On 28 June, the Swedes for the first time defeated the Russian Baltic Fleet, now commanded by Nassau, whose recklessness caught up with him at Svensksund.70 But Catherine, who hated admitting bad news, delayed telling Potemkin for three weeks.71 However, this cloud had a silver lining - the Swedish victory saved Gustavus' reputation, therefore allowing him to seek an honourable peace, signed on 3/14 August at Verela, based on the status quo ante bellum. 'We've pulled one paw out of the mud,' exulted Catherine to Potemkin. 'When we pull the other one out, then we'll sing Hallelujah!'72
The withdrawal of Austria from the war had temporarily alleviated the threat from Prussia too. Potemkin and Catherine realized that, while Prussia and England cooked up their next move, there was a chance to break the Turks, who had strengthened their forces on the Danube and in the Caucasus. The Prince was as 'tired as a dog', travelling back and forth the 1,000 versts between Kherson, Ochakov and his new naval base, Nikolaev, to inspect his ships. Nonetheless, he created an amphibious strategy to reduce the Turkish fortresses on the Danube which would open the road to Constantinople.73 The fleet was to patrol the Black Sea. The army was to take the Danubian fortresses. The flotilla - a most Potemkinian improvisation of converted imperial barges, Benthamite gunboats, Zaporogian chaiki and a Marseilles merchantman disguised as a warship, commanded by Ribas and his motley crew of 'Greek brigands, Corfiote renegades and Italian Counts'74 - was to fight its way up the Danube to rendezvous with the army beneath the most formidable Turkish fortress in Europe: Ismail.
Potemkin personally devised the training for the amphibious troops on Ribas's flotilla over the summer: his instructions, which show that the Prince's ideas predated Suvorov's much more famous Art of Victory, reveal his modernity, imagination and military skill. 'Find out who's most fit for precise shooting, who's good at running and who is skilled in swimming,' he demanded in an order that shows he envisaged what we would call marine assault commandos, lightly armed and highly skilled. Simultaneously, in the Caucasus, he also ordered his Kuban and Caucasus generals to destroy the 40,ooo-strong army of Batal-Pasha before moving on the great Ottoman fortress of Anapa.75
In August, the Prince of Taurida established new headquarters in the captured fortress of Bender on the Dniester, a convenient place to supervise his armies and navies on all fronts while keeping in contact with Warsaw, Vienna and Petersburg. Here, in this half-destroyed Tartar town, surrounded by steppes, he indulged himself in a Sardanapalian effulgence that beggared even his Jassy Court.
New campaign, new mistress: his relationship with Praskovia Potemkin, whom he had loved for two years, ended in Jassy and she was sent to join her complaisant husband in the field. As armies marched, barges rowed and fleets sailed, Potemkin may have enjoyed a short affair with Ekaterina Samoilova, the lascivious niece-by-marriage who had loved Damas at Ochakov. Ligne wrote to say he 'tenderly loved' Potemkin and was jealous that he was missing 'the beautiful eyes, beautiful smile and noble indifference of Madame Samoilova'.
However, she did not last long because Praskovia's place as 'favourite sultana' was then taken by Princess Ekaterina Dolgorukaya, just twenty-one years old and said to be the prettiest girl in Russia. 'Her beauty struck me,' wrote the painter Vigee Lebrun. 'Her features had something Greek mixed with something Jewish about them, above all in profile.' Her long dark hair, let down carelessly, fell on her shoulders. She had full lips, light blue-grey eyes, ivory skin and splendid figure.76 Potemkin's Court was also enlivened by the arrival of exiles from the French Revolution who had volunteered to fight for Russia.
One of them was Alexandre, Comte de Langeron, a veteran of the American War, who was precisely the sort of Gallo-centric aristocrat who sneered at primitive Russians - and was so outraged by Potemkin's sybaritic splendour that his account regurgitates every malicious lie he heard. Langeron's (and Ligne's) bitter memoirs of Potemkin have dominated his historical image in the West ever since. Yet Langeron ended a disappointed man, unjustly cashiered by Alexander I after the Battle of Austerlitz, then forgiven, and later appointed governor-general of the south, in which job he lasted a year. 'Incapable of commanding a corps,' wrote Wiegel, 'he got command of a country.' Only after these failures was he big enough to recognize Potemkin's greatness and pen a passionate tribute.
