Perhaps as a diversion from the new war, Catherine encouraged her closest friends to write one act comedies based on familiar proverbs. “. . . [I]t rains them here and we have decided that it’s the unique means to restore good comedy to the theatre,” she wrote Grimm.1 Some seventeen of these comedies, including several by Catherine herself, were published and performed for a small audience at the Hermitage Theatre.
Eager to surprise Alexander Mamonov, Catherine arranged for an English theatrical troupe to stage a performance in his apartments. He also hosted a production of one of Catherine’s plays in French. True to form, Catherine showered Mamonov with titles and gifts. From a promotion to premier major of the Preobrazhensky Guards, Redcoat was elevated to the rank of lieutenant general by May 1788 and count of the Holy Roman Empire. Catherine’s largesse extended to Mamonov’s family; she promoted his father to the Senate and sent a jeweled snuffbox to his mother.
Catherine’s other extravagant gifts for Mamonov included a silver dinner service acquired from British ambassador Alleyne Fitzherbert, a team of English horses bought for 2,000 rubles from Procurator-General Viazemsky, and a jeweled walking stick. Reportedly unhappy with the last gift, Mamonov confided to a friend that he really wanted to join the Order of St. Alexander Nevsky. Ten days later, Catherine bestowed the prestigious award.
With Russian troops battling the Turks in the south, Gustav III decided it was a good time to test his cousin’s strength and try to retake land lost early in the century to Russia and Peter the Great. In June 1788, against the advice of his naval commanders, the Swedish fleet attacked Russian naval ships in a bid to control the Baltic and land forces near St. Petersburg. “. . . [T]he behavior of this treacherous sovereign [Gustav] resembles madness,” Catherine wrote Potemkin as Russia declared war on Sweden.2 In the fight with Gustav, Russia got help from Denmark, whose troops marched from Norway into western Sweden. After Russia’s Scottish Admiral Samuel Grieg bottled up the Swedish fleet in Sveaborg in July, Catherine received a letter from a group of Swedish officers proposing peace negotiations. Gustav managed to crush the mutiny, halt any negotiations, and the unpopular war continued.
Like Catherine, Gustav loved the theatre, writing, and acting in plays. But there was one production he would not have appreciated. In late January 1789, Catherine and her coterie gathered at the Hermitage Theatre for the premiere of her political satire, The Woeful Knight Kosometovich. The storyline alluded to the Russo-Swedish War; the main character was a parody of Gustav as a cowardly wannabe knight.
“The person of Gustavus III was disguised in a grotesque manner,” wrote Ségur. “He was exhibited in the form of a blustering captain, a dwarfish prince. This searcher for adventures . . . was represented selecting, in an old arsenal, the armor of an ancient and celebrated giant, whose helmet, when placed upon his head, would come down to his belly, whilst the boots would reach his waist. . . . the Empress, who received many awkward and insipid compliments . . . might, I trust, have discovered by my countenance, as well as by my silence, how much I felt grieved at seeing so great a Princess demeaning herself in this manner.”3
Another member of Catherine’s circle also disliked her latest comic opera, but for a different reason. After two years in the south, Potemkin returned to St. Petersburg in late February 1789. After watching the third performance of The Woeful Knight, he pulled the curtain, warning Catherine that it would infuriate Gustav and prolong the war. The next day, Catherine withdrew the satire from Russia’s public theatres; it was not performed again for over two centuries.
Potemkin remained in the capital for three months, procuring provisions and planning his next campaigns. He intended to place Russian ground forces on the offensive, directing them against the Turks in Bessarabia. After bolstering Russia’s fleet, he also planned to engage the Turkish navy. Sultan Abdul Hamid I died in March, succeeded by the more bellicose young Selim III. On May 6, Potemkin left Tsarskoe Selo to lead the battle in the south.
That same month, the Polish Diet seized an opportunity to get out from under Russia’s thumb, raising an army of 100,000 men and ordering Russian troops to leave Poland immediately. Resentment against Russia had been growing since the 1772 partition of Poland. Against warnings by Stanislaus Poniatowski, the Diet confederated and adopted a majority vote for decision making. With her troops stretched to the limit across both northern and southern fronts, Catherine’s hands were tied. She pledged to deal with the ultimatum later. In the face of the growing patriotic movement, Stanislaus Poniatowski attempted to carve out a new role for himself, eventually influencing Poland’s new constitution in 1791.
Meanwhile, France’s monarchy was facing its biggest challenge—this time from the inside. Despite ruinously onerous taxes, France’s treasury was empty, drained in part by the latest war with England. The majority of the French was fed up with the gluttonous lifestyle of Louis XVI, along with his courtiers and ministers. A grain shortage caused by poor harvests had caused bread prices to skyrocket, triggering unrest in the cities and leading to famine. While George Washington was taking the presidential oath, the Estates-General met at Versailles for the first time in 175 years. Though Louis doubled the number of representatives for the Third Estate, or commoners, each Estate continued to have one vote. Ninety percent of France’s 27 million citizens had the same voting power as the 10 percent of nobles and clergy.
