Catherine: The Portrait of an Empress

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Text originally published in 1935 under the same title.

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Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

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CATHERINE THE GREAT OF RUSSIA

THE PORTRAIT OF AN EMPRESS

BY

GINA KAUS

Translated from the German by

JUNE HEAD

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

ILLUSTRATIONS 4

I—Just an Ordinary Person 5

II—The Bridal Journey 19

III—Elizabeth 32

IV—All Haste 49

V—Loneliness 62

VI—A Child, Two Mothers, and No Father 81

VII—The Grand Duke and the Grand Duchess 91

VIII—The Die Is Cast 123

IX—The Ruler 176

X—Ivan 195

XI—The Masks of Peter III 206

XII—Potemkin, or the Inspired Cyclops 219

XIII—Catherine the Invincible 255

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 270

ILLUSTRATIONS

EMPRESS ELIZABETH PETROVNA—Engraving by E. Chemesov

CATHERINE II, THE GREAT—Mezzotint by J. Walker after Shebanov

THE WINTER PALACE—Anonymous Engraving

TSAR PETER III—Engraving after G. Groth

THE SUMMER PALACE—Anonymous Engraving

COUNT BESTUZHEV-RYUMIN—Engraving by J. Bernigeroff after G. K. Prenner

LIVING-ROOM IN THE KREMLIN

GREGORY ORLOV—Engraving by E. Chemesov

THE IMPERIAL CROWN

CATHERINE IN HER THRONE ROOM—Engraving by Kasachinsky

CATHERINE’S ROYAL SLEDGE—Engraving by Hoppe

GRAND DUKE PAUL PETROVICH—Engraving by H. Benedict

PUGACHEV, THE PEASANT TSAR—Anonymous Mezzotint

PRINCE POTEMKIN—Mezzotint by J. Walker

THE STORMING OF OCHAKOV—Engraving by A. Bartsch after F. Casanova

CATHERINE THE GREAT—Anonymous Oil in the Hofburg, Vienna

I—Just an Ordinary Person

CURIOSITY is persistently inherent in the human mind, which cannot contemplate or marvel at any phenomenon without demanding to know how it came about. What are lightning, thunder, ebb and flow? What is personality? What is genius?

This last question was more easily answered in the days when science halted in shuddering awe before the soul of man and paid homage to the divine spark in every human individual. But if man is no more than the child of his parents, then whatever he is, his parents will in some degree have been; and the biographer in his task of analysing personality need do no more than diligently explore the past and endeavour to assemble piece by piece the heritage which it has built up.

There are few characters in history who have defied this academic conception of heredity so successfully as Catherine the Great. Neither the good in her nor the evil, neither her extraordinary intellect nor her unbridled excesses, shows her to have been the child of her parents. None of her many characteristics-her despotism, her tolerance, her insane recklessness, her wisdom, her generosity, her ruthlessness, least of all her genius and her depravity—can be traced to any one of her ancestors.

Even during her lifetime people found it difficult to connect the Semiramis of the North with the little German Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst she was by birth. Russian Court gossip named as her father a certain Count J. J. Betzkoy, for no other apparent reason than that he lived in his youth at the Court of Zerbst and in later years at the Russian Court, where Catherine treated him with great respect and showed a remarkable indulgence towards his many moral lapses. But even descent from Betzkoy, who was not an outstanding man, would not explain Catherine’s greatness by the theory of heredity—though it might well have explained her viciousness. If Betzkoy were indeed her father, then Catherine’s mother must have deceived her husband at the age of sixteen and within a few months of her marriage—a supposition which would throw a tentative light on one facet at any rate of Catherine’s many-sided and glittering character.

