Empress Catherine the Great

“ The evening of this day, during which I had wept a great deal, walking up and down my room, much agitated both in mind and body, one of my maids, named Catherine Ivanovna Cheregorodskaya, came into my bed-room, where I was quite alone, and said to me very affectionately, and with many tears, “We are all very much afraid you will sink under these afflictions; let me go to-day to my uncle—he is your own confessor as well as the Empress’—I will talk to him, and tell him everything you wish, and I promise you he will speak to the Empress in a manner that will give you satisfaction.” ”

“ He had been in the service of the Empress, when she was princess, on her estate at Zarskoe-Selo, whence he had been removed to Oranienbaum. He was fond of predictions, and, among others, his prediction relative to the Empress had been fulfilled. He had prophesied that she would ascend the throne. He told me, and repeated it as often as I was willing to listen to him, that I should become the Sovereign Empress of Russia; that I should see sons, grandsons, and great-grandsons; and that I should die at the advanced age of more than fourscore years. ”

“ PATIOMKIN. Madman: take care!
NARYSHKIN. Advise the Empress!!
THE SERGEANT. Sainted Nicholas!
VARINKA. Hoo hoo! [a stifled splutter of laughter] .
EDSTASTON [following the Empress and resuming kindly but judicially] . After all, though your Majesty is of course a great queen, yet when all is said, I am a man; and your Majesty is only a woman.
CATHERINE. Only a wo— [she chokes] .
EDSTASTON [continuing] . Believe me, this Russian extravagance will not do. I appreciate as much as any man the warmth of heart that prompts it ”

“ EDSTASTON [mollified] . Well, in a sort of way I do; though I don't know why I should. But my instructions are that I am to see the Empress; and—
PATIOMKIN. Darling, you shall see the Empress. A glorious woman, the greatest woman in the world. But lemme give you piece 'vice—pah! still drunk. They water my vinegar. [He shakes himself; clears his throat; and resumes soberly.] If Catherine takes a fancy to you, you may ask for roubles, diamonds, palaces, titles, orders, anything! and you may aspire to everything: field-marshal, admiral, minister, what you please—except Tsar. ”

“ If the Empress seemed to us in a very bad temper during mass, this disagreeable evidence of want of attention, to say no more, did not leave us in the best of humours either. At the other great festivals, when she dined on the throne, we had the honour of dining with her; this time she repelled us publicly. Returning alone in the carriage with the Grand Duke, I told him what I thought of this, and he said that he would complain of it. On reaching home, half dead with cold and fatigue, I complained to Madame Tchoglokoff of having caught cold. The next day there was a ball at the wooden palace ”

“ She did more; she related to the Empress all that had passed. It would seem as if Madame Tchoglokoff had received a reproof, for she lowered her tone very considerably with me. Indeed, there was much need of this being done, for I began to feel a great tendency to melancholy. I felt totally isolated. The Grand Duke, at Reval, took a passing fancy for a Madame Cédéraparre. As usual, he did not fail to confide the matter to me immediately. I had frequent pains in the chest, and at Catherinthal a spitting of blood, for which I was bled. ”

“ EDSTASTON. Don't be angry, dearest: in this country everybody's a darling. I'll prove it to you. [To Catherine.] Will your Majesty be good enough to call Prince Patiomkin?
CATHERINE [surprised into haughtiness] . Why?
EDSTASTON. To oblige me.
Catherine laughs good-humoredly and goes to the curtains and opens them. The band strikes up a Redowa.
CATHERINE [calling imperiously] . Patiomkin! [The music stops suddenly.] Here! To me! Go on with your music there, you fools. [The Redowa is resumed.]
The sergeant rushes from the ballroom to relieve the Empress of the curtain. ”

