Catherine the Great

Thursday 27 June and immediately interred in the neighbouring cemetery following a funeral service conducted by Metropolitan Gavriil.¹⁴⁰ Bezborodko’s attempts not to trouble the empress with the details were thwarted by typically persistent questioning which, as he pointed out, ‘only made her grief the greater’. Catherine did not attend, having been confined to her apartments since Sunday. She, too, had developed alarming symptoms—a sore throat and a high fever—which prompted Dr Rogerson to draw two cups of ‘extremely inflamed’ blood on the day of the funeral. By then, he decided, she was out of danger. Prescribing salt to relieve the indigestion that had prevented her from sleeping, he confidently predicted a full recovery.¹⁴¹ In physical terms, he was right. Emotionally, however, Catherine took longer to recuperate. She shunned most visitors. Sasha’s mother, who arrived in response to the empress’s letter of condolence in the hope of securing her family’s favour, was deflected onto a lady-in-waiting.¹⁴² Though Catherine could hardly refuse to receive Paul and his wife on Paul’s name day, the audience was brief and the subdued celebrations went ahead without her. Servants were confined to their everyday livery and the customary salute, music and toasts were all cancelled as a mark of respect.¹⁴³

Soon the wider implications of the crisis were on everyone’s lips. Princess Dashkova would scarcely mourn the favourite, observed her younger sister: ‘They hated one another.’¹⁴⁴ Personalities were scarcely the point, countered Alexander Vorontsov. Even those who had no connection with Lanskoy must regret his passing when they learned of its impact on Catherine: ‘The preservation of the empress is too interesting to us all.’¹⁴⁵ Riding to the rescue from Kremenchug, Potemkin arrived at Tsarskoye Selo on 10 July, having covered 760 miles in barely a week. He and Fedor Orlov went straight to comfort their bereaved sovereign. On the following Sunday, they were joined briefly by Bruce, Osterman, Kirill Razumovsky, Ivan Chernyshev and Lev Naryshkin. Catherine was persuaded to ride out in her carriage with a favourite lady-in-waiting, Maria Perekusikhina, but not even such close friends could draw her out of her self-imposed seclusion. She continued to dine alone, seeing few apart from Bezborodko, Potemkin, Orlov and her confessor. Though she received further brief visits from Paul and Maria Fedorovna, she avoided the traditional rituals during the Dormition Fast. By 18 August, she felt well enough to write a jocular letter to the Prince de Ligne, explaining (without mentioning Lanskoy) that she had immersed herself in work on her universal etymological dictionary. Anticipating Ligne’s next visit to Russia, she teased him about his son’s abortive flight in the Montgolfier balloon that tore open in mid-air on 19 January:

If you arrive here by balloon, my Prince, I shall reconcile myself to this fine invention, which I have banned for fear of increasing the danger of fire among the wooden buildings of which we have too many in our territories. The crash of the balloon at Lyon has not caused this new method of travel to be believed in here.¹⁴⁶

Yet it was one thing to joke to a friend, another to face her Court. While the feast of St Alexander Nevsky on 30 August brought a welcome opportunity to see her elder grandson, the annual celebrations, transferred from the monastery to Tsarskoye Selo, were conducted in her absence. To deepen her misery, a courier arrived from Moscow next day to announce the death of Zakhar Chernyshev. At the time of their dalliance in 1751, Catherine had been unable to imagine paradise without her dashing cavalier; now he had got there before her. ¹⁴⁷

