Catherine the Great

As the news swept through the court, Countess Rumyantseva wrote to her husband, the general, who, a few months before, had been Potemkin’s superior in the Turkish war, “The thing to do now, my sweet, is to address yourself to Potemkin.”

Panin, despite his warning to Catherine about Potemkin, was pleased by the change because it promised to diminish the influence of the Orlovs. No concern was shown for the hapless Vasilchikov, who, still living in the palace, became simply an inconvenience. Catherine was enraptured by her new favorite; this extended to taking pride in his reputed success with other women. “I’m not surprised that the entire city has ascribed to you a countless number of women as your lovers,” she wrote to him. “No one on earth is better at busying himself with them, I suppose, than you.” She wanted him now, however, exclusively for herself. Less than a week after writing her “Sincere Confession,” she waited at night for Potemkin to come to her. The following day, she wrote to him:

I don’t understand what kept you. And you didn’t even come. Please, don’t be afraid. We are quite too shrewd. No sooner had I lain down than I rose again, got dressed, and went to the doors of the library to wait for you, where I stood in a drafty wind for two hours. And not till midnight … did I return out of grief to lie down in bed where, thanks to you, I spent … [a] sleepless night.… I want to see you and must see you, no matter what!

Potemkin remained jealous of everyone, flaring up when she paid attention to anyone else. One night at the theater, when she made friendly remarks to Gregory Orlov, he got up and stormed out of the imperial box. Catherine cautioned him to moderate his attitude toward this former lover:

I only ask you not to do one thing: don’t damage, and don’t even try to damage, my opinion of Prince Orlov, for I should consider that to be ingratitude on your part. There’s no one whom he [Orlov] praised more to me and whom … he loved more both in former times and now till your arrival, than you. And if he has his faults, then it is unfit for either you or me to judge them and to make them known to others. He loves you, and they [the Orlov brothers] are my friends, and I shan’t part with them. Now there’s a lesson for you. If you’re wise, you’ll heed it. It wouldn’t be wise to contradict it since it’s the absolute truth.

In April, Potemkin moved into the apartment immediately beneath the private apartment of the empress; their rooms were now connected by the private, green-carpeted spiral staircase. Because they kept different hours—Catherine normally rose to begin work at six and retired at night by ten; Potemkin often talked and played cards until dawn and rose at noon—they did not regularly sleep together in the same bed. Instead, at night one climbed, or the other descended, the spiral staircase in order to spend time together.

When they became lovers, Catherine was forty-four, ten years older than Potemkin. She was inclining toward plumpness, but her mental acuity and vitality remained exceptional. And Potemkin could see that his passion for this woman was powerfully reciprocated, which only added to her attractiveness. He might have settled into the luxurious life of an imperial favorite and collected the rewards that came with that position. But Potemkin had no interest in simply becoming the purveyor of private pleasures to the empress. He wanted a life of action and responsibility, and he meant to achieve it with the support of the woman who personified Russia.

Catherine was eager to accept him on this basis. She thought him the handsomest man she had ever met; she scarcely noticed the damaged eye. At thirty-four, he had gained weight and his body was no longer slim. Biting his nails had become an obsession. None of this mattered. To Grimm, she wrote: “I have parted from a certain excellent but very boring citizen [Vasilchikov] who was immediately replaced—I do not myself quite know how—by one of the greatest, most bizarre, and most entertaining eccentrics of the iron age.”

From the beginning there were quarrels. Hardly a day passed without a scene, and almost always it was Potemkin who began the quarrel and Catherine who took the first step toward reconciliation. He questioned the permanence of her feeling for him and worried her and himself with questions and reproaches. Because most of his letters and notes are lost, there is only a slender record of what he wrote to her, but her letters to him give an idea of what he had said to her. In any case, she had to soothe and flatter him like a spoiled child:

No, Grishenka, it’s quite impossible that my feelings for you will change. Be fair with yourself: how could I love someone after you? I think there’s no one like you and I don’t give a damn about everyone else. I hate change.