A far more satisfactory solution to the riddle is provided by another legend that was rife during the middle of the nineteenth century: namely, that none other than King Frederick II of Prussia was her natural father. Prince de Ligne mentions it in his Memoirs; the Saxon ambassador to Paris states it as a fact in a letter to Count Sacken; and the German historian Sugenheim, who was by no means addicted to idle gossip, devotes many pages to discussing the hypothesis. There is, indeed, a great deal to be said in its favour. In the first place it lies within the bounds of possibility. Frederick, at that time a dissatisfied crown prince, spent a great deal of his time at Dornburg during the period in question, and it is very probable that Catherine’s mother did the same. True, no records exist to prove that they met at all intimately or even frequently but we are repeatedly confronted with the suggestion, particularly on the part of the German chroniclers, that it was primarily to Frederick that Catherine owed her later good fortune, while the Russian historians refer to her mother as a spy in the service of Frederick of Prussia. And how easily Catherine’s genius might be explained by her descent from the brilliant and gifted Frederick! It is a highly fascinating and promising theory, but it has one flaw—it lacks any reliable historical foundation whatsoever. There is no word of documentary evidence to lift this beautiful hypothesis from the sphere of the possible to that of the probable. Frederick’s interest in Catherine, and the interest of Catherine’s mother in Frederick, were notoriously based on any but romantic grounds—a point which will be dealt with at length later.

Whether we like it or not, we shall have to agree that Catherine’s father was in fact none other than the homely and insignificant Prince Christian August of Anhalt-Zerbst, a scion of the Zerbst-Dornburg family, one of the dozens of minor princes who existed in Germany at that time. Christian August differed in no way from the rest of the members of his family, which he could trace back to the fifteenth century; like them he was a typical Junker, with no outstanding virtues or vices, moderately ambitious, and unassumingly pious; like them, he had fought in a number of campaigns in his youth, had proved himself to be a good soldier, keen and conscientious in the performance of his duty, but had never contrived to distinguish himself by any deed of conspicuous valour. Nothing happened to halt or hasten his career as a dutiful and reliable servant of the Prussian soldier-king Frederick William. At the age of thirty-one he was made commander of the eighth Anhalt-Zerbst regiment of infantry stationed at Stettin, and soon afterwards governor of the city. Basking in the mild favour of his overlord—who in private was in the habit of referring to him as the Prince of Zipfel-Zerbst, an allusion to his caution—and the enjoyment of a sufficient if not princely income from his small estate, he married in the prime of life a princess of his own rank, and became a model husband and father.

His wife was a woman of infinitely more complicated character, though this was to become apparent only later, for at the time of her marriage Johanna Elizabeth was barely sixteen. She was the fourth daughter of the Prince of Holstein-Gottorp and had grown up at the Court of her uncle, the reigning Prince of Brunswick. The Court of Brunswick was at that time the largest in Germany, far outshining in magnificence and pretension that of the miserly Frederick William in Berlin. But Johanna Elizabeth was only a poor cousin; all she could boast was her exalted relationships, and of this she made the most possible use. She had an extraordinarily developed sense of family pride and spent most of her time keeping up family connexions by means of a copious correspondence and personal visits.

She boasted a twofold, in each case a tragic, connexion with the Russian imperial family: her cousin Charles Frederick of Holstein had married Anna, the younger daughter of Peter the Great, who died shortly after the birth of her son Peter Ulrich; and Johanna’s own brother had been betrothed to Anna’s older sister Elizabeth Petrovna, but had died of smallpox in St. Petersburg a few weeks before the marriage was to have been celebrated.

A few days after his wedding, on November 12, 1727, we find Christian August writing to Tsar Peter II in the following strain:

IMPERIAL HIGHNESS,

May you, in your world-renowned magnanimity, not take it ill that I venture to inform you with the most humble respect that on the eighth of November, after previous betrothal, I married the youngest sister of the Bishop of Lübeck, recently deceased in St. Petersburg, the Princess Johanna Elizabeth of Holstein-Gottorp, in the country seat of Wecheln in Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel.

This letter is typical of Christian August’s simple and clumsily deferential style. Johanna, like most ladies of her day, wrote in an eloquent and far more elaborate strain. Yet one may not be far wrong in assuming that it was she who inspired the letter. It would be characteristic of Johanna to think of keeping up her Russian connexions, whereas Christian August had eyes and thoughts only for his German king.

Eighteen months later—on the twenty-first of April 1729—Johanna gave birth to a daughter who was named Sophia Augusta Frederica in honour of her three living aunts. There is, curiously enough, no document in existence recording this event. The church register of Stettin makes no mention either of the birth or baptism of the little Princess of Zerbst. Was there, after all, a mystery surrounding her birth? The true explanation probably lies in the carelessness of some official who could not guess that the names he had forgotten to enter in the church register were those of a future empress. Incidentally their owner was later almost to forget them herself. It was not until she reached her sixteenth year that she received the name by which she was to become immortal: Catherine.

