Chapter XIV: Letter 8: Be a man, stop and make answer? (4)

Princess Dashkov thanked him for his kind suggestion, but said that she could not take advantage of his offer, because she had already written on his behalf to Prince Potyomkin, and did not want without good reason to do anything in opposition to him.

‘What could there be disagreeable to him in it?’ asked Orlov, feeling the sting of this. ‘However, as you please; you may rely on me; your son will make a great career; it would be hard to find a _handsomer_ young man.’

The mother flushed crimson with anger, and the conversation dropped. But at the next meeting Orlov, addressing young Dashkov, said: ‘What a pity that I shall not be in Petersburg when you arrive! I am certain that you will oust the present favourite as soon as you appear at court; I should be pleased to carry out my present duties—comforting the forsaken.’

Beside herself with indignation, Princess Dashkov sent her son out of the room, and told Orlov that she thought it extremely improper to speak to a boy of seventeen in that way, and that in so doing Orlov was compromising the Empress, whom she had brought her son up to respect; that, as for favourites, she begged him to remember that she had never known and never recognised one of them.

After that they parted. Orlov went to Switzerland, Princess Dashkov to Paris. Then we meet her inspecting the French fortresses with her son and Colonel Samoylov, by special permission of Maréchal de Biron.[64] From France she went to Italy, and there was completely absorbed in pictures and statues, cameos and antiques, bought a picture of Angelica Kauffmann’s as a present for the Empress, went to see the Pope and Abbé Galiani,[65] and finally returned to Russia through Vienna.

In Vienna she had a heated argument with Kaunitz, with whom she was dining. He called Peter the Great the political creator of Russia; Princess Dashkov observed that this was a European misconception. Kaunitz was not ready to yield his point; she was even less so. She admitted that Peter had done a very great deal for Russia, but thought that the material was ready, and that, together with his masterly use of it, he had inhumanly oppressed and distorted it.

‘If he had really been a great statesman, he would by his intercourse with other nations, and by trade, have gained without haste what he attained by violence and cruelty. The nobility and the serfs were both left worse off through his unbridled passion for innovations; from the latter he took the protective tribunal to which alone they could appeal in case of oppression, from the former he took all their privileges. And to what end was it all? To clear the way for a military despotism, that is, for the very worst of all existing forms of government. From simple vanity he was in such a hurry to build Petersburg that he sent thousands of workmen to die in the marshes. He not only forced the landowners to provide a certain number of peasants, but compelled them to build themselves houses according to his own plans, without asking whether they needed them. One of his principal buildings, the Admiralty and Docks, which cost immense sums, was constructed on the bank of a river which no human efforts could make navigable even for merchant vessels, much less for ships of the Navy.’

‘However,’ observed Kaunitz, ‘no one can help being touched at the sight of a monarch learning shipbuilding with the axe in his hand.’

The ruthless lady would not let this pass. ‘Your Excellency,’ she answered, ‘is doubtless joking. Who can know better than you how precious is a monarch’s time, and whether he has the leisure to practise a handicraft? Peter I. was in a position to command the services not only of shipbuilders, but even of admirals. To my mind, when he was wasting time in Saardam working with the axe and learning the slang of the Dutch market, and sailors’ words with which he distorted the Russian language, he was simply neglecting his duty.’

I foresee how the good Orthodox souls of our Moscow Slavophils will rejoice at reading these words; they certainly ought, on days for commemorating the dead, to keep the memory of our princess with pancakes and lenten oil.

Joseph II. was ill, and wanted Princess Dashkov to remain a few days longer, but she had received an invitation from Frederick II. for herself and her son to be present at his manœuvres. She had, however, an informal interview with Joseph II. in the study he devoted to natural history.

A week later Princess Dashkov was at the manœuvres at which Frederick II. drilled forty-two thousand men, and to which he had never before admitted women, but she was specially invited. The Prussian Princess herself drove to fetch her, brought her to the spot where the King was to meet her, and asked her to get out of the carriage, saying: ‘Dear Princess, as I have not the slightest desire to see the old grumbler, I will drive on,’ and Princess Dashkov was left to an innocent _tête-à-tête_ with Frederick II., who took her and her son with him to a military inspection of the provinces.

In July 1782 she returned to Petersburg. The Empress appointed her President of the Academy of Science. Princess Dashkov was apparently for the first time in her life disconcerted, and wanted to decline the honour. She wrote a sharp letter to the Empress, and at twelve o’clock at night drove with it to Potyomkin. Potyomkin had gone to bed; however, he received her. He read the letter, tore it up and threw it on the floor, but, seeing that she was angry, said to her: ‘Here are pen and paper, by all means write it again; only, it is all nonsense; why do you refuse? The Empress has been full of the idea for the last two days. In that position you will be frequently seeing her, and the fact is, to tell the truth, she is dying of boredom, perpetually surrounded by fools.’

Potyomkin’s eloquence overcame her opposition; she went to the Senate to take the oath for her new duties, and from that moment became a consummate president. She asked old Euler, the great mathematician, to introduce her at the assembled Academy; she wanted to appear under the aegis of learning before the academicians. She presented herself to them not in silence, as Russian presidents usually do, but with a speech, after which, seeing that the first place next the president was occupied by Stehlin,[66] she turned to Euler and said: ‘Sit where you prefer; whatever place you occupy will be the first.’