Langeron was joined by his more gifted compatriot, the twenty-four-year- old Armand du Plessis, Due de Richelieu, who left us a less prejudiced account of life with Serenissimus. This admirable aristocrat, with fine, serious features, curly locks and sardonic eyes, was a great-nephew of Louis XIII's Cardinal and a grandson of Louis XV's swashbuckling Field-Marshal. He inherited the cool shrewdness of the former and the cosmopolitan tolerance of the latter.77
Ten days and nights on the road staying at dimly lit inns had not prepared Richelieu for the spectacle that struck his eyes on entering the Prince's salon in the Pasha's Palace in Bender: 'a divan stuffed with gold under a superb baldaquin; five charming women with all the taste and careless elegance possible, and the sixth dressed with all the magnificence of Greek costume, lay on sofas in the Oriental manner'. Even the carpet was interwoven with gold. Flowers, gold and rubies were strewn around. Filigree scent-boxes wafted exquisite Arabian perfumes - 'Asiatic magic'. Potemkin himself, wearing a voluminous sable-edged coat with the diamond stars of the Orders of St Andrew and St George, and little else, sat among them - but closest to Princess Dolgorukaya, who was daringly wearing Turkic costume like an odalisque (except the pantaloons). She never left his side.
Supper was served in a hall by tall Cuirassiers with silver belts and breastplates, red capes and high fur hats surmounted by a tuft of feathers. They walked 'two by two in pairs ... like the Guards in tragedy plays', while the orchestra performed. Richelieu was introduced to Potemkin, who greeted him shyly. He was then relieved him to lose himself in the crowd and find his friends Damas and Langeron.78 The Prince, wrote Richelieu, surpassed 'all that the imagination can define as the most absolute. Nothing is impossible 444 the apogee
to his power - he commands today from Mount Caucasus to the Danube and he also shares with the Empress the rest of the Government of the Empire.'79 Fifty officers were gathered at the end of the brightly illuminated salon keeping their distance and waiting on the Prince. 'Here one saw a dethroned Sultan, established for three years in the Prince's antechamber, then another Sovereign who became a Cossack Colonel, there one saw an apostate Pasha, here a Macedonian and then further along Persian ambassadors'80 - and amid this bazaar sat Samuel Bentham, waiting for his papers to go home. Potemkin felt this Court lacked a painter, specifically the only artist ever allowed to paint him properly - Lampi. So he wrote to Kaunitz in Vienna, asking him to despatch the artist to Bender: 'It relaxes my mind to have good painters around me who work under my gaze.'81
'All that can serve the pleasure of a capital city', noted Richelieu, 'accompanies Prince Potemkin in the midst of camps and the tumult of armies.'82 The surreal daily life there resembled Petersburg with its little suppers, musical recitals, gambling, love affairs, jealousies, 'all that beauty inspires with the delicious, cruel, and perfidious'.83 The Prince existed in a bizarre world so rarefied that 'the word "impossible" had to be deleted from the grammar'. It was said that the magnificence with which he celebrated his love for Dol- gorukaya 'surpassed all that we read in iooi Nights'.84 Whatever she wanted from the four corners of the world, she got. There were no longer any limits. The Princess said she liked dancers. When Potemkin heard of two captains who were the best gypsy dancers in Russia, he sent for them by courier - even though they were in the Caucasus. When they finally arrived, they danced daily, after dinner - one dressed as a girl, the other as a peasant. 'I've never seen a better dance in all my life,' recalled Potemkin's adjutant, Engelhardt.85 The Prince decided to build a subterranean palace for the Princess: he was bored with moving between his palace and the residences of his sultanas, so two regiments of Grenadiers worked for two weeks to build this trogledytic residence. When it was finished, Potemkin decorated its interior with Greek columns, velvet sofas and 'every imaginable luxury'.86 Even Russians were awestruck by such extravagance, but the entire Russian army spent the winter in their zemliankas and the officers' dug-outs were 'as comfortable as houses' with thatched roofs and chimneys.87 Potemkin of course went considerably further: there was a gallery for the orchestra but the sound was slightly 'dulled', which produced an even finer resonance. The inner sanctum of this underground pleasure dome was, like the seraglio, a series of more and more secret rooms: outside there were the generals. Then the apartment itself was divided into two: in the first men gambled day and night, but the second contained a divan where the Prince lay, surrounded by his harem, but always closer and closer to Princess Dolgorukaya.