he said, “Gentlemen, the king of Poland has asked me to commend Count Poniatowski to your care.”
Catherine was cool. Stanislaus now seemed insipid, his manners too exquisite, his compliments excessively elegant and long-winded. As Catherine wrote to Grimm, “It was thirty years since I’d seen him and you can imagine that we found each other changed.” She presented him to her ministers and foreign guests and then, walking stiffly, retired with him for a private half-hour talk. When they returned, her manner was strained and his eyes were sad. At dinner, Segur sat opposite the empress and the king and later he recorded, “They spoke little, but each was watching the other. We listened to an excellent orchestra and drank the king’s health to a salvo of artillery fire.” On departing, the king, rising from the table, could not find his hat. Catherine handed it to him. Stanislaus thanked her and, smiling, said that it was the second article of headgear she had given him; the first had been the crown of Poland.
He tried and failed to persuade her to prolong her visit and remain his guest for several days. He had arranged dinners and a ball in her honor at a palace he had built especially for the occasion. She declined, having already resolved that their reunion should not exceed a single day. Stanislaus was told that she had to meet the Emperor Joseph II in Kherson, downstream; the emperor would be waiting and her schedule could not be changed. Potemkin, who liked Stanislaus, was annoyed, and warned her that her refusal would undermine the king’s position in Poland. Catherine was adamant: “I know of our guest’s desire that I remain here for another day or two, but you yourself know that this is impossible, given my meeting with the emperor. Kindly let him know, in a polite manner, that there is no possibility of making changes in my journey. And moreover, as you yourself know, I find any change in plan disagreeable.” When Potemkin continued to argue, she grew testy: “The dinner proposed for tomorrow was suggested without any regard for what is possible.… When I make a decision there’s a reason for it … and so I’m leaving tomorrow as planned.… I’m truly tired of this!” To appease Potemkin, she permitted her guests to attend the first of Stanislaus’s balls, to be given that night, but she remained on her galley and watched the fireworks from the deck, attended by Mamonov. The following morning, the galley fleet sailed at dawn. To Potemkin, Catherine said, “The king bores me.” She never saw Stanislaus again.
Meanwhile, downriver in Kherson, Joseph had arrived and was waiting. A man who loved to travel unencumbered, Joseph was once again traveling incognito as Count Falkenstein. With little baggage, and accompanied by a single equerry and two servants, he usually arrived early on his travels. In Kherson, he tired of waiting and decided to go upriver by land to meet Catherine in Kaidek, where her fleet of galleys would halt on reaching the first of the Dnieper cataracts. When the galleys arrived in Kaidek, Catherine was informed that Count Falkenstein was waiting downriver at Kherson. Soon, further news arrived that he was already on his way by road to meet her. Determined not to be outdone, Catherine hastily disembarked and hurried by carriage to intercept her ally. The two met by the road, and, riding together in her carriage, returned the twenty miles to Kaidek. Joining her traveling party, Joseph insisted on maintaining his incognito, attending the empress’s levees with other gentlemen of the court, and always being introduced as Count Falkenstein. He was delighted to see his friend and army commander, Ligne, and to strike up a new friendship with Segur. He spoke admiringly to the French ambassador about the vitality of the extraordinary woman ten years his senior who had become his ally, but he had few compliments for Mamonov. “The new favorite is good-looking,” Joseph wrote, “but does not appear to be very brilliant and seems astonished to find himself in this position. He is really no more than a spoiled child.”
After twenty-four hours at Kaidek, Catherine and Joseph left to the courtiers and diplomats the pleasure of shooting the rapids by galley, and traveled together by carriage to the site where Potemkin intended to build the new city of Ekaterinoslav. There, with Joseph at her side, Catherine laid the foundation stone of the city’s new cathedral. The emperor, dubious about building a large church before there was a town or a population, wrote to a friend in Vienna, “I performed a great deed today. The empress laid the first stone of a new church, and I laid—the last.”