Then with her habitual energy she set to work to eradicate abuses, that is, thefts; she increased the number of the pupils, improved the printing-press, and finally proposed to the Empress the founding of a Russian Academy. Catherine appointed her president of this new academy too. Again Princess Dashkov made a speech. ‘You all know, gentlemen,’ she said, among other things, ‘the wealth and splendour of our language. The powerful eloquence of Cicero, the measured grandeur of Virgil, the fascinating charm of Demosthenes, and the light language of Ovid, translated into Russian, lose nothing of their beauties.... But we are without exact rules, the limits and meanings of words have not been defined, and many foreign phrases have crept into our language,’ and therefore she proposed that the Russian Academy should work at a grammar and dictionary of the language. She herself prepared to share the labours of the academicians, and did, in fact, work at the dictionary. The Empress seemed to be pleased with her. Her energy at this period was amazing. She undertook the publication of special geographical maps of the different provinces, and edited the periodical, _Lovers of the Russian Language_, to which the Empress herself, Von Vizin, Derzhavin, and others contributed.

Her relations with the Empress were unmistakably improved. A correspondence sprang up between them again; the letters deal with a review they were publishing and various literary subjects. These letters, which are of little general interest, are a striking proof of the degree to which good manners, culture, and humanity have since sunk in the Winter Palace. Catherine gives no orders, does not command in her notes, does not confine herself to set forms, is not afraid of jesting; she has confidence in herself, and the Empress often gives way to the woman of intelligence. The Prussian Gatchina tone, translated into official red tape by Nicholas, has replaced with brutal illiteracy the gentleness of cultured language.

All would have been well if only Princess Dashkov could have kept on good terms with the favourites; she got on better with Potyomkin than with any of the rest, perhaps because Potyomkin was the cleverest of them; with Lanskoy, and afterwards with Manonov, she was at daggers drawn. Zubov gossiped spitefully against her, and did her a great deal of mischief.

In the summer of 1783 she was in Finland with the Empress, who had an interview there with the King of Sweden. Lanskoy kept pestering her to know why in the news published under the auspices of the Academy her name was the only one mentioned of the persons who were with the Empress. Princess Dashkov explained to him that it was not her doing at all, that the Court news was sent and printed without alteration. Lanskoy went on sulking and grumbling till she was sick of it.

‘You ought to know,’ she said to him, ‘that, though it is always an honour and a happiness to me to dine with the Empress, I cannot really be so much overwhelmed by it as to publish it in the papers. I am too much accustomed to it; as a little child I used to dine on the Empress Elizabeth’s knee, as a little girl I sat at her table; it is so natural that it could not be a matter for boasting to me.’

Lanskoy grew heated, but Princess Dashkov, seeing that the room was beginning to fill up, raised her voice, and said: ‘Sir, people whose whole life has been devoted to the public welfare are not always particularly powerful or happy, but they always have the right to insist on being treated without insolence. They quietly go their own way and outlive those meteors of a day which burst and fall, leaving no trace.’

The doors were flung open and the Empress walked in. Her arrival put an end to the conversation. How could Lanskoy fail to hate her? It was as well for her that he died soon after.

On her return from Finland Princess Dashkov received her friend, Mrs. Hamilton, to stay with her. She took her to her new estate; there she kept a village holiday, met with bread and salt the peasants newly settled there, introduced them to the Englishwoman, and informed them that henceforth the new village would be called Hamiltonovo. After this she travelled with her to other estates in the provinces of Kaluga, Smolensk, Kiev, and Tambov.

The following year Princess Dashkov received a cruel blow in her personal life. Her son was in Rumyantsev’s army, and she was glad that he was not in Petersburg. Latterly even Potyomkin had designs upon him. He once sent Samoylov to fetch him late one evening, and Samoylov gave the mother a hint of their project. She refused to have anything to do with it, and said that if it happened she would take advantage of her son’s influence to obtain leave of absence abroad for many years. For this reason she was relieved that her son was away in Kiev. But there love had another arrow in store for him, aimed not from above, but from below.

One day, as she came out of the Empress’s bedroom, she met Rebinder, who warm-heartedly congratulated her on her son’s marriage. She was thunderstruck. Rebinder was disconcerted; he had had no idea that young Dashkov’s wedding was a secret. She was wounded in her motherly feelings and in her pride; on the one hand, the _mésalliance_, on the other, the lack of confidence. It was a heavy blow, it made her ill.

Two months later her son wrote her a letter, asking for her permission to marry; this was a fresh blow—falsity, cowardice, deceit. Moreover, he had so little understanding of his mother’s character that together with his own letter he sent one from Field-Marshal Rumyantsev obviously written at his request. Rumyantsev tried to persuade Princess Dashkov to sanction her son’s marriage, spoke of the prejudices of aristocratic birth and of the instability of fortune, and, in her words, ‘reached such a pitch of futility as to give advice in a matter of such gravity between mother and son, though nothing in their relations gave him a right to meddle.’

Wounded on two sides at once, she wrote a sarcastic letter to Rumyantsev, in which she explained to him that, ‘among the various foolish ideas with which her head was filled, there was happily no exaggerated respect for aristocratic birth; but that, if she had been endowed with such remarkable eloquence as the Count, she would have used it to show the superiority of good breeding over bad.’

To her son her letter was strikingly simple; here it is: ‘When your father intended to marry a Countess Vorontsov, he drove post-haste to Moscow to ask his mother’s sanction. You are married; I knew this before you wrote, and I know, too, that my mother-in-law had done no more to deserve to have a friend in her son than I have.’