With wars raging against the Swedes in the north and Turks in the south, as well as insubordination in Poland, Catherine experienced a personal crisis. She’d chosen Alexander Mamonov as her lover, hoping he’d turn out like her beloved Lanskoy. Because her new favorite was “clever as the very devil” as well as handsome, Catherine occasionally consulted him on political matters. After a year and a half, the relationship turned frosty. Mamonov, who was rarely allowed out of Catherine’s sight, compared court life to “surviving in the jungle.”4 With Mamonov “cold and preoccupied,” the empress spent her sixtieth birthday by herself. In early June, Catherine decided to let her lover of three years loose, suggesting he marry one of the richest heiresses in Russia. That’s when the ball fell. Mamonov wrote back, confessing to a yearlong, secret affair with Catherine’s maid-of-honor, Princess Daria Shcherbatova.
“I nearly collapsed from shock,” Catherine wrote Potemkin, “and I had still not recovered when he entered my room, fell at my feet and confessed to me his entire intrigue. . . . I said to him . . . that I did not stand in the way of anything, and that I was only offended that for one whole year instead of deceiving me he hadn’t told me the truth, and that if he had he would have spared me, and him too, much grief and worry. . . .”5 To add insult to injury, Mamonov and Shcherbatova had enjoyed a romantic rendezvous at Dubrovitsy, a luxe estate near Moscow which Catherine had given Potemkin.
Catherine put on a brave face a week later when Mamonov married his pregnant 26-year-old lover at the palace church at Tsarskoe Selo. “After marrying Princess Shcherbatova on Sunday, Count Aleksandr Matveevich Dmitriev-Mamonov departed on Monday with his spouse for his parents,” Catherine reported to Potemkin, “and were I to tell you everything that happened during these two weeks, you would say he has gone completely mad; . . . imagine, there were signs that he desired to remain at court with his wife just as before, in short, a thousand contradictions and contradictory ideas.”6
Potemkin was among the many courtiers who knew about Mamonov’s affair. He’d kept it from Catherine—both to protect her from humiliation and to serve his own purposes. In response to Mamonov’s letter asking to be freed from the relationship the previous year, Potemkin replied: “It is your duty to remain at your post. Don’t be a fool and ruin your career.”7 Now Potemkin tried to comfort Catherine: “. . . he [Mamonov] is a combination of sloth and selfishness. Because of the latter he became an extreme Narcissus. Thinking of no one but himself, he demanded everything without giving anything in return; being lay he even forgot decency . . . why keep him here with his wife who is an execrable schemer? You did very well in sending him to Moscow. . . .”8
Mamonov’s betrayal hurt more than Catherine acknowledged. Ivan Rimsky-Korsakov’s affair with dear friend Countess Bruce was still a painful episode after a decade. She was no longer the beauty who dazzled courtiers and foreign envoys twenty-five years earlier. Though Catherine’s complexion was still good and she kept her white hair coiffed, she’d become extremely overweight, with swollen legs. “Though seventy years of age, Catherine still retained some remains of beauty,” observed Charles Masson, author of the controversial Secret Memoirs. “Her hair was always dressed in the old stile of simplicity, and with peculiar neatness. . . . She was of middle stature, and corpulent; few women, however with her corpulence, would have attained the graceful and dignified carriage for which she was remarked. In private, the good-humour and confidence with which she inspired all about her, seemed to keep up an unceasing scene of youth, playfulness, and gaiety.”9 At the same time, Masson wrote scathingly about her two passions—“. . . the love of men which degenerated into licentiousness; and the love of glory, which sank into vanity.”10
A younger Catherine had written in her Memoirs: “I cannot live one day without love.”11 This still held true decades later. Within days of discovering Mamonov’s affair, the sixty-year-old empress noticed a swarthy 22-year-old officer in the Horse Guards. Catherine’s introduction to young Platon Zubov was not by chance. The young man had been planted by two of Potemkin’s foes—distant relative Field Marshal Nikolai Saltykov, vice president of the War College, and Catherine’s confidante Anna Naryshkina, sister-in-law of Lev Naryshkin. By early August, Catherine told Potemkin she’d returned to life after a long winter slumber. “I’m well and merry and have revived like a fly in summer.”12 Potemkin did not attach much importance to the newest favorite, described by contemporaries as medium in stature, polite, and fluent in French.
Like her fellow monarchs, Catherine reacted with outrage to the events in Paris, even though Franco-Russo relations had never been terribly friendly. Nevertheless, a threat against a monarchy in this fashion stoked fear in the hearts of monarchs across the continent. After the Third Estate defected, Louis XVI had no choice but to order the nobles and clergy to join the newly formed National Assembly. But worried about the Assembly’s growing radicalism, Louis gathered troops outside Paris, sparking a demonstration at the Palais Royal. In response, Parisians scoured the city for arms. On July 14, when guards at Bastille refused to open the gates, the crowd stormed the prison.
After English statesman Charles James Fox declared the fall of the Bastille “the greatest event to ever happen in the World,” Catherine removed his bronze portrait bust from between those of Cicero and Demosthenes in the Cameron Gallery at Tsarskoe Selo. The bust wasn’t worth selling, Catherine confided to Princess Dashkova, because she couldn’t even get 30 rubles for it.13 British political cartoonist James Sayers Patriot published a caricature of Catherine removing Fox’s bust with the Demosthenes and Cicero fleeing.