Sex with the Queen (38 page)

On one occasion he escaped his brothers’ watchfulness and appeared at court, dirty and unkempt with bulging eyes. Hearing of his arrival, Catherine insisted on seeing him. Orlov, howling like a wounded animal, saw the corpse of Peter III rise before him seeking vengeance. “It’s my punishment!” he cried.74

Catherine spoke gently to him before his keepers trundled him off. Then she took to her bed, utterly devastated by the sight of her once magnificent lover reduced to this. Gregory Orlov died in 1783, suffering perhaps from the insanity which announced the last stages of syphilis.

By 1782 Lanskoy was experiencing his own health problems; his nocturnal duties with the empress so exhausted him that he began taking sexual stimulants. In 1784 he caught diphtheria, which would not have proved fatal, according to his doctor, if his constitution had not already been weakened by his excessive use of aphrodisiacs. He died quickly, and those who came to offer condolences to the empress found a locked door and heard heart-wrenching sobs coming from behind it. Only Potemkin could help Catherine in her grief. He was called for and, riding day and night, arrived in only a week. The door to the imperial 1 7 2

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bedroom was opened, then locked behind him. Servants heard the two of them wailing for hours.

But Potemkin’s grief could not have been that excessive. He told a British friend, “When things go smoothly my influence is small but when she meets with rubs, she always wants me and then my influence becomes as great as ever.”75

By the time of Lanskoy’s death, the empress had cultivated the reputation of an unbridled nymphomaniac. Menopause had not slowed her down one whit, and her reputation for the benevolent statecraft she practiced in the day was tarnished by the pleasures she enjoyed at night. Rumors portrayed Catherine having sex with stallions and bulls because men could no longer satiate her.

But though Catherine enjoyed sex, she was no nymphoma-niac. After Lanskoy’s death she refused to even consider a new lover for months, although Potemkin continually shoved grin-ning candidates in Catherine’s direction. Seeing the coveted po-sition remain vacant, many ambitious families pushed their muscular teenaged sons forward at court. These youths, wearing the mortgages of their family estates on their backs, were trained to puff out their chests and flash the empress a dazzling smile as she passed. One visitor noticed that “during the church service for the court, lots of young men, who were even the slightest bit handsome, stood erect, hoping to regulate their destiny in such an easy way.”76

The new favorite could quickly earn enough money to found a noble dynasty. Going up the secret staircase to the apartments of the imperial paramour for the first time, he would find as much as ten thousand rubles in cash on the sofa waiting for him. But it was a twenty-four-hour-a-day job, requiring frequent vigorous lovemaking with a stout middle-aged woman, and brilliant con-versation at all other times. Catherine stifled her lovers, suffo-cated them, and rarely let them out of her sight.

But finally her interest was awakened by one of Potemkin’s studs. Thirty-one-year-old Alexis Yermalov was rough and good-natured, with a wide flat nose. Though honest and devoted by nature, Yermalov allowed his sudden rise to go to his head.

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Prodded by the anti-Potemkin faction, he decided to unseat his mentor. He was soon complaining to the empress of Potemkin’s corruption, accusing him of pocketing bribes and diverting money which she had sent to the south for other purposes. The truth was that Potemkin floated in so much money he often mixed his private and government bank accounts, borrowing from one to pay the other. He was so rich he seemed to be above bribery, certainly above pocketing paltry sums.

Potemkin, furious, refused to defend himself against Yer-malov’s allegations. When his friend the French ambassador asked why, he thundered, “So also you say that I am working for my own destruction, and that after all the services I have rendered, I should defend myself against the allegations of an ungrateful boy.

But no little whippersnapper will bring about my downfall, and I do not know of anyone who would dare to do so.”77

In June 1786, during a ball celebrating the anniversary of the empress’s accession to the throne, Potemkin strode in. The mu-sic stopped. The crowd parted as the powerful figure, gleaming with diamonds, Europe’s highest decorations clattering on his broad chest, strode straight up to Yermalov who was playing at the gaming tables. Everyone in the vicinity fled except Yermalov, pinned to the spot by the gaze of his former benefactor.

Potemkin threw the table over; cards and chips were sent flying through the air.

“You cur, you white nigger, you monkey, who dare to bespat-ter me with the mud of the gutters from which I have raised you,”

Potemkin bellowed. Yermalov bravely put his hand to his sword hilt but found himself soaring backward. Potemkin had slugged him. No one dared pick up the crumpled figure on the floor.