The discussions that followed this and other family affairs must have cost her much mortification. Her daughter parted from her husband. Miss Wilmot has omitted several pages in the Memoirs, after which Princess Dashkov goes on like this: ‘All was black in the future and the present.... I was so worn out by suffering that I was at times visited by the thought of suicide.’

And so the demon of family troubles crushed her, as it has crushed many strong characters. Family misfortunes wound so deeply, because they steal upon one in silence and to combat them is almost impossible. Victory in the struggle makes it worse. They are like those poisons whose presence is only recognised when their effect is shown in pain, that is, when the man is already saturated with them.

Meanwhile, the French Revolution had come. Catherine, who was growing old, worn out by a life of vice, threw herself into reaction. This was no longer the conspirator of the 27th of June, who said to Betsky: ‘I reign by the will of God and the election of the people,’ not the Petersburg correspondent of Voltaire and the translator of Beccaria and Filangier,[67] who proclaimed in her famous _Nakaz_[68] the evils of the censorship and the advantage of an assembly of deputies from the whole realm of Russia. In 1792 we find her an old woman afraid of thought, a worthy mother of Paul.... And like a pledge that a savage reaction would crush for long years every branch of free development in Russia, Nicholas was born before her death. Catherine’s dying hand was still there to caress this awful monster who was destined to cry _Halt!_ to the epoch of Peter’s reforms, and to delay the progress of Russia for thirty years.

Princess Dashkov, an aristocrat and an admirer of English institutions, could not sympathise with the Revolution; but still less could she share the feverish terror of free speech and applaud the punishment of thought.

Catherine was alarmed by Radishtchyev’s pamphlet;[69] she saw in it the ‘signal of revolution.’ Radishtchyev was seized and sent without trial to Siberia. Princess Dashkov’s brother, Alexandr Vorontsov, who loved Radishtchyev, and had been a benefactor to him, retired from the Service and went to Moscow.

Her own turn came next. Knyazhnin’s[70] widow asked her, for the benefit of her children, to publish under the auspices of the Academy her husband’s last tragedy. The subject was taken from the history of the subjugation of Novgorod. Princess Dashkov directed that it should be published. Field-Marshal Saltykov, ‘who,’ as she says, ‘could not be charged with ever having read a book of any sort,’ read this one and talked to Zubov of its pernicious tendency. Zubov spoke to the Empress about it.

Next day the Petersburg police-master arrived at the Academy bookshop to seize the copies of the Jacobin Knyazhnin’s inflammatory tragedy; and in the evening the Prosecutor-General, Samoylov, came himself to tell Princess Dashkov of the Empress’s displeasure at the publication of the dangerous play. Princess Dashkov answered coldly that probably no one had read the tragedy, and that it was certainly less pernicious than the French plays which were being performed at the Hermitage.

The ex-liberal Catherine met her with a frowning face. ‘What have I done,’ she asked her, ‘that you publish such dangerous books against me and my authority?’

‘And does your Majesty really think that?’ the princess asked.

‘That tragedy ought to have been burnt by the hand of the hangman.’

‘Whether it is burnt by the hand of the hangman or not is no concern of mine. I shall not have to blush for it. But for God’s sake, madam, before you decide on an action so opposed to your character, read the whole play.’

At that the conversation ended. Next day Princess Dashkov attended a great court reception, and made up her mind that if the Empress did not send for her to her dressing-room, as she always did, she would resign her post. Samoylov came out from the inner apartments. With a patronising air he went up to Princess Dashkov and told her not to be uneasy, that the Empress was not angry with her.

She could not brook this, and answered, as her habit was, in a loud voice: ‘I have no reason to be uneasy, my conscience is clear. It would greatly distress me if the Empress retained an unjust feeling towards me; but I should not be surprised even then: at my age injustice and misfortune have long ceased to surprise me.’

The Empress was reconciled with her, and tried once more to explain why she had acted as she did. Instead of answering her, Princess Dashkov replied: ‘A grey cat has run between us, madam: let us not awaken her again.’

But Petersburg was becoming distasteful to her; she was sick of it. She felt ‘utterly alone in these surroundings, which became every day more hateful to her.’ This feeling of repulsion was so great that she made up her mind to leave the court, Petersburg, her public activity, her Academy of Science, and her Russian Academy, and finally her Empress, and to go and live on her estate in the country.

‘With deep sorrow I thought of parting, perhaps for ever, from the Sovereign whom I loved passionately, and loved long before she was on her throne, when she had less means of bestowing benefits on me than I found occasions for serving her. I still loved her, although she did not always treat me as her own heart, her own brain, would have prompted her.’

That is all! Not one word of anger, of condemnation for complete lack of heart, for ingratitude; even here she gives us to understand that it was not Catherine’s fault, but other people’s.

The parting of these women was remarkable. The Empress said to her drily, and with an angry face: ‘I wish you a good journey.’ Princess Dashkov was amazed; she did not understand it, and went away after kissing her hand. Next morning Troshtchinsky, the Secretary of the Empress, arrived, and in her name handed the princess an unpaid bill, the unpaid bill of a tailor who had done work for Shtcherbinin. The Empress sent word that she was surprised that the princess should leave Petersburg without carrying out her promise to pay her daughter’s debts. Zubov, who hated Princess Dashkov, and was a patron of the tailor’s, had carried these paltry details to the Empress. To crown it all, it appeared that the bill had nothing to do with her daughter, but had been incurred by her husband, Shtcherbinin, who was living apart from her.

