The Prince returned a few weeks later. Catherine welcomed him with a warm note. He moved straight back into his Winter Palace apartments. This confounded his critics: Serenissimus 'arrived here on Saturday evening and appeared at Court the next day. His returning to the apartments he before occupied in the Palace made many apprehensive of the possibilities of his regaining the favour he had lost.'34 They would have been even more surprised to learn that he was soon correcting Catherine's letters to Tsarevich Paul in Berlin.
There is little doubt that they were playing one of their prearranged games, like celebrities today who delight in tricking the press. Having started the year afraid of losing their love and friendship in a frenzy of jealousy and regret, they had now managed to arrange their unique marriage in their own manner. Each could find his own happiness while keeping the services - personal and political, affectionate and practical - of the other. This had not been easy. Affairs of the heart cannot be drilled like regiments, or negotiated like treaties - especially those of two such emotional people. Only trust, time, nature, trial and error, and intelligence had achieved it. Potemkin now made the difficult transformation from an influential lover to 'minister-favourite' who ruled with his Empress.35 They had managed to gull everyone.
The day Serenissimus returned to Court, the couple knew they would be watched for any hint of his fall or recovery. So the Prince strolled into her apartments 'with the utmost composure' and found the Empress playing whist. He sat down right opposite her. She played him a card as if nothing had changed - and told him he always played luckily.36
PART FOUR
The Passionate Partnership
1776-1777
HER FAVOURITES
And Catherine (we must say thus much for Catherine)
Though bold and bloody, was the kind of thing Whose temporary passion was quite flattering Because each lover looked a sort a king
Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto IX: 70
An order from Her Majesty consigned
Our young Lieutenant to the genial care Of those in office. All the world looked kind
(As it will look sometimes with the first stare, Which youth would not act ill to keep in mind,)
As also did Miss Protassoff then there, Named from her mystic office PEprouveuse, A term inexplicable to the Muse.
Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto IX: 84
The love affair of Prince Potemkin and Catherine II appeared to end there, but it never truly ceased. It simply became a marriage in which both fell in love and had sexual affairs with others, while the relationship with each other remained the most important thing in their lives. This unusual marital arrangement inspired the obscene mythology of the nymphomaniac Empress and Potemkin the imperial pimp. Perhaps the 'Romantic Movement', and the serial love marriages and divorces of our own time, have ruined our ability to understand their touching partnership.
Zavadovsky was the first official favourite to share the Empress's bed while Potemkin ruled her mind, continuing to serve as her consort, friend and minister. During her sixty-seven years, we know that Catherine had at least twelve lovers, hardly the army of which she stands accused. Even this is deceptive because, once she had found a partner with whom she was happy, she believed it would last for ever. She very rarely ended the relationships herself - Saltykov and Poniatowski had been removed from her; Orlov had been unfaithful and even Potemkin had somehow contrived to withdraw.
Nonetheless, after Potemkin, her relationships with men much younger than her were obviously abnormal, but then so was her situation.
The reality was very different from the myth. She did make her lover into an official position, and Potemkin helped her. The triangular relationship between Catherine, Potemkin and her young lovers has been neglected by historians - yet this became the heart of her own 'family'.
Catherine's affair with Zavadovsky was the test case for the imperial mёnage- a-trois. Potemkin's presence made life for the favourites more difficult and humiliating, because they could not avoid Catherine's intimacy with him. Their relationship with Serenissimus was almost as important as their love for the Empress. Even without Potemkin, this was a difficult role and Zavadovsky was soon deeply miserable.
Catherine's letters to Zavadovsky give us a wonderful glimpse into the suffocating world of the favourites. He lasted barely eighteen months in favour but his love for Catherine was genuine. Her letters to him reveal she loved him too. But there was less equality between them. Even though he was the same age as Potemkin, he was in awe of her and she treated him patronizingly, thanking him for his 'most affectionate little letter' as if he was clever to have known his alphabet. While Potemkin wanted time and space to himself, Zavadovsky longed to be with her every moment of the day, like a lapdog, so she had to write and explain that 'Time belongs, not to me, but to the Empire'. Yet they worked together - he still toiled in her secretariat all day before retiring with her at ten, after playing three rubbers of whist. It was a routine that was both tiresome and hard work.
The new favourite was also supposedly far less sexually experienced than the Prince, which is perhaps why he fell in love with her so absolutely. 'You are Vesuvius itself,' she wrote. His inexperience perhaps caused him to lose control, for she added: 'when you least expect it an eruption appears but no, never mind, I shall extinguish them with caresses. Petrusha dear!'. She corresponded less formally with Zavadovsky than with Potemkin. While the former called her 'Katiusha' or 'Katia', the Prince had always used 'Matu- shka', 'Sovereign Lady'. The Empress's letters to Zavadovsky seem more sexually explicit: 'Petrushinka, I rejoice that you have been healed by my little pillows and if my caress facilitates your health then you will never be sick.' These 'pillows' may have meant her breasts - but she also embroidered herb- filled cushions, an example of the comical dangers of biographers making sexual interpretations of personal letters.1
Zavadovsky, who loved her so much, was often sick, more from nerves than anything else. He was not suited to being the subject of such intrigue and hatred. While she repeatedly declared her love for him in her letters, he could not relax in his position: his private life was 'under a microscope'.2 She did not understand what he was up against and he did not have the strength that Potemkin employed to get what he wanted from everyone. Above all, he had to tolerate Potemkin's omnipresence. It was a threesome and, when Potemkin wanted attention, he presumably got it. When they had crises in their relationship, it was Potemkin who sorted them out: 'both of us need a restoration of spiritual peace!' wrote Catherine. 'I have been suffering on a par with you for three months, torturing myself ... I will talk to Prince Gri[gory] A[lexandrovich Potemkin].' This talk with Potemkin about Zav- adovsky's private feelings could hardly have helped his spiritual peace. Afterwards, Zavadovsky claimed that he was quite unfazed by Potemkin's ever present flamboyance, but the evidence suggests that he was intimidated and upset by him and hid when he was near by. 'I do not understand', the Empress wrote to Zavadovsky, 'why you cannot see me without tears in your eyes.' When Potemkin became a prince, Catherine invited, or rather ordered, Zavadovsky: 'If you went to congratulate the new Highness, His Highness will receive you affectionately. If you lock yourself up, neither I nor anybody else will be accustomed to see you.'3