Sex with the Queen (36 page)

gory. She wrote him little notes throughout the day, some politi-cal, others sexual: “There is not a cell in my whole body that does not yearn for you, oh infidel!” “I thank you for yesterday’s feast.

My little Grisha fed me and quenched my thirst, but not with wine. . . .” “My head is like that of a cat in heat. . . .” “I will be a ‘woman of fire’ for you, as you so often say. But I shall try to hide my flames.” “Beloved, I will do as you order, should I come to your room, or will you come to mine?”51

“Oh, Monsieur Potemkin!” she gushed. “By what sorcery have you managed to turn a head which is generally regarded as one of the best in Europe.” She cooed, “We remain together for hours on end without a shadow of boredom, and it is always with reluctance that I leave you. I forget the whole world when I am with you. There is something extraordinary that words cannot express, for the alphabet is too short and the letters are too few.”

She called him “my little pigeon, my golden pheasant, my kitten, my little father, my dear little heart.”52

Catherine’s unbounded excitement may have had something to do with the size of Potemkin’s penis, which was reported to be enormous. Many years after Catherine’s death when the Her-mitage Palace had been turned into a museum, the curator re-ported that Catherine had had a porcelain cast of Potemkin’s penis in her private collection. He removed this object from its silk-lined wooden box and showed it to several visitors who ad-mired “the glorious weapon” of Potemkin.53 Alas, it is not listed on the current Hermitage inventory and no one has seen it in years.

The lovers often met in the sauna at night, Potemkin insist-ing on meals being served there. Many at court noticed the lights in the bathhouse and the servants scurrying in and out with dishes. Here they bathed, ate, drank, made love, and ran the empire.

In his dispatch to London, British ambassador Sir Robert Gunning remarked, “Nowhere have favorites risen so rapidly as in this country. But there is no instance even here of so rapid a progress as that of the present one.”54 And indeed Potemkin’s ascent was nothing short of meteoric.

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His rewards far outstripped those of Catherine’s other lovers.

Upon landing in the imperial bed, Potemkin was given 150,000

rubles in cash; an army officer lived well on 300 rubles a year.

He received a salar y of 12,000 rubles a month. His meals and wine, amounting to some 100,000 rubles a year, were paid for by the imperial budget, and Catherine personally covered his substantial gambling losses. Every feast day, of which the court celebrated many, he received another 100,000 rubles as a present.

Catherine gave him a diamond-hilted sword and a portrait of herself set in diamonds to dangle above his heart, just like the one she had bestowed on Orlov. He was given his own lavish palace as well as apartments leading directly to hers in all the im-perial palaces. She named him a count and later a prince and ap-pointed him member of the secret council and vice president of the council of war, with the rank of general-in-chief.

Many scholars believe that Catherine and Potemkin were se-cretly married in 1774, and indeed the rumor reached the courts of Europe soon thereafter. Her correspondence supports the theory as she began to call him “my dearest husband” and “my tender spouse,” signing herself “your devoted wife.”55

Potemkin, who loved to amuse, shock, impress, and terrorize by turns, flaunted his relationship with the empress. He ap-peared at her official morning receptions barefoot, wearing a dirty dressing gown with his chest hair poking out, and a pink bandana wrapped carelessly around his head. He wanted to make it clear that he had just popped out of bed on the other side of the door. The elegant speeches of the empress and courtiers were punctuated by the loud crunches of Potemkin nibbling on a radish. Not wishing to single him out for rude behavior, Catherine initiated a new rule in the Hermitage Palace—courtiers would no longer be permitted to blow their noses on the curtains.

Innocent of underpants, Potemkin often received official visitors with his private parts dangling out of his half-open dressing gown. Though he could dress himself as ornately as any 1 6 4

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French courtier at Versailles, he wanted to show the world that he didn’t have to. That sort of thing was for lesser men.

Unlike any of her other lovers, Potemkin was a born states-man and a brilliant general. He became her viceroy, her political partner, her right hand. Potemkin and Catherine were the Antony and Cleopatra of the eighteenth century, two brilliant lovers ruling a vast empire, sharing a tumultuous passion. They made love passionately at night—and Potemkin seems to have had more sexual stamina than even Orlov—and worked together on political projects throughout the day. Their stunning political partnership alarmed Frederick the Great, who grumbled, “A woman is always a woman and in a feminine government the cunt has more influence than a firm policy governed by reason.”56

“They love each other for they are exactly alike,” wrote one courtier.57 But perhaps not exactly alike, for Catherine faced west, toward Voltaire and the Enlightenment, while Potemkin faced resolutely east. Born in Ukraine, he had an in-depth knowledge of the languages and customs of the Cossack and Tatar tribes. Like them, he was a man of black earth, crystal streams, and sudden storms; the passions of the wild steppes coursed through his veins. Like Russia, he was a man of startling incongruities. “Prince Potemkin is the emblem of the immense Russian Empire,” wrote the prince de Ligne, the Austrian en-voy. “He too is composed of deserts and goldmines.”58

Potemkin boasted countless talents; in addition to statecraft and warfare, he was a gifted musician, poet, theologian, and ar-chitect. Sometimes his bright fire burned itself out, and he col-lapsed suddenly on a divan where he remained for days at a time.

