The Memoirs of Catherine the Great (39 page)

With a brusque transition the Empress went from Brockdorff to the uncovered connection between Stambke and Count Bestuzhev, and said to me, “I leave you to consider how having contact with a prisoner of the state could be excusable.” As my name did not appear in this affair and as there had been no mention made of me, I was silent, taking this as a remark that did not concern me. At this the Empress approached me and said, “You meddle in many things that do not concern you. I would not have dared to do as much during Empress Anna’s reign. How, for example, did you dare to send orders to Marshal Apraksin?” I said to her, “Me! The thought of sending him orders never entered my head.” “How,” she said, “can you deny having written to him? Your letters are there in this basin.” She pointed at them. “You are forbidden to write.” Then I said, “It is true that I transgressed this prohibition and I beg your pardon for it.

But since my letters are there, these three letters can prove to Your Imperial Majesty that I never sent him orders, but that in one I told him what was being said of his conduct.” Here she interrupted me, saying, “And why did you write him this?” I replied, “Quite simply because I took an interest in the Marshal, whom I liked a great deal. I asked him to follow your orders. The two other letters contain only congratulations on the birth of his son and best wishes for the new year.” At this she said, “Bestuzhev says that there were many others.” I replied, “If Bestuzhev says this, he is lying.” “Well then,” said she, “since he is lying about you I will have him put to torture.” She thought to frighten me with this. I replied to her that she was the sovereign mistress and could do what she judged fitting, but that I had certainly only written these three letters to Apraksin. She fell silent and appeared to gather her thoughts.

I am reporting the most striking details of this conversation that have remained in my memory, but it would be impossible for me to remember everything that was said during the at least one and a half hours that it lasted. The Empress walked about the room, alternately addressing herself to me, her nephew, and even more often Count Alexander Shuvalov, with whom the Grand Duke was in conversation most of the time while the Empress spoke to me. I have already said that I observed in Her Imperial Majesty less anger than worry. As for the Grand Duke, in all of his remarks during this interview he showed a great deal of venom, animosity, and even rage toward me. He sought to anger the Empress against me as much as he could. But as he went about this stupidly and showed more passion than justice, he missed his mark, and the Empress’s intelligence and perspicacity brought her to my side. She listened with particular attention and a kind of instinctive approbation to my firm and moderate responses to the immoderate remarks that Monsieur my husband made and in which one saw clear as day that he sought to clear out my position to have his mistress of the moment placed there, if he could. But this could not be to the Empress’s liking, nor would Messieurs Shuvalov scheme to make the Counts Vorontsov their masters. But this lay beyond the powers of judgment of His Imperial Highness, who always believed what he wished and who brushed aside all ideas contrary to the one that dominated him. And he carried on so much that the Empress approached me and said to me in a low voice, “I will have many more things to say to you, but I cannot speak because I do not want to put you two more at odds than you already are,” and with her eyes and head she showed me that it was because of those present. Seeing this sign of intimate goodwill that she gave me in such a critical situation, I was deeply touched, and I too said very quietly, “And I too cannot speak, as pressing as my desire is to open my heart and my soul to you.” I saw that what I had just said to her made a very vivid and favorable impression on her. Tears had come to her eyes, and to hide that she was moved, and to what extent, she dismissed us, saying that it was very late. In truth, it was almost three in the morning. The Grand Duke left first; I followed him. At the moment that Count Alexander Shuvalov wanted to pass through the door after me, the Empress called him, and he stayed in her room. The Grand Duke kept walking with long strides. I did not hurry this time to follow him. He went back into his rooms and I into mine. I began to undress to go to bed when I heard knocking at the door through which I had just entered. I asked who it was. Count Alexander Shuvalov said that it was he, asking me to open, which I did. He told me to dismiss my ladies; they left. Then he said to me that the Empress had summoned him, and after speaking to him some time, she had asked him to present her compliments to me, and to beg me not to be distressed, and that she would have a second conversation with me alone. I bowed deeply before Count Shuvalov and told him to present my very deepest respects to Her Imperial Majesty and to thank her for her kindness toward me, which had brought me back to life, and that I would wait for this second conversation with the keenest impatience and that I begged him to hasten the moment. He told me not to speak of it to a living soul and namely to the Grand Duke, whom the Empress regretted seeing so angry with me. I promised this. I thought, But if she is upset that he is angry, why therefore anger him even more by recounting to him the conversation at the Summer Palace about the people who made him behave stupidly? Nevertheless this unforeseen return of intimacy on the part of the Empress made me very happy.

The following day I told the confessor’s niece to thank her uncle for the exceptional service he had just rendered me in obtaining this conversation with the Empress. She returned from her uncle’s home and told me that the confessor knew the Empress had said that her nephew was an idiot, but that the Grand Duchess had much intelligence. This remark was repeated to me by more than one source, as was the fact that Her Imperial Majesty did nothing but boast of my abilities among her intimates, often adding, “She loves truth and justice. She is a woman with much intelligence, but my nephew is an idiot.” I shut myself up in my apartment as before, under the pretext of ill health. I remember that, at the time, I was reading the first five volumes of the
Histoire des voyages
with the map on the table, which amused and instructed me.
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When I was tired of this reading, I leafed through the first volumes of the Encyclopédie.
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I waited for the day when it would please the Empress to invite me for a second conversation. From time to time I repeated my request to Count Shuvalov, telling him I greatly wished for my fate to be decided at last.

