BOOKS.
CATKERINE II.*
THE story of Catherine II., the Semiramis of the North, as her contemporaries delighted to call her, is not revolting merely because it is the story of a profligate woman. Its deepest horror is to be found in the hideous corruption of the age and people to which the Empress belonged. Peter the Great said of his country, and said truly : " Russia is rotten before she is ripe." To realise the true meaning of these words and the fullness of their implication, one must study in detail the reigns of Elizabeth and Catherine II. In Russia, during the eighteenth century, were to be found side by side the vices alike of savagery and civilisation. Add to the lack of social instinct, of humanity in the wider sense, and of moral respon- sibility that is to be found in a Zulu kraal, the worst corrup- tions that are bred in Courts like that of Louis XV., and one can form some faint notion of the Russian capital under Elizabeth and Catherine. The country, as a whole, was oriental in its want of civil organisation, but without the idealism of the East. The capital was a welter of blood and lust, barbarism and sophistry, atheism and superstition, drunkenness and savage violence, indolence and semi-insane activity. The moral condition was reflected in the physical. Never was there such a mixture of squalor and mag- nificence as in the palaces of the Empress Elizabeth. The rudest and the most costly furniture were jumbled together. Filth and splendour were always alternating, and the vilest food was eaten off plates of gold. Take one fact as an example. Seven women and girls slept in the dressing- room of Catherine while Grand-Duchess, and this dressing- room opened out of her bedroom and had no other approach. It must not be supposed that Catherine, by her example and influence, corrupted the upper classes in Russia. It would be much truer to say that Russia corrupted her. She came from Germany as a girl of eighteen to marry the Grand- Duke Peter, the heir to the Russian Throne. In all proba- bility she was not much better or much worse than other German Princesses of the period; but the surroundings of the young woman, left alone in a land of strangers, soon did their work. Remember what these surroundings were. The Empress Elizabeth, who ruled Russia as a usurper, and kept the true Czar in confinement, was morally as corrupt as Catherine became in later years, and added drunkenness, gross superstition, cruelty, and insanity to her other vices. Yet at the mere word of this frenzied Bacchante, torture, or an exile that meant death or worse than death, could at any moment be pronounced, and pronounced as lightly and easily against the heir to the throne as against the poorest peasant. An actual sentence of death Elizabeth had vowed not to give, but this did not prevent the infliction of the most hideous mutilations. An even more revolting figure was the Grand- Duke Peter. Picture a half-crazy savage in a wig and a lace- coat, and you have the swaggering, cursing, bawling, punch- swilling ruffian to whom Catherine was given as a wife. Left absolutely alone in such surroundings, and with such a husband, can it be wondered that Catherine not only became corrupted, but outdid the corruptions in which she found herself ? It is said that men who live in a momentary fear of death and disaster, as in a town attacked by plague, or threatened with earthquake, are specially apt to abandon self-restraint and to grow demoralised. Catherine in daily and hourly peril from the insane fancies of the Empress Elizabeth, may well have experienced the deadening effects produced by a loss of all security. It is easy to see how, in such circumstances, a girl of her age would have been tempted to abandon all restraint, and to follow the maxim, "Eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die."
The work before us is a translation of M. R. Waliszewski's work on Catherine IL Taken as a whole it is a singularly vivid picture of the Empress. The atmosphere of her Court
* The Romance of an Empress : Catherine II. of Russia From the French of R. Walineweki. 2 role. London; William Heinematua. 1194. has, too, been rendered with great success. The material used must have been enormous in bulk, for not only was Catherine, II. a voluminous writer herself, but all the Ambassadors at St. Petersburg, during thirty years and more, filled their despatches with details about Catherine either as Empress or Grand-Duchess. No doubt the work is far too favourable to Catherine, and exaggerates her intellectual powers, but at the same time no attempt is made to deny the hideous grossness and depravity of her private life. Of the manner in which the work of translation has been done we cannot speak with praise. Not only is the rendering unidiomatic. It is often somewhat careless and clumsy, and the proof-reading has evidently not been very attentively carried out. It would, however, be ab- surd to waste space on condemning a careless translation. We will only say that those who know French will find the original version more satisfactory both for reading and re- ference. We will support what we have said as to the Empresses Elizabeth and Catherine and the Grand-Duke by quotations. Here is the translator's rendering of M. Waliszewski's account of Elizabeth towards the end of her reign :— " As for Elizabeth, worn out by an irregular life, haunted by terrors which will not allow her to sleep two nights following in the same room, and which have caused her to search through all her Empire for a man sufficiently slumber-proof to watch all night by her bedside without dozing, she is now only the shadow of her• self. This Princess,' writes the Marquis de l'Hopital, under date January 6th, 1759, • has sunk into a singular state of superstition. She remains whole hours before an image for which she has great devotion ; she talks to it, consults it; she comes to the opera at eleven, sups at one, and goes to bed at five. Count Chouvalof is the man in favour. His family have taken possession of the Empress ; and affairs go as God wills.' " Here is the Chevalier D'Eon's picture of Catherine :— " The Grand Duchess is romantic, ardent, passionate; her eyes are brilliant, their look fascinating, glassy, like those of a wild beast. Her brow is high, and, if I mistake not, there is a long and awful future written on that brow. She is kind and affable, but when she comes near me, I draw back with a movement which I cannot control. She frightens me."
Here is the account of Catherine's husband, the Grand-Duke Peter :—
" Peter remains the same gross, extravagant, and insupportable being that he has always been, a strange brute, streaked with insanity,' according to St. Beuve's expression. He still knows. how to render himself odious. Frequently he comes to bed dead drunk, and between two hiccups he speaks to his wife on his favourite subject, his amours with the Duchess of Courland, who is a hunchback, or with Freiline Vorontsof, who is marked with small-pox. If Catherine pretends to go to sleep he pummels her with hands and feet to keep her awake until sleep takes hold of himself. He is almost always drunk, and he becomes more and more mad. In 1758 Catherine gives birth to a daughter, the Czarevna Anna, of whom Poniatowski is supposed to be the father. At the moment when the pains of childbed take hold of her, at half-past two in the morning, Peter, informed of it, arrives, booted and spurred, in his Holstein uniform, a belt round his waist, and an enormous sword by his side.' On Catherine's inquiry as to why he has put on these accoutrements, he replies that ' a friend in need is a friend indeed, that in this garb he is ready to act as duty bids him, that the duty of a Holstein officer is to defend the ducal house, according to his oath, against its enemies, and that, be- lieving his wife was alone, he had come to her aid.' He can scarcely stand on his feet."
On the vexed question, "Did Catherine, or did she not, have a share in the murder of her husband ? " Mr. Waliszewski holds a very judicial attitude. On the whole, however, he inclines to the belief that she was not privy to the crime. The fact, however, that the murderers dared to act, and that no attempt was made to prosecute them, seems to show that Catherine had given some indication that the removal of the Grand-Duke would not be distasteful to her. The account of the proclamation of Catherine as Empress is exceedingly dramatic. It shows how true was the saying of the Nea- politan Carracioli,—" The throne of Russia is not hereditary or elective, but occupative." It shows also how much Catherine owed to luck. The Orloffs were far too reckless, and too barbarous, to make good conspirators, and the plot was all but bungled. But then luck is a necessary element in the career of all adventurers. Without luck, what would have been the end of Napoleon and his nephew?—for one the guillotine, and for the other a fate like that of General Boulanger.
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