Chapter XI: Part 11

Slowly there crept into the atmosphere of the room a suggestion of suspense. At moments conversation ceased and the company looked around expectantly. But a glance at the imperturbable figure in the purple mantle and the smiling, confident eyes beneath the diamond crown was sufficient to reassure the company and to restore the atmosphere of ease. The Princess Alexandrina had appeared but Gustav of Sweden for some unaccountable reason still remained invisible. The Russian court had been accustomed to mysterious delays under the Empress Elisabeth, but Catherine’s régime had taught them to expect more promptness and dispatch. But even the Empress Elisabeth expected a bridegroom to be prompt. The time dragged slowly along until at last the tall English clocks showed ten. Still the Empress betrayed no anxiety as she faced the question now apparent in all eyes.

At last Zubov appeared and whispered something in her ear. With difficulty she rose, took his arm, and passed through the room to her own chamber. As the door closed behind her, she fell to the floor unconscious. It is said that she had fainted but it is more probable that she succumbed to a slight stroke of paralysis. Zubov had brought the ultimatum of the King. Gustav would not sign the marriage contract as long as it contained the clause which permitted Alexandrina to retain the Russian religion.

The Empress would not admit herself defeated. To be beaten by a seventeen-year-old boy was unthinkable. She needed a little time to bring the youth around and to overcome a stubbornness which she had underestimated. She arranged a ball and commanded Alexandrina, who had cried until her eyes were red, to don her finery and go on as if nothing had happened. “Why do you weep?” she wrote on a scrap of paper. “What is put off is not lost. Wash your eyes with ice and your ears too, and take Bestushev’s drops. Nothing is lost. It is I who was ill yesterday. You are vexed about the delay. That is all.”

Alexandrina obeyed her grandmother. The King also attended the ball. But the two young things no longer met as formerly; the King was punctilious and the Princess was self-conscious, and even Grandmamma was not so gay and airy as she had been. She insisted on keeping the recalcitrant young man two weeks longer and refused to consider the negotiations closed even after he had departed for Stockholm with his uncle. Her hopes died hard and when they were dead she kept the corpse about, unable to inter it.

To the Empress, the shock of defeat was dreadful. She was accustomed to success, and failure of any kind was unendurable. Almost apologetically she wrote to her son Paul: “The fact is the King pretended that Alexandrina had promised him to change her religion and take the sacrament in the Lutheran way, and that she had given him her hand on it.... She told me with the candor and naïveté natural to her how he had told her that on the coronation day she would have to take the sacrament with him, and that she had replied, ‘Certainly, if I can, and if Grandmamma consents.’ And after that he spoke to her about it again, and she always referred him to me. I asked her if she had given her hand to the King by way of promise on this point. At that she cried with a sort of instinctive fright, ‘Never in my life.’”

The Princess Alexandrina wilted like the proverbial jilted maiden of the village. After her grandmother’s death she was married by her father to a Prince of Austria, where after a brief unhappy married life she died in childbirth. She was always morbid, spiritless, and complaining. The instinctive fright of which her grandmother spoke never left her. All of the Empress’s family were lacking in normal aggressiveness. Her lovers, her son, her grandchildren whom she brought up were all in some degree afflicted by the same instinctive fear which the Princess Alexandrina showed. Catherine the Great, like others of her kind, did not succeed in imparting greatness to her descendants.

4

After the Swedish King’s departure, the Empress’s health grew worse. There were days when her poor swollen legs would not support her at all and she suffered tortures with them. The summer at Czarskoe Selo, where she was always at her best and happiest, did not help her. When she walked to the little audience chamber where she received her ministers, she no longer leaned on Plato Zubov alone but required an attendant on the other side as well. She took the air in her wheeled chair along the blue-walled arcade as far as the agate pavilion and then back again, not an easy journey for a woman, who had she not been herself, would have been bed-ridden. In the month of August she saw a shooting star and said that it foretold her death. She had grown suddenly and darkly superstitious.

