t^Ujt ETVEggffi
YALE UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

THE LIBRARY ASSOCIATES

Gift of
THOMAS EWART MARSTON
YALE 1927

THE ROMANCE OF AN EMPRESS

THE
Romance of an Empress
CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
FROM THE FRENCH OF
R. WALISZEWSKI

IN TWO VOLUMES
Vol. II.

LONDON
WILLIAM HEINEMANN
1894
[A 11 fights reserved ]

CONTENTS
PART II— THE EMPRESS
( Continued)
BOOK I— THE WOMAN

CHAP.

PAGE

II. IDEAS AND PRINCIPLES, . . i
BOOK II— THE SOVEREIGN
I. THE ART OF RULING, . . .28
II. HOME POLICY, . . 58
III. FOREIGN POLICY, 104
BOOK III— THE FRIEND OF THE PHILOSOPHERS
I. LITERARY AND ARTISTIC TASTES, Il6
II. CATHERINE AS A WRITER, 146
III. CATHERINE AND EDUCATION, 1 57
BOOK IV— INNER ASPECTS
I. HOME LIFE, . . • .170
II. FAMILY LIFE — THE GRAND DUKE PAUL, . 204
III. PRIVATE LIFE — FAVOURITISM, . . . . 234

CHAPTER II
IDEAS AND PRINCIPLES
I

With the temperament that we have seen,
Catherine could not well be a woman with prin
ciples, at least immutable principles, nor with
formulated ideas. Her fixed ideas, which she
has often had, were so only for the moment ;
they were comets, not the guiding stars of
her life.
One point, however, on which she never varies,
is the national character, essentially Russian, that
she impresses on her government, and that she
seeks to extend to the entire development, politi
cal, intellectual, and moral, of the Slavonic people,
over whose destinies she, a German princess,
has been called to preside. Not only the admi
nistrative and legislative acts of her reign,
but her slightest sayings and doings bear the
trace of this constant preoccupation. Falconet
had hard work not to invest Peter I. with the
national Russian costume that the Czar was so
vol. 11. A

CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA

emphatic in forbidding throughout his empire.
Catherine would have had this trait in the history
of the great reformer forgotten. She would have
imposed, not merely upon the present, but upon
the past, of her adopted country, a whole host
of things contrary to the fact, but conformable
to the idea that it had pleased her to give her
self and others in regard to this land of vast
horizons, so tempting to flights of fancy. She
would have rewritten in her own way the whole
history of the old Muscovite fatherland. In 1790
Senac de Meilhan offered himself as historio
grapher of the empire : she hesitated to accept
the offer. Would he be willing to lay aside the
prejudices ' that most strangers have against
Russia ' ? — to the point of believing, for example,
' that before Peter the Great the empire had
neither laws nor administration.' Now, ' it is
true that the troubles which followed on the
death of the Czar Ivan Vassilevitch had put
back Russia from forty to fifty years, but before
this time it was on the level of the rest of
Europe . . . the Grand Dukes of Russia took
a prominent part in the affairs of Europe, and
were allied and connected with all the sovereign
houses of our hemisphere.'
After this the poor Senac despaired of be-

IDEAS AND PRINCIPLES

ing able to cope with his task. But here too
Catherine was convinced. She wrote to Grimm :
' No history furnishes better or greater men than
ours. I am passionately fond of this history.'
She meant, besides, to have a good space given
to her own reign, ' for we live in an age in which,
far from hiding the lustre of things and actions,
it is essential to sustain people's minds.' Would
S£nac consent to be ' directed ' in this respect ?
Here again we observe a trace of the huge
proportions which the vast empire, so strangely
become her own property, had little by little
attained in the Czarina's mind ; and we see one
fixed star the more in her firmament. This
hyperbolic idea of grandeur, applied to all the
constituent elements of the national inheritance,
to the past as to the present of Russia, to its
extent as to its population, to its material power
as to its moral worth, to its preponderance in the
Slavonic world as to its European position, is
one of those which never left Catherine, and
never lost its hold upon her. She seems dazzled,
hallucinated, and as if hypnotised before this
collossal conception. High as was the opinion
that she had, and that she wished others to have
of herself, of the merits of her government, and
of the great events which marked it, she did

CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA

not hesitate to make herself small by comparison :
' All that I can do for Russia is but a drop of
water in the sea.'
Russia is the sea, the ocean with its unsounded
depths, its borders lost to sight in the immensity
of space. It is for that that she has been willing
to submerge in it her own past, and the very
remembrance of her German fatherland. Never
theless, it is she who writes, in 1782, complaining
to Grimm of the conduct of the Sultan Abdul-
Hamid : ' Das ist unmoglich dass ich mir sollte
auf die Nase spielen lassen. You know that a
German will never suffer that.' But her mind
is essentially mobile, and, as she confesses, she
does not always know what she wants, or even
what she says, especially when she chats with
her confidant, pen in hand, in her moments of
most complete unbending, after the fatigues of
her formidable task. But she has conscientiously
applied to herself her Russophilist programme,
and she has become Russian from head to foot,
not only on the surface and by an artifice, but
sincerely and profoundly, in her mind and flesh,
in her most formal language, her most familiar
motion, her most private thought. The following
lines were probably seen by no one till after her
death.

IDEAS AND PRINCIPLES

' Never has the universe produced a creature
more manly, more solid, more frank, more human,
more benevolent, more generous, more obliging,
than the Scythian (Scythian and Russian are
synonymous in her eyes). No man equals him
in regularity of features, in beauty of face, in fine
ness of complexion, build, and stature ; having
for the most part well-nourished, or nervous and
muscular, limbs, a thick beard, long and bushy
hair ; naturally averse to all ruse and artifice, to
which his probity and uprightness are utterly
alien. There is not on the earth a horse-soldier
or foot-soldier, or sailor, or manager to equal
him. No one is tenderer to his children and
his kinsmen. He has an inborn deference for his
parents and superiors. He is prompt and exact
in obedience, always faithful.'
This is quite a rhapsody! And no doubt
there is something in it of personal recollection,
too flatteringly recalled. In course of time,
however, something more immaterial, purer and
more profound, found its way into the love of
Russia that the love of certain Russians gave
to Catherine.
We must not forget, among the ideas to which
she remained faithful, what has been called the
great idea of her reign : the Greek project. We

CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA

shall see that she has had it in view from 1762,
and that she still has it in view on the eve of
her death. It was a beautiful dream, beautiful
and fantastic. The resurrection of Greece, the
enfranchisement of the Yougo-Slavs, mingled
with other equally dazzling, but less disinterested
visions : Constantinople opening its gates to
Christianity, represented by a Russian army ;
the crescent replaced on the dome of St. Sophia
by the double Greek cross, crowned by the two-
headed imperial eagle. It is on this account
that the second son of Paul is named Constantine,
and not Peter or Ivan ; it is on this account
that there is a Greek nurse and a Greek servant,
who was afterwards to become an important per
sonage, Count Kourouta. There was also a corps
of Greek cadets, a Greek district-government at
Kherson, newly founded, and under the charge of
Eugene,a Bulgarian. Medals were struck, on which
were seen symbolic and suggestive images : on
one side the Empress, on the other Constantinople
in flames, a minaret crumbling into the sea, and
the cross resplendent in the clouds. The journal
of Chrapowicki is not less edifying on the subject.
On August 17, 1787, he considers a secret pro
ject of Patiomkine for the capture of Bakou and
Derbent. Capital for that could be made out of

IDEAS AND PRINCIPLES

the' troubles in Persia, and, by means of other
connections, a province could be formed to be
called Albania, which would serve as provisional
appointment for the Grand Duke Constantine.
On April 21, 1788, Moldavia and Wallachia
are discussed : these provinces should remain
independent, in order to serve as nucleus to
the future ' Dacia,' that is to say, the future
monarchy of Greece. On October 9, 1789, the
i's are dotted. The Greeks need to be ' stirred
up ' : Constantine may take charge of that. He
has a future before him. In thirty. years he will
have got from Sebastopol to Constantinople.
11
In 1769 the cause of liberty has no more
enthusiastic defender in Europe than the Empress
of Russia.
' To the brave Corsicans, defenders of liberty
and of their country, and, in particular, to General
Paoli : Gentlemen ! All Europe has for many
years seen you oppose oppression, defend and
redeem the country from an unjust usurpation,
and fight for liberty. It is the duty of every
human creature to aid and support all who mani
fest sentiments so noble, so great, and so
natural.'

CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA

The letter is from the hand of Catherine, and
is signed ' Your sincere friends, the inhabitants of
the North Pole (sic).' A sum of money is added,
which passes in the eyes of the brave Corsicans
as the result of a subscription. This, doubtless,
is in order to spare them the humiliation of being
subventioned by an absolute monarch, and also
to make them believe that there is, in the neigh
bourhood of the ' North Pole,' a respectable
number of people capable of sympathising with
the cause they defend.
In 1 78 1 Catherine comes forward on behalf of
Necker. His famous Compte rendu, which is
practically an act of accusation against the ad
ministration of royal finances, that is to say
against royalty itself, enchants and delights
her. She does not doubt that heaven has
destined the able Genevese for the salvation
of France.
Certainly she has not much love, just then,
either for France or for the turn that things are
taking there ; but in her hostile feelings the court
holds as large, if not larger, a place than the
people, and the old rdgime foundering under the
rising flood of social claims has no part in her
favour. This is the impression we receive from
her correspondence with her son and her daughter-

IDEAS AND PRINCIPLES

in-law, during the visit of their Imperial High
nesses, in 1782, to Paris. Here is a specimen.
It is Catherine who writes :• —
' May God bless her most Christian Majesty,
her shows, her balls and her plays, her rouge
and her beards, well or ill adjusted. I am not
sorry that this annoys you and makes you anxious
to return. But, how is it that, with its passion
for the play, Paris is no better off than we ? I
know the reason ; it is because every one leaves
the good show for the bad ; that in tragedy they
have nothing but what is atrocious ; that plays are
written by those who know neither how to make
comedies for laughter nor tragedies for tears ;
that comedy, instead of bringing laughter, brings
tears ; that nothing is in its proper place ; that
colours even have only abject and indecent
names. All that encourages no sort of talent,
but spoils it.'
A frivolous and corrupt court, in the midst of
a society which its evil example has brought to
the verge of a fatal precipice, that is the idea
Catherine seems to hold, at this time, in regard to
the country of her ' dear master,' who himself has
given colour to her opinions, in denying at every
opportunity his kinship with the pitiable 'Vandals.'
Her dominant idea, however, is a feeling of in-

CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA

difference in regard to men and things there.
For a long time, up to the very verge of the
revolutionary crisis, the events and agitations, in
this far country, seem to her without any general
importance ; she does not perceive their bearing.
Nor, whatever may have been said to the con
trary, does she see the approach of the tempest.
On April 19, 1788, she writes to Grimm : ' I do
not share the belief of those who imagine that we
are on the eve of a great revolution.' Hearing,
in the course of her tour through the Crimea, of
the resolution of Louis XVI. to convoke an
'Assembly of Notables,' she sees in it only an
imitation of her own legislative commission. She
invites Lafayette to visit her at Kief. To open
her eyes on what is being prepared by the
Lafayettes, it needs the thunderclap of the
taking of the Bastille. Then she begins to under
stand what is in the air, and the Gazette de St.-
Pe,tersdourg,wh.ich had been silent on the Assembly
of the States and the Tennis-court Oath, breaks
out in indignant protestations : ' Our hand shakes
with horror,' etc. The rest of the article may
be imagined. Soon the constituents are com
pared by the officious journal to ' a drunken
mob,' as their successors are to be compared to
' cannibals.'

IDEAS AND PRINCIPLES n
From this moment Catherine's ideas underwent
a rapid change, and it is curious to follow, in her
correspondence and her confidential conversation,
the progress of this evolution. In June 1790
Grimm, who has not yet had time to perceive the
change which is coming over the Empress's mind,
asks for her portrait on behalf of Bailly, offering
in exchange that of the revolutionary hero of the
day. Catherine replies —
' Listen : I cannot accede to your request, and
it is as little suitable for the mayor who has dis-
monarchised France to have the portrait of the
most aristocratic Empress in Europe, as it would
be for her to send it to the dismonarchising
mayor ; it would be to place both the dis
monarchising mayor and the aristocratissime
Empress in contradiction with themselves and
their functions, past, present, and future.'
And two days after —
' I repeat that you are not to give to the dis
monarchising mayor the portrait of the greatest
aristocrat in Europe ; I would have nothing to
do with Jean Marcel, who will be strung up a la
lanterne some day soon.'
Here is a complete . throwing overboard of
republicanism. It is not so with regard to philo
sophy, to which the Empress still clings. She

CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA

endeavours to find out how far it is responsible
for the present events —
TO GRIMM.
' Jtme 25, I79°-
'The National Assembly should burn all the best
French authors, and all that has carried their language
over Europe, for all that declares against the abominable
mess that they have made. ... As for the people and
its opinion, that is of no great consequence ! '
It is this last phrase especially which shows the
antagonism, now only capable of increase, be
tween the spirit of Catherine and of the Revolu
tion. It is the part, more and more prominent,
played by the people in the events of which Paris
has become the theatre that shocks and offends
the sovereign. There was a time when, in this
respect also, she had other ideas. At the outset
of her reign, in gathering together her legislative
commission, she did nothing less, in reality, than
summon it from the mass of her subjects. But it
is then, too, that, coming for the first time in
contact with the popular element, she began little
by little to change her mind in regard to it.
Perhaps she was unwise in generalising from her
impressions, but she had no other points of
comparison. She could but form her opinion on
what was before her eyes, and this opinion

IDEAS AND PRINCIPLES 13
became a profound contempt. In 1787, as her
secretary, Chrapowicki, points out to her the enor
mous number, of peasants who crowd to see her
and pay homage to her in a certain country town,
she replies with a shrug of the shoulders : ' They
would come just the same to see a bear.' It is
the same spirit to which she gives utterance two
years after, when, referring to the composition of
the political clubs in France, she says : ' How can
shoemakers have anything to do with affairs ? A
shoemaker only knows how to make shoes.'
Soon philosophy in turn is abandoned. Cathe
rine still speaks with respect of ' good French
authors,' but she makes her choice, and, Voltaire
excepted, she throws overboard all those of the
eighteenth century. Diderot, d'Alembert, and
Montesquieu himself, are sacrificed at one blow —
TO GRIMM.
' Sept. 12, 1790.
' I must tell you the truth, the tone with you now is
that of mere intemperance ; this is not the tone to
make France illustrious. . . . What will the French do
with their best writers, who almost all lived under Louis
XIV. ? All — Voltaire himself — are royalists ; they
preach order and tranquillity, and all that is opposed
to the system of this hydra with twelve hundred
heads.'
The National Assembly is referred to more and

14 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
more bitterly. On August 7th, 1 790, Chrapowicki
notes in his journal : ' Said in presence of her
Majesty, speaking of France : " It is a meta
physical country ; every member of the assembly
is a king, and every citizen is an animal." Re
ceived with approbation.' At the same time
Catherine writes to Grimm — 'Sept. 27, 1790.
' In bed I reflected over things, and, among others, I
thought that one reason why the Mathieu de Mont-
morencys, the NoaiUes, etc., are so ill-taught and so
base in spirit that they are among the first promoters
of the decree abolishing the nobility ... is that the
schools of the Jesuits have been abolished among you :
whatever you may say, those scamps looked well after
the morals and tastes of the young people, and what
ever is best in France came out of their schools.' 'Jan. 13, 1791.
' One never knows if you are living in the midst of
the murders, carnage, and uproar of the den of thieves
who have seized upon the government of France, and
who will soon turn it into Gaul as it was in the time of
Caesar. But Caesar put them down ! When will this
Caesar come ? Oh, come he will, you need not doubt'
' May 21, 1791.
' The best of possible constitutions is worth nothmg
when it makes more people unhappy than happy, when
brave and honest folk have to drudge, and only the
rogues are in clover, because their pockets are filled,
and nobody punishes them.'

IDEAS AND PRINCIPLES 15
Observe, however, with what moderation
Catherine is still capable, at this period, of dis
cussing one of the revolutionary principles most
repugnant to her. Her letter of June 30th, 1791,
to the Prince de Ligne may be given in evi
dence —
' I think that the Academies ought to offer a
first prize for the question : What do honour
and worth, synonyms dear to heroic ears, become
in the mind of an active citizen under a jealous
and suspicious government, which proscribes all
distinction, while nature itself has given to the
intelligent man a pre-eminence over the fool, and
courage is founded on the sentiment of the force
of the body or of the head ? Second prize for the
question : Are honour and worth really needful ?
And if so, surely one should not restrain the
desire of emulation, and clog it with an insup
portable enemy, equality.'
But soon she is carried away by more violent
feelings —
'Sept. I, 1791.
' If the French Revolution takes in Europe, there
will come another Gengis or Tamerlane to restore it to
reason : that is what I prophesy, and be sure it will
come true, but it will not be in my time, nor, I hope, in
that of M. Alexandre.'

1 6 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
When the news of the death of Louis XVI.
reaches her, Catherine, as we have mentioned, is
cut to the heart ; she betakes herself to bed, in a
sort of fever, and she cries to her confidant —
'Feb. I, 1793.
' The very name of France should be exterminated !
Equality is a monster. It would fain be king!'
This time the holocaust is complete. Voltaire
is sacrificed with the rest. And in the words
and writing of the Empress there are almost
savage calls to vengeance, the most extravagant
projects of repression — 'Feb. 15, 1794.
' I propose that all the Protestant powers should
embrace the Greek religion, to save themselves from
the irreligious, immoral, anarchical, abominable, and
diabolical plague, enemy of God and of thrones ; it is
the sole apostolic and truly Christian religion — an oak
with wide-spreading roots.'
Thus, after Caesar, she calls for Tamerlane
and his exterminating sword ; after the Jesuits, a
long-bearded pope, who will bring the lost peoples
into the safeUold of the Orthodox Church. Is
the Caesar for whom she calls, he whom France
and Europe have indeed felt? Yes and no.
This Caesar she did not at first perceive. In

IDEAS AND PRINCIPLES 17
1 791 she is evidently dreaming of some officer of
justice coming from without — some Brunswick.
It is only later on that her point of view changes,
becomes clearer, and then, it must be admitted,
she comes very near the truth — touches it almost.
Catherine sees Napoleon before he has ap
peared ; she points to him, describes his charac
teristics —
' If France is to come out of this alive,' she
writes, February 11, 1794, 'she will be more
vigorous than ever ; she will be meek and
obedient as a lamb ; but it will need a man both
great and bold, a man above his contemporaries,
and perhaps above the age. Is he born ? Is he
not ? Will he come ? All depends on that. If
he is found, he will arrest the last downfall, and
that will be arrested whenever he is found, in
France or elsewhere.'
The men of the Revolution who preceded
Napoleon all shared in the indignation of the
Empress, and in the severity of her judgments.
Lafayette is now called 'the big booby.' Mira
beau is at first better treated. The praises
showered on his tardy loyalism in the Gazette de
St. Pdtersbourg show that the relations of the
tribune with the Russian Legation at Paris were
not unknown, nor yet the services that were
vol. 11. B

1 8 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
looked for from him. But, after his death,
Catherine's personal opinion is emphatically ex
pressed in her letters to Grimm —
' Mirabeau was the colossus or monster of our
time ; in any other he would have been avoided,
detected, imprisoned, hanged, or broken on the
wheel.' And three days afterwards —
' I do not like the honours paid to Mirabeau,
and I do not understand the why or wherefore,
unless it be to encourage wickedness and all the
vices. Mirabeau merits the esteem of Sodom
and Gomorrha.'
She retracts, too, her admiration for Necker —
' I agree with the views of M. F. on Malet du
Pan and on that bad and foolish Necker : to me
they are not merely hateful, but mere bores and
chatterboxes.' She is not more tender towards the Duke of
Orleans —
' I hope that no Bourbon will ever again bear
the name of Orleans, after the horror that I feel
towards the last who bore it.'
As for the Abbe Sieges, she settles his account
at once : ' I subscribe to the hanging of the Abbe
Sieges.' It is but just to say that the Revolutionaries ;

IDEAS AND PRINCIPLES 19
give her back her own. Volney returns the gold
medal which the Empress has formerly bestowed
on him. Sylvain Marechal, in his Jugement
Dernier des Rois, depicts the Empress in gro
tesque hand-to-hand conflict with the Pope, who
throws his tiara at her head, after which she is
swallowed up with all her accomplices by a
volcano that opens under her feet. The Moni
teur is not always amiable towards her.
Nevertheless, it must be noted that, for a long
time, Catherine, while severely condemning the
revolutionary movement, does not, in Russia or
elsewhere, set on foot against it any act of direct
repression. She remains a passive, and in some
sort disinterested, spectator of passing events.
Her whole attitude seems to say that all these
things have no concern for her ; that, whatever
may happen, she has nothing to fear for herself
or for the empire. At bottom, she is probably
convinced of it to the last. Only it happens that
the combinations, or we might better say the
improvisations, of her policy come to impose
upon her convictions. The precise epoch when
she decides to abandon her inaction sufficiently
indicates her reasons for doing so : it is the
moment when, having settled affairs with Turkey
and Sweden, she judges the hour come to inter-

CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA

fere in Poland, and to put her hand to the
master-work of her reign. The French Revolu
tion then appears in her eyes as one of those
propitious ' conjunctions ' which, with conjectures
and circumstances, make up, for her, the whole
of politics. A dialogue with her secretary
Chrapowicki, December 14, 1791, gives clear
utterance to her view in this respect —
' I am doing all I can to get the courts of
Berlin and Vienna to concern themselves with
French affairs.'
' They are not very active.'
' No. The court of Berlin goes forward, but
that of Vienna remains behind. They do not
see my point. Am I wrong ? There are
reasons that one cannot say openly. I wish
them to become concerned in the French affairs
in order to leave me elbow-room. I have many
undertakings to be achieved. I would have
them occupied so that they may leave my way
clear. '
And immediately Catherine sets the tocsin
ringing. Up to the present she has been content
to publish in Paris, through her minister Simo-
line (in August 1790) a ukase commanding all
her subjects to quit France, in order that more
of them should not think to imitate the example

IDEAS AND PRINCIPLES

of the young Count Alexander Strogonof, who,
with his tutor, had joined a revolutionary club.
But it had not occurred to her to interdict in her
empire the incendiary publications coming from
the banks of the Seine. Russia remained the sole
country in Europe open to the circulation of the
papers printed at Paris. One number of the Moni
teur had been confiscated, because it enlarged
somewhat too explicitly on the score of the Grand
Duke and different personages of the court.
From that day Catherine examined every number
before authorising the distribution. She soon
came across one where she herself, in her turn,
was very hardly treated : she was described as
'the Messalina of the North.' 'That concerns
no one but myself,' she said proudly, and ordered
its distribution. She tolerated the presence in
St. Petersburg of the brother of Marat, who,
while condemning the sanguinary furies of the
other, did not conceal his republican views.
Tutor in the house of Count Saltykof, he often
comes to court with his pupil. It is only in 1792
that he changes his name, and takes that of
Boudri. Then, in truth, all around him changes :
the Empress embarks in the anti-revolutionary
campaign, at first without much enthusiasm,
purely as a political manoeuvre, but more and

CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA

more sincerely, and more and more passionately
too, entering little by little into the part she has
wished to play, and adopting as her own those
ideas, sentiments, and instincts. Not content
with attacking the revolutionary spirit in France
and among the French, she pursues it in Russia,
among the Russians themselves, which is really
doing it more honour than it deserves. In regard
to France she draws up, in 1792, a memorandum
on the means of restoring the monarchy. It
must be said that she does not manifest much
common-sense in the project. She imagines
that a force of ten thousand men, marching
from end to end of the country, would suffice
to the task. The cost would only be ,£500,000,
which could be borrowed at Genoa. France,
once handed back to its king, would return the
amount. In regard to the Frenchmen imbued
with the revolutionary spirit, who might be found
in her dominions, she concocts the famous ukase
of February 3, 1793, which constrains them,
under threat of immediate expulsion, to take an
oath, of which the terms could not have been
better imagined by a tribunal of inquisitors.
Nor does she treat her subjects with more in
dulgence. To ward them off from the contagion
of Jacobinism, she has recourse to means which

IDEAS AND PRINCIPLES 23
she could not have sufficiently scorned at the
commencement of her reign. Learning the choice
that had been made of Prozorofski for the post
of Governor of Moscow, Patiomkine writes to
his imperial friend —
' You have taken out of your arsenal the most
ancient piece of artillery, which will certainly
shoot in the direction in which you set it, for
it has no motion of its own ; but beware lest it
covers with blood for ever the name of your
Majesty.' Prozorofski and his collaborators of Moscow
and St. Petersburg, Arharof, Chechkofski, and
Pestel, seemed, in the vigorous phrase of a
Russian writer, 'to have risen into the light of
day out of the torture-chambers of the Preo-
brajenski Prikaz, already lost in the night of
oblivion.' The trial of the Muscovite publicist,
Novikof, condemned to fifteen years' imprison
ment for carrying on certain publications to
which the Empress herself had formerly con
tributed, inaugurates a rigime which justifies
only too well the apprehensions of Patiom
kine. Catherine bears a grudge even against
the high French cravats, covering the chin,
which the dandies of St. Petersburg, Prince
Borys Galitzine at their head, persist in wearing.

24 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
We have endeavoured to present the notions
inspired in Catherine by the great political and
social upheaval of the end of the eighteenth
century. These notions, it is evident, were
narrow. Catherine could not see that, under all
its deplorable errors, its culpable mistakes, the
movement that she sought to repress contained
something noble, lofty, and generous. Perhaps
mere intelligence could not suffice for the com
prehension of these things. What was wanted
was a certain personal elevation of sentiment,
which Catherine never possessed. In trying
to fight with the Revolution, she seized her
chance of stifling the last vestiges of national
independence on the banks of the Vistula : that
was a matter of policy, and we may waive our
judgment respecting it. But, the fight once
at end in Poland, she was neither touched as a
woman, nor impressed as a sovereign, by what
made the glory of the expiring republic and its
rehabilitation before posterity, by the last resist
ance of the vanquished, by the hero who personi
fied all its useless effort and its tragic destiny.
Having, summoned to St. Petersburg as a com
mon malefactor the vanquished soldier whom
Michelet named ' the last Knight of the West
and the first Citizen of the East,' whom Napoleon

IDEAS AND PRINCIPLES 25
afterwards, at the height of his power, would
have called to his aid, and who, in his Swiss
shelter, was not to be dazzled by Napoleon,
Catherine was not even curious to see him.
She was content to abuse him. ' Kostiouchko ' —
she did not even know how to spell his name —
' has been brought here ; he is seen to be in
every way a mere fool, quite beneath contempt.
That is how she judges the man. ' Ma pauvre
bete de Kostiouchka,' we read in another letter.
That is all the pity she can spare to the soldier
who had fallen on the field of Macieiowice, the
soldier in whose wounds the very soul of a great
and noble people seemed to pass in one last cry
of agony.
Paul I., on reaching the throne, is said to have
visited the ex-dictator in his prison, and, bending
low before him, desired his pardon for his mother.
Perhaps it is only a legend, and if so, so much
the worse for the son of Catherine. At all events
he set the prisoner free. Catherine had never
thought of doing it.
We once heard a German, who to-day occupies
a high position at Vienna, declare that, being
cosmopolitan in his tastes, he liked every nation
ality equally, except one, and that his own ; for,
said he, along with many good qualities, it had

26 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
one defect which he disliked above all others, it
did not know how to be generous.
In one sense, and from this point of view, just
or not, Catherine remained German. She knew
how to give, sometimes even how to pardon, but
she was utterly inaccessible to certain sentiments
that awaken naturally in all true hearts at the
sight of weakness, suffering, and misfortune.
Her ideas, as we know them, did not allow her
to appreciate a certain type of simple grandeur.
Her own simplicity was all made of show and
convention. She was always playing a part
when she showed herself under this aspect. She
was willing to come down from Olympus, and
she even took pleasure in it, but Olympus and
all its train must be not far off. This is why, in
1782, she refused the honour of receiving
Franklin. ' I do not care for him,' she said.
She did not understand him. In 1795 she did
not understand Kosciuszko.
Is it true that she ever echoed the one among
all the kings her contemporaries whom she pro
fessed the most to scorn, Louis XV., by repeating
in her way the famous saying 'After me the
deluge ' ? ' Poslie mienia hot trava nie rosti
(After me the grass may cease to grow) ' she is
said to have said at the end of her life. It

IDEAS AND PRINCIPLES

may well be. But to arrive at that point, she
had need to abjure all that made the true
glory of her reign, all to which she owes to
day that immortality of which she had the
sublime thirst.

BOOK II
THE SOVEREIGN
CHAPTER I
THE ART OF RULING
I
' I love the fallow land,' wrote Catherine. ' I
have said it a thousand times, I am good for
nothing out of Russia.' She thus proved the
extreme lucidity of mind which permitted her, at
least occasionally, to achieve this tour de force —
a just appreciation of her own merits. Prince
Henry of Prussia, sent to St. Petersburg, as an
act of gratitude, by his brother, and there study
ing the sovereign with a German's resolution to
get to the bottom of things, said one day to the
Comte de Segur —
' She (Catherine) is made to shine, she is
immortalised during her lifetime ; otherwise, she
would no doubt shine much less ; but in her

THE ART OF RULING

country she is more intelligent than all those
about her. It is easy to be great on such a
throne.' Catherine did not fail to recognise one of the
elements, and perhaps the most essential, of all
her successes — luck. ' I have had nothing but
good luck,' she said frankly enough. How
indeed could she fail to see in the path of her
life this indispensable factor of all prosperity ?
In 1770 she copied with her own hand a note
from her improvised admiral, the commandant-in-
chief of her naval forces in the Levant, Alexis
Orlof, who, though he had never till then seen a
ship or a sailor, knew enough at the end of a
week to see that those with whom he had been
told to conquer 'were not worth a pinch of salt.'
' My hair stands on end as I think of these
things,' wrote Orlof. ' If we had to do with any
but Turks, there would soon be an end of the
fleet.' It is this fleet and its admiral that won
the victory of Tchesme, shattering to atoms one
of the finest fleets that Turkey had ever sent to
sea. And in 1781 Catherine had already sent
to Grimm the following rdsumd of the history of
her reign, set forth by her new secretary and
factotum, Besborodko, in the fantastic form of
an inventory : —

3°

CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA

Governments instituted according to the new

form, 

29

Towns built, .......

144

Treaties made, .......

30

Victories won, .......

78

Notable edicts, decreeing laws,

88

Edicts on behalf of the people,

123

Total,

402

Four hundred and ninety-two active measures !
This astonishing piece of book-keeping, which
betrays so naively all that there was of romantic,
extravagant, childish, and very feminine, in the
extraordinary genius that swayed Russia, and
in some sort Europe, during thirty-four years,
will no doubt make the reader smile. It corre
sponds, however, truly enough, to a sum-total
of great things accomplished under her direct
inspiration. And all that, was it not really due to her good
luck? No indeed! Prince Henry of Prussia is
too severe, Catherine too modest, and we have
proved it already in speaking of the character of
the great sovereign. With such a character one
generally puts something more than chance and
success in the balance of human destinies, over
which one is called to preside. Catherine put
there, to begin with, remarkable qualities of

THE ART OF RULING 31
tenue. On July 3, 1764, the envoy of Frederick,
Comte de Solms, wrote to his master —
' On the part of the nation discontent and
commotion, and much courage and firmness, at
least in appearance, on the part of the Empress.
She left here (Livonia) with an air of the greatest
serenity and the most composed countenance,
though, only two days before, there had been a
mutiny in the army.'
In another circumstance, the Prince de Ligne
has noted —
' I was the only one to see that the last declara
tion on part of Turkey gave her only a quarter
of an hour's reflection on the instability of human
things, and the uncertainty of success and glory.
She left the room with the same air of serenity
that she had before her courier had gone.'
Imposing on all the world, her friends as well
as her enemies, by this attitude, Catherine can
never be imposed upon by man or thing, and is
never put out of countenance. In 1788, at the
moment when the Swedish war broke out, there
was a terrible lack of men, both in the army and
in the government, but especially in the army.
The Count of Anhalt presents himself, backed
by his European reputation as a soldier, and
offers his services. He is received with open arms.

32 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
But he demands the rank of general-in-chief, and
the supreme command. Catherine refuses. The
German condottiere, surprised and indignant, de
clares that he will go and plant cabbages. ' Look
after them well,' replies the Empress calmly.
To increase the prestige that she already has,
she does not disdain, from time to time, to have
recourse to certain artifices, to certain effects of
pose and arrangement. The Comte de Segur,
on presenting his credentials, perceives 'some
thing theatrical ' in the behaviour of the Empress ;
but this ' something ' has such an effect upon the
new-comer that he forgets the formal speech
he has prepared beforehand, and is obliged
to improvise another. One of his predecessors,
yet more overcome, was unable, if we may
believe Catherine, to get beyond the words,
' The King my master,' which he repeated three
times in succession. At the third repetition
Catherine put an end to his misery by saying
that she well knew the good-will of his master
towards her. But she looked upon him, from
that moment, as a fool, though he had the
reputation in Paris of being a man of ready wit.
She was indulgent only to her servants. It
should be said that she had the right to be
exigent in regard to those who had to speak

THE ART OF RULING 33

before her, for, as the Prince de Lipme has
observed, she had 'the art of listening.' 'Such
was her presence of mind,' he tells us, 'that
she seemed to be listening, even when she was
thinking of something else.' The Prince de
Ligne adds that nevertheless his own Empress,
Maria Theresa, had 'more charm and magic,'
Catherine manifests more authority. And she
is careful to keep this side of her sovereign
prestige intact. One day, at an official dinner,
having to express some discontent with the
envoy of a foreign power, she makes one of those
scenes of which Napoleon, later on, was so fond.
In the midst of her tirade she hears her secre
tary, Chrapowicki, observing in an undertone
how much it is to be regretted that the ma-
touchka loses her temper in this way. She
stops short, changes the conversation, behaves
most amiably to the end of dinner ; but on
rising from table she goes straight to the in
terrupter : ' How dare you criticise in public what
I say ! ' Her voice trembles with wrath, and
the cup of coffee that she holds in her hand is
in danger of falling to the ground. She puts
down the cup without emptying it, and dismisses
the unfortunate secretary. He thinks himself
lost, and goes home expecting, at the very least,
vol. 11. c

34 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
an order to set out for Siberia. A messenger
comes to summon him before her Majesty.
Catherine is still much excited, and overwhelms
him with reproaches. He falls on his knees.
' Come,' says the Empress, presenting him with a
snuff-box set with diamonds, ' keep this, and when
you have any observations to make in public on
what I say or do, hold your tongue and take a pinch
of snuff. The reminder may be of use to me.'
With such command over herself, it is certain
that she must exercise great command over
others. It is indeed enormous, and all the traits
of her character, of her temperament, and of her
mind, serve to strengthen it. Her attitude
impresses and fascinates, her energy, her fire,
her youthful 'go,' her confidence, her audacity,
her verve, her way of presenting things to others
as they present themselves to her, that is to say,
on the brightest side, her scorn of danger and
difficulty, made up of a good half of ignorance
and a good third of adventurous infatuation, her
day-dreams, that sort of gorgeous hallucination
in which she lives, and through which the sense
of real things comes to her ; all that aids her in
driving forward good and bad, wise and foolish
alike, driving them forward as a horseman does
his horse, now carressed and now flogged,

THE ART OF RULING 35
spurred, shaken, and in some sort borne along by
the effort of a will which increases tenfold the
play of the muscles. Read the correspondence
of the sovereign with her generals in the first
Turkish war, Galitzine and Roumiantsof. Galit-
zine is utterly incompetent, Roumiantsof is an
accomplished soldier : she scarcely notices the
difference. They must both march ; they must
both beat the Turks ; it is impossible that they
should not do that. The Turks, what are they ?
A herd, not an army. And then, 'Europe is ob
serving us.' One seems to hear Napoleon be
side the Pyramids. She thanks Roumiantsof for
a Turkish poignard that he has sent her, but the
capture of two ' hospodars ' would please her
better. Nor is that enough : ' I beg you to be
good enough to send me the Vizier himself, and,
if God wills, his Highness the Sultan himself.'
She will do all to render the victory easy : ' She
is setting fire to the Turkish empire at all four
corners.' She sends word to her Minister of
War, so that he may hold himself in readiness :
' Monsieur, monsieur, I want plenty of cannons.
. . . What am I to do if the cannons are dear ? '
One would take her for a fine lady ordering a
further supply of dresses from a good maker.
She adds : ' I have now an army at Cuban, an

36 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
army acting against the Turks, an army against
the brainless Poles ; I am about to collar the
Swedes, and I have three more soumatohi
(brawls) in petto, that I dare not avow. Send
me, if you can without attracting notice, a map
of the Mediterranean and the Archipelago, and
then pray God : God will arrange all.'
But now, in September 1 771, one of the lieu
tenants of Roumiantsof, General Essen, is de
feated under the walls of Giourgi. It is nothing.
' Where there has been water, there is water
still,' says the Russian proverb. The Russian
proverb is right. ' God favours us, but some
times he punishes us in order that we may not
become too proud.' We must go ahead, and all
will be well. Roumiantsof goes ahead, he leaves
the right bank of the Danube. Victory! cries
Catherine. Quick, a pen, to send the good news
to Voltaire, that the good news may spread
through all Europe ! Alas ! in obeying his sove
reign, Roumiantsof has attempted too much. He
is obliged to beat a retreat. He excuses himself
on account of the state of the army. He ima
gines that he has enemies about the Empress
who have purposely left him without enough food
and ammunition. ' He does not know what he is
saying ! ' Catherine has never heard that he had

THE ART OF RULING 37
enemies capable of doing him a mischief with
her. That would be impossible. 'She has no
people about her to whisper in her ear. . . . She
will have none of such folk. . . . She judges
those capable of doing well by what they
do.' No doubt Roumiantsof s army is weak.
Especially (a little cut in passing) as it must have
suffered in the marches and counter-marches
from one bank of the Danube to the other. But
the Empress cannot forget the inscription en
graved on the obelisk commemorating the vic
tory won by Roumiantsof at Kagoul : it declares
that he had only 17,000 men under his command.
With his skill and energy he can renew this feat
of arms ; provided always that he does not allow
himself to be discouraged. Forward ! Forward !

11
This correspondence discovers yet another
superiority in Catherine : her skill in the manage
ment of men. In that she is simply marvellous.
She employs all the resources of a trained diplo
matist, of a subtle psychologist, and of a woman
who knows the art of fascination ; she employs
them together or apart, she handles them with
unequalled mae stria. If it is true that she some-

38 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA

times takes her lovers for generals and statesmen,
it is no less true that she treats on occasion her
generals and statesmen as lovers. When the
sovereign can do nothing, the Circe intervenes.
If it avails nothing to command, to threaten, or to
punish, she becomes coaxing and wheedling. To
wards the soldiers that she sends to death, bidding
them only win for her victory, she has delicate
attentions, flattering forethought, adorable little
ways. After the battle of Kinburn (October
1787), having to send quantities of ribbon to the
heroes of the day, she arranges them with her
own hands, in a basket of flowers, which she
sends to Patiomkine. In September 1789 she
sends to Prince von Nassau-Siegen, the hew
commander of the fleet, two warm dressing-gowns,
' like those I sent last year to Marshal Prince
Patiomkine before Otchakof, and which were of
great service to him, as he himself assured me.'
She flatters the literary ambitions of the' Comte
de Segur in absolutely insisting on putting his
Coriolanus on the stage, and, in the course of the
performance, she seizes both his hands to make
him applaud himself. She even gives out that she
knows the piece by heart, reciting aloud a dozen
lines, where, it is true, she has caught a political
allusion that she wishes to emphasise.

THE ART OF RULING

39

Should fortune smile upon the efforts she has
thus provoked and stimulated, she is profusely
grateful : honours, pensions, gifts of money, of
peasants, of land, rain upon the artisans of her
glory. But she does not abandon those who have
had the misfortune to be unlucky. In June
1790 Prince von Nassau-Siegen is ingloriously
defeated. She immediately writes to him —
' I hope you know me well enough to be sure
that the gossip of the town, which has apparently
reached you, will have no effect upon me. I know
perfectly your zeal ; I do it justice ; I most sin
cerely share your mortification ; I am distressed
to hear that it has even affected your health. . . .
Mon Dieu, who is there, then, that has not had
great reverses in his life ? Have not the greatest
captains had their unlucky days. The late King
of Prussia was really only great after a great
reverse. . . . Remember, Prince, your successes in
the South and North, rise above these untoward
events, and go forward against the enemy, instead
of asking me to appoint another commander for
the fleet. I cannot do so now without giving
occasion to your enemies. I lay too great store
by the services you have rendered me not to
support you, especially at a time when you are
suffering, as you tell me, in body and mind.'

4o CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA

She supports him, in fact, against all. As, in
his endeavour to retire from the position, he
appeals to the unfavourable state of affairs, she
replies that it will be cruel of him towards her if
he cannot remedy them. ' I have always liked to
take an interest in the affairs of those who looked
after mine.' And, as the clamour of court and
town still continue against the defeated general,
she writes to him again —
' You acted upon a plan approved by me and
upon my orders, and, coming from the supreme
authority, they could not have been submitted to
any further opinion, since, as long as I live, I
shall never allow what I have ordered and
approved of in regard to service to be called
in question by a living soul ; nor does any one
here attempt to do so. You are right, and you
must be right, since I say that you are right.
That is an " aristocratic " reason, no doubt ; but
it can be no otherwise without turning every
thing upside down.'
And it is always thus. In 1794 General
Igelstrom, having been surprised at Warsaw by a
popular outbreak, is suspended from office ; but,
one day, as those about the Empress are intent
upon running him down, she raises her voice :
' Silence, gentlemen ; do not forget that he served

THE ART OF RULING 41
me for thirty years, and that I owe to him the
peace with Sweden.'
A fragment of conversation with Count Nicolas
Roumiantsof, the son of the hero of the first
Turkish war, which is reported to us by Gretch,
shows, on the other hand, the multiplicity of
means which she has at her command, and which
she uses to obtain the aid of those whose devotion
is likely to be useful to her. She asks the Count
if he thinks it easy to govern men. ' I think there
is nothing more difficult,' replies Roumiantsof.
' Come now, you have only to observe three
principles : the first is to act so that people fancy
they are doing of their own accord what you make
them do.' 'That is quite enough,' interrupts
Roumiantsof. Admiral Tchitchagof relates that
his brother, who was gentleman of the bedchamber,
had one day the misfortune to be late in arriving.
The Empress observed it, and did not fail to com
ment on this negligence, but it was in the form
of eulogies heaped on the father of Tchitchagof,
who, for fifty years, never once failed to be at his
post. Those who were present imagined that the
young man was receiving the most extraordinary
signs of imperial favour, until he confessed to
them afterwards that he had never been so
miserable and confused. ' I make it a point to

42 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA

praise aloud, and to complain quietly,' said
Catherine. And is it not easy to imagine the effect that a
word from her lips, a gesture of her hand, the
slightest mark of satisfaction or of dissatisfaction,
coming from her, would have over the simple and
impressionable people with whom she was for the
most part brought in contact ? Tchitchagof relates
that a General Vorontsof, Commandant of the Post
of Revel, whom he had known well, was struck
by an attack of apoplexy, of which he died, at the
mere idea of having incurred the sovereign's
displeasure. A non-commissioned officer named
Stepan Chirai, sent to the Empress by Souvarof
with the news of the taking of a fortress, returned
with the Cross of St. Vladimir of the fourth class,
which the Empress herself had pinned on his
chest. Thirty years later the Emperor Nicholas,
on the day of his coronation, thought to advance
him a class. He returned the new cross: he could
not make up his mind to give up the one that
he had received from the hands of the matouchka !

in

Catherine's art of ruling was not, however,
without its shortcomings, some of which were

THE ART OF RULING 43
due to the mere fact of her sex, whose depen
dences and weaknesses she was powerless to
overcome. ' Ah ! ' she cried one day, ' if heaven
had only granted me breeches instead of petti
coats, I could do anything. It is with eyes and
arms that one rules, and a woman has only ears.'
The petticoats were not solely responsible for her
difficulties. We have already referred to a defect
which bore heavily upon the conduct of affairs
during her reign : this great leader of men, who
knew so well how to make use of them, did
not know how to choose them. Her judgment,
usually so accurate and penetrating, her lucidity,
great as it was, deserted her on this point. She
could not see in others either the qualities or the
defects that she discovered and analysed in herself
with so extraordinary a clearness of sight. There
was here a gap in her intelligence, due probably,
in part at least, to the influence of her tempera
ment. It seems that her vision of men in general -
was disturbed, in this respect, by the breath of
^passion which influenced all her life. The general,
the statesman, of whom she had need, she seemed
to see only through the male whom she liked or
disliked. What she looked for first, in the face of
any functionary whatever, was the romantic side,
the more or less attractive exterior. That she took

44 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
Patiomkine for an able man may be excused ; he
was perhaps a madman, but he had the madness
of genius. He belonged to the category of men
who are called forces of nature. And this force,
let loose upon immensity in this ' fallow land ' for
which Catherine felt that she had been born, had
its value. But after Patiomkine came Zoubof.
He was a mere puppet : Catherine took him for
a man of genius.
The contrary also happened to her. Rou
miantsof having presented before her one of his
lieutenants, General Weissmann, whom he judged
capable of taking his place in case of need,
Catherine conversed with him on three occasions,
and, having turned him this way and that, ' came
to the conclusion that he was an absolute fool.'
The wretched man shortly afterwards rushed
upon his death in the battle of Koutchouk-
Kajnardji. In the opinion of all competent to
judge, he was beyond compare as a soldier, and
valiant among the valiant. One historian has
called him ' the Achilles of the Russian army.'
These mistakes of judgment were frequent.
But Catherine did more than this, and worse.
With the obstinacy which characterised her, and
the infatuation that her successes gave her, she
came little by little to translate this capital defect

THE ART OF RULING 45
into a parti pris, to formulate it as a system ; one
man was worth another, in her eyes, so long as
he was docile and prompt to obey. She had in
this respect maxims which might well disconcert
her admirers.
' Tell me,' she wrote to Grimm, ' if ever
sovereign has more absolutely chosen his min
isters according to the voice of public opinion
than Louis XVI. ? And we have seen what
happened. According to me, no country has a
dearth of men. Don't try to look all round about
you, try to use what you have at hand. It is
always said of us that we have a dearth of men ;
yet in spite of all, things come right. Peter I.
had the same, and knew not how to read or write ;
well, did not things succeed ? Ergo, there is no
such thing as a dearth of men ; there is a multi
tude, but you must make them move : all will go
well if you have this other to make them move.
What does your coachman do, souffre-douleur,
when you are boxed up in your coach ? A good
heart goes everywhere ; ' because this or that is
narrow and limited, the master is not.'
And again : ' Assuredly men of worth are
never lacking, for it is affairs which make men
and men which make affairs ; I have never tried
to look for them, and I have always found close

46 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
at hand the men who have served me, and I have
for the most part been well served.'
This does not hinder her from one day making
this reflection, which she puts in a letter to the
Prince de Ligne —
' Ah, Prince, who knows better than I do that
there are clerks who are ignorant that a maritime
town has a port ? '
And this other —
' It is not ideas which are wanting ; it is in the
execution, it is in the application, that things often
go awry.'
This does not prevent her, in 1774, from being
on the point of going to Moscow herself in order
to put down Pougatchef ; for, since the death of
Bibikof, she knows not who can cope with him.
She summons a council : Gregory Orlof declares
that he has slept badly and has not an idea
in his head ; Razoumofski and Galitzine are
silent ; Patiomkine is for the man whom she
chooses ; Panine alone has the courage to give
advice, and his advice is that the Empress
should appeal to his brother, General Panine,
whose services she has long neglected, thinking
that another would do equally well in his place.
The peril being urgent, she submits, sacrifices
her amour-propre, and Panine saves the crown

THE ART OF RULING 47
and the empire. In 1788, after the first en
counter with the Swedes, she court-martials three
captains of frigates ; the next day she writes to
Patiomkine : ' They deserve the gallows, but there
is nobody else to put in their place, unless he falls
from the sky.'
With the multiplicity of her enterprises, and
with her ideas on this point, which are but the
expression of her caprices, she uses up a terrible
number of men. Her maxim that ' affairs make
men ' leads her to multiply to excess the number
of functionaries. According to one testimony, if
the two capitals and a few other larger towns are
left out of the question, there is one functionary
to every ten inhabitants in the provinces.
And her idea that one man is worth as much as
another causes her, for a mere nothing, for a
word that offends her, for a cast of countenance
that she finds unpleasing, or even without motive,
for the pleasure of change and the delight of
having to do with some one new, as she avows
naively in a letter to Grimm, to set aside,
disgraced or merely cashiered, one or another
of her most devoted servants. In 1788 Rou
miantsof, the greatest warrior whom Russia pro
duced before Souvarof, is still alive, and well
able to take the command, and Alexis Orlof,

48 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
the hero of Tchesme, is burning to renew his
old exploits. He has had a certain apprentice
ship to the trade, which he entered into
in 1770, and a name that the enthusiasm of
Catherine herself has surrounded with such an
aureole, that his reputation is worth in itself a
fleet or an army. But both the one and the
other, Roumiantsof and Orlof, have long been
sacrificed to Patiomkine, and Catherine is re
duced to seeking generals and admirals in Eng
land, in Holland, in Germany. At last she
finds Nassau-Siegen, who, after having enchanted
her by his matador airs and stage costumes, ere
long costs her a fleet, and the shame of a disaster
without precedent in the history of the young
Russian navy.
The extravagant optimism, which is part of
the character of Catherine, and which colleagues
like Nassau and Patiomkine assiduously encour
age, has also to be observed. The story of the
scene-painting on canvas, which, during the visit
to the Crimea, is said to have represented the
absent villages, has been disproved. It is not
so very far from the truth, on the testimony even
of those who have contested its reality. The
Prince de Ligne is among these; he observes,
nevertheless, that Catherine, never going on foot,

THE ART OF RULING

49

could see no more than what was shown her, and
imagined frequently that a town was built and
inhabited, ' when this town had no streets, the
streets no houses, and the houses no roofs, doors,
or windows.' The Comte de Langeron, who
was afterwards governor of these very provinces,
and whose memoirs have not the slightest trace
of retrospective hostility, goes even further. A
proclamation of the governor of Harkof, Vassili
Tchertkof, issued at the same time to announce
to the inhabitants the coming of the sovereign
and to instruct them in their duties on this
solemn occasion, is equally characteristic in the
same way. It is severely ordered that the in
habitants are to dress themselves in their best
clothes when her Majesty is expected to pass by.
The girls are to have their hair carefully combed
out and adorned with flowers. They are also
to strew flowers on the Empress's path, and
all the population is to ' express its delight by
appropriate gestures and attitudes.' The houses
on the route are to be repainted, the roofs
repaired, the doors and windows decked with
festoons, and, as far as possible, with rugs
pleasing to the- eye. It is forbidden for any one
to get drunk, or to present to her Majesty the
smallest request ; this under penalty of the knout
VOL. II. d

So CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
and hard labour. The local magistrates will see
to it in addition that the passage of the sovereign
does not raise the price of food. Prince Chtcher-
batof relates that at Moscow all the beggars had
been put outside, so that the Empress should not
see them. ' The Empress has looked, but not
seen (vidiela i ne vidala),' he adds, with an un
translatable play on words. This is how she
came to be convinced that ' there were no hungry
people in Russia.' She gives that assurance one
day to Grimm !
But the conquest and the arrangement of the
Tauric peninsula were, in the hands of Patiom
kine, nothing but a colossal fderie mounted by
that prodigious improvisatore and disappearing
with him. It was difficult to decide, on seeing
him at work, which to admire the most : his
extraordinary activity and the fertility of his
imagination, or the incredible navvetd with which
both Catherine and himself take their creation,
part madness, part fancy, part childish mystifica
tion, absolutely au sdrieux. A desert is to be
transformed into a cultivated and well-populated
land, inhabited by industry and the arts, and
this is to be done in a few years, as if by magic.
Patiomkine sets to work. He plants forests in
the Steppes, imports the seeds of all known

THE ART OF RULING 51
vegetables, trains vines, cultivates mulberry-trees
for silk-worms, builds manufactories, theatres,
palaces, barracks, and cathedrals. He covers the
peninsula with magnificent towns. The history
of these towns is astounding. The examples
which America offers to-day to our astonishment,
in the same order of instantaneous improvisa
tions, are outdone. In 1784 a site is wanted
for the capital of the province, which is to be
named ' Iekatierinoslaf ' — glory of Catherine.
Two months after the site has been marked out,
there is already a project for a university, open
not only to natives, but also to the strangers
who are expected to flock from all the corners
of Europe. Soon an army of workmen appears
on the right bank of the Dnieper, at the spot
chosen, not far from a humble Tartar village
called Kai'dak; Lieutenant Sinielnikof, who has
charge of them, receives 200,000 roubles for the
first cost, and the work commences. The town
is to extend along the river about 25 versts, and
to cover 300 square versts with streets 200 feet
wide. There is to be a park, with a botanical
garden, fish-pond, and different other embellish
ments. In the middle is to be the palace of the
Prince of Taurida, Patiomkine the magnificent.
Around are the buildings apportioned to the

52 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
different services of the administration ; then
come the dwellings of the workmen employed in
building the town, the workshops, the manu
factories, the houses of the coming population.
Twelve large factories, one of them for silk
fabrics, are planned, and the funds for establish
ing them partly collected. A town-hall in the
style of the old basilicas, a great bazaar in the
style of the Propylaeum, a Bourse, a theatre, a
Conservatoire of music, finally a cathedral on the
model of St. Peter's, but larger, will be erected
in various parts of the city, suitably chosen. The
materials are ready, Patiomkine declares. In
addition, professors are already summoned for
the university and the conservatoire. The cele
brated Sarti is to direct the latter. For the chair
of history in the university a Frenchman named
Guyenne is appointed, a soldier by profession.
But these details must not be looked into too
closely. An observatory too is thought of, and
a sort of Quartier Latin for the students.
Such are the plans ; now see the results. The
palace of Patiomkine is built of conservatories,
one for pine-apples, another for laurels and
orange-trees, others again for pomegranates,
dates, etc. The silk factory is also built. It
costs 240,000 roubles, and works for two years,

THE ART OF RULING 53

after which various reasons, the principal of which
is a scarcity of material, bring it to an end. The
silk-worm industry, for which a manager has
been brought from abroad at a considerable
salary, produces a maximum of twenty pounds of
silk a year ! The remainder of the great city
exists only in fancy. But Iekatierinoslaf had, all
the same, a chance of becoming in time a little
provincial town. Kherson, of which Joseph II.
laid the first stone in 1787, saying that after him
Catherine had laid the last, did not even arrive
at this modest result. In other parts of the
empire the rapid erection of administrative or
industrial centres ran similar risks. In 1787
the poet Dierjavine, accompanying the governor
of Petrosavodsk in a journey undertaken for the
inauguration of a town which had been appointed
chief town of the district, never reached the goal,
he tells us : the town existed only on paper !
Nevertheless the Crimea was conquered and
began to be populated.
' Such, in Russia,' said the Comte de Segur, ' is
the double magic of absolute power and of passive
obedience, that nobody murmurs, even though in
want of everything, and things go on, although
nothing has been prepared or looked after in
advance.'

54 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA

' Things went on,' in fact, from one end to the
other of Catherine's reign, and 'passive obe
dience,' no doubt, had a large share in it. The
adventure of Sutherland, the English banker at
St. Petersburg, is well known. One day the
chief of police, Ryleief, presents himself, and,
with all sorts of excuses, communicates to him an
order of the sovereign which concerns him, an
order which he cannot but deplore, despite his
respect for the will of her Majesty, but which it is
out of his power not to execute. In a word, he
has been ordered to stuff the unfortunate banker.
Conceive of the poor man's fright ! Happily the
mistake is discovered in time. The Empress
had spoken of stuffing a favourite dog that she
had lost, and the English name had put Ryleief
on the wrong track. The English Dr. Dimsdale
relates, in the notes he has left on his residence
in Russia, that having wished to take the lymph
for inoculating the Empress from a child belong
ing to poor moujiks, the mother opposed it :
according to the general belief, it meant the
death of the child. But the father intervened :
' If the Empress ordered us to cut off both the
child's legs, should we not do it ? ' Dimsdale
adds nevertheless another characteristic. The
sick child was placed in an overheated room, in

THE ART OF RULING 55
a fetid atmosphere, the opening of a window,
according to the parents, meaning certain death.
But Dimsdale produced a rouble : he could open
as much as he liked.
The anecdote reveals another agent, universal
and all-powerful, which the ways of the country
put in the hands of Catherine. She did not fail
to use it. She used it vigorously and to excess,
after her usual style. She gave much, and let
even more be taken. The waste of money in
every branch of the administration was enormous.
One day Catherine, in the midst of a violent
headache, could not suppress a smile : ' She did
not wonder that she was suffering so much, for
she had seen in the accounts that she used apoud
(over thirty pounds) of powder every day for her
hair ! ' This detail enables one to judge of the
rest. But the accounts that Harris sent to the
English court, with the detail of 'tens of thou
sands of pounds sterling' used by his French
colleagues in corrupting the functionaries of the
Empress, were not less fanciful. The Baron de
Breteuil was the sole French minister at this
epoch who was empowered to employ in this
manner a considerable sum, to the extent of a
million of francs ; and he never made use of the
permission. His successors had something to do

56 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
to obtain a few ten thousand pounds intended for
the buying over of certain influences or certain
secret documents. And these attempts, con
sidered even at Versailles as useless or dangerous,
had not as a rule any success during the reign of
Catherine. A functionary of the Empress, who
had, or appeared to have, a great fancy for a fine
coach made in Paris, thought better of it before
he had received the present, and informed the
sovereign, who dictated to him herself an ironi
cally-polite letter of refusal. After the Baron
de Breteuil, in the long series of agents repre
senting the French policy who succeeded him
at St. Petersburg, the Comte de S6gur was
the only one who succeeded in exercising any
particular influence, and money, which he would
have found it very difficult to raise, had no
share in this.
From 1762 to the death of Catherine, there
was only one great corrupting influence in her
empire — and that was herself. It is certain that
she used it mainly for the good of the empire, as
she conceived it, and that she found in it the
resources for the accomplishment of great things.
It is not less certain that morality had to suffer
for it, and that the influence of ideas and
customs thus implanted in the national genius,

THE ART OF RULING 57
was destined to exercise on its later development
a long and untoward action.
We shall now endeavour to pass rapidly in
review the results obtained by means of all these
resources as they were wielded in the hands of
the sovereign.

CHAPTER II
HOME POLICY

Happy is the nation without a history : from
1775 the Russian people counted, in point of
view of the home policy, among the happy
nations. After the great effort which she had to
make in putting down the revolt of Pougatchef,
Catherine found herself at first fatigued, then
disenchanted, and finally absorbed by her foreign
policy, by the conquest of the Crimea, the second
Turkish war, the second and third division of
Poland, and the anti-revolutionary campaign.
Up to 1775 she asserted, and had need to assert,
her exuberant activity in every direction. She
had first to defend her throne against a series of
more or less threatening attempts. A series of
repressive measures, more or less calculated to
add to her glory, corresponded with them.
In October 1762 a certain Peter Hrouchtchof
was accused, with the brothers Simon, Ivan, and

HOME POLICY S9

Peter Gourief, of having plotted for the re-
establishment on the throne of Ivan of Brunswick,
shut up since 1741 in prison. Having been
condemned, together with his accomplices, to
transportation to the government of Oremburg,
Hrouchtchof took part in 1772 in the revolt of
the exiles in Siberia, under the leadership of the
famous Beniowski. He succeeded in escaping,
after a series of romantic adventures, reached the
west of Europe by way of America, and served
in the French army in the rank of captain.
This conspiracy, true or false, for the reality of
the criminal intentions imputed to the accused
seems not to have been clearly established, has
often been confused with another later event, in
which the Princess Dachkof was compromised.
In May 1763, during Catherine's visit to Moscow
on the occasion of her coronation, fresh arrests
for high treason were commanded by the Empress.
But the unhappy Ivan, languishing in his prison,
was not the cause this time. It was quite
another affair. There had been a rumour that
Catherine intended to marry Gregory Orlof.
Some of those who had taken the most active
part in the elevation of the new Czarina, Fedor
Hitrovo at their head, judged the interests of the
empire endangered by this real or imaginary

60 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
project. They formed a plot to hinder the
Empress from carrying it out, or, in case of
her persisting, to kill the favourite. Hitrovo,
the first to be arrested, named as accomplices,
Panine, Hliebof, Tieplof, Passek, the greater
part of the heroes of the 12th of July, and the
Princess Dachkof. He afterwards contradicted
his assertions, and declared that he had only had
to do with more obscure friends, the two brothers
Roslavlef and Lasounski. Princess Dachkof, on
being examined, declared proudly that she knew
nothing in the matter, but that, if she had known
anything, she would have kept silence just the
same. Moreover, if the Empress wished to bring
her head to the scaffold, after she had helped to
set the crown on hers, she was prepared ! The
affair had no very serious consequences. Hitrovo
alone was exiled in the government of Orel. A
ukase was also proclaimed in the streets of
Moscow, to the sound of the drum, a ukase which
was merely the repetition of an earlier act of
Elizabeth's government (June 5, 1757), by which
it was forbidden to the inhabitants to occupy
themselves with matters which did not concern
them. The affairs of state in general were com
prised in the enumeration of subjects thus denoted.
The interdiction was renewed in 1772.

HOME POLICY 61

Almost at the same time, a priest, the Arch
bishop of Rostof, Arsene Matsieievitch, raised
the standard of revolt in a much more audacious
manner. The policy of Catherine in regard to
the orthodox clergy did not fail to give rise to
well-established criticisms. On coming to the
throne she had pronounced vigorously against
the measures by which Peter III. had brought
about the disaffection, if not the active opposi
tion, of the church. She had reopened the
private chapels, closed by order of the Czar,
forbidden the performance of pagan plays at the
theatre, reinforced the censorship of books ;
finally, she had put an end to the secularisation
of ecclesiastical property. Suddenly she changed
her mind, and revoked all these measures in
protection of interests which she thought it no
longer needful to consult. A part of the goods
returned to their former possessors was the
object of fresh claims. The clergy in general
bowed the head, as they had done before.
Arsene alone rose in defence of the common
rights thus outraged. He went so far as to
introduce into the ritual certain new formulas
which, under colour of menacing the enemies of
the church, were levelled directly against the
Empress. Arrested and brought before the

62 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
sovereign, he broke out into language so violent
that her Majesty was obliged to cover her ears.
He was condemned to be degraded from his
office, and shut up in a cloister, where he was
employed, by express order, in the meanest work,
in fetching water and chopping wood. Four
years later, after a new attempt at revolt, he was
removed from the cloister to a better-guarded
prison. The fortress of Revel was selected in
order that he might not be able to talk in Russian
with his keepers, who only understood Lithuanian.
He changed his name, and called himself the
peasant Andre Vrai, that is to say, liar, or Brodi-
giaguine, that is to say, brigand. He died in
1772. A year afterwards, a shopkeeper named
Smoline renewed the protest of the unfortunate
bishop against the infringement of the rights of
the clergy. In a letter addressed to the Empress,
and filled with the most virulent invectives, he
openly accused the sovereign of having ap
propriated the goods of the church in order to
distribute them to Orlof and other favourites.
He ended with this apostrophe : ' Thou hast a
heart of stone like Pharaoh. ... Of what chastise
ment art thou not worthy, thou who every day
dost chastise robbers and brigands ! ' Catherine
proved that the mad creature calumniated her

HOME POLICY 63

by showing him mercy. Smoline was only im
prisoned for five years, after which, at his own
request, he was made a monk, and nothing more
was heard of him.
Nevertheless, in 1764, the death of Ivan of
Brunswick had already added another stain of
blood to that which the drama of Ropcha left on
the dazzling horizon of the new reign. Ivan, it
may be remembered, was the little Emperor of
two years old, dethroned in 1741 by Elizabeth.
Shut up at first with the rest of his family at
Holmogory, on the White Sea, then, alone, in
the fortress of Schlusselburg, he had grown up
in the shadow of the dungeon. He was said to
be weak-minded and to stutter ; but he had
reigned, and such another act of violence as the
one that had dethroned him might reinstate him
on the throne : he remained a menace. He gave
some anxiety to Voltaire himself, who foresaw
that the philosophers would not find in him
a friend. In September 1764 he disappeared.
The incident has given rise to contradictory tales
and comments, in which history is quite at a loss.
To oblige his imperial benefactress, the patriarch
of Ferney was good enough to ' arrange ' the
incident. Others have done the same, Catherine
the first of all. Here are the known facts. An

64 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
officer of the name of Mirovitch, on guard at the
fortress of Schliisselburg, induced a party of men
under his command to render him assistance in
setting free the 'Czar.' But Ivan had two
guardians, to whom the strict command had been
given to kill him rather than let him escape.
They killed him. Catherine was suspected of
complicity in the murder : she was thought to
have planned the whole thing with Mirovitch,
He, it is true, let himself be judged, condemned,
and executed without a word ; but had he not
been made to believe that he would be reprieved
at the last moment ? Precedents existed ; under
Elizabeth, several high dignitaries, Osterman
among others, had profited by the imperial
clemency at the very moment when their head
rested on the block.
There were certain curious details in the
trial : on the express command of the Empress,
no attempt was made to find other accomplices,
likely as they were to be found, in the crime.
The relatives of Mirovitch were not interfered
with. It would be unreasonable to try to prove
an accusation on such vague grounds. Catherine
showed once again, in these circumstances, the
force of mind which she possessed. She was
travelling in Livonia when the news reached

HOME POLICY

65

her. She did not hasten her return, or make
any change in her itinerary.
But the great crisis in home affairs was that
of I77I-I775- At all times, up to the begin
ning of this century at least, Russia has been
the home of pretenders. From the first half
of the seventeenth century, after the extinction
of the dynasty of Rourik, they followed one
another at brief intervals. Under Catherine
the series was almost interminable. In 1765
two deserters, Gavrilo Kremnief and Ievdokimof,
successively assumed the name of Peter III.
In 1769 there was a fresh apparition of the
murdered Czar, and it was once more a deserter,
Mamykine, who assumed the tragic and am
bitious mask. Emelian Pougatchef is thus only
the continuation of a series. But this time
Catherine has not to do with an obscure plot or
a puerile attempt, which a few blows of the knout
or the axe will soon set right. A whole tempest
is let loose after the wild Samozvaniets, a storm
which threatens to shake the throne and the
foundations of the empire in a general downfall
of the whole political and social structure. It
is no more a mere duel between usurpers more
or less well-armed for the defence or the con
quest of a crown, which has so long been at
vol. 11. e

66 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
the disposal of whoever can seize upon it. The
contest has another name and another bearing.
It is a contest between the modern state, which
Catherine is endeavouring to extricate from the
unfinished materials left by Peter I. to his heirs,
and the primitive state, in which the mass of
the people persist in still living ; between organi
sation and the inorganic disorder, which is the
natural mode of existence of savage nations ;
between centralisation and the centrifugal force
which is peculiar to that state of nature. It
is also the cry of that misery, in which the
depths of the populace lie buried, rising against
the improvised splendour of a class, how con
fined ! of privileged persons. It is the obscure
protestation of the national conscience against
the panegyrics of philosophers and poets, of
Voltaire and Dierjavine, chanting the splendours
of the new reign. For if Catherine, on the
heights on which she is surrounded by her
crowd of dignitaries and favourites, by all the
pomp and majesty of her supreme rank, has
done much already to give incomparable lustre
to her name, her power, her own greatness,
she has done as yet nothing, or almost nothing,
for those under her, for the poor, the lowly,
who toil and suffer as in the past, who have no

HOME POLICY 67

share in these triumphs and conquests on high,
who know nothing of them, save to be ex
asperated by the reflection which does but light
up the depths of their own misery. Among
these, the short reign of Peter III. had awakened
hopes and left behind it regrets. The seculari
sation of the estates of the clergy, begun by the
Emperor, had seemed to lead the way towards
the enfranchisement of the serfs, and did indeed
point in that direction, for the serfs belonging
to the secularised domains became free. We
have seen that Catherine put an end to this.
Peter had also inaugurated a system of absolute
tolerance in regard to religious dissent. He
had no wish to keep special watch over the
welfare of the orthodox church. Legend, as
usual, exaggerated his merits. The skoptsi, or
mutilators, in particular, venerated in him a
saint and martyr of their cause. His affiliation
to their sect was, they imagined, the real reason
of his death ; and the accidents of his married
life lent some colour to these fables. Catherine,
as we have seen, did not follow in this respect
either the course of her husband, and what had
made her victorious now turned against her.
The raskol played a considerable part in the
movement of insurrection, and with it all the

68 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA

elements of discontent and disorder, even to
the turbulent restlessness of the Asiatic races,
now in conflict, in the neighbourhood of Kasan
and of Moscow, with the Russifying headship
of the state : all that entered into conflict with
the state and the rdgime which it made and
maintained. Emelian Pougatchef was merely
the instrument, the nominal leader of this
general uprising of the rancours and appetites
of an immense proletariat. Yet earlier, scattered
instances of revolt among the serfs attached to
the soil had often been seen. In 1768, in the
government of Moscow alone, there were nine
cases of proprietors killed by their peasants.
The following year there were eight more, and
among the victims was one of the heroes of the
Seven Years' War, General Leontief, taken
prisoner on the battlefield of Zorndorf, and
married to a sister of the victorious Roumiantsof.
Emelian Pougatchef was the son of a Cossack
of the Don. He too had taken part in the
Seven Years' War, where he had distinguished
himself, had served also against the Turks,
and had then deserted. He was captured,
escaped again, and entered upon the career
of an outlaw and brigand, by which he came
in time to the sanguinary drama which brought

HOME POLICY 69

his life to an end. The fact of an accidental
resemblance with Peter III., which rendered his
imposition more practicable, has been denied,
and seems to rest on no serious authority.
The portraits of the Samozvaniets which have
reached us show no trace of likeness. Peter
III. had the face of a grimacing ape; Pou
gatchef s was of the common type of the Russian
moujik. He took the name of the deceased
Emperor as others had taken it before him.
But he had the fatal luck to appear at the
hour marked for the social convulsion, whose
causes we have indicated. He did not start
the movement, which had long been gathering
force ; it was rather the movement that bore
him with it. He did not even try to direct
its course. He put himself at its head and
rushed forward blindly, urged on by the tumul
tuous and threatening flood. It was a terrible
course, covering with smoking ruins a half of
the empire. After four years, the disciplined
force of the organised element got the better
of the savage element. Pougatchef, conquered
and made prisoner by one of the lieutenants of
Panine, was brought to Moscow in a wooden
cage, condemned to death, and executed. The
headsman cut off his head before quartering

70 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
him. Catherine declared that it was by her
order : she wished to appear more clement than
Louis XV. had been with Damiens. She had
nevertheless other injuries and other crimes to
avenge. The victims made by Pougatchef and
his band were beyond all reckoning, and Cathe
rine had been greatly terrified, whatever sallies,
more or less witty, she may have sent to Voltaire
on the subject of the ' Marquis de Pougatchef.'
An odd characteristic of this incident, but odd
in a way which is often seen in similar circum
stances, was that, while revolting against the
state, as they saw it under Catherine's organisa-^
tion, Pougatchef and his companions could only
copy this organisation, ape it at least, even to the
smallest details of its outer forms. After having
married a daughter of the people, the false
emperor gave her a species of court of honour.
Young peasants, beaten into trim, played the
freiline with immense grotesqueness, attempting
ceremonious reverences and a respectful way of
kissing the hand. To increase the illusion of his
supposed sovereignty, Pougatchef even went the
length of naming his principal lieutenants after
the principal members of the court of Catherine :
the Cossack Tchika took the name of Tcherni-
chef, with the title of field-marshal ; others were

HOME POLICY 71

called Count Vorontsof, Count Panine, Count
Orlof, etc.
This comedy cost dear to every one. It took
from Catherine the last remains of her former
enthusiasm for the redress of social iniquities ;
Russia, apart from immense material losses, had
probably that of a reign which had seemed to be
fruitful in great humanitarian reforms. The home
policy of Catherine preserved to the last, as we
have intimated, the trace of these terrible years,
like the scar of blows received and rendered in a
fight which was a fight to the death. There were
others among the dead than those who perished
by fire or steel. Some of the ideas that Catherine
had brought with her to the government of the
empire remained behind on the field of battle ;
and perhaps they were among the best that she
had brought.
In regard to the department of police, Cathe
rine's rdgime, from 1775 especially, was, in a sense,
a rdgime of reaction against that which Peter
III. had inaugurated. Peter had suppressed
the sinister secret chancellorship, the shameful
heirloom of a time which Russia hoped never to
see again. Catherine would not re-establish the
institution with its hateful obsolete forms, but
little by little, without using the name, she re-

72 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
stored something very like the thing. She had
Stephen Ivanovitch Chechkofski. A legend has
been formed about this mysterious functionary,
whom Catherine was never without. The reality,
without equalling the horror of the memories left
by the functionaries of Ivan Vassilevich, was
doubtless of a kind to cast some shadow on the
reputation that the friend of philosophers desired
to preserve in Europe. In her hands it was
a cunning and hypocritical machine of state.
Chechkofski had neither official titles corre
sponding with his position nor apparent organisa
tion of his inquisitorial work. But his hand and
eye were everywhere. He seemed to possess the
gift of ubiquity. He never arrested any one : he
sent out an invitation to dinner, which no one
dared refuse. After dinner, there was conversa
tion, and the walls of the comfortable and'discreet
abode betrayed none of the secrets of these
conversations. A particular chair was, it seems,
set aside for the guest, whom a word, amiable but
significant, had induced to cross the formidable
threshold. Suddenly the chair, in which he had
politely been motioned to be seated, tightened
upon him, and descended with him to the floor
below, in such a manner, however, that the head
and shoulders of the personage remained above.

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The victim thus preserved his incognito from the
assistants of Chechkofski, who subjected the
lower part of the body to more or less rigorous
treatment. Chechkofski himself turned away at
this moment, and appeared to ignore what was
passing. The performance finished, and the chair
restored to its place, the host turned about, and
smilingly took up the conversation at the point
where it had been interrupted by this little
surprise. It is said that a young man, fore
warned of what awaited him, used his presence of
mind, and his great muscular strength, to thrust
Chechkofski himself into the place reserved for
him on the fatal seat. After this he took to
flight. The rest can be imagined. Chechkofski
died in 1 794, leaving a large fortune.

11
The great ensemble of laws which Catherine
proposed, in 1767, to graft upon Russia, on the
model of Montesquieu and Beccaria, was destined
never to be achieved, despite certain legislative
experiments, done always by fits and starts.
The main reason for this, apart from many
secondary reasons, is that the work could only
be done by beginning at the beginning, and the

74 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
beginning was the reform, if not the suppression,
of serfdom.
This question, be it said to the honour of
Catherine, is one of those that occupied her mind
the most. When she was yet Grand Duchess,
she had, as we have seen, certain projects, quite
impracticable indeed, for the enfranchisement of
the peasants belonging to the soil. She had
found in books, one knows not where, the history
of a general and simultaneous emancipation of
serfs in Germany, France, Spain, and other coun
tries, — the work of a council ! She asked herself
if a meeting of archimandrites could not produce
the same excellent result in Russia. On reaching
the throne she inaugurated the great work by
reforming the condition of the serfs in the matter
of the ecclesiastical estates confiscated by the
Treasury : the peasants, included there, were
subjected simply to a light poll-tax ; all that they
gained in addition was their own property, and
they could free themselves altogether for a
moderate amount. It was the offer of liberty as
a premium on the labour and industry of those
concerned; and it was a fruitful idea. Its carry
ing out was not without inconveniences : the
despoiled monks found themselves all at once
reduced to beggary. According to the Marquis

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de Bausset, they had only about eight roubles a
year per head to live on ; they were forced to beg
on the roads ; and the degradation of the Russian
clergy, one of the most melancholy features of
modern Russia, may well be derived, in part at
least, from this. But there were about a million
peasants enfranchised, or about to be. It was
a beginning. For further progress, Catherine
counted on her legislative commission. She had
to alter her course, as we have seen. Her In
struction had in this respect to be retouched as
we have indicated. The great mass of peasants
belonging with the soil had not even a repre
sentative in the assembly, which merely discussed
to whom they should belong. Every one sought
after this right : the shopkeepers laid claim to it,
and also the clergy, and even the Cossacks,
jealous of reclaiming their privileges. This re
luctance to admit her humanitarian ideas vexed
Catherine. Some notes written at this period
give us a curious glimpse of her impressions :
' If it is not possible to admit the personality of a
serf, he is not a man. Call him an animal, and
we shall win the respect of the whole world. . . .
The law of serfdom rests on an honest principle
established for animals by animals.'
But the deputies of the commission did not

76 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
read these notes, and probably they would have
made no difference to their feelings. On all
sides Catherine found an invincible opposition.
By 1766 she had already proposed to the Society
of Political Economy, founded under her auspices,
a question concerning the right of the labourer
to the land which he has watered with his sweat.
A hundred and twenty replies were sent, in
Russian, French, German, and Latin. It was
Bearde de I'Abbaye, member of the Academy of
Dijon, who won the prize of a thousand ducats.
But, by thirteen voices against three, the society
opposed the publication of his work.
Catherine finally persuaded herself that the
problem was for the present insoluble and
dangerous to approach. The revolt of Pougat
chef confirmed her in this idea. In the course of
a conversation which she had at this time with
the head of the excise office, V. Dahl, she ex
pressed the fear that in raising the question there
might result a revolution like that in America.
She had evidently very vague notions as to what
was happening at this moment across the ocean.
' Who knows, however ? ' she added ; ' I have
succeeded in so many other things!' In 1775,
writing to her Attorney-General, Prince Via-
zemski, she insisted again on the necessity of

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doing something for the unhappy serfs, without
which ' they will sooner or later take the liberty
that we refuse them.' Count Bloudof professes
to have seen in the Empress's hands, in 1784,
a projected ukase ruling that the serfs born after
1785 should be free. This ukase never saw the
light. In the papers of the Empress, found after
her death, there is another project concerning the
organisation of freedmen, notably the nine hun
dred thousand serfs who had been emancipated
by the secularisation of the ecclesiastical estates.
This document has been published in the 20th
volume of the Recueil de la Socidtd d 'Histoire
(of Russia). The -numerous corrections on the
original, written throughout in Catherine's hand
writing, prove that she worked over it a long
time. She only arrived, however, at the some
what odd, and probably impracticable, idea of
an application of municipal institutions to the
very different conditions of rural life. This con
ception remained equally barren.
There were many reasons why it should be
so. In fact, the elevation of Catherine in 1762
had been the work of the nobility, or at least
of the upper classes, and not that of the people.
It was therefore essential that the new Czarina
should stand by this element, and be, in the

78 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
first place, sure of it. Besides, even before her
accession to the throne, the ' philosophical mind '
of Catherine, and her liberalism, did not prevent
her from a certain preference for the old families,
as we see plainly in her memoirs. In course of
time she substituted little by little for the old
aristocracy of the Narychkines, the Saltykofs,
the Galitzines, an aristocracy of recent creation,
the Orlofs, the Patiomkines. But this was
merely an exchange. On the other side, it is
easy to see how a liberal of the stamp of
Diderot could easily, after having examined the
question of Prussian serfdom with the Princess
Dachkof, come to the conclusion that a radical
reform on this point would be premature. The
observations of the Princess sufficed to shake,
in the mind of the philosopher, convictions
formed and nourished during twenty years.
Probably something of this appeared in the
conversations that Diderot afterwards had with
Catherine herself. And ten years later, the
Comte de Sdgur, having doubtless seen the
peasants through the windows of the imperial
coach, calmly expressed the conviction that their
lot left nothing to desire. Catherine was bound
to end, as indeed she did, by becoming per
suaded of it herself. In her notes on the book

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of Radistchef, an avowed and inflexible liberal,
who, in 1790, thought it was still possible to act
on the principles of philosophy, and paid dear
for his error, the Empress goes the length of
declaring, as an incontestable fact, that there is
no peasant in the world better treated than the
Russian peasant, and no master more kind and
humane than a proprietor of serfs in Russia !
To know the real truth in the matter, it is need
less to go very deeply into the examination of
the facts, facts which resemble those of a martyro-
logy. As an example of the humanity shown
by the Russian lords to the serfs belonging to
them, the Comte de Segur has pointed in his
memoirs to a certain Countess Saltykof. It is
an unfortunate instance. The early years of
the reign of Catherine were filled with the re
port of the trial and condemnation of a Countess
Daria Saltykof, accused of having put to death,
by means of refined tortures, a hundred and
thirty-eight of her serfs of both sexes. Seventy-
five victims, one of them a girl of fifteen, were
proved with certainty by the inquiry. And yet,
despite the outcry of popular indignation, which
has made the name of the Saltytchiha a fearful
memory, Catherine dared not do complete justice.
The more or less voluntary accomplices of the

So CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
horrible woman, the pope who presided at the
burial of the victims, and the valet who flogged
them, received the knout in one of the squares
of Moscow ; the Countess Saltykof escaped with
penal servitude for life. Even this, however,
denoted a progress ; under the reign of Elizabeth,
under that of Peter III., these very facts, uni
versally known, remained unpunished. The
knout was brought into play merely upon those
who had denounced these abominable crimes !
The case of the Saltytchiha was exceptional ;
the rule, however, was cruel enough. The law
appointed no limit to the right of proprietors,
in regard to the corporal chastisement of their
serfs. It authorised them to send them to
Siberia. It was a means of peopling the vast
solitudes of the land of exile. Catherine added
the power of completing the exile by hard
labour. For the rest, the law was dumb, as
in the past. And the jurisprudence varied.
In 1762 the senate sentenced to transportation
a proprietor who had flogged a peasant to death.
But in 1 76 1 an identical act was punished merely
by religious penance. A curious document has
come down to us, a list of punishments inflicted,
in the year 1 75 1 and onward, on the estates of
Count P. Roumiantsof. It is distressing to read ;

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a very nightmare. For entering his masters'
room while they were asleep, and thus disturbing
their sleep, a servant is flogged and condemned
to the loss of his name : he is to be called only
by an insulting nickname, any one infringing this
order to suffer five thozisand blows of the stick,
without mercy. Five thousand blows of the
stick are, however, far from constituting a maxi
mum. A sort of criminal code, in use on the
same estates, includes much severer chastise
ments. It is further provided that the applica
tion of these penalties is not to cause too much
inconvenience to the proprietor, by depriving
him too long of the labour of the beaten servants..
It is ruled that a man who has received seven
teen thousand (sic) blows of the stick, or a
hundred blows of the knout — the two are con
sidered equivalent — is not to remain in bed more
than a week. If he is longer in rising and re
turning to work, he will be deprived of food.
This code was in force during the reign of
Catherine. It corresponds pretty well with the
general practice. In fact, after all her contra
dictory tentatives, Catherine took the initiative
in this direction only in two cases, both of them a
distinct aggravation of the existing rdgime. In re
gard to the treatment of the serfs by their masters,
VOL. II. F

82 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
by suppressing the right of direct appeal to the
sovereign, she suppressed the sole corrective,
indeed a very insufficient one, which might, in a
certain measure, have attenuated these monstrous
abuses. Those who had complaints were sent to
their proprietors, that is to say, to the butchers
themselves ; and there the lash was applied. In
1765 a ukase of the senate substituted for the
penalty of the lash that of the knout and hard
labour. In 1779 a French painter of the name of
Velly, employed to paint the portrait of the
Empress, was near making the acquaintance of
this new legislation, having taken advantage of a
sitting to present a petition to her Majesty. A
diplomatic intervention was required to rescue]
him from the consequences of his false step. In
regard to the law of serfdom itself, the great work
of Catherine's reign was the introduction of the
Russian common law in the ancient Polish pro
vinces of Lesser Russia, that is to say, the trans
formation of the free peasants into serfs belonging
with the soil.
In 1774, in talking with Diderot, who spoke
with some disgust of the dirtiness that he had
noticed in the peasants round St. Petersburg, the
Empress demanded : ' Why should they look
after a body which is not their own ? ' This

HOME POLICY 83

bitter word, if it was really said, sums up a state
of things with which she had finally come to
reconcile her humanitarian aspiration.
In 1789, in a series of advertisements in the
Gazette de St. Pdtersbourg (No. 36), side by side
with the offer of a Holstein stallion for sale, we find
that of some copies of the Instruction pour la Com
mission Ldgislative, and lower down these lines —
' Any one wishing to buy an entire family, or
a young man and a girl separately, may inquire
at the silk-washer's, opposite the church of Kasan.
The young man, named Ivan, is twenty-one years
of age ; he is healthy, robust, and can curl a
lady's hair. The girl, well-made and healthy,
named Marfa, aged fifteen, can do sewing and
embroidery. They can be examined, and are to
be had at a reasonable price.'
This sums up what Catherine left to her suc
cessor by way of result, in regard to her work as
legislator. ' As she is ambitious of all sorts of fame,' wrote
the Comte de Segur in 1786, 'she wishes to lay
claim, during the peace, to that of legislator ; but
her subjects have put more obstacles in her way
than her enemies, . . . and she has been forced
to acknowledge that it is unfortunately easier to
make great conquests than good laws.'

84 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
At the same time, sending a memorandum on
the general state of the legislation in Russia, the
work of his brother, M. d' Aguesseau, he added
the following reflections : —
' The result of his work will be one more proof
of this truth, that in a land of slaves there can be
neither good laws nor good morals, that every
thing becomes corrupt before being civilised, that
there is an inevitable lack of light and help,
and that all things betray the irrationality of
despotism, even the very measures that are in
tended to restrain and modify it.'
At the top of his memorandum D'Aguesseau
had put this line of Du Bellay : ' Plus je vois
l'etranger, plus j'aime ma patrie.'
in
In regard to the administration of justice,
Catherine's reign is distinguished by several
important reforms, whose merit, however, has
been very variously appreciated. Mercier de la
Riviere expressed great enthusiasm in regard to
an organisation of provincial tribunals put in
force after the peace with Turkey in 1774. In
the memoirs of a contemporary (Vinski), perhaps
a better judge, these tribunals are referred to
with not nearly so much praise. The reform has

HOME POLICY 85

merely put 320 judges where there had formerly
been 50, that is to say, in a government divided,
according to the new regulations, into four districts
with 80 judges each. ' The most obvious result of
this benefit to the poor farmer is that instead of
three sheep he must now bring fifteen a year to
the town,' in order to keep in well with justice.
All that, adds Vinski, may be good to dazzle
strangers, and make them admire the Semiramis
of the North ; for us Russians 'it is a mere
puppet-play.' Catherine also did her best to quicken the
march of justice, always desperately slow. In
1 769 a tradesman of Moscow, Popof, having been
driven by the exasperating intricacies of procedure
into crying aloud in open court that there was no
justice in Russia under the reign of Catherine II.,
the Empress had these audacious words erased
from the minutes of proceedings, but she com
manded, at the same time, that the affairs of Popof
should be settled with the greatest despatch, ' so
that he might see that there was justice in Russia.'
The sovereign's zeal was praiseworthy ; it pro
duced, as a rule, but little effect. The machine
was too cumbersome for any one hand, even as
energetic as hers, to regulate the heavy wheels.
In 1785 some French shipowners were still

86 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
awaiting at St. Petersburg the settlement of
certain indemnities due to them for the losses
they had endured in the first Turkish war. The
Comte de Segur, who had exerted himself on
their behalf, wrote that he could obtain no more
than a postponement from day to day instead of
from week to week. He added —
' As for the actual debts, I will certainly do
what I can, but I guarantee in advance that it
will be useless. The English minister and I are
convinced by sad experience that it is impossible
here to get the money for letters of credit when
the debtor refuses to pay. The laws are explicit,
but the corruption of the judges, the indolence
of the tribunals, custom and precedent, are always
in his favour. The Empress has at this moment
to decide the case of the Sieur Prory of Lyon,
and the debtor says openly that if it is possible to
make him lose his case, it will be at least quite
impossible to make him pay. This inconceivable
negligence in the execution of the ukases relative
to debts is caused by the general disorder of the
principal people here, who are all in a state of
ruin, and who protect the knavery of the Russian
merchants who prop them up. '
The initiative of the Empress, and her supreme
right of justice, are frequently put in force, and

HOME POLICY 87

in the most effectual manner, as we have already
intimated, in the mitigation of the excessive
severities to which the ordinary jurisdictions
still cling. Catherine boasted that she had
never signed a death-warrant. She nevertheless
allowed both Pougatchef and Mirovitch to be
brought to the scaffold. But she employed a
subterfuge for these exceptional cases : declaring
herself directly implicated in the case of those
outrages which were to be punished, she would
occasionally renounce her prerogative as high
justiciary, in order, as she said, that she might
not be at once judge and party. In general, she
substituted transportation for capital punishment,
and even for the lash. She nevertheless allowed
the knout to be sometimes used, even as a means
of coercion, in order to obtain the confession of
the accused. It must be understood what this
kind of torture was. 'The knout was a whip with
a leather thong prepared in such a manner that
it possessed at once the elasticity of gutta-percha
and the hardness of steel. Wielded by an execu
tioner, who took a spring to strike with greater
force, the thong cut into the flesh to the very
bone, and left at every blow a deep furrow. A
hundred blows were considered the limit, beyond
which the resistance, that is to say the life, of the

CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA

patient, even if exceptionally vigorous, could not
go. In general, the ' subjects ' lost consciousness
at the tenth or fifteenth blow. To continue, was
soon to flog a dead body. The skill of the
torturer consisted in taking aim, so as to lengthen
out the bloody slashes on the patient's back, one
by the side of another, without taking away an
inch of flesh. At the moment of striking, the
zaplietchnik (so called because he put the whip-
hand behind his shoulder to give more force to
the blow) cried to the patient : Bieriegis ! (Look
out! or, literally, get aside) as a last touch
of irony. In the torture-chambers the knout
was commonly combined with the strappado ;
the patient was flogged after having been sus
pended in the air by the arms, which had been
pinioned behind the . back, so as to put the
shoulders out of joint, and cause an intolerable
pain. We know that Catherine was resolutely op
posed to the use of torture. Nevertheless, in the
course of a trial which lasted from 1765 to 1774,
in connection with some fires, the torture was
applied three times to the accused.
A legend, of which we cannot verify the source,
shows the sovereign, in the part of high justiciary,
brought into contact with what is called to-day

HOME POLICY 89

' un crime passionnel.' The case is very compli
cated. A young peasant, the child of rich parents,
is in love with a poor young man. Surprised by
the father, she hides her lover under the mattress
of the common bed ; promiscuity in sleeping ac
commodation being then general in Russia, even
among well-to-do people of this class. The father
stretches himself on the bed, and the unlucky
man is stifled. A neighbour comes in. On
hearing what has happened, he takes the corpse
and throws it into the sea. But in return he
forces the girl to become his mistress. She has
a child, whom he also drowns. Then he becomes
in want of money, and demands it from the girl,
who, in order to satisfy him, steals from her
father. Finally, he makes her go with him to
the tavern, so that he may parade his conquest.
She goes, but, on coming out of the tavern, she
sets- it on fire. It burns, with all who are in it.
She is arrested, and convicted of theft, infanticide,
and incendiarism. The tribunals condemn her.
Catherine sets her free, restricting her punish
ment to a religious penance. IV
It is in the domain of administration, properly
so called, that Catherine, from one end to the

90 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
other of her reign, showed the most sustained,
and, to a certain point, the most fruitful activity.
She concerned herself with everything. We
have a very voluminous personal work of hers on
the establishment of manufactures. On the other
hand, she takes it into her head, in 1783, to
reform the toilette of the lords and ladies of her
court, in order to render it less costly : this
reform is not at all pleasing to the manufacturers.
Elizabeth, we are told by Count Galovkine, in
his memoirs, forced the beautiful Narychkine to
wear her dresses without a hoop, in order that
the charms of her figure did not too much outdo
her own beauty. For less personal reasons
Catherine had recourse to sumptuary laws, and
the Grand Duchess Paul, on returning from
Paris, is obliged to send back, without even un
packing them, the marvels that the famous
Mademoiselle Bertin had put in her boxes.
In general, it must be said, notwithstanding
energy and good intentions, the initiative of
the sovereign is shown in this direction, as
in others, without either consistency or any
particular knowledge of things, fragmentary,
capricious, and at the beck of chance.
'There are too many undertakings in this
empire,' writes the Comte de Segur, in 1787;

HOME POLICY 91

' the disorder that follows on the heels of pre
cipitation spoils the greater part of the best ideas.
At the same time, there is an attempt to form
a tiers dtat, attract foreign commerce, establish
manufactures of all kinds, extend agriculture,
increase the paper currency, raise the rate of
exchange, build in towns, people deserts, cover
the Black Sea with a new fleet, conquer a neigh
bouring country, bind down another, and extend
the influence of Russia over all Europe. Certainly
this is undertaking a great deal.'
Catherine, too, had to fight with enormous
difficulties. During the first year of her reign
she discovered that in the Senate, where the
most complex questions regarding the administra
tion of the country were being debated, there was
no map indicating the position of the governmental
centres, whose affairs were settled without the
least notion whether they were on the Black Sea
or the White Sea. She sent a messenger to the
Academy of Sciences with five roubles to bring
one. She worked energetically at the repression
of the many and extravagant abuses which had
crept into the procedure of all the branches of
local government, and Russia is indebted to her
for much serious progress in this respect; yet
there too the task proved to be beyond her

92 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
strength. One day she sent an officer of her
guard, Moltchanof, to Moscow, to give a reversion
of judgment, and clear up certain official corrup
tions which had been brought to her notice.
Moltchanof required a passport for the journey.
Russia has always been the land of passports.
He lost three days in going about from office to
office in order to obtain one. Meanwhile the
delinquents, duly forewarned, had had time to
put everything in order. A vast and shameless
corruption spreads from top to bottom of the
ladder of government. In 1770, during the
plague of Moscow, the police officers arranged
with the health officers to levy contributions on the
rich bourgeois of the city. They were denounced
as suspects ; the doctor, under pretence of ex
amining them, smeared nitrate of silver over their
hands ; black spots soon appeared, the supposed
plague-stricken people were put in quarantine : if
they did not buy themselves out, their houses
were pillaged. At St. Petersburg even, a trust
worthy witness, the inspector of police, Longpre,
sent over from Paris in 1783, on a judicial
mission, points out the most shocking disorders :
streets unguarded, fires destroying, at every
instant, whole quarters of the town, etc. About
the same time, the English envoy, Harris,

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93

mentions the case of one of his compatriots who, '
having been robbed of a large sum of money,
tries in vain to obtain redress from the under-
officers of police, and ends by going to the
lieutenant of police in person, whom he finds at
ten o'clock in the morning employed in working
out combinations with a packet of dirty cards.
One of the most durable, beneficial, and
best managed works of Catherine was the
Foundling Asylum, erected in 1763. Privileges
and favours, such as no benevolent institution
ever received before, were granted to this estab
lishment : exemption from taxes and statute-
labour, powers of legal self-government, personal
liberty of inmates, and of those employed in their
care, monopoly of the lottery, share in benefits at
the theatre, etc. A revenue of 50,000 roubles
was assigned by the Empress for the mainten
ance of the Asylum, while a philanthropist,
Procope Demidof, erected the huge buildings at
his cost. Betzki, appointed director, put into it
his whole fortune (about two millions of francs)
and twenty years of assiduous toil. A work
published by him in 1775, under the title, Plans
et Statuts des diffdrents Etabhssements ordonnds
par I' Impdratrice Catherine pour T Education de
la Jeunesse, gives a good idea of the greatness of

94 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
the scheme. Diderot, who superintended its
translation and publication at the Hague, added
a note in which we find these lines : —
' When time and the steadfastness of this great
sovereign shall have brought (these establish
ments) to the point of perfection of which they
are all susceptible, and which some have reached,
people will go to Russia for the purpose of seeing
them, as people formerly went to Egypt, Lace-
demon, and Crete, but with a curiosity which
will, I venture to think, be better founded and
better rewarded.'
By this time people are, indeed, beginning to
visit Russia. It is true that it is not precisely
with the object that Diderot prophesied. But
perhaps we must still wait for the accomplishment
of his prophecy. v
One side of Catherine's administration presents
itself before us under the aspect of a problem
defying all solution : this is her financial policy.
What the finances of Russia were at her acces
sion she has said in a private journal, of which,
unfortunately, a fragment only has been pre
served : —
' I found the army stationed in Prussia without

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95

pay for the past eight months ; in the Treasury
1 7 millions of roubles of unpaid bonds ; a mone
tary circulation of ioo millions of roubles, of
which 40 millions were taken in kind abroad ;
almost all the branches of commerce monopo
lised by private individuals ; the excise revenue
farmed out for two millions ; a loan of two
millions attempted in Holland by the Empress
Elizabeth, but without success ; no credit and no
confidence abroad ; at home, the peasants in
revolt everywhere, and, in certain districts, the
proprietors themselves ready to imitate their
example.' This was the result of the rdgime that Peter I.
had found in force, and had not attempted to
modify, which came from a conglomeration of
ideas and traditions, the direct heritage of the
Tartar domination, and of the Eastern habit
which was summed up, not so much in the
squandering, as in the pillage of all the econo
mical resources of the country, and which we
have thus characterised, a few years since, in a
study of the financial aspect of the great empire —
' Everything that could be taxed was taxed,
even to the long beards of the moiijiki, who
found themselves obliged to pay toll at the gates
of the towns ! To bring in the taxes, those in

96 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
power resorted to fire and steel, to military
warrants, and to ingenuities of torture recom
mended by the experience of centuries. The
treasury still remaining empty, the revenues
were farmed out, sold, and put up for lottery.
Finally, in despair, the whole was taken for the
part, the object taxed for the tax, and in 1729
there was established an "office of confiscated
goods." '
What does Catherine do with this state of
things? She begins by trying to palliafe.it.
She puts the resources of her private purse at the
disposition of the state. Then she endeavours
to amend the organisation, of the public treasury.
The capital vice of this organisation is the lack
of unity : the finances of the empire are in the
hands of different institutions, independent one
of another, each acting in a different direction,
each seeing which can make the most out of the
other. Catherine attempts a unification and a
centralisation of these services. Isolated reforms,
the suppression of monopolies and indivisible
privileges in a certain number of commercial
societies, the cancelling of the farming out of the
excises, furnish a supplement of receipts. , But
the sum-total of the revenue remains very low :
it is not more than 1 7 millions of roubles (about

HOME POLICY 97

85 millions of francs). Now the question is how
to make it even with the new demands of the
imperial policy, which would be on a level with
that of the great European powers, that of
France, which has a budget of five hundred
millions of francs, of England, which has one of
twelve million pounds. More than this, Cathe
rine desires to eclipse her rivals in the West.
By her innumerable enterprises at home, by the
pageantry of her court, by her largesses to a
whole crowd of adulators, with which Europe is
soon filled, by the gold which she showers on her
favourites, she desires to efface the memory of
the great king, the Roi Soleil, whose dazzling
memory haunts her imagination.
And she well-nigh succeeds ! The first Turkish
war costs 47^ millions of roubles. And, after a
few years' respite, she follows up again her great
enterprises abroad with the annexation of the
Crimea, the second Turkish war, the war with
Sweden, the conquest of Poland, the expedition
to Persia, etc. At home the outlay is not less.
Favouritism costs in thirty-four years about 50
millions of roubles. The maintenance of the
court, with its disorder and extravagance, re
quires enormous sums. From 1762 to 1768 the
keeping up of the palace of Peterhof alone is
vol. 11. G

CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA

debited to the state in 180,000 roubles (900,000
francs), and when the Empress arrives there in
June 1768 she finds everything in absolute dila
pidation. The money has all gone elsewhere. In
1796 it is with a budget of about 80 millions of
roubles that Catherine has to meet her liabilities.
And meet them she does. From one end of
her reign to the other she supplies for all. She
pays for everybody and for everything : the
apprenticeship of Alexis Orlof on the fleet in
the Archipelago, the follies of Patiomkine, and
the enthusiasm of Voltaire. She lets the gold
slip through her fingers, and she is never in want,
or never seems to be in want. How ? by what
miracle ? The explanation is easy to give ; but,
to understand that explanation, it is needful to
penetrate a secret, of which Catherine had (and
this was her merit and her great source of
strength), if not the profound knowledge, at all
events the intuition of genius. In all their
struggles with the finances of the empire, it is
strange that the governments of the empire never
thought, at one time or another, of an expedient
which, disastrous as its practice had been in the
West, still tempted the fancy. On arriving at
power Peter III. did, in fact, decree the founda
tion of a bank, and the issue of bank-notes for

HOME POLICY 99

the sum of 5 millions of roubles. The idea of
the Emperor did not at first attract the Empress.
The paper currency, whose workings she did not
exactly understand, did not seem of much use.
But, in 1769, the exigencies of the Turkish war
overcame her repugnances and scruples, and,
from that time, the instrument of her financial
power, the magic power which, from 1769 to
1796, sustained the fortune and the fame of the
great sovereign, fed the colossal and ever-renewed
effort of her reign, and made up for all her
prodigalities, was born. In twenty-seven years
Catherine issued 137,700,000 roubles'-worth of
paper money. Adding 47,739,130 roubles on
the one part, and 82,457,426 roubles on the
other, for the proceeds of home or foreign loans
contracted at the same period, we arrive at a
total of 264,665,556 roubles, or more than a
milliard of francs, raised on the public credit.
That is how Catherine paid.

VI
There is not much to be said respecting the
army in the reign of Catherine. Her reign was
warlike; it countenanced neither militarism nor
the military spirit. The military spirit lives on

CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA

discipline, respect for the powers that be, and
also ambition. In making Alexis Orlof an admiral
and Patiomkine a general in chief, Catherine by
no means cultivated these sentiments. In 1772,
at the congress of Fokchany, Gregory Orlof, who
had never seen a battlefield, assumed the tone of
a superior in speaking to Roumiantsof, the con
queror of Kagoul, and was near taking the com
mand in partnership with him. But Roumiantsof
only changed rivals. A few years later, he had
to retire before a new favourite. When it was
no longer commanded by Roumiantsof, and not
yet by Souvarof, the army was in general very ill
commanded. But the soldier was then as he has
since been, as he recently was under the walls of
Plewna, and he had before him only the Turks,
who were put hors de combat, so to speak, before
the combat began, by the European tactics ; or
else the Poles, who, like the Turks, were, in point
of view of the art of war, two centuries behind
the time. Catherine was careful to avoid fighting
with the disciplined troops of the West. When
she went against the Swedes, who were never
theless a poor adversary for Russia, she had
cause to repent of it. Besides, she conquered
cheaply, as Prince Henry of Prussia said. Doubt
less, however, her indomitable energy and her

HOME POLICY

audacity contributed to bring victory to her
side. Competent judges have accused her of having,
in all that concerns the military administration,
spoilt the work of Peter the Great. In 1763 she
sanctioned a reform which put the regiments
entirely into the hands of their colonels. Peter
had confided the cares of administration to in
spectors, employed by a general commissariat,
though a commissariat very much centralised.
The abandonment of this organisation gave rise
to numerous abuses. According to the Comte
de Segur, the Russian army amounted, in 1785,
to a fighting force of about five hundred and
thirty thousand men, of whom two hundred and
thirty thousand were the regular troops. Segur
observed, nevertheless, that the disorder which
reigned in the War Office made it impossible to
get at the exact figures, and that the official
numeration was a little dubious. He added :
' Many colonels have confessed to me that they
made from 3000 to 4000 roubles annually out of
their infantry regiments, and that those of cavalry
brought in 18,000 to their chiefs.' The Comte
de Vergennes wrote at the same time : ' The
Russian fleets were far from gaining fame by
leaving the Baltic. The one which was last

CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA

seen in the Mediterranean has not left a good
reputation. Leghorn complains particularly of
the officers, who have bought much and paid for
little.' To sum up, Catherine attempted and began
many things ; she achieved hardly any. It was
in her nature to go forward without looking1- at
what she left behind her. She left many ruins.
' Before the death of Catherine,' some one has
said, ' the greater part of the monuments of her
reign were already in ddbris.'
There was a demon in her which drove her
forward, ever forward, beyond the present hour
and the result already attained, without leaving
her even the satisfaction of a moment's pause to
contemplate the finished work. This demon was
perhaps only that of ambition, and of an ambition
sometimes poor and trivial. When she had
settled the plans and laid the foundations of an
edifice, she had a medal struck, and, the medal
once struck and out awav in her cabinet/ she
thought no more of what was to be built. ' The
famous marble church, begun in 1780, was still
only begun twenty years after.
But perhaps this was the part allotted by Pro
vidence to the Czarina, and was it not hers also to
carry with her on this headlong course a people

HOME POLICY 103

whom Peter I. had not succeeded in shaking
entirely out of its sleep of ages— a sleeping giant
under a shroud of snow — and who needed only to
be drawn out of this torpor in order to follow the
natural course, a torrentjthat nothing can inter
cept, towardsa mysterious destiny ) And perhaps
also Catherine was not entirely at fault when she
wrote to Grimm, the day after the day on which
was unveiled the monument which she had
erected to the great Czar, her predecessor —
' Peter I., seen in the open air, seemed to me
to look quite brisk as well as imposing; one
would have said he was pleased with the work.
For some time I could not look at him fixedly ;
I felt moved, and when I looked around me I
saw that all had tears in their eyes. The face
was turned away from the Black Sea, but the
pose of his head seemed to say that he could see
well enough either way. He was too far away to
speak to me, but he seemed to me to have an air
of satisfaction, which communicated itself to me,
and encouraged me to try to do yet better in the
future, if I can.'

CHAPTER III
FOREIGN POLICY
I
The famous German historian Sybel wrote in
1869: 'No burning question arises in Germany
in our days without our finding some trace of the
policy of Catherine II.' This observation might
well be generalised and applied to the greater
part of Europe. Very ambitious, very feminine,
sometimes almost childish, the foreign policy of
Catherine was one of universal expansion. The
opening of her reign seemed nevertheless to
intimate something quite different.
On coming to the throne, the Empress an
nounced herself as a peaceful sovereign, disposed
to remain quietly at home if she were not inter
fered with, desirous, in consequence, of avoiding
all conflict with her neighbours, and determined
to employ all her activity in the home govern
ment of an empire which offered a sufficient field
for her spirit of enterprise. This programme
corresponded, even from the point of view of
104

FOREIGN POLICY 105
international relations, with an ambition which
abdicated none of its rights, but which was
governed by the most generous inspirations.
Writing to Count Kayserling, her ambassador at
Warsaw, Catherine wrote : ' I tell you, in a word,
that my aim is to be joined in the bonds of friend
ship with all the powers, in armed alliance, so
that I may always be able to range myself on the
side of the oppressed, and in this way become
the arbiter of Europe.'
She was not as yet, it is evident, thinking of
the spoliation of Poland. She rejected the very
idea of conquest. Courland itself did not tempt
her. ' I have people enough to render happy,'
she said, ' and this little corner of the earth will
add nothing to my comfort' She thought to
confirm the treaty of perpetual peace with Turkey.
She reduced the fighting force of her army. She
was in no haste to fill the vacancies made in her
arsenals by the ruinous wars of the preceding
reigns. She repeated that it was needful, before
all things, to set the country in order and repair
the finances.
How did she come to abandon so soon and so
entirely this initial point of view ? We can cite
in this respect a most valuable piece of evidence.
The man to whom we owe it is one of those who

106 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
are the honour of their country, and the frankness
of his language is calculated to throw light on this
obscure side of Catherine's history ; it seems also
to indicate that certain sentiments, to-day ignored
or discredited in Russia, were not always foreign
to noble minds. Some years after the death of
Catherine, in a letter addressed to Alexander I.,
who had just assumed the throne, Count Simon
Vorontsof wrote as follows : —
'The late Empress desired peace and desired
it to last. . . . Everything was calculated to con
firm it. ... It is Prussia . . . that induced Count
Panine to revoke the ameliorations which had
been introduced into the constitution of Poland
in order to gain possession of the country with
more facility. It is Prussia who persuaded this
same minister to insist that all the Polish dissi
dents should be admitted to all the posts of state,
which was impossible without employing violence
against the Poles. It was employed, and it was
this which formed the confederations, the number
of which was carefully concealed from the
Empress. Bishops and senators were arrested
in full diet and exiled to Russia. Our troops
entered Poland, ravaged everything, pursued the
confederates into the Turkish provinces, and this
violation of territory caused the Turks to declare

FOREIGN POLICY 107
war against us. ... It is from the time of this
war that we must date the foreign debts, and the
creation of paper money at home, two calamities
which are the misery of Russia.'
Thus it was Prussia which, in order to gain
the assistance of Russia in its Polish policy, drew
Catherine into a career of violent and violating
enterprises of all kinds in which she found herself
caught as in a wheel. This course, nevertheless,
was, we incline to believe, inevitable for her in
one way or another. Quite apart from Prussia,
Catherine had from the first too lofty a notion of
her power not to be tempted, one day or another,
to make use of it, and too lofty a conception of
the part she had to play, not to brush aside any
sort of scruples. In October 1762, the court of
Denmark having proposed to her to renounce the
guardianship of her son, in respect of the Duchy
of Holstein, she replied in these characteristic
terms —
' The case is perhaps unique that a sovereign
empress should be guardian in a fief of empire
for her son, but it is stranger still that a woman,
who has five hundred thousand men ready to do
battle for her ward, should be told that she ought
not to be concerned with a Schvverdt (sic) which
can hardly maintain three hundred men.'

108 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
It is nevertheless probable, if not certain, that
in entering upon the course which was to lead
her so far from her first projects of collected and
peaceful labour, Catherine did not realise whither
she was going, nor that the current was bearing
her along, that her first successes had intoxicated
her, and that she was thus hurried forward, in
her own despite, into a state of war-fever, which
rose at times almost to madness, and in which
she lost all count of the means at her disposal,
and of every consideration of prudence, or, alas !
of equity. The Marquis de Virac wrote to the
Comte de Vergennes in 1782 : ' Here they snatch
at everything, greedily and unthinkingly, which
seems likely to add a new glory to the reign of
Catherine II. They do not trouble to count the
cost ; the first thing is to be moving.'
To be moving, no matter how, no matter
where, to make a great racket, no matter at what
cost, such, in effect, seemed to be the constant
concern of Catherine from the time of the first
Turkish war onward. Helped by her ' luck,'
she reposed on the belief that something for her
greater fame and the greater grandeur of her
empire would come out of everything. 'The
good fortune which crowns all the enterprises of
the Russians,' writes the Comte de Vergennes in

FOREIGN POLICY 109
1 784, ' wraps them, so to speak in a radiant
atmosphere, through which they see nothing.'
As for political system or general idea at the
back of her enterprises, do not ask the Empress
for anything of the sort. She will answer :
'Cirumstances, conjunctures, and conjectures.' As
for conciliating these enterprises with a higher
law of morals, of humanity, or of international
right, she has no thought of such a thing. ' It
is as useless to speak to her of Puffendorf or of
Grotius,' writes the English envoy Macartney
from St. Petersburg in 1770, 'as if one spoke
of Clarke or Tillotson at Constantinople.'
Catherine, moreover, inaugurates, in the conduct
of foreign affairs, a rule of personal initiative,
which itself cannot but give to them an adven
turous turn, for she flings herself into it with her
nervous and excitable woman's temperament.
She expends, especially at the outset, an extra
ordinary activity. She dictates herself all the
diplomatic correspondence. She soon finds out,
it is true, that she cannot manage it all, and that
the service suffers by it. She then reserves to
herself the most important matters, leaving to the
minister, that is to say, to Count Panine, the
bulk of the work. She writes on April 1, 1763,
to Count Kayserling : ' In future I hope secrecy

CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA

will be better kept, for I do not choose to take
any one into my confidence in regard to what is
in the air.' Her predecessors had only short
extracts communicated to them from the de
spatches of her foreign ambassadors. She insists
on seeing the originals ; she reads and annotates
them. These annotations are curious. On the
margin of a despatch from Prince Galitzine, her
ambassador at Vienna, informing her that the
courts of Vienna and of Versailles are inciting the
Porte to meddle in the affairs of Poland, she
writes : 'He does not keep his eyes open, for he
does not know even what the street children
know, or else he says less than he knows.'
Prince Repnine, writing from Warsaw, that in
the course of a conversation with the Prussian
ambassador, Baron Goltz, the latter has recog
nised that the orders of the King, his master, do
not seem to him in the interests of his subjects,
though they are perhaps in those of the sove
reign, she annotates : ' Is there then any other
glory than the good of the subject. These are
oddities beyond my pale.' In 1780, on the first
visit that he makes to the sovereign, Joseph II.
is informed of this method of work, and is amazed
at it. Up to the time of this meeting, however,
which played a decisive part in the history of

FOREIGN POLICY

Catherine, the influence of Panine, as head of
the department of foreign affairs, had been very
great. It is this influence which, in spite of
wind and tide, in spite even of the personal re
pugnance of the Empress, had kept her policy
in touch with the Prussian alliance. The visit of
Joseph brings about a sudden change. Catherine
promptly brushes her minister aside in order to
form, on her own account, the new alliance which
opens new horizons before her on the side of
the North Sea. And soon Panine is quite out
of the reckoning. A mere clerk, obedient in
carrying out the inspirations of the imperial mind,
will suffice. One is soon found, excellent for the
purpose, Bezborodko. ' Properly speaking, the
Empress has no longer a minister,' writes the
Marquis de Verac in September 1781.
This personal policy, superior as are the
qualities of mind and temper of which Catherine
gives proof, is not slow to subject her to numer
ous failures. There are infatuations, followed by
disenchantments equally arbitrary. Fancy has
full play, and the woman is too often seen in the
place of the sovereign. It is a woman, and an
angry woman, who from the 4th to the 9th of
July 1796 draws up for Count Budberg, Russian
minister at Stockholm, a communication intended

CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA

to take the King of Sweden to task for thinking
of coming to St. Petersburg without entering
into an engagement beforehand to marry the
grand-daughter of the Empress. Let him stay
at home, then, this ill-bred prince ! She is tired
of all the crotchets that cloud his brain. When
one means to do anything, one does not make
difficulties at every step. The document, an
official document which has to pass through the
chancellor's office, is all in this tone. But can
it be called a diplomatic communication ? One
would say rather, a confidential letter to an in
timate friend, on whom one pours out all one's
wrath and impatience, simply and solely to ease
one's nerves. And to make the resemblance
complete, there is a postscript. There are even
four, each of which says something different,
and indeed precisely opposite, to what has just
been said by the last ; the whole summed up by
agreeing, unconditionally and without reserve, to
the visit which had been so vigorously objected
to at the outset.
At times Catherine realises the action of
her temperament on her state policy, and the
unbalanced elements that this influence brings
into it. A propos of her declaration of armed
neutrality, issued April 28, 1780, she writes to

FOREIGN FOLIC Y j , 3

Grimm : ' You will say that it is volcanic, but
there was no means of doing otherwise.' She
adds a reflection which we have already found
her making, and which seems to intimate that
she has not forgotten her German origin, but still
desires to make what capital out of it she can :
' Denn die Teutschen,' she says, ' hassen nicht
so als wenn die Leute ihnen auf die Nase spielen
wollen ; das liebte der Herr Wagner auch
nicht! But this is only a way of putting things, or,
at the most, a proof that she sometimes mis
judges the transformation which has taken place
in her, and which links her to her adopted
country by the deepest fibres of her being ; for
her foreign and home policy alike are essentially
Russian, as is her mode of thinking and feeling,
indeed her whole nature. Russian, and not
German, are the personal elements of success
that she puts at the disposal of her ambition,
as are also the defects which hinder their free
course. For there is nothing German in this
way of rushing forward with one's eyes shut,
or dreaming with one's eyes open, which is
peculiar to her, this way of leaving reflection
and calculation out of the question. It may be
said that her success is due to qualities the most
VOL. II. H

ii4 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
precisely opposed to the German temperament.
A cold and calculating German would never
have undertaken the first Turkish war. ' The
army,' writes Count Simon Vorontsof, ' was re
duced, imperfect, and scattered all over the
empire. It had to march in the depth of winter
against the Turkish frontier, and the cannons,
mortars, bombs, and explosives had to be sent
with the greatest possible speed from the arsenal
at St. Petersburg to Kief.' When the second
Turkish war and the Swedish war broke out,
it was worse still. In 1783 the rupture with the
Porte being imminent, a regiment of dragoons,
which should have consisted of 1200 to 1500
men, was summoned from Esthonia. Only 700
men were to be found, with 300 horses, and
not a single saddle. Catherine was by no means
daunted. She had the faith which scorns ob
stacles, and will not admit impossibilities. This
faith, which removes mountains, and sets cannons
travelling from one end to the other of an empire
some thousand miles in length, is not a German
quality. Meanwhile, in the domain of foreign politics,
Catherine accomplished great things with means
which the constant illusion in which she lived
doubled or tripled in her eyes, but which were

FOREIGN POLICY

"5

really most moderate. She supplied their lack
by her moral force, which was immense.
From the point of view of the administration
of the department of foreign affairs, she brought
a distinct progress to Russia. Nothing daunted
by the labour of which Frederick alone among
contemporary sovereigns showed himself careful
and capable, and adding to it the authority that
she always carried with her, she gave to the
administration of this department a unity of
direction that it had never yet had. At the
same time she insisted on habits of probity and
professional dignity quite alien to the modes of
a not very distant past. In June 1793 the
English ambassador Buckingham, urging upon
the chancellor Vorontsof the conclusion of a
treaty of commerce, thought it quite natural to
supplement his demand by the offer of a personal
gratuity of ,£2000. But Vorontsof at once re
plied : ' I leave it to those who are well versed
in these shameful traffickings to decide whether
2000 or 200,000 pieces would balance the sale
of my sovereign's interests.' Bestoujef, the
chancellor of Elizabeth, did not speak this
language.

BOOK III
THE FRIEND OF THE PHILOSOPHERS
CHAPTER I
LITERARY AND ARTISTIC TASTES
I
Count Hordt, a Swede, serving in the Prussian
army, has left some interesting notes on his visit
to St. Petersburg. The first five months of it
were spent in prison. This was under the reign
of Elizabeth. Peter, on coming to the throne,
liberated the prisoner and invited him to dinner.
'Were you well treated in your captivity?'
asked the Emperor. ' Don't be afraid to tell
me.' ' Very ill-treated,' replied the Swede. ' I had
not even any books.'
At that a voice was heard, saying loudly :
' That was barbarous indeed.' It was the voice
of Catherine.
We shall endeavour to show what were the
relations, so often commented upon, but still so

LITERARY AND ARTISTIC TASTES 117
little really known, between the Empress and
those who were the main instruments of her
European fame. Voltaire and his rivals in the
honour and adulation of the ' Semiramis of the
North ' demand a separate study. We shall
here concern ourselves with Catherine alone.
She loved books, as she has abundantly
proved. Her purchase of Diderot's library is
well known. Dorat has celebrated this ac
quisition in an epistle in verse which figures in
the edition of his CEuvres Choisis, embellished
with a vignette in which are seen little Loves
dressed in furs and travelling in sledges. Diderot
asked 15,000 francs for his treasure. The
Empress offered him 16,000, on condition that
the great writer should remain in posses
sion to the time of his death. Diderot thus
became, without leaving Paris, librarian of
Catherine the Great in his own library. For
this he had a pension of 1000 francs a year. It
was to commence in 1765. The following year
the pension was not paid. This was then the
common lot of pensions and pensioners, not only
in Russia. On hearing of it from Betzky, Catherine
wrote through him to her librarian that she did
not wish ' the negligence of an official to cause any
disturbance to her library, and, for this reason,

1 1 8 CA THERINE II. OF R US SIA
she would send to M. Diderot for fifty years in
advance the amount destined to the maintenance
and increase of her books, and at the expiration
of that period, she would take further measures.'
A bill of exchange for 25,000 francs accompanied
the letter.
One can imagine the transports of enthusiasm
in the philosophic camp. Later on, the library
of Voltaire joined that of Diderot in the Hermi
tage collection. It was Grimm who, after the
death of the patriarch of Ferney, arranged with
Madame Denis for this new acquisition. The
conditions were, ' a certain sum ' at the discretion
of the Empress, and a statue of Voltaire which she
would place in one of the rooms of her palace.
Madame Denis relied on the generosity of
Catherine, so much belauded by the illustrious
dead and by his friends, and Catherine was re
solved, as Grimm expresses it, ' to avenge the
ashes of the greatest of philosophers from the
insults that he had received in his own country.'
The great man's relatives, his grand-nephews
particularly, MM. Mignot and d'Hornoy, pro
tested against the transaction, which, they con
sidered, infringed upon their rights and upon
those of France. M. d'Hornoy even attempted
to procure an official intervention. But the

LITERARY AND ARTISTIC TASTES ng
Empress held to her bargain. Voltaire's books
now form part of the Imperial Library, to which
they have been removed from the palace of the
Hermitage. A special room is assigned to them.
In the middle is the statue of Houdon, a replica,
from the hand of the master, of the one in the
foyer of the Comedie Francaise at Paris. There
are about 7000 volumes, the greater part half-
bound in red morocco. Every volume contains
annotations in Voltaire's handwriting.
One need not be a Frenchman to feel, on
entering this room, the indefinable sensation
caused by the sight of things which are not in
their proper place. These relics, the monument
of one of the greatest glories of France, should
assuredly not be here.
These were not, however, the largest part of
the additions to the imposing collection of printed
books and manuscripts with which Catherine
endowed Russia. The king Stanislas Ponia
towski was, we know, a cultivated man. On
arriving at the throne, he endeavoured to satisfy
his tastes and to share them with his fellow-
citizens. The capital of Poland profited by this.
It had already a considerable library, founded in
1745 by two brothers, who were distinguished
savans and good citizens, the Zaluskis. Ponia-

CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA

towski enlarged it. On taking possession of
Warsaw, Catherine transported the king to St.
Petersburg, and the library along with him.
Having no longer any political independence,
the Poles were supposed to have no longer any
need of books.
Thus Catherine loved books : did she equally
love literature ? The question may seem strange.
It demands an answer, nevertheless. The reign
of Catherine corresponds, in the history of literary
development in Russia, to a well-marked epoch.
The preceding epoch, dominated by the great
figure of Lomonossof, stands out clearly. It was,
during the lifetime of Elizabeth and for some
years after her death, a period of absorption and
assimilation of foreign elements en masse. Euro
pean culture entered into the national life by the
door, one might say rather by the breach that
Peter the Great had hewed open. A period
of reaction and of struggle followed. The
national genius, submerged, trampled upon,
oppressed, revolted and demanded back its
rights. It came finally to treat foreign litera
ture and science as enemies. The poet Dier-
javine, and the satirical journalist and thinker
Novikof, were the heroes of this campaign of
liberation. What part was played in this crisis

LITERARY AND ARTISTIC TASTES 121
by Catherine ? We know what she did with
Novikof : she broke his pen and his life ; fifteen
years of imprisonment were the last reward that
she gave to his labours. She treated Dierjavine
worse still : she made him a tchinovnik and an
abject courtier.
For all this there is a reason. Catherine's
was an intelligence specially, and, so to speak,
solely organised for politics and the government
of men. She is a little German princess, who,
at the age of fourteen, comes to Russia with the
idea that she will be one day the absolute mis
tress of this immense empire, and who has con
scientiously applied herself to prepare for the
part she will have to play, a part, judging by the
examples before her, which has nothing in common
with that of a literary Mecaenas. Consequently,
all her ideas, all her tastes, are subordinated to
this definite conception of her destiny, and of the
rights and duties resulting from it. What she
appreciates in Voltaire, when the fame and the
books of Voltaire reach her, is not the charm of
style — does she even know what style is ? — but
the support that the prose, good or bad, of the
author, his poetry, melodious and full of senti
ment, or dry and hard to the ear, might afford
to the development of the programme of govern-

CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA

ment that she has vaguely mapped out in her
mind. She has no sense of harmony, and, beyond
her family relations and her love-episodes, she
pays little heed to sentiment. At one moment,
at the beginning of her reign, influenced a little
by her reading and a great deal by her friend
of some years' standing, Princess Dachkof, she
is wishful to take part in the artistic, scientific,
and literary movement which she perceives about
her. She flings herself into the melde with the
ardour she puts into everything. She becomes a
writer. She becomes a journalist. But we know
already the lamentable shipwreck of her liberal
ideas. And what happens to her ideas happens
also to her tastes. All the love she may have ever
had for letters founders in this disaster, which
even the glory of Voltaire does not survive.
But let us first look at her tastes. Voltaire
apart, French literature, the only literature with
which she is familiar up to a late period of her
life, is far from attracting her as a whole. She
makes her selection, and what she selects are
the works of Le Sage, and those of Moliere and
Corneille. After studying Voltaire, she has en
joyed Rabelais, and even Scarron. But she has
gone back upon her tastes in this direction, only
remembering them with a sort of shame that she

