Catherine called her “a pillar of salt.” Catherine also stood back from the countess because of a discovery she had made after the palace fire of November 1753 in Moscow. Some of Countess Shuvalova’s belongings, saved from the fire, had been mistakenly delivered to the grand duchess. Examining them, Catherine discovered that “Countess Shuvalova’s petticoats were lined with leather because she was incontinent. As a result, the odor of urine permeated all her under-clothing. I sent them back to her as quickly as possible.”
In May, when the court left Moscow to return to St. Petersburg, to protect her pregnancy, Catherine traveled slowly. Her carriage was drawn at a walk, moving each day only from one relay station to the next and taking a total of twenty-nine days on the road. In the carriage were Countess Shuvalova, Madame Vladislavova, and a midwife, assigned to be always nearby. Catherine arrived in St. Petersburg suffering from “a depression I could no longer control. At every minute, and on every occasion, I was ready to cry. A thousand preoccupations filled my mind. The worst was that I could not get it out of my head that everything pointed to the removal of Sergei Saltykov.” She went to Peterhof and took long walks, “but my troubles followed me relentlessly.” In August, she returned to St. Petersburg, where she was dismayed to learn that the two rooms in the Summer Palace being prepared for her labor and delivery were actually inside the empress’s own suite. When Count Shuvalova took her to see the rooms, she realized that because they were so close to Elizabeth’s, Saltykov would be unable to visit her. She would be “isolated, with no company.”
Her installation in this apartment was planned for a Wednesday. At two o’clock that morning she was awakened by labor pains. The midwife confirmed that Catherine was going into labor. She was placed on a traditional labor bed: a hard mattress on the floor. The grand duke was awakened; Count Alexander Shuvalov was notified, and he informed the empress. Elizabeth swept in and settled down to wait. A difficult labor lasted until noon the following day. On September 20, 1754, Catherine gave birth to a son.
Elizabeth, who had waited so long, was exultant. As soon as the infant had been bathed and swaddled, she called in her confessor, who gave the baby a name, Paul, which had been the name of the first child born to her mother, Catherine I, and her father, Peter the Great. Then the empress departed, commanding the midwife to pick up the new baby and follow. Peter also walked out of the room, and Catherine was left on the floor, with only Madame Vladislavova as company. She was bathed in sweat, and she begged Madame Vladislavova to change her linen and put her back in her own bed, which was two steps away but “to which I had not the strength to crawl.” Madame Vladislavova declared that, without the midwife’s permission, she did not dare. Catherine asked for water to drink and received the same response. Madame Vladislavova sent several times for the midwife to come and authorize these requests, but the woman did not come. Three hours later, Countess Shuvalova arrived. When she saw Catherine still lying in the labor bed, she said that this neglect could kill a new mother. She left immediately to find the midwife; the woman arrived half an hour later, explaining that the empress had been so preoccupied with the child that she would not allow her leave to attend to Catherine. Finally, Catherine was placed in her own bed.
She did not see the baby for almost a week. She could get news of him only furtively because to ask about him would have been interpreted as doubting the empress’s ability to care for him. The infant had been installed in Elizabeth’s bedroom, and whenever he cried, the monarch rushed to him herself. What Catherine heard—and later saw for herself—was that
through excess of care, they were literally stifling and smothering him. He was kept in an extremely warm room, wrapped up in flannel and laid in a cradle lined with black fox fur. Over him was a coverlet of quilted satin, lined with cotton wadding. Above this was another counterpane of rose-colored velvet lined with black fox fur. Afterward, I often saw him lying like this, perspiration pouring from his face and whole body, the result being that when he was older, the least breath of air chilled him and made him ill.
