Catherine appeared only at small dinners. Peter Zavadovsky was frequently present; Potemkin was there less than before - but still too much for the former's liking. Zavadovsky must have felt inadequate between two of the most dynamic conversationalists of their time. Potemkin was still Catherine's lover, while the earnest Zavadovsky was increasingly in love with her. We do not know when (or if) she withdrew from Potemkin and took Zavadovsky as a lover - it was some time during that winter. Indeed, it was most likely that she never completely ceased to sleep with the man she called 'my husband'. Was she playing off one against the other, encouraging both? Naturally. Since by her own account she was one of those who could not contemplate a day without somebody to love her, it would have been only human for her to cast her eyes at her secretary when Potemkin was parading his lack of interest.
In some ways, their relationship is at its most moving in this tense six months because they still loved one another, regarding each other as husband and wife, drifting apart yet trying to find a way to stay together for ever. Count Potemkin sometimes wept in the arms of his Empress.
'Why do you want to cry?', she sweetly asked her 'Lord and Darling Husband' in the letter that reminded him of the 'sacred ties' of their marriage. 'How can I change my attitude towards you? Is it possible not to love you? Have confidence in my words ... I love you.'5
Potemkin had watched the closeness develop between Catherine and Zavadovsky and at least tolerated it. He continued to be as difficult as usual, but he clearly did not mean to kill Zavadovsky as he had once threatened to do to his successor. The letters reveal a crisis in their relationship and a certain amount of jealousy towards Zavadovsky, but Potemkin appears to be so dominant that the other man does not really threaten him. It seems most likely that Potemkin approved of the new relationship - up to a point. It was simply a question of finding it.
Potemkin
'Your life is precious to me and I don't want to remove you,'6 the Empress told him specifically. They liked to settle rows with their dialogue letters: the second that has survived reads like the climax of a discussion, the calm reconciliation after a frantic storm of insecurities. This is much more specific than the earlier epistolary duet. The Empress is lovingly patient with her impossible eccentric, Potemkin is tender and gentle with her - incongruous qualities in such a man:
Catherine
Let me my love say this which will, I hope, end our argument
Don't be surprised if I am
Disturbed by our love.
Not only have you showered
Me with good deeds,
You have placed me in your
heart. I want to be
There alone, and above everyone
else,
Because no one has ever loved
you so much; and
As I have been made by your
hands, I want my peace
To be the work of your hands,
that you should be
Happy in being good to me;
That you should find rest from the great
Labours arising from your high station
In thinking of my comfort. Amen
I allow it
The sooner the better
Don't be disturbed
So have you on me You are there firmly and
strongly and will
Remain there I see it and believe it
In my heart, I shall be
Happy to do so
It will be my greatest pleasure
Of course Give rest to our Thoughts and let Our feelings act freely They are most tender and
Will find the best way. End of quarrel. Amen.7
He was not always so kind. Potemkin, feeling vulnerable, lashed out at her
cruelly. 'I ask God to forgive you your vain despair and violence but also your injustice to me,' she replied. 'I believe that you love me in spite of the fact that often there is no trace of love in your words.' Both suffered bitterly. 'I am not evil and not angry with you,' she tells him after one of their discussions. 'It depends on your will, how you treat me.' But she suggested that they could not sustain this tumultuous tension indefinitely: 'I want to see you calm and be in the same state too.'8
The Court searched for signs of Potemkin's fall or Zavadovsky's rise, while the couple debated what to do. Potemkin wanted to remain in power, so he had to keep his apartments in the Winter Palace. When he became upset, she told him what so many ordinary lovers have told their agonized partners - 'it's not difficult to decide: stay with me'. Then she typically added this reminder of their amorous-political partnership: 'All your political proposals are very reasonable.'9 But Catherine finally lost her cool too.
The way you sometimes talk, one might say I am a monster which has all the faults and especially that of stupidity ... this mind knows no other way of loving than making happy whoever it loves and for this reason it finds it impossible to bear even a moment's breach with him whom it loves without - to its despair - being loved in return ... My mind is busy trying to find virtues, some merits, in the object of its love. I like to see in you all the marvels...
After this expression of her hurt, as Potemkin fell out of love with her, she defined the heart of their problem: 'The essence of our disagreement is always the question of power and never that of love.'10
This has always been taken at face value, but it is a tidy feminine rewriting of their history. Their love was as stormy as their political collaboration. If power was the subject of their quarrels, then removing the love but keeping the power would also perpetuate their rows. Perhaps it was truer to say that the essence of their disagreement was the end of the intensely physical phase of their relationship and Potemkin's increasing maturity and need for freedom. Maybe Catherine could not bring herself to admit that he no longer wanted her as a woman - but they would always argue about power.
None of this satisfied him. Potemkin appears to have been in a permanent rage. 'You are angry,' she wrote in French. 'You keep away from me, you say you are offended ... What satisfaction can you want more? Even when the Church burns a heretic, it doesn't claim any more ... You're destroying all my happiness for the time that is left to me. Peace, my friend. I offer you my hand - will you take it, love?'11
On her return to Petersburg from Moscow, Catherine wrote to Prince Dmitri Golitsyn, her envoy in Vienna, that she wished to 'get His Majesty [Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II] to raise General Count Grigory Potemkin, who has served myself and the State so well, to the dignity of Prince of the Holy
Roman Empire, for which I will be most indebted to him'. Joseph II reluctantly agreed on 16/27 February, despite the distaste of his prim mother, the Empress-Queen Maria Theresa. 'It's fairly droll', smirked Corberon, 'that the pious Empress-Queen recompenses the lovers of the non-believing sovereign of Russia.'
'Prince Grigory Alexandrovich!' Catherine acclaimed her Potemkin. 'We graciously permit you to accept the title of Prince of the Holy Roman Empire.'12 Potemkin was henceforth known as 'Most Serene Highness', or in Russian, 'Svetleyshiy Kniaz'. There were many princes in Russia but from now Potemkin was 'The Prince' - or just 'Serenissimus'. The diplomats presumed that this was Potemkin's golden adieu because Orlov had been granted use of his title only on his dismissal. Catherine also gave Potemkin 'a present of 16,000 peasants who can make annually five roubles a head', and then Denmark sent him the Order of the White Elephant. Was Potemkin being dismissed or confirmed in office? 'I dined at Count Potemkin's,' said Corberon on 24 March, 'It's said his credit falls, that Zavadovsky is still in intimate favour and that the Orlovs have a lot of credit to protect him.'13