than a confident biological claim. Paul certainly grew up to look and behave very much like Peter (puny, snub-nosed and prone to rage) and always revered him as his father. Amid all this circumstantial evidence, one thing is certain: Paul’s birth did nothing to reconcile Peter with Catherine. While the grand duke sought comfort in an affair with the unprepossessing Elizabeth Vorontsova, his wife looked out for a new companion of her own.
She found him in Count Stanislaw August Poniatowski, a twenty-three-year-old Polish aristocrat who came to Russia in June 1755 in the entourage of the new British ambassador, Sir Charles Hanbury-Williams. Having befriended Stanislaw in Berlin in 1750, Williams took him under his wing, introducing him first to the Court at Dresden and later to some of the best company in Europe as together they visited Vienna, Hanover and The Hague in 1753. A classic man of his times, equally at home with the bawdy Hellfire Club and the refinements of Latin verse, Sir Charles set out to polish Stanislaw’s manners and broaden his mind, grooming his young protege for the most enlightened circles in Paris. There his admittance was guaranteed thanks to the renown of a father who had fought with Charles XII against Peter the Great at Poltava and was praised by Voltaire as a ‘man of extraordinary merit’. At the literary salon presided over by Madame Geoffrin, herself the uneducated daughter of a footman, Stanislaw met Montesquieu. And it was Montesquieu’s thirty-two-year-old friend Charles Yorke who became his leading companion during his visit to England in 1754, when Williams was distracted by the demands of a Parliamentary election. A Fellow of the Royal Society whose library boasted some of the latest works of the French Enlightenment, Yorke introduced the young Pole to the pleasures of the English landscape and took him to Salisbury, Bath, Oxford and Stowe. With Yakov Sievers, a youthful secretary at the Russian embassy who later became one of Catherine’s most influential advisers, he went to the debtors’ prison in London to see Theodore I, the deposed self-proclaimed king of Corsica. Having sampled everything in England from Shakespeare to cock fighting, Stanislaw arrived in Russia equipped with a cosmopolitan ease of manner in the company of an avuncular ambassador with a talent for gaining the trust of the young.5
Catherine instinctively liked them both. While Sir Charles became her confidant (it was for him that she wrote her first memoir), Stanislaw became her lover. He offered her a seductive combination of wit, bookishness and sensitivity that her husband so obviously lacked. Hesitant at first—perhaps because he was a virgin (as he later liked to suggest), or more probably because he was understandably wary of the consequences—he eventually succumbed to her advances at the end of December. Like so many royal romances before and since, their affair began with furtive visits to her apartments and continued with secret assignations, fraught with risk, in the houses of complicit friends and courtiers. Catherine had to be smuggled in and out dressed as a man. Such a relationship was too precarious to survive for long, but while it lasted they made each other deliriously happy. ‘I did not think that I was made to love women,’ Stanislaw confessed in the revealing self-portrait he composed at her request. ‘I attributed the first attempts I made in that direction to particular circumstance, but then, at last, I found tenderness, and [now] I love with such passion that I feel that were my love to suffer any reverse I should become the most miserable man on earth.’6 Apart from ‘a mouth which seemed to invite kisses’, he later remembered the attractions of a mind capable of shifting effortlessly from madcap, childish games to complex arithmetical puzzles. In his handsome company, Catherine found the confidence to build a new life of her own.
She first encountered Stanislaw at Oranienbaum on 29 June 1755, when 121 guests of the first five ranks were spread across the palace staterooms at the banquet in honour of her husband’s name day.7 Though Peter had to be satisfied with toy soldiers in the winter months, he preferred drilling the real regiments he had been allowed to recruit from Holstein. An elaborate new star-shaped fort was built for their exercises. With its guns trained firmly on Yekaterinburg, Peterstadt was an excellent metaphor for their marriage.8 To avoid arguments, Catherine had bought all her own furniture for her part of the palace. But her true passion was not so much for interior design as for gardening. We cannot know how far Stanislaw discussed the subject with Catherine—on his visit to Stowe, he had risked offending his hosts by criticising ‘Capability’ Brown’s ‘natural’ landscapes—but by the time of their meeting she had both time and opportunity at Oranienbaum to create a garden of her own. ‘I began to make plans to build and plant, and since this was my first venture into building and planting, my plans became very ambitious.’9
When it came to ambition, the standard was set by Elizabeth herself. On arrival at St Petersburg, Stanislaw had reported home on ‘the astonishing prodigality’ of a Court which continued to look to Versailles for inspiration. In 1756, in response to requests from the francophile Ivan Shuvalov, Mikhail Vorontsov urged Russian diplomats in Paris to write ‘often and in detail’, not only about international affairs, but ‘especially about the king and his family and their way of life’. The favourite would be particularly interested, the vice chancellor continued, to receive detailed reports on the king’s
Scarcely less fabulous sums were spent by leading courtiers, for the mid-1750s was the heyday of private building projects in St Petersburg. Catherine’s architect at Oranienbaum, Antonio Rinaldi, had initially come to Russia to build a palace for Kirill Razumovsky, brother of Aleksey. Rastrelli also accepted numerous private commissions. Delayed by the vice chancellor’s debts, it took him more than a decade to complete the Vorontsov Palace on the Fontanka, where the empress herself attended the consecration of the chapel on 23 November 1758, rewarding its exultant (and bankrupt) owner with 40,000 roubles.13 It was there, over the coming winter, that Catherine first met and befriended his fifteen-year-old niece, the future Princess Dashkova. Between 1753 and 1755, while Vorontsov was struggling to find the money to pay his builders, Elizabeth’s largesse to her favourite allowed Savva Chevakinsky to build a palace for Ivan Shuvalov on Italian Street, overlooking the Summer Palace labyrinth.14 Nearby on the Great Perspective Road, the limitless resources of his family’s salt mines allowed Baron Sergey Stroganov to complete his new palace—an innovative design, adapted to the increasing density of building in the city centre by fronting directly onto the street without a garden—in less than two years after its predecessor was destroyed by fire in 1752.15
As Prince Mikhail Shcherbatov later complained, ‘such examples could not fail to spread to the whole nation, and luxury and voluptuousness everywhere increased’. Nobles who had once been satisfied with tallow candles were now content only with the finest white wax. ‘Houses began to be magnificently furnished,’ Shcherbatov continued, ‘and people were ashamed not to have English furniture. Meals became magnificent, and cooks who were not originally considered the most important servant in the household, began to receive large salaries…Costly and hitherto unknown wines came into use, and not only in the houses of the great.’16 Tempting though it may be to put such grumbling down to the rhetoric of Russia’s most acerbic critic of luxury, it is worth remembering that in 1754–5 alone, the English merchants in St Petersburg imported furniture to the value of 37,000 roubles, far outstripping their continental rivals.17 And there was no limit to the pretensions of the great. Reputed to be the first private individual in Russia to plant his own pineapple orchard, Elizabeth’s principal minister Peter Shuvalov had its fruit fermented into wine and once served a dessert in the form of a mountain studded with precious stones from his own mineralogical collection.18 Mikhail Vorontsov, who frequently enjoined his nephew Alexander to live within his means, nevertheless sent him orders for expensive clarets, port and madeira from Paris and Madrid: ‘P.S. The best chocolate is made in Spain. Buy 100 lbs of it for me, and two or three pounds of the best Spanish snuff.’19
Catherine was aware of the competition. Looking back, she dismissed Shuvalov’s palace as ‘tasteless and ugly, though very richly appointed’:
