Catherine the Great

Within three days, Johanna was able to report to Frederick: “The prince, my husband, has signified his approval. The journey, which at this time of year is an exceedingly dangerous one, holds no terrors for me. I have made my decision and am firmly convinced that everything is happening in the best interests of Providence.”

Prince Christian was not the only member of the Zerbst family whose role in this momentous undertaking was unmistakably secondary. As Johanna read and wrote, ordered and tried on clothes, Sophia was ignored. The money available went into improving her mother’s wardrobe; nothing was left for the daughter. Sophia’s clothing—what might have been considered her trousseau—consisted of three old dresses, a dozen chemises, some pairs of stockings, and a few handkerchiefs. Her bridal linen was made up of a few of her mother’s used sheets. Altogether, these fabrics filled half of a small trunk of a size that a local girl might carry with her when she traveled to be married in the next village.

Sophia already knew what was happening. She had caught a glimpse of Brümmer’s letter and saw that it came from Russia. As her mother was opening it, she had read the words, “accompanied by the princess, your eldest daughter.” Moreover, her mother’s subsequent breathless behavior and her parents’ hasty withdrawal to whisper together encouraged her belief that the letter concerned her future. She knew the importance of marriage; she remembered the excitement her mother had shown four years earlier when she met the little duke Peter Ulrich; she knew that her portrait had been sent to Russia. Eventually, unable to contain her curiosity, she confronted her mother. Johanna admitted what the letters said and confirmed what they implied. “She told me,” Catherine wrote later, “that there was also a considerable risk involved, given the instability of that country. I answered that God would provide for stability, if such was his will; and that I had sufficient courage to face the risk, and that my heart told me that all would be well.” The matter that tormented her father—the question of a change in her religion—did not trouble Sophia. Her approach to religion was, as Pastor Wagner already knew, pragmatic.

During this week, which was to be their last together, Sophia did not tell Babet Cardel about her imminent departure. Her parents had forbidden her to mention it; they put it about that they and their daughter were leaving Zerbst simply to pay their annual visit to Berlin. Babet, keenly attuned to her pupil’s character, realized that no one was being straightforward. But the pupil, in her tearful farewell to her beloved teacher, still would not reveal the truth. And teacher and pupil were never to see each other again.

On January 10, 1744, mother, father, and daughter entered a carriage for the ride to Berlin, where they were to see King Frederick. Sophia now was as eager as her mother. This was the escape she had dreamed of, the beginning of her climb toward a higher destiny. When she left Zerbst for the Prussian capital, there were no painful scenes. She kissed her nine-year-old brother, Frederick (Wilhelm, the brother she hated, was already dead), and her new little sister, Elizabeth. Her uncle, George Lewis, whom she had kissed and promised to marry, was already forgotten. As the carriage rolled through the city gates and onto the high road, Sophia never turned to look back. And in the more than five decades of her life that lay before her, she never returned.

3

Frederick II and the Journey to Russia

THREE AND A HALF YEARS before Sophia and her parents visited Berlin, when twenty-eight-year-old Frederick II ascended the throne of Prussia, Europe confronted an intriguing bundle of contradictions. The new monarch possessed an enlightened mind, restless energy, political astuteness, and remarkable—if thus far unrevealed—military genius. When this introspective lover of philosophy, literature, and the arts, who was also a ruthless practitioner of Machiavellian statecraft, came to the throne, his small kingdom was already pulsing with militant energy, ready to expand and make its mark on the history of Europe. Frederick had only to give the order to march.