Once the galleys had passed safely through the rapids and the two sovereigns reembarked, they made their entry into Kherson by water. Nine years before, when Potemkin had first chosen this site twenty miles up the estuary from the Black Sea, Kherson had been no more than a few huts in a marsh. Now it was a fortified city with two thousand white houses, straight streets, shade trees, flower gardens, churches and public buildings, barracks for twenty thousand men, crowds in the streets, shops filled with goods, and a thriving shipyard with warehouses along the quays and two completed ships of the line and a frigate ready to be launched. More than a hundred ships, many of them Russian, were riding at anchor in the port. On May 15, Catherine and Joseph launched the three warships, including the ship of the line
The proximity of the Turks loomed in the minds of both sovereigns. They saw the arch Potemkin had erected over the entrance to the town, provocatively emblazoned with the inscription in Greek “This is the way to Byzantium.” They met Yakov Bulgakov, the Russian minister in Constantinople, who had come to report to the empress and remind her of what she and Potemkin already knew: that the Ottoman Empire had never fully accepted the annexation of the Crimea or, indeed, any Russian presence on the Black Sea. The Turks were only biding their time, Bulgakov warned. Catherine and Potemkin understood, and because Russia would not be ready for war for at least two years, they urged Bulgakov to be conciliatory.
Catherine herself was now obliged to be cautious. Originally, she had hoped to travel the full length of the Dnieper, which meant going from Kherson down the estuary all the way to the Black Sea. The Turks forestalled this final stage of her river voyage by sending four men-of-war and ten frigates to cruise in the estuary. It was a reminder that the Dnieper was not yet fully open.
Despite this disappointment, Catherine was determined to impress her imperial ally and the foreign ambassadors by taking them on a tour of the Crimea. Leaving Kherson and the Dnieper on May 21, they traveled overland by carriage. Once out on the steppe, Joseph was astonished when twelve hundred Tartar horsemen suddenly appeared in a cloud of dust; here were tribesmen, only recently conquered, now considered to be sufficiently loyal to serve as an imperial guard of honor. Impressed by what he was seeing, Joseph left the encampment at dusk one evening and walked with Segur out into the flat wasteland of grass stretching to the horizon. “What a peculiar land,” the emperor said. “And who could have expected to see me with Catherine the Second, and the French and English ambassadors wandering through a Tatar desert? What a page of history!”
Passing through the Perekop Isthmus connecting the Crimean Peninsula with Ukraine and Russia to the north, the procession of carriages rolled down the steep, rocky road leading to Bakhchisarai, the former capital of the Crimean khans. Here, the private apartments in the palace of the khans became the temporary residence of the two visiting monarchs. Months before, Catherine had sent Charles Cameron, her Scottish architect, to repair and decorate the palace. Cameron had preserved the atmosphere of Islam. There were inner courts and secret gardens enclosed by high walls and hedges of myrtle. There were cool, uncluttered rooms with tiled walls in glowing colors, thick carpets, elaborate tapestries, and, in the center of every room, a marble fountain. Through her open windows, Catherine could see minarets rising above the walls and breathe the scents of roses, jasmine, orange trees, and pomegranates. Surrounding the palace was the town, dominated by nineteen mosques and their high minarets, from which, five times a day, voices summoned the faithful to prayer; while she was there, Catherine ordered the construction of two new mosques. Outside, too, were other sights, sounds, and smells of Islam: teeming street bazaars; Tatar princes and men in flowing robes; their wives and other women, covered except for their eyes.
Because Potemkin was eager to show Catherine and the emperor what he considered his greatest achievement in the south, they spent only three days and two nights in Bakhchisarai. On May 22, they drove across the mountains through forests of cypress and pine to the rugged headlands of the Crimea’s Black Sea south coast. Here they entered a lush, Riviera-like region of mild temperatures the year around, with olive trees, orchards, vineyards, pastures, and gardens of jasmine, laurel, lilacs, wisteria, roses, and violets. Every spring, the sudden, massive flowering of fruit trees, shrubs, vines, and wildflowers, with their swirl of colors and odors, transformed the coast into a vast perfumed garden.
