Your Imperial Majesty's most faithful and most grateful subject, Prince Potemkin of Taurida. Oh Matushka, how ill I am!
Then he collapsed, did not recognize anyone and subsided into coma. The doctors struggled to find a pulse for nine hours. His hands and feet were cold as ice.27
In Petersburg, Catherine was just reading the letters of the 25th and 27th - 'life is even harder when I don't see you'. She wept. She even examined the handwriting, trying to find some hope. 'I confess I am desperately worried by them but I see that your last three lines are written a little better,' she wrote in her last letter to her friend. 'And your doctors assure me you are better. I pray to God ...'. She also wrote to Branicka: 'Please stay with him ... Goodbye, dear soul. God bless you.'28
In the afternoon, Potemkin awoke and commanded that they set out. He believed that if he could reach Nikolaev he would recover. He could not sleep that night, but he was calm. The next morning, he kept asking, 'What time is it? Is everything ready?' It was too foggy, but he insisted. They sat him in an armchair and carried him to the six-seater carriage, where they tried to make him comfortable. He dictated his last letter to tell Catherine he was exhausted. Popov brought it to show him and, at the bottom, he managed to scrawl, 'The only escape is to leave.' But he was not strong enough to sign it.
At 8 a.m. accompanied by doctors, Cossacks and niece, his carriage moved off across the open steppe towards the Bessarabian hills.
EPILOGUE
LIFE AFTER DEATH
They trample heroes? - No! - Their deeds Shine through the darkness of the ages. Their graves, like hills in springtime, bloom. Potemkin's work will be inscribed.
Gavrili Derzhavin, The Waterfall
The next day, the body was solemnly returned to Jassy for post-mortem and embalming. The dissection was carried out in his apartments in the Ghika Palace.[111] Slicing open the soft and majestic belly, Dr Massot and his assistants examined the organs and then extracted them one by one, feeding out the entrails like a hose-pipe.1 They found the innards were very 'wet', awash with bilious fluid. The liver was swollen. The symptoms suggested a 'bilious attack'. There were the inevitable rumours of poisoning, but there was not the slightest evidence. It is most likely that Potemkin was weakened by his fever, whether typhus or malaria, haemorrhoids, drinking and general exhaustion, but these did not necessarily kill him. His earaches, phlegm and difficulties in breathing mean he probably died of bronchial pneumonia. In any case, the stench of the bile was unbearable. Nothing, not even the embalming process, could cleanse it.2
The doctors embalmed the body: Massot sawed a triangular hole in the back of the skull and drained the brains out of it. He then filled the cranium with aromatic grasses and potions to dry and preserve the famous head. The viscera were placed in a box, the heart in a golden urn. The corpse was sewn up again like a sack and then dressed in its finest uniform.
All around it, chaos reigned. Potemkin's generals argued about who was to command the army. Everything - a body, a fortune, the imperial love letters, the war and peace of an empire - awaited the reaction of the Empress.3 When the news reached St Petersburg just seven days later, the Empress fainted, wept, was bled, suffered from insomnia and went into seclusion. Her secretary recorded her days of 'tears and desperation', but she calmed herself by writing a panegyric to Potemkin's
excellent heart ... rare understanding and unusual breadth of mind; his views were always broadminded and generous; he was extremely humane, full of knowledge, exceptionally kind and always full of new ideas; nobody had such a gift for finding the right word and making witty remarks. His military qualities during this war must have struck everyone as he never failed on land or sea. Nobody on earth was less led by others ... In a word, he was a statesman in both counsel and execution.
But it was their personal relationship she most cherished: 'He was passionately and zealously attached to me, scolding me when he thought I could have done better ... his most precious quality was courage of heart and soul which distinguished him from the rest of humanity and which meant we understood each other perfectly and left the less enlightened to babble at their leisure ...'. It is a fine and just tribute.
She awoke weeping again the next day. 'How can I replace Potemkin?', she asked. 'Who would have thought Chernyshev and other men would outlive him? Yes I am old. He was a real nobleman, an intelligent man, he did not betray me, he could not be bought.' There were 'tears' and 'tears' again.4 Catherine mourned like a member of Potemkin's family. They wrote to one another: consolation by graphomania. 'Our grief is universal,' she told Popov, 'but I'm so raw I can't even talk about it.'5 The nieces, travelling to Jassy for the funeral, felt the same. 'My father is dead and I am rolling tears of grief,' wrote his 'kitten' Katinka Skavronskaya to Catherine. 'I became accustomed to rely on him for my happiness ...'. She had just received a loving letter from him when the news of her 'orphanage' arrived.6 Varvara Golitsyna, whom Potemkin had loved so passionately right after Catherine, remembered, 'he was so tender, so gracious, so kind to us'.7
Business had to go on. Indeed Catherine, with the selfishness of monarchs, grumbled about the inconvenience as well her grief: 'Prince Potemkin has played me a cruel turn by dying! It is me on whom all the burden now falls.'8 The Council met the day the news arrived, and Bezborodko was despatched to Jassy to finish the peace talks. In Constantinople, the Grand Vizier encouraged Selim III to start the war again, while the foreign ambassadors rightly told him peace was more likely now that the future King of Dacia was dead.9
Catherine ordered 'Saint' Mikhail Potemkin to fetch her letters from Jassy and sort out the Prince's labyrinthine finances. But the imperial letters were the holiest relics of Potemkin's legacy. Mikhail Potemkin and Vasily Popov argued over them.10 The latter insisted on handing them over himself. So Mikhail11 left without them.[112]
The murky question of the fortune, however, took twenty years and three emperors to settle and was never unravelled. Since 1783, it seems Potemkin had received a total of 55 million roubles - including 51,352,096 roubles and 94 kopecks from the state to pay his armies, build his fleets and construct his cities, and almost 4 million of his own money. His spending of millions could not be accounted for.f Emperor Paul restarted the investigation, but his successor Alexander, who had danced at Potemkin's ball, gave up the impossible task and the subject was finally closed.12
Petersburg talked of nothing but his mythical personal fortune - millions or just debts? 'Although his legacy was considerable, especially the diamonds,' Count Stedingk told Gustavus III, 'one guesses that when all the debts are paid, the seven heirs will not have much left.'13 Catherine was also interested: she could have left his debts for his heirs, which would have used up the entire fortune, said to be worth seven million roubles, but she understood that Potemkin had used the Treasury as his own bank, while spending his own money for the state - it was impossible to differentiate. 'Nobody knows exactly what the deceased left,' wrote the unprejudiced Bezborodko, arriving in Jassy. 'He owes a lot to the Treasury but the Treasury owes a lot to him.' Furthermore, the Court banker Baron Sutherland died at almost the same time as his patron, exposing a financial scandal which was potentially dangerous to Russia's fragile credit. Potemkin owed Sutherland 762,785 roubles14 - and a total in Petersburg alone of 2.1 million roubles.15