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Catherine’s Reign: A Flash of Flamboyance These binges of drinking and lovemaking did not prevent Catherine from conducting herself like a true autocrat whenever she recovered her wits. She scolded and slapped her maidservants for a peccadillo, bellowed at her ordinary advisers, and attended without a misstep the tiresome parades of the Guard; she rode on horseback for hours at a time, to soothe her nerves and to prove to one and all that her physical stamina was beyond dispute. Since she had a sense of family, she brought in brothers and sisters (whose existence Peter the Great had always chosen to ignore) from their remote provinces. At her invitation, former Livonian and Lithuanian peasants, uncouth and aw kwardly stuffed into formal clothing, disembarked in the salons of St. Petersburg.
Titles of “Count” and “Prince” rained down on their heads, to the great scandal of the authentic aristocrats. Some of these new courtiers with calloused hands joined the rest of Her Majesty’s dinner crowd in the conclaves of good humor and licentiousness.
Nonetheless, however keen she may have been for this dissolute debauchery, Catherine always set aside a few hours to deal with public affairs. Certainly, Menshikov continued to dictate decisions in matters affecting the interests of the State, but, from one week to another, Catherine gained in confidence and began to stand up to her mentor, sometimes to the point of disputing his opinions.
While recognizing that she would never be able to do without the advice of this competent, devoted, wily man, she convinced him to convene around her a High Privy Council, including not only Menshikov but several other characters whose fidelity to Her Majesty was notorious: Tolstoy, Apraxin, Vice Chancellor Golovkin, Ostermann… This supreme cabinet relegated the traditional Senate to the sidelines, where they no longer discussed any questions of primary importance. It was at the instigation of the High Council that Catherine decided to ease the fate of the
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Terrible Tsarinas Old Believers, who were persecuted for their heretical beliefs; to create an Academy of Sciences according to the desires of Peter the Great; to accelerate the beautification of the capital; to pursue the construction of the Ladoga Canal; and to equip the expedition of Danish navigator Vitus Behring, who was bound for Kamchatka. These wise resolutions mixed oddly in the tsarina’s turbulent mind with her penchant for sex and alcohol. She was voracious and well-disciplined by turn, hotly sensual and coldly lucid.
Hardly had she tasted the complementary joys of power and pleasure when she again turned her attention to her paramount concern: that of the family. Any mother, tsarina or not, cons iders it her mission to see her daughters established as soon as they reach the age of puberty. Catherine had given life to two pretty daughters, who were clever-minded enough to be as pleasing in their conversation as they were to look at. The elder, Anna Petrovna, had recently been promised to the duke of HolsteinGottorp, Charles Frederick. Weak, nervous and ungainly, he had little but his title to attract the girl. But reason can overrule feelings when, beyond the union of the hearts, political alliances and territorial annexations are foreseen. The marriage having been delayed by Peter the Great’s death, Catherine planned to celebrate it on May 21, 1725. Subservient to the maternal will, Anna sadly resigned herself to what she must have seen as her only choice.
She was 17 years old. Charles Frederick was 25. The archbishop Feofan Prokopovich, who just a few weeks before had celebrated the funeral offices of Peter the Great in Old Slavonic, the language of the Church, now blessed the union of the daughter of the deceased with the son of Duke Frederick of Holstein and Hedwige of Sweden, herself daughter of King Charles XI. As the fiance spoke neither Slavonic nor Russian, an interpreter translated the key passages into Latin for him.
The party was entertained by the acrobatics and contor«18»
Catherine’s Reign: A Flash of Flamboyance tions of a pair of dwarves, who spouted out of an enormous meat pie while dessert was being brought in. The attendees choked with laughter and burst into applause. The bride herself enjoyed it. She did not suspect the bitter disappointment that awaited her. Three day after the wedding ceremony, the Saxon diplomatic representative let his king know that Charles Frederick had stayed out all night three times in a row, leaving Anna fretting alone in her bed. “The mother is in despair at her daughter’s sacrifice,” he wrote in his report. A little later he would add that the scorned wife was comforting herself “by spending the night with one and another.”2 While regretting her elder daughter’s poor luck, Catherine refused to admit defeat and sought to interest her son-in-law in public affairs - since he appeared so little interested in private affairs. She guessed correctly: Charles Frederick was mad about politics. Invited to participate in the meetings of the Supreme Privy Council, he threw himself into the debates with so much passion that Catherine was alarmed, finding that he sometimes meddled in matters that were not his concern.
Dissatisfied with this first son-in-law, she thought to correct her mistake by arranging a marriage that all of Europe would envy for her second daughter, Elizabeth, who had been Peter the Great’s preferred. Europe was known to her mostly through the remarks of her late husband and, recently, through her diplomats’ reports. But, while Peter the Great had found the Germanic rigor, discipline and efficiency attractive, Catherine found the charms and the spirit of France increasingly appealing. She heard wonderful tales from all who visited Paris - they claimed that the pomp and ceremonies of the court at Versailles were incomparable in their refinement. Some went as far as to say that the elegance and intelligence that the French people prided themselves on added luster to the enlightened authority of its government and the
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Terrible Tsarinas power of its army.
The French ambassador, Jacques de Campredon, often spoke to Catherine of the benefits that a rapprochement would represent between two countries that had every reason to support each other. According to him, such an agreement would relieve the empress of the underhanded interventions of England, which never missed an opportunity to interfere in Russia’s disputes with Turkey, Denmark, Sweden and Poland. For the four years that this distinguished diplomat played his role in St. Petersburg, he never stopped his sly preaching in favor of a Franco-Russian alliance. From his first days at the court, he had alerted his minister, Cardinal Dubois, that the tsar’s younger daughter, little Elizabeth Petrovna (“very pleasant and good-looking”) would be an excellent wife for a prince of the house of France. But, at the time, the Regent favored the English and feared irritating them by expressing any interest in a Russian grand duchess. The tenacious Campredon now returned to his original thought. Couldn’t the negotiations that had been broken off with the tsar be taken up again, after his death, with the tsarina?
Campredon sought to persuade his government that they could and, to prepare the ground, he redoubled his attentions towards Catherine. The empress was flattered, in her maternal pride, by the admiration the diplomat expressed for her daughter.
Wasn’t this, she thought, a premonitory sign of the warm sentiments that all the French would one day feel for Russia? With emotion, she remembered Peter the Great’s fondness for little Elizabeth, so young then, so blonde, so slender, so playful. The gamine was only seven years old when Peter asked the French painter Caravaque, a familiar figure at the palace in St. Petersburg, to paint her in the nude so that he could look at her at any hour, whenever he wished. He certainly would have been very proud to have his child, so beautiful and so virtuous, selected for marriage