The great mirror falls like a sash window. The woman who has just pressed the lever smiles: always a tense moment. What if the frame hit the floor with a crash and the glass shattered? But there is padding at the point of contact, and now the world is cut in two. On this side a white-and-gold salon. On the other, hidden by the mirror, a vaulted recess, a candle, a naked man breathing heavily …
A chamberlain sidles into the salon. “Majesty, the chancellor is here.” The woman is already seated at a desk, pen in hand. Beneath her long dress, her body is sated with love. “Ask him to come in!”
She gets up to greet an elderly man with watery eyes, whose frame is too massive for those slender calves in their white stockings.
“Prince, I hope you’ve come to report that order has been restored in the governance of Kazan …”
The audience ended she rushes over to the lever. The mirror rises to reveal the alcove … The man whose embrace she had interrupted had a powerful, scarred body. The new secret guest is svelte; his mouth forms a sweetly petulant line … He is uttering a cry of pleasure at the moment when the chamberlain coughs outside the door before announcing another visitor. The woman breaks free, adjusts her dress, arranges her hair. The mirror falls, hiding the curve of the recess …
“His Excellency, the English ambassador, Sir Robert Gunning.”
She crosses to an armchair where a cat lies sleeping, drives it away with a swift caress.
“Come and sit by the fire, Your Excellency. You will not be used to our Russian hoarfrosts …”
The Englishman leaves. The mirror rises again. The lover now has tight curls, blond like an albino, with thick lips. At the court he is known as “the White Negro.” The woman gives herself to him with expert deftness … The man is on the brink of orgasm when there is a discreet cough in the antechamber.
“Majesty, Field Marshal Suvorov.”
“Dear Alexander Vassilievich! They tell me the sultan is in retreat from our victorious armies. So, when shall we lay siege to Constantinople?”
The alcove opens up. An almost timid lover. It feels to the woman as if she were possessing him, and at the same time teaching him how to possess her …
“His Excellency, the French ambassador, Monsieur de Breteuil!”
She remains seated with an indifferent air and, as she allows the man to approach her, fiddles with a pinch of snuff.
“So, Monsieur le Baron, it seems your court persists in thinking my hatred does you more honor than my friendship?”
The mirror rises: a very young lover weeps, stammering out grievances, then calms down, like a comforted child.
“Majesty, His Majesty, the King of Sweden!”
As she talks with the king the salt from her lover’s tears is still on the woman’s lips …
“Majesty, Monsieur Diderot!”
“Dear friend! You philosophers merely work on paper, which is long-suffering. While I, poor empress, work on human skin, which is a good deal more irritable and ticklish …”
Diderot gets carried away, gesticulates, makes prophetic pronouncements, departs.
The woman makes the mirror rise once more. Her lover is laughing. “Did he beat you black and blue again, that lout of a Frenchman?” She presses against him, smothers his laughter with a kiss. “No. I take refuge behind a little table now …”
“The Right Honorable, the Count of Cagliostro!”
“Great Tsarina! I have had this alloy smelted deep within the fire-vomiting bowels of Vesuvius. It possesses rejuvenating virtues …”
The mirror rises, descends, rises again … The president of the Academy, Princess Dashkova. Lever pressed. Giacomo Casanova, agent of the Inquisition. Lever pressed. Prince Paul, her unloved son. Lever pressed. Count Bobrinsky, her illegitimate son. Lever pressed. The marquis d’Ormesson. Lever pressed. The comte de Saint-Germain. Lever pressed.
Oleg Erdmann turns a pocket mirror over and over in his hand. The back is made of black leather: the dark alcove. The glass: the salon where the empress receives visitors.
The reflection cuts into segments the cramped room where he lives: a sofa, an old wardrobe, shelves groaning under the weight of books. On the worktable a typewriter’s metallic grin. Three leaves of paper, with sheets of carbon paper between them—the text of his …
“Of my utter madness,” he says to himself, anticipating the judgments that will be passed on his screenplay. The worst would be simple contempt. “So, young man, you’ve been browsing through a few pamplets about the life of Catherine the Second, have you?”
