Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

One day, Potemkin arrived back at the Palace. ‘Dear matuskha, I have just arrived but I am so frozen that I cannot even get my teeth warm,’ he announced to her. ‘First I want to know how you are feeling. Thank you for the three garments and I kiss your feet.’ We can imagine the messengers or ladies-in-waiting scampering back and forth down the miles of corridors in the Winter Palace bearing Catherine’s reply: ‘I rejoice that you are back, my dear. I am well. To get warm: go to the bath; it has been heated today.’³¹ Later the servant brought her the news that Potemkin had finished his bath. So the Empress sent back another note: ‘My beauty, my darling, whom nothing resembles, I am full of warmth and tenderness for you and you will have my protection as long as I live. You must be, I guess, even more handsome than ever after the bath.’³²

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Lovers tend to share the details of their health: Potemkin and Catherine shared theirs through their lives. ‘Adieu monsieur,’ she scribbled one morning before going out, ‘how did you sleep? How is your fever? It would be so nice to sit and talk.’³³ When his fever eased, she tempted him back. ‘You will see a new routine,’ she promised. ‘At first I will receive you in my boudoir, I will make you sit down near the table and there you will be warm and so will not get a cold…And we will start to read a book and I will let you go at half past ten…’.³⁴

When he was better, it was her turn to be ill: ‘I slept very well but not much; I’ve got a headache and pain in my chest. I don’t know if I’ll go out today. If I do go out, it’s only because I love you more than you love me and I can prove it as 2+2=4. I will go to see you. Not every person is so clever, so handsome, so lovely as you are.’³⁵

Potemkin himself was a notorious hypochondriac. But even when he was ill he was always in a state of nervous tension, so that sometimes Catherine assumed the tyrannical tone of a brisk German matron to calm him down: ‘Really, it is time to settle down to the right order of things. Be quiet and let me be quiet too. I tell you sincerely that I’m most sympathetic about your illness but I will not spoil you by words of tenderness.’³⁶ When he really was sick: ‘My beloved soul, precious and unique, I can find no words to express my love for you. Don’t be upset about your diarrhoea – it will clean up the bowels well…’.³⁷ Bowels particularly resonate through the letters of that century.

When she herself came down with diarrhoea, she was concerned, like any woman would be, that her lover did not startle her in an undignified position. ‘If you really must see me, send somebody to tell me; since six this morning I have had the most atrocious diarrhoea.’ Besides she did not want to visit him down the icy Tsarskoe Selo corridor: ‘I am sorry but passing through the non-heated corridor…would only make my aches worse…I’m sorry you’re ill. Try to be quiet, my friend, that is the best cure.’³⁸

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Catherine was thrilled to have found a partner who could be an equal of sorts: ‘My darling, the time I spend with you is so happy. We pass four hours, boredom vanishes and I don’t want to part from you. My dearest friend, I LOVE YOU SO MUCH, you are so handsome, clever, jovial and funny; when I am with you I attach no importance to the world. I have never been so happy. Very often I want to keep my feelings from you but usually my heart just blabs out my passion.’³⁹ But even in these early idyllic days of this great love Potemkin was already tormented by his contradictory appetites: a childish hunger for attention and love versus a wild yearning for freedom and independence.

Catherine’s solution to the first problem was to spoil Potemkin day and night with her attention, which he sucked up, for he was quite as greedy for love as she was. The Empress of all the Russias could not humble herself enough before this proud Russian: ‘My dear dove, my precious friend, I must write to you to keep my promise. Please know that I love you and this shouldn’t surprise anyone. For you, one would do the impossible and so I’ll be either your humble maid or your lowly servant or both at once.’⁴⁰ Potemkin constantly demanded more and more attention. He wanted to know she was always thinking about him. If not, he sulked.