Simon Dixon - Catherine the Great

Meanwhile the Court was re-adapting to life in the north after its prolonged stay in the old capital. At the end of his affair with Countess Stroganova, Panin had unexpectedly found happiness (and renewed respectability) with one of Catherine’s maids of honour, Countess Anna Sheremeteva. Since he was by no means a rich man, her income of 40,000 roubles and family connections made this, as the Prussian ambassador reported, ‘the most eminent match that could be made in Russia’. 92A less fortunate courtier was forced to appeal to the empress when his mother-in-law refused to allow his wife to accompany him to St Petersburg. Catherine sent an official to fetch the girl, entrusting him with a letter for Moscow’s Governor General that combines a sense of legal propriety with unmistakeable hauteur:

If the mother becomes stubborn and wants to travel with her daughter, then prevent the mother from leaving the town by my command and bring the daughter whatever happens. If they say that she is ill, then fetch a doctor to examine her to see whether Lopukhina is fit to travel without endangering her life. If the mother cries out a lot, then you should order her to be silent by my command. So that all this should not strike you as strange, let me explain in confidence that the mother will not allow her daughter to join her husband and that the husband has appealed to me to give him his wife. I found his request so just and so in conformity with the laws that I could not refuse; but the mother is to be told nothing of this. Please give the Court official any assistance he needs: the shorter and less public the scene, the better. 93

For her own part, it was time to catch up with old friends. Within a couple of days of her return to St Petersburg, she had made an informal visit to the girls at the Smolny Institute. Alexander Stroganov entertained her to lunch in March. After Easter, she received Archbishop Gavriil, elected to the Legislative Commission in place of Dimitry, who was escorted to his audience in the Diamond Room by ten noble deputies. 94Then tragedy struck when Panin’s fiancée died from smallpox. Despite her sympathy for his loss, Catherine was more anxious about the threat to her son. Though his Young Court had always been alert to the danger from urban epidemics, now the menace was closer to home. 95As the empress secretly admitted to Yelagin, the public would never forgive her if the legitimate heir to the throne were to die in her care. ‘I am very worried, not being sure what to do for the best, since everything in this critical situation is bad.’ 96Reduced to flitting from one suburban palace to another in the hope of dodging the disease, she tried to relax on the boats and toboggans at Gatchina, and spent longer than usual at Tsarskoye Selo. ‘Here I am with my son for the seventh week running,’ she told Saltykov at the end of May, ‘and there’s such an outbreak of the pox, and that of the worst kind, that I decided it was better to live here. It’s grist to my mill to have a pretext to stay in the country.’ 97Nothing, she told Panin, could quite match her favourite summer palace:

Count Nikita Ivanovich. Having parted from you on Thursday, we found ourselves in an autumn zephyr in the hills on the way to Krasnoye Selo, although we had left Tsarskoye Selo in very warm weather. On Friday, we travelled in the rain to Gatchina and came back in such a sharp frost that we all wished we had taken our fur coats. Yesterday was Saturday, and although the skies were grey, we didn’t feel the cold and are warm and well at Peterhof. Still, it touches the heart to see everything here so neglected, although I have spent a hundred and eighty thousand on it since 1762, including twenty thousand to pay off the debt on the iron piping alone, and the devil alone knows what has been done with the money if it hasn’t been used to repair Peterhof. I think it may have been used to pay off the debts of the Construction Chancellery. 98

As Catherine knew, the chancellery was still as active as ever. Shortly before leaving Moscow, she had agreed to spend 64,915 roubles on marble from the western shores of Lake Ladoga for a new cathedral in honour of St Isaac of Dalmatia. The total budget, to be paid for from state funds, was almost four times as much. 99As the empress explained, it was not the first attempt to build such a church, which had ‘suffered more tribulations and persecutions than the early Christians’. 100Peter the Great had been born on St Isaac’s feast day—30 May 1672—but his own St Isaac’s Cathedral, where he married Catherine I in 1712, had burned down five years later and its replacement proved to have been built too close to the river. Chevakinsky was appointed to design a grandiose Baroque successor in the last year of Elizabeth’s reign, but by 1768 a revised project was in the hands of Rinaldi, currently building a mansion for the Naryshkins on the western side of St Isaac’s Square. 101Although it was not until the following January that Catherine saw the architect’s model of the cathedral—a work of art in itself, promising a riot of jasper, marble and porphyry in the manner of the Marble Palace she had commissioned that same year for Grigory Orlov—by midsummer, it was time for her to lay the foundation stone. She inspected the site on 10 July, following lunch with Betskoy and a brief visit to the Academy of Arts on the other side of the river. After reviewing naval exercises in the Gulf on her yacht, the Saint Catherine —‘yesterday and the day before,’ she boasted, ‘I covered ninety miles by sea’—Catherine went to Oranienbaum for the feast of St Panteleymon the Healer on 27 July and to Peterhof for the customary summer sanctification service four days later. Then, braving her fears of the pox, she was back in St Petersburg for the foundation ceremony on 8 August. 102

Since this was the first public spectacle witnessed by William Richardson, tutor to the sons of the new British ambassador, Lord Cathcart, let Richardson describe the scene:

All the space to be occupied by the church had been previously railed in; and into this place, only persons of high rank, and those who had a particular permission, were admitted. An immense multitude of people were assembled without. An arch, supported upon eight pillars of the Corinthian order, and adorned with garlands, was raised immediately over the place intended for the altar. Beneath this arch was a table covered with crimson velvet, fringed with gold; upon which was placed a small marble chest, fixed to a pully directly above the table. On a side-table, fixed to one of the pillars, was a large gold plate, two pieces of marble in the form of bricks, a gold plate with mortar, and other two plates of the same metal, in which were two hammers and two trowels of gold. 103

Although guests had been ordered to take their places by 9.30 a.m., it was not until midday that the carriages bearing the imperial party arrived from the Summer Palace. 104Paul came first, dressed in naval uniform and attended by Panin. Then, bringing up the rear of a solemn clerical procession, Catherine herself appeared, wearing ‘a silver-stuff negligee, the ground pea-green, with purple flowers and silver trimming’, and carrying a small, green parasol. She made a powerful impression:

The Empress of Russia is taller than the middle size, very comely, gracefully formed, but inclined to grow corpulent; and of a fair complexion, which, like every other female in this country, she endeavours to improve by the addition of rouge. She has a fine mouth and teeth; and blue eyes, expressive of scrutiny, something not so good as observation, and not so bad as suspicion. Her features are in general regular and pleasing. Indeed, with regard to her appearance altogether, it would be doing her injustice to say it was masculine, yet it would not be doing her justice to say it was entirely feminine.