“Well, more than any of you ever have!” Oleg whispers defiantly, challenging the scorn of an imaginary jury. He has read and made notes on everything. He knows the empress’s life better than … better than he knows his own! The notion astounds him. But it’s true, he no longer knows what he was doing on, say, March 22, 1980. Nor on the day before, nor the day after. These dates, still so recent, have been completely erased. It’s easier to reconstruct the empress’s life at two centuries’ distance.
So, what is she doing, already in the early scenes? Well, of course! Taking snuff. With her left hand, the other is reserved for people to kiss … And then there’s that occasional table she puts between herself and Diderot. When he gets excited the philosopher starts thumping her on the knees. “I’m covered in bruises,” she complains with a laugh … Breteuil? Catherine has little time for him, as for most of the French diplomats. In 1762 she asks him to finance the coup d’état that is being prepared. Versailles refuses. London foots the bill. Result: a quarrel with France, juicy contracts for England … One of the visitors to the alcove is “Scarface”—Aleksey Orlov, as reckless as his brother, Grigory, the current lover. One night, taking advantage of his resemblance to Grigory, Aleksey manages to slip into the young tsarina’s bed. The darkness facilitates the fraud. At the height of their transports, Catherine comes across the scars on the man’s face … And Cagliostro? He dupes the simple souls of St. Petersburg, converses with spirits, offers elixirs of youth … Catherine banishes him, she has no love of charlatans or Freemasons. Or maybe she is jealous of his wife, the ravishing Seraphina? The Italian departs in the style of a true magician: at midnight twelve carriages ride out through each of the city’s twelve gates. Each of them contains one Cagliostro and one Seraphina. And in the travelers’ register, at every one of the barriers, the sorcerer’s signature … Who else? Count Bobrinsky, the son of Catherine and Grigory Orlov. The child is born just before the coup d’état. He must be hidden from the tsar. Wrapped in a beaver fur (bobr is the Russian for “beaver”), he is spirited away to safety … The comte de Saint-Germain, the adventurer, arrives in Russia in the spring of 1762. To take part in the plot? The marquis d’Ormesson is one of the rare Frenchmen to find favor in the empress’s eyes, is he not the cousin of Louis-François d’Ormesson, who opposed the opening of the Estates General in France in 1789, predicting catastrophe? When Giacomo Casanova comes to Russia he buys himself a female serf, nicknames her “Zaire,” and, wonder of wonders! he falls for her. While at the same time cheating on her with a handsome army officer, Lunin, much to Catherine’s amusement. She prefers Giacomo’s brother, Francesco, the painter whose brush immortalizes Potemkin’s victories … And then there is her unloved son, Paul! A sickly child who changes the cards on the place mats before dinner so he can be seated next to his mother … A mother who signs peace treaties, receives Diderot, corresponds with Voltaire, defeats the Turks (which delights the author of Candide). And who, at intervals, walks over to the great mirror and presses a lever …
“That’s going to make it like a Brazilian soap opera,” one of his fellow students teased him one day. “A TV series in three hundred and a half episodes.” Confused, Oleg faltered: “Why ‘and a half’?” The other burst out laughing. “Well, you’ll need half an hour at least just to list all of Katie’s lovers!”
Mockery did nothing to alter his resolve. Oleg wanted to know everything about Catherine: how she spent her time (she worked fifteen hours a day), how she dressed—very simply—her restrained tastes in food, her fads (the snuff she took, her intensely strong coffee). He knew her political views, what she read, the personalities of the people she corresponded with, her carnal cravings (the “uterine rage” derided by so many biographers), her custom of rubbing her face with ice every morning, her passion for the theater, her preference for riding astride a horse rather than sidesaddle …
Yes, everything about Catherine. Except that often this “everything” seemed strangely incomplete.
Perhaps the key to the enigma could be found in the naive observation that this ultracerebral woman from time to time let slip: “The real problem in my life is that my heart cannot survive for a single moment without love …”