“Tonight,” he said.
“You know that I cannot go out without permission and they would never give me permission to go to her house,” she said.
“I will take you there,” he said.
“Are you mad?” Catherine said. “You would be sent to the fortress and heaven knows what trouble I would be in.”
“But no one will know about it,” Lev said. “I will come for you in an hour or so. The grand duke will be at supper. He will remain at the table for most of the night, and will not get up until he is drunk and ready for bed. To be on the safe side, dress as a man.”
Tired of being alone in her room, Catherine agreed. Lev departed, and, pleading a headache, she went to bed early. Once Madame Vladislavova had retired, Catherine got up, clothed herself as a man, and arranged her hair as best she could. At the appointed time, Lev meowed at her door. They left the palace unnoticed, stepping into his carriage and giggling at their escapade. When they arrived at the house where Lev was living with his brother and sister-in-law, she found—unsurprisingly—that Poniatowski was there. “The evening passed,” Catherine wrote, “in the wildest gaiety. After staying for an hour and a half, I left and returned to the palace without meeting a soul. The next day, at the morning court and the evening ball, we could not look each other in the face without laughing at the folly of the night before.”
A few days later, Lev arranged a reciprocal visit to Catherine’s rooms and escorted his friends into her apartment so skillfully that no suspicion was aroused. The group delighted in these secret gatherings. Through the winter of 1755–56, there were two or three of these every week, first in one house, then in another. “Sometimes at the theater,” Catherine said, “even if in different boxes or in the orchestra, each of us knew without speaking, by certain private signs, where to go. And no one ever made a mistake. But twice I had to return home to the palace on foot.” The happiness of these evenings, Poniatowski’s love, and Bestuzhev’s political support bolstered Catherine’s self-confidence.
Among her own maids of honor, she found occasional opposition, encouraged by Peter’s sometimes flagrant belittling of his wife’s status and qualities. Now officially recognized as Paul’s father, he delighted in playing the untethered male. Singers and dancers, considered by society to be “loose women,” appeared at his private suppers. The woman in whom he showed the most interest was one of Catherine’s maids of honor, Elizabeth Vorontsova, a niece of Bestuzhev’s rival, the vice-chancellor Michael Vorontsov. Placed in Catherine’s entourage at the age of eleven, she was neither particularly intelligent nor pretty. Slightly hunchbacked, with a face scarred by smallpox, she had a fiery temperament and was always ready to laugh, drink, sing, and shout. Although she belonged to one of the oldest families in Russia, it was said that she spat when she spoke, and otherwise behaved “like a servant girl in a house of ill-fame.” Peter’s attachment to her may have grown out of his own sense of inferiority; the grand duke may have concluded that she loved him for himself. At first, Elizabeth Vorontsova was one among many. She had rivals and occasionally she quarreled with Peter, but it was always to Elizabeth that he returned.
At Oranienbaum in the summer of 1756, Catherine’s relationship with some of her maids of honor led to a fierce argument. Feeling that these young women had become openly disrespectful, she went to their apartment and told them that unless they changed their behavior, she would complain to the empress. Some were frightened and wept; others were angry. As soon as Catherine left, they rushed to tell the grand duke. Peter, furious, charged into Catherine’s room. He told his wife that she had become impossible to live with; that every day she became more insufferable; that they were all young women of rank whom she treated as servants; and that if she complained about them to the empress, he would complain to his aunt about her pride, her arrogance, and her bad temper.
Catherine listened. Then she said that he could say whatever he liked about her but if the matter were placed before his aunt, the empress would probably decide that the best solution would be to dismiss from Catherine’s service whichever young women were causing dissension between her nephew and his wife. She said that she was certain that, in order to reestablish peace between the two of them, and to avoid having their quarrels repeatedly dinned into her ears, the empress would take this course. This argument surprised Peter. Imagining that Catherine knew more than he about Elizabeth’s attitude regarding these maids of honor, and that she really might dismiss them over this matter, he softened his tone and said, “Tell me how much you know. Has anyone spoken to her about them?” Catherine replied that if the matter went far enough to reach the empress, she had no doubt that Her Majesty would deal with it in her usual decisive way. Peter paced back and forth, worried. That evening, to warn the women to stop making complaints about her, Catherine told the more sensible of them about the scene with the grand duke and what might happen next.
Catherine cared for Stanislaus Poniatowski—how deeply, she learned, when he was forced, temporarily, to leave her. Poniatowski brought this involuntary departure on himself. He disliked his nominal king, Augustus of Saxony, whose German electorate Frederick of Prussia had invaded, and he constantly belittled Augustus. Some took his attacks as expressions of sympathy for Frederick; they were interpreted this way by Peter. But it was not just Peter who mistakenly saw Poniatowski as an admirer of Prussia. It was also the Saxon-Polish court, which now implored Elizabeth to send the young man home. Poniatowski had no choice, and in July 1756 he was obliged to depart. Catherine let him go, determined to bring him back.
Two days before Poniatowski left, he came to Oranienbaum, accompanied by Count Horn of Sweden, to say goodbye. The two counts were at Oranienbaum for two days; on the first, Peter was gracious, but on the second, because he had planned a day of drinking at the wedding of one of his huntsmen, he simply walked away, leaving Catherine to entertain the visitors. After dinner, she showed Horn through the palace. When they reached her private apartment, her little Italian greyhound began to bark furiously at Horn, but when it saw Poniatowski, it greeted him with a frantically wagging tail. Horn noticed and took Poniatowski aside. “My friend,” he said, “there is no worse traitor than a small lapdog. The first thing I always do when I am in love with a woman is to give her one of these little dogs. This way, I can always discover whether there is someone more favored than myself. The test is infallible. As you saw just now, the dog wanted to bite me because I am a stranger, but when it saw you, it went mad with joy.” Two days after this visit, Poniatowski left Russia.
When Stanislaus Poniatowski departed in July 1756, he assumed that he would return in a matter of weeks. When he failed to come back at the expected time, Catherine began a campaign to bring him back. For the first time, Bestuzhev felt the strong will of the future empress. Through the autumn of 1756, he struggled to do what she asked and persuade the Polish cabinet to return Poniatowski to St. Peterburg. He wrote to Count Heinrich Bruhl, the Polish foreign minister: “In the present critical and delicate state of affairs, I find it all the more necessary that an envoy extraordinary should be sent here without delay from the kingdom of Poland whose presence would draw closer the ties of friendship between the two courts. As I have found no one more pleasing to my court than Count Poniatowski, I suggest him to you.” Eventually, Bruhl agreed.
The way now seemed clear for Poniatowski to return, but, to Catherine’s surprise, he remained in Poland. What was the obstacle? In a letter to Catherine, Poniatowski explained that it was his mother:
I pressed her strongly to consent to my return. She said to me with tears in her eyes that this affair was going to cause her to lose my affection on which she depended for all the happiness of her life; that it was hard to refuse some things, but this time she was determined not to consent. I was beside myself; I threw myself at her feet and begged her to change her mind.
