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Meanwhile, Potemkin continued to love Catherine in his own way. His physical passion for her had faded, but his affection for and loyalty to her remained. Meanwhile, he was transferring his sexual approaches from one young woman to another. Among these were three of his five nieces, Alexandra, Varvara, and Ekaterinia, the daughters of his sister Maria Engelhardt.
Varvara (Barbara) attracted her uncle first. Golden-haired, flirtatious, and demanding, she knew at the age of twenty how to control the prince, who then was thirty-seven. He made herculean efforts to please her. His letters to her were ardent, far more so than any he had written to Catherine:
Varinka, I love you, my darling, as I have never loved anybody before.… I kiss you all over, my dearest goddess.… Good-bye, sweetness of my lips.… You were sound asleep and do not remember anything. When I left you I tucked you in, and kissed you.… Tell me, my beautiful, my goddess, that you love me.… My sweetest, you dare not get out of health; I shall spank you for that.… I kiss you twenty-two million times.
Varvara had no difficulty imposing her will on her doting uncle. She teased and misled him. When Potemkin left for the south, she pretended to be lonely and sad. This prompted the empress to write to him, “Listen, my dearest, Varinka is very sick; it is your absence that is causing it. You are wrong. You will kill her while I am getting more and more fond of her.” The young woman was actually deceiving them both; she had fallen in love with young Prince Sergei Golitsyn and was trying to find a way to win Potemkin’s and Catherine’s permission to marry him. She succeeded, married, and, with Sergei, produced ten children.
Her sister Alexandra (“Sashenka”) came next. She was two years older than Varvara, and the liaison between her and Potemkin was less passionate but more serious and durable. For the rest of his life, they were devoted to each other, and even after she had married an influential Polish nobleman, Count Xavier Branitsky, Sashenka was often at Potemkin’s side. When she was not with him, she was with the empress, having become one of Catherine’s favorite ladies-in-waiting. She was slender, with brown hair, blue eyes, high cheekbones, and impeccable dignity. Of his nieces, Sashenka meant the most to Potemkin. It was to her that Potemkin left most of his wealth; as an elderly woman, she estimated her fortune to be twenty-eight million rubles. Nevertheless, until Catherine’s death, Sashenka spent most winters in the Winter Palace, and when the empress died, Sashenka quietly retired to a wooden house in the country.
The prettiest and laziest of the Engelhardt sisters was Ekaterina (Catherine), who yielded to Potemkin because she did not want the bother of resisting him. This relationship was less turbulent than the one with Varvara and less affectionate than that with Sashenka. Ekaterina married Count Paul Skavronsky, but when Catherine appointed the count as minister to Naples, his wife refused to accompany him, remaining in St. Petersburg because her uncle wanted her to stay. When she finally departed for Italy, she found her husband chronically ill in bed. She left him there and spent her days and nights reclining on a sofa, wrapped only in a black fur coat, playing cards. She refused to wear the large diamonds Potemkin had given her or the Parisian dresses bought for her by her husband. “What’s the use of all this? Who wants it?” she asked. While she was in Italy, Potemkin died, and when her husband also died, she returned to Russia, married an Italian count, and lived with him for the rest of her life.
There was contemporary disapproval of relationships between uncles and nieces, but it was muted, and outright condemnation was almost nonexistent. In Russia and elsewhere in Europe, the glittering, tightly enclosed eighteenth-century worlds of royalty and aristocracy made physical attraction between relatives more likely and criticism more limited. At thirteen, Catherine herself (then Sophia of Anhalt-Zerbst) had dallied with her uncle George before she left for Russia to marry her second cousin, Grand Duke Peter. In Russia, however, there was an exception to the generally lackadaisical attitude toward Potemkin’s affairs with his nieces. Gregory’s mother, Daria Potemkina, emphatically did not approve of her son’s relations with her granddaughters. No one listened to her. Potemkin laughed at her censorious letters, balled them up, and tossed them into the fire.
Catherine was not jealous of these young women because they were sleeping with Potemkin. What she envied them was their youth. Her own youth had been wasted. She had been sixteen when she married a wretched boy. She was a mature woman of twenty-five before she had her first sexual encounter, and this was with a heartless rake. Now approaching fifty, she still saw in Potemkin’s nieces the ardent young girl she could have been. She hated growing old. Her birthday, so publicly celebrated, was for her a day of mourning. In a letter to Grimm, she wrote, “Would it not be charming if an empress could be always fifteen?”
63
Favorites
WHEN CATHERINE, then Sophia, arrived in Russia at the age of fourteen, she learned that “favorite” was the term used to describe an established and formally recognized lover of the woman on the throne, Empress Elizabeth. While she was still a married grand duchess, Catherine herself had three lovers: Saltykov, Poniatowski, and Gregory Orlov. None of these was her “favorite”; she was not yet the empress. Orlov, of course, remained Catherine’s lover after she reached the throne, thereby becoming her first favorite. During her lifetime, Catherine had twelve lovers: the first three, named above, before she reached the throne at thirty-three, the other nine during her thirty-four years as empress. Of the twelve, she loved five: Poniatowsky, Orlov, Potemkin, Zavadovsky, and Alexander Lanskoy. For another three—Saltykov, Ivan Rimsky-Korsakov, and Alexander Mamonov—she felt passion. Three others— Vasilchikov, Simon Zorich and Alexander Yermolov—were quickly chosen and quickly discarded. The twelfth and last, Platon Zubov, was in a category of his own.
Usually there was only a brief interval between the departure of one of Catherine’s favorites and the arrival of the next. Most favorites had no influence on government policy, but they were always close to Catherine’s ear, and, throughout her reign, reports of their rise and fall filled the dispatches of foreign ambassadors attempting to interpret the significance of each change. Several of Catherine’s lovers played a mere decorative role in the life of the woman who drew them from obscurity and eventually sent them back into the shadows. There was always keen competition for the role. The candidate chosen was rewarded with jewels, money, palaces, and country estates. When he was sent away, the parting was almost always managed without tears or recriminations; occasionally a former lover later reappeared at court.
Most of Catherine’s favorites were young officers originally selected for their handsome faces, but their selection and presence was not due solely, or even primarily, to sensuality on Catherine’s part. She wanted to love and be loved. She had lived with an impossible husband in an emotional vacuum. To read her letters to Potemkin is to realize that, as much as physical satisfaction, she wanted intelligent, loving companionship.
Having accepted that he was no longer the imperial favorite, Gregory Orlov consoled himself by falling in love with, and asking to marry, his fifteen-year-old second cousin, Catherine Zinovieva, with whom he set off on an extended journey to western Europe. The empress, although piqued to find herself replaced so quickly, interceded on his behalf with the Holy Synod, arranging for it to set aside the church ban on marriages of people from the same family. In 1777, Orlov was finally able to marry. But his bride had tuberculosis and her health continued to deteriorate. Despite the fact that Orlov lavished care on her and took her everywhere for treatment, she died four years later in Lausanne. Orlov returned to St. Petersburg, where his own health declined. He suffered from hallucinations and lapsed into dementia. On April 12, 1783, he died at the age of forty-six. His will left his immense fortune to Alexis Bobrinsky, his son with Catherine.
However impetuously Catherine may sometimes have behaved in the first, private stage of a love affair, she was always dignified in public. She never apologized for her favorites or indicated that she considered these arrangements unseemly. All of her favorites were openly acknowledged; indeed, nothing seemed more normal than the matter-of-fact attitude with which these men were regarded by the court and society. Their presence at court was a constant. She was the heavily burdened ruler
