Authors: Mary McGrigor
The Tsar's Doctor (19 page)
The doctors, summoned to attend him, wanted to amputate below the knee. But Wylie, who remained in charge as his personal physician, warning that if the tsar died they would be held responsible, used his authority to prevent the operation taking place. Defying the outspoken doubt and antagonism of his colleagues, he then bled the tsar and cauterised the morbid flesh.
The city shrank into silence as news of the emperor’s illness spread. Theatres were empty, balls were cancelled, and the crowds outside the palace waited in silent dread. People prayed in the churches throughout the day and night and, as a French governess wrote, even beggars found coppers to light candles to pray for the emperor’s recovery.
Meanwhile, within the palace itself, Alexander was given little peace as his mother, the bustling, imperious Maria Feodorovna, and his brothers, Nicholas and Michael, the latter soon to be married to Princess Helen of Württemberg, came morning and night to visit him. Finally Wylie, finding Alexander’s temperature to have risen, lost his usually cool reserve and ordered them all out of the room. The dowager empress, much affronted, began to expostulate whereupon Elizabeth, for so long the downtrodden daughter-in-law, turned on her and asked her quite bluntly whether she wanted her son to die. Maria, shocked into silence, then left without a word, while the grand dukes Nicholas and Michael actually crept on tip-toe down the stairs.
For some days the crisis continued but then, as the fever abated, Alexander appeared to be on the mend. Wylie placed him on a vegetarian diet until, to the amazement of the other physicians, who had forecast his imminent death, the tsar began to regain his normal state of health. So quickly did he recover that by the end of March, he and Elizabeth, with Wylie as ever in attendance, moved to Tsarskoye Selo. There in the country, fifteen miles from St Petersburg and free from the rest of his family, he was able to continue his convalescence in peace.
The Alexander Palace, or as it was more commonly known the Great Palace, with its great front and two wings, had been given to Alexander by his grandmother, Catherine the Great, on his marriage. The north part, which had burned down, had by then been rebuilt. Within the chapel, the columns and pilasters were almost entirely covered in gold and beautiful paintings hung from the walls.
Here, in a four-storeyed wing of the neoclassical building designed by Vasily Stasov, Alexander had established a college, the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum, in 1811. Intended for the education of landowners’ sons, one of its first graduates had been Alexander Pushkin, famed throughout Russia as a poet, novelist and social reformer. Recently arrested by the authorities in Odessa, he was actually living in exile on his mother’s estate in Estonia at the time of the founder’s visit to his former academy.
Rather than stay in the vast building, now occupied by noisy students, Alexander and Elizabeth chose to occupy part of the adjacent, even more architecturally impressive Catherine Palace, so named because it had been built by Peter the Great for his wife Catherine in 1717. Following her death it had become the favourite summer home of their daughter, the Empress Elizabeth, who in 1743 had commissioned the great Italian architect Bartolomeo Rastrelli to completely redesign the building in a style as resplendent as Versailles.
The result was a palace, nearly a kilometre in circumference, fronted with decorated blue and white facades featuring gilded atlantes, caryatids and pilasters designed by the German sculptor Johann Franz Dunker, who, on the outside of the building alone, used over 220 pounds of gold. The rooms within the palace were no less ornate than the exterior, the golden enfilade of the state rooms, designed by Rastrelli, being the most outstanding feature of all. The Great Hall, stretching the whole width of the palace, with arched windows on either side, is aptly called the Hall of Light. Leading from it, other rooms include the Portrait Hall, the Picture Gallery, crowded with canvasses from floor to ceiling, and most importantly of all, Rastrelli’s great masterpiece – famous then as now throughout the world – the Amber Room.
To achieve this the architect used panels of amber mosaic, which had originally been designed for an Amber Cabinet at Königsberg Castle. He then embellished them with gilded carving, mirrors and more panels of amber, created by craftsmen from Florence and Russia, inset with mosaics of gemstones from the Urals and the Caucasus, creating one of the most astonishing of all the beautiful rooms in the many palaces in Russia.
