Alexander Pushkin, who befriended Langeron in Odessa in 1824, agreed that Potemkin was 'touched by the hand of history ... We owe the Black sea to him.'34 Cities, ships, Cossacks, the Black Sea itself, and his correspondence with Catherine, remain his best memorials.
Derzhavin was moved to compose his epic The Waterfall soon after Potemkin's death. It catches many sides of the Maecenas and Alcibiades that the poet knew. He uses the waterfall itself - its magnificence, speed, natural power - to symbolize Potemkin as well the turbulence of life and its transitory nature. Potemkin was one of imperial Russia's most remarkable statesmen in a class only with Peter the Great and Catherine herself. The Due de Richelieu, that fine judge of character and himself a statesman, was the foreigner who best understood Serenissimus. 'The sum of his great qualities', he wrote, 'surpassed all his faults ... Nearly all his public actions bear the imprint of nobility and grandeur.'35
The dust of Alcibiades! -
Do worms dare crawl about his head there?
Gavrili Derzhavin, The Waterfall
The Empress decided that the Prince's funeral should be held in Jassy. Potemkin had asked Popov to bury him in his village of Chizhova, but Catherine believed he belonged in one of his cities,36 Kherson or Nikolaev.37 It was strange that she did not bury him in Petersburg, but perhaps that rationalist child of the Enlightenment did not ascribe great importance to graves. She
was much more interested in the places and people they shared when he was alive. Besides, she knew that the further from the capital the body of Potemkin rested, the less Paul could degrade it after her death.
On 11 October, Potemkin's body was placed in a hall, probably in the Ghika Palace, for his lying-in-state: the catafalque was enclosed in a chamber of black velvet, trimmed with silver tassels and held up by silver cords. The dais was decorated in rich gold brocade. He lay in an open coffin upholstered with pink velvet, covered by a canopy of rose and black velvet, supported by ten pillars and surmounted by ostrich feathers. Potemkin's orders and batons were laid out on velvet cushions and on two pyramids of white satin which stood on either side of the coffin. His sword, hat and scarf lay on its lid. Nineteen huge candles flickered, six officers stood guard. Soldiers and Moldavians cried about 'their lost protector' and filed past the coffin. In front of this magnificent mise-en-scene was a black board inscribed with Potemkin's titles and victories.[113]
At 8 a.m. on 13 October, the Ekaterinoslav Grenadiers and Dnieper Musketeers lined the streets through which the procession was to pass. The cannons fired salutes and the bells rang dolefully as the coffin was borne out by generals, along with the canopy carried by Life-Guards. A squadron of Hussars and then Cuirassiers led the way. The horses were led by stablemen in rich liveries tied with black crepe. Then 120 soldiers in long black mantles bore torches, thirty-six officers held candles. Next there were the exotic Turkish costumes of the boyars of Moldavia and the princes of the Caucasus. After the clergy, two generals carried the trappings of power. The miniature diamond-encrusted portrait of Catherine which he always wore was more telling than all the medals and batons.
The black hearse, bearing the coffin, harnessed to eight black-draped horses, led by postillions in long black cloaks and hats, clattered through the streets followed by the Prince's nieces. His Cossacks brought up the rear.
The procession approached the rounded corner bastions of the Golia - Monastery and passed through the fortified thirty-metre-high gate-tower. The coffin was carried into the Church of the Ascension, once visited by Peter the Great. The mixture of Byzantine, Classical and Russian architecture in its white pillars and spires was Potemkin's own. Cannons fired a final salute.38
The loss of Potemkin left a gap in Catherine's life that could never be filled: after Christmas, she stayed in her room for three days without emerging. She talked about him often. She ordered the 101-gun salute for the Peace of Jassy and held the celebration dinner - but she tearfully and curtly waved away any toasts. 'Her grief was as deep as it was before.' On 30 January 1792,
when Samoilov delivered the text of the treaty, she and Potemkin's nephew wept alone.39 When she came back from Tsarskoe Selo that summer, she told everyone that she was going to live at Potemkin's house, which she named the Taurida after him, and she stayed there frequently. She loved that palace and often walked alone in its gardens, as if she was looking for him.4° A year later, she wept copiously on his birthday and the anniversary of his death, crying alone in her room all day. She visited the Taurida Palace with her grandsons and Zubov in attendance. 'Everything there used to be charming,' she told Khrapovitsky, 'but now something's not quite right.' In 1793, she kept returning to the Taurida: sometimes she arranged to stay there secretly after dinner. 'No one', wrote Khrapovitsky,41 'could replace Potemkin in her eyes,' but she surrounded herself with Potemkin's circle.
Popov, already one of her secretaries, now became the living embodiment of the Prince's political legacy. Indeed, Popov had only to say that Potemkin would not have approved for Catherine to refuse even to contemplate a proposal. Such was the power of a dead man. When she came to the Taurida Palace, Popov fell to his knees and thanked her for deigning to live in the house of his 'creator'. Samoilov became procurator-general on the death of Prince Viazemsky. Ribas founded Odessa at Hadjibey as ordered by Potemkin, but Richelieu, as governor-general of New Russia, made it into one of the most cosmopolitan ports of the world. In 1815, Richelieu became prime minister of France.
Two years after Potemkin's death, the Prince de Ligne recalled him to Catherine as 'my dear and inimitable, lovable and admirable' friend. Ligne himself never recovered from not being given command of an army and even begged Metternich to let him take part in Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812 - an unworthy repayment of Catherine's and Potemkin's generosity. He survived to become the aged ornament of the Congress of Vienna and managed his final epigram before expiring at the age of seventy-nine: 'Le Congres', he said, 'ne marche pas; mais il danse'.42 The Comte de Segur adapted to the French Revolution to become Napoleon's grand master of ceremonies, advised the Emperor not to invade Russia in 1812, and then emerged as a peer under the Restoration. Nassau-Siegen tried to persuade Napoleon to let him attack British India but died in 1806 in Prussia.
Francisco de Miranda became 'El Precursor' to the Liberator of South America, after serving as a general in the French Revolutionary armies. In 1806, he landed on the Venezuelan coast with 200 volunteers, then had to withdraw again. But in 1811 Simon Bolivar persuaded him to return as commander-in-chief of the Venezuelan patriot army. An earthquake and military defeats made the indecisive Dictator negotiate with the Spanish. When he tried to flee, Bolivar arrested him and handed him over to the Spanish. That lover of liberty died in 1816 in a Spanish prison - thirty years after meeting Serenissimus. Sir James Harris was created Earl of Malmesbury, and Talleyrand called him the 'shrewdest minister of his time'. Sir Samuel