The Russian courtiers observed Potemkin carefully, chronicling every move of the new favourite, even his jewellery and the decoration of his apartments. Every detail meant something that was important for them to know. Solms had already discovered that Potemkin’s arrival did not trouble the Panins.39 ‘I think this new actor will play his part with great vivacity and big changes if he’ll be able to consolidate his position,’40 wrote General Peter Panin to Prince Alexander Kurakin on 7 March. Evidently, the Panins thought they could use Potemkin to obliterate the credit of the Orlovs.41 ‘The new Adjutant-General is always on duty instead of all the others,’ Countess Sievers wrote to her husband, one of Catherine’s senior officials. ‘They say he is pleasant and modest.’42 Potemkin was already amassing the sort of power Vassilchikov never possessed. ‘If you want anything, my sweet,’ Countess Rumiantseva wrote to her husband, the Field-Marshal, down with the army, ‘ask Potemkin.’43
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To her friend Grimm, Catherine paraded her exhilaration at escaping Vassilchikov and finding Potemkin: ‘I have drawn away from a certain good-natured but extremely dull character, who has immediately been replaced by one of the greatest, wittiest and most original eccentrics of this iron century.’44
Skip Notes
* When Emperor Alexander I died in 1825, he was widely believed to have become a monk wandering the Russian vastness.
PART THREE Together
1774–1776
7
LOVE
The doors will be open…I am going to bed…Darling, I will do whatever you command. Shall I come to you or will you come to me?
Catherine II to G. A. Potemkin
This was Potemkin, a great thing in days
When homicide and harlotry made great.
If stars and titles could entail long praise,
His glory might half equal his estate
This fellow, being six foot high, could raise
A kind of phantasy proportionate
In the then sovereign of the Russian people,
Who measured men as you would do a steeple.
Lord Byron, Don Juan Canto VII: 37
Everything about the love of Catherine and Potemkin is exceptional. Both were extraordinary individuals in the most unique of circumstances. Yet the love affair on which they were now embarked has features that are universal, even today. Their passion was so exhausting and tumultuous that it is easy to forget that they loved one another while ruling a vast empire – at war abroad, in civil war at home. She was an empress and he a subject – both of matching ‘boundless ambition’ – living in a highly competitive Court where everything was seen and every glance had political consequences. They often forgot themselves in their love and moods, but neither was ever completely private: Catherine was always the Sovereign, and Potemkin, from the first day, was more than a mere favourite, a politician of the first rank.
The lovers were no longer young by the standards of their time: Potemkin was thirty-four, Catherine ten years older. But their love was all the more touching for their imperfections. In February 1774, Potemkin had long since lost his Alcibiadean perfection. Now he was a bizarre and striking sight that fascinated, appalled and attracted his contemporaries in equal measure. His stature was colossal, yet his figure was still lithe; his admired head of hair was long and unbrushed, a rich brown, almost auburn, sometimes covered by grey wigs. His head too was titanic, but almost pear-like in shape. His profile resembled the soft lines of a dove – perhaps that is why Catherine often called him that. The face was pale, long, thin and oddly sensitive in such a huge man – more that of a poet than a general. The mouth was one of his best features: his lips were full and red; his teeth strong and white, a rare asset at that time; his chin had a dimple cleft. His right eye was green and blue; his left one was useless, half closed, and sometimes it made him squint. It looked strange – though Jean-Jacob Jennings, a Swedish diplomat, who met him much later, said ‘the eye defect’ was much less noticeable than he had expected. Potemkin never got over his sensitivity about it, but it gave him a certain vulnerability as well as a piratical air. The ‘defect’ did make this outlandish figure seem more like a mythical beast – Panin called him ‘Le Borgne’ – ‘the blindman’, but most followed the Orlovs and called him ‘Cyclops’.1
The diplomatic corps were immediately rapt: ‘his figure is gigantic and disproportioned and his countenance is far from engaging’, wrote Gunning, but:
Potemkin appears to have a great knowledge of mankind and more of the discriminating faculty than his countrymen in general possess and as much address in intrigue and suppleness in his station as any of them. Though the profligacy of his manner is notorious, he is the only one to have formed connections with the clergy. With these qualifications he may naturally flatter himself with the hopes of rising to that height to which his boundless ambition aspires.2
Solms reported, ‘Potemkin is very tall, well formed but has an unpleasant appearance because he squints,’ but three days later he added that given his ‘youth and intellect…it will be easy for General Potemkin…to occupy Orlov’s place in the Empress’s heart’.3
His manners varied from those of a courtier at Versailles to those of one of his Cossack friends. This is why Catherine delighted in nicknaming him after Cossacks, Tartars and wild animals. His contemporaries, especially Catherine, agreed that the whole picture, with its Russian scale and its mixture of ugliness and beauty, reeked of primitive energy, an almost animalistic sexuality, outrageous originality, driving intellect and surprising sensitivity. He was either loved – or hated. As one of Kirill Razumovsky’s daughters asked: ‘How can one pay court to the blind beggar and why?’4
Catherine remained a sexually attractive, handsome and very majestic woman in her prime. Her brow was high and strong, the blue eyes bright, playful and coolly arrogant. Her eyelashes were black, her mouth shapely, her nose slightly aquiline, her skin remained white and blooming, and her bearing made her appear taller than she was. She was already voluptuous, which she camouflaged by always wearing ‘an ample robe with broad sleeves…similar to ancient Muscovite costume’.5 Everyone acclaimed her ‘dignity tempered with graciousness,’6 which made her ‘still beautiful, infinitely clever and knowledgeable but with romantic spirit in her loves’.7
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Catherine and Potemkin were suddenly inseparable. When they were not together, even when they were just in their own apartments, a few yards apart, they wrote to each other manically. They were both highly articulate. Fortunately for us, words were enormously important to them. Sometimes they sent several notes a day, back and forth: they were the equivalent of telephone calls or, even more, the e-mail of the Internet. Being secret love letters that often dealt with state affairs as well, they were usually unsigned. Potemkin’s handwriting, a surprisingly fine and scratchy hand for such a big man, gets progressively worse as times goes on until it is almost illegible in any language by his death. The letters are in a mixture of Russian and French, sometimes almost randomly; at other times, matters of the heart were in French, those of state in Russian. A wealth of these letters have survived, a record of a lifelong love and political partnership. Some belong in that century, but others are so modern they could have been written by a pair of lovers today. Some could have been written only by an empress and a statesman; others speak the timelessly trivial language of love. There are even complete conversations: ‘Go, my dove, and be happy,’ wrote Catherine to Potemkin in one letter. He departed. When he returned, Catherine received this: ‘Mother, we are back, now it’s time for supper.’ To this she replied: ‘Good God! Who might have thought you would return?’8