One might go on forever describing this truly great man with his remarkable character and rare variety of extraordinary talents. They will make him a monarch worthy of profound admiration for countless years, despite the large flaws in his own education and his country's lack of culture and civilization. Such was the reputation he gained everywhere in France, where he was considered a veritable prodigy.
On Sunday afternoon, June 20, Peter left Paris quietly and unescorted. Traveling eastward through France, he stopped at Rheims, where he visited the cathedral and was shown the missal on which for centuries the kings of France had sworn their coronation oaths. To the astonishment of the French priests present, Peter was able to read to them the mysterious characters with which the missal was inscribed. The language was old church Slavonic; in all probability, the missal had been brought to France in the eleventh century by the Kievan princess Anna Yaroslavna, who married King Louis I and became Queen of France.*
Although Peter left Shafirov, Dolgoruky and Tolstoy behind in Paris to negotiate with the French, the visit bore no diplomatic fruit beyond a meaningless treaty of friendship. The Regent was interested in the Tsar's proposal of an alliance between France and Russia, but the Abbe Dubois remained actively hostile to the idea. By now, the antagonism between King George I of England and Tsar Peter was too great to permit a treaty with both; Dubois chose England over Russia. Indeed, the hopelessness of Peter's case was later confirmed by Tesse, who revealed that throughout the negotiations with the Russians, Dubois had secretly disclosed everything to the English. "The government," Tesse later admitted, "had no intention other than to amuse the Tsar as long as he stayed without concluding anything." With the idea of an alliance discarded, the marriage which was to have been its seal was also dropped. Peter's daughter Elizabeth remained in Russia to rule as empress for twenty years, and Louis XV eventually married the daughter of Charles XII's puppet King of Poland, Stanislaus Leszezynski.
As he traveled again through the French countryside, Peter remarked, as he had on his way to Paris, on the poverty of the French peasants. The comparison between the luxury he found in the capital and what he saw outside surprised him and he wondered aloud to his friends how long this system could last.
From Rheims, Peter went slowly down the Meuse by boat, first to Namur and Liege and then to the health resort of Spa. This region, now part of Belgium, was then divided between Holland and the Hapsburg Empire, and along the route both Dutch and imperial officials in the river towns competed to pay him honor. Peter remained at Spa for five weeks, drinking the waters and taking a cure. Catherine still waited for him in Amsterdam, and his letters to her suggest his impatience and fatigue:
Yesterday, I received your letter of the 11th in which you write of the illness of our daughters [Anne and Elizabeth both had smallpox] and that the first, thank God, is getting better while the other has taken to her bed. about which Alexander Danilovich also writes
* It required some sacrifice for a princess of Kiev to leave her native city, then at the height of its civilization, to marry into the cruder culture of France. The relative levels of their cultures are suggested by the fact that Anna could read and write and signed her name to the marriage document, whereas Louis I could only scrawl an X.
me. But your changed style has made me very sad, as the bringer of this letter will tell you. For your letter was very differently written from usual. God grant we can hear the same about Anushka as about Lisenka. When you write for me to come quickly and that you are very lonesome, I believe you. The bringer of this will tell you how lonely I am without you and I can say that except those days when I was in Versailles and Marly twelve days ago, I have had no great pleasure. But here I must stay some days and when I finish drinking the water I will start that very day, for there are only seven hours by land and five days by water. God grant to see you in joy which I wish from all my heart.
P.S. I received this morning the glad news that Anushka is better and therefore began to drink the water more joyously.
Soon after, he wrote again:
I congratulate you on this triumphal day of the Russian resurrection [it was the anniversary of Poltava], only I am sorry that we celebrate apart, as well as tomorrow's day of the Holy Apostle, the name day of your old man [Peter himself] and the boy [their son Peter Petrovich]. God grant that these days pass quickly and that I can be with you sooner. The water, thank God, acts well and I hope to finish the cure in a week from St. Peter's day. Today I put on for the first time your camisole and drank your health, but only very little, because it is forbidden.
P.S. [after acknowledging a letter and two bottles of vodka] You write that you sent little because I drank litte at the waters, which is true. I do not drink altogether more than five times a day and spirits only once or twice, and.not always, partly because it is strong, and partly because it is scarce. I think it is very tiresome that we are so near and cannot see each other. God grant soon. On finishing this, I drink once again to your health.
While at Spa, the Tsar sat for the Dutch painter, Karl Moor, and this painting and the one Kneller had done almost two decades before became the Tsar's favorite portraits of himself.
On July 25, Peter began an eight-day boat journey down the Meuse (in Holland, the Maas), and finally, on August 2, he was reunited with Catherine in Amsterdam. He remained in Holland for a month and on September 2, he departed Amsterdam and Holland for the last time, traveling up the Rhine to Nimwegen, Cleves and Wesel and then on to Berlin. Along the way, he left Catherine behind to follow him. They often separated on the road like this, because it was difficult to find enough horses to service both their suites and also simply because she did not like to travel as rapidly as her husband.
Two days after Peter's arrival, Catherine caught up with him in Berlin. It was her first visit to the Prussian capital, and although by now Peter was familiar, his wife was an object of much curiosity. But Catherine was well received and dinners and balls were given in her honor, so that she and Peter departed for Russia in good spirits. By October, the Tsar was back in St. Petersburg. There, Peter had to face the climax of a personal and political tragedy which ran deeper than any other in his reign.
51
THE EDUCATION OF AN HEIR
On October 11, 1717, Peter returned to St. Petersburg. "The two princesses, his daughters [Anne and Elizabeth, then nine and eight], waited for him in front of the palace, dressed in Spanish costumes," Monsieur de La Vie, the French envoy, reported to Paris, "and his son, the young Prince Peter Petrovich, greeted him in his room where he was riding a tiny Icelandic pony." But his joy at seeing his children quickly faded. While he was away, the government of Russia had functioned badly. Maladministration, jealousies and corruption everywhere had all but swamped the governmental system he had tried to erect; men who were supposed to be the leaders of the state were quarreling like children, frantically accusing one another of political and financial misdeeds. Peter plunged into this confusion and tried to straighten it out. Every morning, at six a.m., he convened the Senate and sat in person to hear the accusations and defenses of the contending parties. Finally, realizing that the complaints were too widespread and the corruption too deep, he created a special court of justice with separate investigating commissions, each consisting of a major, a captian and a lieutenant of the Guards, who were to examine the cases and render judgement according to "common sense and equity." "And so it came to pass in Russia," wrote Weber, "that members of the venerable Senate, composed of the heads of the greatest families in the Tsar's dominions, were obliged to appear before a lieutenant as their judge and be called to account for their conduct."