Catherine the Great

same’.¹⁹ Still, faced with two evils, as she emphasised to Frederick the Great, ‘every reasonable man’ would choose the lesser, ‘all other things being equal’.²⁰ So, rather than relapse into more indecisive shuttling between suburban palaces—her pattern, as we have seen, throughout the summer of 1768— Catherine determined to submit herself to a controversial treatment. Inoculation had been banned by the Sorbonne as an interference with the workings of Providence and was opposed even in some Enlightened circles on the grounds that it might lead to infection. Provided all went well, she could claim to have acted both rationally and courageously.²¹

The doctor chosen to perform the operation was the fifty-six-year-old Thomas Dimsdale, whose celebrated treatise on the subject had been published in 1767.²² When he arrived in St Petersburg at the end of August, Dimsdale found himself ‘upon as free and easy a footing in the imperial palace as he could be in the house of any nobleman in England’.²³ Despite his execrable French and Catherine’s minimal English, doctor and patient established an immediate rapport (their interpreter, on days when he was not paralysed by gout, was Alexander Cherkasov, who had studied informally at Cambridge in the early 1740s and now headed the Medical College). Understandably nervous about exposing a foreign sovereign to risk, and sharing the widespread belief that diseases varied according to climate and geography, Dimsdale hesitated to operate until he was sure that his treatment would be as effective in Russia as it had been at home. Catherine gave him the confidence to continue, even when tests on impoverished local youths proved equivocal. Adding sauce to an already titillating story, a Scottish merchant in St Petersburg reported that the doctor, whose presence in Russia was an open secret, had ‘free access’ every morning to the empress’s bedroom, where Grigory Orlov often sat on the bedspread beside them.²⁴ Grigory, however, was away on a hunting expedition when Catherine finally summoned Dimsdale to the Winter Palace in the dead of night on 12 October. Apart from Cherkasov, only two others were present at the inoculation: Panin, the treatment’s leading advocate, and Caspar von Saldern, the fixer from Holstein who had attached himself to Paul’s household in the 1760s.

Complaining of low mood, Catherine retreated to Tsarskoye Selo on the following day. At first she was able to live relatively normally, chatting and playing cards in the afternoon, taking regular walks outside and even a drive to inspect the new road to Gatchina.²⁵ As she retired to her apartments over the course of the next few days, Panin let it be known that she continued to work, and that her only reported symptom, other than ‘a very favourable eruption of small pox, very few in number’, was a mild fever.²⁶ She also complained of persistent giddiness, ‘in a manner according to her like drunkenness’, and of mild constipation, which Dimsdale treated with his trusty bedtime laxative made from calomel, crabs’ claws and tartar emetic, either crushed into pills or mixed with syrup or jelly. To keep her temperature down, he prescribed the occasional glass of cold water and a stroll in the unheated Great Hall. Having noticed the first marks on her arm on the evening of 19 October, he spent the whole of the following day on watch in her apartments. Catherine woke at seven, having ‘sweated considerably in the night’. ‘The inflammation of the arms was spread considerably & a number of small pustules were discoverable around the incision.’ Only one spot had appeared on her forehead, offering no serious threat to her complexion, and two more on her hand or wrist. ‘Her complaints were of stiffness under the arms, particularly the left, of some pain in her back and legs and a sort of general weariness, but not sleepy as yesterday. Upon the whole Her Majesty was very brisk and cheerful the whole afternoon.’²⁷ Now the danger was past, she began a period of active convalescence, informing Saltykov in Moscow on 27 October that she had not only remained on her feet throughout, but experienced only the sort of minor discomfort that was to be expected. ‘I tell you this happy outcome so that you can counter any erroneous rumours.’²⁸ After another drive and a walk in the fresh air, she felt sufficiently confident to reassure Falconet, who had written to her in mock reproach for defying the Sorbonne, that she had no intention of succumbing to the disease: ‘They often decide in favour of absurdities, which in my opinion should have discredited them long ago; after all, the human species are no longer goslings.’²⁹