Alexander was at home in the Catherine Palace, for it was here that, in his childhood, he and his brother Constantine had spent many happy summers with their grandmother, who so dearly loved both the palace itself and the surrounding gardens.
Once fully recovered from his ailments, Alexander resumed his normal routine of rising at seven, working with secretaries until noon, and then walking in the English Park, so called because it was laid out by the English-trained landscape designer Johann Busch, on the instruction of the Empress Catherine in the 1770s. A central attraction, fringed by overhanging trees, is the meandering lake, or the Great Pond as it was called, where the Dutch-style boathouses were known as the Admiralty, and the Marble Bridge was modelled on those of the great houses of Stowe and Wilton in England.
Elizabeth, walking with him, fed the swans on the pond. Then afterwards he rested while she sat beside him, quietly doing her embroidery and making sure that his sleep was undisturbed. They dined together at four, and after Alexander had attended to any business of importance, she joined him in his study, where, after drinking tea made in a samovar, they spent the rest of the evening quietly together until it was time to go to bed.
It was during this period that Wylie himself had an accident as his own carriage overturned. His injuries are not described in detail but are said to have been serious. More worthy of note was the tsar’s great concern for his personal physician, as he sat by his bedside for three whole days until Wylie was out of danger.
Successful as he was, however, in effecting a bodily cure, even Wylie, with all his expertise, could not heal Alexander’s mind. At the end of June he went to Krasnoe Selo, about sixteen miles from St Petersburg, where, in Elizabeth’s words, the small palace was so dominated by the army that she felt inclined to head her letters, ‘From General Headquarters’.
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On this occasion Alexander, true to form, had gone to watch army manoeuvres. As he mounted his horse he realized that his aides-de-camps were whispering among themselves and guessed they were trying to hide something from him. Turning in his saddle to Wylie, who was standing near him, he asked him bluntly what was happening and Wylie found himself forced to tell him that Sophia, the elder of the two daughters borne him by his Polish mistress Maria Naryshkin, had died of tuberculosis.
The girl had been educated in Paris, purportedly to save Elizabeth the embarrassment of seeing her husband’s illegitimate child in the same city where she lived. However, although she was known to be delicate, her ambitious mother insisted on her being brought to Russia to marry Count Shuvalov, one of the tsar’s aides-de-camps.
Elizabeth, walking one day in the garden at Krasnoe Selo, met her in the company of the Shuvalovs. Recognizing her immediately she gave her a kiss, saying, ‘I cannot help loving you for the likeness you bear; it is impossible to mistake it.’ Tragically, it was only a short time afterwards that the girl, who was only eighteen, died of a haemorrhage in her lungs.
As the news was brought to Alexander, the officers standing near him thought for a moment that he was ill. Tears streamed down his face and he sat astride his horse in dumb misery throughout the rest of the parade. Convinced that the death of his daughter was God’s punishment for his sins, he was devastated with feelings of guilt and remorse. The affair with Maria was long over and now, in his misery, he turned to his wife for comfort and to his doctor for support.
The year 1817 had seen the reintroduction of a great annual event in the form of a ball or fête at the Winter Palace, with a supper at the Hermitage, an event unique to Russia. All and sundry were invited, peasants and princes alike. Once, according to De Maistre, the guests had even included a Serbian chief, who had murdered both his father and his brother by hanging them with his own hands.
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On 13 January 1824 Alexander insisted on being present at this grand annual event. Ignoring a warning that an attempt would be made to assassinate him, he allowed no special precautions to be taken and was reported to be looking more cheerful than usual while a vast concourse of people roamed through the rooms of the Winter Palace.
Nonetheless, despite his apparent nonchalance towards the ever-present threats to his life, none knew better than his doctor the secret and all-pervading anxiety which so constantly obsessed his mind.
In the autumn Elizabeth returned from visiting her mother in Baden. She wrote how the smell of Russia, ‘that dear country’, gladdened her heart, but that the sight of the Winter Palace plunged her into depression, as she thought of the tedium of court protocol and more particularly of the dominance of her mother-in-law, behind whom, thanks to a law of Tsar Paul’s which gave precedence to the dowager empress, she was still forced to walk on all ceremonial occasions.
