Simon Dixon - Catherine the Great

By the time their party approached the Russian capital on Saturday 15 June 1773, Grigory Orlov had already been back at Court for almost a month, having resumed all his former offices except that of favourite on 20 May. It was he who rode out with General Bauer to meet the girls on their way from Count Karl Sievers’ estate at Seltsa. Catherine was waiting for them at Gatchina, where they arrived at two o’clock in time for lunch. Paul caught his first sight of his future wife when they set off for Tsarskoye Selo three hours later. He met them halfway, stepping out of his carriage to pay his respects to their mother, Landgravine Caroline. On reaching the palace, where a small crowd had gathered to greet them at the gates, the guests were given an hour to unwind in their apartments before being taken to the Picture Gallery, lined from floor to ceiling with 130 seventeenth-century masterpieces, mostly Flemish and Dutch, as a way of emphasising Russia’s rightful place among the European great powers. 24At her most resplendent in the insignia of the Order of St Andrew, the empress engaged them in conversation until she retired to bed at ten. At the dinner which followed, protocol dictated that the eldest girl, Amalia, and her mother should sit beside Paul while the seventeen-year-old Wilhelmina found herself sandwiched between Panin and Lev Naryshkin, the leading voice in foreign affairs and the wittiest man at Court. 25The same pattern followed next day, as banquet followed upon banquet in an effort to overwhelm the guests with the magnificence of Russian power. Sometimes they dined outside on the balcony, on tables made from the finest mahogany; a band played as they strolled through the garden to the grotto. Catherine was delighted to find that Wilhelmina seemed to confirm all her instincts. In view of her evident desire that her son’s marriage should be happier than her own, it was even more reassuring that Paul instantly liked the girl (by no means a foregone conclusion, particularly for such a temperamental youth) and she accepted him. At lunch on 17 June, they sat next to each other for the first time. 26Within four days of her arrival, the deal was done. Soon the young princess was taking instruction in Orthodoxy from Father Platon, now archbishop of Tver, whose Short Course in Christian Theology was familiar to her mother in German translation. 27

Still dreaming of a ‘crusade’ to Constantinople, Voltaire would have preferred Wilhelmina to be ‘re-baptised in the church of Saint Sophia, in the presence of the prophet Grimm’. 28Instead, she was converted at the end of the Dormition Fast on 15 August, taking the name Natalia Alekseyevna. The couple were betrothed next day. At the end of the month, in a further demonstration of Orthodox splendour, Catherine was again persuaded to trudge to the Alexander Nevsky monastery on the saint’s feast day, for only the second time since 1762. While Landgravine Caroline looked on from Field Marshal Golitsyn’s house near the Kazan Church, Paul and his fiancée joined the empress in the procession. Wearing the small crown and dressed as a knight of the Order of St Alexander, she emerged from the Winter Palace at ten o’clock to be driven to the church, where Grigory Orlov greeted her at the door, resplendent in his silver guards’ uniform. Platon and the bishop of Mogilëv, Georgy (Konissky), led a brief service for the knights, already gathered inside the church. Then, flanked by more than fifty liveried servants, banner-carrying clergy set out on foot to the monastery. The knights followed two-by-two in order of seniority. Behind them came Paul, Natalia and Catherine herself, accompanied by senior courtiers. The Horse Guards brought up the rear. Having twice paused for prayers, first at the Anichkov bridge and then opposite the Church of the Entry into Jerusalem, the empress reached the monastery gates just before midday. Archbishop Gavriil led her past the serried ranks of the Izmailovsky Guards to a service conducted by Innokenty (Nechaev), the bishop of Pskov. Suspending her disbelief during prayers, Catherine kissed the shrine containing the saint’s relics. It was three in the afternoon before she returned to the palace, where the customary banquet and ball continued into the small hours. 29

They returned to the Kazan Church for the wedding on 29 September, nine days after Paul’s nineteenth birthday had signalled his coming-of-age in Russia. Just as Catherine’s wedding had been, the ceremony was followed by ten days of celebrations, advertised almost immediately in an official guide to the proceedings. 30Gunning echoed Lord Hyndford’s praise in 1745: ‘The weather was remarkably fine, which added much to the splendid appearance of the equipages and dresses, the magnificence of which nothing could exceed.’ 31To compensate him for the loss of his tutorship, and with it the direction of the Young Court, Panin was rewarded on coronation day with the rank of field marshal, 10,000 serfs, 100,000 roubles for a house, another 50,000 for a silver service, and an annual pension of 30,000. For eleven years, Catherine had lived in fear that Paul might die before reaching the age of majority. His survival had helped to ensure hers. Relieved that her son’s majority had passed without any increase in his political influence, she was not to know that a very different menace was brewing among rebellious Cossacks in the lands east of the Volga. Instead, in the brief interval before disaster struck, she delighted in her first encounter with one of the closest friends of her life and one of the most brilliant minds of the age.

Friedrich-Melchior Grimm had edited the Correspondance littéraire for twenty years before leaving for Russia in the entourage of Wilhelmina’s brother, Ludwig, whose Grand Tour he had been conducting since 1771. D’Alembert, who edited the Encyclopédie with Diderot, had recommended this fortnightly manuscript newsletter to Catherine as long ago as 1764. She became a regular subscriber in the following year, joining the elite circle of crowned heads, never more than fifteen in number, who relied on Grimm for a digest of the Parisian journals and an insider’s view of the salons. As a member of the philosopher Baron d’Holbach’s circle, he was well placed to report on the philosophes and pulled no punches in his accounts of their debates. D’Holbach’s own Good Sense , written in response to critics of his System of Nature , was breezily dismissed as ‘atheism made easy for chambermaids and wigmakers’. 32Grimm helped to confirm Catherine’s low view of Rousseau (Voltaire was delighted to join in) and steered her towards a more favourable appreciation of Beccaria. He sent her the abbé Galiani’s influential treatise on grain prices in 1770. More practically, in his acknowledged role as ‘a great friend of humanity’, 33he had not only helped her to acquire Diderot’s library and numerous works of art, but also, as a trusted servant of Landgravine Caroline, played a crucial part as matchmaker for Paul and Natalia.

Since Catherine had every reason to admire him, Grimm found himself subjected to a charm offensive almost as soon as he arrived in St Petersburg. Even before the wedding, General Bauer had already made the first attempt to lure him into Russian service; Vladimir Orlov tried again shortly afterwards. Grimm found the courage to refuse in an audience, scheduled to last five minutes, which went on for an hour and a half. 34Dubbed ‘the white tyrant’ thanks to his penchant for face powder, he knew that no amount of make-up could conceal the social chasm separating a pastor’s son from Regensburg from a reigning empress. Nevertheless, he was determined to try. ‘I believe that it is unprecedented that a man of my station should have been treated by the sovereign of one of the most powerful empires with the kindness that I have experienced,’ Grimm boasted to Mme Geoffrin. Though protocol kept him well down the table at mealtimes, he was drawn into Catherine’s intimate circle after dinner. Predictably, he found her ‘a charming woman, the like of whom is not to be found in Paris’, admiring the way that she chattered, ‘often very gaily about serious things, and very seriously about frivolous things, by virtue of the laws of all good conversation’. 35