“ The Empress stood godmother for her, after which she received an appointment among the maids of honour. M. Tchoglokoff made it a point to show her attention, because her elder brother had laid the foundation of his fortune, by taking him from the corps of cadets, where he was receiving his education, removing him into the horse-guards, and keeping him about himself as a messenger. The Princess of Courland thus brought into our society, and playing daily for hours at trisset with the Grand Duke, Tchoglokoff, and myself, conducted herself at first with great discretion. ”

“ So shook he perfunctorily the Arctic Ursine Fleece, the Hyperborean Candour, when he heard something fall sharply at his feet. He even caught a flash of it as it fell. He saw it issuing from that ear of Thule which would hear no more; he saw it sliding down the whiteness of the hair and gleaming dully in the candlelight upon the polished wood of the flooring.
There was no mistake. It was IT. It was that pledge of respect and esteem which the ever-memorable Catherine, Empress of All the Russias, had bestowed three lives ago upon the stalwart Bones. ”

“ This lady was altogether in the interest of Count Bestoujeff, extremely silly, spiteful, capricious, and very selfish. Her husband, Chamberlain to the Empress, was then gone on some sort of mission from her Majesty to Vienna. I wept a great deal on seeing her arrive, and all the rest of the day. I was to be bled on the following day. In the morning the Empress came to my room, and seeing my eyes red, said to me that young women who did not love their husbands were always crying; that my mother, however, had assured her I had no repugnance to marrying the Grand Duke ”

“ Superficially Patiomkin is a violent, brutal barbarian, an upstart despot of the most intolerable and dangerous type, ugly, lazy, and disgusting in his personal habits. Yet ambassadors report him the ablest man in Russia, and the one who can do most with the still abler Empress Catherine II, who is not a Russian but a German, by no means barbarous or intemperate in her personal habits. She not only disputes with Frederick the Great the reputation of being the cleverest monarch in Europe, but may even put in a very plausible claim to be the cleverest and most attractive individual alive. ”

“ They were to serve in turn in all the rooms, and Andrew Czernicheff like the rest. The Grand Duke often had concerts in the afternoon, and he himself played the violin at them. During one of these concerts, which usually wearied me, I went to my own room. This opened into the great hall of the Summer Palace, which was then filled with scaffoldings, as they were painting the ceiling. The Empress was absent; Madame Krause had gone to her daughter’s, Madame Sievers; and I did not find a soul in my room. From ennui I opened the door of the hall, and saw at the other end Andrew Czernicheff. ”

“ No domestic life could in all its relations have been more perfect, and her love of children amounted to a passion. Among the great female rulers it would be difficult to find one less like Queen Victoria than the Empress Catherine of Russia, but they had this common trait of an intense love of children and a great power of winning their affection. There is a charming letter of Catherine to Grimm, describing her life among her grandchildren, which might almost have been written by the English Queen. ”

“ In 1744, while the court was at Moscow, Catherine II arrived there with her mother, on the 9th of February.
The Russian court was at that time divided into two great sections or parties. At the head of the first, which now began to recover from its previous depression, was the Vice-Chancellor Count Bestoujeff Rumine. He was a man far more feared than loved, excessively intriguing and suspicious, firm and resolute in his principles, not a little tyrannical, an implacable enemy, but a steady friend, never abandoning those who did not first turn their backs on him. ”

“ On her return she told me that her uncle had heard that the Empress had called her nephew a fool, but said that the Grand Duchess had a great deal of sense. This remark came to me from more quarters than one, as well as that her Majesty, among her intimate associates, was constantly extolling my talents, often adding, “She loves truth and justice; she is a woman of great sense; but my nephew is a fool.”
I still continued to keep my room, as before, under the pretext of bad health. ”

“ Whilst there, the church was struck with lightning; fortunately her Imperial Majesty was in a chapel at the side of the great church, and only learnt the fact through the terror of the courtiers; however, there was no one either hurt or killed by the accident. A little while afterwards she returned to Moscow, whither we also repaired from Liberitza. Upon our return to the city, we saw the Princess of Courland kiss the Empress’ hand in public for the permission which had been given her to marry Prince George Hovansky. ”

