Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

Potemkin’s uncouth behaviour shocked the usually Francophile courtiers and the fastidious ambassadors, but when he felt like it he appeared in formal or military uniform with the perfect grace and immaculate presentation of a dapper courtier. Everything with him was a battle of extremes. If he was thoughtful or brooding, as he was very often, he would bite his nails to the quick: he was to suffer terribly from hangnail for his whole life, so that the letters between the two rulers of the Empire would often be distracted from laws and wars by the state of his fingertips. ‘The greatest nailbiter in the Russian Empire’, was what Catherine called him. ‘The Cyclops’, wrote Alexander Ribeaupierre, ‘has a charming habit. He bites his nails with frenzy right down to the skin.’¹⁵ If it was not his nails, it was anything else close within reach. At the Little Hermitage, where the Empress had written out a list of rules to enforce informality, she added a special rule aimed at her Potemkin. ‘You are requested to be cheerful,’ went Rule Three, ‘without however destroying, breaking or biting anything.’¹⁶

Nonetheless Potemkin took over Catherine’s apartments too: he put a huge Turkish divan in her salon so he could lounge around in his dressing gown – ‘Mister Tom [Catherine’s English greyhound] is snoring very deeply behind me on the Turkish divan General Potemkin has introduced,’¹⁷ Catherine told Grimm rather proudly. His effects were strewn around her neat rooms – and she admired his untamed, almost Bohemian, nonchalance: ‘How much longer will you leave things in my rooms that belong to you!’, she wrote to him. ‘Please do not throw your handkerchiefs all over the shop in your Turkish fashion. Many thanks for your visit and I love you a lot.’¹⁸

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It is impossible to reduce a friendship yet alone a love to its components. But, if anything, their relationship was based on laughter, sex, mutually admired intelligence, and power in an order that changed all the time. His wit had made her laugh when Orlov presented him twelve years before – and that continued throughout their lives. ‘Talking of originals who make me laugh and above all of General Potemkin,’ Catherine told Grimm on 19 June that year, ‘who is more à la mode than any one else and who makes me laugh so much I could burst my sides.’¹⁹ Their letters were pervaded as much by her guffaws as by the force of their ambition and attraction: ‘Darling, what stories you told me yesterday! I can’t stop laughing when I think of them. What happy times I am spending with you!’²⁰

There were lots of games that involved Potemkin competing with Mister Tom to see who could unleash more disorder in the imperial apartments. Her letters to Grimm are filled with Potemkin’s antics including his covering himself with Mister Tom’s little rug, a most incongruous sight: ‘I’m sewing a new bed-blanket for Thomas…that General Potemkin pretends to steal from him.’²¹ Later Potemkin was to introduce a badly behaved monkey.

She was never bored with Potemkin and always bored without him: he was protean, creative and always original. When she had not seen him for a while, she grumbled: ‘I’m bored to death. When will I see you again?’ But, as so often happens in love affairs, the laughter and the love-making seemed to lead inexorably to each other. Her sexual happiness shines through her letters. The affair was highly sexual. She was extremely proud of his sex appeal to other women and his record of female conquests. ‘I don’t wonder that there are so many women attributed to you,’ she wrote to him. ‘It seems to me that you are not an ordinary person and you differ from everyone else in everything.’²²

Darling I think you really thought I would not write today. I woke up at five and now it is seven, I will write…I have given strict orders to the whole of my body, down to the last hair to stop showing you the smallest sign of love. I have locked up my love in my heart under ten locks, it is suffocating there and I think it might explode. Think about it, you are a reasonable man, is it possible to talk more nonsense in a few lines? A river of absurdities flows from my head, I do not understand how you can bear a woman with such incoherent thoughts. Oh Monsieur Potemkin! What a trick have you played to unbalance a mind, previously thought to be one of the best in Europe. It is time, high time, for me to become reasonable. What a shame! What a sin! Catherine II to be the victim of this crazy passion…one more proof of your supreme power over me. Enough! Enough! I have already scribbled such sentimental metaphysics that can only make you laugh. Well, mad letter, go to that happy place where my hero dwells…Goodbye, Giaour, Muscovite, Cossack…²³