Princess Dashkov, utterly revolted at this humiliation, firmly resolved to leave Petersburg for ever.

But people of her temperament do not fold their hands at a little over fifty, in the full possession of their faculties. She became a capital manager of her estates; she built houses, drew maps, and laid out parks. There was not a tree nor a bush in her garden which she had not planted or to which she had not at least assigned its position. She built four houses, and says with pride that her peasants were among the most prosperous in the neighbourhood. While she was engaged in these rustic pursuits, Serpuhovsky, the Marshal of the Nobility, suddenly arrived, looking distressed.

‘What is the matter with you?’ she asked.

‘Don’t you know?’ answered the Marshal; ‘the Empress is dead.’

Princess Dashkov’s daughter rushed to her, thinking that she would faint. ‘No, no, don’t worry about me,’ said her mother; ‘I am quite well, though it would be happiness to die at this moment. My fate is worse; I am destined to see all the reforms that had been begun destroyed, and my country ruined and unhappy.’

With these words she fell into convulsions, and gave way to prolonged grief.

It was not long before she felt the heavy, weighty, autocratic hand of Peter’s crazy son.[71] First she received a decree discharging her from her post; she asked the Prosecutor-General, Samoylov, to testify to the Tsar her gratitude for relieving her from the burden which had become too great for her strength.

A little later she went to Moscow, but the Governor-General of Moscow called on her at once and informed her that she should go back to the country immediately, and there think of the year 1762. She answered, ‘that she never forgot that year, but that in accordance with the Tsar’s will she would think of that time, which had left her neither stings of conscience nor remorse.’

Her brother Alexandr, anxious to soothe her, told her that Paul was doing all this now for the rehabilitation of his father’s memory, but that after his coronation things would go better. On reaching Troitskoye she wrote to him: ‘Dear brother, you write that Paul will leave me in peace after the coronation. Believe me, you are much mistaken in his character. When the tyrant has once struck his victim, he will repeat his blows until he has crushed the victim utterly. The consciousness of innocence and the feeling of indignation serve to give me courage to endure discomfort so long as his growing spite does not assail all of you, my relations, also. Of one thing you may rest assured, that no circumstances will compel me to do anything or say anything to demean myself.

‘Examining my past life,’ she adds, ‘I am not without inner consolation, aware in myself of sufficient strength of character, tested by many calamities, to feel certain that I shall find again strength to endure misfortune.’

She correctly gauged the character of the relentless, petty, frenzied tyrant. Only a few days after she had reached Troitskoye, a courier from the Governor-General arrived from Moscow. Paul commanded Princess Dashkov to go at once to her son’s estate in a remote district of the Novgorod Province, and there to await his further commands.

She answered that she was ready to obey the Sovereign’s will, and that it was a matter of complete indifference to her where she ended her days, but that she knew nothing of the estate nor of the roads thither, that she would have to write from Moscow either for her son’s steward or for a peasant from that village to guide her by the cross-country roads.

When she was ready and had obtained a guide, she drove off into her exile in the winter frost, travelling slowly with her own horses, surrounded by the spies of Arharov, and accompanied by her kind-hearted kinsman, Laptyev, whom she tried in vain to dissuade from coming and exposing himself to the persecution of the frenzied autocrat.

But as the foremost symptom of madness is inconsistency, she was here mistaken: when it was reported to Paul that Laptyev had accompanied her, he said: ‘He is not such a petticoat as our young men; he knows how to wear the breeches.’

As a rule far more value is attached to such momentary flashes of humane feeling in Paul and others than they deserve. What would Paul have done if all the young men had known ‘how to wear the breeches’ like Laptyev? he had plenty of Arharovs, Araktcheyevs, and Obolyaninovs to torture them, fetter them in chains, and send them into exile. (Pahlen and Bennigsen[72] did show him, however, that there was an even better way to ‘wear the breeches’!)

This approbation of the victim is the final outrage on him, the miscreant sets his conscience at rest with it. On one occasion, in the presence of Ségur, Potyomkin gave some colonel a blow, and, recollecting himself, said to the ambassador: ‘How is one to treat them differently when they put up with everything?’

And what would Potyomkin’s answer have been, if the colonel had given him a blow or a challenge?

Princess Dashkov settled in a peasant’s hut. She took another for her daughter, and a third as a kitchen. To add to the discomforts of this life in the wilds in winter, exiles from Petersburg to Siberia were brought by her windows. The figure of one young officer haunted her long afterwards; he was some distant relative of hers. Learning that she was here, he wanted to see her. Risky as such an interview was, she received him. She was shocked to see the convulsive twitching of his face, and how ill he looked; this was the result of the tortures in which his limbs had been twisted and dislocated. What had this criminal done? He had said something about Paul in the barracks, and some one had informed against him. Yet perhaps he, too, knew how to ‘wear the breeches,’ till his arms were wrenched out of their sockets.

Before the spring flooding of the rivers, which would have cut off Princess Dashkov from all communication for a long period, she wrote a letter to the Empress Marya Feodorovna, and enclosed in it a request for permission to move to her Kaluga estate. Paul could not have liked the tone of her letter; she said in it that it was as little to her honour to write this letter as it was to her Majesty’s to read it, but that religion and humanity compelled her to make a final effort to save all her people from this cruel exile.