“ When the Empress Elizabeth ascended the throne of Russia, she sent the Chamberlain Korf into Holstein to demand her nephew. In consequence, the Prince Administrator immediately sent him off, accompanied by the Grand Marshal Brummer, the Chamberlain Berkholz, and the Chamberlain Decken, nephew of the former. The Empress received the Prince with great joy, and soon after his arrival set out for Moscow to be crowned. She had determined to declare him her heir ”

“ During my confinement, the Grand Duke had also a great affliction, for he learned from Count Alexander Schouvaloff, that one of his old huntsmen, named Bastien, whom the Empress a few years before had ordered to marry Mademoiselle Schenck, my old lady’s-maid, had come to give information of his having heard, from some one or other, that Bressan wished to give something or other to the Duke to drink. ”

“ But she decided that she should be named after her eldest sister, Anne Petrovna, Duchess of Holstein, mother of the Grand Duke. His Imperial Highness appeared much pleased at the birth of this child; he made great rejoicings over it in his own apartments, ordered rejoicings to be made in Holstein also, and received all the compliments paid to him on the subject with great manifestations of pleasure. On the sixth day the Empress stood godmother to the child, and brought me an order on the cabinet for 60,000 roubles. ”

“ Petersburg. The Princess Dashkoff, the youngest sister of Elizabeth Voronzoff, although she wishes to arrogate to herself all the honour of this revolution, was in very bad odour on account of her connections, while her age, which is only nineteen, was not calculated to inspire confidence. She pretends that everything passed through her to reach me, yet I was in communication with all the chiefs for six months before she even knew one of their names. It is quite true that she has great talent, but it is spoilt by her excessive ostentation and her naturally quarrelsome disposition. ”

“ The adherents of the great-duke seemed secure of success, and the friends of Catherine were avoided as persons doomed to destruction. At this juncture, Bassevitz whispered one of the opposite party, "The empress is mistress of the treasures and the fortress; she has gained over the guards and the synod, and many of the chief nobility, and even here she has more followers than you imagine; advise, therefore, your friends to make no opposition, as they value their heads." ”

“ In this were interested all the personal partisans of Catherine, those “chosen sons of the people,” who had stirred up the empress to put herself at the head of the movement. They were far more interested in the matter than Catherine herself: the change had been brought about by all classes of society, by the whole nation, not by her; no one could even think of the detested Peter ascending the throne a second time—it was not on Catherine that the malcontents would revenge themselves, that is if there were or would be any, but on the “chosen of the people.” ”

“ A prisoner in the palace, she could do nothing without permission. If she wept for the death of her father, the Empress sent her word that she had grieved enough. “That her father was not a king, that she should mourn him longer than a week.” If she evinced a friendship for any of her maids of honour, she might be sure the lady would be dismissed. If she became attached to a faithful servant, still more certain was it that that servant would be turned away.
Her relations with the Grand Duke were monstrous, degrading. He made her the confidante of his amorous intrigues. ”

“ The history of the court under Peter I, under the empress Anna, and under Elizabeth is full of examples of tyranny, cruelty, and arbitrariness; all Catherine’s contemporaries were astonished at the mildness of her behaviour to those around her and rejoiced at the absence of stiff formalities and hard measures in her intercourse with her subordinates. In spite of her quick temper and impulsiveness, Catherine had complete control over herself, and in her intercourse with her fellow creatures she was governed by principles of humanity. ”

“ Not seeing any advantage to Russia in helping the king of Prussia in his war against the German emperor and his allies, Catherine did not consider it necessary to assist the latter. “I am of tolerably martial tastes,” said she, in the first days after her accession to the throne, to one of the ambassadors to the Russian court, “but I will never begin war without a cause; if I begin war, it will not be as the empress Elizabeth did—to please others, but only when I find it favourable for myself.” These words are characteristic of all Catherine’s further foreign policy ”