Her birth was a grievous disappointment to her parents, who, not unreasonably, had longed for a son. Sons grew up to be soldiers, and there was always a demand for soldiers. The care of a daughter, on the other hand, meant a heavy burden to a poor but aristocratic family. This disappointment was apparently not easy to overcome; the unwanted daughter, at any rate, was constantly reminded of it, and forty-two years later began her Memoirs with the words: It was told me that I was not so very joyfully welcomed.... A reproach against her parents can be plainly read in these words. My father, however, showed the more satisfaction of the two, she continues, thus casting the onus of blame upon her mother.

Her reproaches were justified. From the very beginning Johanna Elizabeth showed an almost pathological lack of affection for her first-born child. There were, of course, a number of excuses in her favour. To begin with, she was still absurdly young—barely seventeen—when her child was born, and she had her own still unfulfilled demands on life. Accustomed to the luxury and distractions of the Brunswick Court, life in the narrow provincial world of Stettin, at the tiny Court of Zerbst, seemed unspeakably dull and dreary. The income yielded by the little principality was a small one; moreover Christian August was a man addicted to rigid economy, while his young wife yearned for all the things that money could buy. It must take any woman a year or two to become adjusted to a husband more than twice her age, and Johanna was a vital, pleasure-loving girl unused to the ways of a taciturn, puritanical soldier. And it was during this critical period of mutual adaptation that Sophia was born, condemning her mother to months of ill health, and turning out on top of it all to be a girl.

To say that the first cry of a newly born infant involuntarily wakens the physical response of mother love is a pious superstition. Johanna Elizabeth’s case proved the fallacy of such a belief. She was not prepared for motherhood when she carried Sophia in her womb; she had no maternal feeling for the child, either at its birth or afterwards. She neither nursed it, caressed it, nor paid it any attention; it remained foreign and vaguely inimical to her, a creature to be handed over first to a wet-nurse and then from one governess to another. She rarely spoke to the child, and when she did so it was for no other purpose than to reprimand or find fault with her.

Sophia herself, of course, learned only from hearsay of the mixed feelings with which her parents had greeted her arrival in the world. But she was able to judge with her own very immature eyes the joyous welcome that was accorded to the birth of a son two years later. Her earliest and most vivid recollection is one of bitter resentment at the undeserved favouritism shown to her brother.

Two years later she (Sophia’s mother) bore a son whom she loved idolatrously. I was merely endured and was often harshly and violently scolded, and not always with justice. I felt this without, however, being quite clear in my knowledge.

It is not to be wondered that Sophia hated this unreasonably favoured brother of hers. Her childhood recollections make no mention of any brotherly and sisterly affection, and this could hardly have existed in the circumstances, for their mother kept the boy constantly at her side, petting and spoiling him, while she tolerated her daughter’s presence in her apartments for no more than a few minutes each day. Catherine’s Memoirs show no further reference to this brother until his death is reported.

He lived to be only thirteen and died of spotted fever. It was not until after his death that we learned the cause of an illness which had compelled him to walk always on crutches, and for which remedies had been constantly given him in vain and the most famous physicians in Germany consulted. They advised that he be sent to the baths at Baden, Töplitz, and Karlsbad; but he came home each time as lame as when he went away, and his leg became smaller in proportion as he grew. After his death his body was dissected, and it was found that his hip was dislocated and must have been so from his infancy.

This astoundingly cold and impersonal statement cannot conceivably refer to the loss of a beloved playmate; it merely records the death of a hated enemy whose sufferings had been needlessly prolonged. Twenty years after writing this, in 1779, when she was the all-powerful ruler of the greatest empire in Europe, when not only her brother, but her unjust mother as well, had been relegated to a mortal grave, she wrote to her friend Grimm: Never would anyone more than he have deserved a proper—, can you guess what? Mamma gave me plenty when she was in a bad humour, though with scarcely any reason. Neither the death of her childhood rival nor her own fantastic rise to power could wipe out the memory of those unmerited slights.

Whenever in later years Catherine mentioned her childhood, she did so with the pride of a self-made millionaire who loves to recall the fact that he went to school in worn-out boots. She described the poverty-stricken atmosphere of the Court of Zerbst, the narrow-mindedness of her family, her witless teachers; she never spoke wistfully of her youth, she betrayed no hint of that nostalgic longing for the vanished joys of childhood which is known even to the great ones of this earth. She was not a happy child.

