Catherine the Great

Another incident in the sickroom, widely reported, further burnished Sophia’s reputation. At a moment when the worst was feared, Johanna spoke of bringing a Lutheran pastor to comfort her daughter. Sophia, still exhausted by fever and bloodletting, nevertheless managed to whisper, “Why do that? Call Simon Todorsky instead. I would rather talk to him.” Elizabeth, hearing this, burst into tears. Soon, Sophia’s request was the talk of the court and the city, and people who had regarded the arrival of the Protestant German girl with apprehension now were filled with sympathy.

Whether Sophia knew what she was doing and understood the possible effect of her words cannot be known. It is unlikely that in the few weeks she had been in Russia she had become a genuine convert to the Orthodox faith. And yet the fact remains that, lying close to death, she had the extraordinary luck—or the extraordinary presence of mind—to use the most effective means of winning the sympathy of her future countrymen: “Call Simon Todorsky.”

In her Memoirs

, Catherine, looking back, seems to suggest that the fourteen-year-old girl did, in fact, understand the impact of her request. She admits that there were times during her illness when she did deceive. Sometimes, she would shut her eyes, pretending to be asleep in order to listen to the conversation of the ladies by her bedside. French, which she spoke, was commonly used at the Russian court. Together, she said, “the ladies would speak their minds freely and in that way I learned a great many things.”

Perhaps the explanation is even simpler. There is no apparent reason that Sophia’s spirits should have been raised or her health improved by the appearance at her bedside of an unknown Lutheran clergyman. And if Lutheranism and Orthodoxy were essentially similar, as Todorsky had explained to her, why not ask Todorsky himself, a man she liked and whose conversation she enjoyed, to come and comfort her?

By the first week in April, Sophia’s fever had passed. As she was regaining her strength, she noticed changes in the attitudes of people around her. Not only were the ladies in the sickroom more sympathetic; she also noticed that “my mother’s behavior during my illness had lowered her in everyone’s esteem.” Unfortunately, just at this point, Johanna chose to create more difficulty for herself. Johanna’s concern for her daughter’s life had been genuine, but while the young girl was quietly winning praise and admirers, her mother, barred from the sickroom, had become querulous. One day when Sophia was recovering, Johanna sent a maid to ask her daughter to give her a piece of blue and silver brocade that had been a parting gift from Sophia’s uncle, her father’s brother. Sophia surrendered the cloth, but she did so reluctantly, saying that she treasured it, not only because her uncle had given it to her but because it was the only beautiful thing she had brought with her to Russia. Indignant, the ladies in the sickroom repeated the incident to Elizabeth, who immediately sent Sophia a large quantity of beautiful material, including a new length of rich blue silk woven with silver flowers, similar to, but much finer than, the original fabric.

On April 21, her fifteenth birthday, Sophia appeared at court for the first time since her illness. “I cannot imagine that the world found me a very edifying sight,” she wrote later. “I had become as thin as a skeleton. I had grown taller, but my face and all its features were drawn; my hair was falling out and I was deathly pale. I appeared to myself as frightfully ugly; I didn’t even recognize my own face. The empress sent me a pot of rouge that day and ordered me to use it.” To reward Sophia for her courage and to celebrate her recovery, Elizabeth gave her a diamond necklace and pair of earrings worth twenty thousand rubles. Grand Duke Peter sent her a watch encrusted with rubies.

When she emerged into the world that birthday evening, Sophia was perhaps not a picture of youthful beauty, but as she entered the reception rooms of the palace, she became aware that something had changed. In the look on every face, the warm pressure of every touched hand, she saw and felt the sympathy and respect she had won. She was no longer a stranger, an object of curiosity and suspicion; she was one of them, returned to them, welcomed back. In those weeks of suffering, Russians had begun to think of her as a Russian.

The next morning she was back at work with Simon Todorsky. She had agreed to enter the Orthodox Church, and a brisk correspondence ensued between Moscow and Zerbst in order to obtain her father’s formal consent to her change of religion. She knew that Christian Augustus would be deeply grieved, but Zerbst was far away and she was now committed to Russia. At the beginning of May, she wrote to her father: