Catherine the Great

In the midst of this whirlwind, the Swedish diplomat Count Adolf Gyllenborg arrived in St. Petersburg. He came as an official envoy to announce the marriage of the new crown prince of Sweden, Adolphus Frederick of Holstein (Johanna’s brother and Catherine’s uncle) to Princess Louisa Ulrika, sister of Frederick II of Prussia. It was Catherine’s second encounter with Gyllenborg; they had met five years before at her grandmother’s house in Hamburg, when she was ten. It was then that she had so impressed him with her precocious intelligence that he had advised her mother to pay her more attention.

As Catherine described their second encounter:

He was a man of great intelligence, who was no longer young [Gyllenborg then was thirty-two].… He noticed that I accepted without protest all the intrigues and customs of the court and it seemed to him that I was showing less intelligence in Petersburg than he had given me credit for in Hamburg. He told me one day that he was surprised by the prodigious change that had taken place in me. “How is it,” he said, “that your character, so vigorous and strong in Hamburg, has allowed itself to deteriorate. You busy yourself now only with superficialities, with luxury and pleasure. You must recover the natural inclination of your mind. Your genius is destined for great achievements and you are wasting yourself on trifles. I would wager that you have not read a book since you have been in Russia.”

I told him of the hours I spent in my room, reading. He said that a philosopher of fifteen was too young yet for self-knowledge and that I was surrounded by so many pitfalls that I would stumble unless my soul was of an utterly superior metal; that I should nourish it with the best possible reading. He recommended Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, a life of Cicero, and The Causes of the Grandeur and Decline of the Roman Republic by Montesquieu. I promised to read them and actually did look for them. I found the life of Cicero in German and read a few pages; then I was brought the Montesquieu. When I began to read, it caused me to reflect, but I could not read it straight through because it made me yawn and I tossed it aside.…

I was not able to find Plutarch’s Lives; I read it only two years later.

To prove to Gyllenborg that she was not superficial, Catherine composed an essay about herself, “so that he would see whether I knew myself or not.” The next day, she wrote and handed to Gyllenborg an essay titled “Portrait of a Fifteen-Year-Old Philosopher.” He was impressed and returned it with a dozen pages of comments, mostly favorable. “I read his remarks again and again, many times; I impressed them on my consciousness and resolved to follow his advice. In addition, there was something else surprising: one day, while conversing with me, he allowed the following sentence to slip out: ‘What a pity that you will marry!’ I wanted to find out what he meant, but he would not tell me.”

Early in February, Peter was finally well enough to travel, and the empress brought him back to St. Petersburg. Catherine went to meet them in a reception hall of the Winter Palace. It was after four in the afternoon and the light was failing; they met, Catherine says, in “semi-darkness.” Until that moment, absence and anxiety had softened Catherine’s image of the man she was to marry. Peter had never been handsome, but he had possessed a certain nondescript, inoffensive blandness. Sometimes he wore a surly grin, sometimes a slight smile that might be inane or could be merely shy. Overall, his appearance had not been not wholly displeasing. Catherine was eager to see him.

The figure now standing before her in the gloom was quite different; it filled her “almost with terror.… His face was practically unrecognizable.” It was ravaged, swollen and pitted with still unhealed pockmarks. It was evident that he would be deeply scarred. His head had been shaved, and the enormous wig he was wearing made him appear even more terrifying. Despite the poor light, Catherine was unable to mask her horror; later, she described her future husband as “hideous.” As she stood there, “he came up to me and asked, ‘Do you recognize me?’ ” Summoning her courage, she stammered congratulations on his recovery, then fled to her apartment, where she collapsed.