Would you like to know what I did the day I arrived here? I ran like a hare and at 11 o’clock, I duly went to mass, as if it were a Sunday. Then I gave an audience to M. de la Torre, whom I count among my old acquaintances, and to M. de la Hererra and Count Lacy, and then to the minister of Saxony. After that, I walked the length of the garden to the quayside in search of my lunch with M. Betskoy. After lunch, I took a launch to the admiralty; there I took some tar and gave three strokes of the hammer to each of two new 100-gun vessels that I had ordered to be built; then I got onto a ship with 74 guns which I ordered to be launched into the water once I was aboard. It took us towards the bridge over the Neva. There, having dropped anchor, we disembarked and got back into the launch to return to the admiralty, where we walked across to find a carriage to take us to the Master of the Horse’s country estate [Leventhal on the Peterhof road]. Having walked through his woods and his promenades, we dined and then arrived here at half-past midnight. So what do you say of a day like that? Wasn’t it packed? I assure you that everyone apart from me was exhausted.88
As if to symbolise her indomitable drive, Catherine finally unveiled Falconet’s statue of Peter the Great on 7 August 1782, a hundred years after his accession to the throne. Only the clergy were absent, perhaps still smarting that the Church had been unable to register its objections to the superhuman figure, twice as big as the tsar himself.89 ‘From Catherine II to Peter I’ was the lapidary motto, inscribed in Latin on the west-facing side of the pedestal and in Russian on the side facing east. Harris grasped the unspoken comparison immediately: ‘I could not avoid, during this ceremony, reflecting how impossible it was that any successor of Her Imperial Majesty who might, in some future day, erect a statue in commemoration of her great actions, ever should be so much superior to her, as she herself is superior to Peter the Great, both in the art of governing, and in that of making her people respected and happy.’90
If Tsar Peter remained the single most powerful symbol of Russia’s superhuman potential, then the great flood of 1777 had offered a salutary reminder of the fragility of man’s triumph over nature. Woken by a gale at five o’clock on the morning of 10 September, Catherine gazed out from the Hermitage onto a scene resembling ‘the destruction of Jerusalem’.91 Rising almost eleven feet above its normal level, the swollen Neva had dumped a fleet of merchant vessels onto the embankment, leaving a forest of tangled masts prey to scavengers for timber. It subsequently emerged that the storm had felled hundreds of trees at both the Summer Palace and Peterhof; the Winter Palace cellars were flooded and its roof damaged; and dozens of the capital’s grandest buildings were severely disfigured.92 Though her first thought had been to summon her sentries to safety, more than a hundred of Catherine’s subjects lost their lives that night. ‘Where am I going to put the 100 gaolbirds taken prisoner by the water?’ she mused to Potemkin. ‘In the House of Quarantine, I say, but I don’t know whether it is strong enough. The canals are alive, and fifteen faithful soldiers have sunk into them.’93
Even as it overflowed, the river was gradually being enclosed by granite embankments designed by Georg Veldten. Begun in 1763, this extraordinary project had reached the Summer Garden by 1770 but was still incomplete in 1777. Four years later, as her carriage snaked between the boulders littering the English Embankment, Elizabeth Dimsdale expressed a common prejudice by doubting that it would ever be finished: ‘the Russians are with great truth remarked to begin things with great spirit and for a little time go on very rapidly, then leave for some other object’.94 She did Catherine an injustice. In January 1780, the empress had charged General Bauer with dredging and redecorating the Fontanka with a budget of 2,372,650 roubles, payable in ten annual instalments. By 1787, much of the canal had been clad in stone under her watchful eye, despite a disconcerting demonstration by 400 peasant labourers, protesting against the miseries imposed on them by the merchant contractor.95 Ultimately, only the Admiralty wharf interrupted an elegant promenade stretching ten feet above the normal water line for several miles along the left bank of the Neva. Widely admired as ‘one of the most sumptuous ornaments of the city’, the embankment was praised by foreign visitors as a ‘grand work, which, in regard to utility and magnificence’ could not ‘be paralleled except among the ruins of ancient Rome’.96
Classical models were no less prominent in Catherine’s mind in planning the redesign of Tsarskoye Selo, where she had advertised her intention ‘to summarise the age of the Caesars, the Augustuses, the Ciceros and such patrons as Maecenas and to create a building where it would be possible to find all these people in one’.97 In 1773, she had hoped that Charles-Louis Clerisseau would draw on his long residence in Rome to design a classical
As this letter shows, Rastrelli’s Baroque interiors were also transformed in these years. Once the main staircase had been moved in 1778 from the southern end of the palace to the centre where it now stands, Catherine had the southern wing converted into a series of cool, neoclassical rooms, no longer extant. Cameron produced at least three variations for the decor of the Lyon room, ultimately said to have cost 201,250 roubles, or ?40,250, not including the lapis lazuli. Measuring thirty-six by thirty-two feet, the room was twenty-eight feet high and took its name from the French silks hanging between twelve mirrors, thirteen feet long by four feet wide. It was almost complete by the time the Court returned to St Petersburg at the end of September 1781. Three further apartments were already finished: the Chinese room, decorated ‘with prodigious fine China jarrs’; the Arabesque room, where Catherine was to enjoy countless games of cards and chess; and her tiny study, which appeared to Elizabeth Dimsdale ‘like an enchanted place, the sides of it inlaid with foil red and green so that it dazzled ones eyes to look at it’.100 Equally delighted by Cameron’s ‘superlative’ interiors, the ever-competitive empress announced to Grimm that ‘no one has seen anything to match them: I can tell you that I have done nothing but look at them for the last nine weeks’.101 Paul’s departure for Vienna allowed Cameron to start on his northern part of the palace, between the staircase and the chapel. ‘Every Sunday I pass your apartments,’ Catherine reported to Maria Fedorovna shortly after her fifty-third birthday in 1782, ‘which currently have neither windows nor doors and are full of workmen.’102
The grand duchess was even keener to hear of progress at the new palace at nearby Pavlovsk, the estate presented to the heir on the birth of his first son. There was still snow on the ground when Catherine made an impromptu visit on 29 April, much to the alarm of the steward, who had only recently taken delivery of 3.5 million bricks. Catching up with the empress while she was still inside the house, he accompanied her on a characteristically demanding tour of the park:
From the ruin Her Majesty wanted to go down to the right of the temple where the paths are not yet made… I prayed M. Nelidinsky to go by a better path but Her Majesty wished to continue… Before arriving [at the cascade] she asked several questions about the water, which I had to answer as no one could explain it sufficiently to Her Majesty. She stopped a moment at the cascade, and passed to the chalet, asking me questions from time to time. She sat a moment at the chalet and asked me several questions about the colonnade then took the path to the edge of the garden.103
‘Building is a devilish thing,’ Catherine confessed to Grimm in one of her periodic excursions into her native German. ‘It devours money, and the more one builds, the more one wants to go on. It is a sickness, like drinking, and a sort of habit.’104 So powerful was that habit that it was not only her favourite summer palace that she had ‘turned upside down, so to speak’:
You wouldn’t recognise my bedroom here in town…I used to have a niche: I have it no longer. My bed is facing the windows and, so that I don’t have the light in my eyes, there is a mirror facing the windows at the foot of the bed, under which is a canopy that barely covers the bed. On both sides of the bed, I have some banquettes