She knew no tenderness from her parents. The desire to be loved is surely one of the first and most elementary instincts of the human soul. Sophia suffered from a perpetually unsatisfied hunger for love, even before she realized it or was able to put it into words—a hunger that tormented her for the rest of her life, though later she was to know more than her share of love. Nothing could satisfy that longing which, having been born long before she reached womanhood, was to outlive her womanhood and drive her, a toothless crone, even in the shadow of approaching death, to seek love and still more love, to take it where and however she found it.

But her early years were entirely devoid of love. Her father she forgave. She grew in time to learn that under his rough soldierly exterior a vein of real feeling lay hidden; moreover Christian August was a just man, and justice is a quality infinitely satisfying to the childish mind. I have never known a man more honest in thought and deed than he, she wrote at a time when she knew dozens of men superior to her father in every other respect. She realized, too, that her father was too much occupied by his official duties to have time for his children. What affection he was able to give them was at least divided equally. But her mother was not just. Her mother had time only for her son. Her mother could be gentle and tender, could whisper endearments, bestow a hundred caresses—on her son. For Sophia she had only an impatient word, a sharp rebuke, a swift cuff on the ear.

What was the reason for this singular injustice, for these daily humiliations and slights? We do not know. According to contemporary evidence, Sophia was a pretty, intelligent child, perhaps a trifle high-spirited, but quick to respond to affection. Might it have been that the sight of her served to remind her mother of some guilty secret? It must be repeated: there is no shred of historical evidence to credit such a supposition. The only evident motive was the fact that Sophia was a mere girl while her little brother was a boy. It was, at all events, the only motive Sophia herself could discover, and one that she was constantly reminded of. It formed the obbligato to her childhood and moulded her entire character; it was the irritant around which the pearl took shape—she was only a girl.

But she was a healthy, robust child, possessed of a quick intelligence and a will whose potentialities neither she nor any of those who came in contact with her could guess. Unjustly scolded, humiliated, pushed into the background, she nursed a vast and secret resentment against her mother, against fate, against nature itself. She wanted to be a man, to be as much as and more than any man.

More than a man! That was her earliest and possibly quite unconscious ambition, but it was one which this extraordinary woman never relinquished to the day of her death.

I was brought up, Sophia said on numerous subsequent occasions, to marry one or other of the neighbouring princelings. Indeed, what other destiny could she hope for? The great Courts of Europe could be counted on the fingers of one hand; their heirs had the choice of a host of unmarried princesses, though a choice that was usually dictated by some political motive; and what possible interest could a reigning European family have in seeking an alliance with the insignificant house of Zerbst?

In order to become a satisfactory wife for a German princeling in the eighteenth century, a young princess had first of all to be able to converse and write in French, for in those days the German language was held to be both ugly and vulgar among Germans themselves. She must further have a smattering of music, be able to dance, show a due regard for religion and etiquette, and be modest and unassuming in her manner. That was the ideal to which little Sophia was educated.

A French emigrant, Babette Cardel, was entrusted with Sophia’s upbringing, and she is the only being connected with her child hood of whom Sophia cherishes a kindly and grateful memory. She had a noble soul, a cultured mind, a heart of gold; she was patient, gentle, cheerful, just, consistent—in short the kind of governess one would wish every child to have had.

Whether Babette Cardel really possessed all these virtues, or whether Sophia’s judgment was influenced by a desire to contrast her with her mother, is immaterial. One thing is certain: she gave the child what her mother denied her—time, attention, encouragement, and a sense of loving security. Within a few weeks the suspicious little girl was won over; she was no longer obstinate and rebellious; she lost her sulky reserve and began to show the healthy response of an affectionate and grateful nature. (One cannot always know what children are thinking. Children are hard to understand, especially when careful training has accustomed them to obedience and experience has made them cautious in conversation with their teachers. Will you not draw from that, if you please, the fine maxim that one should not scold children too much but should make them trustful, so that they will not conceal their stupidities from us? To be sure it is much easier for a schoolmaster to govern his pupils with commands.—Catherine to Grimm, 1776.)

Whether Mademoiselle Cardel really knew the plays of Molière and Racine by heart, whether it was she who implanted in Sophia that love of the classics which was to mean so much to her later on, must remain an open question. More important is the fact that she took the little princess into the town gardens and allowed her to play there with the children of simple citizens. One of these was later to recall how at that tender age Sophia already displayed an unusual talent for organization, how she loved to issue commands and showed a particular preference for games that were usually played only by boys. But though this fits well enough into the picture we have made of Sophia’s early days, such remembered incidents and judgments often prove to be unreliable.

For the rest, the little princess’s tutors were an undistinguished set, both as men and teachers. Her writing master would pencil a row of letters which Sophia was made to go over in ink, and her dancing master set her on a high table to practise curtsies and steps. Nevertheless she learned in time both to write and to dance. She had no ear at all for music: to the end of her life it remained a tiresome noise as far as she was concerned. But she greatly enjoyed drawing the pastor who was sent to teach her the Protestant religion into lengthy disputes, and even if she refrained from saying all the things which her subsequent attachment to the works of Voltaire indicate must have lain in her mind, she was in the habit of contradicting him freely, only to be scolded by Mademoiselle Cardel for being what that good lady called an esprit gauche. But these are the only sources of mental stimulation we can discover during this early period of Sophia’s life.

There was one point on which Johanna Elizabeth personally supervised her daughter’s education: though she herself made no virtue of modesty, she did everything in her power to instil that virtue into Sophia. The child was repeatedly told that she was a person of repulsive ugliness, was forbidden to express an opinion unless asked, and was made to approach respectfully all the ladies who visited the house and to kiss the hems of their skirts. This was all the more extraordinary since etiquette at the Court of Zerbst was by no means strictly observed, and even at Courts where a strict degree of formality obtained it was not the custom for princesses to pay respect to their inferiors. This whim of Johanna’s was born of her love of domination and her desire to crush the girl’s eager, budding spirit, to drive the devil of pride out of her.

But Sophia’s pride was an altogether individual thing. It was so deeply ingrained, so securely anchored to a sense of innate strength, that she was never particularly concerned by it; indeed she made so little show of it that she seemed almost to have no pride. She submitted to her mother’s dictates without a murmur, dutifully kissed the dusty trains of the visiting ladies, and towards her mother herself never varied her attitude of assumed respectfulness. This may have been construed as a lack of assertiveness or as weakness, but in later years it was to be recognized as a deliberate policy to which she adhered throughout all the trials and difficulties of her life, even when she was at the height of her power. In time she recognized its usefulness herself and employed it whenever she was in danger of defeat; she would never find better tactics than those of meekness, submissiveness, and deference with which to outwit a personal enemy—the tactics she first discovered at the age of seven or eight, when she was in daily conflict with her capricious mother. It is possible that Mademoiselle Cardel helped her more than she knew. Mademoiselle Cardel’s character had been tempered by experience; a woman of gentle birth, she had accepted a position of inferiority and still contrived to preserve her self-respect, her pride, her equability. Perhaps she succeeded in imparting something of the age-old French heritage of the art of living to the little German princess.

She was assisted in this by the child’s native adaptability. Sophia had a positive and determined character; she welcomed everything that was agreeable in life, responded readily to friendship, was eager to learn, and had a natural capacity for forgetting whatever was sad or unpleasant. She was not a happy child but she was undoubtedly cheerful. This is no contradiction in terms. Her unhappiness had an external source—namely, the lack of family love; her cheerfulness, on the other hand, was a private possession that sprang from the vigour of her healthy young body and the curiosity of her lively mind. As yet both body and mind were denied the opportunity for development; in the eighteenth century little girls did not practise sport, and the dry lessons of her secular and religious mentors provided poor food for a mind teeming with speculations about life and the future. What outlet then had the bubbling vitality of this ten-year-old child? Games in the park and walks with her governess were not enough; moreover Mademoiselle Cardel never left her side, even at night, save for the most needful purposes. Sophia invented a game to make the most of these few minutes of freedom: she ran down and up the four flights of palace stairs and was back in her chair, demure and composed, by the time Mademoiselle Cardel returned. And in the evenings, when the governess, fondly believing her charge to be peacefully asleep, settled down to gossip with the Court ladies in an adjoining room, Sophia would sit bolt upright on her pillow and pretend that she was astride a horse, galloping fast and furious until her strength was exhausted.

