Catherine the Great

Eventually, however, Diderot realized that the empress did not intend to put into practice any of the advice he had been preaching for so many weeks, and the glow of their first conversations began to fade. His own worsening health, his loneliness in an alien court, the open hostility of courtiers jealous of his easy access to the sovereign, all contributed to Diderot’s increasing desire to return home. He had seen much of Catherine but almost nothing of Russia. When he spoke of departing, she did not urge him to stay. He had been her guest for five months, and she had sat with him for sixty afternoons. He was the only one of the philosophes she was ever to meet.

Diderot left Russia on March 4, 1774. He had been dreading the return journey, and, to ease his passage, Catherine provided him with a specially constructed carriage in which he could lie down. When she said goodbye, she handed him a ring, a fur, and three bags containing a thousand rubles each. The journey was more difficult than he had feared. The ice was breaking on the rivers along the Baltic coast, and, as his carriage was crossing the river Dvina, the ice cracked and the carriage began to sink. The old man was pulled free, but the horses were drowned, and three-quarters of his baggage was lost. He wound up with a high fever. Eventually, he made it back to The Hague and recuperated in Prince Golitsyn’s care.

From Catherine’s perspective, the visit had been less than a success. Diderot’s ideas did not constitute a practical program for Russia; a noble, idealistic philosophe was not a practical politician or administrator. Once physically recovered, Diderot, however, decided that his visit had been a triumph. From Paris, he wrote to Catherine, “Now you sit beside Caesar, your friend [Joseph of Austria], and a little above Frederick [of Prussia,] your dangerous neighbor.”

Diderot’s exuberant stories about his long stay with Catherine so irritated Voltaire that he became sick with jealousy. For months, he had not received a single letter from St. Petersburg; clearly Catherine had rejected him for another. On August 9, 1774, four months after Diderot left Russia, Voltaire was unable to stand it any longer:

Madame:

I am positively in disgrace at your court. Your Imperial Majesty has jilted me for Diderot, or for Grimm, or for some other favorite. You have no consideration for my advanced age. All well and good if Your Majesty were a French coquette; but how can a victorious, law-giving empress be so inconstant.… I am trying to find crimes I have committed that would justify your indifference. I see that indeed there is no passion that does not end. This thought would cause me to die of chagrin, were I not already so near to dying of old age.

                            Signed,

                            He whom you have forsaken,

                            your admirer, your old Russian of Ferney

Catherine answered lightly: “Live, Monsieur, and let us be reconciled, for in any case there is no cause for quarrel between us.… You are so good a Russian that you could not be the enemy of Catherine.” Appeased, Voltaire declared that he acknowledged defeat and “returned to her in chains.”

Voltaire had exercised the greatest intellectual influence on Catherine, and Diderot was the only one of the major philosophes she actually met, but it was in Friedrich Melchoir Grimm that the empress found a lifelong friend. Born a Lutheran in Regensburg in 1723 and educated in Leipzig, Grimm traveled to Paris to make his career. He made his way through the literary salons and became an intimate friend of Diderot’s. In 1754, he took over the Correspondance Littéraire, an exclusive fortnightly cultural newsletter, reporting from Paris on books, poetry, the theater, painting, and sculpture. The fifteen or so subscribers, all crowned heads or princes of the Holy Roman Empire, received their copies through their embassies in Paris, thus avoiding censorship and enabling Grimm to write freely. Once on the throne, Catherine became a subscriber, but her personal acquaintance with Grimm had to wait until September 1773, when he arrived in St. Petersburg—a month before Diderot—for the wedding of Grand Duke Paul to Princess Wilhelmina of Hesse-Darmstadt. Grimm was present as part of the escort for the bride.