LITERARY AND ARTISTIC TASTES 123
has ever had them. As for Racine, she simply
does not understand him. He is too literary
for her. Literature with him is art for art's
sake, and art for art's sake, to Catherine, is
nonsense. When she applies herself to the
task of writing comedies and tragedies, she does
not for an instant dream of making a work of
art : what she does is criticism, satire, and, above
all, politics. She attacks the prejudices and vices
that, she perceives in the morals of the country,
the ideas, and even the men, that offend her.
She makes war upon the Martinists, and occa
sionally upon the King of Sweden. Literature,
to her, is merely a branch of her military and
repressive powers. Rhetoric, for her, does not
exist : she replaces it by logic and her authority
as samodierjitsa, ruler of forty millions of men.
She, nevertheless, makes a solitary choice in the
work of Racine : she likes Mithridate. One
sees why.
Still her disputatious instincts and her moralis
ing intentions come in collision with continual
obstacles in the surroundings in which she lives.
The incident in connection with Sedaine is charac
teristic in this respect. She had liked Sedaine
for his simple gaiety, and the easy flow of his
couplets, so pleasantly brought out by the music

124 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
of Philidor. This pupil of Montesquieu and of
Voltaire had a taste for comic opera. In 1779 it
occurred to her to utilise, after her own fashion,
the talent of the witty and prolific writer. Why
should he not compose, on her lines, and for her
theatre at the Hermitage, a comedy which might
follow up her own satirical pieces? Urged on
by Grimm, encouraged by Diderot, Sedaine com
poses a piece, L' Epreuve Inutile. ' Tell him,'
writes Catherine immediately to Grimm, ' that if
instead of one, two, or three pieces, he were to
do a hundred, I would read them all with the
greatest eagerness. You know that, after the
Patriarch, there is no one whose writing I like so
much as Sedaine's.' But Betzky, who has read
the piece aloud to his august benefactress, is
much less enthusiastic. He points out ' that the
piece, if it were played before the court, would
give umbrage to the spectators, and that the
master plays a very small part in it.' Catherine
at first rebukes these timid objections ; she
intends to have the piece acted, ' if it were only
to show that she has more credit herself than
Raymond.' Betzky insists ; he considers such a
tentative not merely useless, but dangerous ; and
the Empress finally comes round to his point of
view. She tells Sedaine that she thinks his play

LITERARY AND ARTISTIC TASTES 125
' good, very good ' ; she sends him 1 2,000 francs
for his trouble, but she informs him that his
masterpiece will not be acted, ' from precaution.'
L'Epreuve Inutile does not even receive the
honours of print. We are unaware if it was pre
served in manuscript.
Some years later a polemical writer of quite
other range appeared on the scene, before a
public at first surprised and terrified, but soon in
great part won over, and doing all that could
be done to atone for its first scandal by the
vehemence of its present applause. Catherine
ranges herself on the side of those whom the
new work still continues to shock or frighten.
' If I ever write a comedy,' she says, ' I shall
certainly not take the Mariage de Figaro as a
model, for, after Jonathan Wild, I have never
found myself in such bad company as at this
celebrated marriage. It is apparently with an
idea of imitating the ancients that the theatre has
recurred to this taste, from which it had seemed
to be purified. The expressions of Moliere
were free, and bubbled up like effervescence from
a natural gaiety, but his thought is never vicious,
while in this popular play the undertone is con
stantly unworthy, and it goes on for three hours
and a half. Besides that, it is a mere web of

126 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
intrigues, in which there is a continual effort, and
not a scrap of what is natural. I never laughed
once all the time I was reading it.'
But Catherine's business is not to play the
part of a critic, it is to govern Russia, and what
Russia needed at this period was assuredly not
to be set in the van of European progress, intel
lectual and artistic ; it was to follow, at a great
distance, those who were ahead, to try to come
up with them, not by a servile imitation, but
doubtless by finding inspiration in them for the
development of the original resources of the
national genius. What did Catherine do to help
on rthis event, as was her duty and even her
ambition in the radiant days -when-sbe-' accepted-
the title of ' the Semiramis "of the North,' and
Voltaire declared that the sun seemed to have
taken to shining on the world from another
quarter? We hold with those who think that
the best way of protecting literature that can be
found by a ruler, is to leave it alone without
interfering in its concerns. Such was not the
opinion of Catherine. She wished to assert, in
this as in all other domains, her personal initia
tive and her supreme command. She professed
in vain to have ' a republican soul ' ; the republic
of letters . was transformed in her eyes into a

LITERARY AND ARTISTIC TASTES 127
__  _  I 
monarchy governed by her despotic will. Did
she, however, bring to light a force, a glory, or
did she even aid the outcome of a new period in
letters, which could balance the merit and the
reputation of the writers of whom the reign of
Elizabeth could legitimately boast ? We cannot
see that she did. No name of the importance
of Lomonossof and Soumarokof, whose fame
belongs to the former reign, can be found in hers.
Catherine confined herself to making the most of
this heritage, always for her own personal interests,
which were far from being those of art and
literature. Lomonossof, now grown old, served
as a sort of figure-head ; Soumarokof, with his
imitations of the French dramatists, was suffi
ciently good as a set-off. There was perhaps in
Dierjavine the making of a great poet ; she sees
nothing of it in him, and in time he ceases to see
it in himself. Felitsa, the poem on which his
literary reputation rests, is merely a pamphlet
done to order, half panegyric, half satire. The
panegyric, we need not say, is for the Empress ;
the satire for the court nobles, to whom Catherine
desires to read a lesson, and to whom she sends
copies of the work, with the passages concerning
them carefully underlined. At the end of the
reign the author of Felitsa is a mere buffoon,

128 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
wallowing in the antechambers of the favourite,
Plato Zoubof. The serious rivals of Lomonossof,
— those who try to react against the current
of foreign importation, by which Soumarokof is
carried along, Kherasskof too, in his Rossiade,
and Bogdanovitch, in his Douchenka, made up
from the insipidities of the centuries on the
subject of the loves of Psyche — Kniajnine, Von-
Visine, Loukine, add some interesting plays to
the national drama. Kniajnine writes the Fan-
faron, a comedy which remains one of the classics
of Russian literature, and, in Vadime a Nov
gorod, attempts the historical drama, drawn from
the fresh sources of national tradition. Von-
Visine, the Russian Moliere, ridicules in his
Brigadier the acquirements of Muscovite Tris-
sotins, founded on the reading of French novels ;
and, in his Dadais, takes off the educators of
aristocratic youth, brought at great expense from
abroad. But this national drama is not that of
Catherine. She never visits it, until in her later
years, when the whim takes her, or rather she finds
it good policy, to be interested in the dramatisation
of scenes taken from the history of the country.
Meanwhile, literature, national or otherwise,
feels itself so little under her protection, that the
contributors to the Sobiessiednik, founded by the

LITERARY AND ARTISTIC TASTES 129
Princess Dachkof, dare not sign their articles,
even though they are aware that the Empress
herself is one of their number. They are not
unwise, if one may recall the fate of Prince
Bielossielski, who wrote so charming an : Epistle
to France,' won so flattering a reply from Voltaire
on ' the laurels thrown to his compatriots and
falling back upon himself,' and who, then being
Minister at Turin, was recalled in disgrace, for no
reason but that he was a man of wit, that he
showed it in his despatches, and that he turned
agreeable verse. Kniajnine, too, knew what it
cost to cultivate the national drama. His Vadime
a Novgorod was torn up by order of the
Empress, and came near being burnt by the
public executioner.
An Academy, founded in 1 783 on the model of
the French Academy, under the inspiration of
the Princess Dachkof, is the sole monument that
Russian literature owes to a sovereign to whom
Russia owes so much in other respects. To this
Academy was confided the mission of fixing the
rules of orthography, the grammar and prosody,
of the Russian language, and of encouraging the
study of history. It began, one need hardly say,
by undertaking a dictionary, to which Catherine
herself contributed.
vol. 11. 1

1 30 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA

II
' Tragedy offends her, comedy bores her, she
does not care for music, her cuisine is quite
unstudied ; in gardens she cares only for roses ;
she has, in short, no taste for anything but for
building and for domineering over her court — for
what she has for reigning, and figuring in the
world, is a passion.'
It is thus that Durand, the French chargd-
d' affaires, summed up, in 1773, the intellectual
position of Catherine the Great. His observation
was correct, especially from the artistic point of
view. Was it lack of knowledge in her, or lack
of natural disposition ? It was as much the one
as the other. She herself was well aware of it.
In 1767, when Falconet submitted to her judg
ment the design for the statue of Peter the Great,
she excused herself from passing an opinion ; she
understood nothing about it, and she recom
mended the artist to the judgment of his own
conscience and of posterity. Falconet was foolish
enough to insist —
' My posterity is your Majesty. The other
may come when it will.'
' Not at all,' replied Catherine. ' How can you
submit yourself to my opinion ? I do not even

LITERARY AND ARTISTIC TASTES 131

know how to draw. This is perhaps the first
good statue I have ever seen in my life. The
merest school-boy knows more about your art
than I do.'
We often find in her mouth, and in her writing,
this parti pris of incompetence and self-abnega
tion, so alien from the general tendency of her
mind and temperament.
She has an opera for which the best singers are
sought all over Europe. She pays heavy incomes
to the 'stars,' whose demands at that time were
without limit. But she acknowledges that all
this expense is not in the least for her own
pleasure. ' In music,' she writes, ' I am no more
advanced than formerly. I can recognise no
tones but those of my nine dogs, who in turn
share the honour of being in my room, and
whose individual voices I can recognise from a
distance ; the music of Galuppi and Paisiello I
hear, and I am astonished at the tones that it
combines, but I cannot recognise them at all.'
Nevertheless, certain comic operas of Paisiello
succeed in charming her. She ha's a sense and
taste for the grotesque. She is enchanted by the
Pulmonia, and even remembers some of the airs,
which she hums over when she happens to meet
the maestro.

132 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
Sometimes, too, even in the domain of art,
where she feels so out of place, her despotic
instincts claim their rights ; and, as if by miracle,
she has certain inspirations which are not without
a certain savour. Here is a letter, written at the
time of her first triumphs over Turkey —
' Since you speak to me of festivities in honour
of the peace, listen to what I am going to say,
and do not believe a word of the absurdities of
the gazettes. The original project was like that
of all festivities : temple of Janus, temple of
Bacchus, temple of the Devil and his grand
mother, stupid and intolerable allegories, because
they were gigantic, and because not to have
common sense was supposed to be an effort of
genius. Disgusted with all these fine and mighty
plans, which I positively would not have, one fine
day I summon M. Bajenof, my architect, and I
say to him : My friend, three versts from the city
there is a meadow ; imagine that this meadow is
the Black Sea ; that there are two roads leading
to it from the city ; well, one of these roads shall
be the Tanai's, the other the Borysthene : at the
mouth of the first you will build a banqueting-
hall, that you will name Azof; at the mouth of
the other you will build a theatre, that you will
name Kinburn ; you will trace out with sand the

LITERARY AND ARTISTIC TASTES 133
peninsula of the Crimea ; you will there enclose
Kertch and Ienicale\ as ball-rooms ; on the left of
the Tanais you will place buffets of wine and
eatables for the people ; opposite to the Crimea
you will have illuminations which will represent
the joy of the two empires over the re-establish
ment of peace ; on the other side of the Danube
you will have the fireworks, and on the land
which is supposed to be the Black Sea you
will place illuminated ships and boats ; you will
garnish the banks of the rivers which serve as
roads with landscapes, mills, trees, houses, all lit
up; and there you will have z.fete without any
thing imaginary in it, but perhaps as good as
many others, and much more natural.'
There is something, indeed, very natural and
charming in this plan of a fete, but there is also
a stroke of policy. There is always this in every
thing that Catherine thinks and does. All her
prepossessions, artistic and literary included, tend
in this direction. She accumulates in her Her
mitage considerable artistic collections, but she
confesses that it is not for love of the things of
beauty that are heaped up in the galleries and
cabinets that she prepares expressly for them.
One cannot delight in what one does not under
stand, and she does not understand in what

134 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
consists the merit of a fine picture or of a fine
statue. She admits that it is part of the glory of
a great sovereign to have these things in his
palace. All her famous predecessors, all the
monarchs in history whose renown she envies or
seeks, Louis XIV. at their head, have had them.
But she hits on a word which, coming from any
one but herself, would have the air of a cruel
epigram, but which characterises the purchases,
very extensive during the first part of her reign
in particular, to which she submits in order to
carry out this part of her programme of imperial
magnificence. ' It is not love of art,' she says,
' it is voracity. I am not an amateur, I am a
glutton.' In 1768 she buys for 180,000 roubles
the famous Dresden gallery of Count Briihl, ex-
Minister of the King of Poland. In 1772 she
purchases, at Paris, the Crozat collection. In
reference to this Diderot writes to Falconet :
' Ah, my friend Falconet, how things have
changed! We sell our pictures and our statues
in time of peace ; Catherine buys them in time of
war. The sciences, the arts, taste, and wisdom,
all make for the North, and barbarism with its
attendant train comes down upon the South.
I have just carried through an important affair :
the acquisition of the collection of Crozat, in-

LITERARY AND ARTISTIC TASTES 135
creased by his descendants, and known to-day
under the name of the gallery of the Baron de
Thiers. There are Raphaels, Guidos, Poussins,
Van Dycks, Schidones, Carlo Lottis, Rem-
brandts, Wouvermans, Teniers, etc., to the
number of about eleven hundred. It has cost
her Imperial Majesty 460,000 francs. That is
not half its value. '
Her usual good luck accompanied Catherine in
these proceedings. Three months later, fifty
pictures of not greater worth were sold for 440,000
francs at the sale of the Due de Choiseul's
collection. She herself paid 30,000 francs to
Mme. Geoffrin for two pictures of Van Loo, La
Conversation Espagnole and La Lechtre Espagnole.
It is true that this is, perhaps, on her part, a way
of establishing friendly relations with the in
fluential matron, who gains on the bargain two-
thirds of the amount. She has one misfortune,
in 177 1, with the Braancamp collection, bought
in Holland for 60,000 ecus, which goes down on
the coast of Finland with the vessel that brings
it. But, says Catherine, there is only 60,000
ecus lost. She can easily make up for the rest.
She buys en bloc the engraved gems of the Due
d'Orleans. Through Grimm and Diderot she
sends order after order to French artists : from

136 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
Chardin and Vernet she demands landscapes ;
from Houdon a Diana (which has been refused
admittance at the Louvre, on the ground that it
is too little clothed) ; from Vien, a ceiling for the
grand staircase at T_zarskoieT.£i|elo ; from the
painter on enamel, De Mailly, an artistic inkstand
for the room of the Order of St. George, for
which he charges 36,000 francs, and which he
executes very unwillingly, and only on being
forced to do so by an intervention of Government.
In 1778 she has copies made at Rome, by
Gunterberger and Reiffenstein, of the frescoes of
Raphael in the Vatican ; and she has a gallery
erected at the Hermitage with panels of the same
dimension to receive these copies, which, being
done on canvas, have been since utilised in the
reconstruction of the palace. They can still be
seen there. In 1790, in sending to Grimm her
portrait, ' in a fur cap,' she writes : ' Here is some
thing for your museum ; mine, at the Hermitage,
consists of pictures, the panels of Raphael, 38,000
books, four rooms filled with books and prints,
10,000 engraved gems, nearly 10,000 drawings, and
a cabinet of natural history contained in two large
rooms. All that is accompanied by a charming
theatre, admirably adapted for seeing and hearing,
and also as to seating accommodation, and with

LITERARY AND ARTISTIC TASTES 137
no draughts. My little retreat is so situated that
to go there and back from my room is just 3000
paces. There I walk about in the midst of a
quantity of things that I love and delight in, and
these winter walks are what keep me in health
and on foot.'
All that is her own doing. In accomplishing it
she has had to fight with serious difficulties, for,
though she may make gold at will, her power in
this respect is unlimited only within the limits of
her empire — outside, the paper money loses too
much in change. Thus, from the year 1781 she
feels obliged to use moderation. She writes to
Grimm : ' I renew my resolution to buy nothing
more, not a picture, nothing ; I want nothing
more, and consequently I give up the Correggio of
"the divine." : That is indeed a 'glutton's ' vow,
as valid as a drunkard's ! A veritable conflict
commences, from this moment, in the mind of
Catherine, between her desires as a collector, now
a passion with her, and her forced instincts of
economy. It is not the latter that most generally
win the day. The letter to Grimm that we have
just cited is dated March 29 ; on the 14th of
April we find in the correspondence of the
Empress with her art-purveyor this passage :
'If "the divine" [Reiffenstein] would send her,

138 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
direct to St. Petersburg, some very very fine
old cameos, in one, two, or three colours, in
perfect state and keeping, we should be infinitely
obliged to those who would procure them for us.
That is not to be called a purchase, but what is
one to do? ' And on the 23rd she writes : ' Now,
you may say what you like, you may rail at me
as you please, but I must have two copies of
coloured prints, according to the list I am going
to give you ... for we are gluttons, and so
gluttonous for everything of that kind, that there
is no longer a house in St. Petersburg where one
can decently live if it does not contain something
faintly resembling the panels, the Eternal Father
or the whole string that I have enumerated.'
' Lord, one would say that the good resolutions
of Thine anointed are wavering ! ' observes
Grimm maliciously in his reply. He has his
doubts, too, as to what has provoked this return
of 'gluttony.' In using the collective pronoun
' us,' Catherine does not use the plural instead of
the singular by a mere trick of speech. The
' gluttons ' of whom she speaks are indeed two at
present. After the favourite Korssakof, who
was a mere boor, has, come, since the end of 1780,
the handsome Lanskoi', who is a man of education
and refined tastes. And the handsome Lanskoi

LITERARY AND ARTISTIC TASTES 139
has a real passion for prints and cameos. In
July 1 78 1, sending Grimm new orders for
purchases, Catherine explains that these are not
for her, 'but for gluttons who have become
gluttons through knowing me.' The money is
certainly hers, that is to say, Russia's. In 1784
she renews her resolution of buying nothing more,
'being poor as church mice.' But Lanskoi
sends 50,000 francs to Grimm 'for the purchase
of a cabinet of pictures,' and promises a further
amount shortly. This new course of things goes
on for some time. In 1784, it is true, there is a
momentary pause : Catherine will have no more
cameos, nor anything of the kind. Lanskoi' is
dead, and with him is dead also the taste for
things which, as she frankly confesses, she does
not understand a bit. But in April 1785 it
begins again. What has happened ? Mamonof
has taken the place of Lanskoi, and with the
place he seems to have inherited the artistic
• tastes of the deceased. It is not till 1794 that
this intermittent fever comes finally to an end.
'I shall not buy anything more,' says Catherine,
on January 13. 'I must pay my debts and save
up money ; so refuse all the bargains that are
offered you.' It is Plato Zoubof who reigns now,
and Zoubof cares for nothing engraved save the

Ho CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
gold circles bearing the effigy of his imperial
mistress. Up to now the Empress has not merely been
increasing her collections ; she has also been
building. We should say, she has especially
been building. And this time the pleasure has
all been her own, as Durand intimated in 1773.
We have seen what the Prince de Ligne thought
of the sovereign's taste and knowledge in regard
to architecture. But in default of judgment and
sense of proportion she has at least plenty of
spirit. She replaces artistic sense by enthusiasm,
and quality by quantity. 'You know,' she
writes in 1779, 'that the mania of building is
stronger with us than ever, and no earthquake
ever demolished so many buildings as we have
set up.' She adds in German these sad re
flections : ' The mania of building is an infernal
thing ; it runs away with money, and the more
one builds, the more one wants to build ; it is a
disease, like drunkenness.'
At this moment she sends to Rome for two
architects — Giacomo Trombara and Geronino
Quarenghi. She thus explains her choice : ' I
want Italians because our Frenchmen know too
much, and make horrid houses, inside and out,
because they know too much.' Always the same

LITERARY AND ARTISTIC TASTES 141
contempt for care, the same penchant for impro
visation ! She nevertheless frequently consults
the learned Clerisseau, who sends her plans of
palaces in the Roman style. Perronnet furnishes
her with the scheme of a bridge over the Neva ;
Bourgeois de Chateaublanc, another of a light
house for the shores of the Baltic. In 1765 she
demands of Vasse a design for an audience-
chamber 1 20 feet long and 62 high.
With all that, does she give good cause to
artists, whether architects, painters, or solictors,
to praise her treatment of them ? Let us not ask
Falconet, on his return from St. Petersburg ; his
reply would be too bitter. We shall have to speak
elsewhere of the visit to the capital of the North of
the man to whom the city of Peter the Great and
of Catherine owes to this very moment its finest
ornament. We shall try also to show what were
his relations with the sovereign, beginning, on her
part, with more than courtesy, and ending with
more than indifference. Let us say here that,
not having the least comprehension of artistic
things, Catherine could not in any way be likely
to understand the soul of an artist. Falconet
pleased her at first by his original and somewhat
paradoxical turn of mind, still more perhaps by
the oddities of his disposition ; she soon grew

142 CA THERINE II. OF RUSSIA
tired, and finally impatient of him. He was
too much of an artist for her liking. She had
always her own way of interpreting the part to
be played in the world by the men of talent
whom she wished to employ in improving her
capital. She frankly confesses it in one of her
letters to Grimm : ' Si il signor marchese del
Grimmo volio mi fare [sic] a pleasure, he will
have the goodness to write to the divine Reif
fenstein to look me out two good architects,
Italians by birth and skilled in their profession,
whom he will engage in the service of her Imperial
Majesty of Russia for so many years, and whom
he will send from Rome to St. Petersburg like a
bundle of tools.' Tools — it is just that ; tools that
one uses, and then throws away when they are
done with, or one finds better and handier ones
at hand. It was thus that she did with Falconet.
She gives this further piece of advice to Grimm :
' He will choose honest and reasonable people,
not dreamers like Falconet ; people who walk on
the earth, not in the air.' She will have nothing
aspiring. A Michael Angelo,' it has been justly
said, ' would never have remained three weeks at
the court of Catherine.' To remain there nearly
twelve years, required in Falconet an extra
ordinary power of resistance, and a veritable

LITERARY AND ARTISTIC TASTES 143
passion for the work he had begun, into which he
had put all his soul. But when at last he went,
he was broken down. Apart from him, Catherine
did not keep by her any foreign artists who were
not mediocrities : Brompton, an English painter,
a pupil of Mengs, and Koenig, a German sculp
tor. Brompton paints allegories which delight
the sovereign, for they are political allegories.
' He has painted my two grandsons, and it is a
charming picture : the elder amuses himself by
cutting the Gordian knot, and the other has
proudly put the flag of Constantine about his
shoulders.' Koenig does a bust of Patiomkine.
Mme. Vigee-Lebrun, arriving at St. Petersburg
in 1795 with an achieved reputation, meets with
a flattering reception everywhere but at the court
— Catherine finds little pleasure in her society,
and considers her pictures so bad ' that one must
have a very distorted sense of things to paint like
that.' And the Russian artists — what does she do in
this respect? Does she try to discover native
talent, to encourage it, and bring it to the front ?
The list of national glories, contemporaneous
with her reign, is easy to establish in this sphere.
There is Scorodoumof, an engraver, who had
studied art in France, and whom she sent for at

144 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
Paris in 1782, in order to take him into her
service ; and whom a traveller, Fortia de Piles,
found, a few years later, in an empty studio,
engaged in polishing a copper plate for a wretched
design done to order : he explained that there
was not a workman in St. Petersburg capable of
doing this kind of work ; was astonished that a
stranger took any interest in what he was doing ;
was quite resigned to the low uses of his pro
fession. There is Choubine, a sculptor, dis
covered by the same visitor in a narrow room,
without models, without pupils, with only one
order, a bust, for which an admiral has offered
him 100 roubles, the marble itself costing 80
roubles, which he has to take out of the price.
There is, lastly, the painter Lossienko. Here is
what Falconet says of him : ' The poor fellow,
starving and in the depths of misery, wishing to
live anywhere but at St. Petersburg, came and
told me all his troubles ; then, sinking into drunk
enness in his despair, he little knew what he
would gain by dying : we read on his tombstone
that he was a great man ! '
The glory of Catherine wanted one great man
the more, and she had him cheaply. The artist
once dead, she willingly added his apotheosis
to all her grandeurs. She had not taken any

LITERARY AND ARTISTIC TASTES 145
pains to keep him alive. All her artistic ideas
reduce themselves, in the last resort, to a question
of show. And, for this object, the ' divine '
Reiffenstein, whose name is known all over
Europe, is obviously worth more than the poor
Lossienko, though he was no more than a good
copyist. National art, in short, owes to Catherine
some models furnished by her to the study and
emulation of Russian artists. Beyond that, she
did not give it so much as a morsel of bread.

vol. il.

K

CHAPTER II
CATHERINE AS A WRITER

Durand certainly made a mistake in his reckon
ing when giving his list of the things in which
Catherine took pleasure. He forgot one at least
of her favourite pastimes : she liked to write.
We do not believe there was anything she liked
so much. It was not only a taste in her — it was
in some sort a necessity, almost a physical neces
sity. It seems that the mere fact of holding a
pen in her hand, and having before her a white
sheet of paper, on which she can set her fancy
roving, gives her a pleasant sensation, not only
mental, but like a thrill of physical delight. She
says herself, in one of her letters to Grimm, that
the sight of a new pen makes her fingers itch.
She never dictates. ' I do not know how to
dictate,' she says. All that she writes is written
with her own hand, and what does she not write ?
Besides her political correspondence, which is
very active, and her private correspondence,
146

CATHERINE AS A WRITER 147
which, with the enormous budgets sent regularly
to Grimm, attains huge proportions ; besides her
work in regard to signatures, to reports sent in
to her, which she covers with marginal notes, to
her dramatic and other compositions, she writes
much and often for herself, for her own satisfac
tion, sometimes for no apparent reason, unless for
that of calming that itching of the fingers. She
makes extracts from old chronicles relating to the
life and glorious actions of St. Sergius, in which
we cannot imagine that she has any particular
interest. She works at copying the old church
Sclavonic, an acquaintance with which would not
seem to be indispensable to her duties as Orthodox
sovereign. She cannot read a book without
covering the margins with her great scrawling
writing. She draws up plans for fites and pro
grammes for concerts. Contrary to that statesman
of our days who could only think when he was
talking, one might say of her that she could only
think when writing. So, like the other with his
words, she was carried away by what she wrote.
Her pen ran away with her thought, and sent it
astray. She was well aware of it herself. She
wrote to Grimm —
' I was going to say that I would write for you,
so much in the scribbling mood am I ; but I

148 CATHERINE II OF RUSSIA
recollect that I am here and you in Paris. I
advise you to dictate, for I have been advised a
hundred times to do so myself : happy is the
man who can do so ; for my part, it would be
impossible to talk nonsense with the pen of an
other. . . . If I said to this other what flows from
my pen, he would often not write what I said.'
How does she find the time to write all that
she writes ? She rises at six o'clock in the
morning to chat at her ease with her confidant,
pen in hand. Despite these laborious habits, the
question remains for us an enigma. On May 7,
1767, the Empress, on a voyage of inspection,
finds, herself on the Volga in ' frightful ' weather.
She takes the opportunity to write a long letter
to Marmontel, who has just sent her his Bdlisaire.
It is miraculous. Note that, thinking and writing
being the same thing to her, and her inaptitude
to precede the manual labour of putting things
down by the intellectual labour of putting them
together being complete, she goes over and
over again anything to which she attaches much
importance. We have thus two rough drafts of
a letter addressed by her in 1768 to the Aca
demy of Berlin, which had offered her the title
of honorary member. She sometimes makes
more, for she does not like erasures. If the

CATHERINE AS A WRITER 149
expression or the phrase which comes up does
not suit her, she throws aside the sheet — ¦
generally a large-sized sheet, gilt-edged — and
begins over again.
Her phraseology is at times very happy, trans
lating her thought with a single vigorous or
picturesque expression. In refusing to evacuate
the Crimea, as the cowardice of Patiomkine ad
vises her in 1788, and looking for arguments to
justify her decision, she writes : ' Does a man
who is in the saddle get down in order to hold
on to the horse's tail?' Her letters, especially
her letters to Grimm, are full, at the same time,
of words and turns of phrase in which the
bonhomie and carelessness of thought and lan
guage alike are unbounded, - and sometimes be
come positively gross. Not content with inter
larding her incorrect French with German or
Italian words and phrases, she often writes in
slang. She puts 'sti-la' for 'celui-la,' 'ma 'for
'mais.' Probably she speaks in the same way.
She is not averse from a certain triviality. We
shall not venture to reproduce here the gaul-
oiseries — are they indeed gauloiseries ? — which
sometimes crop up when she is in the jocose and
familiar vein, and we should certainly tire or
even disgust our readers with the quips and

150 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
quibbles which she is for ever sprinkling over
her epistolary conversation.
It is true that this is her 'undress' style, her
language of asides. Let us see now what is her
style as a writer, her way of writing for the
public. n
It is in her works written for the stage that
the pen of Catherine is most prolific. She does
something of everything in literature, but espe
cially dramatic writing.
'You ask me,' she writes to Grimm, 'why I
write so many comedies. I will reply, like
M. Pinc6, with three reasons : primo, because it
amuses me ; secundo, because I should like to
restore the national theatre, which, owing to its
lack of new plays, is somewhat gone out of
fashion ; and tertio, because it was time to put
down the visionaries who were beginning to hold
up their heads. Le Trompeur and Le Trompd
have had a prodigious success. . . . The most
amusing part of it is that at the first performance
there were cries of "Author!" who, however,
kept completely incognito, despite his huge
success. Each of these pieces has brought in,
at Moscow, 10,000 roubles to the management.'

CATHERINE AS A WRITER 151
It is not needful, we see, to be an author
played at Paris to secure the welcome that a
happy idea always receives from the public, and
the imperial diadem does not preclude happy
ideas. In Le Trompeur and Le Trompd Catherine
has brought Cagliostro and his dupes on the
stage. The greater part of her plays are thus
polemical or satirical, philosophical, social, or
religious. She bravely attacks the ideas or
tendencies, or even persons, that she disapproves
of or dislikes. One may say that she has put
into them her best work as a writer. She has,
nevertheless, not the least sense of the dramatic.
The dramatic element, properly speaking, is
absent from her comedies as from her serious
dramas. There is no art of composition, no
knowledge of effect, no creative faculty, not a
type among all these characters ; but here and
there certain traits caught sur le vif in the
manners of the country, a certain wit, good-
humour, and a real gift of observation. The
general tendency is that of Voltaire, toned down
by the respect of certain sentiments, the religious
sentiment among others, which she is obliged to
treat so carefully in the surroundings in which she
is placed. The principal aim is to oppose the

152 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
current of mysticism which begins to penetrate
the upper strata of society, finding in the natural
leanings of the Russian mind an element highly
favourable to its propagation. It is with Free
masonry and Martinism that she has most often
a bone to pick. One day she assimilates the
Freemasons to the Siberian sect of Chamanes,
whom she tries to turn into ridicule by accusing
them of extorting money from the weak-witted
folk on whose credulity they trade. This is the
theme of Chamane Sibirski (Chamane of Siberia),
a piece for which an article in the Encyclopddie
(Theosophy) has furnished her with the canvas ;
it is also that of Obmanchtchik (The Deceiver),
and Obolchtchenie (The Deceit). But she also
attacks occasionally other errors and absurdities.
One of the characters of O Vremia ! (translated
into French under the title, O temps ! O moeurs I),
Madame Hanjahina, in the fervour of her religious
devotion, is in the act of performing fifty genu
flections before a holy image. A peasant enters,
and, after kissing his mistress's feet, puts a paper
into her hand. How dare he trouble her at such
a moment. ' Leave me, demon, imp of hell ! '
she cries. ' Fear the wrath of God, and mine.'
She nevertheless glances at the paper : it is a
petition, on the part of a lover who wishes to

CATHERINE AS A WRITER 153
marry, and who, in his capacity of serf, requires
the authorisation of his mistress. ' The idea of
coming and disturbing with such requests a pro
prietress of serfs, who is at her devotions ! '
Mme. Hanjahina turns the luckless importunate
out of doors, and returns to her genuflections.
But she has lost the reckoning. Must she do
them all over again ?/She begins the task, but
before beginning she summons her people, and
orders them to give fifty times fifty blows to the
peasant, who must have been sent by Satan him
self, and who shall never marry, let him be
assured of that, as long as she lives and continues
to reverence the holv images.
Catherine also, itTappears, wrote fiction. In
the third volume of his History of German
Literature, Kurtz includes the Empress among
the number of German writers of the eighteenth
century, as author of an Eastern romance,
Obidach, written in 1786. He attributes to her
several other works in her mother tongue, of
which he does not mention the titles.
We have also some fragments of the Empress's
work as a fabulist. In writing for her grand
children one of the tales that Grimm published
for the first time in 1 790, in his Correspondence,
Catherine was a little out of her reckoning. The

*&•

154 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
Tsarevitch Chlore, as well as the Tsarevitch Febei,
are philosophical tales in the style of Voltaire,
with allegorical turns, moralising intentions, and
scientific pretensions, quite out of the range of
childish minds. Catherine had, nevertheless,
what we now call ' a knowledge of children,' the
art of putting herself on the level of young, fresh,
naive imaginations ; she had also a love of
children. But, pen in hand, she sometimes
forgot what she knew the best. Nor has she
given evidence, in these compositions, of much
fertility of invention, or of a particularly in
genious turn of mind, or an original inspiration.
She has once again stolen some one's ideas —
those of Jean-Jacques and of Locke this time.
Finally, Catherine has had her poetical
moments. The taste came to her late in life.
'Imagine,' she writes in 1787, to Grimm, 'that
on my galley, going down the Borysthene, he
[the Comte de Segur] wanted to teach me to
write verse ! I have been rhyming for the last
four days, but it takes too much time, and I have
begun too late.' Nevertheless, the year before,
she had already asked Chrapowicki to send her a
dictionary of Russian rhymes, if there was one in
existence. We do not know what success attended her

CATHERINE AS A WRITER 155
secretary's researches in this direction, but after
1788 we often enough find the Empress rhym
ing, both in Russian and in French. In August
1788 she writes burlesque verses on the King
of Sweden, while composing a French comedy,
Les Voyages de Madame Bontemps, which she
intends to have acted, by way of surprise, in
the apartments of the favourite Mamonof on his
birthday. In January 1789 she sends to Chrapo-
wicki two Russian quatrains on the taking of
Otchakof. One of them is somewhat remark
able for its vigour of thought and the energy of
some expressions. As for the poetic form, it
escapes our estimation. Here is a French qua
train, without date, which will permit the reader
to see for himself the skill of Catherine in this
branch of literature. It is an epitaph composed
by her on the occasion of the death of the Count
I. I. Chouvalof, who, since 1777, had been the
Empress's high chamberlain —
' Ci git
Monseigneur le grand chambellan
A cent ans blanc comme Milan ;
Le voila qui fait la moue ;
Vivant il grattait la joue.'
We shall doubtless be excused from giving
more.

156 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
Catherine also undertook to translate the
Iliad. Three sheets of attempts in her hand
writing are preserved in the archives of the
empire. Certainly, she attempted many things.

CHAPTER III
CATHERINE AND EDUCATION
I
The institutions founded by Catherine for the
furtherance of national education, her educational
ideas and writings, hold too large a place in the
history of her reign, and in that of the intellectual
development of her people, for us to omit some
consideration of them in this study, brief as must
be the space that we can give them. On arriving
at power, Catherine was quick to see what ad
vantage she had derived, in the struggle from
which she had come out victorious, from the
superiority of her intellectual culture, the relative
extent and variety of her knowledge. At the
same time, she was able to judge how much it
cost in Russia, even on the throne, to arrive at
the little knowledge that she possessed. Finally,
the handling of power must soon have shown
her the enormous difficulties that the best-inten-
tioned rulers have always had to meet with from
the ignorance of their subjects. The reform, or
157

158 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
rather the establishment, of national education is,
from the first, one of the principal ideas brought
by the Empress to the government of her empire.
In this regard she had everything, or almost
everything, to do. The lower classes did not
count, the middle class hardly existed ; there
was therefore nothing to do but to raise the level
of studies at the summit of the social ladder.
But this level was terribly low. The children
of the nobility were brought up by serfs or by
foreign tutors. We can guess what they had to
learn from the former ; as for the latter, we can
guess also what sort of people they were — French
for the most part — who at that time entered upon
the career of private tutor in the far-distant
Russia. Mehee de la Touche tells the story
of the governess who, being asked by the
parents of her future charge if she spoke French,
replied: ' Sacrddid ! I should think so; if is my
own language.' She was engaged without further
question; only, the name of Mile. Sacredie always
stuck to her.
As ever, Catherine would do everything, and
everything at once. In the second year of herreign,
Betzky, the collaborator whom she picked out for
this purpose, received the order to set to work
on a project, which included a whole new system

CA THERINE AND ED UCA TION 1 59
of education, able to serve as basis for a number
of scholastic institutions, to be set on foot sub
sequently. The result was the publication, in
1764, of General Regulations for the Education
of Children of both Sexes. Betzky has admitted
that the ideas developed in this document were
those of the Empress herself. They must be
considered bold, if not original : they are more
or less those of Locke and of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau; those of Jean- Jacques especially, little
as Catherine generally professed to think of his
genius. It was a project for fabricating men and
women not in the least like any that had ever
been seen in Russia, taken radically away from
the soil which had given them birth, transplanted
from their natural surroundings, and developed
in an atmosphere artificially prepared for the
culture to which they were destined. They were
to be taken at the age of five or six, kept strictly
shut up, and removed from all outside influence,
to the age of twenty or more.
Catherine seriously thought of carrying out this
programme. If this was not done, at least within
the desired limits and proportions — that is to say,
throughout the whole length and breadth of public
education — it is because she encountered great
difficulties on the way, and that here, too, patience,

160 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
firmness of resolution, and continuity of effort
were once again lacking to her will. Difficulties
arose at the outset from the opposition that she
met with, not only in her immediate surroundings
— but little enlightened itself, as a rule, and con
sequently indifferent, if not hostile, to the develop
ment of any programme whatever, relating to this
order of ideas — but also among even the most
open-minded and cultivated of those to whom she
could appeal, outside the official sphere, for some
amount of help in her enterprise. The ideas of
Jean-Jacques were by no means those of Novikof,
for example, nor those of the circle in which the
influence of the publicist was exercised. Now,
this was perhaps the most intelligent circle in
the Russia of that time. Novikof had pedagogic
views of his own, entirely different, giving a large
place, in national education, to local feeling, to
custom, tradition, to the ways of the country,
averse from the introduction of foreign elements.
As for the officials at Catherine's disposal, they
were inclined to ask whether public education,
and schools in general, were of any real value.
In 1785, at one of the Empress's evening recep
tions, as Patiomkine was discussing the necessity
of starting a large number of universities through
out Russia, Zavadofski, the director of the

CATHERINE AND EDUCATION 161
recently established normal schools, observed that
the University of Moscow had not produced a
single distinguished man in science during the
whole of its existence. 'That,' replied Patiom
kine, ' is because you hindered me from continuing
my studies by turning me out.' This was a fact ;
the favourite had been sent down, and obliged to
enter a regiment, which was the beginning of his
fortune. He forgot to say that his idleness and
misconduct had quite justified the punishment.
Catherine thereupon declared that she herself
owed much to the university education : since she
had had in her service some men who had carried
out their studies at Moscow, she had been able to
make out something in the memoranda and other
official documents presented for her signature.
It was after this conversation that she decided
upon founding the Universities of Nijni-Nov-
gorod, and Iekatierinoslaf. But the latter town
had itself yet to be founded.
Another difficulty presented itself in the selec
tion of a staff of teachers. In organising the
establishment of the corps of cadets, Betzky
took for director a former prompter from the
French theatre, and for inspector of classes a
former valet de chambre of Catherine's mother.
One of the professors, Faber, had been a lackey
VOL. II. L

162 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
in the service of two other French professors,
Pictet and Mallet, whose colleague he now
became. Pictet and Mallet having ventured to
protest, Betzky contented himself with giving
Faber the rank of lieutenant in the Russian army,
which, it appeared, put things straight. The
master of police in the establishment was a
certain Lascaris, a mere adventurer, who after
wards became director, with the title of lieutenant-
colonel. The greatest liberty reigned in this school, if
we may believe the testimony of Bobrinski, the
natural son of Catherine, who was brought up
there : the ideas of Jean-Jacques were liberally
applied. Catherine was thus forced to complicate her
programme of scholastic organisation ; she had
first to think of training the masters for the future
pupils that she meant to intrust to them. She
sent to Oxford, to the Academy of Turin, to the
schools in Germany, young men who were to be
prepared for the delicate duties of professorship.
But many other things were yet wanting for the
founding of national schools, and first, to know
how to set about it. She confessed it naively to
Grimm- ' Listen a moment, my philosophical friends :

CATHERINE AND EDUCATION

you would be charming, adorable, if you would
have the charity to map out a plan of study for
young people, from A B C to the University. I
am told that there should be three kinds of
schools, and I who have not studied and have not
been at Paris, I have neither knowledge nor
insight in the matter, and consequently I know
not what should be learnt, nor even what can be
learnt, nor where one is to find out unless from
you. I am very much concerned about an idea
for a university and its management, a gym
nasium and its management, a school and its
management. '
She intimates, however, the means by which
she intends to get over the difficulty for the
present —
' Until you accede or do not accede to my
request, I know what I shall do : I shall hunt
through the Encyclopedie. Oh, I shall be certain
to haul out what I want and what I don't want.'
The philosophers remaining silent, it is the
Encyclopedie that has to afford matter for the
conceptions to which the universal genius of
Catherine betakes itself, in this new order of
things.

