[12] The Panin fortunes were founded on marriage to the niece of Peter the Great's favourite Prince Alexander Menshikov, who had started life as a pie-seller.
[13] This was the child with whom she was pregnant at Elisabeth's death - Alexei Grigorevich Bobrinsky, 1762-1813. Though he was never officially recognized, Catherine saw to his upbringing. He led a debauched life in Paris with the Empress paying his debts, before returning home and later travelling again. Paul I finally recognized him as a half-brother and made him a count.
[14] This did not stop one diplomat claiming he had 'procured a glass eye in Paris'.
[15] Brother of the Empress Elisabeth's favourite, he was appointed Hetman of the Ukraine in his early twenties. This meant that he was the governor of the nominally semi-independent Cossack borderlands throughout Elisabeth's reign. Razumovsky backed Catherine's coup, then requested that she make the Hetmanate hereditary in his family. She refused, abolished the Hetmanate, replacing it with a College of Little Russia, and made him a field-marshal instead.
[16] Rumiantsev's mother was born in 1699 and lived to be eighty-nine. The grandest lady-in-waiting at Court had known the Duke of Marlborough and Louis XIV, remembered Versailles and the day St Petersburg was founded. She liked to boast until her dying day that she was Peter the Great's last mistress. The dates certainly fitted: the boy was named Peter after the Tsar. His official father, yet another Russian giant, was a provincial boy who became a Count, a General-en-Chef and one of Peter the Great's hard men: he was the ruffian sent to pursue Peter's fugitive son, the Tsarevich Alexei, to Austria and bring him back to be tortured to death by his father.
[17] Catherine, in one of the undated love letters usually placed at the official start of their affair in 1774, tells Potemkin that a nameless courtier, perhaps an Orlov ally, has warned her about her behaviour with him and asked permission to send him back to the army, to which she agrees.
[18] Peter the Great did make his favourite Prince Menshikov, but that was an exception. After 1796, Emperor Paul and his successors began to create princes themselves so promiscuously that they ultimately caused an inflationary glut in the prestige of that title.
[19] When Emperor Alexander I died in 1825, he was widely believed to have become a monk wandering the Russian vastness.
[20] In the late nineteenth century, the painter Constantine Somov, one of the 'Art for Art's Sake' circle of intellectuals, whose father was then Curator of the Hermitage Museum, held a tea party for his mainly homosexual friends, the poet Kuzmin, probably the ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev, the poetess Anna
[21] It was a mark of the anarchy engulfing the Volga region that yet another false Peter III, a fugitive serf, now managed to raise another rabble army and conquer Troitsk, south-east of Moscow, where he set up another grotesque Court.
[22] Renamed Stalingrad in 1925. Since 1961, it has been called Volgagrad.
[23] There is another possible Moscow venue. During the nineteenth century, a Prince S. Golitsyn, a collector, used to invite visitors to his palace on Volkonsky Street, said to be one of the places where Catherine stayed in Moscow during 1775. He used to show them two icons supposedly given by Catherine to his chapel to celebrate her marriage there to Potemkin.
[24] Catherine granted Daria a house on Prestichenka where she lived until her death.
[25] Until 1733, forceps had been the secret weapon, as it were, of a surgical dynasty, the Chamberlens. In that time, even the doctors were hereditary.
f Potemkin was said to have arranged this death and mysteriously visited the midwife. Medical murder is a recurring theme in Russian political paranoia - Stalin's Doctor's Plot of 1952/3 played on the spectre of 'murderers in white coats'. Prince Orlov, Grand Duchess Natalia, Catherine's lover Alexander Lanskoy and Potemkin himself were all rumoured to have been murdered by the doctors caring for them. Potemkin was said to have been involved in the first three deaths.
[25] Paul and Maria Fyodorovna were married in Petersburg on z6 September 1776. The two emperors were Alexander I and Nicholas I, who ruled until 1855. Their second son Constantine almost succeeded but his refusal of the throne sparked off the Decembrist Revolt in 18x5.
[26] Alexander I appointed him Russia's first Minister of Education.
[26] The letters mentioning Cagliostro are usually dated to 1774 by V.S. Lopatin and others because of their obvious sensual passion for Potemkin. But Count Cagliostro emerged in London only in 1776/7, so they could not have discussed him in 1774. Cagliostro travelled through Europe in 1778, finding fame in Mittau through the patronage of the ducal family and Courland aristocracy before coming to Petersburg, where he met Potemkin: their relations are discussed in the next chapter. If her wish that, instead of 'soupe a la glace' - Vassilchikov - they had begun their love 'a year and a half ago' is translated as 'a year and a half before', the letter could date from 1779/80, when their reunion would have reminded Catherine of that wasted year and a half.
[27] Catherine's handful of adjutants included her favourite of the moment and also the sons of magnates and several of Potemkin's nephews. This was further complicated because in June 1776 Potemkin created the rank of aide-de-camp to the Empress whose duties (written out in his own hand and corrected by Catherine) were to aid the adjutants. The Prince of course had his own aides-de-camp, who often then joined Catherine's staff.
[28] This Georg-Ludwig was also the uncle of her husband Peter III, who brought him to Petersburg during his short reign. Ironically, his orderly was young Potemkin.
t On her death, Orleans' enemies sang: 'La pleures-tu comme mari / Comme ta fille ou ta maitresse?' - Do you weep for her as a husband, for your daughter or your mistress?
[29] Potemkin showed off many of Kingston's treasures at his ball in 1791, described in Chapter 32. The Hermitage today, which holds much of the contents of Potemkin's collections, is spotted with the former belongings of the Duchess of Kingston. Garnovsky was to be cursed for his avarice, for the Emperor Paul threw him into a debtor's prison and he died poor in 1810.
t The Peacock Clock is one of the centrepieces of today's Hermitage Museum. It still performs every hour on the hour.
ф This now stands in the Menshikov Palace, part of the Hermitage, and is played at midday on Sundays. In its music, we can hear the sounds of Potemkin's salon two centuries ago.
[30] There was a special Scottish relationship with Russia. The Scots often became Russianized. Empress Elisabeth's Chancellor Bestuzhev was descended from a Scotsman named Best; Count Yakov Bruce was descended from Scots soldiers of fortune; Lermontov, the nineteenth-century poet, from a Learmond named 'Thomas the Rhymer'.
f One Browne cousin was a field-marshal in the Austrian army, while George Browne joined Russian service, was captured by the Turks, sold thrice in Istanbul and then became governor of Livonia for most of Catherine the Great's reign, dying in his nineties. Field-Marshal Count Lacey became Joseph II's most trusted military adviser and correspondent, while another, Count Francis Antony Lacey, was Spanish Ambassador to Petersburg and Captain-General of all Catalonia.