positive opinion of Paul, although it was tinged with qualifications:
When they admitted me into their society, I learned to know all the rare qualities which at this period won general affection.… Their circle, though fairly large, seemed, especially in the country, more like a friendly gathering than a stiff court. No private family did the honors of the house with more ease and grace … everything bore the imprint of the best tone and the most delicate taste. The grand duchess, majestic, affable and natural, pretty without coquetry, amiable without affectation, created an impression of virtue without pose. Paul sought to please and was well-informed. One was struck by his great vivacity and nobility of character. These, however, were only first impressions. Soon, one noticed, above all when he spoke of his personal position and future, a disquiet, a mistrust, an extreme susceptibility; in fact, oddities which were to cause his faults, his injustices and his misfortunes. In any other rank of life he might have made himself and others happy; but for such a man the throne, above all the Russian throne, could not fail to be dangerous.
Years later, after his return to France and after Paul’s reign had ended in assassination, Segur had more to say about the emperor. It was less favorable:
He combined plenty of intelligence and information with the most unquiet and mistrustful humor and the most unsteady character. Though often affable to the point of familiarity, he was more frequently haughty, despotic, and harsh. Never had one seen a man more frightened, more capricious, less capable of rendering himself or others happy. It was not malignity … it was a sickness of mind. He tormented all who approached him because he unceasingly tormented himself.… Fear upset his judgement. Imagined perils gave rise to real ones.
After the death of Gregory Orlov in 1783, Catherine purchased the palace at Gatchina, thirty miles south of the capital, which she had given her favorite; now she presented it to Paul. Living there with his family, he complained bitterly about his exclusion from power and responsibility. “You tax me with my hypochondria and black moods,” he wrote to Prince Henry. “It may be so. But the inaction to which I am condemned makes the part excusable.” On another occasion, he wrote to Prince Henry, “Permit me to write you often; my heart has need to unburden itself, especially in the sad life that I lead.” The letter stopped abruptly: “My tears prevent me from continuing.”
At Gatchina, Paul was free to indulge his version of Peter III’s mania for soldiering. To console himself for the humiliation of being barred from a regular army command, he engaged a Prussian drillmaster and proceeded to create his own small, private army. By 1788, he had five companies of men dressed in tightly buttoned Prussian uniforms and powdered wigs. Every day, Paul appeared, wearing high boots and elbow-length gloves, and drilled his men to exhaustion—just as Peter III had done. He was short-tempered and, when displeased, would lash out with his cane. Count Fyodor Rostopchin wrote to a friend:
One cannot see everything the grand duke does without being moved to pity and horror. One would think he was trying to invent ways to make himself hated and detested. He has gotten it into his head that people despise him and want to show their disrespect; starting from that conception, he seizes on anything and punishes indiscriminately. The least delay, the least contradiction … and he flies into a rage.
A humiliation Paul could never overcome and which kept him away from court was the presence of his mother’s favorites; they automatically became his enemies. As a child, he had hated Orlov. Then Orlov was replaced by Vasilchikov and other nobodies like Zorich, Yermolov, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Zubov. The vast sums continually bestowed on these young men emphasized to Paul, himself always in debt, the difference between the way she treated them and him. Potemkin, upon becoming all-powerful, stopped bothering even to be polite to the grand duke and openly dismissed him as a fool.
When she seized the throne, Catherine had proclaimed Paul to be her heir. Conceivably, when he reached his majority, she might also have enthroned him as co-ruler with significant responsibilities, as Maria Theresa had done with her son Joseph. In Vienna, Paul had seen the results of this other mother giving her son opportunities to learn by assisting her in ruling. There was never a chance that Catherine would do this. She saw her son as a rival, not a helpmate, and she gave Paul no role in the government of Russia. He and his wife were required to appear at official ceremonies; otherwise, mother and son saw little of each other.
To keep Paul in his place as a political cipher, Catherine found constant fault with him; at times he was too childish; at others too independent. One minute, she would accuse him of paying insufficient attention to serious matters; the next, she complained that he was interfering in matters beyond his competence. Unable to decide how or where to use him, she gave up and decided not to use him at all. When he asked to become a member of the Imperial Council, he was rejected. “I told you that your request needs mature consideration,” his mother said. “I do not think your entrance into the Council would be desirable. You must be patient until I change my mind.” On the outbreak of her second war with Turkey in 1787, Paul, who was thirty-three, asked to join the army as a volunteer. At first, she refused permission; then she gave in, but she reversed course again when Maria became pregnant. Her reasoning, she told Paul, was that if he deserted his wife at the moment of childbirth, his absence might jeopardize a precious Romanov life. He bitterly resented this veto on military service. When war suddenly broke out with Sweden a year later, Catherine relented sufficiently to allow Paul to visit the army in Finland. His passion for this duty was reflected in the degree to which his wife worried about his safety; she believed that he was actually going to fight. “I shall be separated from my beloved husband,” Maria wrote. “My heart is almost broken by anxiety for the life of him for whom I would willingly sacrifice my own.” Paul put on his uniform and left St. Petersburg on July 1, 1788, but his service was brief. He criticized the hastily assembled Russian soldiers in Finland because they did not live up to the parade ground standards of Gatchina; he quarreled with the Russian commander in chief; he was not allowed to see maps or discuss military operations. By mid-September he was back in the capital; he never went to war again.
During the childhood of Paul and Maria’s first son, Alexander, Catherine began to think seriously about disinheriting Paul and passing the succession directly to her grandson. There was no constitutional barrier to this: the law of succession decreed by Peter the Great empowered every reigning Russian sovereign to overrule the tradition of primogeniture and name his or her successor, male or female. Catherine could make that decision right up to the moment of death. That the empress was thinking of naming her gifted and handsome grandson to succeed her was widely suspected, especially by Paul. He had another reason to hate his mother: not only had she stood between him and any training for the throne; now she was confronting him with his own son—precocious, attractive, and beloved by the empress—as a rival for the prize for which he had been waiting most of his life.
As years of frustration warped Paul’s character, his eccentricities became more pronounced. Already, he was melancholy and pessimistic; now he began to appear unbalanced. His behavior sometimes worried even his loyal wife. “There is no one who does not every day remark the disorder of his faculties,” Maria said. Ironically, Paul’s shaky reputation and strange behavior reinforced Catherine’s hold on the throne; everyone desired the reins of government to remain in her strong hands as long as possible. When she felt her own strength declining, and she worried about the future of Russia, she never spoke of the reign of her son. It was Alexander of whom she spoke as her heir. Otherwise, she said gloomily, “I see into what hands the empire will fall when I am gone.” In a letter to Grimm in 1791, referring to the bloody turmoil of the French Revolution, she predicted the coming of a Genghis Khan or a Tamerlane to Europe. “This will not come in my time,” she said, “and I hope not in the time of M. Alexander.” In the last months of her life, she may have thought of changing the succession. Thirty years later, Maria, as Paul’s widow, confided to her daughter Anna that a few weeks before Catherine’s death, the empress had invited her to sign a paper demanding that Paul renounce his right to the throne. Maria had indignantly refused. A subsequent appeal by Catherine to Alexander to save his country from rule by his father was equally fruitless.
Paul, enduring this long nightmare, had no idea how it would end. For years, he had been aware that disinheritance was in his mother’s mind. In 1788, as he was leaving for the army in Finland, he dictated a will instructing his wife to find and secure the empress’s papers at once in the event of her death; he wanted to make