1 64 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA

II
These conceptions were destined to remain
sterile, with one exception. Some scholastic
establishments date, it is true, from her reign.
But these are special schools, that, for instance,
of artillery and engineering, founded in 1762,
the school of commerce founded in 1772, the
academy of mines in 1773, the academy of
Beaux Arts in 1774. In 1781 there was even an
attempt at popular schools, and in 1783 Jankovitz
was summoned for the foundation of normal
schools, after the order of those in Austria. Ten
were at once founded at St. Petersburg, and the
following year they had 1000 pupils. Catherine
was full of enthusiasm on the subject, and wrote
to Grimm : ' Do you know that we are really
doing fine things, and getting along famously,
not in the air (for, from dread of fire, I have
expressly forbidden aerostatic globes) but ventre
a terre, for the enlightening of the people.'
In reply Grimm conferred upon the sovereign the
title of Universal-normalschulmeisterin.
But all that was not the national education
according to Locke and Jean-Jacques, of which
the Empress dreamed, and which ought, she
thought, to regenerate Russia. The dream was

CATHERINE AND EDUCATION 165
unrealised save in the establishment founded in
1764 for the education of girls, in the famous
Smolnyi Monastyr, which was one of the favourite
achievements of Catherine, the one among all
others to which she was most constant ; the
majestic edifice on the banks of the Neva is even
now the admiration of travellers from the West.
Demoiselles nobles are still educated there in the
most careful manner, and but lately the two
daughters of the Prince of Montenegro grew up
within these walls, where so often the Empress
was to be seen surrounded by her pupils,
following their studies with solicitude, and in
teresting herself in their recreations. Rigorous
seclusion, during twelve years, the removal of all
outside influences, even family influences, even
religious influences : all the details of the plan
sketched out in 1764 were to be found in the
scheme of this institution. No one was allowed
to go out, except to go to the court, whither the
Empress frequently summoned the scholars
whom she had particularly noticed. There were
hardly any holidays. Every six weeks the
parents were admitted to see their children, and
to witness a public examination which showed
what progress they were making. That was all.
The lay schoolmistresses never spoke to their

1 66 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
pupils of God or the Devil save in general terms,
without any attempt at proselytism ; the clergy
were admitted to this singular monastery, and
to some part in the instruction given there, but
within prescribed limits. It was a convent having
as abbess a philosophising Empress; monastic
life with a door of communication opening on the
splendours and seductions of the imperial palace ;
St. Cyr, minus Christianity, and not merely the
severe and gloomy Christianity of Madame de
Maintenon, but Christianity in general. A long-
bearded pope was sometimes seen there ; the
Christian teaching was absent. The very plan
of the establishment was alien to it, for could
anything be more absolutely contrary to its spirit
than the separation into two divisions of the
inmates, kept absolutely apart and distinct, by
the very first principles of the undertaking ? In
this establishment, in which there is room for 500
pupils, there are daughters of the nobility and of
the middle classes. They have nothing in com
mon one with another, either in mode of living,
of education, or even of costume. The former
are indulged with fine clothes, the refinements of
the toilette, of the table, and of accommodation, a
course of study in which the arts of pleasing hold
a large place ; the latter have to put up with a

CATHERINE AND EDUCATION 167

coarse kind of clothing, with simple dishes, with
lessons in sewing, washing, and cooking. The
colour of the clothes is the same, but the ' corset '
takes the place of the elegant 'fourreau,' and is
•completed by a pinafore, which denotes the
humility of their condition. All that is Pagan,
utterly Pagan, as is the plan of the teaching itself,
into which Diderot would have wished to in
troduce thorough instruction in anatomy ; as are
the sallies into the frivolous and corrupt world of
the court.
As it has been noted, Catherine is the first
Russian sovereign to give attention to the educa
tion of women. She gave to her undertaking
all the breadth and magnificence that we find in
all her creations, and that would seem to be in
some sort the natural emanation of herself. But
she also put to proof principles which she had
not sufficiently gauged. The germs that she thus
introduced into the intellectual and moral develop
ment of her sex still bear fruit in Russia, not
perhaps always for the best.
We have had means of judging, in the
Empress's confidences to Grimm, what point she
had reached, after fifteen years of sway, in her
own studies and notions in regard to this delicate
and difficult matter : she obviously went right

1 68 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA

ahead, picking up principles and ideas for her
plans of education as she picked up soldiers for
her plans of conquest. In the very numerous
writings on educational subjects that she has
handed down to posterity, some ideas and in
genious intuitions alternate with the most para
doxical assertions, as, for example, that ' the
study of languages and sciences ought to hold
the last place in education,' or that 'the health of
the body and the inclination of the mind towards
what is good make up the whole of education.'
The idea of enlightened despotism, coming out
in the blind subjection of pupil to master, accords
as best it can with that of the progressive develop
ment of the spirit of independence, in which one
is to endeavour to fortify the child's mind. As
a whole it is almost incoherent. Catherine saw
clearly that the way in which the youth of
Russia in her time was educated was useless
alike to them and to Russia, and she admitted
the necessity of a change of system, as an abso
lute necessity of national progress. It was only
on this one point that she had quite made up
her mind. At her time, and in the place that
she occupied, coming after Ann, Elizabeth, and
Peter III., it was something already to have made
this discovery and cherished this conviction. But

CATHERINE AND EDUCATION 169
the glory of having been the founder of the
national education was not to be hers. The
judgment of posterity has given this title to a
name more humble than hers, that of a man
whom she treated as a foe, to whom she gave
a dungeon and a chain as the reward of the
labours of which Russia reaps the benefit to-day.
It was in the educational establishments founded
at St. Petersburg by Novikof that the programme
of studies and the plan of scholastic organisation
now in force throughout the empire were really
mapped out.

BOOK IV
INNER ASPECTS
CHAPTER I
HOME LIFE
I
We shall try to give an account of a single day
in the life of the Empress, an ordinary day, one
of those which show the habitual course of her
existence. We are in winter, let us suppose,
and about the middle of the reign, in 1785 for
example, a year of peace. The Empress occu
pies the Zimnyi Dvariets, the Winter Palace.
The private suite of rooms, on the first story,
is not very large. On mounting the little stair
case, we come to a room in which a table,
covered with writing materials, awaits the secre
taries and others employed in her Majesty's
immediate service. We pass through this first
room, and enter the dressing-room, whose win
dows look out on the square of the palace.
It is there that the Empress's hair is dressed
170

HOME LIFE 171

before a small circle of intimate friends and high
functionaries, admitted to the early morning
audiences. It is the petit lever of her Majesty.
There is no grand lever. Two doors open
before us : one leads to the Diamond Room, the
other to the bedroom. The bedroom communi
cates at the back with a private dressing-room,
and at the left with a work-room opening on the
Mirror Room, and the other reception-rooms.
It is six o'clock in the morning, the hour at
which the Empress rises. By the side of her
bed is a basket, where, on a couch of pink satin
ornamented with lace, sleeps a whole family of
little dogs, Catherine's inseparable companions.
They are English greyhounds. In 1770 Dr.
Dimsdale, whom the Empress, as we know, sum
moned from London to inoculate her, brought
over for her a couple of these creatures. They
have increased and multiplied, so that one sees
a greyhound in all the aristocratic houses in St.
Petersburg. The Empress always has half a
dozen about her, sometimes more. The bell-
ringer of the palace having rung the hour of
six, Maria Savichna Pierekousihina, the head
femme de chambre of her Majesty, enters the
bedroom. Formerly Catherine had no one about
her at this time ; she rose by herself, and in

172 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
winter even lit her own fire. Time has changed
this habit. But to-day her Majesty is late
in waking. The night before she was not so
early as usual in going to bed ; an interesting
conversation detained her at the Hermitage
after ten. Maria Savichna coolly finds a divan,
opposite to the sovereign's bed, lies down on it,
and seizes the happy chance of a little additional
nap. But now the Empress awakens. She gets
up, and in her turn awakens the slumbering
Maria Savichna. She goes into her dressing-
room. A little warm water to rinse out her
mouth, and a little ice to rub over her face, are
all that her Majesty is in need of for the
moment. But where is Catherine Ivanovna,
the young Calmuck, whose business it is to have
these things ready? She is always behind her
time, this Catherine Ivanovna ! What, already
a quarter past six ! The Empress has a move
ment of impatience ; she taps her foot nervously
on the ground. Here she is at last : beware of
her Majesty's wrath ! Catherine snatches from
her hands the silver-gilt ewer, and, hastily
making use of it, she apostrophises the lazy
girl— ' What are you thinking about, Catherine
Ivanovna? Do you think you will always be

HOME LIFE 173

able to go on like this ? One day you will get
married, you will leave my service, and your
husband, be sure, will not be like me. He will
be much more particular. Think of your future,
Catherine Ivanovna ! '
That is all, and that is repeated day after day.
Meanwhile the Empress goes briskly into her
work-room, followed by her dogs, who have
waited till now to leave their luxurious bed.
It is time for ddjeuner. The coffee is waiting:
good. Is it strong enough ? It needs a pound
of coffee for the five cups that the Empress is
accustomed to take. One day one of her secre
taries, a certain Kozmine, coming to make his
report, is benumbed with the cold. The Empress
rings. ' A cup of coffee for the poor shivering
wretch ! ' She insists on his swallowing the
steaming cup at a draught. But what is the
matter ? He is unwell ; he has palpitations of
the heart. He has had the coffee that is pre
pared for her Majesty, and which she alone
can drink. It never occurred to any one that
the cup was for the secretary ; who could imagine
that her Majesty would share her ddjetmer with
a mere tchinovnik like him ? Generally Catherine
only shares her ddjeuner with her dogs. The
imperial coffee is not in their line ; but there is

174 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
thick cream, biscuits, sugar. The whole con
tents of the sugar-basin go to them, and the
biscuits too.
Her Majesty has now no further need of any
one. If her dogs want to go out, she opens the
door for them herself. She wishes to be alone,
and to give herself entirely to her work or
correspondence, till nine o'clock. But where is
her favourite snuff-box, which should always be
on her work-table ? A portrait of Peter the
Great, which is on the cover, is there, she says, to
remind her that she has to continue the work of
the Great Czar. Catherine takes a great deal of
snuff. But she never carries a snuff-box. There
must be one at hand in every corner of her
palace. She uses only a particular kind of
tobacco that is specially grown for her in her
garden of Tzarskoie-Sielo. When writing, she
needs to take snuff almost all the time. She
rings. 'Will you kindly,' she says to a valet de
chambre who enters, 'look for my snuff-box.'
'Veuillez,' ' Prenez la peine de,' are formulas
that she invariably uses in speaking to the
people about her, however humble.
At nine precisely Catherine returns to her
bedroom. It is there that she receives the
officials who come to give in their report. The

HOME LIFE 175

prefect of police enters first. Her Majesty is
dressed, at this moment, in a white dressing-
gown of gros de Toiirs, with large folds. She
wears a cap of white crape, which the vigour of
her work or the excitement of her conversation
with Grimm has accidentally pushed aside, to
right or left. Her complexion is fresh, her eyes
bright ; nevertheless, in reading the papers pre
sented for her signature, she puts on glasses.
' You don't need this, do you ? ' she says to her
secretary Gribofski. ' How old are you ? '
' Twenty-six.'
'You have not had time, as I have, to lose
your sight in the service of the empire.'
On entering, Gribofski has bowed very low.
The Empress has replied with a slight inclination
of the head, after which, with an amiable smile,
she lends her - hand to the secretary. At this
moment Gribofski can notice that a front tooth
is missing from the otherwise well-furnished
mouth of the sovereign. On stooping to kiss
the imperial hand, a white, plump hand, he has
felt a pressure of this august hand, and he has
heard the words 'sit down,' which summon him
to his task. It is a task often interrupted.
Ministers, generals, high officials, who have been
granted audiences, are announced, and the Em-

176 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
press is often considerate enough not to make
them wait. Now General Souvarof is ushered
in. Without looking at the Empress, he marches
with his automatic soldier's step straight to the
right, where, in a corner, a lamp is always kept
burning before the image of Our Lady of Kasan.
He stops short before the icone, and bends three
times, striking the ground with his forehead.
Having accomplished this rite, he turns sharply,
as if he were at drill, takes a few steps forward,
and a fourth genuflection brings him to the
sovereign's feet.
' Pray, are you not ashamed ? ' she murmurs.
She makes him sit down, addresses two or three
questions to him, one after another, to which he
replies in the tone of a trooper catechised by a
corporal, and she dismisses him after two minutes.
Other personages arrive. But, all at once, some
one whispers a word in the Empress's ear, she
gives a sign of the head, and all retire : it is
the favourite, Patiomkine, Lanskoi, or Mamonof,
who wishes to come in. For him her Majesty is
always visible, and, when he comes, every one
else goes.
This goes on till mid-day, afterwards till one
o'clock when the dinner-hour has been changed
from one to two. After dismissing her secretary,

HOME LIFE 177

the Empress retires to her private dressing-room,
where she makes a complete toilette, dresses,
and has her hair dressed by her old coiffeur Koz-
lof. Her costume, except on great occasions, is
extremely simple : a loose and open gown, a la
Moldave, with double sleeves ; the under ones of
a light material, plaited to the wrist, the over
ones very long, of similar material to the skirt,
and caught up at the back. The gown is of
violet or grey silk ; thfere are no jewels, no
indication of supreme rank ; comfortable shoes
with very low heels. Catherine puts no coquetry
in anything but the arrangement of her hair : she
wears her hair drawn back, showing the whole of
the forehead, the development of which she per
haps likes to emphasise. Her hair is long and
heavy ; when she sits before her toilet-table,
it touches the ground. On state occasions a
diadem crowns the cunning edifice raised by the
skilful hands of Kozlof ; but then the silk dress
is replaced by red velvet, and the costume thus
transformed, though it keeps much the same easy
character, takes the name of ' the Russian dress.'
It is obligatory at court, despite the heavy
sacrifices it imposes on the young women, who
are distressed at not being got up in the Paris
fashion. VOL. II. M

178 CA THERINE II. OF RUSSIA
Her private toilette over, Catherine goes into
the official toilette-chamber, where she finishes
dressing. It is the petit lever. The number of
those who have the privilege of being present is -
limited ; but in spite of this, the room is full.
There are, first, the Empress's grandchildren, who
are invariably brought in; then the favourite ; with
a few friends, such as Leon Narychkine. There
is also the court fool, who is a person of much
wisdom : Matrena Danilevna holds this office, to
which she adds that of tale-bearer. She diverts
the sovereign by her jokes, and Catherine is
kept au courant of all that is going on at court
and in the city, the scandals in the air since the
night before, and even the best kept family
secrets. Matrena Danilevna has an eye and ear
everywhere, and admirable police instincts. One
day she is very severe upon Ryleief, the chief
of imperial police. Catherine summons him to
her, and advises him in a friendly manner to send
some fat fowls and geese to Matrena Danilevna,
who seems to be in want of them in order to duly
celebrate the Prasdnik (Easter). A week passes.
'And Ryleief?' asks the Empress of the worthy
gossip, who is dishing up to her the string of
daily tattle. Matrena Danilevna has nothing
but praise for the official, for whom, a week

HOME LIFE 1 79

before, she had nothing but abuse. ' Ah ! ah ! '
interrupts Catherine. ' I see what it is : he has
sent you some fowls and geese.'
But now the Empress is seated before her
toilet- table, a superb table in massive gold. Her
four femmes de chambi'e approach her. They are
four old maids, whom she has had in her service
since her accession to the throne, and who have
passed their heyday in her service. They were
all of them very plain. One of them, Maria
Stiepanovna Aleksieievna, paints her face in the
most preposterous way. They are all Russian.
To give her subjects an example that they have
never, up to the present time, followed, Catherine
has absolutely none but Russian servants. Now
Maria Stiepanovna presents to the sovereign a
piece of ice, which she rubs over her cheeks in
public, to prove that she herself has no recourse
to the coquettish tricks employed by her femme de
chambre ; the old Palakoutchi places on her head
a little crape cap, this time carefully adjusted ;
the two Zvieref sisters add some pins, and her
Majesty's toilette is over. The whole ceremony
has lasted about ten minutes, during which
Catherine has spoken to several of those present.
And now to table. Up to the time of the
Swedish war, dinner was at one o'clock. At that

180 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
time the pressing occupations with which Cathe
rine was burdened made her put off the hour of
dinner, which remained afterwards at two o'clock.
On ordinary days there are generally about a
dozen guests at her Majesty's table : the favourite
first of all, as a matter of course, a few friends,
Count Razoumofski, Field-Marshal Prince Galit-
zine, Prince Patiomkine, the Count of Anhalt,
the two Narychkine brothers, the General
Aide-de-Camp, Count Tchernichef, Count Stro-
gonof, Prince Bariatinski, Countess Bruce, Coun
tess Branicka, Princess Dachkof, and, later on,
during the last years of the reign, the General
Aide-de-Camp Passek, Count Strogonof, the
Maid of Honour Protassof, Vice-Admiral Ribas,
the General Governor of the Polish provinces,
Toutolmine, and two of the French emigres,
Comte Esterhazy and the Marquis de Lambert.
Dinner lasts about an hour. The dishes
are very simple. Catherine cares nothing
about elaborate cookery. Her favourite dish is
boiled beef with salted cucumber; her drink,
water with gooseberry sirup. Later, on the
advice of physicians, she takes a glass of Madeira
or Rhine wine. For desert, some fruit, apples or
cherries by preference. Among her cooks there
is one who cooks abominably. For years she

HOME LIFE

has never noticed it. When it has been pointed
out to her, she has refused to dismiss the
man, saying that he has been in her service
too long. She merely inquires when his turn
comes, and then says on sitting down to
table : ' Ladies and gentlemen, we must exer
cise our patience ; we have a week's fast before
us.' Twice a week her Majesty keeps jour maigre,
and on these occasions she has only two or three
people to dinner.
It should be added that her guests are not
obliged to go beyond the palace to find better
cheer. Her Majesty's table is poorly served,
and Catherine sees that the expenses are kept
down ; but the table of the favourite, Zoubof,
that of his protector, the Count N. J. Saltykof,
and that of the Countess Branicka, Patiomkine's
niece, which are all three paid for out of the
imperial treasury, come to 400 roubles (2000
francs) a day in 1792, without counting the
drink, which, with tea, coffee, and chocolate,
comes to 200 roubles a day extra.
After dinner there are a few minutes' con
versation ; then every one retires. Catherine
takes up her embroidery, at which she is very
skilful, and Betzky reads aloud to her. When

182 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
Betzky, now growing old, begins to lose his
sight, she does not have him replaced ; she reads
herself, with the aid of her glasses. An hour
passes in this way, and now her secretary is
announced : twice a week he comes with the
courier, who is immediately despoiled. The
other days, it is the officials who come, one
after another, handing in reports, demanding
instructions. All the while the Empress gener
ally has with her her grandchildren, with whom
she plays in the intervals of her business. By
four o'clock she has well earned the rest and
recreation which she now allows herself. She
betakes herself to her favourite Hermitage,
through the long gallery which connects it with
the Winter Palace. Lanskoi or Mamonof or
Zoubof accompanies her. She examines her new
collections, sees to their arrangement, has a game
of billiards, and sometimes amuses herself with
turning ivory. At six o'clock she returns to the
reception-rooms. Slowly she makes the round of
her salons, giving an amiable word here and
there, and then sits down to her whist-table.
She plays whist at ten roubles the rubber,
rocambole, piquet, and Boston ; always very
cheaply. Her usual partners are Count Razou-
mofski, Field-Marshal Count Tchernichef, Field-

HOME LIFE 183

Marshal Prince Galitzine, Count Bruce, Count
Strogonof, Prince Orlof, Prince Viazemski, and
the foreign ministers. Catherine gives the pre
ference to the two first, because they play well,
and do not try to make her gain. She herself
plays her very best. The chamberlain Tchert-
kof, whom she sometimes admits to make up
a party, generally gets in a rage, reproaches her
with not playing fair, .and, sometimes, in his
vexation, throws the cards' in her Majesty's face.
She never loses her temper, defends her way
of playing as best she can, appealing to the
bystanders. One day she calls on the two
French exiles, who are of the party, to give
their opinion.
' Fine arbiters ! ' cries Tchertkof. ' They be
trayed their own king ! '
This time Catherine has to impose silence on
the too reckless player. One sees that she has
no easy task to maintain at her court the tone
that should reign there. Another time, as she
is playing at whist with Count Strogonof, General
Arharof, and Count Stackelberg, Strogonof con
stantly loses. At last, unable to contain himself
any longer, and forgetting all the convenances, he
rises in a heat, leaves the party without finishing
it, and, with purple cheeks, begins to stride to

1 84 CATHERINE IT. OF RUSSIA
and fro in the Diamond Room, giving free course
to his irritation —
' I shall lose all my money ! As for you, it
makes no difference for you if you lose. But
as for me, I shall soon be in, destitution.'
Thinking that this is going too far, Arharof
would interfere, but Catherine stops him : ' Let
him be ! He has been just like that for fifty
years. You will never change him, no more
shall I.'
The play invariably stops at ten o'clock. Her
Majesty then retires. Except on reception-days,
there is no supper, and even on these days
Catherine only sits down to table as a matter
of form. Returning to her private suite of rooms,
she goes immediately to her bedroom, drinks
a large glass of boiled water, and goes to bed.
Her day is ended. n
This is a quiet enough course of existence,
and the picture that we have just presented will
not, perhaps, be much in agreement with the
very different pictures presented to us by the
usual legend. We have, however, drawn from
the best sources ; but we find a very natural
explanation of the contrast between legend and

HOME LIFE 185

history. The former draws its inspiration, for
one thing, from what was really reprehensible, and
might well have justified the most ill-natured sup
positions in regard to one side of the Empress's
private life, on which we shall enlarge later.
Legend and ill-feeling have also made capital out
of certain periods of dissipation which were never
theless only accidental and occasional in the history
of the great Empress, such as that which followed
the great crisis of despair after the death of
Lanskoi. The general course of life of Catherine
appears under quite a different light, and, if we
can make up our minds to throw a veil over
certain pleasures, which, for the rest, never dis
turbed, in a permanent fashion, the harmonious
balance of her faculties, nor the wisely planned
programme of her occupations, the other distrac
tions, associated with them, were quite mild and
innocent. Those who, on the strength of certain
reports, have looked upon her existence as one
continual orgy, would find it hard indeed to
justify such a conception by the testimony of
fact. History gives no support to it. But is
this history well informed ? Did not the more
or less edifying outside of the Empress's private
life hide something far more scandalous under
neath? Were there not, in the palaces of St.

1 86 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
Petersburg and Tzarskoie-Sielo, in the rooms of
the Hermitage, certain hidden corners, conceal
ing more unmentionable pleasures ? We do not
think so, for reasons founded as much on the
character of Catherine as on the very organisa
tion of her private life, itself, in one way, so
much a scandal, but a scandal which was official,
cynically but frankly avowed. The Empress
has given the lie, for the rest, not in words but
in actions, to the greater part of the infamous
accusations that were brought against her during
her lifetime. The Englishman Harris wrote in
January 1779 : 'The Empress becomes from day
to day more disordered and dissipated, and her
society is composed of the lowest set among the
courtiers ; the health of her Majesty is certainly
tried by the life she leads.' And the Foreign
Office concluding that the sovereign, ' worn out
by debauch,' had only a short while to live, all
Europe soon found out, rather at its expense,
that Catherine was quite alive, healthy in body
and mind. Never was she in better health,
physically and mentally, than at this time.
Catherine was certainly sensual, licentious if
you will, but she was nothing of a Bacchante.
Insatiably amorous, as she was infinitely ambi
tious, she accommodated her love affairs, as she

HOME LIFE 187

accommodated her ambition, to certain rules of
conduct, from which she never varied. Favour
ites had always a large place in her palace and
in all the material, moral, and even political
organisation of her life ; but the sovereign always
held her own, and, strange as it may sound, the
quiet housewife as well.
Catherine was passionately fond of children ;
it was one of her favourite pastimes to play with
them. In a letter addressed to Ivan Tchernichef
in 1769 she brings herself before us, with the
usual company of her leisure hours, and we see
her, Gregory Orlof, Count Razoumofski, and
Zahar Tchernichef, Ivan's brother, playing with
the little Markof, whom the sovereign has just
adopted, gambolling, rolling on the ground, com
mitting a thousand absurdities, and all the time
in fits of laughter. The little Markof, then six
years old, is afterwards replaced by the son of
Admiral Ribeaupierre. The child is hard to
tame, having got into his little brain the idea
that he has been brought to the palace that he
may have his head cut off. But Catherine
gradually wins him over, cutting out paper
figures, making toys for him. One day she tears
a ribbon out of her collerette to make the reins
of a horse and pair that she has cut out of card-

1 88 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
board. She has him with her for hours together,
sends him away when any one comes to her on
business, then sends for him again ; at the age of
five she makes him an officer of the Guards.
He is not the only one to be thus favoured : two
little Galitzines, four grand-nephews of Patiom
kine, the son of the Field-Marshal Count Salty
kof, the son of the hetman Branicki, the young
Count Chouvalof, who afterwards accompanied
Napoleon to Elba, and young Valentine Ester
hazy, all have their share. Little Ribeaupierre
lives under her Majesty's roof till the age of
twelve. On sending him away, Catherine wishes
him to write to her, and she replies to his letter
in her own handwriting. But her letter is so full
of erasures — she has not, this time, taken the
trouble to begin over again — that she has it
copied out by her secretary, Popof, who after
wards sends on the original.
After children, we dare not say before, but it
would perhaps be more correct, dogs, and ani
mals in general, play a large part in Catherine's
private life. The family of Sir Tom Anderson
is certainly, of all the families of the empire, the
one whose position at court is most solidly
established. Here is the list, in one of the
Empress's letters —

HOME LIFE

' First comes the head of the race, Sir Tom
Anderson, his spouse, Duchess Anderson, their
children, the young Duchess Anderson, Mr.
Anderson, and Tom Thomson : the last is
established at Moscow under the guardianship of
Prince Volkonski, Governor- General of the city.
There are also, besides these, whose reputation
is made, four or five young people of infinite
promise, who are being brought up in the best
houses in Moscow and St. Petersburg, as for
example that of Prince Orlof, MM. Narychkine,
and Prince Toupiakine. Sir Tom Anderson has
taken as second wife Mile. Mimi, who has since
taken the name of Mimi Anderson. But up to
now there is no family. Besides these legitimate
marriages (since the faults as well as the virtues
of people must be told in their history) M. Tom
has had several illegitimate attachments : the
Grand Duchess has several pretty bitches who
have greatly taken him, but up to the present no
bastards have been seen, and it would seem that
there are none ; anything to the contrary is a
mere calumny.'
But Catherine was not content with dogs
alone. In 1785 she takes a fancy to a white
squirrel, which she brings up herself, and feeds
out of her hand with nuts. And about the same

1 90 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
time she gets a monkey, of whose cleverness and
pretty ways she often boasts. ' You should have
seen,' she writes to Grimm, ' the amazement of
Prince Henry ' (brother of the King of Prussia)
' one day when Prince Potemkin let loose a
monkey in the room, with which I began to play,
instead of going on with the conversation we
were engaged in. He opened his eyes, but in
spite of all, he could not resist the tricks of the
monkey.' At that time she had also a cat, the
present of Prince Patiomkine : ' the most tom-cat
of all tom-cats, gay, witty, not obstinate.' The
present is in return for a service in Sevres
porcelain, which she has had made for the
favourite, saying that it was for her, 'so that it
should be finer.' The Anderson family, however,
loses none of its rights. 'You will excuse me,'
says the Empress in one of her letters, ' if all
the preceding page is very badly written. I am
extremely hampered at the moment by a certain
young and fair Zemire, who of all the Thomassins
is the one who will come closest to me, and who
pushes her pretensions to the point of having her
paws on my paper.'
Let us quote also this fragment of the Sou
venirs of Madame Vigee-Lebrun : ' When the
Empress had returned to town, I used to see her

HOME LIFE

191

every morning open the shutters and throw out
crumbs to hundreds of rooks who came every
day at the same hour to seek their pittance. In
the evening, about ten, when the rooms were lit
up, I used also to see her send for her grand
children and some persons of the court, to play at
hot cockles and hide-and-seek.'
Madame Vigee-Lebrun lodged in a house op
posite to the imperial palace. Regardless of local
colour, legend has since transformed the rooks
into pigeons ; but, legend or history, does not all
that the one and the other tell us of the tastes
and habits of Catherine stand out in anything
but the colours of a Messalina ? Doubtless the
objection that we have ourselves raised retains
its force. Is what we know of the interior of a
palace in which Catherine dwelt in company with
an Orlof or a Patiomkine the whole truth, the
true truth, as the Italians say? Doubt is the
first virtue of the historian, and we would not
forget it. Nevertheless, as we have already said,
Catherine was no hypocrite ; she lived openly
before the world, and she had the pride, or the
shamelessness, to seek no disguise, and to defy
rebuke, at the point where our respect and admira
tion must needs forsake her.

192 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA

III
From the outside, the Empress's life offers
little material for the chronicler, favourably in
clined or the reverse.
Apart from the great tours which stand out in
the history of her reign, that in the Crimea for
instance, she preferred generally to keep within
the bounds of her vast and luxurious palaces.
Sometimes, during the carnival, on a fine sunny
day, she would make a longer expedition. Three
great sledges, drawn by ten or twelve horses,
carried her and her ordinary retinue. To each of
these sledges a dozen smaller ones were fastened
on behind with ropes, and into these the lords
and ladies of the court crowded pell-mell, and the
strange cavalcade set out at a gallop. They have
dinner in the suburbs of the capital, in the
Tchesme Palace, and afterwards cross the Neva
and go on as far as Gorbilevo, an imperial villa
where there are montagnes russes ; returning to
the Taurida Palace for supper. On one of these
excursions, after having dined and returned to
her place in one of the large sledges, which she
has all to herself, Catherine inquires of her squire
if the drivers and lackeys have had their dinner.
On his replying in the negative, she gets down

HOME LIFE I93

from the sledge. ' They want dinner as much as
we do,' she says. And, as there is no meal ready
for them, she waits patiently until the hunger of
the poor servants is appeased.
But these escapades are rare. The sovereign
does not care to be seen too often, except in her
palace, in the midst of the decorative mise-en-
scene that surrounds her ; she fears to lessen her
prestige. One day when she has a headache,
and a walk in the open air has done her good,
she is recommended to try it again next day, the
headache having returned. ' What would the
people say,' she replies, ' if they saw me in the
street two days following ? ' Twice in the course
of the winter she goes to the masked ball.
Those whom she invites to accompany her find
masks and costumes at the court. Generally, on
these occasions, in order the better to preserve
her incognito, Catherine goes in some one else's
coach. She likes to put on a man's costume, and
to puzzle the women, to whom she pays court,
and whose curiosity she puts off the track. Her
voice, rather deep, lends itself to this disguise.
One of those whose fancy she takes, carrying her
imaginary conquest to some lengths, is so curious
that she ends by violently tearing off the mask of
the mysterious cavalier. Catherine is very angry,
VOL. II. N

194 CA THERINE II. OF RUSSIA
but she merely reproaches the too susceptible
fair one of having broken the etiquette in usage
a.t fetes of this kind.
She accepts no invitations. The opulent
Prince of Taurida, Count Razoumofski, Prince
Field-Marshal Galitzine, the two Narychkines,
the Countess Bruce, and Madame Batiouchkine
are almost the only persons who have sometimes
the honour of having her as guest. But as a rule
she will not have herself announced, delighting
in the confusion caused by her unexpected ap
parition. In spring she leaves the Winter Palace for the
Taurida Palace, when that magnificent abode,
built by Patiomkine, has been bought by her
from the wealthy favourite. She generally goes
there on Palm Sunday, and pays her Easter
devotions. She remains there till the month of
May, when she returns to the shades of Tzar
skoie-Sielo. This abode that she has built, in
place of the residences of Peterhof and Oranien-
baum, about which there cling too mournful
souvenirs, is the spot where she is most happy.
There, no more reception, no more court cere
mony, no more tiresome audiences. Affairs even
are in some sort suspended, or at least reduced to
what is strictly necessary. The Empress rises

HOME LIFE I95

at six or seven, and begins her day with a walk.
Lightly dressed, a cane in her hand, she strolls
through her gardens. The faithful Pierekousihina,
a valet de chambre, and a huntsman, are the
only ones who accompany her. But the Anderson
family, one may be sure, is of the party, and the
sovereign's presence is known from afar by the
joyous barking of the band that gambols before
her on the grass. Catherine is passionately fond
of gardening, and plantomania, as she calls that
taste, rivals with her the taste for building. She
follows, in this respect, the fashion of the age.
' I am madly enamoured at present,' she writes
in 1772, 'of gardens in the English manner,
curved lines, gentle slopes, pools in the form of
lakes, archipelagos in terra firma, and I have a
profound scorn for straight lines. I hate foun
tains that torture the water to make it take a
course contrary to nature : in a word anglomania
dominates my plantomania.' And five years
later : ' I often enrage my gardeners, and more
than one German gardener has said to me : Aber,
mein Gott, was wird das werden ! I found that
the greater part were mere pedantic followers of
routine : the departures from routine that I often
propose to them horrify them, and, when I see
that routine is too strong for me, I employ the

196 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
first docile young gardener that comes to hand.
There is no one who laughs at my plantomania so
much as Count Orlof. He spies on me, mimics
me, makes fun of me, criticises me, but, on going
away, he asked me to look after his garden
during the summer, and this year I am going to
play pranks there after my own fashion. His
land is close to mine ; I am very proud that he
has recognised my merits as a gardener.'
The gardens of Tzarskoie are public. One
day, sitting on a bench with la Pierekousihina,
Catherine sees a man pass, a citizen of St. Peters
burg, who, seeing the two old women, and not
recognising the~~sovefe'i'ghrcasts a scornful look
upon them, and goes on his way. La Pierekousi
hina is indignant, but Catherine replies : ' What
would you have, Maria Savichna? /J Twenty
years ago that would not have happened to us ;
we have aged : it is our fault.' //
After her walk, at nine, Catherine begins
work, and till six o'clock the rest of the day goes
on much as it does in town, except that there are
fewer officials and tedious clerkly people, and
that the private retinue is lessened. One or two
invited guests from the capital sometimes appear
at dinner. At six o'clock, another walk, this
time in larger numbers, but in the most complete

HOME LIFE 197

liberty. The Empress's grandchildren play at
base-ball, with Count Razoumofski as umpire.
If it rains, Catherine gathers together her people
in the famous gallery of colonnades covered with
glass, in which one sees the busts of the great
men, ancient and modern, for whom she has a
particular admiration.
The foreign ministers are sometimes admitted
to share the pleasures of the imperial villegiahtra.
The Comte de S6gur, who had this honour, thus
recounts his recollections of it : —
Catherine II. had the extreme kindness to show
me herself all the beauties of this magnificent
pleasure-house, whose limpid waters, fresh groves,
elegant pavilions, noble architecture, priceless
furniture, cabinets panelled in porphyry, in lapis-
lazuli, in malachite, had a fairy-like air, and recalled
to those who admired them the palace and gardens
of Armida. . . . The entire liberty, the gaiety of
conversation, the absence of all ennui and con
straint, might have made me believe, had I
turned away my eyes from the imposing majesty
of the Palace of Tzarskoie-Sielo, that I was in
the country among the pleasantest of private
people.^^. . M. de Cobenzel manifested his
unquenchable gaiety ; M. Fitz-Herbert, a fine and
finished wit; General Potemkin, an originality

198 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
that made him always new, even during his
frequent moments of moroseness or dreaminess.
The Empress chatted familiarly on all subjects,
politics excepted ; she liked to hear amusing
stories, and to tell them, and if by chance the
conversation flagged, the chief equerry, Narych-
kine, recalled the laughter and gaiety by his
mad humour. Catherine worked almost all the
morning, and we were all free to write, read,
walk, or do whatever we felt inclined. / The
dinner, very limited as to dishes and guests, was
good, simple, without display ; the time after
dinner was devoted to play and conversation.
In the evening the Empress retired early, ana
after that we met together, Cobenzel, Fitz-
Herbert, and I, either in the room of one of our
number, or in Prince Potemkin's.'
Catherine rested in this pleasant retreat from
the fatigues of her position, from those especially
which came from the necessity of her presence in
the court festivities and ceremonies. We owe
our readers a few words on the celebrated soirees
of the Hermitage.
In the amplitude of its proportions, the magni
ficence of its interior decoration, the palace thus
called did not by any means answer to its name.
A series of rooms and galleries led to a circular

HOME LIFE

199

salle de spectacle, a reduced copy of the ancient
theatre at Vicenza. The receptions were of
three different kinds, the great receptions, the
medium, and the small. To the first were ad
mitted generally all the persons of distinction and
the foreign ministers. Balls alternated with
performances, in which all the famous artists took
part : Sarti, Cimarosa, Paisiello conducted the
orchestra ; Biotti, Puniani, Dietz, Lulli, Michel,
displayed their talents on different instruments ;
la Gabrielli, la Todi, the baritone Marchesi,
the tenor Majorletti, sang ; in pantomime there
were Pic, Rossi, Santini, Canucciani. After the
concerts and Italian operas came the performances
of Russian comedies and plays, with Volkof,
Dmitrefski, Choumski, Kroutitski, Tchernikof,
Sandounoff, la Trepolskaia. The French drama
and opera also had their place, with Sedaine,
Philidor, Gretry, whose works found elegant
interpreters, such as the famous Aufresne. At
the ball, each lady had two cavaliers, who supped
with her.^\fter supper one more polonaise was
danced, and the ball was over before ten.
The medium receptions differed from the
grand receptions merely by the smaller number
of guests.
Ouite different was the character of the small

CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA

receptions. As a rule no one was present except
the members of the imperial family and some
special friends carefully selected — a score of
people in all. An invitation to a stranger was a
mark of exceptional favour, to which the greatest
value was attached. In the orchestra, when
there was a play, as was often the case, there
were sometimes only three or four picked musi
cians, Dietz with his violin, Delfini with his
violoncello, Cardon with his harp. After the
play, every one did as he liked. In the rooms
thrown open to the guests there was really no
longer un soupgon dimpdratrice, as she is made
to say to the Baron Grimm in a passage of
his memoirs^ On the walls is a notice : it is
forbidden, among other things, to rise before the
sovereign, even if one is sitting down, and the
Empress comes over, and chooses to enter into
conversation while standing. It is forbidden to
have an ill-tempered air, to exchange unkind
words, to speak ill of any one whatever. It is
forbidden to remember the quarrels or the friend
ships that one may have out of doors : they must
be left at the door, with sword and hat. It is
forbidden also to lie and to talk idly. A fine of
ten kopecks, which is received in a poor-box, is
inflicted on those who break these rules. Bez-

HOME LIFE

borodko is appointed cashier/M.mong the habituds
there is one who, by his constant blunders, con
tinually has the cashier after him with his money
box. One day when the bore has gone before
the other guests, Bezborodko says to the Empress
that she ought to refuse him admission to the
Hermitage, otherwise he will ruin himself in
fines. 'Let him be,' replies Catherine, 'after
having passed the day in hearing your reports
and those of your colleagues, I need some rest,
and such idle talk is quite pleasant.' ' Then,
Matouchka,' says Bezborodko, 'come and pay
us a visit in the senate : you will get as much
of it as ever you want.'
Games are all the rage in these gatherings,
and Catherine herself is the life and soul of the
company, stirring up the gaiety of her guests,
and authorising every liberty^' The forfeits are,
to drink a glass of water at one draught, to recite
a passage of the Tdldmachide of Trediakofski
without yawning, etc. The evening ends with a
game of cards. Often, in the middle of a rubber,
the sovereign is interrupted to execute some
forfeit. ' What must I do ? ' she asks meekly.
'Sit on the ground, Matouchka.' She obeys at
once.

Am that is far enough from the imaginary

CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA

orgies which haunted the minds of her contem
poraries. In a way, it is true, Catherine afforded
some excuse for suppositions of this kind, which
have done some harm to her reputation. She
had from the first, and she kept to the last,
ways and manners which are unusual enough in
sovereigns. In 1763 the Baron de Breteuil,
just as he was leaving his post, received from her
the following letter, the style of which might
have surprised a diplomatist accustomed to the
ceremonious forms in use in courts : —
' Monsieur le Baron de Breteuil will have the
kindness to be at the cottage, on whose beauty
he has promised to keep eternal secrecy, on
Sunday at eleven o'clock in the morning, and if
he will be so good, he will remain till after supper
on the pretext of paying a visit to Count Orlof
The note, without date or signature, was in
the Empress's handwriting. The cottage referred
to was a villa newly built in the neighbourhood
of Moscow. Breteuil answered as follows : —
'The Baron de Breteuil renews his vows of
secrecy in regard to the cottage, where he looks
forward to the pleasure of being publicly admitted
on Sunday at eleven o'clock. He will be there,
in all respect and gratitude, and he will take
advantage of the kind permission to remain all

HOME LIFE

day, but M. le Comte d' Orlof will excuse him
from making the pretext of paying him a visit.'
One would say that this was written at the
dictation of the Baroness. But if she really
saw anything dubious in the sovereign's invita
tion, she was well deceived, and her husband
well taken aback, when he found out the real
cause of it.