Following Catherine’s return to St Petersburg on 1 November, Paul, who might have been inoculated earlier had he not been recovering from chickenpox, was treated next evening after a formal Te Deum in the palace chapel led by Archbishop Gavriil.³⁰ More than a hundred nobles soon followed suit. ‘Starting with me and my son,’ Catherine boasted to Ivan Chernyshev a fortnight later, ‘there is not an aristocratic household that does not contain some of the inoculated—and many complain that they had smallpox naturally and so cannot follow the fashion.’ Grigory Orlov and Kirill Razumovsky were among the ‘countless others’ who had ‘passed through Mr Dimsdale’s hands’, including even ‘beauties’ such as Princess Shcherbatova and Princess Trubetskaya. ‘See what setting an example can do! Three months ago, no one wanted to hear of it, and yet now they look on it as salvation.’³¹

Once Paul’s survival seemed assured, the next great feast in the Orthodox calendar—the Presentation of the Mother of God in the Temple on 21 November—marked a natural opportunity for a formal service of thanksgiving in the Winter Palace chapel. ‘On the inside of a rail which extended across the room,’ William Richardson recorded, ‘and close by the pillar which was next to the altar, on the south side, stood the Empress and her son; and also on the inside of the rail, and on each side of the altar, was a choir of musicians. All the rest who witnessed, or took part in the solemnity, excepting the priests, stood on the outside of the rail.’³² This service, commemorated annually at Court until 1795 and perpetuated by the Senate in February 1769 in churches across the empire, was the first of a barrage of measures designed to propagate the image of a selfless and knowledgeable empress conferring benefits on her people. Bells rang out day and night from every church in the capital for the next two days, with fireworks across the city at midnight.³³ No one was more relieved than Dimsdale. ‘I shall never forget the care you gave me,’ Catherine later wrote to him, ‘and the anxiety you experienced in the time following my inoculation and that of my son.’³⁴ On her name day, 24 November, she invested her doctor as a baron of the Russian empire and rewarded him with ?10,000—an outlandish sum, supplemented by an annual pension of ?500 for life.³⁵ Alexander Markov, the boy who had supplied the necessary infected matter, was ennobled under the unflattering soubriquet ‘ospenny’ (‘Lord Smallpox’). The Court theatre staged an allegorical ballet, Prejudice Overcome, in which the Genius of Science (played by the ballet master Angiolini), Minerva (representing Catherine), and Ruthenia (Russia), conquered Superstition and Ignorance with the assistance of Alcind (Paul) and released the common people from their grasp.³⁶ The commemorative medal, struck in 1772, when inoculations were still being administered in a variety of Russian hospitals, drove home the empress’s fundamental message: ‘She herself set an example.’³⁷

When the children of the Austrian empress were successfully inoculated by another British doctor, Maria Theresa held a feast at Schonbrunn at which the royal family waited on his sixty-five lesser-ranking patients.³⁸ Obsessed with order and hierarchy, Catherine would never have turned the world upside down. Competitive as ever, she gaily told Voltaire in December 1768 that ‘more people have been inoculated here in one month than in eight at Vienna’. For her part, she teased, the best medicine during her convalescence had been to listen to readings from Candide, in which the master had written that if two armies of 30,000 men were to meet in battle, two-thirds of the soldiers would be pock-marked: ‘After that, it is impossible to feel the slightest bit ill.’³⁹

To make Catherine feel even better, an extension to her palace was nearing completion. At last she would be able to escape echoing staterooms, indulge her passion for informal entertainment, and exercise her legendary charm to devastating effect. Designed by Veldten and Vallin de la Mothe, the Small Hermitage was built on a narrow plot of land immediately to the east of the Winter Palace, hitherto occupied by dilapidated mansions built for two of Peter the Great’s admirals, Cornelius Cruys and Fedor Golovin. Catherine inspected some early plans while in Moscow after her coronation, work started in 1764, and by the time she returned to the old capital in February 1767, she had seen a magnificent pavilion grow up at the southern end of the site. Grigory Orlov was to live there until 1775 in a suite of rooms linked to her own apartments by a flying bridge. His three reception rooms and a dining room overlooked Millionnaya to the south; to the north, a bedroom, mirrored boudoir and study faced onto a hanging garden. While the empress was preparing to sail the Volga, Cruys’s house on the Neva was finally demolished, and work began to extend the garden northwards to a new pavilion overlooking the river, originally known as the orangery after the fruit trees planted in decorative pots on the balustrade. Catherine inspected a wooden model in March 1768 and by the following February the new building was ready to hold the first of many private entertainments—themselves soon christened ‘small hermitages’—beginning with a theatrical performance in the neighbouring stables and ending with dinner at the two mechanical tables in the easternmost room.⁴⁰