Potemkin, deluged with responsibilities and already disliking Jones, did not reply. The capital became a desert to Jones. Detective Segur was the only friend who supported his old American comrade and resolved to investigate who had framed him. He discovered that Jones had told Potemkin the truth - the accusing mother was a procuress who traded 'a vile traffic in young girls'. The girl, Katerina Goltzwart, was not nine but twelve, if not fourteen. She sold butter to guests at Jones's hotel, the London Tavern. In his statement to the chief of police three days after the incident, Jones admitted that the 'depraved girl' came several times to his room. He always gave her money. He claimed that he had not taken her virginity but 'each time she came chez moi, she lent herself with the best grace to all a man could want of her'.
Segur asked Potemkin to reinstate Jones and not charge him. The latter was possible but not the former. 'Thanks for what you tried to do for Paul Jones, even though you did not achieve what I wanted,' Segur wrote to the
Prince. 'Paul Jones is no more guilty than I, and a man of his rank has never suffered such humiliation, through the accusation of a woman, whose husband certifies she is a pimp and whose daughter solicits the inns.'18 Thanks to Segur's investigations and Potemkin's tepid help, Jones was not prosecuted and was received by Catherine one last time on 26 June 1789. Who framed Jones? Potemkin was above such vendettas. The English officers hated the American corsair enough to frame him, but Segur the detective concluded that Prince de Nassau-Siegen was the culprit.
Once back in Paris, Jones wrote a vainglorious account of the Liman and bombarded Potemkin with complaints about the medals he was owed. 'Time will teach you, my lord,' he wrote to Serenissimus on 13 July 1790, 'that I am neither a mountebank nor a swindler but a man loyal and true.'19
On 27 March, the pacific, wine-quaffing Sultan Abdul-Hamid I died. This made things worse, not better, for Russia because Selim III, his eighteen-year- old successor, was an aggressive, intelligent reformer whose determination to fight was buttressed by Moslem fanatics and the ambassadors of Prussia, England and Sweden. Austria and Russia wished to discuss peace with Selim in order to ward off a possible Prussian intervention in the Turkish War - but the augurs were not encouraging. The Austrian Chancellor, Kaunitz, wrote to Potemkin about Selim's ferocity, alleging that when he had once spotted a Polish Jew on the streets of Istanbul wearing the (wrong) yellow shoes, he had had him beheaded before the unfortunate had a chance to explain that he was a foreigner.20 Peace could be won only on the battlefields in Potemkin's next campaign: no wonder Catherine was so anxious.
Potemkin and Catherine still flirted with one another. After her birthday reception at Paul's palace on 12 April, he sweetly boosted her flagging morale by complimenting the 'mother of her subjects, especially to me' and the 'angelic virtues' of the 'first-born eagle nestling', her grandson Alexander.21 Before he left he gave her an exquisite present, 'a so-called bagetelle,' she wrote to him, 'which is of rare beauty and, more to the point, as inimitable as you yourself. I marvel at both - it and you. You really are the personification of wit.'22
On 6 May 1789, having laid plans with Catherine for every eventuality, including wars against Prussia and Poland, the Prince of Taurida left Tsarskoe Selo for the south. The old partners were not to meet again for almost two years.23
Serenissimus raced to the front, where he divided the combined Ukraine and Ekaterinoslav armies - about 60,000 men - into his own main army and four corps. The strategy was to fight round the Black Sea in a south-westerly direction through the Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia (today's Moldova and Rumania), taking the fortresses on each river: Dniester, Pruth, then Danube. Potemkin's army was to cover the Dniester until the Turks were diminished enough to begin fighting up the Danube into modern Bulgaria - to the walls of Constantinople.24
The main Austrian army, under one of their many Scottish officers, Field- Marshal Loudon, was to attack Belgrade (in today's Serbia), while Prince Frederick Joseph of Saxe-Coburg-Saarlfeld co-operated with the Russians in Wallachia and Moldavia. The most important force, except Potemkin's own, was Suvorov's 'flying corps', the Third, which was to protect the 'hinge' with the Austrians on the Russian extreme left. Suvorov balanced himself across three parallel rivers - the Sereth, Berlad and Pruth - and waited.
The new Grand Vizier Hassan-Pasha Genase commanded an Ottoman army of 100,000: his strategy was to smash the Austrians where the link between the allies was weakest around the rivers Pruth and Sereth, close to Suvorov's 'hinge', while a new armada landed on the Crimea. Ex-Capitan- Pasha Ghazi Hassan, the white-bearded Crocodile of Sea Battles, took to the land in command of a 30,ooo-strong corps that was to distract Potemkin's main army while the Vizier broke through. The Turkish manoeuvres were unusually adept. The Russians were vigilant. On 11 May, Potemkin crossed the Bug, massed his forces at Olviopol and then advanced towards the powerful Ottoman fortress of Bender on the Dniester.
In the West, the world was changing. Potemkin was settling into his new headquarters at Olviopol when the Parisian mob stormed the Bastille on 3/14 July. The National Assembly passed the Declaration of the Rights of Man on 15/26 August.25 The Polish Patriots, who were opposed to Russia, were encouraged by the French Revolution - Warsaw enjoyed a febrile fiesta of freedom and hope. Poland demanded that Russia withdraw its troops and magazines. Potemkin carefully monitored Poland, yet he had no choice but to comply.26 He continued to pursue his own Polish policies, vigorously expanding his Black Sea Cossacks to act as an Orthodox spearhead which would raise the pro-Russian eastern area of the Commonwealth when the time came.27
Potemkin 'flew' between his headquarters at Olviopol, where Russia, Poland and Turkey met, and Kherson, Ochakov and Elisabethgrad, checking and inspecting his vast front until he had exhausted himself with 'haemorrhoids and fever', as he told Catherine, 'but nothing can stop me except death'.28 She encouraged him by sending one of his rewards for Ochakov, the diamond-studded field-marshal's baton.
The Grand Vizier stealthily pushed forward, with a corps of 30,000, to strike at Coburg's Austrians before they could join up with the Russians. At this vital moment, a long and anguished secret letter arrived from a frantic empress. Just as the Turks probed the weakest point of Potemkin's front, Catherine's relationship with Mamonov disintegrated in the most humiliating way.
Catherine finally understood that Mamonov was not happy: it is hard to blame him. The favourite always complained that life at Court was like surviving in the jungle.29 His role as a companion to an older woman bored him, now that he was accustomed to luxury. Potemkin blocked any political role for him - on his last visit, the Prince had vetoed Mamonov's request to be a Court vice-chancellor. His sexual duties may have become tedious, even distasteful.