Catherine the Great

the small hours.²⁹

They returned to the Kazan Church for the wedding on 29 September, nine days after Paul’s nineteenth birthday had signalled his coming-of-age in Russia. Just as Catherine’s wedding had been, the ceremony was followed by ten days of celebrations, advertised almost immediately in an official guide to the proceedings.³⁰ Gunning echoed Lord Hyndford’s praise in 1745: ‘The weather was remarkably fine, which added much to the splendid appearance of the equipages and dresses, the magnificence of which nothing could exceed.’³¹ To compensate him for the loss of his tutorship, and with it the direction of the Young Court, Panin was rewarded on coronation day with the rank of field marshal, 10,000 serfs, 100,000 roubles for a house, another 50,000 for a silver service, and an annual pension of 30,000. For eleven years, Catherine had lived in fear that Paul might die before reaching the age of majority. His survival had helped to ensure hers. Relieved that her son’s majority had passed without any increase in his political influence, she was not to know that a very different menace was brewing among rebellious Cossacks in the lands east of the Volga. Instead, in the brief interval before disaster struck, she delighted in her first encounter with one of the closest friends of her life and one of the most brilliant minds of the age.

* * *

Friedrich-Melchior Grimm had edited the Correspondance litteraire for twenty years before leaving for Russia in the entourage of Wilhelmina’s brother, Ludwig, whose Grand Tour he had been conducting since 1771. D’Alembert, who edited the Encyclopedie with Diderot, had recommended this fortnightly manuscript newsletter to Catherine as long ago as 1764. She became a regular subscriber in the following year, joining the elite circle of crowned heads, never more than fifteen in number, who relied on Grimm for a digest of the Parisian journals and an insider’s view of the salons. As a member of the philosopher Baron d’Holbach’s circle, he was well placed to report on the philosophes and pulled no punches in his accounts of their debates. D’Holbach’s own Good Sense, written in response to critics of his System of Nature, was breezily dismissed as ‘atheism made easy for chambermaids and wigmakers’.³² Grimm helped to confirm Catherine’s low view of Rousseau (Voltaire was delighted to join in) and steered her towards a more favourable appreciation of Beccaria. He sent her the abbe Galiani’s influential treatise on grain prices in 1770. More practically, in his acknowledged role as ‘a great friend of humanity’,³³ he had not only helped her to acquire Diderot’s library and numerous works of art, but also, as a trusted servant of Landgravine Caroline, played a crucial part as matchmaker for Paul and Natalia.

Since Catherine had every reason to admire him, Grimm found himself subjected to a charm offensive almost as soon as he arrived in St Petersburg. Even before the wedding, General Bauer had already made the first attempt to lure him into Russian service; Vladimir Orlov tried again shortly afterwards. Grimm found the courage to refuse in an audience, scheduled to last five minutes, which went on for an hour and a half.³⁴ Dubbed ‘the white tyrant’ thanks to his penchant for face powder, he knew that no amount of make-up could conceal the social chasm separating a pastor’s son from Regensburg from a reigning empress. Nevertheless, he was determined to try. ‘I believe that it is unprecedented that a man of my station should have been treated by the sovereign of one of the most powerful empires with the kindness that I have experienced,’ Grimm boasted to Mme Geoffrin. Though protocol kept him well down the table at mealtimes, he was drawn into Catherine’s intimate circle after dinner. Predictably, he found her ‘a charming woman, the like of whom is not to be found in Paris’, admiring the way that she chattered, ‘often very gaily about serious things, and very seriously about frivolous things, by virtue of the laws of all good conversation’.³⁵