Very often Sophia accompanied her parents on their travels. As well as being a custom of the day, it was considered advisable to let as many people as possible know that a well-mannered little daughter was growing up at Zerbst. The real motive behind these frequent journeyings was Johanna Elizabeth’s restlessness: an attractive, spirited woman, not yet thirty, she could never endure the monotony of life at Zerbst for very long at a stretch. First she would betake herself to the glittering Court of Brunswick, where there was a hunting party, a picnic, or an opera performance every day of the week; then to Hamburg, where her mother kept an elaborate establishment; and each February at carnival time she paid a visit to the Court of Berlin, since she felt it was the duty of a woman in her position to wait on the king and the royal family at least once a year.

The chief benefit which Sophia derived from these journeys was that she soon began to realize the petty narrowness of life at Stettin and Zerbst and to notice that her mother, all-powerful at home, became in more polished circles nothing but a very ordinary provincial lady, while her father, the governor, was merely a vassal of the Prussian king.

Once, returning from Hamburg, they stopped at Eutin to visit Johanna’s brother, the Bishop of Lübeck, who after the death of Charles Frederick of Holstein had become Governor of Kiel. He had brought with him to Kiel his ward, the eleven-year-old Peter Ulrich, grandson of Peter the Great. There was every reason why the bishop should have devoted particular care to the upbringing of this boy who was first heir to the throne of Sweden and held a further, if for the moment less hopeful, claim to the crown of Russia. But the task of educating the young can often be a tiresome one, and the bishop had delegated it to a Swede named Brümmer, without troubling to inquire very deeply into that gentleman’s qualifications. Brümmer was, in truth, highly unsuited to the post of tutor to a prince; he lacked education, patience, and natural kindness, and his young pupil soon grew to hate him wholeheartedly. A contemporary commentator writes: Brümmer was far better suited to be a horse trainer than the tutor of a prince. His method of instruction consisted principally of injunctions and punishments and of maintaining a strict but purely superficial discipline.

Sophia eyed this young aspirant to two thrones with unconcealed curiosity. She saw a frail boy, underdeveloped for his age, his puny body further dwarfed by the gorgeous parade uniform into which it had been bundled. His features had a certain wan prettiness, but they were not enhanced by the thin sandy hair that straggled down to his shoulders, and his manner was shy and awkward.

No one seemed to have observed and recorded the historical moment when these two children exchanged their first formal greeting in the manner approved by the rules of Court etiquette—nor could anyone then have guessed how their destinies were fated to become interwoven. A sardonic fate had given to each what the other most passionately desired. How happy Sophia would have felt had she been a boy—a boy with the prospect of one day becoming a ruler of men. And the little boy, whose soul was oppressed by the thought of his future responsibilities even as his delicate body was weighed down by the all too gorgeous uniform, would have considered it heaven to be allowed to play in the park with other children of his own age. Best of all he liked to amuse himself with dolls, but this was the most strictly forbidden of all pleasures. Sophia, on the other hand, would have liked to spend her every waking hour on horseback—mounted astride, of course—and what pains she would have taken if she had thought that her training was a preparation for future kingship! We do not know whether any word concerning this cruel blindness of fate passed between the two children, whether indeed they exchanged more than the barest conventionalities of speech. (What the mature Catherine said concerning this first meeting with her future husband is quite unreliable, for she contradicts herself over and over again. The first version of her Memoirs, written during Peter’s lifetime, is full of praises of the awkward little boy; twenty years later, as the autocratic Empress of Russia, she declared that he was already a drunkard at that early age. In each case she yielded to the temptation of reviewing the past in the light of her feelings at the moment she was writing.)

A year or two later, at her grandmother’s house in Hamburg, Sophia made the acquaintance of the Swedish Count Gyllenborg, an idealist and eccentric, who drew the little girl whom everyone else ignored into conversation and was amazed by her quick and lively intelligence. He was one of those rare individuals who have the power of breaking down the reserve of a child, and it did not take him long to discover that beneath Sophia’s cheerfulness lay a secret unhappiness and to find out the cause of that unhappiness. He did what he could for her and was able to help her a great deal. He encouraged her self-confidence by openly praising her intelligence—he even called her little philosopher, a compliment which made a deep impression on her—and told Johanna Elizabeth in the child’s presence: Madame, you do not know the child; I assure you, she has more mind and character than you give her credit for. I beg you therefore to pay more attention to your daughter, for she deserves it. Johanna Elizabeth was not greatly moved by these words, but her daughter never forgot them.

All the more so since Gyllenborg was the only person who considered her in the least way remarkable. The general consensus of opinion at that period reported her to be a nice, well-mannered child of a naturally cheerful disposition, but no one seems to have been able to discover any remarkable qualities of mind or character in the girl who was destined to become one of the greatest and most notorious figures in the history of the world. Not one of her teachers showed amazement at her quickness; none complained of her violent passions. A lady-in-waiting to her mother remarked of the girl who was later to unite the political genius of a Cæsar with the licentiousness of a Messalina: In her youth I noticed in her only a serious, calculating, and cold intelligence, which was as far removed from anything distinguished or brilliant as it was from error, eccentricity, and frivolity. In a word, I thought her just an ordinary person.

This lady’s judgment deserves full credit, for she resisted the temptation of colouring her original impression by her knowledge of later events. Sophia was no prodigy; at the age of thirteen and fourteen she showed no signs of any exceptional tendencies either towards greatness or depravity. She was simply a normal, healthy being with unplumbed potentialities. Circumstances alone changed the little Sophia into Catherine the Great; she herself contributed nothing but her iron will, her burning ambition, and that which the Baroness von Prinzen, her mother’s lady-in-waiting, shrewdly recognized but clumsily expressed as her calculating and cold intelligence. A cold and calculating intelligence may be useful enough in little ventures, but it leads to no dizzy heights; in order to achieve these an impetus of a vastly different nature is necessary. What Sophia possessed, and what most people who do not possess it are apt to call cold and calculating intelligence, was a sense of reality, a talent for recognizing facts, for admitting them and basing her conduct upon them. She proved this early in life by her attitude towards her mother: sensitive as she was to injustice, she immediately realized the futility of resistance in a situation where power was so unequally distributed. Frederick the Great had to pay far more dearly for this same realization in his relationship with his father.

For Johanna Elizabeth, too, those years were full of bitterness and disillusion. She could not reconcile herself to her lot as the wife of the worthy but excessively dull Christian August. Why, she demanded, could they not move to Berlin, establish themselves near the Court, where at any rate there were interesting people to be met, distractions to be found, and where her husband might improve his position? But Christian August was of a different opinion. His ancestors had all been content to enjoy what their modest lands brought in at home; he had no mind to embark on an adventure that promised no sure reward but only added expenses. What guarantee had he that he would improve his position at the Court of Berlin? Johanna Elizabeth knew as well as he did that there was none. Of course, if she had been the person concerned, it would have been a very different matter. She firmly believed herself to possess all the qualities that go to the making of a great woman—shrewdness, tact, wisdom, and worldliness. And these dazzling gifts were to fade unseen in the provincial obscurity of Zerbst!

In 1740 King Frederick William died. Johanna knew just how it behoved a lady of royal rank to act under such circumstances; since she regarded herself as a member of the Berlin Court, she ordered a mourning gown and did her best to encourage the other ladies of Stettin to follow her example. But they were not at all impressed; they regarded Johanna’s behaviour as entirely lacking in taste, and their gossip eventually reached Berlin. When Johanna arrived at the Court to pay her respects to the new king, an explanation was tactfully demanded of her. She glibly denied the rumours, declaring them to be a spiteful slander invented by her enemies. All the same, she did not see the king; he had other matters to occupy his mind than the women of his family and the affairs of Zerbst: he was preparing for his first Silesian campaign. At the very moment when war was declared, Christian August had a slight paralytic stroke and so lost his first and most promising opportunity of making himself useful to the new king.

Almost simultaneously a piece of interesting news arrived from Russia. Elizabeth, daughter of Peter the Great, had overthrown the Regent Anna and her twelve-month-old son, the baby Tsar Ivan, and had seized the throne for herself. This news filled Johanna with tremendous activity. Elizabeth had been betrothed to Johanna’s brother, and rumour had it that she had remained single ever since his death because she could not forget him; moreover Elizabeth was the aunt of little Peter Ulrich of Holstein and therefore, albeit somewhat distantly, a relation of Johanna’s. Elizabeth had a soft corner in her heart for the Holsteiners; that was well known, for she often inquired about them.