Only two days after his return to St Petersburg, Alexander and Elizabeth were together in the Winter Palace when, on the night of 18 November 1824, the wind from the south-west began to rise. By daylight the following day it was blowing a hurricane. The River Neva, running higher than anyone could remember, and combined with an incoming tide which pushed back the water, soon flooded much of the city. Within the palace itself the occupants shivered with cold and fear. Elizabeth, writing to her mother, described how they dared not light the fires in case the chimneys caught alight in the force of the high wind.
A doctor then living in St Petersburg described what had happened in a letter to his friend Doctor Robert Lee:
I attempted to cross the Voskresensky Bridge of boats, on my way to the General Naval Hospital on the Wybor side, but was unable owing to the great elevation [of the water]. I then paid some professional visits; and at eleven o’clock called on Prince Naryshkin [gentleman-in-waiting to the Empress Elizabeth], who had already given orders to remove the furniture from his lower apartments, the water then being above the level of the Fontanka Canal, opposite to his residence. From this time the rise was rapid; and at half-past eleven, when I returned to my house, in the great Millione, the water was gushing upwards through the gratings of the sewers, filling the streets and courtyards with which every house is provided. A servant took me on his back from the droshky, my horses at that time being above their knees, and conveyed me to the landing of the staircase. The wind now blew in awful gusts; and the noise of the tempest with the cries of the people in the streets was terrific. It was not long before boats were seen in the streets, with vast quantities of firewood and other articles floating about . . . Now and then a horse was seen swimming across from one pavement to another. The number of rats drowned on this occasion was inconceivable; and of dogs and cats not a few. The crisis seemed to be from one to three in the afternoon, at which hour the wind having veered round a couple of points to the northward, the water began to abate; and by four o’clock the tops of the iron posts, three feet in height, by the sides of the pavement, made their appearance.
From the commencement of the report the signal cannon, fired first at the Galleyhaven at the entrance of the river, then at the Admiralty dockyard, and lastly at the fortress, was continued at intervals as a warning to the inhabitants, and added not a little to the horror of the scene.
The depth of water in the different parts of the city varied from four to nine and ten feet, but along the border of the Gulf of Finland, and especially in the low suburb of the Galleyhaven, the depth was from fourteen to eighteen feet, and many of the small wooden houses built on piles were carried away, inmates and all. A few were floated up the Neva, rocking about with poor creatures clinging on to the roof. Some of these perished; others were taken off at great risk, by boats from the Admiralty yard, which had been ordered out by the express command of his Imperial Majesty, who stood during the greatest part of the day on the balcony of the Winter Palace, giving the necessary orders.
On the 20th, the Emperor Alexander, ever benevolent and humane, visited those parts of the city and suburbs most afflicted by this catastrophe. In person he bestowed alms and consolation to the sufferers, for the most part of the lower classes, and in every way afforded such relief, both then and afterwards, as won for him the still greater love and admiration of his people and of the foreign residents in St Petersburg.
Over 600 people in all are said to have perished in the flood. Hospitals and prisons were evacuated, and according to another account the Winter Palace and other public buildings were opened on the emperor’s orders so that people could be saved from the flood. Alexander’s youngest sister, the Grand Duchess Anna, now married to William of Orange (William II of the Netherlands) who was visiting her brother, described how ‘the square in front of the Winter Palace, the boulevard and the streets which lead to the Palace showed a terrible sight of a raging sea’.
The tsar’s sister continued to describe how the next morning he insisted on going out to supervise the relief work. Wading through the mud of the devastated streets – elsewhere it is claimed that he went about rescuing people in a boat – from one of the ruined hovels a voice cried out, ‘It is a punishment from God Almighty for our sins!’ But Alexander was heard to reply, ‘No; it is a punishment for my sin.’
Alexander was by now visibly unwell. At Epiphany, at the beginning of January in 1824, he stood for hours bareheaded as a hole was bored through the ice and the blessing of the Neva took place. Shivering, he returned to the Winter Palace, where during the evening’s festivities he was plainly seen to be ill. Nonetheless he insisted in going to Tsarskoe Selo, driving through drifts of snow.