Sex with the Queen (40 page)

Potemkin “lived on gold,” said one court wit, but “died on grass.”95 Indeed, everyone found his death as remarkable as his life.

Between her sobs the empress kept asking, “Whom shall I rely on now?”96 And, “Prince Potemkin has played me a cruel turn by dying! It is me on whom all the burden now falls.”97

Grand Duke Paul announced that Potemkin’s death meant there was one less thief in the empire. Plato Zubov was also elated, though he feigned sympathy with the empress. “It is his fault I am not twice as rich as I am,” he told his friends peev-ishly.98 The large shadow of Potemkin which had loomed over him had suddenly disappeared. Zubov immediately pestered Catherine to give him Potemkin’s honors and riches. He further requested the top government positions for foreign affairs.

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Catherine was tired, fading slowly, and found it easier to give her lover whatever he wanted. Charles Masson, in comparing the empress’s two lovers, wrote, “Potemkin owed almost all his greatness to himself. Zubov owed his only to Catherine’s de-crepitude.”99

In 1793 Catherine sent the Russian army into Poland and carved it up as if it were a pie, doling out slices to Prussia and Austria and keeping a large share for herself. In 1795, after a reign of thirty-one years, King Stanislaus abdicated. Catherine confined him to a Russian palace; she gave thousands of acres of Polish land and thousands of Polish serfs to Zubov, who was now the richest and most powerful man in Russia.

Yet success had its price. Catherine’s sexual needs grew stronger with age. One courtier reported seeing Zubov, having just serviced the empress, returning to his rooms “prostrate with fatigue and pitiably sad, throwing himself upon his couch, and drenching his handkerchief with scent.”100

Catherine gave Zubov the lead role in the delicate negotia-tions for the marriage of Paul’s thirteen-year-old daughter Alexandra to young King Gustavus IV of Sweden in September 1796. But Zubov mangled them horribly, neglecting to address the issue of religion. The Swedes insisted the bride become Protestant; Catherine insisted she retain her Orthodox faith.

Zubov insisted to both sides that it was a small matter, easily cleared up.

When the Swedish ambassador told a stunned Catherine that under no circumstances would a queen of Sweden be permitted to profess the Orthodox faith, she grew so angry that she had a slight stroke. Zubov still argued that the betrothal ceremony should go forward, that the Swedish king would lose his honor if he didn’t follow through. At the last minute Gustavus would surely sign the wedding contract allowing her to remain Ortho-dox. Unaware of Zubov’s ploy, the king of Sweden came to St.

Petersburg for the betrothal, believing his bride would convert.

The blushing princess, arrayed in a white gown, waited in a drawing room with hundreds of guests. But the king, who at the last minute had been handed documents to sign that would allow 1 8 2

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the girl to keep her religion, never showed up. Hours passed; the would-be fiancée wept quietly. In the half century since she had come to Russia, Catherine had never once lost her formidable dignity in public. But now, publicly humiliated and probably suffering brain damage from her recent stroke, Catherine vented her anger at the Swedish representatives, swearing at them like a fishwife and reportedly banging one of them over the head with her scepter, twice.

On the morning of November 5, 1796, Catherine rose and put on a white silk dressing gown. Her ladies commented on how remarkably youthful she looked. Settling down to her desk with her secretaries, she asked them to leave for a few moments and visited her private room with the chamber pot. She never came out. After waiting nearly an hour, her alarmed maids and valets opened the door and found her on the floor, felled by a stroke.

She lived for two days without recovering consciousness. Ac-cording to witnesses, Zubov looked like a man whose “despair was beyond comparison.”101 And well should he despair, for the new emperor hated him with particular venom.

Catherine’s enemies became Paul’s friends; her friends, his enemies. He liberated Stanislaus Poniatowski from his refined prison and invited him to live in a marble palace in St. Peters-burg. The former king, who still had a spring in his step and a sparkle in his eye, was the toast of the town, the guest of honor at the best dinner parties. Yet some noticed an air of sadness about him as he promenaded from one social event to the other with his silver-tipped walking stick. He died suddenly in 1798, a bachelor to the end. He was, perhaps, one of those rare individ-uals who falls in love only once, and when his mate departs, re-mains true to the memory of those long-ago golden nights.

If Paul had rewarded Poniatowski, he had a score to settle with Potemkin who, though dead, could still be punished. The em-peror decreed that his bones should be dug up and dispersed and his grave monument smashed. Soldiers sent to do the job de-stroyed the monument but could not bear to disturb their gen-eral’s bones. They pretended they had carried out the emperor’s orders, but let Potemkin rest in peace.

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Paul’s most bizarre act of vengeance was his mother’s state fu-neral. He decreed that the ceremony should be not for her alone, but also for his father Peter III, who had been murdered thirty-four years earlier. The ornate casket with Peter’s remains was placed next to Catherine’s open casket for the viewing. It was a macabre reunion, a bloated corpse and a dusty skeleton lying next to each other. The bodies of Catherine the Great and her murdered husband were buried together as if they had been the most loving couple in the world. Over them hung a banner: “Di-vided in life, united in death.”102

Still stewing about the long, magnificent reign of his mother, in 1797 Paul changed the law regarding the imperial succession.

Women, he decreed, would be disqualified from ruling. Never again would another Catherine the Great tell men what to do.

This law remained in effect until the end of the Russian Empire in 1917.

Paul’s hallucinations and paranoia increased each year. He was stabbed to death in 1801 by a group of conspirators that in-cluded Plato Zubov. As in the case of Peter III, when it came time to punish the mad emperor’s murderers, there came from the Russian people a deafening silence. Paul’s gifted son Alexan-der would lead Russia through the Napoleonic Wars and into the future.

Was Catherine great? A woman of her time, she devoted her life to making her country powerful rather than her people happy. Today we could not imagine a great monarch keeping her people in miserable servitude. We could not admire palaces built on the broken and bleeding backs of helpless slaves.

Perhaps the quality that made Catherine truly great was an in-tensely personal quality—her understanding of the weakness of human passion. Hypocrisy was not one of her failings. An unwise love affair, an unwelcome pregnancy, well did she understand these, and never did she judge. Generous in the face of romantic betrayal, she paid off her former lovers and their mistresses handsomely.

In her memoirs she wrote candidly, “Nothing in my opinion is more difficult than to resist what gives us pleasure. All argu-1 8 4

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ments to the contrary are prudery.”103 Catherine thought soci-ety’s preoccupation with female chastity greatly exaggerated, and she laughed at stories of her nymphomania. Though she enjoyed sex, her work took precedence. “Time belongs not to me, but to the Empire,” she often said.104

She never permitted off-color jokes in her presence and maintained a strict decorum throughout the day; she gave in to her passions at night behind tightly closed doors. Deeply in love with all of her favorites, she practiced serial monogamy. Hers was a healthy sexuality, straightforward and uncomplicated, with no feigned shame or attempts at concealment. Hers was a sexuality which threatened the customs of the day.

The legend of her sexual appetites increased until it rewrote the story of her death. Catherine the Great died by impalement on a horse penis, it was said. According to a slightly varied ver-sion, the impalement didn’t kill her; it was the horse being low-ered into position on top of her and suddenly falling that crushed her. That, then, was a suitable punishment for a woman’s unabashed sexual freedom. Perhaps Catherine’s loud-est laugh would have been reserved for the horse story.

“In love she was indulgent,” wrote one courtier, “but in poli-tics implacable; ambition was her ruling passion, and she made the lover subservient to the Empress.”105

Catherine’s greatest success was in convincing her subjects that she was as Russian as they were, and not a petty upstart Ger-man princess. One day she said to her doctors, “Bleed me to my last drop of German blood so that I may have only Russian blood in my veins.”106 And indeed, of all her many lovers, the greatest, longest-lasting love affair of her life was with Russia.

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S I X

e i g h t e e n t h - c e n t u r y

e u r o p e : p o w e r , p a s s i o n , a n d p o l i t i c s