beautiful skin in the world, tall, but still graceful; modesty, sweetness, kindness, and innocence are reflected in her face.… The whole world is enchanted with her … she does everything to please.… In a word, my princess is everything that I desired. So there, I am content.
On September 6, Catherine, Paul, and Sophia traveled from Tsarskoe Selo to St. Petersburg. A Lutheran pastor and an obliging Orthodox priest confirmed Frederick of Prussia’s opinion that the differences between Lutheranism and Orthodoxy were minimal. On September 14, Sophia Dorothea’s official conversion took place; she accepted Orthodoxy and became Maria Fyodorovna. Her formal betrothal followed the next day, on which occasion she wrote to Paul, “I swear to love and adore you all my life and to be always attached to you, and nothing in the world will make me change with respect to you. Those are the sentiments of your ever affectionate and faithful betrothed.”
On September 26, 1776, only five months after Natalia died, Paul and Maria were married and the new grand duchess set about her duty. Fourteen and a half months later, on December 12, 1777, after only a few hours of labor and without complications, Maria gave birth to a healthy boy, Catherine’s first grandchild, a future emperor. Catherine, ecstatic, named him Alexander. A second child arrived eighteen months later, another healthy boy, insurance for the dynasty. Again, Catherine rejoiced. She named him Constantine.
Paul’s second marriage probably gave him the greatest happiness of his life. “This dear husband is an angel, the pearl of husbands. I am madly in love with him and I am perfectly happy,” Maria wrote to a friend in Germany. She was an excellent wife for Paul. She did her best to make him happy and to calm his anxieties, becoming not only his wife but his friend. She encouraged Paul’s best qualities at home and treated him with respect and deference in public. Paul was grateful and wrote to Henry of Prussia, “Wherever she goes, she has the gift of spreading gaiety and ease. And she has the art of not only driving out all my melancholy thoughts, but even of giving me back the good humor that I had completely lost during these last three unhappy years.” Together, Paul and Maria produced nine healthy children.
• • •
In 1781, Catherine, hoping to convince her Prussophile son of the advantages of her new friendship with Joseph II of Austria, arranged for Paul and Maria to make a European tour. It would take them a year and carry them to Vienna, Italy, her home in Wurttemburg, and Paris, but would pointedly exclude Berlin. Maria Fyodorovna was eager to see her family, but her pleasure faded when she was told that her children would remain behind. Paul’s disappointment was political; his mother’s refusal to let him revisit Berlin meant that he could not renew his acquaintance with Frederick. Tension between mother and son was heightened by the almost simultaneous dismissal of Nikita Panin from leadership of the College of Foreign Affairs. In fact, Panin’s removal and Catherine’s refusal to let Paul visit Berlin were linked. The close relationship between Russia and Prussia, which had been the centerpiece of Panin’s foreign policy, was crumbling even as Catherine’s friendship with Joseph II of Austria was growing stronger. Joseph had visited Catherine and St. Petersburg the year before, and the empress was hoping to embrace Austria as a partner and ally against the Turks.
On October 1, 1781, the journey began with the couple traveling incognito as the Comte et Countess du Nord —the Count and Countess of the North. Maria, upset to be leaving her children, fainted three times before the carriage could get under way. Once on the road, however, she recovered and the tour was a triumph. Catherine had been generous, supplying three hundred thousand rubles for travel expenses. She wrote affectionate letters to “my dearest children,” telling them to come straight home if they became homesick and that three-year-old Alexander “had been given a map of Europe so that he could follow his parents’ itinerary.”
Their first stop was in Poland, where Stanislaus charmed Maria Fyodorovna. Catherine, curious about her former lover, asked Paul “whether his Polish majesty was still such a delightful conversationalist or whether the cares of royalty had destroyed these qualities.” She added, “My old friend must have had difficulty in tracing any resemblance between my contemporary portraits and the face he remembers from the past.”
The warm reception in Poland was a taste of what was to come. Joseph II traveled to the Austrian frontier to welcome the heir to the Russian throne. Vienna celebrated the couple’s presence, and Maria reveled in the elegance of the Austrian court and aristocracy. A visit scheduled to last a fortnight was extended to a month, during which Paul moderated his pro-Prussian sentiments and gravitated toward Joseph II. When his guests were leaving for the south, Joseph instructed his relatives in Tuscany and Naples that the grand duchess “prefers stewed fruit to rich deserts and neither she nor her husband touches wine. She has a fondness for mineral water.”
The Hapsburg princes in Italy continued the warm welcome, but the culmination of their long journey was Paris. Crowds cheered the young couple wherever they appeared: at the theater, the racetrack, or walking in the Tuileries Gardens. At Versailles, Marie Antoinette, Joseph II’s sister, concentrated on pleasing Paul and reported, “The grand duke has the air of an ardent and impetuous man who holds himself in.” The queen treated the grand duchess as an old and dear friend. Presented with a rare porcelain dinner set produced at Sevres, Maria thought it was intended for the empress, her mother-in-law, until, with astonishment, she saw the arms of Russia and Wurttemburg intertwined on the plates.
Their return to Russia was painfully anticlimactic. The Count and Countess of the North had been absent for fourteen months; on first meeting their sons, the boys looked at them as strangers and clung to their grandmother’s skirts. The empress appeared determined to deflate the couple’s sense of accomplishment. The welcome Paul had received everywhere had enhanced his sense of self-worth; now Catherine told him that his travels had spoiled him. The young grand duchess was met with a more specific rebuff. She had gone to Marie Antoinette’s milliner, the famous Mlle Bertin, and made a number of purchases. The trunks from Paris were still being unpacked in St. Petersburg when Catherine forbade the wearing at court of tall headdresses with feathers, exactly the fashion which Maria had brought home to emulate the queen of France. Paul’s wife was commanded to return the purchases, having been told that a tall woman looked better in simple Russian costume than in these gaudy Parisian trappings. Paul, meanwhile, found that Nikita Panin’s health had collapsed. In 1783, the grand duke and his wife were at the deathbed of the man who had been Paul’s teacher, adviser, protector, and friend for twenty-three years.
• • •
Paul was fortunate in his second marriage, but in most other areas of life, he suffered constant frustration. At different times he exhibited two distinctly different personalities, and people meeting him often took away entirely opposite views of the heir to the throne. In 1780, Emperor Joseph II of Austria paid his first visit to Russia, and he reported his impressions to his mother, Maria Theresa. Like everyone, he admired Maria Fyodorovna. More surprisingly, his verdict on Paul was largely favorable:
The grand duke is greatly undervalued abroad. His wife is very beautiful and seems created for her position. They understand each other perfectly. They are clever and vivacious and very well educated, as well as high- principled, open, and just. The happiness of others is more to them than wealth. With the empress, they are ill at ease, especially the grand duke. There is a lack of intimacy [between Paul and his mother] without … which I could not live. The grand duchess is more natural. She has great influence over her husband, loves him, and rules him. She will certainly play an important part some day.… The grand duke has many qualities deserving respect, but it is extremely difficult to play second fiddle here when Catherine II plays the first. The more I learn of the grand duchess, the greater is my admiration. She is exceptional in mind and heart, attractive in appearance and blameless in conduct. If I could have met a princess like her ten years ago, I should have been most happy to marry her.
The French ambassador, the Comte de Segur, who arrived in St. Petersburg in 1784, also had a generally
