love for the gallows? European opinion will relegate us to the time of Tsar Ivan the Terrible!’60
Now she had less time for Diderot, who recorded 5 December as the date of their last discussion. Nor was Vasilchikov the man for a crisis. Instead, on 4 December, the empress wrote her first surviving letter to the man who was to supplant him and almost everyone else in her affections for the remainder of his life. The thirty-four- year-old Grigory Potemkin was at that time besieging the Turks on the Danube:
Mr Lieutenant-General and Cavalier. You, I imagine, are so firmly focused on Silistria that you have no time to read letters. And although I do not at this moment know whether your bombardment has succeeded, I am certain, nevertheless, that everything you undertake should be ascribed to nothing but your impassioned zeal toward me personally and toward the dear fatherland in general, whose service you love.
But since for my part I very much wish to preserve zealous, brave, intelligent and skilful people, so I ask you not to endanger yourself in vain. Having read this letter, you may put the question: why was it written? To which I can reply: so that you should have confirmation of the way I think about you, for I am always most benevolent toward you.61
Confronted with this tantalising summons, Potemkin promptly sought leave from his camp and headed for St Petersburg.
While she was waiting for him, Catherine attempted to blunt the international impact of Pugachev’s rebellion by making light of it to Frau Bielke. ‘There is no revolt at Kazan,’ she declared. ‘That kingdom is peaceful.’ It was true that the ‘so-called Peter III’ and his ‘band of robbers’ had ‘hanged five hundred people of every age and sex’ in their rapacious progress through Orenburg province. Nevertheless, Bibikov had everything in hand ‘and it will probably all come to very little’.62 In the meanwhile, there was no shortage of New Year celebrations to distract her. At a betrothal ceremony before the ball on Epiphany, she placed rings on the fingers of Duke Peter of Courland (the son of Anna’s disgraced favourite, Ernst Buhren) and his fiancee Princess Yevdokiya Trubetskaya. And although it was too cold to spend long looking at the model of Bazhenov’s new palace in the Kremlin, set up for her inspection in the furthest palace ante-chamber, she found time to play chess and cards with Grimm and other guests in the Hermitage, having attended a performance of the ballet
Yet even as the carnival continued all around her, the empress failed to match its mood. A placard found at the Winter Palace on New Year’s Day, apparently alleging government corruption, was burned in front of the Senate on 11 January when it proved impossible to discover the identity of its anonymous author, a self-styled ‘honest man’. Security was stepped up at the palace so that no one below the rank of major could ‘pass beyond the Chevaliers Gardes’.64 With both Orenburg and Ufa under siege, the prospects looked a good deal less certain than Catherine had implied in her letter to Frau Bielke. Even a French comic opera performed by the girls at the Smolny Institute on 20 January was not enough to lift her spirits. After that, she retreated to her apartments for several days. ‘The Empress is at present a good deal out of order,’ Gunning reported in the middle of this self- imposed seclusion. ‘The insurrection in Orenburg, and the height it has been allowed to get to, has certainly given her great uneasiness.’65 As if to unsettle her further, Paul finally confessed Caspar von Saldern’s duplicity to Catherine before the end of the first week in February. This news ‘must have been extremely offensive to her’, Gunning concluded, ‘as, in the passion it threw her into, she declared she would have the wretch tied neck and heels and brought hither’. Only thanks to Panin was she persuaded to allow Saldern to retire, provided that he returned a snuffbox she had given him and renounced all his titles.66
Honesty and fidelity were subjects at the forefront of the empress’s mind as the turmoil in her personal life matched the chaos in the eastern borderlands. We do not know whether she was already in love with Potemkin when she wrote to him in December. (Even if she was, it did not prevent her from continuing to lunch with Vasilchikov and Orlov, who can hardly have felt at ease as the only guests at her table apart from Alexander Cherkasov and the duty gentleman-in-waiting.)67 By the beginning of March, however, there could be no doubt about her new passion. Potemkin was first presented to the empress at Tsarskoye Selo on 4 February. That morning, she had said farewell in the Amber Room to Prince Dolgoruky, who was returning to Berlin as her ambassador. They were joined for lunch by a regular guest, Admiral Sir Charles Knowles, a seventy-two-year-old veteran of the Royal Navy who, in addition to designing several new men-ofwar, had done much to rescue the dilapidated dockyard at Kronstadt since arriving in Russia at the beginning of 1771. Then, late in the afternoon, a very different visitor arrived to be led straight to her private apartments.68
