Catherine addressed her lover as ‘my darling soul’, ‘my heart’, ‘sweetheart’ and ‘bijou’. Later she often used the traditional Russian ‘batushka’ or ‘batinka’ – or papa’ – and endless diminutives of Grigory: ‘Grisha’, ‘Grishenka’, ‘Grishenok’, even ‘Grishefishenka’. At the height of their love, her names for him become even more colourfuclass="underline" ‘My golden pheasant’, ‘Golden cockerel’, ‘Dearest dove’, ‘Kitten’, ‘Little Dog’, ‘Tonton’, ‘dear little heart’, ‘Twin Soul’, ‘Little parrot’, ‘part-bird, part-wolf’, and lots of others that combine his force with his sensitivity. If he was playing up, she ironically brought him down to size as ‘Dear Sir’ or ‘Dear Lieutenant-General’ or ‘Your Excellency’. If she was giving him a new title, she liked to address him accordingly.
Potemkin virtually always addressed Catherine as ‘Matushka’, or ‘Little Mother’, or ‘Sovereign Lady’ or both. In other words, he deliberately used the old Russian way of addressing a tsarina rather than calling her Katinka, as some of her later lovers did. This was due not to a lack of intimacy but rather to Potemkin’s reverence for his Sovereign. For example, he made the courier who brought the Empress’s notes kneel until he had written the reply, which amused Catherine with its romanticism: ‘Write please, has your Master of Ceremonies brought my messenger to you today and has he knelt as he usually does?’
Potemkin always worried that the letters could be stolen. The diligent Empress burned some of his earlier love letters as soon as she read them. Those that survive from this period were mostly her letters, or his letters that she sent back to him with an addendum. So we have far more of hers. Later, most of his letters survived because they became state as well as personal papers. The passionate Russian treasured his in a scruffy wad, tied up with string and often secreted in his pocket, close to his heart, so that he could read and reread them. ‘Grishenka, good morning,’ she began a letter probably in March 1774,’…I am in good health and slept well…I am afraid you will lose my letters: someone will steal them from your pocket…They’ll think they are banknotes and pocket them.’9 But, luckily for us, he was still carrying them around when he died seventeen years later. They had nicknames for all the main courtiers, which sometimes are hard to interpret, and also a secret coded language possibly so that Potemkin could tell her in what way he would like to make love to her.
‘My dove, good morning,’ she greeted him typically. ‘I wish to know whether you slept well and whether you love me as much as I love you.’10 Sometimes they were as short as this: ‘Night darling, I’m going to bed.’11
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When the court returned to town from Tsarskoe Selo on 9 April, Potemkin moved out of Yelagin’s house, where he had been living since he became the Empress’s lover, into his newly decorated apartments in the Winter Palace: ‘they are said to be splendid’, Countess Sievers reported the next day. Potemkin was now a familiar sight around the town: ‘I often see Potemkin who rushes around in a coach and six.’ His fine carriage, expensive horses and speed became elements of his public image. If the Empress went out, Potemkin was usually in attendance. When Catherine went to the theatre on 28 April, ‘Potemkin was in the box,’ noticed Countess Sievers. Royalty, indeed sometimes the entire audience, often talked throughout the play – Louis XV irritated Voltaire with this royal habit. Here, Potemkin ‘talked to the Empress all the way through the play; he enjoys her greatest confidence.’12
Potemkin’s new rooms were directly beneath Catherine’s in the Winter Palace. Both their apartments looked out on to the Palace Square and into an internal courtyard, but not on to the Neva river. When Potemkin wished to visit – which he did, unannounced, whenever he liked – he came up (as Orlov had come down) the spiral staircase, as always decorated with green carpets. Green was the colour of amorous corridors – for the staircase linking Louis XV’s apartments to the boudoir of the Marquise de Pompadour was green too.
Potemkin was given apartments in all the imperial palaces, including the Summer Palace in town and Peterhof outside, but they were most often at the Catherine (or Great) Palace at Tsarskoe Selo, where Potemkin reached the imperial bedroom by crossing a corridor so chilly that their letters often warn each other against traversing this arctic tundra. ‘Sorry you’re sick,’ she wrote. ‘It is a good lesson for you: don’t go barefoot on staircases. If you want to get rid of it, take a little tobacco.’13 They rarely spent the night together (as Catherine did with some later favourites), because Potemkin liked to gamble and talk late and lie in all morning, while the Empress awoke early. She had the metabolism of a tidy German schoolmistress, though with a strong vein of sensuality; his was that of a wild frontiersman.
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At Catherine’s intimate evenings, Potemkin often burst in, unannounced, dishevelled in a Turkish dressing gown or some other species of wrap, usually with nothing underneath so that his hairy chest and legs were quite visible. Whatever the weather, he would be barefoot. If it was cold, he threw on a fur cloak over the top which gave him the look of a giant who could not decide if he was a brute or a dandy. In addition to all this, he liked to wear a pink bandana round his head. He was an Oriental vision far from the Voltairean tastes of the Court, which was why she called him ‘bogatr’, the knightly Slavic hero from the mythology of Rus. Even in the earliest days of the affair, Potemkin knew that he was different from everybody else: if summoned, he might languidly decide not to turn up. He appeared in the Empress’s rooms when it suited him and never bothered to be announced, nor waited to be summoned: he lumbered in and out of her apartments like an aimless bear, sometimes the wittiest member of the party, other times silently, not even bothering to acknowledge the Empress herself.
His tastes were ‘truly barbaric and Muscovite’ and he liked ‘nothing better than the plain food of his people, particularly Russian pastries, like pirozki, and raw vegetables’, which he kept at his bedside.14 When he came upstairs, he would often be nibbling apples, turnips, radishes, garlic, behaving in the Winter Palace exactly as he had as a boy wandering with serf children through Chizhova. The political significance of the Prince’s choice of nibble was as natural and deliberate in its Russian rusticity as Walpole’s red Norfolk apples were of his earthy Englishness.
Potemkin’s uncouth behaviour shocked the usually Francophile courtiers and the fastidious ambassadors, but when he felt like it he appeared in formal or military uniform with the perfect grace and immaculate presentation of a dapper courtier. Everything with him was a battle of extremes. If he was thoughtful or brooding, as he was very often, he would bite his nails to the quick: he was to suffer terribly from hangnail for his whole life, so that the letters between the two rulers of the Empire would often be distracted from laws and wars by the state of his fingertips. ‘The greatest nailbiter in the Russian Empire’, was what Catherine called him. ‘The Cyclops’, wrote Alexander Ribeaupierre, ‘has a charming habit. He bites his nails with frenzy right down to the skin.’15 If it was not his nails, it was anything else close within reach. At the Little Hermitage, where the Empress had written out a list of rules to enforce informality, she added a special rule aimed at her Potemkin. ‘You are requested to be cheerful,’ went Rule Three, ‘without however destroying, breaking or biting anything.’16