CHAPTER II
FAMILY LIFE  THE GRAND DUKE ' PAUL
I
Catherine did not show a very profound affec
tion for her parents ; she seemed to forget that
she had a brother ; she was on bad terms with
her husband, if she had not even some share,
direct or indirect, in his tragic end ; finally, her
son, the only one of her legitimate children who
survived her, had not much cause for gratitude
to her, if even, as it has been supposed, she did
not think of disinheriting him. These are facts.
It has been inferred from this that she had no
sort of family feeling, and that even the maternal
feeling, found in the lowest of the low, and even
among the animals, was alien to her cold and
corrupt heart, depraved by ambition and by vice.
These are questions to be considered.
What were the relations of Catherine with her
husband, we have already said. Her relations
with the heir to the throne have been variously
interpreted. Some have imagined them to have

FAMILY LIFE— THE GRAND DUKE PAUL 205
been excellent up to the time of Paul's first
marriage. From this moment the presence of a
stranger may have exercised, in their regard,
a jarring influence, such as one finds in the
history of many families. Besides this, in the
first year of this union, in 1774, a conspiracy
is said to have been discovered, the aim of which
was to raise the Grand Duke to the throne in
place of his mother, and at the head of this plot
was the new daughter-in-law of Catherine, the
Grand Duchess Nathalie Aleksieievna, nde Prin
cess of Darmstadt. A secretary of Count Panine,
Bakounine, betrayed the secret to the Empress,
who threw the list of conspirators in the fire :
among the names she had found that of her
Prime Minister, side by side with her former
friend, Princess Dachkof.
This story, which is founded merely on a family
tradition, has been doubted by many. It raises,
in fact, many objections. Plots, real or imagin
ary, having for object the support of the incon
testable rights of the son of Peter IIL, were
frequent throughout the whole reign of Catherine.
In his despatch of June 26, 1772, Count Solms
notifies to Frederick the discovery of an intrigue
of this kind set on foot by some officers of the
Pr^obrajenski regiment. But he speaks also of

206 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
blows of the knout distributed, of noses and ears
cut off. Such was the natural order of things.
The fact admitted of an almost hostile tension
between mother and son, in place of the former
harmonious, if never very intimate and affec
tionate, relations, another explanation has been
given and another date attributed to this change
of things. The tour that Paul wished to make in
Europe, in company with his second wife, the
Grand Duchess Maria of Wurtemberg, brought
about the crisis. Having authorised this excur
sion only against her will, Catherine wished her
son, at all events, not to stop at Berlin. She was
on the point of breaking with the court there.
Paul took no heed of all that. He let himself
be feted, flattered, and cajoled by Frederick, and
when he made his appearance at Vienna, people
were astonished to find that he knew nothing,
or professed to know nothing, of the alliance
which had already linked that court with his.
He put himself forward everywhere as a severe
critic of his mother's policy. At Florence,
talking with Leopold, the brother of Joseph,
he expressed himself in the most unguarded
manner in reference to the principal assistants
of Catherine, Prince Patiomkine, Bezborodko,
Panine himself, declaring that they were all

FAMILY LIFE— THE GRAND DUKE PAUL 207

without exception in the pay of the Emperor.
' I will stamp them all out,' he repeated wrath -
fully. This second version seems to us as arbitrary
as the first, and neither appears to have any
foundation ; it , remains to be proved that at
any period whatever Catherine treated her son
better than she did after his marriage, or after
the ' grand tour ' which separated them for a
time. Doubtless, in her letters to Madame Bielke,
which date from 1772, it pleases the sovereign
to paint in the most agreeable colours the life
that she leads at Tzarskoie, in company with
Paul ; but we know already what Catherine's
epistolary sincerity is worth. Doubtless also,
in the course of the September of that year,
the Prussian ambassador, Count Solms, mentions
several times a revival of tender demonstrations
of the Empress to the Grand Duke. ' She
cannot make a step without having him with
her,' he writes. But this is at the very height
of the crisis which, in separating the sovereign
from her first favourite, and thus putting her at
variance with the powerful tribe of the Orlofs,
causes her serious misgivings as to the security
of her throne. ' I know on sure authority,' adds
Solms, ' that the Grand Duke is not too sure

208 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
himself of the meaning of this excess of friend
liness on the part of his mother.' And not
without reason. About the same time, writing
to her son, and beginning her letter twice over,
Catherine first wrote these words : —
' It seems to me that you were either afflicted
or sulky during the day ; both would distress
me as a mother ; but as for the sulkiness, I
confess I am not much concerned about that,
either as mother or as Empress.'
She tore up the page, and began again thus : —
' It seems to me that you were either afflicted
or sulky during the day ; if you were in affliction,
I should be distressed by it ; if it was sullenness,
I leave you to imagine what attention I should
pay to that.'
But the first draft probably rendered her
thought more exactly, and it does not indicate,
to our view, very cordial relations. Catherine
supposed that the affliction or sulkiness of the
Grand Duke came from her refusal to admit
him to her council, and this refusal was assuredly
not in itself a proof of confidence or affection.
As early as 1764 Berenger wrote from St. Peters
burg to the Duke of Praslin —
'This young Prince gives evidence of dark
and dangerous dispositions. It is known that

FAMILY LIFE— THE GRAND DUKE PAUL 209

his mother does not love him, and that, since
her accession, she shows -him none of the marks
of tenderness that she showered upon him be
fore. ... He asked, a few days ago [Berenger
had this detail from one of the Grand Duke's
valets de chambre\, why his father had died, and
why the throne which belonged to him had been
given to his mother. He added that when he
was grown up, he would get at the bottom of
all that. They say . that the child makes too
many such remarks for them not to reach the
ears of the Empress. Now, no one doubts that
this Princess takes all possible precautions against
such an event.'
It is possible, however, that the tour under
taken by Paul against the wish of his mother,
and the attitude that he often assumed on that
occasion, may have helped to bring about some
ill-feeling on the part of the Empress, and to
urge her forward on a path on which her ac
cession to the throne, that is to say, properly
speaking, her usurpation of the rights of her
son, had made her enter.
But the intimacy and affection had ceased
before this. They were incompatible with the
respective position of these two beings, one of
whom had violently taken the place of the other.
VOL. 11. o

CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA

Had these affectionate feelings and relations
ever existed? Could Catherine ever have had
a mother's heart for the child who had been
torn from her arms as soon as he was born,
whom she had never nursed, whom she had
never brought up, whom she had never even seen
except at rare intervals ? Did she ever really
shower upon him those caresses of which Beren
ger speaks ? Perhaps, before she had become
Empress, when the child, her son, might one day
become her Emperor and her master. If there
was a change in her demeanour, the event must
have been simultaneous with that of July 5, 1762,
as indeed the report of the French chargd-
d'affaires clearly indicates, and the reason is
sufficiently apparent. 11
We have already spoken several times of the
tour of the Count and Countess du Nord. The
departure, which took place on October 5, 1781,
produced a great sensation at St. Petersburg.
The people surrounded the carriage which bore
the heir to the throne, with tears and sobs and
every sign of the warmest affection. Some
enthusiasts threw themselves under the wheels
of the carriage to hinder it from advancing. This

FAMILY LIFE— THE GRAND DUKE PAUL 211
alone might well have alarmed Catherine. She
was, however, at first well pleased, rather than
otherwise, by the homage with which Paul
was greeted at Berlin. A conversation that
she had with her son, after his return, changed
her feelings on the subject. Then only she be
thought herself that he had been made too much
of by Frederick. As Paul made no disguise of
his opinions and sympathies, she grew angry,
declaring in her wrath that after she was dead
' Russia would become a Prussian province.'
The Grand Duke's travels were in the strictest
incognito. Their Highnesses refused even the
apartments that had been prepared for them,
putting up in furnished lodgings with all their
suite, which must have been considerable, since
it required sixty horses at every posting station.
Paul and his wife consented, however, to be
guests at Versailles for a few days, and their
visit seems to have left a favourable impression.
' The Grand Duke,' wrote Marie Antoinette, the
day after their departure, ' has the air of an ardent
and impetuous man who holds himself in. . . .
The King has not noticed that he professed ex
travagant opinions.' There was a mythological
and allegorical fHe at Trianon, where a young
Hebe particularly charmed the august spectators.

CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA

It was — how can one record it without a pang ?
— Madame Elizabeth ! The royal family wished
also to make good the reputation of French
hospitality. At Mouceaux (sic), in the gardens
of the Due de Chartres, 'after having traversed
a thousand winding byways, arched over with
sycamores, lilac-trees, Italian poplars, and a thou
sand shrubs of the Indies ; after having breathed
the fresh air, and rested on plots of grass and
wild thyme, visited rustic huts and crumbling
Gothic manor-houses, the Comte and Comtesse
du Nord partook of the simple repast of the
labouring shepherds.'
At Paris the passage of their Highnesses,
coinciding with the effervescence of Russian
sympathies that we have noted above, had almost
the air of a triumphal progress. Everywhere
agreeable surprises were in store for the visitors.
At the Royal Library, a number of Russian
books were taken down for the Grand Duke's
benefit from the shelves, where no doubt they
found few readers, and the librarian, Desolnais,
called his attention to a volume that had served,
said he, in the education of a prince whom Paris
had long learned to admire, and was now learning
to love. It was a manual composed for the use
of Paul himself by the Archbishop Plato. Their

FAMILY LIFE— THE GRAND DUKE PAUL 213
Highnesses did their utmost to repay all this
courtesy. After having reviewed Marshal Biron's
regiment of Gardes-francaises, the Grand Duchess
sent to the marshal a gracious letter, enclosing
ten bank-notes of 1200 francs, for the soldiers to
drink the health of their chief. The parsimony,
a forced parsimony indeed, of Paul in 1776 was
still remembered at Berlin, where the Grand Duke
had come to marry his second wife. Imperious
orders from St. Petersburg had cut short his
generous intentions. The proceeding was much
criticised, even at Paris, and the present differ
ence was all the more appreciated. There was,
however, the painful incident of Clerisseau.
Paul, naturally, was surrounded in the capital
of arts and letters by the literary clique with
which his mother was connected. He did not
always give it satisfaction, or consider all its
susceptibilities. But for the distance which separ
ated Paris from St. Petersburg, Catherine herself
might not have succeeded. Madame d'Ober-
kirch relates this scene in her memoirs, much as
follows. The scene took place at the house of
M. de la Reyniere, now occupied by the Cercle
de 1' Union Artistique. M. de la Reyniere was
a wealthy fermier-gdndral, and his house, which
was decorated by the best artists in Paris,

214 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
Clerisseau at their head, was famed as one of
the wonders of the city. Paul wished to see it.
He had already been introduced to the irascible
architect, and he had not been too attentive to
him : so at least Clerisseau thought, and he had
written a letter to Prince Bariatinski, the Grand
Duke's aide-de-camp — a very dignified letter,
according to Grimm — in which he had stated
that he would acquaint the Empress with the
reception that persons honoured by her esteem
met with from her son. A few days after, the
artist and the prince met in the dining-room
of de la Reyniere's house, one of C16risseau's
masterpieces. On entering, the Comte du Nord
perceived a man who bowed without speaking.
Paul returned the bow, but the man barred the
way. ' What do you want, Monsieur ? '
' You do not recognise me, Monseigneur? '
' I recognise you perfectly ; you are the Sieur
Clerisseau.' ' Why then do you not speak to me ? '
' Because I have nothing to say.'
' Then you are going to be here as you were
at home, Monseigneur, slight me, treat me as a
stranger; I, the architect of the Empress, and
in correspondence with her ! And I have written

FAMIL Y LIFE— THE GRAND DUKE PA UL 215
to her, to complain of your unworthy treatment
of me.'
' Write her also, then, that you are hindering
me from passing, Monsieur. She will certainly
thank you for it.'
The version that Grimm gives of the incident,
in his correspondence with Catherine, is quite
different, and it seems to us more probable. It
was Paul who first made overtures to Clerisseau,
wishing to repair the wrongs he might have done
him, showing himself most amiable, and recalling
the flattering words that he had used on their
first meeting. But Clerisseau cut short these
tardy demonstrations —
' Monsieur le Comte, you may have intended
to say all that to me, but I heard nothing of it.'
'You must have neither ears nor memory,
then,' said Paul, with some heat.
With this, some people coming up just then, the
conversation ended. ' Never was I so uncivilly
used,' said the Grand Duke, laughing, to those
about him; 'it gave me quite a shock.' The
Grand Duchess tried to smooth over matters ;
but Clerisseau was unmanageable, and ended
by becoming rude. The Princess having asked
him to send her the plan and sketches of a salon
that she had admired, he replied dryly —

216 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
' I will send them to my august benefactress,
where Madame la Comtesse can have them.'
Catherine did not, in this circumstance, attempt
to justify her architect against the heir to her
throne; she knew too well the interests of her
rank and dignity ; but the incident doubtless
left an unpleasant impression on her mind :
she was only too much disposed to think her
son and heir a clumsy creature. The letters that
she sent to the travellers, during their absence,
were, however, always affectionately maternal. It
would seem even as if this separation exercised
a calming influence over her mind. When he
was present, and by her side, Paul became a
menace and a source of perpetual uneasiness.
Had it not been publicly stated that she was
only awaiting his coming of age to restore to
him his own, that is to say, the place that she
herself occupied ? in
After his return these disagreements grew
worse. Paul and his wife complained that the
Empress took out of their hands the education of
their children. At the time of the Crimean tour,
Catherine had wished to take with her the little
Grand Dukes Alexander and Constantine. This

FAMILY LIFE— THE GRAND DUKE PAUL 217
time the parents' objections were so strong that
she hesitated to go against them. But questions
of policy played a considerable part in the
quarrel, which grew worse from day to day. In
July 1783 the Marquis de Verac, then French
minister at St. Petersburg, wishing to prevent a
conflict between Russia and Turkey, renewed the
representations that the Court of Versailles never
ceased to urge, and complained of the unfavour
able, almost scornful, reception that was given
them on the part of the Empress and her
ministers ; he insisted in these terms on an
antagonism in which he saw some hope for the
future : ' The Grand Duke is entirely opposed to
all this system of ideas ; this Prince, brought up
in the wise principles of the late Count Panine,
regards with mortal dissatisfaction the deplorable
state to which the empire has come through the
boundless prodigality of the Empress. He con
siders the plan of campaign against the Turks a
project likely to lead Russia to utter ruin, and he
is personally much incensed against the Emperor,
whom he regards as the prime mover in the
matter.' When the war had broken out, Catherine
objected to the Grand Duke's taking part in it.
' It would be a fresh inconvenience,' she wrote to

218 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
Patiomkine. She allowed him to go to Finland,
during the Swedish war ; but Knorring, who
commanded the army in the field, declared after
wards that he had been commanded not to
communicate to his Highness any plan of opera
tions. In 1789, when there was question of a
rupture with Prussia, the situation of Paul
assumed a certain likeness, irritating for Catherine,
but still more threatening for him, with that
occupied by Peter during the last years of
Elizabeth's reign. Dark rumours were in the
air. The famous Greek project of the Empress
was yet another source of continual conflict : on
the part of the Grand Duke it met with open
opposition. Finally, in the course of the changes
which came about from year to year in those who
were about the Empress, Paul sometimes went
so far as to forget his duty as a son, and, in
return, the favourites, whether Patiomkine or
Zoubof, did not feel obliged to be very respectful
to his Highness. One day, at table, the Grand
Duke having approved of an idea put forward
by Zoubof, ' Have I said anything stupid ? ' said
he. The young count was frequently in difficulties
about money. In 1793, when Catherine was
engaged in looking through the accounts of the

FAMILY LIFE— THE GRAND DUKE PAUL 219
court banker, Sutherland, who had made some
bad speculations, and was on the point of sus
pending payment, her secretary, Dierjavine,
comes, in his enumeration of the assets, to a sum
due to the banker ' from a person in high position,
but who has the misfortune not to be loved by
the Empress.' Catherine was not long in dis
covering who was meant. ' How absurd ! ' she
cries ; ' what does he want with such sums ? '
Dierjavine ventures to observe that the late
Prince Patiomkine had been accustomed to borrow
much larger sums ; he points out some in Suther
land's assets. The Empress pays no heed, and
the examination of the accounts goes on. They
come to another item of the ' person in high
position.' ' Another !' cries Catherine, furiously.
' No wonder, after that, Sutherland became
bankrupt ! ' Dierjavine thinks the occasion
favourable to pay a bad turn to the new favourite,
Plato Zoubof, by whom he does not consider
himself sufficiently well paid. He turns to a
long sum recently put to his account. The
Empress, without replying, rings a bell. ' Is
there any one in the secretary's room ? ' she asks.
There is Vassili Stiepanovitch Popof. ' Send
him in.' Popof enters. ' Sit down there, and do
not leave me till the end of this report. This

CA THERINE II. OF RUSSIA

gentleman' (pointing to Dierjavine) 'wishes to
come to blows with me, I think.'
At this period the Grand Duke lives with his
wife at Gatchina or Pavlovsk, entirely apart from
his mother and also from his children, who are
with her, and whom he sometimes does not see
for months together. To see them he requires
the permission of Count Saltykof, their governor.
We have already spoken of the opinion, general
enough during the last years of Catherine's reign,
according to which she intended to disinherit her
son. This measure was hoped for by a large
number of persons. A manifesto deciding this
important point was anxiously expected. It was
thought that it would appear on January i, 1797.
According to one version, the manifesto was
already drawn up, and was intended to inaugurate
constitutional government in Russia under the
sceptre of Alexander, the character of Paul being
utterly opposed to the adoption of this form of
government. In the memoirs of Engelhardt, in
a fragment of the memoirs of Dierjavine, which
has been preserved, there is, on the other hand,
some reference to a testament of the Empress,
having the same object, except for the enigmatic
and doubtful introduction of constitutionalism, so
little in accord with the ideas then prevailing in

FAMILY LIFE— THE GRAND. DUKE PAUL 221
the mind of Catherine. The Ode written by
Dierjavine for the coronation of Alexander seems
to allude to it, as well as a curious document
which circulated after the death of the Empress
under the title, Catherine II. in the Elysian
Fields. The sovereign reproaches Bezborodko,
to whom the testament in question was supposed
to have been confided, with having inflicted the
reign of Paul on her country.
It is certain that in alluding, frequently enough,
in her correspondence, ,to the future of Russia
after her death. Catherine never speaks of the
reign of her son. It is always Alexander whom
she speaks of as her heir. According to certain
authorities, she finally took stringent measures
against the difficulties that she anticipated on the
part of the natural heir.
Mother and son now met only in official
ceremonies. They exchanged ceremonious
letters. During the very short visit of the Grand
Duke to the army in Finland, where he soon
discovered that he had nothing to do, the cor
respondence is almost daily. It recalls a little
that of the King of Spain with Maria of
Neubourg, in the version that Victor Hugo has
given of it. Here is a specimen : —
' My dear Mother, — The letter of your Imperial

CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA

Majesty has caused me the greatest pleasure,
and I am deeply touched by what is said in it.
I beg her to accept the expression of my grati
tude, and at the same time that of the respect
and affection with which I am . . .'
Here is Catherine's reply : —
' I have received, my dear son, your letter of
the 5th, with the expression of your sentiments,
to which mine respond. Good-bye. I hope
you are well.'
The letters are all after this fashion, almost
without variation. IV
What bears witness against Catherine in these
unhappy events — the seamy side of the splen
dours of the great reign— is the way in which
she acted in regard to another son, in whom
there was nothing to alarm her ambition or her
responsibility as a sovereign. She had, as we
know, a second son, a love-child, who was known
as Bobrinski. Did she love him? It does not
seem so. Did she look after his welfare? She
gave him enough to live comfortably, to travel
abroad, and even to commit some extravagances.
He carried them to excess : she hears of it, and
betrays an astonishing indifference on the subject.

FAMILY LIFE— THE GRAND DUKE PAUL 223
'What,' she writes to Grimm, 'is this affair of
Bobrinski ? The young man is singularly un
concerned. ... If you could manage to find
out the state of his affairs at Paris, you would
oblige me. . . . However, he ought to be well
able to pay his way ; he has 30,000 roubles a
year.' Two years afterwards she writes —
' It is tiresome that M. Bobrinski will get into
debt ; he knows the amount of his income, and
is quite honest. Beyond that, he has nothing.'
It is thus that she announces her resolution
not to meet the debts of this son ; beyond the
modest quota that she allows him, he and his
creditors must not count upon her. And she
keeps her word. At the end of 1787 young
Bobrinski is in Paris, in the greatest distress,
several million francs in arrears, besides the
amount that he owes in London, whence he has
just fled his creditors. For one thing, he has
given the Marquis de Ferrieres a bill of credit
for 1,400,000 francs. Catherine up to now has
made no attempt to arrest this disordered career.
She now makes up her mind to act ; she recalls
the young man to Russia, and confines him to
Revel, where she has all his movements carefully
watched, without, however, caring to see him or

224 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
to know what becomes of him. As long as he
leaves her in peace, and does not ask her for
money, and she does not hear him referred to,
she is quite satisfied.
Nothing could be more definite than that.
But is there no touch of nature in the heart of
this insensible mother ? How can we maintain
the contrary ? But how also can we affirm it ?
We have seen her relations with her son. But
now let us see her relations with her grand
children. From 1779 onwards, every day at half-
past ten, the little Alexander is brought to her.
' I have said it to you before and I say it to you
again,' she writes to Grimm, ' I dote on the little
monkey. . . . Every day we make new acquaint
ances, that is to say that of every toy we make
ten or twelve, and we try which of the two can
best develop his talents. It is extraordinary how
industrious we have become. . . . After dinner
my little monkey comes back as often as he likes,
and he spends three or four hours a day in my
room.' The same year she begins to teach his
ABC to 'Mr. Alexander, who cannot yet talk,
and who is only a year and a half old.' As we
have seen, she makes his clothes for him. ' This
is how he has been dressed ever since he was six
months old,' she says, when sending to Grimm

FA MIL Y LIFE - THE GRA ND D UKE PAUL 225
the facsimile of a costume of her invention. ' All
that is sewn together, and goes on at once, and
fastens behind with four or five little hooks. . . .
There is no ligature anywhere, and the child
scarcely knows that he is being dressed : his
arms and legs are put into the dress at once, and
it is all done ; it is a stroke of genius on my part,
this dress. The King of Sweden and the Prince
of Prussia have demanded and received a pattern
of the dress of Mr. Alexander.' Then come the
inevitable anecdotes that we find in the letters of
all mothers, in which are narrated day by day
the great deeds of the infant prodigy, the clever
sayings, the indications of intelligence, 'wonder
ful for his age.' One day when the precious
' little monkey ' is ill and shivering with fever,
Catherine finds him at the door of her room,
wrapped up in a great cloak. She asks what that
is for, and the child replies, ' It is a sentinel dying
of cold.' One day he asks one of the Empress's
femmes de chambre whom he is like. ' Your
mother,' she replies ; ' you have all her features,
her nose, her mouth.' 'No, not that; but my
temper, my ways, what are they like ? ' ' Oh, in
that you are more like grandmamma than any
body.' Thereupon the little Grand Duke throws
his arms round the old woman's neck, and kisses
vol. 11. p

226 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
her effusively. ' That is what I wanted you to
say ! '
This story is very significant in regard to the
place that Paul and Catherine occupied respec
tively in this family, in which the widow of
Peter III. usurps all the supremacy. Read one
more passage from a letter to Grimm, referring to
the adored little being : 'He will, to my thinking,
become a most wonderful personage indeed,
provided the secondaterie does not hinder his
progress.' Secondat, secondaterie, are words after the
manner of Catherine, used by her to describe her
son and her daughter-in-law, as well as the
educational, political, and all kinds of ideas that
prevail at Pavlovsk, and are in general entirely
opposed to her own.
The little Constantine does not at first get into
the good graces of his grandmother to the same
extent as his brother. Catherine finds him too
frail, too delicate, for an Empress's grandson.
' As for the other,' she says, after having spoken
enthusiastically of Alexander, ' I would not give
ten sous for him ; I am very much mistaken if he
is likely to live very long.' But by and by the
younger wins his way. With time the child
grows and becomes stronger, and, dreams of

FAMIL Y LIFE— THE GRA ND D UKE PAUL 227
Byzantine sovereignty showing themselves on
the horizon, the affection of Catherine awakens
little by little for the nursling of the Greek
Helen. Alas ! it must needs be said that her state
policy plays its part, and even a main part, in
this chapter of the great sovereign's history.
Policy ! we are sure to find that wherever we
follow Catherine: in her feelings as in her
thoughts, in her likes as in her dislikes, and her
family feelings themselves make no exception to
the rule. It is there, to our mind, that we must
seek the starting-point and the solution of all the
doubts, all the enigmas, to which the study that
this book is devoted to may give rise. Naturally,
as we think, in this woman, who, in certain sides
of her character and certain details of her conduct,
deserves all reprobation, as on other sides she
merits all the praise, the moral sensibility, without
being of a high order, was neither absent, as
some have fancied, nor yet deadened, nor vitiated
and reduced to the level of the lowest instincts.
Her heart was on a level with her mind, which,
as we have intimated, never reached a very great
elevation. She could love, but she subordinated
love, as she subordinated everything else, to the
motive force of her life, which was of exceptional

CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA

force and vigour : she lived, above all things, by
and for politics. At one time she loved the
handsome Orlof because he was handsome, but
also because he declared that he would risk his
life to give her a crown, and she believed him
capable of carrying out his word. She was cold
and even harsh towards Paul, a little because she
had not had the leisure to develop the maternal
sentiments, thwarted from the cradle, but very
much because she saw in him a dangerous rival
in the present, and a pitiful successor in the
future. She manifested a passionate affection for
the little Alexander under the influence of just
opposite causes, in the same category of ideas
and feelings.
The letters that she wrote to her grandchildren
when she was away from them, in 1783, during
her stay in Finland, in 1785, when she spent
some time in Moscow, and in 1787, during her
Crimean tour, are full of freshness, of communi
cative warmth, of loving abandonment. It was a
great trial to her not to have them with her on
the fairyland roads of Taurida. It was a reason
of economy that decided her to cut short the
endless negotiations, on this subject, between St.
Petersburg and Pavlovsk : every day's delay cost
her 12.000 roubles. One may judge from that

FA MIL Y LIFE— THE GRAND D UKE\PA UL 229
what must have been the total expense of the tour,
which all Europe looked on in wonderment.
Catherine had the opportunity, in directing
the education of Alexander and Constantine, of
applying her own theories in the matter. Her
success seems to have been doubtful. The sove
reign was almost alone, it would seem, in being
satisfied with the progress of her scholars. La
Harpe, among others, did not share her opinion.
He had often to complain of the bad instincts and
defects that he found in the elder. He gives
several unpleasant enough traits. In 1796 the
visit of the young King of Sweden caused
comparisons to be made, not to the advantage of
the two boys. Catherine, however, did her best,
not allowing her affection to hinder her from a
sometimes necessary severity. One day she
noticed that in changing the squad on guard
under the windows of the palace the men were
kept under arms longer than was needful : it was
a sight intended for the little Grand Dukes. She
immediately sent for their tutor, and reprimanded
him severely. The service of the state, the
military service in particular, was not made for
the amusement of children. If the Grand Dukes
complained, they were to be informed that grand
mamma had forbidden it. This was an accidental

CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA

instance of a very wise principle. But perhaps
the system as a whole was less wise.
Catherine was much concerned, and she was
the only one to concern herself, as to the marriage
of her grandchildren. The parents were not even
consulted. Paul was scarcely consulted, indeed,
in regard to his own marriage. Eleven German
princesses were successively brought to Russia
by the sovereign, solicitous as to the well-being of
her son and her grandchildren : three Princesses
of Darmstadt, three Princesses of Wurtemberg,
two Princesses of Baden, and three Princesses of
Coburg. Choice was to be made from the lot.
The Princesses of Wurtemberg only went as far
as Berlin, Frederick having insisted on Paul being
sufficiently gallant to come half way to meet his
fiancde. It was Prince Henry of Prussia, who
was at St. Petersburg in 1776, who arranged the
marriage. The eldest of the Princesses was
already promised to the Prince of Darmstadt, but
it was understood that he would give her up if,
as Prince Henry wrote to his brother, ' he had
the least good feeling,' and did not desire to
trouble the happiness of two states.' The Prince
of Darmstadt did indeed prove his ' good feeling.'
Being deprived of the eldest, he turned his
attention to the younger, 'because, at bottom,

FAMILY LIFE— THE GRAND DUKE PAUL 231
that came to the same thing.' Besides, as
Frederick gave him to understand, the father of
the Princess had not waited to consult him before
' playing for the biggest stake that presented
itself to his daughter.' He had had no difficulty
beyond that of finding a Lutheran minister suf
ficiently ' enlightened ' to make the future Grand
Duchess understand that she would please God
by changing her religion. But, as the court of
St. Petersburg had sent 40,000 roubles for the
cost of the Princess's journey, 'a real help,' as
their mother said, to the rickety finances of the
family, that difficulty was soon overcome.
Two years later, the Princesses of Darmstadt
went all the way to St. Petersburg. Then came
the turn of the two Princesses of Baden-Durlach.
As they were orphans, the Countess Chouvalof,
widow of the author of the Epitre a Ninon, was
sent to bring them over ; and she was accom
panied by a certain Strekalof, who appears to
have conducted himself like a Cossack who had
been ordered to carry off girls into Georgia. But
the German courts were not susceptible at this
time. On the arrival of the Princesses, the
Empress asked to see their trousseau. Having
examined it, she said, ' My friends, I was not so
rich as you when I arrived in Russia.'

CA THERINE II. OF RUSSIA

The elder remained in Russia, and married
Alexander ; the younger returned to her own
country : Constantine would not have her. She
was only fourteen, and not yet developed. Later
on she married the King of Sweden. The files
which were given on the occasion of the marriage
of Alexander mark the last brilliant and happy
moment of the reign of Catherine. The following
epithalamium was composed : —
' Ni la reine de Thebes au milieu de ses filles,
Ni Louis et ses fils assemblant les families,
Ne formerent jamais un cercle si pompeux.
Trois generations vont fieurir devant elle,
Et c'est Elle toujours qui charmera nos yeux.
Fiere d'etre leur mere et non d'etre immortelle :
Telle est Junon parmi les dieux ! '
The year after, the arrival of the Princess of
Saxe-Coburg with her three daughters produced
less effect. This time Catherine considered that
the belongings of their Highnesses were quite
too mean. Her own penury at the time of her
arrival in Russia was exceeded. The wardrobe
of the family had to be renewed before it was
presentable to the court, and Constantine, in
spite of all, was still unsatisfied. He ended,
however, by deciding on the youngest.
Catherine, then, resolutely disregarded certain
family affections and responsibilities imposed on

FAMILY LIFE— THE GRAND DUKE PAUL 233

her both by nature and the proprieties ; she
entered into others with at least equal intensity.
We have pointed out the most admissible solu
tion, in our eyes, of this moral problem ; we do
not profess that it answers every objection.
But, with regard to the great figures of history,
there are many of these insoluble enigmas, in
which no one can say the last word.

CHAPTER III
PRIVATE life  FAVOURITISM
I
There is a whole legend in regard to the love
affairs of Catherine. We shall try to replace it
by a few pages of history. It is certainly not in
the character of historian that Laveaux has re
corded Catherine's first taste of intrigue, at a
time when she had not yet arrived in Russia.
Even at Stettin she would have had as lover a
Count B., who imagined that he was marrying
her, when leading one of her friends to the altar.
It is an absurd fabrication. The small courts of
Germany were certainly not temples of virtue ;
nevertheless, at the age of fourteen, princesses
were not exactly on the streets. Afterwards, at
Moscow and at St. Petersburg, Laveaux shows us
Catherine abandoning herself to the first comer,
in the house of a Countess J., where she had in
numerable lovers, who had no idea who she was.
Saltykof gives place to a Venetian actor named
Dalolio, who, in turn, arranges new rendezvous for
234

PRIVA TE LIFE— FA VO URITISM 235
his mistress of a day in the house of Ielaguine.
In all this Laveaux echoes mere on dits without the
slightest shadow of proof. Sabatier de Cabre is a
witness really well informed and really serious, and
one, too, who cannot be suspected of partiality.
Now, in a memorandum drawn up by him in 1772,
we read : ' Though not free from reproach, she is
far from the excess of which she has been accused ;
nothing has been proved beyond the three known
connections — with M. Saltykof, the King of
Poland, and Count Orlof
On arriving in Russia, Catherine finds a court
and society, we dare not say more debauched than
those of the other great European centres, but at
least equally so, and, to crown it all, a form of
regal debauchery, similar also, though with an
inversion of roles, to the examples afforded
elsewhere by the morals of the time, by French
royalty among others. This is favouritism.
Since the death of Peter I. the throne of Russia
has been constantly occupied by women ; they
have lovers, as Louis XV. has mistresses, and,
when the imperial lover is called Biron, he is as
powerful in Russia as a royal mistress, when she
is called Pompadour, can be in France. As
Louis XIV. married Madame de Maintenon, so
Elizabeth marries Razoumofski. He is only the

236 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
son of a little Russian peasant, once choir-boy in
the imperial chapel ; but Scarron's widow is of
no very illustrious line. Choubine, who had
preceded Razoumofski, was a mere soldier in
the Guards : he was at all events the equivalent
of the du Barry. And, going back a little further,
when, by the cradle of Louis XIV., royalty had
provisionally fallen to the female line, the presence
of Signor Mazarini on the steps of the throne
must have seemed not less extraordinary to the
people who are easily astonished than, a hundred
and fifty years later, that of Patiomkine. Need
one even, to parallel the favourites of Catherine,
go back so far ? Struensee, Godoy, Lord Acton,
are contemporaries.
Favouritism in Russia is what it is or has been
elsewhere, allowing for the difference of scale. It
is just this which gives it, under the reign of
Catherine, a place apart. This time it is a
woman who has the gift of going to extremes
in everything. She has favourites, as Elizabeth
and Anne have had ; but urged by her tempera
ment, her character, her inclination to do things
grandly, she gives unparalleled proportions to
this usual, traditional order or disorder of things.
Anne merely made Biihren the groom a Duke of
Courland ; Catherine makes Poniatowski King of

PRIVA TE LIFE— FA VO URITISM 237

Poland. Elizabeth was content with two ad
mitted favourites, Razoumofski and Chouvalof;
Catherine has them by dozens. Nor is this all.
Her mind is not only of vast reach, scorning the
ordinary limits, passionately desirous of what lies
beyond ; it is also, and especially, imperious,
absolute, disregardful of established rules, but
readily turning into rule or law the inspiration of
the moment, will or caprice. With Anne and
Elizabeth, favouritism is a mere caprice ; with
Catherine it becomes almost an institution of state.
It is only gradually, however, that things reach
this height. Up to 1772 Catherine is merely a
sovereign who takes her pleasures as all those
who preceded her on the same throne have done.
Her caprices are talked of just as were those of
Elizabeth, in the most unconcerned way.. Writ
ing to Frederick, the Comte de Solms does, it
is true, a propos of Gregory Orlof, make this
observation, that ' one might find to-day artisans
and lackeys who have been seated with him at
the same table ' ; but he adds, ' One is so ac
customed to favouritism in Russia, so little sur
prised at any rapid ascent, that one can but
applaud the choice of a young man who is mild
and polished in his manners, who betrays neither
pride nor vanity, who lives with his old acquaint-

238 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
ances on the same terms of familiarity, and never
loses sight of them in the crowd, avoiding mixing
himself up in affairs, except sometimes to recom
mend a friend.' Gregory Orlof, it is true, does
not long content himself, or rather Catherine is
not contented on his behalf, with this modest and
retiring part, and the Comte de Solms writes
later on : ' Her Majesty's passion having in
creased, she has wished to bring Orlof into
affairs. She has put him into the commissions
established for the reform of government.' And
it is then, if we may believe the Prussian am
bassador, that discontent breaks out. The
hetman Razoumofski, Count Boutourline, both
generals aides-de-camp, do not willingly suffer
that a man who has been so far below them,
just before, should now become their equal.
Other lords, princes, and generals are scandal
ised at being obliged to wait in the Sieur Orlof's
antechamber, to be admitted to his lever. Count
Cheremetief, the high chamberlain, one of the
first and wealthiest lords of the land, as well as
all whom their offices oblige to accompany the
Empress's carriage on horseback, see with dis
satisfaction the favourite seated in the coach
beside their sovereign, while they trot by at
the side.

PRIVA TE LIFE— FA VO URITISM 239
But that is an old tale, and those of the great
Russian lords who remember the favouritism of
Biron under the reign of the Empress Anne, the
Bironovchtchina, as the detested period has been
called, must find the present state of things very
acceptable in comparison, especially as Gregory
Orlof rarely shows much inclination to avail him
self of the somewhat forced part that the loving
attentions of Catherine impose upon him in the
government of the country. His ambitious fits
are few and far between. Generally, as we have
pointed out, he merely obeys the exigencies of
the sovereign in this respect, and with a con
strained and unwilling air. He is backward and
retiring, a lover of voluptuous ease, careless and
inoffensive. On the giddy heights, in the intoxi
cating atmosphere, where the stroke of fortune
has suddenly raised him, he lives in a half dream,
and a day comes when his reason gives way
altogether, sinking into the black abyss of
madness. With him the weakness of Catherine has an
excuse, a defence ; the man has risked his life
for her, the man has given her a crown, and she
loves him, or imagines she loves him, with a love
not only of the senses. Separated from him, she
will suffer in all his sufferings, and at his death

240 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
she will shed real tears, tears coming from the
heart. The scandal really commences only after the
disgrace of this first favourite. With Vassiltch-
kof, in 1772, it is the mere lust of the flesh, gross
and shameless. With Patiomkine, in 1774, it
is the division of power with mere chance lovers
that enters into the history of the reign. Then
comes the long procession of passing favours : in
June 1778 the Englishman Harris announces the
elevation of Korssakof; in August, he speaks of
competitors who are already canvassing his suc
cession, some supported by Patiomkine, others
by Panine and Orlof acting in concert ; in Sep
tember, it is a certain Strahof, ' a low buffoon,'
who seems to win the day; four months after,
it is a major of the Siemionofski Guards, a
certain Levachof, a young man protected by the
Countess Bruce, Svie'ikofski, stabs himself in
despair at seeing a rival preferred to himself.
Then Korssakof seems once more to gain the
upper hand. He struggles with a new com
petitor, Stianof, then is blotted out entirely by
Lanskoi, who is replaced by Mamonof, who
struggles in turn with Miloradovitch and Mik-
lachefski ; and so on, and so on. It is the rising
of a tide that is to go on for ever; in 1792, at

PRIVA TE LIFE— FA VO URITISM 24 1
sixty-three years of age, Catherine begins again
with Plato Zoubof, and probably also with his
brother, the same old story that has been gone
over with twenty predecessors.
Is it, nevertheless, even in this last descent into
nameless depths, sheer shameless sensuality on
her part ? and is her reason, the reason of a
woman of genius, carried away, along with her
modesty and her dignity, by the impetuous
current which bears her forward ? In our belief,
no. A phenomenon of another order is to be met
with, raising the old and ever new problem which,
now once more, is being passionately discussed.
The question in regard to Catherine and her
favourites is the broad question of 'sexuality,'
from the material and moral point of view, and
this question resolves itself, we can almost say,
in the clear light of historical experiences. Here
is an exceptional woman, exceptionally endowed
with aptitudes and energies, both intellectual and
moral, even physical, exceptionally exempt also
from the bondage common to her sex. She has
all liberty, all independence, and all power, an
absolute power. How does she make use of it ?
No, it is not alone the imperious and unwearying
appeal of the senses that throws her, now into
the arms of a Zoubof, now into the arms of a
VOL. 11. Q

242 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
Patiomkine. Another need, another imperative
demand, comes into play, by its side, in the
amorous Odyssey whose changing fortunes we
are about to sketch. And in the first place,
whatever may be the energy of her character, the
firmness of her mind, and the good opinion that
she has of her own abilities, Catherine does not
profess that they can suffice to themselves and to
her for the accomplishment of her task ; she feels
the need of support from a virile mind and re
solution, however inferior these may be to hers
in actual value. And she proves this necessity !
When she writes to Patiomkine that without
him ' she is without arms,' it is not a mere phrase.
In 1788, when the favourite is in the Crimea, the
letters that her confidential agent, Garnofski,
sends to him from St. Petersburg are full of
pressing objurgations, showing the urgent need of
his return, as much on account of the disorder
into which his absence has thrown affairs, as of
the state in which the Empress herself is, 'de
jected, subject to constant terrors, and vacillating
from lack of support.' And it is here, too, that
the part played in history by the- conqueror of
the Crimea and his fellows differs from the ex
amples given at the same time, at the other end
of Europe, by feminine favouritism : Louis XV.

PRIVA TE LIFE— FA VO URITISM 243
simply endures the influence of his mistresses
and their intervention in affairs of government :
Catherine encourages and demands it.
Nor is this all. Lanskoi, Zoubof, are twenty-
two when they succeed to the place of Patiom
kine. Now Nicholas Saltykof, who retains his
freedom of speech with the Empress, expressing
his astonishment at a choice so utterly out of
keeping with the age of the sovereign, she makes
this reply, which may perhaps cause a smile, but
which contains a characteristic trait of the ' eternal
feminine ' : ' Well ! I am serving the empire in
the education of such capable young men.' And
she believes it! In her anxiety to initiate these
young ' scholars ' of a particular kind into the
handling of the great interests of the state, there
is really a sort of maternity. And it is thus that
in her the irremediable weaknesses of a woman's
nature join with her highest vocation in necessi
tating the presence and assistance of the male,
near this proud and headstrong female autocrat.
Naturally, — for without this Catherine would
not be herself— political calculation has its share
in this particular complication of her existence,
strange as it may seem to say so. The statement
is verified by the facts, and, so fantastic as a
whole is the fortune of this great handler of men,

244 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
the facts decide in her favour even on this point.
Her intentions, extravagant as they may seem,
are not entirely unjustified ; ' educated ' by her,
trained, rough-hewn, raised from step to step,
rapidly it is true, in the hierarchy of high civil
and military functions, Patiomkine finally cuts a
certain figure as all-powerful minister. When a
whim of the sovereign installs him for a few
months in the special suite of rooms communi
cating with the Empress's by an inner staircar
Zovitch is merely a major in the Hussars.
comes afterwards to fill an important placy
history of national education. We areX
venting : this favourite was the first to conct.
of a military school modelled on the foreign
establishments of the kind. At Chklof, a magni
ficent estate near Mohilef, which was given him
as a residence after his disgrace, a school founded
by him for the children of poor gentle-folk served
as nucleus for the establishment of the Corps de
Cadets of Moscow, now the principal military
gymnasium of the city.
Doubtless, such miracles came about through
a peculiar concourse of circumstances presiding
over the material and moral development of the
great empire, become so entirely her own. But
the complete history of her life is unintelligible ;

PRIVA TE LIFE— FA VO URITISM

245

indeed, none such is possible, when it is not seen in
this light. With Zovitch, Patiomkine, Mamonof,
and ten others, the court of Catherine is quite
that of Gerolstein, but a Gerolstein in which the
comic, the grotesque, and the extravagant com
bine with serious elements, which make of this
amalgam one of the most singular pages in the
annals of the world. The Russia of to-day is
still a unique country, existing, so to speak, on
the verge of the European community ; and
Catherine was also a most extraordinary woman.
These two conditions were required in order that
it might be possible for operatic heroes to thus
enact by her side, on one of the great stages of
the universe, the great parts of the human drama.
But these conditions being realised, and the
history of the Russia of that day being thus
played out amid pantomime scenery, it would be
idle to try to explain it on the ordinary lines of
analysis, which belong to the ordinary run of
things. Lastly, from a final point of view, favouritism
such as Catherine practised was by no means the
reign of sensuality pure and simple, blindly
reaching after ever new pleasures. There was
method in the madness of Hamlet; and in the
veins of Catherine there was a little Danish blood.

246 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
As we have said, she made of favouritism an
institution. n
We read, under date September 17, 1778, the
following lines in the despatch of the day sent
from St. Petersburg to the Comte de Vergennes
by M. de Corberon : —
' We may observe in Russia a sort of inter
regnum in affairs, caused by the displacement of
one favourite and the installation of his successor.
This event eclipses everything else. On it hang
all the interests of a certain side of things, and
even the cabinet ministers, succumbing to the
general influence, suspend their operations until
the choice has been made, and things fall back
into the accustomed groove, and the machine is
once more in proper order.'
All this is an essential part of the machinery of
government, and, this once lacking, everything
comes to a dead stop. The interregnums are,
however, as a rule of very short duration. Only
one lasts for several months, between the death
of Lanskoi (1784) and the succession of Iermolof.
Generally it is a matter of twenty-four hours, and
the slightest ministerial crisis is a much more
serious inconvenience to-day. There is no lack

PRIVA TE LIFE— FA VO URITISM 247

of candidates. The place is good, and those
whose ambition it tempts are legion. In the
regiments of the Guards, the traditional home of
vremienchtchiks (favourites), there are always two
or three handsome officers who turn their eyes in
the direction of the imperial palace with a hope
and longing more or less concealed. From time
to time one of them makes his appearance at
court, introduced by some great personage, who
tries his chance of making a ' creature ' for him
self, and in a post which is the source of all riches
and honours. In 1774 a nephew of Count Zahar
Tchernichef, a Prince Kantemir, young, dissolute,
deep in debt, beau garpon, prowls for some weeks
around the Empress. Twice, pretending to have
lost his way, he reaches the private apartments of
the Empress. The third time, he finds her, falls
on his knees, and begs her to use him as she will.
She rings, he is seized, put in a kibitka, and sent
back to his uncle, who is advised to teach his
nephew a little wisdom. Catherine is indulgent
for this kind of folly. Patiomkine, more for
tunate, makes his way by a bold stroke almost
exactly similar. In general, however, this post, so
much sought after, is the price of some intriguing.
After 1 776 it is Patiomkine, now honorary favourite,
who brings forward deputies discovered, trained,

248 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
and managed by him, and offers them to the
choice of the sovereign. But both they and
he have no easy task to keep the position, once
attained : an absence, an illness, a momentary
default, are enough to ruin all their chances.
The very name, so expressive in Russian (vremia
means time, moment ; vremienchtchik, the man of
the moment) tells the chosen ones that the favour
is fleeting. In 1772 it is at Fokchany, where he
has gone to negotiate peace with Turkey, that
Gregory Orlof learns of the installation of Vassil-
tchikof in the place that he has imprudently
quitted. He sets out at full speed, covers 2000
miles without stopping, travelling post, without
sleep, almost without food, in order to reach the
capital as quickly as he can. In spite of all, he
arrives too late. In L764, Lanskoi, fallen ill, has
recourse to artificial stimulants, which irreparably
ruin his health. Sometimes, too, on the height
by the throne, reached at a bound, these spoilt
children of fate grow giddy : Zovitch thinks he
may even defy her who has raised him from
nothingness. Mamonof even imagines that he
can share her favour with a court lady, for whom
he sighs. It is over in an instant : at an evening
reception, it is noticed that the Empress has
gazed attentively at some obscure lieutenant,

PRIVA TE LIFE— FA VO URITISM 249

presented but just before, or lost sight of till
then among the crowd of courtiers ; next day, it
is reported that he has been appointed aide-de
camp to her Majesty. What that means is well
known. Next day he finds himself in the special
suite of rooms, in which the abode of the favourite
is as brief as, in our days, are those of the heads
of departments in the ministerial quarters. The
rooms are already vacated, and everything is pre
pared for the new-comer. All imaginable comfort
and luxury, a splendidly appointed house, await
him ; and, on opening a drawer, he finds a hundred
thousand roubles (about 500,000 francs), the
usual first gift, a foretaste of Pactolus. That
evening, before the assembled court, the Empress
appears, leaning familiarly on his arm, and on the
stroke of ten, as she retires, the new favourite
follows her.
He will never leave the palace except at the
side of his august mistress. From this moment
he is a bird in a cage. The cage is fine, but
it is carefully guarded : the Empress is on her
guard against accidents, such as the generally
far from reassuring antecedents of the chosen
ones might reasonably lead her to fear. And
it is for this reason, among others, that we can
give no credit to the stories that represent the

250 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
favours of Catherine as shared by casual comers
and goers. No doubt the place to which Patiom
kine, Lanskoi, and so many others have found
their way is not an inviolate sanctuary ; still, it
is by no means accessible to the first comer.
At the outset of her reign, Catherine certainly
committed some imprudences, which caused her
no little inconvenience. In 1762 an officer of
the name of Hrastof, charged with the inventory
of the wardrobe of the late Empress Elizabeth,
was accused of making away with 200,000
roubles'-worth. A woman had been seen wear
ing jewels that had belonged to the deceased
sovereign. She was recognised as one of the
innumerable mistresses of the favourite, Gregory
Orlof, who probably shared the fair lady's favours
with Hrastof. Now, the latter, according to the
report of the French charge"- d'affaires Berenger,
had been living for some time in considerable
intimacy with the new Czarina.
Since then, Catherine has put all that in order :
the favourite is a person whose slightest move
ments are subjected to an invariable routine and
a minute scrutiny. He pays no visits, accepts no
invitations. Once only was Mamonof authorised
to accept a dinner, to which he had been invited
by the Comte de Segur. Even then Catherine

PRI VA TE L IFF— FA VO URITISM 2 5 1
became uneasy, and the French minister and his
guests, on rising from table, see the Empress's
coach under the windows : it goes slowly back
ward and forward, with a persistence which
betrays all the distress of the momentarily aban
doned lover. A year later, the vremienchtchik
nearly loses his place through a very natural
and a very innocent infraction of the severe
discipline to which he is subjected. On his
birthday the Czarina has authorised him to pre
sent her with a pair of earrings, which she her
self has purchased for the sum of 30,000 roubles.
The Grand Duchess sees the earrings and
admires them greatly : upon which Catherine
makes her a present of them. She puts them
on, and next day she summons Mamonof to her,
to thank him for having, however indirectly,
contributed to this unexpected liberality. He
is on the point of going, considering himself
bound to obey a command from one so high
in position ; but the Empress, on finding it out,
falls into a violent rage ; she apostrophises him
in violent terms, and sends to the Grand Duchess
the most severe of reprimands : let her take care
never to do it again ! Paul thinks to make
himself agreeable by sending to the favourite a
snuff-box set with diamonds ; Catherine allows

CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA

Mamonof to go and thank the Grand Duke, but
not by himself: she designates the particular
person who is to accompany him. Paul refuses
the visit.
We must add that, on their side, the favourites
do their best to guard against the danger of an
unfaithfulness, even accidental, which would put
them into competition with a rival perhaps
capable of supplanting them. Their power, and
it is great, is employed in a vigilance not less
active than that of Catherine herself. So long
as Patiomkine is in favour, and he is in favour,
'honorary' after a certain time, for fifteen years,
from 1774 to 1789, his imperious will raises an
insurmountable barrier against every caprice that
he does not choose to sanction. He can even,
at need, use violence to her who, in giving her
self to him, has found a master indeed.
Catherine's choice, it should be noted, falls,
without exception, on men in the prime of life,
and, for the most part, of Herculean build. As
she grows older, she chooses them younger and
younger. Of the two brothers Zoubof, one was
twenty-two and the other eighteen at the time
when she was first attracted by them. We know
the age of Lanskoi, and the circumstances of his
premature end.

PRIVA TE LIFE— FA VO URITISM 2 5 3

What was the actual number of favourites,
from the day of Catherine's accession to the day
of her death ? It is not easy to say with absolute
precision. Only ten officially occupied the post,
with all the privileges and responsibilities of the
post: Gregory Orlof, from 1762 to 1772 ; Vas-
siltchikof, from 1772 to 1774; Patiomkine, from
1774 to 1776; Zavadofski, from 1776 to 1777;
Zovitch, from 1777 to 1778; Korssakof, from
1778 to 1780; Lanskoi, from 1780 to 1784;
Iermolof, from 1784 to 1785; Mamonof, from
1785 to 1789; Zoubof, from 1789 to 1796. But
at the time when Korssakof was in favour, a
crisis came about which called forth several
aspirants, and brought at least one of them,
Strahof, very much into the good graces of the
sovereign. Strahof never occupied the special
apartments of the favourite ; it is almost certain,
however, that he took the place, for a short time,
of the official favourite. Very likely something
similar happened on various occasions. On visit
ing the Winter Palace, shortly before the death
of Catherine, a traveller was particularly struck
by the decoration of two little rooms close to
the Empress's bedroom : the walls of one of
these rooms were completely covered with minia
tures of great price, set in gold, and representing

254 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA

different lascivious scenes ; the other room was
similarly decorated, but the miniatures were por
traits, portraits of men whom Catherine had
known or loved.
Among these men, some showed themselves
singularly ungrateful for the excess of favours
which Catherine heaped indiscriminately upon
them all. She herself behaved well to every one
of them, and not one, even of those who were
unfaithful to her, had to suffer the weight of her
wrath and vengeance. For she was betrayed
and abandoned like the most vulgar of mistresses :
all her power, all her fascination, and the im
mensity of the price set on her favour, could not
shield her from the mishaps that have tortured the
hearts of empresses and of grisettes alike since
the beginning of the world. In 1780 she sur
prises Korssakof in the arms of the Countess
Bruce. In 1789 it is Mamonof who gives her up
to marry 2.freiline. Taking everything into con
sideration, it is she who was the least changeable.
Referring to the departure of Mamonof, simply
sent to Moscow with his lady, with whom he is
soon in disagreement, the Comte de Segur wrote
in a despatch to the Comte de Montmorin 
' One can shut one's eyes indulgently on the
errors of a woman who is a great man, when she

PRIVA TE LIFE— FA VO URITISM 255
shows, even in her weaknesses, such mastery
over herself, such mercy, and such magnanimity.
It is rarely that one finds in union absolute
power, jealousy, and moderation, and such a
character could only be condemned by a man
without a heart, or a prince without a weakness.'
Perhaps the Comte de Segur was too in
dulgent. Perhaps, too, Saint- Beuve was not
sufficiently so, when he observed that Catherine's
way of treating her lovers, when she got tired of
them, so different from that of Elizabeth of
England and Christina of Sweden, really told
against her. That she should load them with
gifts, instead of having them assassinated, ' is too
much, betrays too openly the scorn that she has
of men and of nations.' There is, at all events,
an error of fact in this severe judgment : Catherine
was not tired of either Korssakof or Mamonof
when she learned how they had deceived her.
She clung to them still, to the latter especially,
and her pride was not alone in suffering from
the disgrace that they inflicted upon her. Her
weaknesses were often, too often, those of a
woman who takes her pleasure where she finds
it ; but the English statesman who wrote ' she
was a stranger to love,' understood very little, to
our mind, of the psychology of a woman.

256 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA

III
Before making up her mind to abandon Gregory
Orlof, Catherine endured from him what few
women would have endured. In 1765, seven
years before the rupture, Berenger writes from
St. Petersburg to the Due de Praslin : —
'This Russian openly violates the laws of
love in regard to the Empress. He has mis
tresses in town, who, far from calling down the
indignation of the sovereign through their com
plaisance to Orlof, seem, on the contrary, to gain
her favour by it. The senator, Mouravief who
had found his wife with him, attempted to make
a sensation by demanding a separation : the
Empress appeased him by giving him some land
in Livonia.'
But at last things get to such a pitch that
Catherine can endure it no longer, and she
profits by the absence of the favourite to break
her chain. At the moment when Orlof, travelling
post, is coming to reclaim his rights, he is stopped
by command a few versts from St. Petersburg,
and banished to his estates. But he will not
admit that he is beaten; now suppliant, now
menacing, he begs to be allowed to see the
sovereign again, if only for a moment. She has

PRIVA TE LIFE- FA VO URITISM 257

only to say the word to be rid for ever of his
importunities : Patiomkine is already at hand, and
he would willingly make away with all the Orlofs
at once. But this word is never said. She
parleys, comes to an agreement, and finally sends
to the lover, — how lightly punished for a part
that might justify quite other measures ! — a plan
of agreement which is a very poem of supreme
tenderness of heart ; the past forgotten, an appeal
to the reason of the guilty one that painful
mutual explanations may be spared, the necessity
of separation for a time, indicated how mildly,
almost imploringly — nothing is wanting. He is
to take leave of absence, to settle at Moscow, or
on his estates, or elsewhere, if he will. His
allowance of 150,000 roubles a year will be con
tinued, and he will receive 100,000 roubles in
addition, to furnish a house. Meanwhile he
may make use of any of the Empress's houses
near Moscow, use the court equipages as before,
and keep the servants in the imperial livery.
Catherine remembers that she has promised him
4000 peasants for the victory of Tchesme, in
which it happens he took no part ; she adds 6000
more, whom he can pick out as he likes, in any
of the domains of the crown. And as if she were
afraid of not doing enough for him, she multiplies
VOL. II. R

258 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
the proofs of her munificence : now a silver
service, and then another ' for ordinary use,' and
then a house at the Troitskaia Pristagne, furni
ture, and everything that is found in the apart
ments that had belonged to the favourite in the
imperial palace, the value of which escapes her
reckoning. In return, Catherine exacts only a
year's absence. At the end of a year the ex-
favourite will be better able to realise the situa
tion. As for Catherine, ' she will never forget all
that she owes to the family of Gregory Orlof, nor
the talents with which he is personally endowed,
and how useful they may be to the nation.' She
desires only 'a mutual repose, which she will do
her best to preserve.'
It may be that in this way of accommodating
things there is a little fear of what might be the
result of hostility on the part of a family to which
she herself has given such power in her empire ;
but is there not also a genuine tenderness?
Eleven years later, on hearing of the ex-favourite's
death, Catherine wrote —
' The loss of Prince Orlof put me into a fever,
with such delirium during the night, that I had
to be bled.'
It is in June 1783 that she hears the fatal
news, and two months after, on her way to

PRIVA TE LIFE— FA VO URITISM 1 59

Frederikshamn to meet the King of Sweden,
she stipulates beforehand that he will not speak
to her of this catastrophe, which still moves her
to the very depths of her being. She is the
first to speak of it, with an effort to conceal the
agitation which so distant a past never fails to
awaken in her mind. Nevertheless, she has
found several successors to the lover whom she
had replaced even before his death. Is it a mere
infatuation, as Grimm at first supposes, which, in
1778, throws her into the arms of Korssakof?
' Infatuated ? infatuated ? ' she replies to her
confidant. ' Do you not know that this term is
out of place in speaking of Pyrrhus, King of
Epirus' (the name she gives to the new favourite),
'a peril to painters, a despair to sculptors ? It is
the admiration, sir, it is the enthusiasm, that the
masterpieces of nature inspire ! Things of beauty
fall and are dashed to pieces like idols before the
ark of the Lord, before the character of this
mighty man. Never does Pyrrhus make a move
ment which is not either noble or graceful. He
is radiant as the sun, he radiates light. All that
is not effeminate, but male, all that one would
have it : in a word, it is Pyrrhus, King of Epirus.
It is all in harmony ; nothing is out of place : it
is the effect of a mingling of the priceless gifts

26o

CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA

of nature; art is not absent, but artifice is a
thousand leagues away.'
We may admit that the sentiment which in
spires this language in her is neither very deep
nor very delicate. And indeed Korssakof is a
mere hector. But take another actor in this
drama of passion, Patiomkine, the man of genius,
and read what follows. It is a letter from the
favourite, written after a lover's quarrel of a few
days' duration. Catherine replies in the margin,
point by point. A sort of treaty of eternal peace
and love is thus signed and sealed by the re
conciled lovers : —

In Patiomkine' s
handwriting —
' Permit me, dear love, to
tell you how I think our
quarrel will end. Do not
be surprised that I am
concerned in regard to our
love. Besides the number
less favours you have
showered upon me, you
have also given me a place
in your heart. I would be
there alone, and above all
who have gone before, for
none has loved you as I
love you. And as I am

In Catherine 's

' The sooner the better.
Do not be concerned.

Hand washes hand.
Sure and firm.
He is and will be.
I see and believe it.
I rejoice at it.

PRIVA TE LIFE— FA VO URITISM 26 1
the work of your hands, I That is my greatest joy.
would find rest in you also ;
I would have you delight That will come of itself.
in doing me kindness; I
would have you toil for Let calm return to your
my happiness, and find in mind, and your feelings
it a solace from the serious have free course ; they are
tasks that are laid upon loving, and will find the
you by your high position, best way themselves. End
Amen.' of the quarrel. Amen.'
This is no commonplace exchange of vows,
and the two beings who, placed at the summit of
human greatness, speak of their love in these
terms are no vulgar debauchees. All the dreamy,
troubled, and imperious disposition of Patiomkine
manifests itself in these lines, as does the tempera
ment, at once practical and exalted, of Catherine.
It is by her judgment that the sovereign generally
rules the favourite, it is by his ardour that he
often carries her away. A great part of their
correspondence has been published. There never
was such a correspondence between two persons
so linked by a common destiny. The turns of
phrase generally employed by Catherine, especially
during the early years of their connection, could
not be paralleled, perhaps, in their excessive
familiarity, in the correspondence of no matter
what jeune galante of the time. We will not

262 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
dwell on, ' I embrace you a thousand times, my
friend,' ' Forgive me if I am troubling you, my
heart,' 'Do you see, my soul?' little as one
expects to find these tender expressions from the
hand of an Empress. But here is a note which
ends, ' Good-bye, my bow-wow.' ' Good-bye, my
gold pheasant,' we read elsewhere. Or again,
' Good-bye, papa.' There are frequent squabbles :
Patiomkine has a troublesome disposition, and is
sulky or furious at the least excuse. She writes to
him thus : ' If you are not more amiable to-day
than you were yesterday, I — I — I — well, I really
won't eat my dinner.' Is there an allusion, in this
other note, to the project that this irascible lover
professed at one time of going into a monastery ?
We know not. 'A plan,' writes Catherine,
' which had been formed four or five months ago,
with which even N. B., the town and suburbs,
were acquainted ; a plan for plunging a dagger
into the breast of his friend, on the part of one
who loves us the most, who has our happiness
always at heart ; does such a plan do credit to the
mind and heart of him who has conceived it and
would put it into execution ? '
The favourite, as one may imagine, is him
self not behindhand in tender flowers of speech.
Only, and it is a curious trait of this astonishing

PRIVA TE LIFE— FA VO URITISM 263
idyl, in all the abandonment of his amorous
warmth, he never for a single instant forgets the
distance between them. His turns of phrase,
often more passionate and intense, always preserve
a certain solemnity, never follow those of Catherine
in their rather trivial freedom. ' If my prayer is
heard, God will prolong your days to the utmost
limit, O thou merciful mother ! ' That is his
most customary style. He never, as a rule, uses
the tutoiement except in this form of invocation, in
which he seems to address her, the work of whose
hands he feels himself to be, as he would address
God. We have other fragments of love-letters
of Patiomkine, not addressed to Catherine, in
which he reveals himself as an accomplished
virtuoso, mingling Oriental fantasy with the
reverie of the North, and the delicacy of the most
exquisite models that the West has furnished.
' O my life, O sister soul of mine, how can
words tell thee of all my love ? Come, O my
mistress (soudarka maid), hearken, O my friend,
my joy, my treasure without price, gift un
paralleled that God has given me ! . . . Darling
(matouchka goloubouchka), give me the joy of
seeing thee, the delight of rejoicing in thy heart.
... I kiss with all my love thy pretty little hands
and thy pretty little feet.'

264 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
It is not to Catherine that Patiomkine
writes that. Matouchka she is, indeed, but
at the same time, and always, gossoudarinia
(sovereign), before whom one bows with his
forehead in the dust, even when speaking of
love ; never goloubouchka (darling) nor soudarka
(mistress). Called to the post of favourite in 1774,
Patiomkine makes way, two years later, for
Zavadofski. The lover gives place, but the friend
remains ; and the engagement entered into at the
beginning is not broken as yet. It will scarcely
be so, even when, just before the death of the
Prince of Taurida, Zoubof, installing himself as
master in the palace as well as the heart of the
sovereign, leaves no room for one who had
formerly ruled alone. Till that time there is
scarcely a difference to be traced in Catherine's
manner towards the brilliant adventurer, whom
she allows to rule over her court, command
her armies, govern her empire, though she has
already broken off her more tender relations with
him ; and she accepts from him new lovers, while
showering upon him not only riches and honours,
but the most unmistakable signs of an unbroken
affection. ' Good-bye, my friend ; take care of yourself ;

PRI VA TE LIFE— FA VO URITISM 265
I embrace you with all my heart. Sacha sends
greetings.' This is dated June 29, 1789, and Sacha is
¦Mamonof, the reigning favourite, and the creature
of Patiomkine.
' Sachenka greets you and loves you as his
own soul,' we read in another letter, dated May
5, 1784 ; ' he often speaks of you.'
In September 1777, Patiomkine receives from
the sovereign a present of 150,000 roubles. In
1779 he receives an advance of 750,000 roubles as
his annual pension of 75,000. In 1783 Catherine
pays to his account 100,000 roubles to hasten on
the erection of a palace that he is building, which
she will buy from him for several millions, and
of which she will make him a present immediately
after. He is Field-Marshal, he is Prime Minister,
he is Prince, he has all the distinctions, all the
posts, all the honours, all the powers, that there
are to be bestowed. At the time of the annexa
tion of the Crimea, during the second Turkish
war, he acts as master, without guidance and
without control. He does as he pleases, follows
his own devices, and Catherine is like a little girl
who bows before the decree of a superior genius.
He leaves her without news for months to
gether; he does not even trouble to reply to

266 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA

her letters. Then she complains, but timidly,
almost humbly : —
' I have been between life and death all the
time that I have had no news of you. . . . For
God's sake and for mine, take more care of
yourself than you have done in the past. I
am afraid of nothing, except that you may be ill.
... At this moment, my dear friend, you are
no longer a private person who lives as he likes
and does as he pleases : you belong to the state,
to me.'
Tender appellations, that of ' papa ' among
others, find their place once more in the former
lover's letters. The Empress is herself again in the
frequent moments of discouragement into which
the conqueror of the Crimea is always thrown
by a momentary reverse. In 1787 an attack
of the Turks on Kinburn makes him think of
resigning his command. Catherine will not hear
of it.
' Strengthen your mind and soul against all
that may befall, and be assured that you will
overcome everything with a little patience, but
it is a weakness indeed to wish to quit your post
and hide yourself away.'
A few weeks later a storm destroyed part
of the fleet brought together by Patiomkine at

PRIVA TE LIFE— FA VO URITISM 267
Sebastopol. This time he would not only
abandon the army, but evacuate the Crimea.
'What is it you say? 'writes Catherine. 'No
doubt you thought so at the first moment, fancy
ing that all the fleet had perished, but what
would become of the rest of this fleet after the
evacuation ? And how can you begin a campaign
by the evacuation of a province which is not even
threatened? It would be better to attack Otcha-
kof or Bender, thus substituting the offensive
for the defensive attitude, which you yourself say
is less politic. Besides, it is not only against us
that the wind has blown, I imagine ! Courage !
courage ! I write all this to you as to my best
friend, my pupil and scholar, who at times shows
more resolution than I, but at this moment I have
more courage than you, because you are ill and
I am well. ... I think you are as impatient
as a child of five, whilst the affairs under your
charge at this moment demand an imperturbable
patience.' She adds that he may return for a time to
St. Petersburg. Is he afraid that some one will
play him an ill turn during his absence ? ' Neither
time, nor distance, nor any one in the world will
ever change my way of thinking in regard to
you, nor the feelings I have for you.'

268 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
This freedom of action that Catherine allows
to the man in whom she has placed her confi
dence, this way of closing her eyes on his pro
ceedings, in order to pay him the greater com
pliment, is only the application of a system that
we know already. Occasions are not wanting,
however, on which the will of the Empress and
her personal intervention are exercised in a direct
and effectual manner. There are then frequent
disagreements between the two, and neither
friendship nor love hinder Catherine from insist
ing on her authority being obeyed. The ill-
temper of the favourite comes out plainly enough :
he is now sharp, now sulky : ' I tell you,' he
writes, ' what is for your interest ; after that, do
as you please.' ' You may get angry if you like,'
replies Catherine, ' but you must admit that I am
right' The causes of disagreement are some
times of a rather delicate nature. An inspector
of the troops has been nominated by Patiom
kine. Catherine opposes the choice, which
she conceives to have been made for a parti
cular reason. This is how she reasons the matter
out : —
' Allow me to tell you that the miserable face
of his wife is not worth the trouble you will have
with such a man. Nor have you any chance

PRIVA TE LIFE— FA VO URITISM 269

there, for madame is charming, but there is
nothing to be gained by paying court to her.
That is a well-known fact, and an immense
family watches over her reputation. My friend,
I am accustomed to tell you the truth. You do
the same with me when there is occasion for it.
Oblige me in this instance by choosing some one
more suitable for the post, one who knows the
work, so that the approval of the public and of
the army may crown your choice and my nomina
tion. I like to give you pleasure, and I do not
like to refuse you anything, but I should like that
in a post of that sort, every one might say, what
a good choice, and not, what a wretched choice,
of a man who does not know what he has to do.
Make peace, after which you can come here and
amuse yourself as much as you like.'
Catherine forgot to add that meanwhile she
was amusing herself on her side, and that this
time she had not consulted her ' friend ' on the
nature of the new amusement that she had found
for herself. Zoubof appeared on the horizon
and proclaimed himself a formidable rival in
the conquest of the imperial favour, and even of
the part that friendship had left to his pre
decessor. Tied to the other extremity of the
empire, Patiomkine bounded with rage ; he de-

270 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
clared that he would soon return to St. Peters
burg, ' to have a tooth taken out ' (zoub means
tooth in Russian) which troubled him. He did
not succeed in his attempt. He came back only
to witness the definite triumph of the enemy.
He returned to the South, chafing at his fate ;
he was struck to the heart, and soon death came
to spare him the last humiliations of disgrace.
Catherine, nevertheless, had taken all the trouble
in the world to make him look favourably upon
her new choice, and the letters in which she
gives voice to this anxiety are not the least
curious of the collection from which we have
already made many extracts. Compliments, kind
attentions, delicate flatteries, even unexpected
outbursts of tenderness, follow one another,
coming to the friend already sacrificed, on the
part of the victorious lover, of ' the child,' the
' little blacky,' as she delights in calling the new
favourite, with the caressing ways that age has
not taken from her. ' The child,' she writes,
' thinks you are cleverer and more amusing and
more amiable than all those about you ; but keep
this quiet, for he does not know that I know
that.' But Patiomkine is not to be wheedled. He
sees his prestige escaping him, he feels that

PRIVA TE LIFE— FA VO URITISM 27 1
this time the place is taken altogether, and not
only the corner of the imperial palace, near her
Majesty's private rooms, which he had let go so
lightly, but that other sanctuary as well, which
the vows of bygone days had led him to hope
would retain a place for him for ever. That too
he was going to lose !
Once already he had had a serious cause for
anxiety. Among his rivals there had been one,
before Zoubof, whom Catherine seemed to have
loved as she never loved before or after. It
seems to have been the fate of this extraordinary
woman to exhaust, in all their diversity, the
whole range of sentiments and sensations, and
the entire order of the phenomena of passion.
The love that she experienced for Lanskoi was
utterly different from that which she had for
Patiomkine, or for any of those who filled her
life, so rich in varied impressions. But Lanskoi
was not ambitious, and it was not given to Cathe
rine to keep him long. On June 19, 1784, the
young man who for the last four years had made
the joy of her existence, in whom all her thoughts,
all her affections, and all her desires were con
centrated, the most petted, the most caressed, the
most feted of favourites, was attacked by a
mysterious disease. The German physician

272 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
Weikard was hastily summoned from St. Peters
burg to Tzarskoie-Sielo. He was a savant of
the pure Teutonic breed, little used to delicate
discretion in his dealings. Sitting on the patient's
bed, Catherine anxiously questioned him.
' What is it ? ' she asked.
'A bad fever, Madame, and he will die of it.'
He insisted that the Empress should leave the
patient, judging the malady to be contagious.
So far as we can conjecture, it was a quinsy.
Catherine never hesitated an instant between the
counsels of prudence and those more imperious
ones of her heart. She was soon taken with a
troublesome uneasiness of the throat. She
braved it all. Ten days later Lanskoi expired
in her arms. He was only twenty-six. Hear
the lament of the lover from whom the loved
one has been taken by death : —
' When I began this letter, I was in hope and
joy, and my thoughts came so swiftly that I knew
not what became of them. It is so no more : I
am plunged into the depths of sorrow, and my
happiness has fled : I thought I should have died
of the irreparable loss that I have just had, a
week ago, of my best friend. I had hoped that
he would be the support of my old age : he was
attentive, he learnt much, he had acquired all my

PRIVA TE LIFE— FA VO URITISM 273
tastes. He was a young man whom I was
bringing up, who was grateful, kind, and good,
who shared my sorrows when I had them, and
rejoiced in my joys. In a word, I have the mis
fortune to have to tell you, with tears, that
General Lanskoi is no more, . . . and my room,
so pleasant before, has become an empty den, in
which I can just drag myself about like a shadow.
Something went wrong with my throat the day
before his death, and I have a raging fever ;
nevertheless, since yesterday, I have got up
from bed, but so feeble and sorrowful that at
the present hour I cannot look on a human face
without my voice being choked with tears. I
cannot sleep or eat ; reading wearies me, and
writing is too much for me. I know not what
will become of me ; but I know that never in
my life have I been so unhappy as since my
kind, my best friend has quitted me. I have
opened my drawer, I have found this sheet that
I have begun, I have written these lines, but I
can no more.'
This is on July 2, 1784. Only after two
months does Catherine resume her correspond
ence with Grimm.
' I confess to you that all that time I was
incapable of writing to you, because I knew that
vol. 11. s

274 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA

it would make us both suffer. A week after I
had written to you my letter of July, Count
Fedor Orlof and Prince Potemkin came to me.
Up to then I could not endure to see any one ;
these took me just in the right way : they began
to howl with me, and then I felt at my ease with
them ; but it took a long time to come to it, and
thanks to my sensibility, I had become insensible
to everything but this one sorrow ; and this
seemed to increase and take fresh hold at every
step, at every word. Do not think, however, that
despite the horror of the situation, I neglected
the least thing which required my attention. In
the most awful moments I was called upon to
give orders, and I gave them, in an orderly and
sane manner : which particularly struck General
Saltykof. More than two months passed without
any respite ; at last some calmer hours have
come, and now calmer days. The weather having
become wet, the rooms at Tsarsko-Selo have
had to be heated. Mine have been heated with
such violence that on the evening of the 5 th
September, not knowing where to go, I called
out my coach, and came straight here without
any one's knowing it; I have put up at the Her
mitage, and yesterday, for the first time, I went
to mass, and consequently, for the first time also,

PRIVA TE LIFE— FA VO URITISM 275
I saw everybody and. was seen by everybody ;
but, in truth, it was such an effort that on getting
back to my room I was so overcome that any one
but I would have fainted. ... I ought to re-read
your three last letters, but I really cannot. ... I
have become a most sad creature, and speak
only in monosyllables. . . . Everything distresses
me . . . and I never liked to be an object of
pity.' An English orator, Lord Camelford, has said
that Catherine honoured the throne by her vices,
while the King of England (George III.) dis
honoured it by his virtues. The expression is
somewhat strong ; but it may be admitted that
vices capable of manifesting themselves in so
touching a form deserve something other than
absolute condemnation.

IV
Favouritism, as practised by Catherine, was
not without its serious inconveniences. On
December 1, 1772, the French minister at St.
Petersburg, Durand, writes to the Due d'AiguiUon
that, according to reports coming from the palace,
' the Empress is so singularly occupied with the
affair of M. Orlof, that for nearly two months she

276 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
has attended to nothing else, she reads nothing,
and scarcely ever goes out.' Two months after,
the crisis is not yet over. ' This woman does
nothing,' says one of the courtiers to Durand ; ' so
long as the Orlof faction is in power, there is
nothing to be done.' Now these crises are
frequent. In February 1780 the English am
bassador Harris, coming to Prince Patiomkine
to question him in reference to an important
memorandum which has been in the Empress's
hands for some time, is told that he has come at
a wrong time : Lanskoi is ill, and the dread of
his death so paralyses the Empress that she is
unable to fix her attention on anything. All her
thoughts of ambition and of glory are forgotten ;
all care for her own interest or her own dignity
leaves her; she is completely absorbed in this
one anxiety. And Prince Patiomkine expresses
his fear lest Count Panine should profit by the
occasion to bring his ideas into play, and give a
new direction to the foreign policy. Three years
later, it is an illness of the Prince himself that
throws the Sovereign into a state of such dis
tress, that the Marquis de Verac, on the point
of leaving St. Petersburg, cannot obtain his fare
well audience. Those about the Empress, seeing
her eyes red with the tears that she cannot

PRIVA TE LIFE— FA VO URITISM 277
restrain, beg her not to appear in public. The
audience is put off.
When favouritism does not bring affairs to
a standstill, it sometimes puts their guidance
into hands as little suitable as possible to manage
the helm, those of Mamonof or Zoubof, for
example. And it is not merely the hasty advance
ment of the favourites themselves, becoming
generals, marshals, ministers, from one day to
another : the high personages thus created with a
wave of the wand have in turn their dependants.
They have also their enemies whom they seek to
put in the background — as Patiomkine did with
the illustrious Roumiantsof, thus depriving the
empire of its finest soldier. Sometimes they
push forward an ambitious man in order to get rid
of a rival. In 1787 Mamonof is alarmed by the
appearance at court of a young Prince Kotchou-
bey : he arranges to have him sent as ambassador
to Constantinople! The favourite gone, the
consequences of his elevation still last. After
the death of Patiomkine, his secretary, Popof,
replaces him as head of the government of
Iekatierinoslaf. He settles everything off-hand
by the magic formula : ' Such was the will of the
late Prince.' He inherits the secret of this will,
and remains the instrument of his ' maker,' as he

278 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
calls the deceased. Now, Count Rastoptchine,
a good judge, declares that this man, though,
during the lifetime of Patiomkine, he had
governed the whole empire in his name for ten
years, had no aptitude for affairs. Besides, he had
other engagements. Rastoptchine never noticed
in him more than one quality : the strength of
his physical constitution, which enabled him
regularly to pass his days and nights in gambling.
Meanwhile, he is appointed general, chevalier of
three orders, and incumbent of posts which bring
him in 50,000 roubles a year. In February 1796
Rastoptchine writes : ' Never were crimes so
frequent as they are now. Impunity and
audacity are pushed to their utmost. Three
days ago, a certain Kovalinski, who had been
secretary of the War Commission, and had been
dismissed by the Empress for pillage and cor
ruption, was appointed governor at Riazan,
because he has a brother blackguard like himself
who is in favour with Gribolski, Plato Zoubofs
chancellor. Ribas alone steals 500,000 roubles
a year.' Favouritism is expensive. Castera has made
out a formidable sum-total on account of ten
principal heads of affairs, adding a doubtful
supernumerary, Vysotski. I

PRIVATE LIFE— FAVOURITISM

279

Amounts received —

Roubles.

The five Orlofs, .

17,000,000

Vysotski, .

300,000
Vassiltchikof,
1,110,000
Patiomkine,
50,000,000
Zavadofski,
1,380,000
Zovitch,
1,420,000
Korssakof,
920,000
Lanskoi',
7,260,000
Iermolof, .
550,000
Mamonof, .
88o,000
The brothers Zoubof,
3,500,000
Expenses of the favourites,
Total
8,500,000
92,820,000
This comes, at the then rate of exchange, to
more than 400 millions of francs. This is much
the same as the calculation of the English am
bassador Harris.
From 1762 to 1783 the Orlof family received,
according to him, 40,000 to 50,000 peasants and 17
million roubles in money, houses, plate, and jewels.
Vassiltchikof, in twenty-two months, received
100,000 roubles in cash, 50,000 in jewels, a fur
nished palace with 100,000 roubles, plate worth
30,000, a pension of 20,000, and 7000 peasants ;
Patiomkine, in two years, 37,000 peasants, and
about 9,000,000 roubles in jewels, palaces, pen
sion, and plate ; Zavadofski, in eighteen months,
6000 peasants in Ukraine, 2000 in Poland,
280 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
1800 in Russia, 80,000 roubles'-worth of jewels,
150,000 roubles in cash, plate worth 30,000, and
a pension of 10,000; Zovitch, in a year, an.
estate worth 500,000 roubles in Poland, another
worth 100,000 in Livonia, 500,000 roubles in
cash, 200,000 in jewels, and a commandership in
Poland, with an income of 12,000 roubles; Kors
sakof, in sixteen months, 150,000 roubles, and, on
his leaving, 4000 peasants in Poland, 100,000
roubles to pay his debt, 100,000 for his equip
ment, 20,000 roubles a month to travel abroad.
These figures need no comment. In July 1778
the Chevalier de Corberon wrote from St. Peters
burg to the Comte de Vergennes —
' The new favourite Corsak ' (such appears to
have been the individual's original name) 'has
just been made chamberlain. He has received
150,000 roubles, and his fortune, which will not
last, will be at least brilliant for him and burden
some for the state, which has to suffer for it.
This nuisance, so often repeated, spreads dissatis
faction and discontent in the public mind, and
the result might be dangerous if Catherine II.
were not more powerful and more farseeing than
those about her. There are murmurs, but she
rules through all, and the ascendency of her mind
is her salvation, . . . Lately, in a Russian house,

PRIVA TE LIFE— FA VO URITISM 281

some one calculated how much had been spent on
favouritism during the present reign : the total
came to 48 million roubles.'
But it was not merely a question of money.
Prince Chtcherbatof has excellently characterised
the demoralising influence of an institution which
brought into prominence excesses of this kind at
the highest point of society. The favourites of
Catherine might well, from the absolute point of
view, seem only the equivalent of the mistresses
of Louis XV., but the absolute is out of place
both in morals and in politics, the difference of
the sexes will probably always make, in this con
nection, an enormous difference in the relative
bearing of the same facts, and if Marie- Antoinette
found painful surprises awaiting her at the court
of her father-in-law, these were probably nothing
to the impression made on the second wife of
Paul, Maria Fedorovna, when her residence at
St. Petersburg had brought her in contact with
the official scandal of the imperial palace. Be
sides, the mistresses of Louis XV. were not sup
posed, in France, to transact the business of
royalty. One of Kosciuszko's campanions in arms,
Niemcewicz, speaks in his memoirs of having
visited in 1794 the houses constructed for the

282 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
passage of the Empress on her tour in the
Crimea, in 1787. The Empress's bedroom was
everywhere made after a uniform plan. Beside
the bed was a square of glass ; on touching a
spring it moved, and another bed, that of
Mamonof, appeared. Catherine was then fifty-
nine ! Shamelessness carried to this height was
surely a school of vice.
There was certainly, in this strange woman, a
colossal disregard of her situation in regard
to the eternal laws of womanhood. For it
must be observed that there was in her in no
sense an affectation of cynicism, nor even an
obliteration of the moral sense, nor even deprava
tion of mind. Favouritism with all its conse
quences once excepted, Catherine is severe in
regard to moral questions, and very susceptible
in regard to outward decency. She values
chastity, and at times is even prudish. One day,
on the way to Kief, she requests the Comte de
Segur, who is in her carriage, to repeat some
verses. He recites a piece, ' a little free and gay,'
he tells us, 'but nevertheless decent enough to
have been well received at Paris by the Due de
Nivernais, the Prince de Beauveau, and ladies
as virtuous as they are amiable.' Catherine
at once frowns, stops him midway by a question

PRIVATE LIFE— FAVOURITISM

on quite another subject, and turns off the conver
sation. In 1788, the Admiral Paul Jones, whom
she has summoned to her service from England,
is accused of having taken liberties with a girl
belonging to the court. He is immediately
dismissed, notwithstanding the dearth of men
capable of taking the command. For a similar
reason the English ambassador Macartney is
obliged to leave his post. In 1790, chatting with
her secretary over the events that have been
taking place in France, Catherine inveighs
against the actresses, whom she accuses of having
depraved the morals of the nation. ' What has
ruined the country,' she declares, ' is that the
people fall into vice and drunkenness. The
comic opera has corrupted the whole nation.'
She is conscious of not having taken to drink
herself, and of having done nothing to corrupt
the morals of her_ country// »• But she thinks it
quite natural to write to Patiomkine that his
successor Mamonof — Sachenka, as she calls him
— 'loves him, and looks upon him as a father.'
And she is in nowise embarrassed in asking her
son and daughter-in-law for news of the King
Poniatowski, whom they have seen in passing
through Warsaw. 'I think,' she writes, 'that
his Polish Majesty would have some difficulty

284 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
in remembering my face as it was twenty-five
years ago by the portraits you showed him.'
'One could never venture,' writes the Prince
de Ligne in his portrait of the sovereign, 'to
speak ill of Peter I. nor of Louis XVI. before
the Empress, nor the least thing in regard to
religion or morals. Scarcely could one venture
on anything in the least risky, however glossed
over ; at which, however, she would laugh
quietly. She never permitted trifling, either of
this kind or in reference to any one.'
A ukase instructing keepers of public baths
to have separate compartments for the two sexes,
and not to allow any men in the women's quarter,
except those required for attendance, and doctors,
bears the signature of Catherine. An odd ex
ception is made in favour of painters, who would
study their art in the feminine compartments.
Certain accusations have nevertheless been
brought forward, associating the last years in
particular of the Empress with infamous tastes
and habits. Besides the 'set' admitted to the
private receptions at the Hermitage, another
more limited ' set ' had been formed, comprising,
in addition to the two brothers Zoubof and Peter
Saltykof, some women whose names we prefer
to omit. The name of Lesbos has been uttered

PRIVA TE LIFE— FA VO URITISM 285
in regard to these gatherings, and the name of
the Cybele of the North affixed to the other
glorious titles of Catherine the Great. We are
averse to discuss such imputations. We cannot
believe that Catherine has ever justified them,
though we dare not say that she has not, in a
sense, deserved them. Is not this outrage to
her memory a just expiation ? Maria Theresa
was not a woman to give credence to calumnies
without proper examination. She could also be
indulgent, needing no indulgence on her own
account. Nevertheless she wrote in 1778 —
'The Grand Duke, it is well known, like his
supposed father and the Empress, is utterly
debauched.' From the sovereign and mother, by way of
the lover, the scandal thus attained the son also.
The sudden death of Catherine, coming as it
did, was perhaps another expiation. For a long
time past her excesses had been thought to
be telling on her robust health. In a despatch
of May 1774, Durand, the French charge-
d' affaires, speaking of the anxiety of the favourite
on account of the Empress's health, wrote —
' He is well aware of what few people know,
that the Empress had a fainting-fit a day or two
ago, lasting more than half an hour, just as she

286 CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA
was about to take a cold bath; that her most
trusty servants have noticed curious twitches
and movements that she has been subject to for
some time ; that by the use of cold baths and of
tobacco she has moments of absence of mind and
ideas quite opposed to her natural ones. All
that I infer at present from these symptoms is
that she is affected with hysteria.'
In 1774 these conjectures were premature.
Twenty years later Catherine justified them.
We ask the pardon of our readers for having
raised the veil cast by time and oblivion over
these details. For all we have done we have had
but one reason, and we desire but one excuse —
the sincerity that, in default of other merit, we
have brought to our task, a task whose difficulties
and dangers we have by no means ignored, but
one which has appealed to us in spite of all, as it
has interested, we hope, others as well, by reason
of the variety, the complexity, and the originality,
perhaps unique, of facts which are purely a
matter of history, and which yet might challenge
the best attempts of the most fertile imagination.
FINIS.