Returning to Petersburg in the autumn, she put herself in the hands of a notorious quack named Lambro-Cazzioni. Her doctors were more astonished than offended. The Empress who had searched Europe for scientific physicians, who had brought men like Rogerson, Weikard, and Dimsdale to Russia, and who had introduced vaccination by offering herself as a subject, had suddenly gone back to shamanism. She closed her doors on all the reputable doctors and admitted the magician only. Lambro-Cazzioni was a lesser kind of Cagliostro, the charlatan whom she had satirized in her comedies and abused in her correspondence, a breeder of the kind of superstition which she and other enlightened spirits of her age had lived to exterminate. Pathetically she submitted to all the drastic remedies that her healer recommended. A daily foot-bath of ice-cold sea-water was a part of his régime and he went himself daily to fetch the water for the patient’s use. At first, the Empress seemed to improve. She appeared at the little Hermitage again and joined in the gaiety, laughing until her sides ached.

On the morning of November the sixth, she rose as usual at six o’clock, drank her customary five cups of coffee, and set forth cheerfully on the routine of the day. She saw her lover and her secretaries, and gave her usual orders. Then she asked to be left alone for a moment and retired to her dressing-room. The attendants in the antechamber waited more than the usual length of time for their summons, but it never came. When her private secretary finally entered the apartment, he found her lying unconscious before the door of her water closet. She had had a stroke of paralysis. They dragged the mattress from the bed and laid the dying woman upon it, for she was too heavy to be lifted. This gasping animal, which had once been the Empress, lay on her mattress and struggled with death while the hands of the clock went around three times. The following evening she died.

After Peter the Great, the Romanovs had all been buried in the fortress of Saint Peter and Saint Paul. Catherine had deviated from this custom when she ordered the body of the late Czar, Peter the Third, to be laid in the Alexander Nevsky monastery at the opposite end of the city. Although it seems strangely out of keeping with her ambitious temperament, she herself did not wish to be buried beside Peter the Great. Four years before her death, she wrote these instructions concerning her burial place: “In case I should die in Czarskoe Selo, lay my body in the churchyard of Sofia. If in the city of Petersburg, in the cathedral or the burial church of the Nevsky Cloister. If in Pella, bring me along the waterways to the Nevsky Cloister. If in Moscow, bring me to the Donskoy Cloister or to the town churchyard near by. If in Peterhof, to the Sergei Cloister. If in some other place, to a churchyard near by.

“The coffin shall be borne by horse guards only and no one else. My body shall be clothed in a white dress, with a golden crown on the head on which my name shall be written. Mourning shall be worn for six months but not longer; a little is best. After the first six weeks, the people’s amusements shall be opened. After the burial, betrothals, weddings, and music shall be allowed.

“My library with all my manuscripts and all my papers, I bequeath to my dear grandson, Alexander Pavlovich; likewise my jewels; and I bless him from my heart and from my soul. A copy of this shall be put away in a safe place to insure its fulfilment, so that sooner or later shame and disgrace shall overtake those who do not carry out my will.

“It is my intention to place Constantine on the throne of the Greek Oriental Empire. For the welfare of the Russian and Greek Empires, I recommend that the Princes of Württemberg be removed from the counsels of these empires which should have as little to do with them as possible; also that the two half-Germans shall be removed.”

The Empress was buried in the Cathedral of Saint Peter and Saint Paul beneath a white marble slab like that which covers all the Czars of Russia who followed Peter the Great. Beside her lies the body of Peter the Third, brought there by her son a short time after her burial.

She had prepared an inscription for her gravestone and this is what she wished to have it say:

Here lies

CATHERINE THE SECOND

born in Stettin on April 21 / May 2, 1729.

In the year 1744 she went to Russia to marry Peter III. At the age of
fourteen, she made the threefold resolution, to please her consort,
Elisabeth, and the Nation.

She neglected nothing in order to succeed in this.

Eighteen years of boredom and solitude caused her to read many books.

When she ascended the throne of Russia, she wished to do good and
tried to bring happiness, freedom and prosperity to her subjects.

She forgave easily and hated no one.

She was good-natured, easy-going; was of a cheerful temperament,
republican sentiments, and a kind heart.

