could predict when he would be willing and able to fulfill his dynastic duty. At one moment rigid with grief, the next sobbing and screaming, throwing himself around the room, smashing furniture, threatening to kill himself by jumping out a window, he refused ever to think of marrying again.
To subdue this emotional storm, Catherine chose a cruel remedy. She broke into Natalia’s desk. There, as she expected, she found the love letters exchanged by the dead woman and Andrei Razumovsky. Furious at seeing her son weep over a wife who had betrayed him with his best friend, Catherine decided to use the letters to wrench him back to reality. She thrust the pages under Paul’s eyes. He read the proof that the two people he had loved most had deceived him; he did not even know whether the dead child had been his. He groaned, wept—and then erupted with rage. He demanded that Razumovsky be sent to Siberia, but the empress, loyal to Andrei’s father, refused and simply ordered Andrei to leave the capital immediately. Exhausted, almost unable to function, Paul then agreed to all of his mother’s decisions. He was ready to marry again immediately, long before the year of official mourning had passed. To Grimm, Catherine wrote, “I have wasted no time. At once, I put the irons in the fire to make good the loss, and by so doing I have succeeded in dissipating the deep sorrow that overwhelmed us. The dead being dead, we must think of the living.”
Catherine was distressed by Natalia’s death, not because she had lost a daughter-in-law but because she had lost a grandson. In a letter to Frau Bielcke, she addressed the situation with an icy absence of sympathy: “Well, since it has been proven that she could not give birth to a living child, we must not think about her any more.” The essential thing now was to replace the dead wife quickly. The future of the dynasty and the empire were at stake; ensuring them was a sovereign’s duty. On the day Natalia died, Catherine was already considering possible replacements.
65
Paul, Maria, and the Succession
THREE YEARS BEFORE, Princess Sophia of Wurttemburg had been Catherine’s first choice as a bride for Paul, but Sophia had been ruled out because she was only fourteen. Now, Sophia, almost seventeen, was in every respect exactly what Catherine sought: a German princess whose family was aristocratic but of modest circumstances, prolific with nine children, the three sons tall and strong, the six daughters handsome and wide-hipped. The presence of Prince Henry of Prussia in St. Petersburg made Catherine’s new project easier to achieve. Sophia of Wurttemburg was a great-niece of Frederick II and Prince Henry, and, as Paul idealized Prussia and the Prussian monarch, Catherine hoped that Prince Henry could help persuade her distraught son to marry a relative of his hero. Henry, knowing that his brother was always eager to strengthen ties with Russia, sent a message to Frederick by the fastest courier.
Frederick did everything he could to satisfy and please Catherine. He urged Sophia and her parents to accept the marriage, stressing its political advantages for Prussia and potential financial benefits for the house of Wurttemburg. He pointed out that Catherine had pledged a dowry for all three Wurttemburg daughters. An obstacle had to be overcome: Sophia was already engaged to Lewis (Ludwig), prince of Hesse-Darmstadt, who happened to be the brother of the recently deceased Natalia and therefore Paul’s former brother-in-law. On the king’s orders, the Hesse engagement was broken off, and, with the promise of a pension from Catherine and the hand of another Wurttemburg daughter, Prince Lewis was appeased.
The next step was to arrange a meeting of the prospective bride and groom. Frederick summoned Sophia to Berlin, where Paul would travel to meet her. This plan suited everyone. Foreign travel was what Paul needed as a distraction from thoughts of Natalia’s death and the stinging humiliation of her betrayal. Further, the prospect of a trip to Berlin appeared certain to delight the young widower, who had never been abroad. The opportunity to meet Frederick II provided another powerful incentive.
The journey to Berlin began on June 13, 1776, with Paul sitting in a large, comfortable carriage and Prince Henry at his side. During Paul’s absence, Catherine wrote frequently, praising his letters and worrying about his health. With her encouragement, Paul inspected local Russian government offices, military garrisons, and commercial enterprises along the road to the frontier. She responded to Paul’s praise of the orderliness and manners of Livonia by saying, “I hope that in time the main part of Russia will not yield to … [Livonia] in anything, neither in order nor in the correction of manners, and that your lifetime will be sufficient to see such a change.” While Paul was traveling, Frederick was briefing Sophia of Wurttemburg about the Russian court, just as he had briefed Sophia of Anhalt-Zerbst thirty-two years before. As he had done with the earlier Sophia, he emphasized that conversion from Lutheranism to Orthodoxy was of little consequence, especially when high matters of state were involved.
When Paul reached Berlin, Frederick made every effort to impress and honor the twenty-three-year-old grand duke. Paul was saluted by cannon, rode beneath triumphal arches, and passed between double lines of soldiers. He attended receptions, dinners, and balls. Few were more practiced and effective in the art of political flattery than the king. Paul, accustomed to playing an insignificant role at his mother’s court, now found himself honored and celebrated by the great Frederick. For the first time in his life, he received the consideration due to the heir to a great throne. “Nothing can exceed the attention His Prussian Majesty pays to the grand duke, nor the pains he takes to captivate and please him,” reported the British ambassador from Berlin. Paul reveled in this attention, which cemented his view that the king of Prussia was the greatest man and greatest monarch in Europe. He wrote to his mother that the level of civilization in Prussia was two centuries ahead of that in Russia.
Not only did Paul’s reception in Berlin thoroughly reconcile him to the idea of a second marriage, but he also developed an immediate liking for Sophia. She was tall, blond, wholesome, amiable, and sentimental. And, because she had been recommended by Frederick, she seemed to Paul twice as desirable. As for Sophia, she made no protest when her engagement to the handsome Lewis of Hesse was suddenly broken off and her great uncles Frederick and Henry introduced the small, less attractive Paul. Whatever her innermost feelings when she first saw Paul, she dutifully accepted him. “The grand duke is exceedingly amiable,” she wrote to her mother. “He has every charm.”
Catherine was pleased by what Paul wrote in his letters about Sophia’s appearance and good sense, her determination to be a good wife, and her resolve to learn Russian. The empress sent her blessing, but, in order to make certain that she would keep absolute control, she insisted that Sophia leave her mother behind in Berlin and come to Russia alone. She wrote to the princess, praising her willingness to make herself “my daughter.… Be assured that I shall not neglect a single occasion where I may prove to Your Highness the sentiments of a tender mother.” She also stressed that she wanted the marriage to take place as soon as possible. She wrote to Grimm:
We shall have her here within ten days. As soon as we have her, we shall proceed with her conversion. To convince her, it ought to take about fifteen days, I think. I do not know how long will be necessary to teach her to read intelligibly and correctly the confession of faith in Russian. But the faster this can be hurried through, the better.… To accelerate that … [a cabinet secretary] has gone to Memel to teach her the alphabet and the confession en route; conviction will follow afterwards. Eight days from this, I fix the wedding. If you wish to dance at it, you will have to hurry.
Meanwhile, the empress sent a diamond necklace and earrings to the bride-to-be, and a jewel-encrusted snuffbox and a sword to her parents. On August 24, Sophia crossed the Russian frontier at Riga, and on August 31, she and Paul were received by Catherine at Tsarskoe Selo. The empress greeted Sophia warmly, and, a few days later, she wrote to Madame Bielcke:
My son has returned very much taken with his princess. I confess to you that I am enchanted with her. She is precisely that which is desired; shapely as a nymph, a complexion the color of the lily and the rose, the most
