empty; most people who lived there stayed out of duty, not out of liking for it. When the court was in Moscow and about to return to Petersburg, all the courtiers rushed to ask for leaves for a year, six months, or at least a few weeks in order to stay in Moscow. The officials, such as senators and others, would do the same, and when they feared not obtaining a leave, then came the fake or real illnesses of husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, or children, or else trials and other indispensable affairs to settle. In a word, six months and sometimes more were necessary before the court and the city returned to what they had been before the court’s departure, and while the court was absent, grass grew in the streets of Petersburg because there were almost no carriages in the city. Under these circumstances, for the moment not a lot of company could be expected, especially for us, who were moreover kept quite isolated. Monsieur Choglokov decided during this time to entertain us, or rather, since he and his wife did not know what to do in their boredom, he invited the Grand Duke and me to come every afternoon to play cards at their residence in the apartment that he occupied at the court, which consisted of four or five rather small rooms. He invited the gentlemen and ladies of the court, and the Princess of Courland, daughter of Duke Ernst Johann Biron, the former favorite of Empress Anna. Empress Elizabeth had let this Duke come back from Siberia, where during the regency of Princess Anna he had been exiled. He had been assigned to stay in the city of Yaroslavl, on the Volga; there he had lived with his wife, his two sons, and his daughter.

This girl was neither beautiful, nor pretty, nor shapely—she was hunchbacked and rather small—but she had pretty eyes, intelligence, and a singular capacity for intrigue. Her father and her mother did not love her very much; she claimed that they constantly mistreated her. One fine day, she escaped from the paternal household and fled to the house of Madame Pushkina, the wife of the governor of Yaroslavl. This woman, delighted to make herself important at the court, brought her to Moscow and spoke to Madame Shuvalova, and they passed off the Princess of Courland’s flight from her father’s house as the result of the persecution that her parents had inflicted upon her because she had manifested a desire to embrace the Greek Orthodox religion. And indeed the first thing she did at the court really was to confess her faith. The Empress was her godmother, and afterward she was given an apartment among the maids of honor. Monsieur Choglokov took pains to cultivate her because the Princess’s older brother had provided the foundation for his fortune by taking him from the cadet corps, where he had been raised, into the horse guard, and keeping him in his service as an errand boy.
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Having made her way into our company and playing cards several hours every day with the Grand Duke, Choglokov, and me, the Princess of Courland at first conducted herself with great restraint. She was flattering, and her wit made one forget the disagreeable aspect of her figure, especially when she was seated. She spoke to each person in a manner that would please him. Everyone regarded her as an interesting orphan; she was considered a person of practically no consequence. In the eyes of the Grand Duke she had another merit, which was of no small importance. She was a kind of foreign Princess, and what is more, German; consequently they spoke only German together. This made her charming in his eyes; he began to pay her as much attention as he was capable of giving. When she dined in her residence, he sent her wine and a few of the favorite dishes from his table, and when he acquired some new grenadier’s hat or some bandolier, he sent them to her so she could see them.

The Princess of Courland, who at the time was twenty-four or twentyfive years old, was not the only acquisition that the court had made in Moscow. The Empress had engaged the two Countesses Vorontsova, nieces of the Vice Chancellor and daughters of Count Roman, his younger brother. The elder girl, Maria, may have been fourteen; she was placed among the Empress’s maids of honor. The younger, Elizabeth, was only eleven; she was given to me. She was a very ugly child with a sallow complexion and she was extremely dirty. They both started out in Petersburg by catching smallpox at the court, and the younger one became even uglier as a result because her facial features were totally deformed and her face was covered not with pockmarks but with scars.

