Potemkin and Panin welcomed the Prince of Prussia together on 26 August. However, Potemkin pointedly decreed that Alexandra Engelhardt would 'not give him a supper',14 and Catherine nicknamed the 'heavy, reserved and awkward' Prussian, 'Fat Gu'. The Hohenzollern was soon boring the entire capital except for the Grand Duke, who was so impressed with Frederick the Great and his military drill that any Prussian prince would do. Besides, Frederick's plan had already been undermined by the arrival of Joseph II's secret weapon - the Prince de Ligne.15
Corberon and Goertz convinced themselves, with wishful thinking, that nothing would come of Joseph's visit. However, the Frenchman then went to dinner with the Cobenzls 'and the new arrivals, the Prince de Ligne and his son'. Corberon dismissed this 'grand seigneur of Flanders' as an 'amiable гоиё\ but he was much more than that.
Charles-Joseph, Prince de Ligne, now fifty, was an eternally boyish, mischievous and effortlessly witty aristocrat of the Enlightenment. Heir to an imperial principality awarded in 1602, he was raised by a nurse who made him dance and sleep naked with her. He married a Liechtenstein heiress but found marriage 'absurd for several weeks and then indifferent'. After three weeks, he committed his first infidelity with a chambermaid. He led his Ligne regiment during the Seven Years War, distinguishing himself at the Battle of Kolin. 'I'd like to be a pretty girl until thirty, a general ... till sixty,' he told Frederick the Great after the war, 'and then a cardinal until eighty.' However, he was eaten by bitterness about one thing - he longed to be taken seriously as a general yet no one, from Joseph to Potemkin, would ever give him an independent military command. This rankled.16
Ligne's greatest talent was for friendship. The charmer of Europe treated every day as a comedy waiting to be turned into an epigram, every girl as an adventure waiting to be turned into a poem, and every monarch as a conquest waiting to be seduced by his jesting. His flattery could be positively emetic: 'What a low and brazen sycophant Ligne is!', wrote one who observed him in action. But it worked. Friends with both Joseph II and Frederick the Great, no mean feat in itself, as well as with Rousseau, Voltaire, Casanova and Queen Marie-Antoinette, he showed how small the monde was in those days. No one so personified the debauched cosmopolitanism of the late eighteenth century: T like to be a foreigner everywhere ... A Frenchman in Austria, an Austrian in France, both a Frenchman and an Austrian in Russia.'
Ligne's letters were copied, his bons mots repeated, across the salons of Europe - as they were meant to be. He was a superb writer whose bitchy portraits of the great men of his time, especially Potemkin, who fascinated him, were never bettered. His Melanges are, along with Casanova's Histoire, the best record of the era: Ligne was at the top and Casanova at the bottom of the same faro society. They met the same charlatans and dukes, prostitutes and countesses at balls and card tables, operas and bordellos, roadside taverns and royal courts, again and again, across Europe.
Ligne entranced Potemkin. Their friendship, bringing together two of the best conversationalists of the age, would wax and wane with the intensity of a love affair, chronicled in Ligne's many unpublished letters contained in Potemkin's archives, written in his tiny hand but dripping with wit and intelligence before sinking again into illegibility. This 'jockey diplomatique', as he called himself, was invited to all the Empress's private card games, carriage rides and dinners at Tsarskoe Selo. The bovine Prince of Prussia did not stand a chance against the man Catherine called 'the most pleasant and easy person to live with I've ever known, an original mind that thinks deeply and plays all sorts of tricks, like a child'.
Grand Duke Paul alone took trouble with Frederick William, which only served to alienate him from Catherine and Potemkin all the more. When the Empress gave a spectacle, ball and supper at the Hermitage Theatre in the Prince of Prussia's honour, the Grand Ducal couple accompanied the guest but Catherine sighed to Harris, 'I want you to defend me from boors,' and did not bother to attend the show. Diplomats wondered where the Empress had gone. It turned out she was playing billiards with Potemkin and Ligne.17
Empress and Serenissimus were relieved when Frederick William finally departed, having achieved nothing. He had noticed the cold shoulder: as king, he would take his revenge. But the Russians almost refused to let Ligne go. Ever the gentleman, the 'jockey diplomatique' stayed a little longer. Finally, in October, he insisted, so Potemkin went with him to show off one of his regiments and only let him leave with a deluge of presents - horses, serfs and a box encrusted with diamonds. Potemkin missed Ligne and kept asking Cobenzl when he was returning.