As for the Grand Duke, I did not hear any more talk of him at all. I knew only that he was waiting for my dismissal with impatience and that he was planning for sure to marry Elizabeth Vorontsova in a second wedding. She came to his apartment and already played the hostess there. Apparently her uncle, Vice Chancellor Count Vorontsov, who was a hypocrite if ever there was one, learned of the plans that were perhaps his brother’s or more likely his nephews’, who were only children at the time, the eldest being barely twenty years old or thereabouts. Fearing that his newly restored favor with the Empress would suffer from this plan, he requested the task of dissuading me from requesting my dismissal. For here is what happened. One fine morning it was announced to me that Vice Chancellor Mikhail Vorontsov was asking to speak to me on behalf of the Empress. Utterly astonished by this extraordinary delegation, though not yet dressed, I had Monsieur the Vice Chancellor enter. He began by kissing my hand and squeezing it with great affection, after which he wiped his eyes, from which flowed a few tears. As at the time I had been somewhat warned against him, I did not put much faith in this prelude, which was supposed to signal his zeal, but I let him perform what I regarded as a kind of playacting. I asked him to sit down. He was a bit out of breath because of a kind of goiter from which he suffered. He sat down with me and told me that the Empress had asked him to speak with me and to dissuade me from insisting on being sent home. Her Imperial Majesty herself had ordered him to beg me on her behalf to give up this idea, to which she would never consent. In particular, he begged and beseeched me to give him my word not to talk about it anymore. This plan truly pained the Empress and all honorable people, among whose number he assured me that he counted. I replied to him that there was nothing that I would not do willingly to please Her Imperial Majesty and honorable people, but I believed my life and my health were in danger from the kind of life to which I was exposed. I only made people miserable, all those who drew near me were continually exiled and dismissed, the Grand Duke was poisoned against me to the point of hatred, and moreover he had never loved me. Her Imperial Majesty as well gave me almost continual signs of her disfavor, and seeing myself a burden to everyone and dying from boredom and sorrow myself, I had asked to be sent home so as to free everyone of this person who was such a burden and was wasting away from sorrow and boredom. He spoke to me of my children. I told him that I did not see them, and that since my churching ceremony I had not yet seen the youngest and could not see them without an express order from the Empress, two rooms from whom they resided, their apartment being part of hers. I did not doubt that she took excellent care of them, but being deprived of the satisfaction of seeing them, it did not matter to me whether I was a hundred steps or a hundred leagues from them. He told me that the Empress would have a second conversation with me, and he added that it was to be sincerely hoped that Her Imperial Majesty would be reconciled with me. I replied by asking him to hasten this second conversation and said that for my part, I would neglect nothing that could expedite his wish. He stayed in my room for more than an hour and spoke a long time and about many different things. I noticed that his improved favor had given him something attractive in his speech and his bearing that he did not have before, when I had considered him indistinguishable from everyone else. One day at the court, unhappy with the Empress, with political affairs, and with those who possessed Her Imperial Majesty’s favor and trust, seeing that the Empress spoke at length with the Ambassador of the Empress Queen of Hungary and Bohemia while he and I and everyone were standing around bored to death, he had said to me, “What do you want to bet that she is mouthing nothing but empty phrases?” Laughing, I replied, “My God, what are you saying?” He replied in Russian with this catchphrase:
“she is by her nature a speaker of empty phrases.” Finally he left, assuring me of his zeal, and he took leave of me by kissing my hand once again. For the time being I was sure not to be sent away, because I was being asked not even to speak of it. But I judged it fitting not to appear in public and to continue to stay in my room, as if I expected the decision about my fate only in the second conversation that I was supposed to have with the Empress.

I waited for this conversation a long time. I remember that April 21, my birthday, I did not go out. While having dinner, the Empress informed me through Alexander Shuvalov that she was drinking to my health. I thanked her for deigning to remember me on the day, I said, of my unfortunate birth, which I would curse if on the same day I had not received baptism.
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When the Grand Duke learned that the Empress had sent this message to me that day, he decided to send me the same message. When they came to give me his compliments, I got up and with a very deep bow, I expressed my thanks. After the parties for my birthday and the Empress’s coronation day, which were four days apart, I again remained in my room without going out until Count Poniatowski sent me notice that the French Ambassador, Marquis de L’Hôpital, highly praised my firm conduct and said that this decision to not leave my apartment could only turn to my advantage. Taking this remark as devilish praise from an enemy, I then decided to do the opposite of what he praised, and one Sunday, when it was least expected, I dressed myself and left my private apartment. At the moment that I entered the apartment in which the ladies and gentlemen were, I saw their astonishment at seeing me. A few minutes after my appearance, the Grand Duke arrived. I saw his astonishment too, displayed on his physiognomy, and as I spoke to the group, he participated in the conversation and addressed a few remarks to me, to which I responded in a natural tone.

Meanwhile, on April 17, Prince Charles of Saxony came to Petersburg for the second time. The Grand Duke had received him the first time he had been to Russia in a sufficiently gentlemanly style. But this second time, His Imperial Highness believed himself justified in behaving without any manners toward him, and here is why. It was not a secret to the Russian army that at the battle of Zorndorf, Prince Charles of Saxony had been one of the first to flee. It was even said that he had continued this flight without stopping until Landsberg. Now, having heard this, His Imperial Highness decided that as the man was an avowed coward, he would not speak to him, nor did he want anything to do with him. There is every indication that the Princess of Courland, the daughter of Biron, of whom I have already often had occasion to speak, contributed more than a little to this, because at the time, people had begun to whisper that the plan was to make Prince Charles of Saxony a Duke of Courland, which greatly angered the Princess of Courland, whose father was still held at Yaroslavl.
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She conveyed her animosity to the Grand Duke, over whom she had maintained some influence. At the time, this Princess was promised for the third time, to Baron Alexander Cherkasov, whom she in fact married the following winter.
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