Sunk into a deep depression, he would play with loose diamonds, dropping them from one cupped hand into the other, looking with childlike wonder at how they caught the light as they fell.

Then with a burst of energy, he would spring up from his couch and work tirelessly for days on end without a moment’s sleep.

Recognizing his brilliance, Catherine soothed and encouraged him when he was depressed. When he was buoyant, the two of them argued, fretted, reconciled, and finally agreed on policy.

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Sometimes Potemkin enjoyed torturing Catherine by refus-ing to make love to her. She would wait up, hoping to hear his footfall padding down the hall, the creak of her door, to feel the flood of warmth that came with his presence. When he did not come, forgetting all pride, she would creep to his apartments and find the doors locked. “I come to your room to tell you how much I love you, and I find your door locked!” she scribbled in a note.59 Once she sadly wrote him, “The subject of our disagree-ments is always power and never love.”60

For Potemkin, the unattainable was most desirable. The al-ready attained was dull. After eleven years of worshiping a shin-ing image, he suddenly found himself with a plump, sexually insatiable middle-aged woman, abject in her love for him, com-pletely, irrevocably, and boringly conquered. Potemkin would always love Catherine as the personification of Mother Russia, his eternal mistress and only true love. But by 1776 he sought a plan to extricate himself from her bed. She had not wearied of him yet, but the day might come, and Potemkin had no inten-tion of being pensioned off as another useless cast-off lover.

Moreover, he longed to burst forth from the constraints of the relationship and make his own path in the world, to win po-litical power and riches outside of St. Petersburg. He found himself in the usual position of a queen’s favorite—his mistress’s son and heir heartily detested him. Paul hated all his mother’s lovers, but particularly resented Potemkin for coruling with Catherine. He, Paul, with Romanov blood reportedly flowing in his veins, should have helped rule the empire. If Catherine, who was ten years older than Potemkin, should die before him, Potemkin could reckon with the confiscation of all his property, and probably prison and death.

Grand Duke Paul had grown up twitching, paranoid, and a devoted admirer of Frederick the Great of Prussia—oddly similar to Peter III. Though she indicated in her memoirs that Saltikov was Paul’s father, perhaps Catherine simply couldn’t bear the thought of creating a child with Peter. On the other hand, per-haps Paul, hearing stories of Peter’s behavior, strove to imitate it 1 6 6

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to prove he was legitimate. Paul’s paternity is still hotly debated among Russian historians.

Paul suffered from epileptic seizures and night hallucinations in which he saw his murdered father seeking revenge on his murderer, Catherine. Paul grew up terrified that his mother would kill him, too, just as Peter the Great had killed his son and heir. According to the French chargé d’affaires, at the age of ten Paul asked “why they had killed his father and why they had given his mother the throne that rightfully belonged to him. He added that when he grew up, he would get to the bottom of all that.”61 Eyeing his mother’s lovers coldly, Paul promised “hard-ness and vengeance” the moment he took the throne.62 For her part, Catherine found her son repulsive, unappetizing, like

“mustard after dinner.”63 She called him “
die schwere Bagage
,”

heavy baggage.64

Potemkin, keenly aware of Paul’s hatred, and tiring of Catherine’s urgent embraces, needed to shift the love affair onto the footing of deep friendship and political partnership. He be-gan by persuading the empress that their relationship involved far more than the two of them. Their love existed in the realm of the sublime; it was a shining spiritual partnership, far above mere groping in bed. In a sexual relationship, he pointed out, they spent time quarreling, valuable time that they could give to Russia. Such quarrels would be acceptable with meaningless lovers, but not with each other.

Sadly Catherine realized that in order to keep him at all, she had to let him go. In St. Petersburg Potemkin would always have to share power with the empress. So she sent him to govern var-ious imperial provinces, and in 1783 he landed in the Crimea, a former Turkish province on the north of the Black Sea. There he ruled alone, sending the empress reports of his decisions. He held his own court, something in between the Oriental magnifi-cence of the sultan’s palace and the filth and disorder of a barn-yard. Here visitors would find him wearing a silk caftan, reclining on a divan, with a harem of half-dressed odalisques around him, a one-hundred-twenty-piece orchestra playing in e i g h t e e n t h - c e n t u r y r u s s i a 1 6 7