Catherine the Great

Meanwhile, Johanna continued to create trouble. The empress had assigned Catherine a suite of four rooms in the Winter Palace; these rooms were separated from the four rooms assigned to her mother. Johanna’s rooms were of the same size, furnished with the same furniture, and the same fabric of blue and red cloth; the only difference was that Catherine’s were to the right of a stairway and Johanna’s to the left. Nevertheless, when Johanna discovered the arrangement, she complained. Her daughter’s rooms were grander than hers, she said. Furthermore, why was Catherine being separated from her at all? She had not proposed it; she had not approved it. When Catherine told her mother that the separation had been ordered and the rooms specifically assigned by the empress, who did not want her to share her mother’s quarters, Johanna’s indignation mounted. She regarded this new arrangement as a form of criticism of her conduct at court and of her influence on her daughter. Unable to direct her anger at Elizabeth, Johanna poured it out on Catherine. She picked constant quarrels “and was on such bad terms with everybody that she no longer joined us for meals but had them served in her apartment.” Catherine confessed, however, that the separation “was very much to my liking. I was not at all at ease in my mother’s rooms and had no good opinion of the group of intimate friends which she gathered around herself.”

Catherine’s separation from her mother and her careful avoidance of her mother’s friends meant that there were areas of Johanna’s life of which her daughter had little knowledge. The nature and extent of Johanna’s relationship with Count Betskoy was one of these. Catherine was aware that her mother was fond of Betskoy and saw him constantly, and that many people at court, including the empress, believed that the relationship had become too intimate. Of the rumors that Johanna had become pregnant by Betskoy, Catherine says nothing in her Memoirs. She does, however, tell this story:

One morning, Johanna’s German chambermaid rushed into Catherine’s room to say that her mother had fainted. Catherine ran to her mother’s room and found Johanna, pale but conscious, lying on a mattress on the floor. Catherine asked what had happened. Johanna said that she had asked to be bled and that the surgeon had been clumsy. “He had not succeeded with two veins on her arms and then had tried to open two on her feet” and failed again. She had fainted. Catherine knew that Johanna was afraid of bloodletting and had violently opposed it as treatment for her own pneumonia; she did not understand why her mother had wanted it done now to herself—or as treatment for what illness. Johanna, becoming hysterical, refused to answer further questions and began to scream. She accused her daughter of caring nothing about her and then “she ordered me to go.”

Here, Catherine ends her account, hinting at what had happened. Johanna offered a flimsy excuse that she had contracted a sudden, unspecified illness. It is unlikely that this particular woman would ever ask to be bled. There is the accusation of gross surgical incompetence to explain heavy bleeding. There is the placement of a titled patient on a mattress on the floor rather than on a bed, suggesting that Johanna had suddenly staggered and collapsed. There is Johanna’s rage and hysteria when confronting her daughter. And, finally, in the days that followed, there is the absence of any further symptoms of the illness that this surgical bleeding might have been intended to cure or alleviate. A possible explanation of this sequence is that Johanna had suffered a miscarriage.

Not long after this episode, Johanna suffered another blow. From Zerbst came the news that her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, Catherine’s younger sister, had died suddenly. Johanna had been away from home for over a year. In his letters, her husband had repeatedly asked her to come home. Always, she replied that her primary obligation was to shepherd and oversee the brilliant marriage being offered to her eldest daughter.

Eventually, a message from the empress at Khotilovo reached Catherine:

Your Highness, my very dear niece, I am infinitely obliged to Your Highness for your agreeable messages. I have delayed replying to them because I could not reassure you with regard to the health of His Highness, the Grand Duke. Now this day, I can assure you that, to our joy, God be Praised, we may hope for his recovery. He has come back to us.

On reading this letter, Catherine’s natural cheerfulness returned, and that evening she went to a ball. When she appeared, the whole room crowded around her; the news had spread that the danger was over, the grand duke was recovering. Relieved, Catherine saw the Moscow days repeat themselves: every evening a ball or masquerade; every evening another triumph.