having his huntsmen come to talk to him about the pack’s condition and needs. Peter became intimate with these men, eating and drinking as well as hunting with them.
At this time, the Butirsky Regiment was stationed in Moscow. In this regiment there was a headstrong lieutenant named Yakov Baturin, a gambler, deeply in debt. Peter’s huntsmen lived near the regimental camp. One day, one of the huntsmen told Peter that he had met an officer who expressed great devotion for the grand duke and who had said that, with the exception of the senior officers, his entire regiment agreed with him. Peter, flattered, wanted more details. Eventually, Baturin asked the huntsman to arrange a meeting between himself and the grand duke during a hunt. Unwilling at first, Peter eventually agreed. On the day arranged, Baturin waited in an isolated spot in the forest. When Peter appeared on horseback, Baturin fell to his knees, swearing to recognize no other master and to do whatever the grand duke commanded. Peter later told Catherine that on hearing this oath, he was alarmed and, fearing connection to any sort of plot, had spurred his horse, leaving the other man on his knees in the woods. He also said that none of the huntsmen had heard what Baturin had said. Since then, Peter claimed, he and his huntsmen had had no contact with Baturin. Peter had since learned that Baturin had been arrested for interrogation. Peter feared that his huntsman or even he himself might have been compromised. His fear increased when a number of the huntsmen were, in fact, arrested.
Catherine attempted to calm her husband, telling him that if he had not entered into any discussion beyond what he had told her, then guilty as Baturin might be, she did not believe that anyone could find much to criticize in what he, Peter, had done except the imprudence of speaking to an unknown man in the woods. She could not say whether her husband was telling the truth; in fact, she believed that he was playing down the extent of the discussions. Sometime later, Peter came to tell her that some of his huntsmen had been released and that they had told him that no one had mentioned his name. This reassured him, and there was no more discussion of the matter. Baturin was put on the rack and found guilty. Catherine learned later that he had admitted to planning to kill the empress, set fire to the palace, and, amid this confusion, place the grand duke on the throne. He was sentenced to spend the rest of his life in the Schlusselburg Fortress. In 1770, during Catherine’s reign, he tried to escape, was recaptured, and was sent to the Kamchatka Peninsula, on the Pacific. He escaped again and eventually was killed in a petty fracas on the island of Formosa.
That autumn, Catherine developed another severe toothache accompanied by another high fever. Her bedroom adjoined Peter’s apartment, and she suffered from the racket made by his violin and his dogs. “He would not have sacrificed these amusements even if he had known they were killing me.” she said. “I therefore succeeded in getting Madame Choglokova’s consent to having my bed moved out of reach of the dreadful sounds. The [new] room had windows on three sides and there were fierce drafts but they were preferable to my husband’s noise.”
On December 15, 1749, the court’s year in Moscow came to an end and Catherine and Peter left for St. Petersburg, traveling in an open sleigh. During the journey, Catherine’s toothache returned. Despite her pain, Peter would not agree to have the sleigh closed. Instead, grudgingly, he allowed her to draw a little curtain of green taffeta to protect herself from the icy wind blowing directly into her face. When they finally reached Tsarskoe Selo, on the outskirts of St. Petersburg, she was in agony. As soon as she arrived, Catherine sent for the empress’s chief physician, Dr. Boerhave, and begged him to extract the tooth that had been tormenting her for five months. With extreme reluctance, Boerhave consented. He sent for the French surgeon Monsieur Guyon to do the extraction. Catherine sat on the floor with Boerhave on her right and Choglokov on her left, holding her hands. Then, Guyon came from behind, reached around, and twisted the tooth with his pliers. As he wrenched and pulled, Catherine felt that her jawbone was breaking. “I have never in my life felt anything like the pain of that moment,” she said. Instantly, Boerhave shouted at Guyon, “Clumsy fool!” and having been handed the tooth, he said, “It is just as I feared. This is why I did not want this tooth to be pulled.” Guyon, in pulling the tooth, “had pulled out a piece of my lower jaw, to which the tooth had been attached. At this moment, the empress came into the room and, seeing me suffer so terribly, she wept. I was put to bed and was in great pain for four weeks, not leaving my room until the middle of January. Even then, on the lower part of my cheek, I still had in the form of blue and yellow bruises, the imprint of Guyon’s five fingers.”
