Somewhere in the 2,000 versts that separated the two of them, the couriers must have crossed paths. Catherine would not have been so optimistic if she had read Potemkin’s letter, written on 4 October, the day before, as he set out. ‘Matushka [Little Mother] Most Merciful Lady,’ he dictated to his secretary, ‘I have no energy left to suffer my torments. The only escape is to leave this town and I have ordered them to carry me to Nikolaev. I do not know what will become of me. Most faithful and grateful subject.’ This was written in the secretary’s hand but pathetically, at the bottom of the letter, Potemkin scrawled in a weak, angular and jumping hand: ‘The only escape is to leave.’12 It was unsigned.
The last batch of Catherine’s letters to reach him had arrived the day before in the pouch of Potemkin’s fastest courier, Brigadier Bauer, the devoted adjutant whom he often sent galloping to Paris to bring back silk stockings, to Astrakhan for sterlet soup, to Petersburg for oysters, to Moscow to bring back a dancer or a chessplayer, to Milan for a sheet of music, a virtuoso violinist or a wagon of perfumes. So often and so far had Bauer travelled on Potemkin’s whim that he jokingly requested this for his epitaph: ‘Cy git Bauer sous ce rocher, Fouette, cocher!’13*1
As they gathered round him on the steppe, the officials and courtiers would have reflected on the implications of this scene for Europe, for their Empress, for the unfinished war with the Turks, for the possibilities of action against revolutionary France and defiant Poland. Potemkin’s armies and fleets had conquered huge tracts of Ottoman territory around the Black Sea and in today’s Rumania: now the Sultan’s Grand Vizier hoped to negotiate a peace with him. The Courts of Europe – from the port-sodden young First Lord of the Treasury, William Pitt, in London, who had failed to halt Potemkin’s war, to the hypochondriacal old Chancellor, Prince Wenzel von Kaunitz, in Vienna – carefully followed Potemkin’s illness.
His schemes could change the map of the Continent. Potemkin juggled crowns like a clown in a circus. Would this mercurial visionary make himself a king? Or was he more powerful as he was – consort of the Empress of all the Russias? If he was crowned, would it be as king of Dacia, in modern Rumania, or King of Poland, where his sprawling estates already made him a feudal magnate? Would he save Poland, or partition it? Even as he lay on the steppe, Polish potentates were gathering secretly to await his mysterious orders.
These questions would be answered by the outcome of this desperate rush from the fever-stricken city of Jassy to the new town of Nikolaev, inland from the Black Sea, to which the sick man wished to be borne. Nikolaev was his last city. He had founded many, like the hero whose achievements he had emulated, Peter the Great. Potemkin designed each city, treating it lovingly like a cherished mistress or a treasured work of art. Nikolaev (now in Ukraine) was a naval and military base, on the cool banks of the Bug, where he had built himself a Moldavian–Turkish-style palace, low by the river, cooled by a steady breeze that would ease his fever.14 This was a long journey for a dying man.
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The convoy had left the day before. The party spent the night in a village en route and set off at 8 a.m. After five versts, Potemkin was so uncomfortable that they transferred him to the sleeping carriage. He still managed to sit up.15 After five more versts, they had stopped right here.16
The Countess cradled his head: at least she was there, for the two best friends in his life were women. One was this favourite niece; the other, of course, was the Empress herself, fretting a thousand miles away, waiting for news. On the steppe, Potemkin was shaking, sweating and moaning, undergoing agonizing convulsions. ‘I am burning,’ he said. ‘I’m on fire!’ Countess Branicka, known as ‘Sashenka’ to Catherine and Potemkin, urged him to be calm, but ‘he answered that the light grew dark in his eyes, he could not see any more and was able only to understand voices.’ The blindness was a symptom of falling blood pressure, common in the dying. Ravaged by malarial fever, probable liver failure and pneumonia, after years of compulsive overwork, frantic travel, nervous tension and unbridled hedonism, his powerful metabolism was finally collapsing. The Prince asked the doctors: ‘What can you cure me with now?’ Dr Sanovsky answered that ‘he had to put his hopes only in God’. He handed a travelling icon to Potemkin, who embraced both the mischievous scepticism of the French Enlightenment and the superstitious piety of the Russian peasantry. Potemkin was strong enough to take it. He kissed it.
An old Cossack, watching nearby, noticed that the Prince was slipping away and said so respectfully, with the sensitivity to death found among frontiersmen who live close to nature. Potemkin removed his hands from the icon. Branicka held them in hers. Then she embraced him.17 At the supreme moment, he naturally thought of his beloved Catherine and murmured: ‘Forgive me, merciful Mother–Sovereign.’18 Then Potemkin died.19 He was fifty-two.
The circle froze around the body in that shocked silence that must always mark the passing of a great man. Countess Sashenka gently placed his head on a pillow, then raised her hands to her face and fell back in a dead faint. Some wept loudly; some knelt to pray, raising their hands to the heavens; some hugged and consoled each other; the doctors stared at the patient they had failed to save; others just peered at his face with its single open eye. To the left and right, groups of Moldavian boyars or merchants sat watching while a Cossack tried to control a rearing horse, which perhaps sensed how ‘the earthly globe was shaken’ by this ‘untimely, sudden passing!’.20 The soldiers and Cossacks, veterans of Potemkin’s wars, were sobbing, one and all. They had not even had time to finish building their master’s tent.
So died one of Europe’s most famous statesmen. Contemporaries, while admitting his contrasts and eccentricities, rated him highly. All visitors to Russia had wished to meet this force of nature. He was always – by pure power of personality – the centre of attention: ‘When absent, he alone was the subject of conversation; when present he engaged every eye.’21 When they did meet him, no one was disappointed. Jeremy Bentham, the English philosopher who stayed on his estates, called him ‘Prince of Princes’.22
The Prince de Ligne, who knew all the titans of his time, from Frederick the Great to Napoleon, best described Potemkin as ‘the most extraordinary man I ever met…dull in the midst of pleasure; unhappy for being too lucky; surfeited with everything, easily disgusted, morose, inconstant, a profound philosopher, an able minister, a sublime politician or like a child of ten years old…What is the secret of his magic? Genius, genius and still more genius; natural abilities, an excellent memory, much elevation of soul; malice without the design of injuring, artifice without craft…the art of conquering every heart in his good moments, much generosity…refined taste – and a consummate knowledge of mankind.’23 The Comte de Ségur, who knew Napoleon and George Washington, said that ‘of all the personalities, the one that struck me the most, and which was the most important for me to know well, was the famous Prince Potemkin. His entire personality was the most original because of an inconceivable mixture of grandeur and pettiness, laziness and activity, ambition and insouciance. Such a man would have been remarkable by his originality anywhere.’ Lewis Littlepage, an American visitor, wrote that the ‘astonishing’ Serenissimus was more powerful in Russia than Cardinal Wolsey, Count-Duke of Olivares and Cardinal Richelieu had ever been in their native kingdoms.24