Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [311]
Season of White Nights: electric season. Surely it must have been some dangerous magnetism in the atmosphere that led Alexander Bobrov to commit such acts of complete insanity. No other explanation is possible.
For by that summer, the world had entirely changed. It was as if some huge electric storm was about to break. Who knew what monarchies might fall, what societies dissolve into chaos? Each day, St Petersburg waited for news from the west where, just three summers before, with the storming of the Bastille in Paris, the epoch-making cataclysm had begun.
The French Revolution. Already the King of France, his Queen Marie Antoinette and their children were virtual prisoners. Who knew what these revolutionaries – these Jacobins – would do next? The monarchs of Europe were outraged. Even now, Austria and Prussia were at war with this disruptive new revolutionary power. Britain was ready to join. And no one was more shocked than the enlightened Empress Catherine of Russia. The principles of freedom and Enlightenment were one thing – splendid theory. Revolution and mob rule were quite another. Remember Pugachev! She had crushed that desperate Cossack and his peasants’ revolt years ago; she was not going to invite another peasant rising.
Small wonder therefore if enlightened thinkers, from the empress down, looked at these results of the Enlightenment with horror and concluded: ‘It went too far, too fast.’ Instead of reform, they saw only chaos. ‘These Jacobins have betrayed us all.’
And if, in France, the revolutionaries believed they were witnessing a new springtime of the world, at the distant court of St Petersburg, it seemed rather that a golden era was passing – as though Catherine’s long summer, having extended too far into autumn, had suddenly been exposed by this harsh, cruel wind blowing in the world; and’ that now her leaves were suddenly falling, revealing a bare forest before the unrelenting winter.
The empress was lonely. The faces about her were changing. Above all, she had lost her one true friend, her gallant old warhorse, the great Potemkin.
What a loyal friend he had been. He had given her the Crimea. Just two years before the Revolution, together with the awestruck ambassadors of the great European powers, he had taken Catherine on a magnificent tour of that huge southern province by the Black Sea. The path had been almost literally strewn with flowers. He had even erected delightful stage-set hamlets – the famous Potemkin villages – along the way to charm them. The villages might be artifice, but the new empire was not: it was rich indeed. And so it was that at last a Russian ruler had come to sit in the fabled palace of the Crimean Khans, at Bakhchisarai, and receive the final homage of the Tatars.
And that, both for Catherine and Potemkin, had been the end of their long, late summer. The winds had started to blow; the French Revolution had come; they had failed to take the last, glittering prize of Constantinople; and sadly for both of them – just as Alexander Bobrov had foreseen – Catherine’s young lover had been unfaithful and this time Potemkin’s enemies had succeeded in putting their own protégé, a vain young man, into her bed. It was the end of the game for Potemkin and he probably knew it. He came to St Petersburg, gave the most gigantic party for the empress that the capital had ever seen, and then departed south once more, in deep depression. In a year he was dead.
She was lonely. What had she left? A vain young lover – at least she was not alone in bed. A son who had come to hate her, and who grew daily more like her late, impossible husband. Her two grandsons, educated by her own instructions, and adored. And the empire. She would preserve it and strengthen it for her grandsons. As with everything she did, she was thorough.
How changed was St Petersburg now. France was quite out of fashion: even French dress was frowned upon. The newspaper reports of the terrible French contagion were kept to a minimum. ‘Thank