She rose at six and wrapped herself in a silk dressing gown. Her movements awakened the family of small English greyhounds sleeping on a pink satin couch next to her bed. The oldest of them, whom she had named Sir Tom Anderson, and his spouse, Duchess Anderson, were gifts from Dr. Dimsdale, who had inoculated her and her son, Paul, against smallpox. They, with the help of Sir Tom’s second wife, Mademoiselle Mimi, had produced numerous litters. Catherine attended them; when the dogs wanted to go out, Catherine herself opened the door into the garden. This done, she drank four or five cups of black coffee and settled down to work on the mass of official and personal correspondence awaiting her. Her sight had weakened, and she read with spectacles and sometimes used a magnifying glass. Once when her secretary saw her reading this way, she smiled and said, “You probably don’t need this contrivance yet. How old are you?” He said that he was twenty-eight. Catherine nodded and said, “Our sight has been blunted by long service to the State and now we have to use spectacles.” Promptly at nine, she put down her pen and rang a little bell, which told the servant outside her door that she was ready for her daily visitors. This meant a long morning of receiving ministers, generals, and other government officials; of reading or listening to their reports; and of signing the papers they had prepared for her. These were working sessions; visitors were expected to object to her ideas and offer their own when they thought she was wrong. Her attitude almost always remained attentive, pleasant, and imperturbable.
An exception to this demeanor was her reaction to the visits of her brilliant general Alexander Suvorov. Devout as well as eccentric, Suvorov entered her room, bowed three times to the icon of Our Lady of Kazan hanging on a wall, and fell on his knees before the empress, touching the ground with his forehead. Catherine always tried to stop him, saying, “For heaven’s sake, are you not ashamed of yourself?” Unabashed, Suvorov sat down and repeated his request to be allowed to fight the French army in northern Italy, commanded by a young general named Napoleon Bonaparte. “Matushka, let me march against the French!” he pleaded. After many visits and many pleas, she agreed, and in November 1796, Suvorov was ready to march at the head of sixty thousand Russians. Catherine died on the eve of his departure, and the campaign was canceled. No battlefield meeting of these two famous soldiers ever took place.
At one in the afternoon, her morning work was finished, and Catherine retired to dress, often in gray or violet silk, for midday dinner. Ten to twenty guests sat down with her: personal friends, noblemen, senior officials, and her favorite foreign diplomats. She was not interested in food, and the fare was Spartan; afterward guests discreetly retreated to the apartments of courtiers living in the palace where they could supplement their meal.
In the afternoon, Catherine read books or was read to while she sewed or embroidered. At six, if there were a court reception, she moved among her guests in the drawing rooms of the Winter Palace. Supper was served, but Catherine never ate, and at ten she withdrew. When there was no official court reception, she entertained privately in the Hermitage. The company listened to a concert, watched a French or Russian play, or simply played games, performed charades, or played whist. During these gatherings, her long-standing rules remained in force: formality was banned; it was forbidden to rise when the empress stood; everyone talked freely; bad tempers were not tolerated; laughter was required. To her friend Frau Bielcke, she wrote: “Madame, you must be gay; only thus can life be endured. I speak from experience for I have had to endure much, and have only been able to endure it because I have always laughed whenever I had the chance.”
In the 1790s, Catherine’s health was declining. For years, she had suffered from headaches and indigestion; now colds and rheumatism were added. By the summer of 1796 she was afflicted by open leg sores. Sometimes swollen and bleeding, her legs bothered her so much that she tried soaking them daily in fresh, ice-cold seawater; Dr. Rogerson’s skepticism regarding this unconventional treatment only made her more certain that it was having “marvelous effects.”
Her physical infirmities were an inconvenience, but she was not immobilized. She spent autumn and winter at the Winter Palace and the Hermitage. After Potemkin’s death, she had another residence in the capital and lived for a few weeks in spring and again in autumn in the Tauride Palace, which she had bought from the prince’s heirs. Living there helped her keep fresh the memory of the man who had been her partner, lover, and perhaps her husband. In preference to the estates at Peterhof and Oranienbaum on the Gulf of Finland, which could summon unhappy memories from the past, Tsarskoe Selo, where she could be surrounded by her friends and grandchildren, was her favorite summer retreat. No serious barriers were placed between the imperial family and the public; all parks in the capital and the nearby countryside were open to all who were “decently dressed.” This included the park at Tsarskoe Selo. One day, Catherine was seated on a bench with her favorite personal maid after their early morning walk. A man passed by, glanced briefly at the two elderly women, and, failing to recognize the empress, walked on, whistling. The maid was indignant, but Catherine merely remarked, “What do you expect, Maria Savichna? Twenty years ago this would not have happened. We have grown old. It is our fault.”
Catherine was forty-eight when, in 1777, her daughter-in-law, Maria, gave birth to the empress’s first grandson. She, not the child’s mother or father, named him Alexander. Motherhood had provided Catherine with few joys; now, as a grandmother, she had an opportunity to catch up. Setting aside her long-ago grief when Empress Elizabeth had taken away her firstborn, Paul, Catherine assumed the dominant role in the new infant’s life. Her reason was similar to Elizabeth’s. Both women had been frustrated by their inability, in one case to conceive, in the other to mother a child. Both used the same excuse for their subsequent behavior: a young, inexperienced mother could not be given the responsibility of raising and educating a future tsar.
Catherine did not take complete possession of Alexander, as Elizabeth had done with Paul. She had him brought to her every afternoon to be placed on the carpet next to her desk. When he arrived, she stopped whatever she was doing to play with him. She lay on the floor next to him, told him stories, invented games, corrected his mistakes, and hugged him repeatedly. “I have said it to you before and I say it again,” she wrote to Grimm. “I dote on the little monkey.… In the afternoon, my little monkey comes as often as he likes and spends three or four hours a day in my room.” She called him “Monsieur Alexander” and announced, “It is astonishing that, although he cannot yet talk, at twenty months he knows things that are beyond the grasp of any other child at the age of three.” When he was three, she said, “If you only knew what wonders Alexander achieves as a cook, and an architect; how he paints, mixes colors, chops wood; how he plays being the groom and the coachman; how he is teaching himself to read, draw, calculate and write.” These conceits are no different from the effusions of any grandmother eager for the world to know—indeed, insisting that the world must know—of the extraordinary qualities and accomplishments of her grandchild. In any case, Catherine was convinced that Alexander was unique and that this was due exclusively to her. “I am making a delicious child of him,” she said. “He loves me instinctively.” She designed a loose, one-piece garment that could be put on him easily and would not restrict his arms and legs. “It is sewn together and goes on at once, and fastens behind with four or five little hooks,” she told Grimm. “The king of Sweden has demanded and received a pattern of the dress of Monsieur Alexander.”
Her second grandson was born eighteen months after Alexander. The empress named him Constantine to indicate the throne she had in mind for him: one day, she hoped, he would reign over a great new Orthodox Greek empire based on Constantinople. When Constantine was old enough, he joined his brother to play on her carpet. As they were intended for different thrones, they were given different educations. Alexander, who would become the future occupant of Catherine’s own throne, was brought up on the English model. He was given an English nanny and was taught the history of Europe and the literature of the Enlightenment. Constantine, destined for Constantinople, was given a Greek nurse, Greek servants, and Greek playmates so that he could begin speaking the language early. His lessons included the histories of Greece, Rome, and Byzantium, as well as of Russia.
When Alexander was seven and Constantine almost six, and they had reached the age for tutors, Catherine wrote thirty pages of instructions to guide their education. They were to be truthful and courageous. They were to be courteous to servants as well as to elders. They must go to bed early in rooms with plenty of fresh air circulating at a temperature of sixty degrees Farenheit. They were to sleep on flat beds with leather mattresses. They were to wash every day in cold water, and, in winter, to go to Russian steam baths. In summer, they were to learn to swim. Food was to be plain; fruit of all kinds was to serve as breakfast in summer. They were to plant their own gardens
