The favourites usually accelerated their own fall, either through cuckolding the Empress like Korsakov, becoming deeply unhappy like Zavadovsky and Potemkin himself, or getting embroiled in clumsy intrigues against Potemkin, as Zorich did, which caused the Empress to tire of them. When Potemkin demanded their dismissal, which he did quite frequently, she probably told him to mind his own business and gave him another estate or admired the latest plans for his cities. At other times, she criticized him for not telling her when they were deceiving her, but he probably knew that she was so in love at the time, there was no point.
The Prince liked to boast that Catherine always needed him when things were not going well, politically or amorously. During crises of the boudoir, he was especially indispensable, as Harris reported to London during Catherine's hiccup with Lanskoy in May 1781: These revolutions are moments when the influence of my friend is without bounds and when nothing he asks, however extravagant, is refused.'55 But it was undoubtedly more than that.
In times of crisis, such as her humiliation by Korsakov, he became her husband and lover again. 'When all other resources fail him to achieve what he wants,' the Austrian envoy, Count Louis Cobenzl, who was one of the few foreigners who really knew Catherine and Potemkin intimately, told his Emperor Joseph II, 'he retakes for a few days the function of favourite.'56 The letters between Empress and Prince suggest that their relationship was so informal and intimate that neither would have thought twice about spending the night together at any time throughout their lives. Hence some writers call him 'favori-en-chef' and the others just 'sous-favoris'. No wonder the 'sous-favoris' failed to understand Potemkin's role and tried to intrigue against him.
Potemkin and Catherine had settled their personal dilemma in this formal system, which was supposed to preserve their friendship, keep imperial love out of politics and reserve political power for Potemkin. Even though there was a system which worked better than most marriages, it was still flawed. No one, not even those two deft manipulators, could really control favouritism, that sensitive and convenient fusion of love and sex, greed and ambition.
Nonetheless, it was their cure for jealousy. While Catherine was truly happy at last with Lanskoy in 1780, she was equally unjealous about Potemkin's scandalous antics. This step has increased Potemkin's power,' Harris told Weymouth, 'which nothing can destroy unless a report is true ...'. The report? That Potemkin might 'marry his favourite niece'.57
HIS NIECES
There was a man, if that he was a man,
Not that his manhood could be called in question
Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto VII: 36
When the five Engelhardt sisters arrived at Court in 1775, these motherless, barely educated but beautiful provincial girls were instantly transformed by their uncle into sophisticates and treated as if they were members of the imperial family - 'almost as Grand Duchesses'.1 When Potemkin ended his relationship with the Empress of Russia, he almost at once became very close to his striking teenage niece Varvara Engelhardt. It was not long before Court gossip claimed that the degenerate Prince had seduced all five of these girls.
Now he was a semi-single man again, Potemkin immediately plunged into an imbroglio of secret affairs and public liaisons with adventuresses and aristocrats that were so intertwined that they fascinated his own times and are still difficult to unravel. 'Like Catherine, he was an Epicurean,' wrote Count Alexander Ribeaupierre, son of one of Potemkin's adjutants, who married his great-niece. 'Sensual pleasures had an important part in his life - he loved women passionately and nothing could stand in the way of his passions.'2 Now he could return to the way he preferred to live. Rising late, visiting Catherine through the covered passageway, he swung constantly between frenetic work and febrile hedonism, between bouts of political paperwork and strategic creativity, and then love affairs, theological debates, and nocturnal wassails, until dawn, at the green baize tables.
Nothing so shocked his contemporaries as the legend of the five nieces. All the diplomats wrote about it to their captivated monarchs with ill-concealed relish: 'You will get an idea of Russian morality', Corberon told Versailles under its prim new King Louis XVI, 'in the manner in which Prince Potemkin protects his nieces.' In order to underline the horror of this immoral destiny, he added with a shiver, 'There is one who is only twelve years old and who will no doubt suffer the same fate.' Simon Vorontsov was also disgusted: 'We saw Prince Potemkin make a harem of his own family in the imperial palace of which he occupied a part.' What 'scandalous impudence!' The scandal of the nieces was accepted by contemporaries as true - but did he really seduce all five, even the youngest?3
The 'almost-Grand-Duchesses' became the gilded graces of Catherine's Court, the richest heiresses in Russia and the matriarchs of many of the aristocratic dynasties of the Empire. None of them ever forgot who they were and who their uncle was: their lives were illuminated and mythologized by their semi- royal status and the prestige of Serenissimus.
Only five of the Engelhardt sisters mattered at Court because the eldest, Anna, left home and married Mikhail Zhukov before Potemkin's rise, though he looked after the couple and promoted the husband to govern Astrakhan. The next eldest, the formidable Alexandra Vasilievna, twenty-two in 1776, became Potemkin's favourite niece, his dearest friend apart from the Empress. She was already a woman when she arrived, so it was hardest for her to adapt to Court sophistication. But she was as haughty as Potemkin had been, and 'clever and strong-willed'. She used her 'kind of grandeur' to conceal 'her lack of education'.4 She had a head for business and politics and a talent for friendship. Her portraits show a slim brunette, hair brushed back, with high cheekbones, bright intelligent blue eyes, a broad sensual mouth, small nose and alabaster skin, graced by a lithe body and the grandness of a woman who was an honorary member of the imperial family and the confidante of its greatest statesman.
The third sister was Varvara, twenty, who charmed her way through life. 'Plenira aux chevaux d'or' - 'the fascinatress with the golden hair' - was what the poet Derzhavin called her; she was celebrated for her radiant blondeness. Even in middle age, she kept her slender figure, and her features were described by the memoirist Wiegel as 'perfect ... with the freshness of a twenty- year-old girl'. No statesman liked her sister Alexandra, she was excitable, flirtatious, capricious, hot-tempered and incessantly demanding. No one could criticize her ill-temper and bad manners when the Prince was alive, but on one occasion she pulled a friend by the hair; on another she whipped one of her estate managers. She was harsh to the pompous or corrupt but very kind to her servants5 - though not necessarily to her serfs. Years later, force was required to suppress a peasant revolt on her estates.
Nadezhda, fifteen, contrived to be both ginger and swarthy and must have suffered from being the ugly duckling in a family of swans, but Potemkin made her a maid-of-honour like the others. She was headstrong and irritating: Nadezhda means 'hope' in Russian so Potemkin, who coined nicknames for everyone, cruelly called her 'bez-nadezhnaya' - or Hopeless. The fifth sister was the placid and passive Ekaterina, who was already the physical paragon of the family: her portrait by Vigee Lebrun, painted in 1790, shows her seraphic face surrounded by bright auburn-blonde curls, looking into a mirror. Ekaterina, wrote Segur, the French envoy, might 'have served as a model for an artist to paint the head of Venus'. Lastly, Tatiana was the youngest - aged seven in 1776 - but she grew up as good-looking and intelligent as Alexandra. After Potemkin withdrew from Catherine's alcove, he fell in love with Varvara.6