On the sixth day of his life, Paul was baptized. That morning, the empress came into Catherine’s bedroom, bringing with her a gold plate on which lay an order directing the imperial treasury to send the new mother one hundred thousand rubles. To this Elizabeth added a little jewel case, which Catherine did not open until the empress had left. The money was very welcome: “I did not have a kopeck and was heavily in debt. But when I opened the box, it did not much improve my mood. It contained only a poor little necklace with earrings and two miserable rings which I would have been ashamed to give my maids. In the whole box there was not one jewel worth a hundred rubles.” Catherine said nothing, but the meanness of the gift may have troubled Count Alexander Shuvalov, because eventually he asked whether she liked the jewelry. Catherine replied that “whatever came from the empress was always priceless.” Later, when Shuvalov saw that she never wore this necklace and the earrings, he suggested that she put them on. Catherine replied that “for the empress’s parties, I was accustomed to wearing my most beautiful jewelry and that the necklace and earrings did not fall within that category.”
Four days after Catherine received the gift of money from the empress, the cabinet secretary came to her and begged her to lend this money back to the treasury; the empress needed money for another purpose and no funds were available. Catherine sent the money back and it was returned to her in January. Eventually, she learned that Peter, having heard about the empress’s gift to his wife, had become angry and had complained vehemently because nothing had been given to him. Alexander Shuvalov had reported this to the empress, who immediately sent the grand duke an order for a sum equal to what she had given Catherine—which is why the money had to be borrowed back from the original recipient.
While cannonades, balls, illuminations, and fireworks celebrated her son’s birth, Catherine remained in bed. On the seventeenth day after the delivery, she learned that the empress had assigned Sergei Saltykov to a special diplomatic mission: he was to deliver the formal announcement of her son’s birth to the royal court of Sweden. “This meant,” Catherine wrote, “that I was immediately going to be separated from the one person I cared about most. I buried myself in my bed where I did nothing but grieve. In order to stay there, I pretended to have continual pain in my leg which prevented me from getting up. But the truth was that I could not and would not see anybody in my sorrow.”
Forty days after Catherine gave birth, the empress came back to her bedroom for a ceremony to mark the end of her confinement. Catherine had dutifully risen from her bed to receive the sovereign, but when Elizabeth saw her so weak and exhausted, she made her remain sitting in bed while prayers were read. The infant Paul was present, and Catherine was permitted to look at him from a distance. “I thought him beautiful and the sight of him raised my spirits a little,” Catherine said, “but the moment the prayers were finished, the empress had him carried away and she also left.” On November 1, Catherine received the formal congratulations of the court and the foreign ambassadors. For this purpose, a room was richly furnished overnight, and there, on a couch of rose-colored velvet embroidered with silver, the new mother sat and extended her hand to be kissed. Immediately after the ceremony, the elegant furniture was removed and Catherine was returned to the isolation of her room.
From the moment of Paul’s birth, the empress behaved as if the child were her own; Catherine had been simply a vehicle for bringing him into the world. Elizabeth had many reasons for holding this point of view. She had brought the two adolescents to Russia in order to create a child. For ten years, she had been keeping them both at the expense of the state. Thus, the child, required for reasons of state, created by her command, was now, in effect, the property of the state—that is, of the empress.
There were other reasons, beyond political and dynastic, for the love and care Elizabeth lavished on Paul. It was not for reasons of state that she took physical possession of the baby. It was also a matter of love welling up from an emotional, sentimental nature; of bottled-up maternal impulses and a desire for family. Now, forty-four years old and in declining health, Elizabeth meant to be the child’s mother, even if the motherhood was make- believe. It was as a part of her effort to make this role real to herself that she excluded Catherine from the baby’s life. Elizabeth’s extreme possessiveness was more than an expression of thwarted maternal need; it was a form of jealousy. In effect, she simply kidnapped the baby.
What Elizabeth took, Catherine was denied. She was not allowed to care for her infant; indeed, she was scarcely allowed to see him. She missed his first smile and his early growth and development. Even in the middle of the eighteenth century, when aristocratic and upper-class women performed little actual child care, leaving most of this work to wet nurses and servants, most mothers still held and fondled their newborn infants. Catherine never forgot the emotional misery attending the birth of her first child. Her son and her lover, the two humans she was closest to, were absent. She was
