Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

Catherine replied with an oral message that went something like this: ‘I cannot understand what can have reduced him to such despair since I have never declared against him. I fancied on the contrary that the affability of my reception must have given him to understand that his homage was not displeasing.’²⁰ It was not enough. The fasting, chanting, rustling of go-between skirts and delivery of messages continued. The holier of the monks must surely have rolled their eyes at this worldly bustle.

Catherine, by all accounts, made up her mind and despatched Countess Bruce – ironically, Rumiantsev’s estranged sister – to bring Potemkin back. The Countess, in all her finery, arrived at the monastery in a Court coach. She was taken to Potemkin, who was bearded, wearing monk’s habit and prostrated in a plain cell before an icon of St Catherine. In case the Countess was in any doubt about his sincerity, he continued praying and chanting for a very long time. Finally Potemkin deigned to hear her message. He then swiftly shaved, washed and dressed in uniform to re-emerge at Court.

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What was Catherine feeling during this operatic interlude? During the next weeks, when they were finally lovers, she revealed to him, in this most tender and moving account, how she already loved him by the time he returned from the army:

Then came a certain hero [bogatr]: this hero, through his valour and demeanour, was already very close to our heart; on hearing of his arrival, people began to talk of his staying here, not knowing we had already written to him, on the quiet, asking him to do so, with the secret intention however of not acting blindly when he did come, but of trying to discover whether he really had the inclination of which Countess Bruce said that many suspected him, the inclination I wanted him to have.²¹

The Empress was at Tsarskoe Selo outside the city. Potemkin rode out there, most likely accompanied by Countess Bruce. The Court Journal tells us that Potemkin was presented on the evening of 4 February: he was ushered straight into her private apartments, where they remained alone for an hour. He is mentioned again on the 9th, when he attended a formal dinner at the Catherine Palace. They dined officially together four times in February, but we can guess that they were together much more: we have a few undated notes from Catherine to Potemkin that we can place in those days.²² The first is addressed ‘Mon ami’, which suggests a growing warmth but warns him about bumping into a shocked Grand Duke, who already hated Prince Orlov for being his mother’s lover.²³ In the second, written a few days later, Potemkin has been promoted to ‘Mon cher ami’. Already she is using the nicknames they have made up for the courtiers: one of the Golitsyns is ‘M. le Gros’ – ‘Fatty’ – but, more importantly, she calls Potemkin ‘l’esprit’ – ‘the wit’.²⁴

They were coming closer by the hour. On the 14th, the Court returned to the Winter Palace in town. On the 15th, there was another dinner with both Vassilchikov and Potemkin among the twenty guests. One can imagine the unhappiness of poor Vassilchikov as Potemkin dominated the scene.

Potemkin and the Empress might have consummated their love affair around this time. Few of their thousands of notes are dated, but there is one that we can tentatively place around 15 February in which Catherine cancels a meeting with ‘l’esprit’ in the banya, the Russian steam-bath, mainly because ‘all my ladies are there now and probably won’t leave for another hour’.²⁵ Ordinary men and women bathed together in banyas in the eighteenth century, much to the indignation of foreigners, but empresses did not. This is the first mention of Catherine and Potemkin meeting in the banya, but it was to be their favourite place for rendezvous. If they were meeting in the intimate banya on the 15th, it is likely they were already lovers.

On the 18th, the Empress attended a Russian comedy at the House of Opera and then probably met Potemkin in her apartments. They talked or made love until one in the morning – extremely late for that disciplined Germanic princess. In a note in which one can sense their increasing intensity but also her submissiveness to him, she sweetly worries that ‘I exceeded your patience…my watch stopped and the time passed so quickly that an hour seemed like a minute.’²⁶