Catherine the Great

That, as to my stupidity, I could not be blamed because everyone is just as God has made him; that my debts were not surprising because, with an allowance of thirty thousand rubles, I had to pay off sixty thousand rubles of debt left me by my mother; and that he should tell whoever had sent him that I was extremely sorry to hear that I was being blackened in the eyes of Her Imperial Majesty to whom I had never failed to show respect, obedience and deference and that the more closely my conduct was observed, the more she would be convinced of this.

The prohibition against any unapproved communication between the married couple and the outside world remained, but it was porous. “To show how useless this kind of order is,” Catherine wrote later, “we found many people willing and eager to undermine it. Even the Choglokovs’ closest relatives sought to reduce the harshness of this policy.” Indeed, Madame Choglokova’s own brother, Count Hendrikov, who was also the empress’s first cousin, “often slipped me useful and necessary information. He was a kind and outspoken man who ridiculed the stupidities and brutalities of his sister and brother-in-law.”

Similarly, there were cracks in the wall Bestuzhev had erected to block Catherine’s correspondence. Catherine was forbidden to write personal letters; the Ministry of Foreign Affairs wrote them for her. This injunction was underscored when Catherine learned that an official at the ministry had almost been charged with a crime because she had sent him a few lines, begging him to insert them into a letter he was writing over her signature to Johanna. But there were people who tried to help. In the summer of 1748, the Chevalier di Sacrosomo, a Knight of Malta, arrived in Russia and was warmly greeted at court. When he was presented to Catherine, he kissed her hand, and, as he did so, he slipped a tiny note into her palm. “This is from your mother,” he whispered. Catherine was frightened, dreading that someone, especially the Choglokovs, who were standing nearby, might have seen him. She managed to slip the note inside her glove. In her room, she found a letter from her mother rolled up inside a note from Sacrosomo. Johanna wrote that she was anxious about Catherine’s silence, wanted to know the reason for it, and what her daughter’s situation was. Catherine wrote back that she was forbidden to write to her or to anyone, but that she was well.

In his own note, Sacrosomo had informed Catherine that she was to send her reply through an Italian musician who would be present at Peter’s next concert. Accordingly, the grand duchess rolled up her response in the same way as the one sent to her and waited for the moment when she could pass it along. At the concert, she made a tour of the orchestra and stopped behind the chair of a cellist, the man described to her. When he saw the grand duchess behind his chair, the cellist opened his coat pocket wide and pretended to take out his handkerchief. Catherine quickly slipped her note into the open pocket and walked away. No one saw. During his stay in Petersburg, Sacromoso passed her three other notes and her replies went back the same way. No one knew.

20

Summer Pleasures

THE CHOGLOKOVS had been appointed to enforce Bestuzhev’s desire to isolate Catherine and Peter from the outside world and also to provide the young couple with a shining example of virtue, marital happiness, and productive fertility. In the first of these assignments, they partially succeeded; in the second, they failed spectacularly.

During a stay at the Peterhof estate on the Gulf of Finland in the summer of 1748, Catherine and Peter, looking out their windows across the garden, frequently saw Monsieur and Madame Choglokov walking back and forth from the main palace on the hill to Monplaisir, Peter the Great’s small redbrick Dutch-style house at the edge of the water, where the empress had chosen to stay. They quickly discovered that these recurring trips were all related to a secret affair Monsieur Choglokov had been having with one of Catherine’s maids of honor, Maria Kosheleva, and that the young woman was pregnant. The Choglokovs now faced ruin, a possiblity for which the watchers from the upper palace windows fervently prayed.