Paul, as usual, flew into a fury, and gave orders that pen and paper should be taken from Princess Dashkov, that she should be forbidden all correspondence, be kept under stricter supervision, and I do not know what else. ‘It is not so easy,’ he said, ‘to turn me off the throne.’ With these orders a courier was despatched, but the Empress and Madame Nelidov induced the Grand Duke Michael Pavlovitch to beg his infuriated father for mercy, and the little boy, with the help of the wife and mistress, succeeded. Paul took up a pen and wrote: ‘Princess Ekaterina Romanovna, since you desire to return to your Kaluga estate, I give you permission for the same. I remain well disposed to you.—PAUL.’

Arharov had to despatch another courier: fortunately the second overtook the first.

In 1798 Paul suddenly took a fancy to Prince Dashkov, showered undeserved favours of all sorts upon him, and made him the present of an estate. Dashkov asked Kurakin to submit to Paul that, instead of an estate, he would prefer permission for his mother to live where she chose. Paul gave the permission with the proviso that she should never remain in the same town where he was.

The mother was forgiven. Now came the son’s turn. A certain Altesti was tried for misappropriation of public money, but really for being a friend of Zubov. Dashkov said to Lopuhin that Altesti was innocent. In the evening he received the following note: ‘Since you meddle in affairs that have nothing to do with you, I have dismissed you from your duties.—PAUL.’

Dashkov, afraid of worse to follow, went off to his Tambov estate.

At last, on the 12th of March 1801, Paul’s life ‘came to an end,’ as Princess Dashkov says. With deep emotion and intense joy she learned that this pernicious man had ceased to exist. ‘How many times,’ she goes on, ‘have I thanked Heaven that Paul exiled me! by so doing he saved me from the humiliating obligation of appearing at the court of such a sovereign.’

She breathed freely again in the reign of Alexander ... she could appear at his court without the loss of her human dignity, but she did not feel at home in the new surroundings. Many things had changed since Catherine had sent her the tailor’s bill. Princess Dashkov, now an old woman, is angry with the younger generation surrounding Alexander, and thinks that they are all Jacobins or martinets.

One pure presence arrested her, and with respectful love, with reverence, she looked upon her and attached herself to her; sorrowful and unappreciated, this melancholy being moved thoughtfully through the halls of the Winter Palace, and vanished like a shadow; she would have been forgotten, if we did not sometimes come across a well-known picture of the year 1815, in which the Emperor Alexander and the Empress Elizabeth are represented as the peacemakers of Europe.

Miss Wilmot has appended to Princess Dashkov’s Memoirs a well-drawn portrait of the Empress Elizabeth; the unhappy woman is standing with her arms folded, she looks out mournfully from the paper, a hidden grief and a sort of perplexity can be seen in her eyes, the whole figure expresses one thought: ‘I am a stranger here’; indeed, she is holding up her skirt and wraps as though on the point of departure.

How strange was her destiny, and that of Anna Pavlovna, the wife of the Tsarevitch!

After the coronation Princess Dashkov saw that there was really no place for her at the new court, and she began making plans for repose at Troitskoye. In her honoured seclusion she again became a power.

Friends and relations, celebrities whose fame was waning, and rising stars visited her.

‘Crossing your threshold
I am back in Catherine’s days.
Taking no share in the world’s hopes and fears,
You at your window stand with mocking gaze
To watch at times the flying wheel of change.
E’en so, withdrawing from the busy whirl
To court the Muses and their idle ease,
In porphyry baths and marble palaces,
Grandees in Rome endured their world’s decay.
And to them from afar the young men came,—
Dictator, consul, tribune, warrior chief—
To rest in peace, to heave luxurious sighs,
Then off at once upon the road again.’

She often visited Moscow. There she was held in the highest respect; active and inexhaustible, she was seen at balls and dinners, and arrived there indeed earlier than any. Young ladies trembled at her criticisms and observations, men sought the honour of being presented to her.

At the other end of Moscow, not far from the Donsky Monastery, another living monument of the reign of Catherine was passing his last days in a palace surrounded by gardens. He led a gloomy life, retaining in spite of his age his athletic frame and savage energy of character. In 1796, with a scowling brow but unrepentant, he carried all over Petersburg the crown of the man whom he had murdered; hundreds of thousands of people pointed the finger at him; his companion, Prince Baryatinsky, turned pale and nearly fainted; old Orlov merely complained of his gout.

But his sombre life was not to pass uncheered. At his side a gentle, tender little girl, exceptionally graceful and talented, was growing up. The haughty old man began to live for her; he became her nurse, petted her, cared for her, waited on her, and loved her beyond all measure, as no one but her dead mother could have loved her.

Sitting on his sofa, he made his daughter dance gipsy and Russian dances, watched her movements with fond tenderness and unspoken pride, sometimes wiping a tear from eyes which had, dry and cold, looked on so many horrors.

At last the time came for the old man to bring his treasure out into the world; but to whom was he to confide her, into what woman’s care was he to entrust this cherished flower? There was, indeed, one woman whom he could have trusted, who with her marvellous tact might have directed her first steps; but they were not on good terms. She had not forgiven him for the stain he had brought on her revolution forty-two years before.

And now the haughty Alexey Orlov, the Orlov of Chesme,[73] whom even Paul could not crush, sought the favour of an interview with Princess Ekaterina Romanovna, and, receiving permission to present his daughter to her, joyfully hastened to take advantage of it and went with his Annushka to see her.