Toward the end of carnival, the Empress returned to the city.
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The first week of Lent, we began to make our devotions. Wednesday evening I was supposed to go bathe in Madame Choglokova’s house, but the evening before, she came into my room, where the Grand Duke was too, and conveyed to him as well on the Empress’s behalf the order to go bathe. Now, not only did he have a great dislike for bathing and all the other Russian customs or national habits, he even mortally detested them. He said quite firmly that he would do no such thing. She was also very stubborn and blunt in her speech, and told him that this would be disobeying Her Imperial Majesty. He declared that he could not be ordered to do what was repugnant to his nature, that he knew that the baths, to which he had never been, did not agree with him, that he did not want to die and that he held life most dear, and that the Empress would never force him to go. Madame Choglokova shot back that the Empress would know how to punish his disobedience. At this he became incensed and said angrily to her, “I will see what she does to me. I am not a child.” Then Madame Choglokova warned him that the Empress would have him put in the fortress. At this he began to cry bitterly and they said to each other the most outrageous things that fury inspired in them, and indeed neither had any common sense. Finally she departed, saying that she was going to report this conversation word for word to the Empress. I do not know what she did, but she returned and the subject of argument changed, because she came to say that the Empress said that we did not have any children, that she was very angry, that she wanted to know which of us was at fault, and that she would send me a midwife and him a doctor. To all this she added many other outrageous remarks, of which we could make neither heads nor tails, and ended by saying that the Empress excused us from our devotions that week because the Grand Duke had said that the bath would undermine his health. During these two conversations, it should be known that I did not open my mouth,
primo,
because they both spoke with such vehemence that I could not get a word in;
secondo,
because I saw that they were both talking the most complete nonsense. I do not know how the Empress judged all this, but in the end, there was no more talk of either matter beyond what I have just reported.

Toward the middle of Lent, the Empress departed for Count Razumovsky’s house at Gostilitsa to celebrate his birthday and she sent us with her maids of honor and our usual entourage to Tsarskoe Selo. The weather was extraordinarily mild and even so warm that on March 17 there was no more snow but dust on the road. Upon arriving at Tsarskoe Selo, the Grand Duke and Choglokov began to hunt. The ladies and I went out, sometimes on foot, sometimes in carriages as often as we could. In the evenings we played different little games. Here the Grand Duke developed a decided taste for the Princess of Courland, especially when he had drunk in the evening at supper, which he did almost every day. He was never more than a step away from her and spoke only to her. Eventually this affair was in full swing in my presence and that of everyone, which began to shock my vanity and my self-esteem, seeing that this monstrous little figure was preferred over me. One evening, as I rose from the table, Madame Vladislavova said to me that everyone was shocked that this little hunchback was preferred over me. I replied to her, “What can I do?” Tears came to my eyes and I went to bed. I had only just fallen asleep when the Grand Duke came to bed as well. As he was drunk and did not know what he was doing, he tried to strike up a conversation with me about the eminent qualities of his belle. I pretended to be in a deep sleep so as to make him shut up more quickly, but after having spoken even more loudly to wake me up and seeing that I gave no sign of being awakened, he gave me two or three rather hard punches in the side, cursing the depth of my slumber, then turned, and fell asleep. I cried a great deal that night over the affair and the blows he had given me, and over my situation, which was in every way as disagreeable as it was tedious. The following day, he seemed ashamed of what he had done; he did not speak to me about it and I pretended not to have felt anything.

Two days later we returned to town. The last week of Lent we began again to make our devotions; no more mention of bathing was made to the Grand Duke. Another accident happened to him that week that made him think a bit. In his room during the day, he was almost always doing one thing or another. One afternoon he practiced cracking an immense coachman’s whip that he had had made. He snapped it right and left with large strokes and continually made his valets run from one corner to the other for fear of getting slashed. I do not know how he did it, but it happened that he gave himself a very big lash on the cheek. The scar went down the entire left side of his face and was bleeding. He was very alarmed, fearing that he would be unable to appear in public on Easter and that since he had a bloody cheek, the Empress would again forbid him from making his devotions, and that when she learned the reason, the whip exercise would bring him some unpleasant reprimand. He could think of nothing better to do in his distress than to come running to me for advice, which he never failed to do in such cases.