Having initially intended to remain in the country until 10 September, she returned to town five days early, travelling in a simple two-seater with a favourite lady-in-waiting, Anna Protasova, and sleeping in the Hermitage. The rooms she had occupied with Lanskoy carried too many memories, and it was not until the following spring that she returned to her usual Winter Palace apartments. Looking back, Catherine remembered the summer of 1784 as a perpetual series of battles to recover her equilibrium: ‘one to be fought, one to be won, one to be lost.’¹⁴⁸ Only on 8 September did she finally summon the courage to appear in public on the feast of the Nativity of the Virgin. After mass, she endured a lengthy hand-kissing ceremony before retiring to the Hermitage for lunch with Potemkin, a handful of friends, and Prince Repnin, who had come to request her permission to take his sick daughter abroad.¹⁴⁹ ‘In truth,’ Catherine confessed to Grimm, ‘it was such a big effort that on returning to my bedroom, I felt so exhausted that anyone else would have fainted, something which has never happened to me in my life.’ ‘If you want to know my true state,’ she continued a fortnight later:

I will tell you that for three months from yesterday I have been inconsolable over the irreparable loss I have sustained, that the sole improvement is that I have got used to human faces again, that otherwise my heart still bleeds just as it did at that first moment, that I do my duty and try to do it well, but that my grief is extreme, and such as I have never felt in my life, and it is now three months that I have been in this cruel situation, suffering like the damned.¹⁵⁰

Count Cobenzl was more interested in the political consequences of such ‘immoderate grief’. Mercifully for a supporter of the Austrian alliance, they had proved to be minimal. For all Catherine’s emotional turbulence, the direction of her government had remained firm:

There has been not a single sort of discord within the Court. On the contrary, I believe that there have been few epochs where there has been so much unity and so little jealousy between the people to whom the management of affairs is entrusted. There is no question of a new favourite, and many people are beginning to believe that there won’t be one. If the health of the Empress is not altered by this change, it will certainly do more good than harm.¹⁵¹

CHAPTER ELEVEN Zenith 1785–1790

In the event, the interval between favourites, though longer than usual, proved to be only temporary. During the celebrations surrounding Catherine’s fifty-sixth birthday on Easter Monday 1785, a new shooting star emerged. Introduced to the empress by Potemkin, the thirty-one-year-old Lieutenant Alexander Yermolov was first mentioned in the Court journal on 22 April. His presence among the five guests at lunch on the following day suggests that the relationship may have begun during Lent, a time of greater privacy than any other for the empress.¹ Although Potemkin dubbed him the ‘white negro’ on account of his unusually flat nose, it was Yermolov’s flat-footedness in politics that led to his rapid downfall. Drawn into business in April 1786 by his appointment to a commission to restructure the assignat bank, he struggled, as his friend Bezborodko had predicted, to cope with machinations at Court. After being inveigled into an intrigue against Potemkin that may have been inspired by Zavadovsky and Alexander Vorontsov, Yermolov was dismissed in July with the now customary redundancy package—the Polish Order of the White Eagle, 4300 serfs in Belorussia, 130,000 roubles in cash and a silver dinner service—and sent abroad. In the following year, he embarrassed Semen Vorontsov, Catherine’s ambassador in London, by demanding to be presented to George III. ‘The king has always found it ridiculous that in Russia one can be promoted from sergeant to major general in the space of two years without serving at all.’²

By comparison with Yermolov’s extended ‘retirement’ (he died in Vienna at the age of eighty in 1834), the empress’s infatuation was brief indeed. While it lasted, however, it served its purpose, as Cobenzl noted, by staving off melancholy and stimulating her natural joie de vivre. During the long months of misery after Lanskoy’s death, she had been consoled by a treatise sent to her by the Court physician at Hanover, Dr Johann Zimmerman. Solitude considered with respect to its influence on the mind and the heart was eventually published in Russian translation in 1791. For the moment, Catherine acknowledged the support of the new favourite and her other faithful friends: ‘My inner self has regained its calm and serenity.’³ Restored to health and happiness, she had launched into a new bout of ‘legislomania’, capping a decade of fundamental domestic reform by promulgating the Charter to the Nobility and the Charter to the Towns on her birthday, 21 April 1785.

Though Catherine had no intention of inflating the pretensions of the nobility as a whole—it was part of the