24
A Bath Before Easter and a Coachman’s Whip
THE TRANSFER OF THE COURT to Moscow for a year left St. Petersburg socially and culturally as well as politically deserted. Because there were so few horses and almost no carriages in the city, grass grew in the streets. The truth was that most residents of Peter the Great’s new capital on the Baltic lived there by necessity, not choice. Once back in Moscow during one of Peter’s daughter’s yearlong visits, the old families of the nobility were reluctant to leave. Moscow was the place their ancestors had lived for generations, and they cherished their palaces and homes in the old capital. When the time came to return to the new city rising from a northern marsh, many courtiers rushed to ask for leaves of absence from court—for a year, six months, or even a few weeks—in order to remain behind. Government officials did the same, and when they feared they were not succeeding, there came a torrent of illnesses, pretended or real, followed by a stream of lawsuits and other business affairs, all supposedly indispensable, which could be settled only in Moscow. The return to St. Petersburg, therefore, was gradual, and it took months for the entire court to drag itself back.
Elizabeth, Peter, and Catherine were among the first to return. They found the city practically empty and those who were there lonely and bored. In this dreary setting, the Choglokovs invited Catherine and Peter every afternoon to play cards. They included the Princess of Courland, the daughter of the Protestant Duke Ernst Johann Biron, the former lover and minister of Empress Anne. On taking the throne, Empress Elizabeth had recalled Biron from Siberia, where he had been exiled during the regency of Anna, the mother of the child tsar Ivan VI. Elizabeth did not want Biron completely reinstated, however; she preferred not to see him. Rather than bring him back to St. Petersburg or Moscow, Elizabeth had ordered him and his family to live in the city of Yaroslavl on the Volga.
The Princess of Courland was twenty-five years old. She was not handsome—indeed, she was short and hunchbacked—but she had, according to Catherine, “very beautiful eyes, fine chestnut brown hair, and great intelligence.” Her father and mother were not fond of her, and the princess complained that she was mistreated at home. One day in Yaroslavl, she ran away to the household of Madame Pushkina, wife of the governor of Yaroslavl, explaining that her parents had refused her to permit her to embrace the Orthodox faith. Madame Pushkina brought the princess to Moscow and introduced her to the empress. Elizabeth encouraged the young woman, stood as godmother at her conversion to Orthodoxy, and gave her an apartment among her maids of honor. Monsieur Choglokov cultivated the princess because in his youth, when her father was in power, her older brother had boosted his career by promoting him into the Horse Guards.
Having made her way into the company of the young court and playing cards for hours every day with Peter and Catherine, the Princess of Courland conducted herself with discretion. She spoke to each person in a manner carefully designed to please that person, and, Catherine said, “her wit made one forget the disagreeable nature of her figure.” In Peter’s eyes, she had the additional merit of being German, not Russian. She preferred speaking German, and she and Peter spoke only that language together, excluding the people around them. This made her even more attractive to him, and he began to pay her special attention. When she dined alone, he sent her wine from his table; when he acquired some new grenadier’s hat or military shoulder belt, he sent them for her to admire. None of this was done in secret. “The Princess of Courland cultivated a faultless attitude towards me and never for one moment forgot herself,” said Catherine. “Therefore, this relationship continued.”
The spring of 1750 was unusually mild. When Peter, Catherine, and their young court—now including the Princess of Courland—went to Tsarskoe Selo on March 17, it was so warm that the snow had melted and the carriages stirred up clouds of dust from the road. In this rural setting, the group amused itself by riding and hunting during the day and playing cards in the evenings. Peter openly displayed his interest in the Princess of Courland; he was never more than a step away from her. Eventually, with this relationship blossoming before her eyes, Catherine’s vanity was stung. Despite her previous dismissal of jealousy as undignified and unproductive, she admitted that she did not like “seeing myself slighted for the sake of this deformed little figure who was preferred
