to travel did the Court depart for St Petersburg. 67
Begun by Bartolomeo Rastrelli almost as soon as the Court returned from Moscow in January 1732, the Winter Palace he completed three years later was a highly embellished wooden structure incorporating the mansion which had once belonged to Peter the Great’s Admiral Apraksin. Empress Anna’s apartments struck visitors as ‘rather beautiful’ but ‘not very imperial’, because they were small and dark. 68 Catherine and Peter were to think better of them during their brief occupation in the winter of 1746. This time, however, there was no room in the palace for either of them. While the lower floor was allocated to the small army of servants, actors, musicians and guards who accompanied the Court, the fun-loving Elizabeth was busy converting the upper rooms formerly occupied by her ladies-in-waiting to make space for a new merry-go-round, complete with expensively saddled wooden horses, to replace the dilapidated machine which stood outside the Summer Palace at the time of Catherine’s arrival in Russia. 69 She and Johanna Elisabeth were lodged in a neighbouring house, where for the first time they had separate apartments on either side of the main staircase. Catherine had known of Elizabeth’s orders in advance. For her status-conscious mother, who had not, it came as a shock:
As soon as she saw this arrangement, she lost her temper, primo , because she thought that my apartment was laid out better than hers; secondo because hers was separated from mine by a shared room. In fact, we each had four rooms, two at the front and two overlooking the courtyard, and the rooms were of equal size, furnished in exactly the same blue and red fabric. 70
Squabbles about precedence were the last thing Catherine needed now that her fiancé had again been taken ill on the journey from Moscow. On learning of this new outbreak of pox, accompanied by a high fever, Elizabeth raced back from St Petersburg to join her nephew at Khotilov, a staging post between Novgorod and Tver where they had all celebrated her birthday on 18 December. Cancelling the New Year’s banquet, she stayed with him there until his recovery was assured, having cannon hauled specially from Tver to celebrate Epiphany, though Khotilov was too far from the river to conduct the customary blessing of the waters. 71 By 26 January, empress and heir were safely back at Tsarskoye Selo. When they returned to the capital at the beginning of the following month, Catherine andher mother were taken straight to see Peter in the gloomy great hall of the Winter Palace. Johanna Elisabeth reported to her husband in Zerbst that Providence had granted the youth a miraculous recovery. Catherine remembered the scene differently:
All of his features were distorted; his face was still completely swollen, and one could see that he was bound to be permanently scarred. As his hair had been cut, he wore a huge wig that disfigured him all the more. He came up to me and asked if I found it difficult to recognise him. I stammered my congratulations on his recovery, but in truth he had become hideous. 72
At best this was a disconcerting turn of events. Yet there was nothing to be done about it now. While Lent kept her pock-marked fiancé out of the public eye between his birthday and hers, preparations for their marriage continued in earnest. 73
Since Princess Charlotte of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, the consort of Peter the Great’s ill-fated tsarevich, had been permitted to retain her Lutheran faith, Elizabeth instructed Count Santi, her Master of Ceremonies, to model Catherine’s wedding on the marriage of her own elder sister, Anna Petrovna, to Karl Friedrich of Holstein-Gottorp in 1725. On discovering that no records of that occasion survived, Santi had to work partly on oral tradition but above all on the basis of his own researches into the practice of rival European Courts. 74 The plan he presented to the College of Foreign Affairs
Begun by Bartolomeo Rastrelli almost as soon as the Court returned from Moscow in January 1732, the Winter Palace he completed three years later was a highly embellished wooden structure incorporating the mansion which had once belonged to Peter the Great’s Admiral Apraksin. Empress Anna’s apartments struck visitors as ‘rather beautiful’ but ‘not very imperial’, because they were small and dark. 68 Catherine and Peter were to think better of them during their brief occupation in the winter of 1746. This time, however, there was no room in the palace for either of them. While the lower floor was allocated to the small army of servants, actors, musicians and guards who accompanied the Court, the fun-loving Elizabeth was busy converting the upper rooms formerly occupied by her ladies-in-waiting to make space for a new merry-go-round, complete with expensively saddled wooden horses, to replace the dilapidated machine which stood outside the Summer Palace at the time of Catherine’s arrival in Russia. 69 She and Johanna Elisabeth were lodged in a neighbouring house, where for the first time they had separate apartments on either side of the main staircase. Catherine had known of Elizabeth’s orders in advance. For her status-conscious mother, who had not, it came as a shock:
As soon as she saw this arrangement, she lost her temper, primo , because she thought that my apartment was laid out better than hers; secondo because hers was separated from mine by a shared room. In fact, we each had four rooms, two at the front and two overlooking the courtyard, and the rooms were of equal size, furnished in exactly the same blue and red fabric. 70
Squabbles about precedence were the last thing Catherine needed now that her fiancé had again been taken ill on the journey from Moscow. On learning of this new outbreak of pox, accompanied by a high fever, Elizabeth raced back from St Petersburg to join her nephew at Khotilov, a staging post between Novgorod and Tver where they had all celebrated her birthday on 18 December. Cancelling the New Year’s banquet, she stayed with him there until his recovery was assured, having cannon hauled specially from Tver to celebrate Epiphany, though Khotilov was too far from the river to conduct the customary blessing of the waters. 71 By 26 January, empress and heir were safely back at Tsarskoye Selo. When they returned to the capital at the beginning of the following month, Catherine andher mother were taken straight to see Peter in the gloomy great hall of the Winter Palace. Johanna Elisabeth reported to her husband in Zerbst that Providence had granted the youth a miraculous recovery. Catherine remembered the scene differently:
All of his features were distorted; his face was still completely swollen, and one could see that he was bound to be permanently scarred. As his hair had been cut, he wore a huge wig that disfigured him all the more. He came up to me and asked if I found it difficult to recognise him. I stammered my congratulations on his recovery, but in truth he had become hideous. 72
At best this was a disconcerting turn of events. Yet there was nothing to be done about it now. While Lent kept her pock-marked fiancé out of the public eye between his birthday and hers, preparations for their marriage continued in earnest. 73
Since Princess Charlotte of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, the consort of Peter the Great’s ill-fated tsarevich, had been permitted to retain her Lutheran faith, Elizabeth instructed Count Santi, her Master of Ceremonies, to model Catherine’s wedding on the marriage of her own elder sister, Anna Petrovna, to Karl Friedrich of Holstein-Gottorp in 1725. On discovering that no records of that occasion survived, Santi had to work partly on oral tradition but above all on the basis of his own researches into the practice of rival European Courts. 74 The plan he presented to the College of Foreign Affairs
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