She had friends.

Work came easy to her; she loved sociability and the arts.

The instructions of the Empress were not followed; her wishes, not obeyed. The cold white slab which covers her conveys no word of her last message to posterity.

INDEX

Adadurov, 141

Adolph Friedrich of Holstein, 53

d’Alembert, 269

Alexander, Grand Duke, later Alexander I, 259, 279, 284-285, 294

Alexandrina, Princess, 208, 315-321

Alexei Michaelovich, 40, 212

Alexei Petrovich, 38, 48

Anna Ivanovna, Empress of Russia, 45, 47, 96

Anna Leopoldovna, 45, 46, 102, 164

Anna Petrovna, 13, 45

Anthony Ulrich of Brunswick, 45, 52

Apraxin, General, 141-146

Arsenii of Rostov, 311

August the Strong, 132

Babet, nickname of Elisabeth Cardel, 24

Bariatinsky, Prince Feodor, 167, 173, 174, 175, 309

Bergholz, 173

Bestushev, 55, 73, 90, 104, 135, 141, 181

Bibikov, 166, 215

Bilbassov, 51, 142, 143, 155, 194, 259

Bjelke, Madame, 208

Bobrinsky, Alexei Gregorevich, 159, 268

Bolhagen, 23

Branicky, Countess, 242, 248, 264

Brockdorf, Herr, 126, 129

Bruce, Countess, 208, 234

Brückner, 170, 228, 275

Brümmer, 57, 62, 64, 173

Burgoyne, General, 281

Cagliostro, 296

Cardel, Elisabeth, 24-26, 28, 34, 284

Casimir, Jan, 197

Catherine I, 41, 44, 45, 46, 49

Catherine the Great,
Baptised Sophie Auguste Friedrike, (Fike), Princess of Zerbst, 11
Birth, 10
Education, 22
Childhood, 32
Meeting with Frederick the Great, 67
Journey to Russia, 66-71
Arrival in Russia, 71
Conversion to Greek faith, 80-83
Enters the Greek Church, 84-88
Sophie Auguste Friedrike becomes Catherine Alexeievna, 85
Marriage, 96-100
Relation to Saltikov, 118
Gives birth to an heir, 120
Relations with Peter III, 126, 130
Birth of Grand Duchess Anna, 137
Complicity in the Apraxin affair, 141-146
Birth of Bobrinsky, 159
Manifesto of 1762, 169
Revolution of 1762, 161-180
Coronation, 183-184
Foreign Policy, 180, 193, 251
Manifesto of Silence, 187
Partition of Poland, 195-204
Census of Russia, 204-206
Reign, 207
Reforms affecting women, 208-211
Foundling Hospital, 209
Domestic Policy, 211-216
Instruction for a Code of Laws, 212
Attitude toward serfdom, 215
Campaign against smallpox, 216-222
Crimean journey, 248-249
Acquisition of Crimea, 250-251
The French Revolution, 251, 311-315
Pugachev’s Rebellion, 312
Turkish Wars, 251-259
Favorites, 231-237, 259-262
Relation with Poniatovsky, 133-139
Attempted marriage with Orlov, 184-188
Relation with Potiomkin, 237
Relation with Zubov, 301-308
Birth of Grandsons, 279
Education of Grandsons, 281-287
Writings, 292-299
Comedies, 295
Failure of the Swedish Marriage, 315-321
Death, 323-325

Charles XII of Sweden, 8

Chernichev, Andrei, 259

Chetardie, 91

Chitrovo, 186

Choglokov, Maria, 104, 118, 236

Choiseul, 193

Christian August, Prince of Anhalt-Zerbst, 4-6, 21, 29, 69, 76-79,
88, 112

Constantine, Grand Duke, 280, 282

Courland, 21, 195

Crimean journey, 248-249

Czarskoe Selo, 101, 221, 271, 305

Czartorisky, Adam, 198

Dashkov, Countess Catherine, 154, 162, 170, 208, 244

Dashkov, Prince, 302, 303

Diderot, 180, 233, 306

Dimsdale, Dr. Thomas, 217, 322

Elisabeth Petrovna, Empress of Russia,
Birth, 47
Revolution of 1741, 49-55
Relations with Princess of Zerbst, 58, 88-89, 150
Appearance, 75
Death, 151-152

Eudoxia, First Wife of Peter the Great, 41

Fike, nickname of Sophie Auguste Friedrike, later Catherine the
Great, 11

de Fraigne, Marquis, 147

Frederick the Great, 14, 29, 60, 65, 67, 78, 81, 93, 128, 132, 148,
196-204, 217, 226, 272

Frederick William I, 3, 32

Friedrich August, Prince of Anhalt-Zerbst, 11, 147

Fokshani, Congress of, 222, 254

Gatchina, 223, 279

George of Holstein, 63, 157, 165, 170, 242

Godunov, Boris, 38

Granovitaya Palata, 184

Grimm, 227, 266, 274, 293, 306

Gustav III of Sweden, 257, 316

Gustav IV of Sweden, 316

Gyllenborg, Count, 23

Hedwig Sophie, Provost of Quedlinburg, 15

Henri le Grand, 84, 231

Henry, Prince of Prussia, 14, 202, 203, 241, 272, 275-277, 314

Hermitage, The Little, 307

Homburg, 12

Ivan the Terrible, 38

Ivan VI, Ivanushka, 45, 46, 53, 158, 164, 312

Johann Ludwig, Prince of Anhalt-Zerbst, 5

Johanna Elisabeth, Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst, 58

Johanna Elisabeth, Princess of Holstein-Gottorp, 6-9, 20, 65, 70,
75, 89, 147-151

Jones, John Paul, 256-257

Karl Peter Ulrich, Duke of Holstein, later Grand Duke Peter
Feodorovich, later Peter III, 9, 13, 53

Kayserling, Count, 197

Khayn, Fräulein, Lady in Waiting to the Princess of Zerbst, 18

Kiev, 86

Kolmogory, 103

Kolomenskoe Palace, 47, 213

Kosciuszko, 204

Krasnoe Selo, 102

Kremlin, 40, 158, 183, 220, 225

Kruse, Madame, 99, 108, 113

Kutchuk-Kainardi, Peace of, 254

Lanskoy, 239, 260, 261

LeBrun, Madame Vigée, 306

Lestocq, 49, 52, 61, 89, 92, 114

von Lieven, Madame, 310

de Ligne, Prince, 247

Luther, Martin, 4, 14, 29

Machiavelli, 194

Mamonov, 238, 239, 260

Mardefeld, 58, 81, 93

Maria Theresa, Empress of Austria, 49, 120, 196, 201, 203

Marie Feodorovna, Grand Duchess, 278-279, 281

Masson, Major, 43, 209, 211, 286

von Mengden, Julie, 46, 102

Menshikov, 38, 41

Mirovich, 312

Molière, 34, 294

Monplaisir, 164, 171

Montesquieu, 211

Morals in Russia, 41-44

Moscow, 190, 219

Narishkin, Leo, 308, 313

Natalie Alexeievna, Grand Duchess, 273

Natalie Narishkin, 40

Nicholas, Grand Duke, later Nicholas I, 287

Oranienbaum, 110, 138, 173

Orlov, Alexei, 165, 166, 173, 175-179, 186, 224, 291

Orlov, Gregory, 152, 161, 167, 184, 191, 213, 215, 217, 220-224,
239, 300

Otchakov, 275

Panin, Nikita, 55, 163, 168, 174, 182, 186, 212, 268, 270-271

Partition of Poland, 195-204

Passeck, 166, 175

Paul I,
Birth, 118-120
Appearance, 122, 266, 296
Infancy, 124
Health, 182
Baptised Peter Feodorovich, 130
First Marriage, 271-273
Second Marriage, 276-279
Melancholia, 287-292
Journey through Europe, 288-289
Mysticism, 290
Conspiracy against his life, 226
Death, 292

