his political speculations,’ Bezborodko remarked, ‘then he should count this visit among his greatest mistakes.’72 By contrast, Count Cobenzl had found a perfect advocate for the Habsburg cause in the forty-five-year-old Prince de Ligne, a rakish cosmopolitan charmer with a penchant for the sorts of contrived witticism that Catherine loved best. Ligne, she duly reported to Grimm, was ‘one of the easiest and most agreeable beings I have ever met; he is truly original, thinks profoundly and performs follies like a child’.73
Once the death of Maria Theresa in November 1780 had removed the last major obstacle to a formal alliance between Austria and Russia, it was delayed only by a dispute over protocol. Joseph, as Holy Roman Emperor, was unable to accept Catherine’s status-conscious demand to sign first. She resolved the impasse by proposing an exchange of private letters in place of a conventional treaty. In a secret exchange in May and June 1781, each vowed to support the other in the event of a Turkish attack. As soon as the little grand dukes had recovered from their inoculation, Paul and his wife were packed off to Vienna on 19 September in an attempt to bring them round to Catherine’s way of thinking. In such a political climate, there was no further room for the disappointed advocate of the Northern System. Panin had not been taken to Mogilev and had failed in his attempts to prevent Paul’s Grand Tour: three days after the departure of his former pupil, he was unceremoniously sacked.74
‘The big noise has arrived,’ Mozart reported to his father when Paul reached Vienna in November. ‘I have been looking about for Russian popular songs, so as to be able to play variations on them.’75 Though at first the grand duke made a poor impression, scarcely troubling to conceal his preference for Berlin, Joseph brought his visitor round by balancing a series of magnificent Court balls with a tantalising glimpse of his own working methods. He even showed the grand duke his secret correspondence with Catherine.76 After six weeks as his guests, Paul and Maria Fedorovna moved on to Italy, travelling semi-incognito as the count and countess of the North. After visiting Venice, Rome and Naples, they reached Florence as guests of Joseph’s brother. Having been irritated by Paul’s enthusiasm for the Venetian republic—it was easy enough for such a tiny state to put its affairs in order, she told him—Catherine was relieved to learn of his admiration for Archduke Leopold’s enlightened regime in Tuscany.77 Throughout their tour, which reached its climax with an adulatory reception in Paris at the beginning of May 1782, she kept in regular touch with her children, regaling them with news of their sons’ progress in her care. No less revealing are the letters sent to a member of Paul’s entourage, Prince Kurakin, by his former tutor, which tell us much about the rhythms of life at Court over the winter of 1781– 2.78
In political terms, the autumn was uneventful. Despite public expectations of changes in the wake of Panin’s dismissal, there were no civic or military promotions either on Catherine’s name day or on St Andrew’s Day. For once the empress had resisted what Bezborodko called ‘her habit of making alterations’.79 He himself proved the only exception to the rule, continuing his inexorable rise by being placed in charge of the postal service on 1 December.
Meanwhile, the empress’s ‘hermitages’ continued on Thursdays and Sundays, despite a scare in late October when a lackey discovered three intruders under some matting in a vacant room. One turned out to be a deserter from the army, another a fugitive serf from Moscow. While the third escaped the guards, Catherine ordered her two prisoners to be handed over to the police to face the criminal courts. Her concern with justice remained undimmed. In an attempt to evade the delays about which delegates to the Legislative Commission had complained, the Provincial Reform had created ‘conscience courts’. The empress boasted to Grimm in 1776 that they were already ‘working wonders’ and would prove ‘the tomb of chicanery’.80 If that was a triumph of hope over expectation, new courts were soon hard at work as far away as Bashkiria, more in the manner of modern arbitration tribunals than of the English equity courts on which they may have been based. ‘Only those with no conscience would refuse to serve in a conscience court,’ Catherine insisted to her secretary in April 1782. And again in July: ‘The conscience court is the pulse showing the morals of each province.’81 To reinforce those morals, she had promulgated a lengthy Police Ordinance on 8 April—literally a ‘statute of good order’—which not only determined the procedures and punitive powers of urban police boards, but also embodied the Cameralist conception of ‘police’ as a rational, creative force for shaping her subjects’ behaviour. To that end, police boards were provided with a characteristic instruction, ‘The Mirror of the Police’, incorporating moral injunctions reminiscent of the empress’s
While Catherine was at work on this new statute, the Court had embarked on its usual round of formal entertainments. Panin’s dismissal had cleared the way for Potemkin to arrange suitable marriages for his nieces in the autumn of 1781. Not that he ever released his hold over them. Count Skavronsky soon discovered that his wedding on 5 September to Catherine Engelhardt had not ended her incestuous relationship with her uncle. Alexandra, who had replaced Praskovya Bruce in the empress’s affections, was married off to the forty-nine-year-old Count Branicki as a way of staking Potemkin’s claims in Poland.83 No banquets followed these weddings, much to the irritation of the more elderly relatives, who were displeased to find old customs ignored. As a further sign of the passing of the generations, the ageing Hofmeisterin Countess Maria Rumyantseva, who had once danced with Peter the Great, was chosen to partner little Alexander at the ball on Catherine’s name day. Rumours that the Engelhardts’ eleven-year-old sister would be made a maid of honour turned out to be false. The St George’s Day ceremony was notable mainly for Catherine’s anger when Princess Repnin was the sole Court lady to appear in chapel. Already irritated by the low turnout earlier in the month—when her maids of honour had been happy to watch the banquet for the Semenovsky officers from the gallery, but not to attend mass—Catherine instructed the Hofmarshal to fine future absentees ten roubles. In that respect, she was no different from the Empress Elizabeth.
There was no difficulty in persuading courtiers to attend the theatre. Moliere’s
The theatre is built in the new style, hitherto completely unknown in this country. The stage is very wide and high, whereas the hall for the spectators is made of three-quarters of a circle. There are no boxes, but apart from the benches in the stalls, there are three balconies, one above the other and running around the auditorium without interruption. The paintings are very beautiful and the view excellent when, on entering, you see the audience, sitting, as in ancient times, in an amphitheatre. Apart from the main entrance there are six more very roomy exits, built in such a way that the public can get out in a matter of minutes in case of fire. Everyone is very pleased with this exceptional and spacious new place of entertainment, which they owe to General Betskoy.86
Though the autumn of 1781 was one of the warmest in living memory, winter finally set in with a vengeance at the end of November. In the following week, it was so cold that Catherine had to close the imperial theatres and cancel her gatherings at the Hermitage. On 20 December, two coachmen were found dead in more than thirty degrees of frost. Nor was this the final trick that the weather had up its sleeve. Within a week of an unseasonal thaw in mid-January, the Court apothecary had dispensed medicine to more than 500 victims of a flu epidemic. Catherine herself succumbed at the end of the month, bringing the Court to a standstill for several days. Though she felt well enough on 3 February to attend her annual lunch with Stroganov, who had returned from Siberia in December with two ancient silver vases, dug up from his own salt mines, she did not linger long.87 Yet any thoughts of a permanent slowdown in middle age were soon dispelled. At Peterhof to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of her accession to the throne in June, she had lost none of her energy, as she emphasised to Grimm:
