Nonetheless Potemkin took over Catherine’s apartments too: he put a huge Turkish divan in her salon so he could lounge around in his dressing gown – ‘Mister Tom [Catherine’s English greyhound] is snoring very deeply behind me on the Turkish divan General Potemkin has introduced,’17 Catherine told Grimm rather proudly. His effects were strewn around her neat rooms – and she admired his untamed, almost Bohemian, nonchalance: ‘How much longer will you leave things in my rooms that belong to you!’, she wrote to him. ‘Please do not throw your handkerchiefs all over the shop in your Turkish fashion. Many thanks for your visit and I love you a lot.’18
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It is impossible to reduce a friendship yet alone a love to its components. But, if anything, their relationship was based on laughter, sex, mutually admired intelligence, and power in an order that changed all the time. His wit had made her laugh when Orlov presented him twelve years before – and that continued throughout their lives. ‘Talking of originals who make me laugh and above all of General Potemkin,’ Catherine told Grimm on 19 June that year, ‘who is more à la mode than any one else and who makes me laugh so much I could burst my sides.’19 Their letters were pervaded as much by her guffaws as by the force of their ambition and attraction: ‘Darling, what stories you told me yesterday! I can’t stop laughing when I think of them. What happy times I am spending with you!’20
There were lots of games that involved Potemkin competing with Mister Tom to see who could unleash more disorder in the imperial apartments. Her letters to Grimm are filled with Potemkin’s antics including his covering himself with Mister Tom’s little rug, a most incongruous sight: ‘I’m sewing a new bed-blanket for Thomas…that General Potemkin pretends to steal from him.’21 Later Potemkin was to introduce a badly behaved monkey.
She was never bored with Potemkin and always bored without him: he was protean, creative and always original. When she had not seen him for a while, she grumbled: ‘I’m bored to death. When will I see you again?’ But, as so often happens in love affairs, the laughter and the love-making seemed to lead inexorably to each other. Her sexual happiness shines through her letters. The affair was highly sexual. She was extremely proud of his sex appeal to other women and his record of female conquests. ‘I don’t wonder that there are so many women attributed to you,’ she wrote to him. ‘It seems to me that you are not an ordinary person and you differ from everyone else in everything.’22
Darling I think you really thought I would not write today. I woke up at five and now it is seven, I will write…I have given strict orders to the whole of my body, down to the last hair to stop showing you the smallest sign of love. I have locked up my love in my heart under ten locks, it is suffocating there and I think it might explode. Think about it, you are a reasonable man, is it possible to talk more nonsense in a few lines? A river of absurdities flows from my head, I do not understand how you can bear a woman with such incoherent thoughts. Oh Monsieur Potemkin! What a trick have you played to unbalance a mind, previously thought to be one of the best in Europe. It is time, high time, for me to become reasonable. What a shame! What a sin! Catherine II to be the victim of this crazy passion…one more proof of your supreme power over me. Enough! Enough! I have already scribbled such sentimental metaphysics that can only make you laugh. Well, mad letter, go to that happy place where my hero dwells…Goodbye, Giaour, Muscovite, Cossack…23
This is how she felt, probably during March 1774, when she woke early, the morning after a tryst with Potemkin, who was still asleep in his apartments. The roguish names she gave him – the ‘Cossack’, ‘giaour’ (the pejorative Turkish for a non-Moslem), ‘Lion of the Jungle’, ‘Golden Tiger’, ‘Golden Cockerell’ and ‘Wolf’ – may refer to sexual energy. She even called him ‘Pugachev’ of all things, presumably meaning ferocious, energetic, and unbridled like a Cossack.
In these months, they were sharing everything; their meetings seem to have been frantic sessions of laughter, love-making and political planning, one after another, because both enjoyed all three. The sex was instantly mixed with politics. ‘I love you very much,’ she began a letter, some time in April, ‘and when you caressed me, my caress always hurries to answer you…Don’t forget to summon Pavel [P. S. Potemkin, his cousin, who was being sent to assist in suppressing Pugachev]: when he arrives, it will be necessary to do two things’24 – and on she went on to discuss the measures against the rebellion.
Catherine was addicted to him: one night when he did not come to visit her, she actually ‘got up from my bed, dressed myself and went to the library towards the doors so that I might wait for you, where I stood for two hours in the draught; and then at 11 o’clock went to bed in misery where, thanks to you, I had not slept for five nights.’25 The vision of the Empress waiting outside Potemkin’s room for two hours in her dressing gown and bonnet gives us some idea of her passion for him. There were the inevitable rumours of Potemkin’s elephantine sexual equipment and this may explain the persistent myth that Catherine took a cast of his formidable member to console herself during his increasingly long absences in the south.26 This ranks in terms of historical veracity with the other malicious smears against Catherine, but stories of Potemkin’s ‘glorious weapon’ found their way into the homosexual mythology of St Petersburg.*1
If he was busy, she respected his privacy, even though she was the Empress. One day, she could not resist visiting him in his apartments. She ventured downstairs but as she approached, ‘I saw through the doorway the back of a clerk or an adjutant and I fled at top speed. I love you all the time with all my soul.’27 This also shows how carefully the Empress had to behave in front of clerks and servants in her own palaces. Catherine complained repeatedly about her love for him making her lose her reason, the governing ideal of this devotee of Voltaire and Diderot. This Enlightened ruler in the Age of Reason revelled in the swooning language of schoolgirl silliness: ‘When you are with me, closing my eyes is the only way not to lose my mind; the alternative which would make me laugh for the rest of my life would be to say, “My eyes are charmed by you.” ’ Was she referring to his romantic song to her? ‘My stupid eyes gaze at you; I become silly and unable to reason.’ She dreamed about him: ‘A strange thing happened to me. I have become a somnambulist’ – and she recounted how she imagined meeting ‘the most fascinating of men’. Then she awoke: ‘now I am looking everywhere for this man of my dreams…How I treasure him more than the whole world!…Darling, when you meet him, give him a kiss for me.’28
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Downstairs in the Winter Palace on the basement floor, beneath Catherine’s chapel, there was her Russian bath – the banya – where much of their love affair seems to have taken place.*2
‘My dear fellow, if you want to eat some meat, everything’s ready in the bath. But I beg you not to swipe any food from there because everyone will know that we’re cooking in there.’29 After his promotion in the Guards in March 1774, Catherine writes: