Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe (33 page)

When word of Potemkin’s antics at the monastery made it back to the palace, Catherine dispatched Countess Bruce to inform him that the empress wished him to return to court. He kept the countess waiting while he shaved and changed into his military uniform. Upon his arrival at Tsarskoe Selo at six p.m. on February 4, he was immediately presented to Catherine. They retired to her private apartments, where they remained alone in conversation for an hour. Clearly, they desired each other. But Potemkin was ballsy: He had conditions. Among them, he demanded an immediate promotion to adjutant-general. Catherine was bored to tears with Alexander Vassilchikov, who was good in bed, but that hadn’t been enough for some time. She needed excitement, diversion, and intellectual stimulation. Potemkin represented a challenge. And that in itself was erotic.

At the time, Grigory Potemkin was thirty-four years old, a decade younger than the empress, although she was very much considered a woman in her prime. Catherine was fairly tall, and in her youth she’d had an excellent figure, but in middle age she had taken to wearing full gowns with wide sleeves to disguise her increasing embonpoint. She often smiled, and with her pointed chin it lent her a charming, elfin appearance. Although her hair had been blond when she was a girl, it had darkened to a deep chestnut by the time she was in her mid-teens. She powdered it now, and like all Russian aristocrats rouged her cheeks with doll-like circles of color.

Alexander Vassilchikov was pensioned off within days of Potemkin’s return to court, and the “Cyclops,” as the Orlovs cruelly called him, became the empress’s lover. From the start, it was a combustible romance of two like-minded, tempestuous, gargantuan appetites who could never have too much of anything, whether it was power, glory, or love.

On February 18, 1774, after spending a late night with Potemkin, Catherine wrote him a note, fretting, “I exceeded your patience…my watch stopped and the time passed so quickly that an hour seemed like a minute.” In the early days of their relationship she wrote, “My darling, what nonsense you talked yesterday…. The time I spend with you is so happy. We passed four hours together, boredom vanishes and I don’t want to part with you. My dear, my friend, I love you so much: you are so handsome, so clever, so jovial, so witty: when I am with you, I attach no importance to the world. I’ve never been so happy….” She confided to Potemkin that she wished they had commenced their romance a year and a half earlier instead of wasting valuable time being unhappy.

“My darling friend, I fear you might be angry with me,” read another note from Catherine to Potemkin. “If not, all the better. Come quickly to my bedroom and prove it.”

Catherine sent her new lover infatuated billets-doux, often several times a day, every day, usually written in Russian and sometimes in French, but always peppered with endearments and pet names. Potemkin was her sweetheart, darling,
toton
(French for a child’s toy top),
Giaour
(an ethnic slur to denote an infidel, used by Muslims in Turkey), Muscovite, Cossack, and various diminutives of his Christian name, such as Grisha and Grishenka. Given the vast size of her palaces, her ladies-in-waiting and footmen must have received a tremendous cardio workout. Potemkin always saved Catherine’s letters to him, some of which contained written replies on the same pages as his letters to her. He kept them in a scruffy wad tied with string, and sometimes stuffed them inside a pocket of his coat so he could reread them. The empress, however, burned his correspondence.

She would typically send him a note when she awoke along the lines of “My dove, good morning. I wish to know whether you slept well and whether you love me as much as I love you.” At the end of
the evening, she would send another note that could be as short and sweet as “Night, darling, I’m going to bed.”

They tended to communicate through written messages rather than face-to-face conversation, even when they were both in the same palace, the way people might e-mail or text each other today. An example of their daily correspondence follows:

P to C:  Dear matushka [“mama” or “little mother,” a nickname for the empress], I have just arrived but I am so frozen that I cannot even get my teeth warm. First I want to know how you are feeling. Thank you for the three garments and I kiss your feet.

C to P:  I rejoice that you are back, my dear. I am well. To get warm: go to the bath; it has been heated today.

C to P, later in the day: My beauty, my darling, whom nothing resembles, I am full of warmth and tenderness for you and you will have my protection as long as I live. You must be, I guess, even more handsome than ever after the bath.

The couple even shared their intimate medical details, as lovers are wont to do: sleeplessness, diarrhea, and bouts of indigestion.

So desperately in love was the empress with Potemkin that she was willing to abase herself, at least in writing: “For you, one would do the impossible and so I’ll be either your humble maid or your lowly servant or both at once.” It was all part of her perpetual reassurance of her devotion to him. “I’ll never forget you…. Darling I love you like my soul,” she wrote. But after Potemkin threw another of his too-frequent temper tantrums, she was quick to defend herself. “Fool! I am not ordering you to do anything! Not deserving this coldness, I blame it on our deadly enemy, your spleen!”

Catherine was more passionately in love with Potemkin than with any previous paramour, and his intensity matched her own. They were also fiercely competitive in everything, including which of them loved the other the most. Potemkin was an exceptionally jealous and possessive paramour, requiring continual confirmation of Catherine’s affections. He was a man apart, with the chutzpah to demand an
inventory of Catherine’s previous lovers, accusing her of having fifteen of them.

So on February 21, 1774, Catherine penned her “Sincere Confession,” in which she revealed that Potemkin was her fifth paramour, insisting that she was not guilty of debauchery or wantonness, and if she had enjoyed a fulfilling marriage, she never would have felt the urge to stray. As she delineated the details of her first four liaisons in the Sincere Confession, she confided to Potemkin, “the trouble is that my heart is loath to remain even one hour without love.”

When she was still Grand Duchess, her first lover, to whom she gave herself “unwillingly” was her chamberlain, Sergei Saltykov. He was twenty-six when the empress Elizabeth all but shoved him into Catherine’s bed in 1752, after seven years of a celibate marriage to her husband, Grand Duke Peter. Then twenty-three, she had tried to remain faithful to Peter, but he had no interest in sex (at least with her, despite her beauty), and Russia was desperate for an heir to succeed them. Catherine later admitted that it had been difficult to resist Saltykov. “He was as handsome as the dawn. There was no one to compete with him in that, not at the Imperial Court, and still less at ours [the separate court that she and Peter kept].”

At the age of twenty-six, and a new mom for the first time, in 1755 Catherine captivated the virginal twenty-two-year-old secretary to the British ambassador. Stanislas Poniatowski, a war hero and the son of a Polish count, arrived in the nick of time, because Catherine had heard reports that not only had Saltykov indiscreetly discussed their love affair at the courts of Sweden and Dresden, but that he was flirting with other women. Poniatowski described Catherine at the time of their meeting.

“…She was at that peak of beauty which most beautiful women experience. She was of a vivid coloring, with dark hair and a dazzlingly white complexion, large, slightly prominent and very expressive blue eyes, very long dark eyelashes, a Grecian nose, a mouth which seemed to invite kisses, perfect hands and arms, and a narrow waist. On the tall side, she moved with extreme agility yet at the same time with great nobility. She had a pleasant voice and a laugh as merry as her disposition.”

Poniatowski also noticed Catherine’s ability to turn on a dime
from behaving playfully to becoming utterly focused on a serious matter. He found her fearless, affectionate, but a genius at pinpointing a person’s weak spot. By the summer of 1756, Catherine and Poniatowski were both physically and emotionally involved. It was a sentimental attachment worthy of the Baroque period. Catherine tried to secure him a diplomatic posting that would keep him in Russia more often, so she sent him to King Augustus III of Poland with a letter of introduction. In December 1756, Poniatowski returned to Russia as the official representative of the Polish king and resumed relations with Catherine, fathering her second child, Anna Petrovna, born on November 29, 1757. The little girl never made it to her second birthday, dying on March 9, 1759.

Poniatowski was recalled to Poland in 1758. After the death of Augustus in 1763, Catherine, by then empress of Russia, made it extremely clear that she wanted Stanislas Poniatowski to be elected the next king of Poland. She got her wish in 1764.

Eleven days before Catherine’s thirty-third birthday she gave birth to a son by the third lover mentioned in her Sincere Confession. This was the handsomest of the five strapping Orlov brothers, the burly and formidable Lieutenant Grigory Orlov of the elite Izmailovsky Guards. Grigory Orlov was Catherine’s lover for more than eleven years, and her paramour at the time she seized control of the throne.

Lover number four was the twenty-eight-year-old Alexander Vassilchikov, who became Catherine’s lover “in despair,” according to the Sincere Confession. She made him a gentleman of the bedchamber on August 1, 1772. Dark, of average height, polite and unprepossessing, he seemed an unlikely candidate to topple the formidable Orlov, particularly after so many years. But on the day that Orlov left Tsarskoe Selo (the “Tsars Village” where the Catherine Palace and the Alexander Palace were situated, located some fifteen miles south of St. Petersburg), en route to a peace congress, she was reliably informed that he had been having affairs with other women. Still, after a dozen years, Catherine didn’t relinquish her passion for the duplicitous Orlov so easily. As late as June 1772, she was still describing him as “without exaggeration, the most handsome man of his time.” Yet as Vassilchikov notched a number of court appointments, the
usual indication that an imperial paramour was in the ascendant, Orlov was finally, although generously, pensioned off.

And so, with these bold, daring, and vulnerable strokes of the pen, Potemkin was fully apprised of the empress’s sexual history. But she advised him that the way for a lover to keep her was to demonstrate as much friendship as affection, to continue to love her, and to tell the truth.

New lovers often try to spend as many hours as possible together, but in the case of Catherine and Potemkin, their schedules didn’t mesh. Potemkin was a night owl, often gambling at faro until the wee hours of the morning and rising late. Although she was a hedonist, Catherine’s strict German discipline never deserted her; she was usually in bed by ten or ten thirty and up at seven every morning, ready to tackle the business of the empire. As a result, she and Potemkin rarely spent the night together, even at the start of their relationship. Although Catherine was a widowed autocrat and Potemkin a bachelor, it was still considered unseemly for her to be seen in his rooms, or he in hers. And the empress didn’t like sneaking around like an illicit lover to tryst with him.

She also feared that her own feelings for Potemkin were so intense that they weren’t reciprocated with the same ardor. Only five days after the Sincere Confession, it seemed as though he was merely toying with her affections after she had completely bared her soul to him. On February 26, she wrote to him, “As soon as I had gone to bed and the servants had withdrawn, I got up again, dressed and went to the doors in the library to wait for you, and there I stood for two hours in a draught; and not until it was nearly midnight did I return out of sadness to lie down in bed where, thanks to you, I spent the fifth sleepless night.”

One can’t help feeling sorry for Catherine, one of the most powerful women in the history of the world, with her hair about her shoulders, standing in her slippers, hidden in the shadows, holding her breath and anxiously waiting for the lover who never came.

Was Potemkin holding sex for ransom? Thirty-six hours later he asked to be made adjutant-general and Catherine’s personal aide-de-camp, having written, “I remain unmotivated by envy toward
those who, while younger than I, have nevertheless received more signs of imperial favor than I….” He couldn’t bear to think that she would deem him less worthy than others for the post. Although Potemkin had distinguished himself in battle, the strong emotions he inspired in people were not always positive. But the empress was so impressed by his bluntness that she had the paperwork drawn up right away, and Potemkin was confirmed as adjutant-general on March 1.

One of the keys to their romance was that Potemkin made Catherine laugh, and he could also keep her entertained for hours. For a woman who claimed that her previous lover had bored her, she was ecstatic that Potemkin had utterly bewitched her. And she admitted to him, “In order for me to make sense, when you are with me, I have to close my eyes or else I might really say what I have always found laughable: ‘that my gaze is captivated by you.’ An expression which I used to think was stupid, improbable and unnatural…” She went on to add that she was afraid
he
would become bored with
her
.

Back in March, impressed by his sex appeal, she had written to him, “I don’t wonder that there are so many women attributed to you. It seems to me that you are not an ordinary person and you differ from everyone else in everything.”

On her own admission, one of the smartest minds of the day lost its focus in his presence. “…I have given strict orders to the whole of my body, down to the last hair to stop showing you the smallest sign of love. I have locked up my love in my heart under ten locks, it is suffocating there and I think it might explode. Think about it, you are a reasonable man, is it possible to talk more nonsense in a few lines? A river of absurdities flows from my head, I do not understand how you can bear a woman with such incoherent thoughts. Oh, Monsieur Potemkin! What a trick have you played to unbalance a mind, previously thought to be one of the best in Europe….”