Pavlovsk, 279, 281

Peter Feodorovich, Grand Duke of Russia, 53

Peter II, 47

Peter III,
Birth, 8
Baptised Karl Peter Ulrich, Duke of Holstein, 9
Education, 55-57
Karl Peter Ulrich, Duke of Holstein becomes Peter Feodorovich,
Grand Duke of Russia, 53
Marriage, 98
Relations with Catherine the Great, 94, 126, 130, 153, 160
_Folie militaire_, 127, 130
Government of Holstein, 131
Accession, 153
Reign, 156-159, 180
Deposition, 171-179
Death, 178, 179

Peter the Great, 3, 8, 38, 39, 44, 47, 81, 190, 207, 252

Petersburg, 189

Poniatovsky Stanislas, King of Poland, 128, 133-139, 181, 197-204,
236

Potiomkin, Gregory, Prince of Tauris, 191, 235, 237-258, 262-265,
300

Potiomkin Villages, 247

Prascovia Feodorovna, 103

Prascovia Nikitichna Vladislav, 113

von Prinzen, Baroness, 66

Protassov, Countess, 208, 234

Pugachev, 312

Razumovsky, Alexei, 89, 116, 126, 185

Razumovsky, Kyril, 126, 162, 167

Reformation, The, 15, 29

Religion in Russia, 42, 87

Repnin, Prince, 258, 310

Ribas, Admiral, 268

Rimsky-Korsakov, 260

Rogerson, 209, 234, 322

Romanov, House of, 38

Ropsha, 174

Rumiantsov, General, 253, 256

Rurik, House of, 38

Saltikov, Sergei, 117-119, 121, 124, 179, 236

Schlözer, 196

Seven Years War, 93, 141

Sheremetiev, Count, 153, 183, 192

Shuvalov, Alexander, 142

Shuvalov, Ivan Ivanovich, 117, 119, 135, 150

Smolny, 210

Sophie Alexeievna, 40

Sophie Auguste Friedrike, later Catherine the Great, 11

Sophie Christina, Canoness of Gandersheim, 5, 15, 17

Stehlin, 56, 61, 128, 172

Stenka Rasin, 312

Stettin, 3, 20

Streltsi, The, 40

Stroganov, Count, 161, 192

Suvarov, General, 242, 256, 310

Sylvester, the Monk, 38, 39

Tchesme, Battle of, 222

Terem, 43, 46

Todorsky, Simon, 82, 84

Treaty of Westminster, 134

Troitsky Monastery, 86, 91, 184

Trubetsky, Prince, 172, 182

Turkish Wars, 251-259

Ulrica, Princess of Prussia, later Queen of Sweden, 60, 97, 258, 316

Uspensky Cathedral, 183

Vassilchikov, 223, 235, 254

Viazemsky, 215, 228

Voltaire, 193, 194, 210, 216, 218, 229, 253, 270, 293, 300

Vorontsov, Elisabeth, 138, 146, 154, 155, 162, 170

Wagner, Pastor, 12, 24, 26, 30-31, 66, 82, 87

Williams, Sir Charles Hanbury, 133, 139-140, 181, 194

Yermalov, 238, 260, 262

Zavadovsky, 259, 310

Zoritch, 260

Zubov, Plato, 239, 260, 265, 291, 301, 304, 305, 306, 307, 318

Zubov, Valerian, 291, 301

Transcriber’s Notes

Obvious punctuation errors have been silently corrected.

Page 71: “couriers had remained” changed to “courtiers had remained”

Page 79: “nicht Griechisch werden!’” changed to “nicht Greichisch werden!’”

Page 127: “his preocupation had grown” changed to “his preoccupation had grown”

Page 174: “from there to Schlüsselberg” changed to “from there to Schlüsselburg”

Page 220: “distinguished ordinarily for courage and intiative.” changed to “distinguished ordinarily for courage and initiative.”

Page 266: “One day I shall write a dessertation” changed to “One day I shall write a dissertation”

Page 312: “in the Schüsselburg fortress” changed to “in the Schlüsselburg fortress”

The spelling of Prince Troubetsky has been standardized to Prince Trubetsky.

In the original, chapter IV has no section 3. Chapter VII has no section 8.