servant of the lower sort.” Another correspondent provided an even less flattering portrait of Peter’s mistress: “She swore like a trooper, had a squint, stank, and spat when she talked.” According to some reports, she also liked to beat up her boyfriend when they drank.
* 5 After carefully concealing her pregnancy, Catherine’s son by Gregory Orlov was born in secret in April 1762. To distract Peter while she was in labor, the empress’s faithful valet, Vasili Shkurin, burned down his own home, knowing that the firebug emperor would race off to watch the excitement. The child was given the name Alexis Gregorovich Bobrinsky: the patronymic for his father, Gregory Orlov, and the surname for the estate where he was raised.
Paul (1796–1801): “He Detests His Nation”
There is no one who does not daily remark on the disorder of his faculties.
—G RAND D UCHESS ( LATER E MPRESS ) M ARIA F EODOROVNA
After her death in 1796, Catherine the Great was succeeded by her son Paul, whose father was either the late empress’s murdered husband, Peter III, or, more likely, her first lover, Sergei Saltykov. Though questions of paternity lingered, Paul believed he was Peter’s son and honored him accordingly—by imitation, alas, which ultimately resulted in the two emperors sharing the same ghastly fate .
Catherine II was dead, and now it was time for her son and successor, Paul, to rectify some wrongs. Certainly he would bury with all due honor the mother he so feared and despised. But she wouldn’t be alone. The new emperor ordered that the skeletal remains of his putative father, Peter III, be disinterred from his vault at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery and, with much ceremony, carried to the Winter Palace and laid in state next to Catherine’s coffin. Thus, after thirty-four years, the husband and wife who loathed each other in life were reunited in death as their former subjects shuffled by to payhomage. Paul was pleased with this bit of macabre handiwork, but he still had more planned. During the funeral procession that followed, he arranged for the architect of his father’s murder, the now aged and decrepit Alexis Orlov, to carry the dead emperor’s crown on a cushion, while other surviving conspirators were designated pallbearers. Then, amid the incense and solemn chants at the Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul, Catherine II and Peter III were interred together forever.
The bond between the baby Paul and his mother had been broken at a most critical time, when the infant was whisked away by Empress Elizabeth immediately after Catherine delivered him in 1754. The new mother was only allowed to see her son occasionally, and then for just the briefest visits. Paul was a child of the state, and the state, in the person of the empress, literally smothered him.
“He was kept in an excessively warm room,” Catherine wrote, “swaddled in flannel, and laid in a cradle lined with black fur; he was covered with a counterpane of pink satin, lined with wadding, and another one above it, lined with black fur. I saw him many times often lying so, with sweat running down his face and his whole body, and so it was that when he grew older, the least breath of air chilled him and made him ill. In addition, he was surrounded by a bevy of ignorant old crones, who, by dint of their senseless means of management, did him infinitely more harm than good, both physically and mentally.”
While Catherine was always concerned about the welfare of the baby snatched away from her by Elizabeth, her husband showed no such inclination. Perhaps Peter doubted whetherPaul really was his child, or, just as likely, there was little room in his disordered mind for much paternal sentiment. Indeed, the only real interest Peter ever showed in the boy was when he insisted at Paul’s birth that he receive the same financial reward his wife did when she delivered the child. (To satisfy this petulant demand, Elizabeth, her treasury nearly empty at
* 5 After carefully concealing her pregnancy, Catherine’s son by Gregory Orlov was born in secret in April 1762. To distract Peter while she was in labor, the empress’s faithful valet, Vasili Shkurin, burned down his own home, knowing that the firebug emperor would race off to watch the excitement. The child was given the name Alexis Gregorovich Bobrinsky: the patronymic for his father, Gregory Orlov, and the surname for the estate where he was raised.
Paul (1796–1801): “He Detests His Nation”
There is no one who does not daily remark on the disorder of his faculties.
—G RAND D UCHESS ( LATER E MPRESS ) M ARIA F EODOROVNA
After her death in 1796, Catherine the Great was succeeded by her son Paul, whose father was either the late empress’s murdered husband, Peter III, or, more likely, her first lover, Sergei Saltykov. Though questions of paternity lingered, Paul believed he was Peter’s son and honored him accordingly—by imitation, alas, which ultimately resulted in the two emperors sharing the same ghastly fate .
Catherine II was dead, and now it was time for her son and successor, Paul, to rectify some wrongs. Certainly he would bury with all due honor the mother he so feared and despised. But she wouldn’t be alone. The new emperor ordered that the skeletal remains of his putative father, Peter III, be disinterred from his vault at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery and, with much ceremony, carried to the Winter Palace and laid in state next to Catherine’s coffin. Thus, after thirty-four years, the husband and wife who loathed each other in life were reunited in death as their former subjects shuffled by to payhomage. Paul was pleased with this bit of macabre handiwork, but he still had more planned. During the funeral procession that followed, he arranged for the architect of his father’s murder, the now aged and decrepit Alexis Orlov, to carry the dead emperor’s crown on a cushion, while other surviving conspirators were designated pallbearers. Then, amid the incense and solemn chants at the Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul, Catherine II and Peter III were interred together forever.
The bond between the baby Paul and his mother had been broken at a most critical time, when the infant was whisked away by Empress Elizabeth immediately after Catherine delivered him in 1754. The new mother was only allowed to see her son occasionally, and then for just the briefest visits. Paul was a child of the state, and the state, in the person of the empress, literally smothered him.
“He was kept in an excessively warm room,” Catherine wrote, “swaddled in flannel, and laid in a cradle lined with black fur; he was covered with a counterpane of pink satin, lined with wadding, and another one above it, lined with black fur. I saw him many times often lying so, with sweat running down his face and his whole body, and so it was that when he grew older, the least breath of air chilled him and made him ill. In addition, he was surrounded by a bevy of ignorant old crones, who, by dint of their senseless means of management, did him infinitely more harm than good, both physically and mentally.”
While Catherine was always concerned about the welfare of the baby snatched away from her by Elizabeth, her husband showed no such inclination. Perhaps Peter doubted whetherPaul really was his child, or, just as likely, there was little room in his disordered mind for much paternal sentiment. Indeed, the only real interest Peter ever showed in the boy was when he insisted at Paul’s birth that he receive the same financial reward his wife did when she delivered the child. (To satisfy this petulant demand, Elizabeth, her treasury nearly empty at
Similar Books