I saw him enter with his bloody cheek. I cried out on seeing him, “My God, what has happened to you?” He told me the story. Having considered the situation a bit, I said to him, “Well, perhaps I will get you out of this mess. First of all, go back to your room and make it so that your cheek is seen as little as possible. I will come into your apartment as soon as I have what I need, and I hope that no one will notice.” He departed and I remembered that when I had fallen a few years before in the garden at Peterhof and scratched my cheek so badly it bled, my surgeon, Guyon, had given me a salve with white lead
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with which I covered my scratch. I went on appearing in public and no one even noticed that I had scratched my cheek. I immediately sent for this salve, and when it was brought to me, I went into the Grand Duke’s apartment and I treated his cheek so well that in the mirror he himself could see nothing. Thursday we went to communion with the Empress in the big court church, and when we had taken communion we returned to our places. The sunlight shone on the Grand Duke’s cheek, and Choglokov approached us to say I know not what. Looking at the Grand Duke, he said, “Wipe your cheek because there is ointment on it.” At this I said to the Grand Duke, as if playing, “And I who am your wife forbid you to wipe it.” Then the Grand Duke said to Monsieur Choglokov, “You see how these wives treat us. We dare not even wipe ourselves when they do not want it.” Monsieur Choglokov began to laugh and said, “What a truly feminine whim.” The matter rested there, and the Grand Duke was grateful to me, both for the ointment, which did him a service by sparing him unpleasantness, and for my presence of mind, which did not leave even the least suspicion in the mind of Monsieur Choglokov.

As I had to stay up Easter night, I went to bed on Holy Saturday around five o’clock in the afternoon in order to sleep until the time when I would get dressed. I was hardly in bed when the Grand Duke came running with all his might and told me to get up and come without delay to eat the very freshest oysters that had just been brought to him from Holstein. When they arrived it was for him a grand and double feast; he loved them, and they also came from Holstein, his native land, for which he had a great predilection but which he did not govern any better for that, and in which he did and was made to do terrible things, as will be seen later. I would have offended him and exposed myself to a very violent quarrel if I had not gotten up. Therefore I arose and went to his apartment, although I was exhausted from performing my devotions for Holy Week. Once in his apartment, I found the oysters already served; I ate a dozen of them, after which he allowed me to return to my room to go back to bed, and it was for him to finish his oyster repast. I further pleased him by not eating too many because there remained more for him; he was infinitely greedy when it came to oysters. At midnight I got up and dressed myself to go to matins and to Easter mass, but I was unable to stay until the end of the service because I was seized by violent stomach cramps; I do not remember in all my life having had such pains. I returned to my room with only Princess Gagarina, all my servants being at church. She helped me undress for bed and sent for doctors. I was given medicine; I spent the first two days of the feast in bed.

It was around this time or a little before that Count de Bernis, Ambassador from the court of Vienna; Count Lynar, the Danish envoy; and General Arnim, the Saxon envoy, came to Russia; the latter brought his wife, née Hoym, with him.
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Count de Bernis was Piedmontese. At that time he was just over fifty years old, witty, amiable, merry, and educated, and of such a character that young people preferred him over and enjoyed themselves with him more than with those of their own age. He was generally loved and esteemed, and a thousand times I said and repeated that if this man or one like him had been placed in the Grand Duke’s service, it would have resulted in great good for this Prince, who like me had developed an affection and a particular and very distinguished esteem for Count de Bernis. The Grand Duke himself said that with such a man by one’s side, one would be ashamed to commit foolishness. This was an excellent thing to say, which I have never forgotten. Count de Bernis had with him Count Hamilton, a Knight of Malta, as gentleman of the embassy. One day at the court, when I asked the latter for news about the health of the ambassador, Count de Bernis, who was indisposed, I decided to tell Knight Hamilton that I had the highest opinion of Count Bathyany, whom the Queen Empress Maria Theresa had just then named the governor of her two eldest sons, the archdukes Joseph and Charles, because in this function he had been preferred over Count de Bernis. In the year 1780, when I had my first meeting with Emperor Joseph II at Magilov, His Imperial Majesty told me that he knew I had made this remark. I replied to him that apparently he had heard it from Count Hamilton, who had been placed in this Prince’s service when Hamilton had returned from Russia. He said that I had guessed rightly and that Count de Bernis, whom he had not known, had been reputed to be more apt for this position than his former governor.