Had Grimm accepted her repeated offers of jobs, either during this first visit or on his return to Russia in 1776, when she hoped he might play a leading role in educational reform, their talks might have lasted for longer. As it was, while he accepted a retainer from the empress from 1777, he chose to preserve a degree of independence by returning to Paris in the service of the duke of Saxe-Gotha (who promptly made him a baron). Now they had to pursue their friendship by other means. Since correspondence formed a natural extension of salon conversation in the eighteenth century, they started to write to one another as soon as he left St Petersburg in the spring of 1774. ‘Adieu, monsieur’, Catherine concluded her opening salvo on 25 April, ‘this letter is beginning to resemble our gossip after eight at Tsarskoye Selo, and the fools who read it after you might find it indecent that people as serious as us should write such letters.’³⁶ It was worth taking care over compositions that straddled the boundary between private and public spheres. The whole correspondence is punctuated by the sorts of self-conscious literary artifice that characterised all such exchanges at the time.³⁷ ‘For as long as there have been German barons in the world,’ ran a typical missive from the empress, ‘no one has been so passionately in favour of the post-scriptum as you.’ ‘For my honour and glory,’ she continued on another occasion, ‘I have to tell you that everything that was written above on the 20th of September between dinner and the ball is divine in style and inspiration and the promulgation of a divine communication [from Grimm himself] acting on a mortal brain on a day half cloudy, half rainy. You will see that it is vital for you to know all this for the sake of historical understanding. If anyone ever makes a commentary on this letter, I think the price of paper will go up.’³⁸ Since there could be no more responsible business than writing for posterity, it was crucial that nothing should fall into unscrupulous hands. Appalled in 1787 that Beaumarchais might include her letters in his edition of Voltaire’s correspondence, Catherine ordered Grimm to buy up every relevant volume and consign it to the flames. ‘And make sure that this objectionable man doesn’t keep a copy, so that having sold it to me, he cannot publish it again.’ ‘Listen, we are all mortal,’ she had written earlier that autumn. ‘Burn my letters so that they cannot be printed in my lifetime; they are much more sprightly than the ones I wrote to Voltaire, and could do the most awful damage; I insist that you burn them, do you understand? Or that you put them somewhere so safe that no one will unearth them for a hundred years.’³⁹

Quite how Grimm managed to inspire her to write such revealing letters remains a mystery. His own are deadly dull. Yet somehow he gave her the confidence to rise above conventional generic pleasantries so that her side of the correspondence not only sparkles, but also takes us to the heart of her sensibility. It was to her Parisian ‘whipping-boy’ that Catherine confided some of her most intimate thoughts for the remainder of her life. ‘I think,’ she declared in 1791, ‘that it is decreed on high that you and I have been created expressly so that we may each have a pen continually in hand to write to one another without stopping.’⁴⁰

One reason why Catherine felt so secure with Grimm was that he was generally to be found at the least radical end of the Enlightened political spectrum. Whereas Voltaire was uncomfortably aware that by supporting his heroine’s campaign against the Turks he was not thinking ‘sufficiently as a philosophe ought’, Grimm regarded war as a good in itself because it channelled man’s violent instincts into active, noble virtues. Along with his growing intimacy with Catherine, that was one reason why he was eventually disowned by one of his oldest pacifist collaborators. ‘My friend, I no longer recognise you,’ sighed Diderot, looking back on their time together in Russia. ‘Perhaps without suspecting it, you have become one of the most closet and yet most dangerous anti-philosophes. You live among us, yet you hate us.’⁴¹

Having been the beneficiary of Catherine’s largesse since she purchased his library in 1765, Diderot was in no position to refuse her invitation to St Petersburg. His arrival on the eve of Paul’s wedding brought the empress into contact with a very different sort of Enlightenment from Grimm’s. For a sixty-year-old with no experience of continental travel, the journey had proved predictably gruelling. Illness had delayed him along the way and continued to afflict him for much of his stay (he drank from the infested waters of the River Neva and ‘paid them the tribute they obtain from all foreigners’).⁴² The visit could hardly have got off to a less auspicious start when he discovered, to his distress, that the room promised by his friend Falconet was occupied by the sculptor’s artist son, a pupil of Sir Joshua Reynolds. Forced to take refuge at the Naryshkin mansion in St Isaac’s Square, Diderot was a fish out of water at Court, turning up for all the dinners and balls in his little black suit to widespread ridicule and suspicion. Etiquette and intrigue were foreign to him; he had virtually no Russian, though he made desultory efforts to learn some over the course of the autumn; and he made little impact on polite or academic society. Although he and Grimm were elected foreign members of the Russian Academy of Sciences on 25 October, that inauguration was the only meeting he attended, even though a further twenty-six were held before he left for Holland in the following March. Grimm told Mme Geoffrin that it was ‘the only occasion on which I should have been well disposed to see my name alongside that of Diderot’.⁴³

Catherine, however, was fascinated by him. ‘And with her he is just as odd, just as original, just as much Diderot, as when with you,’ Grimm explained to another Parisian salon hostess, Suzanne Necker. ‘He shakes her hand as he takes yours, he shakes her arm as he shakes yours; but in this last point he obeys sovereign orders,