Princess Dashkov came in to greet him; bowing, the old man kissed her hand; both were agitated; at last Princess Dashkov said to him: ‘So many years have passed since we have met, Count, and so many events have transformed the world in which we once lived that, indeed, I feel that we are meeting now as shades in the other world. The presence of this angel’ (she added, feelingly pressing to her bosom the daughter of her former enemy) ‘who has brought us together again makes that feeling even stronger.’ In his delight Orlov kissed the hand of Miss Wilmot, who was afraid of him, in spite of the fact that she calls him ‘a majestic old man,’ and saw with surprise the portrait of Catherine on his breast, framed in nothing but diamonds, and the _heiduks_ standing in the hall, and with them a dwarf dressed like a jester.

The Count invited Princess Dashkov, and gave one of those fabulous banquets of which we used to hear traditions in our childhood, feasts reminiscent of Versailles and the Golden Horde. The gardens were brilliantly lighted up, the house was thrown open, throngs of house-serfs in gorgeous masquerade costumes filled the rooms, an orchestra played, the tables groaned under the viands; in short, a royal banquet. He had some one now to whom to entrust his daughter!

At the height of the festivities, the father called her, the guests formed a circle, and she danced, danced with a shawl and danced with a tambourine in the Russian style. The old father beat time and watched Princess Dashkov’s face; the old lady was pleased, the crowd was silent through respect for the father’s rank and the daughter’s extraordinary grace. ‘She danced,’ says Miss Wilmot, ‘with such simplicity, such natural charm, such dignity and expression, that her movements seemed her language.’

After each dance, she ran to her father and kissed his hand. Princess Dashkov praised her; her father bade her kiss the princess’s hand too. But he fancied that she was overheated, and with his own hands wrapped her in a shawl that she might not take cold. At supper, with a blare of trumpets and kettledrums, the Count, standing, drank the health of Princess Dashkov. Then followed her favourite Russian songs accompanied by a full orchestra. Then the strains of the polka were heard, and Orlov led Princess Dashkov into the drawing-room, where the music of the wind instruments astonished our Irish girl, who had never before heard serfdom put to the service of art. At last Princess Dashkov got up to take leave, and the Count, bowing and kissing her hand, thanked her for honouring his poor house.

This was how Orlov of Chesme celebrated his reconciliation with old Princess Dashkov, and this was how the grim, harsh man loved his daughter.

I, too, like Princess Ekaterina Romanovna, am almost reconciled to him. Savage were the days in which he lived, and savage were his actions; the Russia of Peter’s creation was still in the melting-pot: let us not judge him more severely than Princess Dashkov did, and, if the prayers of parents can do much in the next world, let us forgive Orlov much in this for his love for his daughter.

Her fate, too, was a strange one.

As a boy I saw her once or twice, then I saw her again in 1841 at Novgorod; she was living near the Yurev Monastery. Her whole life was one prolonged, sorrowful penitence for a crime that she had not committed, one prayer for the remission of her father’s sins, one act of atonement for them. She could not overcome the horror inspired in her by the murder of Peter III., and was crushed at the thought of her father’s eternal punishment. All her mind, all her Orlov energy, she fixed on this one object, and little by little abandoned herself completely to gloomy mysticism and superstition. Called by birth, by wealth, and by talent to one of the foremost positions not only in Russia, but in Europe, she spent her days with tedious monks, with old bishops, with all sorts of paralytics, sanctimonious hypocrites, crazy saints. I am told that after 1815 German hereditary princes sought her hand; Alexander showed her marked attention; she withdrew from the court. Her palace grew emptier and emptier, and at last sank into complete silence; neither the clatter of old-fashioned goblets nor the choruses of singers were heard in it, and no one cared about the cherished racehorses. Only the black figures of bearded monks moved gloomily about the garden avenues and looked at the fountains, as though Count Alexey’s funeral were not yet over—and, indeed, the prayer for the repose of his soul still went on.

In the drawing-room, where she had spun and twirled in the gipsy dance in her girlish purity, innocent of the significance of the ardent movements of the Asiatic dance, where smoothly, with downcast eyes, she had danced with modestly raised hand our languid feminine dances, and where her terrible father had gazed at her with tears in his eyes, the bigoted fanatic, Foty,[74] sat now uttering incoherent speeches, and bringing even greater horror into her crushed soul; the daughter of the haughty conqueror of Chesme meekly listened to his sinister words, carefully covering his feet with a shawl, perhaps the very one in which her father had wrapped her!

‘Anna,’ Foty would say, ‘fetch me water,’ and she ran for water. ‘Now sit and listen,’ and she sat and listened. Poor woman!

Her palace and gardens in Moscow she presented to the Tsar. What for? I do not know. The immense estates, the stud-farms, all went to adorn the Yurev Monastery; thither she transferred, too, her father’s coffin; there in a special vault a lamp for ever burned, and a prayer was muttered over him, there her own sarcophagus, still empty when I saw it, was prepared. In the church twilight, the wealth of the Orlovs, transformed into rubies, pearls, and emeralds, glitters mournfully in the settings of ikons and the caps of archimandrites. With them the luckless daughter tried to bribe the Heavenly Judge.

Catherine had robbed the monasteries of their estates and distributed them among the Orlovs and her other lovers. What a nemesis!

Princess Dashkov’s Memoirs fail us about this time. The very details of her interview with Orlov we have taken from the letters of the two Wilmot sisters.