Catherine, who had left the ball early, was astonished to see Potemkin roaring into her apartments without knocking.

Courtiers in the hall heard him shouting, “It’s either he or I. If this nonentity of nonentities is allowed to remain at court, then I quit the state’s services from today.”78

Trembling with the excitement that Potemkin always pro-voked, Catherine readily gave up Yermalov, who after seventeen months was beginning to bore her anyway. Moments after 1 7 4

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Potemkin’s temper tantrum, the court was regaled with the vi-sion of a smiling Serenissimus leading the empress by the hand back to the ball. Catherine slept three hours later than usual the next morning, presumably with Potemkin.

Yermalov received notification of his dismissal that evening but walked away staggering under the weight of his retirement gifts—4,300 serfs, 130,000 rubles in cash, a silver dinner ser-vice, and the polite suggestion to live abroad for five years.

Within days of Yermalov’s dismissal, Potemkin placed an-other young man in the imperial bed, twenty-six-year-old Alexander Momonov, predictably handsome and charming. He was, alas, easily bored with the empress’s stifling devotion and fretted at the tight leash she kept him on. Momonov stayed on in his position only because of his loyalty to Potemkin, whom he idolized, and not because of the exceptional financial rewards.

In the first eighteen months Momonov was given 27,000 serfs, a salary of 180,000 rubles a year, and a table budget of 36,000

rubles. The empress made him adjutant general and a count of the Holy Roman Empire.

Despite the cash and honors heaped upon them, the vapid young men who came and went in the empress’s bed did not awaken the most vicious jealousy at court. That was reserved for the insolently powerful Potemkin, reigning like a sultan in his southern kingdom. Many courtiers were furious at reports of cities springing up from dust at the prince’s command. Rumors spread that his vaunted success was nothing short of a pack of lies. And so Potemkin arranged for his show of shows, the em-press’s nine-month voyage to visit her new southern provinces and see for herself. To ensure that all Europe learned of his achievements, he arranged for a slew of foreign diplomats to ac-company the empress. Even Emperor Joseph II of Austria agreed to join part of the expedition.

The expedition embarked on January 7, 1787. Wrapped in luxurious sables, Catherine cast quick glances out the windows of her gilded coach. She saw the beauty of her country but none of the misery of its serfs. As she had written Voltaire earlier, “The soil of the country was so productive and the rivers so rich in fish e i g h t e e n t h - c e n t u r y r u s s i a 1 7 5

that the Russian peasant was happier and better fed than any other in the world.”79 Certainly the Russian peasant should have been happy and well fed in such a land of natural riches, if the Russian peasant’s master had not taken his happiness and food away from him.

Well aware of the power of visual images, Potemkin spruced up the towns and villages through which the empress would travel. Roads were repaired, trash removed, cottages painted, and undesirable characters temporarily imprisoned. When his enemies stewing in St. Petersburg heard reports that his suc-cesses were true, they were furious. It had all been a mirage, they growled, a façade, a series of grandiose optical illusions. The magician Potemkin, they declared, had built a series of stage sets which he transported from place to place, just ahead of the em-press’s caravan, along with the same plump cheerful peasants to stand in front of them. Potemkin villages.

Joseph II was awestruck by Potemkin’s achievements. Look-ing closely at the gleaming new buildings, he saw not façades but shoddy construction. “But what does this matter,” he asked, “in a countr y which exists on slave labor and where any-thing which crumbles can be built again? Money is limitless and lives are of no account. In Germany and France we would not dare to attempt things which they risk here ever y day with-out encountering a single obstacle or hearing one word of complaint.”80

In August the party boarded a luxurious galley specially made by Potemkin to cruise the Dnieper River, the border between Russia and Poland. Docking in the town of Kanieve, Catherine reluctantly met with King Stanislaus, the lover she had not seen in nearly thirty years. At fifty-six, Poniatowski was still hand-some. He was one of those men who, though insipid in youth, grows more handsome with age. His eyes sparkled with confi-dence, his salt-and-pepper hair gave him the air of wisdom; the lines in his face spoke of experience. But Catherine did not find him attractive. After her decades of exciting sex with domineer-ing men, she found Poniatowski weak, dull, and unbearably sin-cere. How could she ever have loved him?

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