They were coming closer by the hour. On the 14th, the Court returned to the Winter Palace in town. On the 15th, there was another dinner with both Vassilchikov and Potemkin among the twenty guests. One can imagine the unhappiness of poor Vassilchikov as Potemkin dominated the scene.
Potemkin and the Empress might have consummated their love affair around this time. Few of their thousands of notes are dated, but there is one that we can tentatively place around 15 February in which Catherine cancels a meeting with ‘l’esprit’ in the banya, the Russian steam-bath, mainly because ‘all my ladies are there now and probably won’t leave for another hour’.25 Ordinary men and women bathed together in banyas in the eighteenth century, much to the indignation of foreigners, but empresses did not. This is the first mention of Catherine and Potemkin meeting in the banya, but it was to be their favourite place for rendezvous. If they were meeting in the intimate banya on the 15th, it is likely they were already lovers.
On the 18th, the Empress attended a Russian comedy at the House of Opera and then probably met Potemkin in her apartments. They talked or made love until one in the morning – extremely late for that disciplined Germanic princess. In a note in which one can sense their increasing intensity but also her submissiveness to him, she sweetly worries that ‘I exceeded your patience…my watch stopped and the time passed so quickly that an hour seemed like a minute.’26
‘My darling, what nonsense you talked yesterday…’, she wrote in these early days. ‘The time I spend with you is so happy. We passed four hours together, boredom vanishes and I don’t want to part with you. My dear, my friend, I love you so much: you are so handsome, so clever, so jovial, so witty: when I am with you, I attach no importance to the world. I’ve never been so happy…’.27 For the first time, we can hear the intimate laughter that must have echoed at night out of the Winter Palace banya. They were both sensualists – a pair of Epicureans. ‘My darling friend, I fear you might be angry with me. If not, all the better. Come quickly to my bedroom and prove it.’28
Vassilchikov was still in residence – at least officially. Catherine and Potemkin nicknamed him ‘soupe à la glace’ – ‘iced soup’.29 It was now she told Potemkin that she wished they had started a year and half before instead of wasting precious time unhappily.30 But the presence of Vassilchikov in his apartments was still upsetting Potemkin, who was always hysterically jealous. He had apparently flounced off because, in a letter a few days later, Catherine had to coax him back: ‘I cannot force someone to caress…You know my nature and my heart, you know my good and bad qualities, I let you choose your behaviour…It is silly to torment yourself…You ruin your health for nothing.’31
Vassilchikov has been almost forgotten, but these days must have been agonizing for him. Catherine was ruthless with those she could not respect and one senses she was ashamed of his mediocrity. Vassilchikov realized that he could never play the role of Potemkin, whose ‘standing was very different from mine. I was merely a sort of kept woman…I was scarcely allowed to see anyone or go out. When I asked for anything, no notice was taken whatsoever…When I was anxious for the Order of St Anna, I spoke about it to the Empress and found 30,000 roubles in my pocket next day in notes. I always had my mouth closed like that…As for Potemkin, he gets what he wants…he is the master.’32
‘The master’ insisted that the unfortunate bowl of ‘Iced Soup’ be removed from the table. Vassilchikov moved out of his apartments in the Winter Palace. They became the Council Room, because Potemkin refused to live in someone else’s apartments. New rooms were decorated for him. Potemkin himself moved out of the cottage at the Samoilov’s to stay with the trusted Chamberlain Yelagin.33
By late February, the relationship was no longer either an amorous courtship or a sexual affair: the couple were absolutely committed. On the 27th, Potemkin was confident enough to write a letter requesting that he be appointed ‘general and personal aide-de-camp to Her Majesty’. There were a handful of adjutant-generals, mostly just courtiers. But in this case the meaning would be clear. He added in what was presumably a Potemkinian joke, ‘it could not offend anybody’. Both of them must have laughed at this. His arrival would offend everybody, from the Orlovs to the Panins, from Maria Theresa and Frederick the Great to George III and Louis XVI. It would change the political landscape and ultimately Russia’s alliances abroad. But no matter, because he touchingly added his real feelings: ‘I would be the happiest man alive…’.34 The letter was handed in to Stekalov, who was in charge of requests, like any other petition. But this one was answered far more quickly.
‘Lieutenant-General…I think your request is appropriate,’ she replied the next day, taking off official language, ‘in view of the services that you have rendered to me and our Motherland.’ It was typical of Potemkin simply to write officially: ‘he was the only one of her favourites who dared to become enamoured of her and to make the first advances’, wrote Charles Masson, later Swiss mathematics tutor at Court and author of scandalous but unreliable memoirs. Catherine appreciated this courage in her reply: ‘I am ordering the drawing up of your nomination to adjutant-general. I must confess to you that I am pleased that you, trusting me, decided to send your request directly to me without looking for roundabout ways.’35 It is at this moment that Potemkin steps out of the shadows of history to become one of the most described and discussed statesmen of the century.
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‘A new scene has just opened,’ Sir Robert Gunning, the English envoy, reported to the Earl of Suffolk, Secretary of State for the North, in London on 4 March, having just watched the new Adjutant-General at Court, ‘which is likely to merit more attention than any that has presented itself since the beginning of this reign.’ Since this was the age of letter-writing, everyone now wrote about Potemkin. Diplomats were agog because, as Gunning saw at once, Potemkin was abler than both Prince Orlov and Vassilchikov. It is interesting that, just a few days after appearing as official favourite, even foreigners not intimate with the Court were informing their kings that Potemkin had arrived to love the Empress and help her rule. ‘Mr Vassilchikov the favourite whose understanding was too limited to admit of his having any influence in affairs or sharing his mistress’s confidence’, explained Gunning, ‘is replaced by a man who bids fair for possessing them both in the most supreme degree.’36 The Prussian Ambassador Count von Solms went further to Frederick: ‘Evidently Potemkin…will become the most influential person in Russia. Youth, intellect and positive qualities will give him such importance…Soon Prince Grigory Grigorevich [Orlov] will be forgotten and Orlov’s family will drop to the common standard.’37
Russia’s chief ally was even more repulsed than he had been by the arrival of Vassilchikov two years before. Thoroughly informed by Solms, Frederick the Great wrote to his brother Prince Henry ridiculing the newcomer’s name – ‘General Patukin or Tapukin’ – but recognized that his rise to power ‘might prove prejudicial to the well-being of our affairs’. Being Frederick, he coined a philosophical principle of misogynistic statesmanship: ‘A woman is always a woman and, in feminine government, the cunt has more influence than a firm policy guided by straight reason.’38