Miss Mary Wilmot, grieving for the loss of her brother and dull at home, received an invitation from Princess Dashkov to spend a year or two with her. Miss Mary did not know the princess personally, but (she was Mrs. Hamilton’s niece) she had from her childhood heard of this wonderful woman, had heard how at eighteen she had been at the head of a conspiracy, how she had dashed on horseback before revolting troops, how afterwards she had lived in England and stayed in Ireland, had been President of the Academy, and had written passionate letters to Mrs. Hamilton. The young girl imagined her something fantastic, ‘a fairy and partly a witch,’ and for that very reason decided, in 1803, to go to her.

When she reached Troitskoye, however, she felt so scared and homesick that she would have been glad to return if it had been possible.

A short old lady, in a long dark cloth dress with a star on the left side, and something like a peaked hat, came to meet her. Round her neck she had a shabby old kerchief—one damp evening, when out for a walk, twenty years earlier, Mrs. Hamilton had given her that kerchief, and from that time forward she had kept it as a holy relic. But if her attire really was suggestive of a witch, the noble features of her face and the expression of infinite tenderness in her eyes fascinated the Irish girl from the first moment. ‘There was so much truth, so much warmth, dignity, and simplicity in her manner, that I loved her before she said anything.’

Miss Mary was completely under her influence from the first day, was surprised at it, and angry with herself, but could not resist the attraction of the splendid old lady. She liked everything in her, even her broken English, which gave something childlike to her words. ‘Tears and life,’ she says, ‘have given serenity and softness to her features, and their expression of pride, of which slight traces still remain, has been replaced by indulgence.’

But how Princess Dashkov loved her! She loved her passionately, as she had once loved Catherine. Such freshness of feeling, such feminine tenderness, such craving for love, such youthfulness of heart, are astounding at sixty. The solicitude of a mother, the solicitude of a sister, a lover, are what Miss Mary found at Troitskoye; for her entertainment Princess Dashkov went to Moscow, took her to balls, showed her monasteries, presented her to Empresses, adorned her room with flowers, spent evenings with her reading the letters of Catherine and other celebrities.

Miss Wilmot begged and besought her to write her Memoirs. ‘And what I would never do for my relatives or my friends, I am doing for her.’

She wrote her Memoirs for her, and dedicated them to her.

In 1805 Princess Dashkov invited Miss Mary’s sister, Miss Katharine, who was then in France and was obliged to leave that country, being persecuted as an Englishwoman. The sisters were not in the least alike. Mary was a soft, tender creature, delighted to have some one to protect her, and to nestle under some one’s wing; she attached herself to Princess Dashkov, as the weak twig to a strong old tree; she calls her ‘my Russian mother’; she came to her from a little town, and had seen nothing before except her ‘Emerald Isle.’ Her sister, who had lived in Paris, was lively and hot-tempered, independent in her opinions, clever and ironical, not particularly loving or tolerant, and rather free in her speech. Moreover, there was a great deal in Russia that she positively disliked—and so her letters have for us a special interest of their own.

‘Russia,’ she says, ‘is like a girl of twelve—wild and awkward, who has been dressed up in a fashionable Parisian hat. We are living here in the fourteenth or fifteenth century.’[75]

She was far more shocked by serfdom than her kind-hearted sister. In vain Princess Dashkov pointed out to her the prosperity of her peasants.

‘They are well off,’ writes Miss Katharine, ‘while the princess lives, but what will happen to them afterwards?’ Every landowner seems to her an iron link in the fetters of Russia.

In the pitiful cringing, the shameless servility of our society she very correctly sees the reflection of slavery. With amazement she sees again in assembly halls and drawing-rooms slaves devoid of all moral feeling and personal dignity. She is astonished at visitors who dare not sit down, and stand for hours at a time at the door, shifting from one foot to the other, till they are dismissed with a nod. ‘The conceptions of good and evil are in Russia mixed up with the idea of being in favour or out of favour. A man’s worth is easily ascertained from the address calendar, and it depends on the Tsar whether a man is unreservedly taken for a snake or an ass.’

The Moscow grandees did not overawe her with the galaxy of their stars, with their ponderous dignity and boring dinners.

‘I feel,’ she writes after the festivities of 1806, ‘that I have been floating all this time among the shades and spirits of Catherine’s palace. Moscow is the imperial political Elysium of Russia. All the personages of power and authority in the reigns of Catherine and Paul, who have long ago been succeeded by others, retire into the luxurious idleness of this lazy city, maintaining a supposed consequence which is allowed them out of courtesy. Influence and power have passed years ago to another generation; nevertheless, the _oberkammerherr_ of the Empress Catherine, Prince Golitsyn, is still hung all over with orders and decorations under the burden of which his ninety years are weighed down to the ground; still, as in the palace of Catherine, a diamond key is tied to his skeleton, which is dressed in an embroidered kaftan, and he still majestically accepts tokens of respect from his companion shades who once shared power and honour with him.

‘By his side is another gaudy _revenant_, Count Osterman, once the great Chancellor; he is hung with ribbons of every possible colour, red, blue, and striped; eighty-three years are piled upon his head, but still he drives his skeleton about with the bones rattling behind a team of six horses, dines with _heiduks_ waiting at his table, and keeps up the solemn etiquette by which he was surrounded when he was in power.’ Among the shades she saw, too, Count Alexey Orlov.

‘The hand that murdered Peter III. is studded with diamonds, among his gifts from royalty the portrait of the Empress is particularly conspicuous; Catherine smiles from it in everlasting gratitude.’