Johanna lost no time in writing to the new empress. This time she did not entrust the task to her slow-witted husband but penned the letter herself and made a far better job of it than he could have done. It was a fulsome letter, overflowing with good wishes for a long life and a prosperous reign, and it did not remain unanswered. As quickly as the postal facilities of the day would permit, a reply arrived. A most fascinating reply. Few things are more charming than for a superior to ask a favour of an inferior, and this was precisely what the empress did. She begged for a portrait of her dead sister Anna which was in the possession of the Princess of Zerbst. One can picture the eagerness with which this request was granted; the very next courier took the portrait of Anna of Holstein out to Russia. A few weeks later the empress expressed her gratitude in truly royal fashion. She sent the dazzled Johanna a miniature of herself set in brilliants, a trinket worth quite twenty thousand thalers. And even that was not enough. Elizabeth of Russia succeeded, where all the devotion of Christian August, all the social efforts of his wife, had failed, in making Frederick recognize the existence of his faithful and devoted servant at Zerbst. Christian August was raised to the rank of field marshal.

Soon afterwards there was fresh news calculated to fan the flame of family pride in Johanna’s breast. The boy Peter Ulrich of Holstein, together with his tutor Brümmer, was suddenly called to Russia, where he was received into the Orthodox Greek Church and formally acknowledged by the Empress Elizabeth as her heir. His guardian, Johanna’s brother, the Bishop of Lübeck, was nominated, at the intervention of Russia, as heir to the Swedish throne in Peter’s place.

The new sun from Moscow warmed the Court of Zerbst with its prodigal rays. Johanna could hold her head high. She had a brother who was a king and a nephew who was heir to a vast empire; her unenterprising husband, who had at last achieved the rank of field marshal by the courtesy of his wife’s benefactress, had entirely fallen out of the picture. She was continually racking her brains to find fresh ways of turning the favour of the empress to account.

In the course of these meditations her eye fell on her daughter. There was nothing remarkable about the child, to be sure, but that was a matter of small moment where political alliances were concerned. Why not make an attempt to play into the hands of fate? Since it amused the empress to collect family portraits, she would surely have no objection to receiving a picture of her young relative at Zerbst. A famous court painter of the name of Paine was living in Berlin at that time. It was his habit to flatter his sitters, and it would surely be an easy matter for him to make a girl of thirteen look like fifteen, to transform a lanky, half-grown stripling into a promising beauty. He could, and he did. Prince August of Holstein took the finished portrait to Russia, and Stehlin, the new tutor of Peter Ulrich—who by this time had been received into the Orthodox Church and as grand duke and heir to the throne of Russia had been given the name of Peter Feodorovich—wrote: The empress is charmed by the expressive features of the young princess, and added: The grand duke also viewed the portrait not without pleasure.

Since the routine of court life does not follow the lines of a musical comedy plot, it may safely be assumed that Cupid had no hand in this affair. Johanna had commissioned her daughter’s portrait to be painted in order that Peter Feodorovich might see it, and the empress had shown it to him so that he might regard it not without pleasure.

But it was still too early for further speculation. More than a year passed without fresh news from Russia. Life at Zerbst dragged on its accustomed, monotonous course.

Sophia was now fourteen, tall and thin, not exactly beautiful, but of a prepossessing appearance. Her hair was black and silky and her eyes dark and bright under a high, well-developed forehead. She was still convinced of her own ugliness and paid no attention to her clothes or her style of hairdressing; she was still Cinderella, overshadowed by her gayer and prettier mother. But she had discovered the secret of making people like her, and she practised this newly discovered art assiduously. Those who imagine that this future Aspasia began her career by turning men’s heads, are on an entirely wrong track. Sophia was anything but a coquette; it was not sexual admiration she wished to attract, but sympathetic understanding. She needed this, hungered for it, demanded it indiscriminately from men and women, old and young, great and small. To this end she used means so humble that they appeared sublime. At fourteen she had already realized that people prefer to be admired rather than to admire, to talk rather than to listen. Her mother had all the pretentious airs of a woman who thinks herself more than she is; Sophia’s manner was simple and natural in the extreme. Her mother fawned on those who were her superiors, was