bedchamber Count Zakhar Chernyshev, now a colonel in the army, returned to St. Petersburg after a five-year absence. When he had departed, Catherine was an adolescent of sixteen; now she was a woman of twenty- one.
I was very glad to see him. For his part, he did not miss a single opportunity to give me signs of his affectionate feelings. I had to decide what interpretation to give to his attentions. He started by telling me that he found me much more beautiful. This was the first time in my life that anyone had said anything like this to me and I found it pleasing. I was simple enough to believe him.
At every ball, Chernyshev made this kind of remark. One day, Princess Gagarina, a lady-in-waiting, brought Catherine a printed billet-doux, a little slip of paper containing sentimental verses. It was from Chernyshev. The following day, Catherine received another envelope from Chernyshev, but this time she found inside a note with lines written in his own hand. At the next masquerade, while dancing with her, he said that he had a thousand things to say to her that he could not put on paper. He begged her to give him a brief audience in her room. She told him that this was impossible, that her chambers were inaccessible. He told her that he would disguise himself as a servant if necessary. She refused. “And so,” Catherine wrote later, “things went no further than these notes stuffed into envelopes.” At the end of the monthlong Carnival, Count Chernyshev returned to his regiment.
During these years when she was in her early twenties, Catherine was living the life of a royal Cinderella. On summer days, she galloped over the meadowlands and shot ducks in the marshes along the Gulf of Finland. Winter nights, she danced as the belle of court balls, exchanging whispered confidences and receiving romantic notes from attentive young men. These moments were elements of her dream world. The reality of her daily life was different: it was filled with frustration, rebuff, and denial.
One shock occurred on the day Madame Choglokova told her that the empress had just dismissed Timothy Evreinov, her chamber valet and friend. There had been a quarrel involving Evreinov and a man who served coffee to Catherine and Peter. During this argument, Peter had walked in unexpectedly and overheard the insults the two men were shouting at each other. Evreinov’s antagonist then had gone and complained to Monsieur Choglokov that, without consideration for the presence of the heir to the throne, Evreinov had covered him with abuse. Choglokov rushed to report the incident to the empress, who instantly dismissed both men from court. “The truth,” Catherine reported, “is that both Evreinov and the other man were deeply devoted to us.” In Evreinov’s place, the empress placed a man named Vasily Shkurin.
Soon afterward, Catherine and Madame Choglokova clashed over a matter in which Shkurin played a critical role. From Paris, Princess Johanna, Catherine’s mother, had sent her daughter two pieces of beautiful cloth. Catherine was admiring these fabrics in her dressing room in the presence of Shkurin when she let slip that they were so beautiful that she was tempted to present them as a gift to the empress. She waited for an opportunity to speak to the monarch; she wanted the fabric to be a personal present and she wanted to hand it to Elizabeth herself. She specifically forbade Shkurin to repeat to anyone what she had said in his hearing. He immediately ran to Madame Choglokova to report what he had heard. A few days later, the governess came to Catherine and said that the empress thanked her for the fabrics; that Elizabeth was keeping one and sending the other back to the grand duchess to keep. Catherine was dumbfounded. “How is this, Madame Choglokova?” she asked. Madame Choglokova replied that she had been told that Catherine meant the fabrics to go to the empress and so she had brought them to her. Catherine, stammering so badly that she could hardly speak, managed to tell Madame Choglokova that she had looked forward to presenting the empress with these fabrics herself. She reminded Madame Choglokova that the governess could not possibly have known her intentions because she had not spoken of them to her, and said that if Madame Choglokova was aware of what she planned, it was only from the mouth of a treacherous servant. Madame Choglokova replied that Catherine knew that she was not permitted to speak directly to the empress and that she also knew that her servants had orders to report to her, Madame Choglokova, everything Catherine said in their presence. Consequently, her servant had only done his duty, and she hers by bringing the fabrics to the empress. In short, Madame Choglokova declared, everything had been done according to the rules. Catherine was unable to reply; her fury left her speechless.
When Madame Choglokova departed, Catherine rushed to the little antechamber where Shkurin spent his mornings. Finding him there, she slapped him with all her strength and told him that he was an ungrateful traitor for having dared to report to Madame Choglokova what she had forbidden him to speak about. She reminded him that she had showered him with gifts; still he had betrayed her. Shkurin fell to his knees, begging forgiveness. Catherine was touched by his remorse and told him that his future conduct would determine her treatment of him. In the days that followed, Catherine complained loudly to everyone about Madame Choglokova’s behavior, intending that the matter reach the empress’s ears. Apparently it did and, eventually, when Elizabeth saw the grand duchess, the empress thanked her for her present.
*Curiously, a similar “little imperfection” afflicted the sixteen-year-old French dauphin, the future King Louis XVI, at the time of his marriage in 1770 to the fifteen-year-old Austrian archduchess Marie Antoinette. This continued to be the case for the next seven years. Finally, in 1777, Louis was circumcised and a son was conceived.
27
Saltykov
IN SEPTEMBER 1751, the empress assigned three young noblemen as gentlemen-in-waiting to Grand Duke Peter. One, Lev Naryshkin, came from the family that had produced Natalya Naryshkina, the mother of Peter the Great. Lev himself was an amiable, quick-witted wag whom everybody liked and no one took seriously; Catherine described him as someone who made her laugh more than anyone else in her life.
He was a born clown and if not of noble birth, he could have made a fortune as a comic actor. He was witty and had heard all the gossip. He had a wide superficial knowledge of almost everything and was able to talk continuously in technical terms on any given art or science for a quarter of an hour. At the end, neither he nor anyone could make any sense of the stream of words flowing from his mouth and everyone simply burst out laughing.
The other two were the Saltykov brothers, sons of one of the oldest and noblest families in Russia. Their father was an aide-de-camp to the empress; their mother was cherished by the empress for her devotion during Elizabeth’s seizure of the throne in 1740. Peter, the older of the brothers, was a lout whom Catherine describes as “a fool in every sense of the word. He had the stupidest face I have ever seen: a pair of big, staring eyes, a flat nose, and a gaping mouth, always half open. He was a notorious gossip and, as such, on excellent terms with the Choglokovs.”
The second Saltykov brother, Sergei, was entirely different. Sergei was handsome and ruthless; a man who was making the seduction of women his life’s purpose. He was dark-complexioned, with black eyes, of medium height, and muscular yet graceful. Constantly on the lookout for a new triumph, he always went straight to work, employing charm, promises, and persistence, in whatever combination worked. Obstacles only increased his determination. When he first noticed Catherine, he was twenty-six years old and had been married for two years to one of the empress’s ladies-in-waiting, Matriona Balk. This marriage had resulted from impulse: he had seen her on a high- flying swing at Tsarskoe Selo and her skirt, flared by the breeze, had exposed her ankles; he had proposed the following day. Now he was tired of Matriona and ready for something new. He observed how blatantly Catherine was ignored by her husband, and how obviously bored she was by the company around her. The fact that the grand duchess was closely guarded added allure; her marriage to the grand duke made the prize more glittering; and the pervasive rumor that Catherine was still a virgin made the challenge irresistible.