Quite how the relationship developed we cannot be sure. But sometime that month, lost in the delirium of their new affair yet painfully conscious of its fragility, Catherine and Potemkin consummated their passion at the Winter Palace. As a harbinger of the mood-swings to come, he was already jealous of her previous lovers. Concealing herself from public gaze on 21 February, she sent him a list of them in a ‘sincere confession’ designed to test his faith in her:
The trouble is that my heart is unwilling to be without love for as long as an hour. They say that people try to hide such vices as if out of kindness, and it may be that such a disposition of the heart is more of a vice than a virtue. Perhaps it is in vain to write this to you, since after this you will fall in love with me or will not want to go back to the army fearing that I shall forget you. However, in truth, I don’t think I should do anything so stupid, and if you want to keep me for eternity, then show me as much friendship as love, and above all, love me and tell me the truth.69
After all, he had scarcely been celibate himself. ‘I’m not surprised that the whole town has credited you with countless women,’ she continued two days later. ‘No one on earth romps with them more than you do, I imagine.’ She asked him only to refrain from criticising Orlov and his brothers: ‘He loves you, and they are my friends, and I shan’t give them up.’70
Despite their attempts to conceal it from prurient eyes, their whirlwind romance was obvious to her closest companions. ‘They’ve all begun to preach to me,’ she told her lover on 26 February after a fifth sleepless night alone, ‘and I hear them out. But inwardly they don’t dislike you, the Prince [Grigory Orlov] above all. I have not admitted to anything. Neither have I justified myself in such a way that they could reproach me for lying.’ Now they had only a few days left together before the onset of the Great Fast. ‘I shall have to prepare for communion. Ugh! I can hardly contemplate such thoughts without crying.’71 Aleksey Orlov, who had come up from Moscow to take stock of developments, twice asked her ‘Yes or no?’ ‘I cannot lie,’ she answered, causing him to laugh when she admitted that she had fallen in love: ‘“And you see each other in the bath-house?” I asked him why he thought so. “Because,” he said, “for about four days we have seen a light in the window rather later than usual.”’ There could be no room for Vasilchikov now. Panin must find some way of sending him away to take the waters. ‘Then he could be appointed ambassador somewhere where there isn’t much business. He’s boring and suffocating.’72 Meanwhile, on the first day of the Fast, Vasilchikov had to suffer the indignity of lunch in the Diamond Room with the man who had displaced him in Catherine’s affections. They sat next to one another again after mass on the following Sunday.73
By then it was clear to watching diplomats that the new favourite was cast from a different mould. ‘His figure is gigantic and disproportioned,’ Gunning reported on 4 March, ‘and his countenance far from engaging. From the character I have had of him, he appears to have a great knowledge of mankind, and more of a discriminating faculty that his countrymen in general possess… and although the profligacy of his manner is notorious, he is the only one who has formed connections with the clergy.’74 Links with the bishops were a legacy of Potemkin’s time as a student of theology at Moscow University. Though the subject kept its hold on his mercurial mind, he was far too flamboyant to contemplate an ecclesiastical career. Now languid, now brimming with muscular energy, he presented the empress with a fascinating study in contradictions, so different from the colourless creatures who fawned on her at Court. If his intelligence was one part of the attraction, his virility was another, tested and confirmed in action against the Turk. The last time she had seen him in St Petersburg was in the afterglow of the victories at Kagul and Larga, where he had been decorated with the Order of St George, Third Class.75 Now they launched into a flurry of love letters (she burned his so that only hers survive). ‘My dear little dove,