This was exactly what the Austrians wanted. They fired a barrage of compliments at Potemkin: in a little illustration of the lubricious nature of diplomatic flattery, Cobenzl asked his Emperor to mention Potemkin favourably in as many of his en clair despatches as possible. The Russian, he flattered Joseph in turn, rated a word from the Kaiser more highly than anything from the Kings of Prussia or Sweden. But the direct compliments of the Emperor should be saved for special occasions. And Joseph should also send regards to the Engelhardt nieces.18
On 17/28 November 1780, Joseph was liberated from the sensible restraints of Maria Theresa. Her death, after a reign of forty years, gave Joseph the chance almost to ruin the Habsburg legacy in a way that even Frederick of Prussia could not have imagined. In the lugubrious letters of sorrow that passed between Vienna and Petersburg, the grins were only just concealed behind the grief. 'The Emperor', Ligne joked to Potemkin on 25 November, only a week after her death, 'seemed to me so profoundly filled with friendship for you ... that I have had real pleasure to remonstrate with him on your account in all regards ... Have me told from time to time that you haven't forgotten me...'.19 There was no question of that.
When the Empress-Queen's body was laid in the Kaisergruft - imperial vault - of Vienna's Capucin Church, Joseph knew he could embark on his rapprochement with Russia. Potemkin declared both his 'keenness' and 'seriousness' to Cobenzl. Catherine made sure that all the details went directly to her and not to Panin, 'that old trickster', as she called him to Potemkin.20 Catherine and Joseph turned their attention to the coming struggle against the Sultan.
Sir James Harris, who thought an Austrian alliance would help his own mission, still could not understand Russia's reluctance to ally with Britain, even after Potemkin's return from Mogilev. The Prince cheerfully blamed Catherine's refusal on a raft of flimsy excuses, including the 'imbecility of the tale-bearing favourite' Lanskoy, her weakness induced by her 'passions' and the 'adroit flattery' of the Habsburg Emperor, who made her think she was the 'greatest Princess in Europe'. This diatribe displayed Potemkin's genuine frustration with the effort of managing Catherine, but it also rings of Pot- emkinian mischief. This is a clear example of Potemkin 'playing' poor Harris, because the couple's secret letters prove they were both pinning their entire political system on an alliance with Austria.21 Harris at last realized the mistake of backing Potemkin against Panin, because the former was now uninterested, if friendly, while the latter was openly hostile.
Harris requested recall in the face of Panin's hostility. But London was still pressing him to find a way to win the Russian alliance. So in nocturnal conversations with Potemkin the ever resourceful Harris conceived an ambitious scheme. Potemkin's imagination was the source of what became official British policy. Britain, suggested the Prince, should offer Russia 'some object worthy of her ambition' to join the war. In cypher, Harris explained to his Secretary of State, Viscount Stormont, in November 1780: 'Prince Potemkin, though he did not directly say so, yet clearly gave me to understand that the only cession, which would induce the Empress to become our Ally, was that of Minorca.' This was not as far-fetched as it might sound because, in 1780, Potemkin was building his Black Sea Fleet and promoting trade through the Straits and out to Mediterranean ports such as Marseilles. Port Mahon in Minorca might be a useful base for the fleet. Russia had occupied Greek islands during the last war - but not kept any at the peace; Potemkin regularly offered Crete to France and England in his Ottoman partition plans; and Emperor Paul later occupied Malta. Besides he was careful, as Harris emphasized, never to suggest it directly. This was one of those fantastical empire-building games that Potemkin loved to play - at no cost to himself.