Printed by T. and A. Constable, Printers to Her Majesty,
at the Edinburgh University Press.

TTeleovapbic Kfcbrees :
SunlocJes, .'London,
si Bedford street, w.c
September i S<)3

A LIST OF
Mr. WILLIAM HEINEMANN'S
Publications AND
Forthcoming Works

The Books wentwned in this List can
be obtained to order by any Book
seller if not tn stock, or ivill be sent
by the Publisher post free on receipt
of the published price.

jnaej of autbors.

PAGE

TAGE

Alexander

13

Knight - -

4

Anstey

8

Kraszewski

12

Arbuthnot

9

14

Atherton

14

Le Caron .

7

Baddeley

7, 16

Lee ...

11

Balestier

10, 14

Leighton .

10

Barrett

14

Leland

4

Behrs .

7

Lie .

7,J8

Bendall

16

Lowe ...

Bjornson

* A> I2

Lowry

ij

Bowen

5

Lynch .

13

Briscoe

14

Maartens

11

Brown

TO

Macnab

11

Brown and

3ii:Tulis . . 16

Maeterlinck

IS 8
8

Buchanan .

9, n, 14

Mantegazza

Butler

5

Maude

Caine .

9, *3

Maupassant

12 88

Caine .

16

Maurice

Cambridge

T3

njerriman .

Chester

8

Michel ....

3

Clarke

11

Mitford ....

13

Colomb

8

10
Compayre-
5
Murray
8
Coppee
14
Norris
10
Couperus
12
11
Cowen
11
Palacio-Vakk's
12
Crackantho
pe . . 14
Pearce
11
Davidson
5
Pennell
8
Dawson
16
Philips
14
De Quincey
7
Phelps
14
Dow.-, on
10
Pinero
15
Eeden
4
Rawnstey ,
9
Ellwanger
8
Kenan
9
Ely .
9
Richter
9
Farrar .
9
Riddell
14
Fitch .
5
Rives ....
14
Forbes
8
Roberts (C.G.TJ.)' .
10
Fothergill
14
Roberts (A vim)
12
Franzos
 12
Salaman (M. C.J
8
Frederic
. 8, 13
Salaman (J. S.)
9
Garner
9
Sarcey
7
Garnett
4
Scidmore .
10
Gaulot
4
Scudamore .
S
Gilchrist
11
Serao 
12
Gore .
16
Sergeant ,
13
Gosse .
. • t,n, 15
Steel .
11
Grand
. 10, 1 •
Tallentyre
8
Gray .
8
Tasma
11, 13
Gray (Max
veil) 10
Terry . . .
4
Griffiths
16
Thurston .
16
Hall .
16
Tolstoy
T2, 15
Hanus
> ¦ 5
Tree .
15
Harland
14
Valera ....
12
Hardy
13
Vazoff
12
Heine .
• • • 6, 7
Waliszewski
4
Henderson
14 ^
Ward . ...
T4
Howard
11
Warden ....
IJ
Hughes
. 5
Waugh
7
Hungerford
. ii, 13
Weitemeyer
9
Ibsen .
15
West .
5
Irving .
 15
Whistler .
4, a
Ingersoll
10
White
11
Jarger .
7
Whitman ....
9
Jeaffreson
 7
Williams ....
9
Keeling
• . 1 c
Wood ....
11
Kennedy
. . IX
Zangwill ....
8, 11
Kimball
. _ . . . 16
Zola . .
14
Kipling ani-*
Balestier . . . n
MR. WILLIAM HEINEMANN'S LIST.

In preparation.
REMBRANDT:
HIS LIFE, HIS WORK, AND HIS TIME.
BY
EMILE MICHEL,
MEMBER OF THE INSTITUTE OF FKA.VCE.
(Authorised EngUsh Edition.)
EDITED AND PREFACED EY
FREDERICK • WEDMORE.

Nothing need be said in justification of a comprehensive book
upon the life and work of Rembrandt. A classic among classics,
he is also a modern of moderns. His works are to-day more
sought after and better paid for than ever before ; he is now at
the zenith of a fame which can hardly decline.
The author of this work is perhaps, of all living authorities on
Rembrandt, the one who has had the largest experience, the best
opportunity of knowing all that can be known of the master.
The latest inventions in photogravure and process-engraving
have enabled the publisher to reproduce almost everything that is
accessible in the public galleries of Europe, as well as most of the
numerous private collections containing specimens of Rembrandt's
work in England and on the Continent.
This work will be published in two volumes 4to, each containing
over 300 pages. There will be over 30 photogravures, about 40
coloured reproductions of paintings and chalk drawings, and 250
illustrations in the text.
Two Editions will be printed — one on Japanese vellum, limited
to 200 numbered copies (for England and America), with duplicates
of the plates on India paper, price £\o icr. net. The ordinary
edition will be published at £2 2s. net.
An illustrated prospectus is now ready and may be had on applica
tion. Orders will be received by all booksellers, in town and country

MR. WILLIAM HEINEMANN'S LIST.

forthcoming Works.
MEMOIRS.
By Charles Godfrey Leland (Hans Breitmann) In Two Volumes, 8vo.
With a Portrait.
THE ROMANCE OF AN EMPRESS.
Catharine II. of Russia. By R. Waliszewski. In Two Volumes, 8vo. With
a Portrait.
A FRIEND OF THE QUEEN.
Being Correspondence between Marie Antoinette and Monsieur de Fersen.
By Paul Gaulot. In One Volume, 8vo. With Portraits.
LIFE OF HEINRICH HEINE.
By Richard Garnett, LL.D. With Portrait. Crown 8vo (uniform with the
translation of Heine's Works).
GOLF STORIES.
By Professor Knight of St. Andrews University. Crown 8vo.
LITTLE JOHANNES.
By Frederick van Eeden. Translated from the Dutch by Clara Bell.
With an Introduction by Andrew Lang. Illustrated.
*,* Also a Large Paper Edition.
STRAY MEMORIES.
By Ellen Terry. In One Volume. 410. Illustrated.
A NEW PLAY.
By BjiiRNSTjERNE Ejornson. Translated from the Norwegian.
SONGS ON STONE.
By J. McNeill Whistler. A Series of lithographic drawings in colour
by Mr. Whistler, will appear from time to time in parts, under the
ab.jve title. Each containing four plates. The first issue of 200 copies
will be sold at Two Guineas net per part, by Subscription for the Series
only.
The*e will also be issued 50 copies on J 'apanese paper, signed by the artist,
each Five Guineas net.

MR. WILLIAM HEINEMANN'S LIST.

£be (Sreat Eoucatore.
A Series of Volumes by Eminent Writers^ presenting in their
entirety "A Biographical History of Education?*
The Times.—" A Series of Monographs on ' The Great Educators ' should
prove of service to all who concern themselves with the history, theory, and
practice of education."
The Speaker. — ** There is a promising sound about the title of Mr. Heine-
mann's new series, ' The Great Educators.' It should help to allay the hunger
and thirst for knowledge and culture of the vast multitude of young men and
maidens which our educational system turns out yearly, provided at least with
an appetite for instruction."
Each subject will form a complete volume, crown 8vo, $s.
Nozu ready.
ARISTOTLE, and the Ancient Educational Ideals.
Thomas Davidson, M.A., LL.D.
The Times. — " A very readable sketch of a very interesting subject."
LOYOLA, and the Educational System of the Jesuits. By
Rev. Thomas Hughes, S.J.
Saturday Review. — " Full of valuable information. . . . If a school
master would learn how the education of the young can be carried on so as to
confer real dignity on those engaged in it, we recommend him to read Mr,
Hughes' book."
ALCUIN, and the Rise of the Christian Schools. By
Professor Andrew F. West, Ph.D.
FROEBEL, and Education by Self-Activity. By H. Cour-
THOPE BOWEN, M.A.
ABELARD, and the Origin and Early History of Uni
versities. By Jules Gabriel Compayre, Piofessor in the Faculty of
Toulouse. In preparation.
ROUSSEAU; and, Education according to Nature. By
Paul H. Han us.
HORACE MANN, and Public Education in the United
States. By Nicholas Murray Butler, Ph.D.
BELL and LANCASTER, and Public Elementary Edu
cation in England. By J. G. Fitch, LL.D., Her Majesty's Inspector
of Schools.
Volumes on Herbart, and Modern German Education ; and Pestalozzi :
or, the Friend and Student of Children, to fallow.

6 MR. WILLIAM HEINEMANN'S LIST.
THE WORKS OF HEINRICH HEINE.
TRANSLATED BY
CHARLES GODFREY LELAND, M.A., F.R.L.S.
(HANS BEEITMANN.)
Issued in Two Editions : — The Library Edition, in crown Svo, cloth, at $s.
per volume. Each volume of this edition is sold separately. The Large
Paper Edition, limited to 100 Numbered Copies, price 15.V. per volume net,
will only be supplied to subscribers for the Complete Work,
The following Volumes, forming
HEINE'S PROSE WORKS,
Are now ready, and may be had in a handsome box, in special binding,
gilt top, price 1.1 iqs.
I. FLORENTINE NIGHTS, SCHNABELEWOPSKI,
THE RABBI OF BACHARACH, and SHAKE
SPEARE'S MAIDENS AND WOMEN.
II., III. PICTURES OF TRAVEL. 1823-1828. In Two
Volumes.
IV. THE SALON. Letters on Art, Music, Popular Life,
and Politics.
V., VI. GERMANY. In Two Volumes.
VII., VIII. FRENCH AFFAIRS. Letters from Paris 1832
and Lutetia. In Two Vols.
Times. — "We can recommend no better medium for making; acquaintance
at. first hand with 'the German Aristophanes' than the works of Heinrich
Heine, translated by Charles Godfrey Leland. Mr. Leland manages pretty
successfully to preserve the easy grace of the original."
Saturday Review.— ¦" Veriiy Heinrich Heine and not Jean Paul is der
Einzige among Germans: and great is the venture of translating him which
Mr. Leland has so boldly undertaken, and in which he has for the most part
quitted himself so well."
Pall Mall Gazette. ~u It is a brilliant performance, both for the quality of
the translation of each page and the sustained effort of rendering so many of
them. ( There is really hardly any need to learn German now to appreciate
Heine s prose. English literature of this country does not contain much prose
more striking, more entertaining, and more thought provoking than these now
placed before English readers."
Daily Telegraph.— -"Mr. Leland has done his translation in able and scho
larly fashion.' In preparation,
THE POETIC WORKS OF HEINRICH HEINE.
The first of which, forming Vol. IX. of the Works, will be
THE BOOK OF SONGS. Followed by
NEW POEMS.
ATTA TROLL, GERMANY and ROMANCERO
LAST POEMS.
%* Large Paper Edition, limited to loo Numbered Copies, 15s. each, net.
Prospectus on application.

MR. WILLIAM HEINEMANN'S LIST. 7
VICTORIA : Queen and Empress. By John Cordy
Jeaffreson-, Author o "The Real Lord Byron," &c. In Two Volumes
Svo. With Portraits. £1 ios.
ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON: a Study of his Life and
Work. By Arthur Waugh, B.A. Oxon. With Twenty Illustrations
from Photographs Specially Taken for this Work, and Five Portraits.
Third Edition, Revised. Crown 8vo, 6s.
TWENTY-FIVE YEARS IN THE SECRET SERVICE.
The Recollections of a Spy. By Major Le Caron. Ninth Edition.
In One Volume, 8vo. With Portraits and Facsimiles. Price 14J.
ALSO A POPULAR EDITION, without portraits, 8vo, boards, 2s. 6d.
DE QUINCEY MEMORIALS. Being Letters and other
Records here first Published, with Communications from Coleridge, The
Wordsworths, Hannah More, Professor Wilson and others. Edited,
with Introduction, Notes, and Narrative, by Alexander H. Japp, LL.D.,
F.R.S.E. In two volumes, demy 8vo, cloth, with portraits, 30s. net.
RECOLLECTIONS OF MIDDLE LIFE. By Francisque
Sarcey. Translated by E. L. Carey. In One Volume, Svo. With
Portrait, xos. 6d.
PRINCE BISMARCK. An Historical Biography. By
Charles Lowe, M.A. With Portraits. Crown 8vo, 6s.
THE FAMILY LIFE OF HEINRICH HEINE. Illus
trated by one hundred and twenty-two hitherto unpublished letters ad
dressed by him to different members of his famihy. Edited by his nephew
Baron Ludwig von Embden, and translated by Charles Godfrey
Leland. In One Volume, 8vo, with 4 Portraits. 12s. 6d.
RECOLLECTIONS OF COUNT LEO TOLSTOY.
Together with a Letter to the Women of France on the " Kreutzer
Sonata." By C. A. Behrs. Translated from the Russian by C E.
Turner, English Lecturer in the University of St. Petersburg. In One
Volume, 8vo. With Portrait. 105. 6d.
THE LIFE OF HENRIK IBSEN. By Henrik J/eger.
Translated by Clara Bell. With the Verse done into English from the
Norwegian Original by Edmund GoSSE. Crown Svo, cloth, 6s.
QUEEN JOANNA I. OF NAPLES, SICILY, AND
JERUSALEM ; Countess of Provence Forcalquier, and Piedmont. An
Essay on her Times. By St. Clair Baddeley. Imperial 8vo. With
Numerous Illustrations. *6s.
THE POSTHUMOUS WORKS OF THOMAS DE
QUINCEY. Edited with Introduction and Notes from the Author's
Original MSS., by Alexander H. Japp, LL.D, F.R.S.E., &c. Crown
8vo, cloth, 6s. each.
I SUSPIRIA DE PROFUND1S. With other Essays.
II. CONVERSATION AND COLERIDGE. With other
Essays.

8 MR. WILLIAM HEINEMANN'S LIS7.
MR. PUNCH'S POCKET IBSEN. A Collection of some
of the Master's best known Dramas, condensed, revised, and slightly re
arranged for the benefit of the Earnest Student. By F. Anstey Author
of "Vice Versa," "Voces Populi," &c. With Illustrations, reproduced
by permission, from. Punch, and a new Frontispiece, by Bernard Part-.
ridge. i6mo, cloth, ^s. 6d.
FROM WISDOM COURT. By Henry Seton Merriman
and Stephen Graham Tallentvre. With 30 Illustrations by
E. Courboin. Crown 8vo, cloth, 3$. 6d.
THE OLD MAIDS' CLUB. By I. Zangwill, Author of
" The Bachelors' Club." Illustrated by F. H. Townsend. Crown 8vo,
cloth, 3J. 6d.
WOMAN— THROUGH A MAN'S EYEGLASS. By
Malcolm C. Salaman. With Illustrations by Dudley Hardy. Crown
8vo, cloth, 3J. 6d.
THE ART OF TAKING A WIFE. By Professor Mante-
gazza. Translated from the Italian. Crown 8vo, cloth.
GIRLS AND WOMEN. By E. Chester. Pott 8vo, cloth,
2j. 6d. , or gilt extra, 3J. 6d.
QUESTIONS AT ISSUE. Essays. By Edmund Gosse.
Crown 8vo, buckram, gilt top, 7s. 6d.
**** A Limited Edition on Large Paper, 25s. net.
GOSSIP IN A LIBRARY. By Edmund Gosse, Author of
" Northern Studies," &c. Third Edition. Crown 8vo, buckram, gilt top,
js. 6d. *** A Limited Edition on Large Paper, 25$. net.
THE ROSE : A Treatise on the Cultivation, History, Family
Characteristics, &c, of the Various Groups of Roses. With Accurate
Description of the Varieties now Generally Grown. By H. B. Ell-
wanger With an Introduction by George H Ellwanger. i2mo
cloth, 5s
THE GARDEN'S STORY; or, Pleasures and Trials of an
Amateur Gardener. By G. H. Ellwanger. With an Introduction by the
Rev. C. Wolley Dod. i2mo, cloth, with Illustrations, ss.
THE GENTLE ART OF MAKING ENEMIES. As
pleasingly exemplified in many instances, wherein the serious ones of this
earth, carefully exasperated, have been prettily spurred on to indiscretions
and unseemliness, while overcome by an undue sense of right Bv
J , M'Neill Whistler. A New Edition. Pott 4to, half-cloth, 10V. 6d.
THE JEW AT HOME. Impressions of a Summer and
Autumn Spent with Him in Austria and Russia. By Joseph Pennei i
With Illustrations by the Author. 4to, cloth, ss.
THE NEW EXODUS. A Study of Israel in Russia. By
Harold Frederic. Demy 8vo, Illustrated. i6j.
THE GREAT WAR IN 189 -. A Forecast. By Rear-
Admiral Colomb, Col. Maurice, R.A., Captain Maude, Archibald
Forbes Charles Lowe, D Christie Murray, and F. Scudamore.
In One Volume, large 8vo. With numerous Illustrations, 121. 6d.
IDLE MUSINGS: Essays in Social Mosaic. By E Conder
Gray, Author of " Wise Words and Loving Deeds," &c. &c. Crown 8vo
cloth, os. '

MR. WILLIAM HEINEMANN'S LIST. g
STUDIES OF RELIGIOUS HISTORY. By Ernest
Renan, late of the French Academy. In One Volume, 8vo, 7$. 6d.
THE ARBITRATOR'S MANUAL. Under the London
Chamber of Arbitration. Being a Practical Treatise on the Power and
Duties of an Arbitrator, with the Rules and Procedure of the Court of
Arbitration, and the Forms. By Joseph Seymour Salaman, Author of
" Trade Marks," etc. Fcap. Svo. 3$. 6d.
THE COMING TERROR. And other Essays and Letters.
By Robert Buchanan. Second Edition. Demy 8vo, cloth, 12s. 6d.
ARABIC AUTHORS: A Manual of Arabian History and
Literature. By F. F. Arbuthnot, M.R.A.S., Author of " Early Ideas,"
"Persian Portraits," &c. 8vo, cloth, 5s.
THE LABOUR MOVEMENT IN AMERICA. By
Richard T. Ely, Ph.D., Associate in Political Economy, Johns Hopkins
University. Crown 8vo, cloth, 5$.
THE SPEECH OF MONKEYS. By Professor R. L.
Garner. Crown 8vo, 7^. 6d.
THE WORD OF THE LORD UPON THE WATERS.
Sermons read by His Imperial Majesty the Emperor of Germany, while
at Sea on his Voyages to the Land of the Midnight Sun. Composed by
Dr. Richter, Army Chaplain, and Translated from the German by John
R. McIlraith. 4to, cloth, ss. 6d.
THE HOURS OF RAPHAEL, IN OUTLINE.
Together with the Ceiling of the Hall where they were originally painted
By Mary E. Williams. Folio, cloth, £2 2s. net.
THE PASSION PLAY AT OBERAMMERGAU, 1890.
By F. W. Farrar, D.D., F.R.S., Archdeacon and Canon of Westminster,
&c &c. 4to, cloth, 2s. 6d.
THE LITTLE MANX NATION. (Lectures delivered at
the Royal Institution, 1891.) By Hall Caine, Author of "The Bond
man," " The Scapegoat," &c. Crown 8vo, cloth, 3s. 6d.; paper, 2s. 6d.
NOTES FOR THE NILE. Together with a Metrical
Rendering of the Hymns of Ancient Egypt and of the Precepts of Ptah-
hotep (the oldest book in the world). By Hardwicke D. Kawnsley, M.A.
Imperial i6mo, cloth, 5s.
DENMARK: lis History, Topography, Language, Literature,
Fine Arts, Social Life, and Finance. Edited by H. Weitemeyer. Demy
Svo, cloth, with Map, 12s. 6d.
<V Dedicated, by permission, to H.R.H. the Princess of Wales.
THE REALM OF THE HABSBURGS. By Sidney
Whitman, Author of " Imperial Germany." In One Volume. Crown
8vo, 7s. 6d.
IMPERIAL GERMANY. A Critical Study of Fact and
Character. By Sidney Whitman. New Edition, Revised and Enlarged.
Crown Svo, cloth 2s. 6d.; paper, 2j.

io MR. WILLIAM HEINEMANN'S LIST.
THE CANADIAN GUIDE-BOOK. Parti. The Tourist V
and Sportsman's Guide to Eastern Canada and Newfoundland, including full
descriptions of Routes, Cities, Points of Interest, Summer Resorts, Fishing
Places, &c, in Eastern Ontario, The Muskoka Dis;rict, The tit. Lawrence
Region, The Lake St. John Country, The Maritime Provinces, Prince
Edward Island, and Newfoundland. With an Appendix giving Fish and
Game Laws, and Official Lists of Trout and .^almnn Rivers and their
Lessees. By Charles G.D.Roberts, Professor of English Literature in
King's College, Windsor, N.S. With Maps and many Illustrations.
Crown 8vo. limp cloth, 6s.
Part II. WESTERN CANADA. Including the Peninsula
and Northern Regions of Ontario, the Canadian Shores of the Great
Lakes, the Lake of the Woods Regioi , Manitoba and " The Great
North- West," The Canadian Rocky Mountains and National Park,
British Columbia, and Vancouver Island. By Ernest Ingersoll. With
Maps and many Illustrations. Crown 8vo, limp cloth, 6s,
THE GUIDE-BOOK TO ALASKA AND THE NORTH
WEST COAST, including the Shores of Washington, British Columbia,
South-Eastein Alaska, the Aleutian and the Seal Islands, the Behring
and the Arctic Coasts. By E. R. Scidmore. With Maps and many
Illustrations. Crown 8vo, limp cloth, 6s.
THE GENESIS OF THE UNITED STATES. A
Narrative of the Movement in England, 1605-1616, which resulted in the
Plantation of North America by Englishmen, disclosing the Contest
between England and Spain for the Possession of the Soil now occupied
by the United States of America; set forth through' a series of Historical
Manuscripts now first printed, together with a Re-issue of Rare Contem
poraneous Tracts, accompanied by Bibliographical Memoranda, Notes,
and Brief Biographies. Collected, Arranged, and Edited by Alexander
Brown, F. R. H. S. With 100 Portraits, Maps, and Plans. In two volumes
Royal 8vo. buckram, £3 13s. 6d.
jficUon.
In Three Volumes.
THE HEAVENLY TWINS. By Sarah Grand, Author
of"Ideala,"&c. Fourth Thousand.
THE COUNTESS RADNA. By W. E. Norms, Author of
"Matrimony," &c.
THE LAST SENTENCE. By Maxwell Gray, Author of
" The Silence of Dean Maitland," &c. Second Thousand.
AS A MAN IS ABLE. By Dorothy Leighton.
A COMEDY OF MASKS. By Ernest Dowson and
Arthur Moore\ a"u

THE HOYDEN. By Mrs. Hungerford.
A SUPERFLUOUS WOMAN {m No-.emb
BENEFITS FORGOT. By Wolcott Balestier. u».«*v.*

MR. WILLIAM HEINEMANN'S LIST. n
fiction.
Six Shilling Volumes.
FROM THE FIVE RIVERS. By Flora Annie Steel,
Author of " Miss Stuart's Legacy," Crown 8vo, cloth, 6s.
RELICS. By Frances Macnab. Crown 8vo, cloth, 6s.
IDEALA. By Sarah Grand, Author of "The Heavenly
Twins." Fifth Edition. Crown Svo, cloth, 6s.
THE TOWER OF TADDEO. By Ouida, Author of "Two
Little Wooden Shoes," &c. New Edition. Crown Svo, cloth. Illus
trated. 6s.
CHILDREN OF THE GHETTO. By I. Zangwill,
Author of " The Old Maids' Club," &c. New Edition, with Glossary.
Crown 8vo, cloth, 6s.
THE PREMIER AND THE PAINTER. A Fanlastic
Romance. By I. Zangwill and Louis Cowen. Third Edition. Crown
8vo, cloth, 6s.
THE NAULAHKA. A Tale of West and East. By Rudyard
Kipling and Wolcott Balestier. Crown 8vo, cloth, 6s. Second
Edition.
AVENGED ON SOCIETY. By H. F. Wood, Author of
" The Englishman of the Rue Cain," " The Passenger from Scotland
Yard." Crown 8vo. Cloth, 6s.
THE O'CONNORS OF BALLINAHINCH. By Mrs.
HuNGERFORD, Author of " Molly Bawn," &c. Crown Svo. Cloth, 6s.
PASSION THE PLAYTHING. A Novel. By R. Murray
Gilchrist. Crown 8vo, cloth, 6s.
Five Shilling Volumes.

THE SECRET OF NARCISSE. By Edmund Gosse.
Crown 8vo, buckram, 5$.
THE PENANCE OF PORTIA JAMES. By Tasma,
Author of " Uncle Piper of Piper's Hill," &c. Crown Svo, cloth, 5s.
INCONSEQUENT LIVES. A Village Chronicle. By J. H.
Pearce Author of "Esther Pentreath," &c. Crown 8vo, cloth, $s.
A QUESTION OF TASTE. By Maarten Maartens,
Author of " An Old Maid's Love," &c. Crown Svo cloth S£-
COME LIVE WITH ME AND BE MY LOVE. By
Robert Buchanan, Author of "The Moment After," "The Coming
Terror," &c. Crown 8vo, cloth, $s. . ,, „
VANITAS. By Vernon Lee, Author of "Hauntings, eic.
Crown 8vo. cloth, 5s.  . „
THE DOMINANT SEVENTH. A Musical Story. By
Kate Elizabeth Clarke. Crown 8vo, cloth, 5s.
In p repa ra tion .
A BATTLE AND A BOY. By Blanche Willis Howard,
Author of "Guenn," &c. . tTtcb
APPASSIONATA: The Story of a. Musician. By H.LSA
D'Esterre Keeling.
MR BAILEY MARTIN. Bv Percy White.
IN THE DWELLINGS OF SILENCE. A Rom.mco
of Russia. By Walker Kennedy.

MR. WILLIAM HEINEMANN'S LIST.

Ibeinemann's Snternational Xibrarg,
Edited ey EDMUND GOSSE.
New Review. — " If you have any pernicious remnants of literary chauvinism
I hope it will not survive the series of foreign classics of which Mr. William
Heinemann, aided by Mr. Edmund Gosse, is publishing translations to the great
contentment of all lovers of literature."
Each Volume has an Introduction specially 'written by the Editor.
Price, in paper covers, ar. 6d. each, or cloth, 3^. 6d.
IN GOD'S WAY. From the Norwegian of Bjornstjerne
BjORNSON.
Athena'um. — "Without doubt the most important and the most interesting
work published during the twelve months."
PIERRE AND JEAN. From the French of Guy de Mau
passant.
Pall Mall Gazette. — "Admirable from beginning to end."
Athenaum. — " Ranks amongst the best gems of modern French fiction."
THE CHIEF JUSTICE. From the German of Karl Emil
Franzos, Author of " For the Right,*' &c.
New Review. — " Few novels of recent times have a more sustained and
vivid human interest."
WORK WHILE YE HAVE THE LIGHT. From the
Russian of Count Leo Tolstoy.
Manchester Guardian.—" Readable and well translated ; full of high and
noble feeling."
FANTASY. From the Italian of Matilde Serao.
Scottish Leader. — " The book is full of a glowing and living realism. ....
There is nothing like ' Fantasy ' in modern literature."
FROTH. From the Spanish of Don Armando Palacio-
Valdes.
Daily Telegraph.—" Vigorous and powerful in the highest degree."
FOOTSTEPS OF FATE. From the Dutch of Louis
Cou PERUS.
Gentlewoman.—" The consummate art of the writer prevents this tragedy
lrom sinking to melodrama. Not a single situation is forced or a circumstance
exaggerated." ^ c
PEPITA JIMENEZ. From the Spanish of Juan Valera.
ftew Rev,ew (Mr. George Saintsbury) :— " There is no doubt at all that
it is one of the best stories that have appeared in any country in Europe for the
last twenty years. e
THE COMMODORE'S DAUGHTERS. From the Nor-
wegian of Jonas Lie.
.k A\ "'"'",""'¦—'' Everything that Jonas Lie writes is attractive and pleasant ;
the plot of deeply human interest, and the art noble."
THE HF.RITAGE OF THE KURTS. From the Norwegian
Of KjORNSTJERNE BjORNSON. &
¦,r,rnl"J^lCfi''1t"'-~\ " ' * b°°V° read a"d * b°°k t0 thil* about, for,
incontestably, u is the vcik a man of genius." ">'"'>
LOU. Fr..m the German of Baron Alexander von Roberts.
DONA LUZ. From the Spanish of Juan Valera.
THE J EW. From the Polish of Joseph Ignatius Kraszewski
UNDJiR THE YOKE. From the Bulgarian of Ivan Vazoif!

MR. WILLIAM HEINEMANN'S LIST. 13
popular 3s. 65. IRovels.
CAPT'N DAVY'S HONEYMOON, The Blind Mother,
and The Last Confession. By Hall Caine, Author of " The Bondman,"
" The Scapegoat," &c. Sixth Thousand.
THE SCAPEGOAT. By Hall Caine, Author of "The
Bondman," &c. Nineteenth Thousand.
THE BONDMAN. A New Saga. By Hall Caine.
Twenty-third Thousand.
DESPERATE REMEDIES. By Thomas Hardy, Author
of "Tess of the D'Urbervilles," &c.
A LITTLE MINX. By Ada Cambridge, Author of "A
Marked Man," &c.
A MARKED MAN: Some Episodes in his Life. By Ada
Cambridge, Author of "Two Years' Time," "A Mere Chance," &c.
THE THREE MISS KINGS. By Ada Cambridge, Author
of <CA Marked Man."
NOT ALL IN VAIN. By Ada Cambridge, Author of "A
Marked Man," " The Three Miss Kings," &c.
A KNIGHT OF THE WHITE FEATHER. By Tasma,
Author of "The Penance of Portia James," "Uncle Piper of Piper's
Hill," &c.
UNCLE PIPER OF PIPER'S HILL. By Tasma. New
Popular Edition.
THE RETURN OF THE O'MAHONY. By Harold
Frederic, Author of " In the Valley," &c. With Illustrations.
IN THE VALLEY. By Harold Frederic, Author of
" The Lawton Girl," " Seth's Brother's Wife," &c. With Illustrations.
PRETTY MISS SMITH. By Florence Warden, Author
of "The House on the Marsh," "A Witch of the Hills," &c.
THE STORY OF A PENITENT SOUL. Being the
Private Papers of Mr. Stephen Dart, late Minister at Lynnbridge, in the
County of Lincoln. Ey Adeline Sergeant, Author of " No Saint," &c.
NOR WIFE, NOR MAID. By Mrs. Hungerford, Author
of " Molly Bawn," &c.
MAMMON. A Novel. By Mrs. Alexander, Author of " The
Wooing O't," &c.
DAUGHTERS OF MEN. By Hannah Lynch, Author of
"The Prince of the Glades," &c.
A ROMANCE OF THE CAPE FRONTIER. By Bertram
Mitford, Author of "Through the Zulu Country," &c.
'TWEEN SNOW AND FIRE. A Tale of the Kafir War of
1877. By Bert ram Mitford.

i4 MR. WILLIAM HEINEMANN'S LIST.

popular 3s. 65. IRovels.
ORIOLE'S DAUGHTER. By Jessie Fothergill, Author
of " The First Violin," &c.
THE MASTER OF THE MAGICIANS. By Elizabeth
Stuart Phelps and Herbert D. Ward.
THE HEAD OF THE FIRM. By Mrs. Riddell, Author
of " George Geith," " Maxwell Drewett," &c.
ACCORDING TO ST. JOHN. By Am£lie Rives, Author
of " The Quick or the Dead."
KITTY'S FATHER. By Frank Barrett, Author of
"The Admirable Lady Biddy Fane," &c.
DONALD MARCY. By Elizabeth Stuart Phelps,
Author of "The Gates Ajar," &.C.
PERCHANCE TO DREAM, and other Stories. By Mar
garet S. Briscoe.
THE AVERAGE WOMAN. By Wolcott Balestier.
With an Introduction by Henry James.
THE ATTACK ON THE MILL, and other Sketches
of War. By Emile Zola. With an essay on the short stories of M.
Zola by Edmund Gosse.
WRECKAGE, and other Stories. By Hubert Crackan-
thorpe.
MADEMOISELLE MISS, and other Stories. By Henry
Harland, Author of " Mea Culpa," &c.
TRUE RICHES. By Francois Coppee. With an Intro
duction by T. P. O'Connor.
WRECKERS AND METHODISTS. Cornish Stories. By
H. D. Lowry.
LOS CERRITOS. A Romance of the Modern Time. By
Gertrude Franklin Atherton, Author of " Hermia Suydam," and
" What Dreams may Come."
A MODERN MARRIAGE. By the Marquise CLARA LaNZA.
popular Sbtllfng Boofes.
MADAME VALERIE. By F. C. Philips, Author of "As
in a Looking-Glass," &c
THE MOMENT AFTER: A Tale of the Unseen. By
Robert Buchanan.
CLUES ; or, Leaves from a Chief Constable's Note-Book.
By William Henderson, Chief Constable of Edinburgh.

MR. WILLIAM HEINEMANN'S LIST. 15

Dramatic ^Literature.
THE MASTER BUILDER. A Play in Three Acts. Bv
Henrik Ibsen. Translated from the Norwegian by Edmund Gosse
and William Archer. Small 4to, with Portrait, 5s. Popular Edition,
paper, is. Also a Limited Large Paper Edition, 21s. net.
HEDDA GABLER : A Drama in Four Acts. By Henrik
Ibsen. Translated from the Norwegian by Edmund Gosse. Small 410,
cloth, with Portrait, 5s. Vaudeville Edition, paper, xs. Also a Limited
Large Paper Edition, 21s. net.
BRAND. A Drama in Verse. By Henrik Ibsen. Translated
from the Norwegian by C. H. Herford. r Cloth, 5s.
THE PRINCESSE MALEINE: A Drama in Five Acts
(Translated by Gerard Harry), and THE INTRUDER : A Drama in
One Act. By Maurice Maeterlinck. With an Introduction by Hall
Caine, and a Portrait ot the Author. Small 4to, cloth, 5s.
THE FRUITS OF ENLIGHTENMENT : A Comedy in
Four Acts. By Count Lyof Tolstoy. Translated from the Russian by
E. J. Dillon. With Introduction by A. W. Pinero. Small 4to, with
Portrait, 55.
KING ERIK. A Tragedy. By Edmund Gosse. A Re-issue,
with a Preface by Mr. Theodore Watts. Fcap. 8vo, buckram.
THE DRAMA: ADDRESSES. By Henry Irving. 8vo.
With Portrait by J. McN. Whistler. Second Edition. Fcap. 3s. 6d.
SOME INTERESTING FALLACIES OF THE
Modem Stage. An Address delivered to the Playgoers' Club at St.
James's Hall, on Sunday. 6th December, 1891. By Herbert Beerbohm
Tree. Crown 8vo, sewed, 6d.
THE PLAYS OF ARTHUR W. PINERO. With Intro
ductory Notes by Malcolm C. Salaman. i6mo, Paper Covers, is. 6d.
or Cloth, 2S. 6d. each,
I. THE TIMES: A Comedy in Four Acts. With a Preface
by the Author.
II. THE PROFLIGATE : A Play in Four Acts. With
Portrait of the Author, after J. Mordecai.
III. THE CABINET MINISTER: A Farce in Four Acts.
IV. THE HOBBY HORSE : A Comedy in Three Acts.
V. LADY BOUNTIFUL: A Play in Four Acts!
VI. THE MAGISTRATE : A Farce in Three Acts.
VII. DANDY DICK: A Farce in Three Acts.
VIII. SWEET LAVENDER.
To be followed by The Schoolmistress, The Weaker Sex, Lords and
Commons, and The Squire.

16 MR. WILLIAM HEINEMANN 9S LIST.
Ipoetrg.
TENNYSON'S GRAVE. By St. Clair Baddeley. 8vo,
paper, is.
LOVE SONGS OF ENGLISH POETS, 1500—1800.
With Notes by Ralph H. Caine. Fcap. 8vof rough edges, 3^. 6d.
*** Laige Paper Edition, limited to 100 Copies, ios. 6d. Net.
IVY AND PASSION FLOWER: Poems. By Gerard
Bendall, Author of '* Estelle," &c. &c. i2ino, cloth, 3$. 6d.
Scots77tan. — " Will be read with pleasure."
Musical World. — " The poems are delicate specimens of art, graceful and
polished.'
VERSES. By Gertrude Hall. i2mo, cloth, y. 6d.
Manchester Guardian. — " Will be welcome to every lover of poetry who
takes it up."
IDYLLS OF WOMANHOOD. By C. Amy Dawson.
Fcap. 8vo, gilt top, $s.
ibefnemann's Scientific Ibanfcboofts*
MANUAL OF BACTERIOLOGY. By A. B. Griffiths
Ph.D., F.R.S. (Edin.), F.C.S. Crown 8vo, cloth, Illustrated. 7s. 6d.
Pharmaceutical Journal. — "The subject is treated more thoroughly and
completely than in any similar work published in this country  It should
prove a useful aid to pharmacists, and all others interested in the increasingly
important subject of which it treats, and particularly so to those possessing little
or no previous knowledge concerning the problems of micro-biology."
MANUAL OF ASSAYING GOLD, SILVER, COPPER,
and Lead Ores. By Walter Lee Brown, B.Sc. Revised, Corrected
and considerably Enlarged, with a chapter on the Assaying of Fuel &r
By A. B. Griffiths, Ph.D,, F.R.S. (Edin.), F.C.S. Crown 8vo, cloth
Illustrated, js, 6d. '
Colliery Guardian. — "A delightful and fascinating book."
Financial World.—1' The most complete and practical manual on everything
which concerns assaying of all which have come before us."
GEODESY. By J. Howard Gore. Crown 8vo, cloth, Illus
trated, 5s.
St. James's Gazette.— "The book may be safely recommended to those who
desire to acquire an accurate knowledge of Geodesy."
Science Gossip.— " It is the best we could recommend to all geodetic students
It is full and clear, thoroughly accurate, and up to date in all matters of earth
measurements.
THE PHYSICAL PROPERTIES OF GASES Bv
Arthur L. Kimball, of the Johns Hopkins University. Crown 8™
cloth, Illustrated, 5^. ' " ovo>
Chemical News.— "The man of culture who wishes for a general and accurate
acquaintance with the physical properties of gases, will rind in Mr Kimball'!
work just what he requires. * ¦"¦uilu'lu a
HEAT AS A FORM OF ENERGY. By Professor R H
Thurston, of Cornell University. Crown 8vo, cloth, Illustrated u '
Manchester Examiner.- Bears out the character of its predecessors for
discoveries' "° statement and deduction under the light of the most recent
LONDON :
WILLIAM HEINEMANN,
21 BEDFORD STREET, W.C.

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