Miss Wilmot mentions, too, Korsakov, ‘who might have been taken for a glittering vision of diamonds,’ Prince Baryatinsky and some other figures from this world of the past, ‘from which they have retained the habit of court gossip about important nonentities, haughtiness, vanity, and the empty bustle in which they find their joy and their sorrow.’

And she concludes with indignation: ‘And yet the open coffin stands at their tottering feet threatening to consign their paltry existences to speedy oblivion.’

‘All these old grandees are surrounded by wives, daughters, and granddaughters, dressed up to the nines, and sitting in gilded apartments, in patriarchal fashion making their maids dance for their amusement, and incessantly regaling one on jam. There is something French in their appearance, and, being brought up by Frenchwomen, they speak that language well and dress in the latest Parisian mode. But there is very little real politeness in these ladies; their education is absolutely superficial, and there is not a trace here of the charming lightness of French society. When a Moscow lady has scanned you from head to foot and kissed you five or six times (though twice, one would think, would be more than enough), has assured you of her everlasting affection, told you to your face that you are sweet and charming, asked you the price of everything you have got on, and babbled about the coming ball at the Hall of the Nobility, she has nothing more to say.’

Both sisters were greatly shocked by the vulgar habit of wearing other people’s diamonds at balls. Moreover, every one knew whose they were; thus a Princess Golitsyn used to lend her friends a girdle of diamonds and a headdress of marvellous beauty that was known to the whole town. On one occasion she adorned the shoulders of a niece of Princess Dashkov’s with her jewels; the young lady had completely forgotten that the princess was to be present; the stern and implacable old lady, it need hardly be said, detested these displays of other people’s wealth. The young lady was so terrified at the sight of Princess Dashkov that she kept out of sight all the evening. But the fatal hour of supper arrived; Miss Mary, feeling cold, put on her shawl; this struck the young lady as a way of salvation, and she took hers to conceal the rivers of diamonds from Princess Dashkov. They sat down, the aunt opposite; the soup tureen screened the niece a little, but her headdress burnt her like fire. Princess Dashkov stared at it. Red patches came out on the poor girl’s face and tears came into her eyes. The princess said not a word.

The sisters, who in many ways disagreed over people and incidents, are completely at one whenever Princess Dashkov is spoken of. Miss Katharine’s sarcastic pen loses all its venom when writing of the princess. We have put her description of her at the beginning of this account. In it she has shown least appreciation of the tender, womanly side, for which love was a necessity. This side of her nature was far better understood by Miss Mary, and yet she abandoned her.

In 1807 Miss Katharine went away. Mary meant to leave a little later. She was detained by a terrible blow which fell upon Princess Dashkov.

Though the latter loved her son devotedly, she had never quite forgiven his marriage, and would never receive his wife; she was in correspondence with her son, however, but did not see him. In spite of all entreaties, and in particular those of Miss Wilmot, whose influence was so immense, the mother’s wounded heart, which they had not known how to soften immediately after the marriage, could not do violence to itself and be fully reconciled. In 1807, immediately after Princess Dashkov had arrived in Moscow, her son was taken ill, and a few days later he died.

This was a terrible blow for her, it shortened her life; repentance too late laid all its irrevocable burden of regret upon her. She sent for her daughter-in-law. And these women, who had done each other so much harm, who had never met and had openly and senselessly hated each other, fell sobbing in each other’s arms, and were reconciled for ever beside the coffin of the man whom they had so much loved.

Life was shattered for the princess. One consolation was left her—that was her child, her friend, her ‘Irish daughter,’ and _she_ was preparing to leave her.

Why she went away I do not understand. It is hard to restrain a feeling of vexation, seeing how unnecessarily Miss Wilmot abandoned Princess Dashkov for the sake of her Irish relatives, who played an extremely limited part in her life, and with whom she must have been very dreary.

Princess Dashkov, frightened of her isolation, wanted to go with her to Ireland, there to end her existence, ‘which has no heirs and must die out.’ Miss Wilmot persuaded her not to go and promised to come back to her. The old woman felt it bitterly. Miss Mary, to spare her, set off secretly, but, detained in Petersburg by the departure of the ship and the incredibly stupid police measures taken against the English on account of the war which had then been declared, she made up her mind to go back for some months to Moscow; the figure of the old lady with tears in her eyes rent her heart; she wrote to her of her intention.

Princess Dashkov’s joy and gratitude knew no bounds, and how did she celebrate the news? She sent to the prison for five men who were there for debt to be released, and charged them to celebrate a thanksgiving service for her.

But the bitterness of separation was only deferred; the obstinate Miss Mary would have her way, and went after all. Princess Dashkov, heartbroken at parting from her friend, had gone to bed. At night Miss Wilmot stole quietly once more into her room. The princess, who had been weeping the whole day, had fallen asleep: ‘The expression of her face was serene as a child’s. I softly kissed her and went away.’ They never saw each other again.

The last days of our princess were passed in complete emptiness, through which those dreary ‘shades’ flitted from time to time, covered with stars and powder, and growing still more decrepit. Her thoughts were concentrated on the young girl with a sorrow and dreamy tenderness which makes the heartache; one has a distinct feeling that this grief must go uncomforted.

‘What am I to say to you, my beloved child, not to grieve you?’ she writes on the 25th of October 1809. ‘I am sad, very sad, tears are flowing from my eyes, and I cannot get used to our separation. I have built a few bridges. I have planted a few hundred trees, I am told successfully; all that distracts me for a minute, but my sadness comes back again.’