PRINCESS EKATERINA ROMANOVNA DASHKOV

‘I very much wish,’ Miss Katharine Wilmot writes to her relations in Ireland, from the Princess Dashkov’s country estate, ‘that you could see the Princess herself. Everything about her—dress, language, everything—is original; whatever she does, she is absolutely unlike any one else. It is not only that I have never seen such a creature, I have never even heard of one. She teaches the masons how to build walls, helps make the paths, goes to feed the cows, composes music, writes articles for the Press, knows the Church ritual perfectly and corrects the priest if he makes a mistake in the prayers, understands the theatre perfectly and corrects her serf-actors when they go wrong in their parts; she is a doctor, a chemist, a sick-nurse, a blacksmith, a carpenter, a judge, a legislator; every day she does the most opposite things in the world, and carries on a correspondence with her brother, who holds one of the foremost posts in the Empire, with savants, with literary men, with Jews, with her son, and with all her relations. Her conversation, charming in its simplicity, sometimes borders upon childlike naïveté. Without stopping to think she speaks at once French, Italian, Russian, and English, mixing all the languages together.

‘She was born to be a minister or a general, her place is at the head of a State.’

All that is true, but Miss Wilmot forgets that, in addition to all that, Princess Dashkov was born a woman, and remained a woman all her life. She was exceptionally developed on the side of the heart, of tenderness, of feeling, of devotion.

For us that is particularly important. In Princess Dashkov the Russian woman, awakened by the revolution made by Peter the Great, emerges from her seclusion, displays her capacity, demands her share in politics, in science, in the civilisation of Russia, and boldly takes her stand beside Catherine the Great.

In Princess Dashkov we are conscious of that force, still formless, which was struggling into life and freedom from under the mildew of Moscow stagnation, something powerful, many-sided, active, something of Peter the Great and of Lomonossov, but softened by aristocratic breeding and womanliness.

Catherine II., in making her President of the Academy, recognised the political equality of the sexes, which is perfectly consistent in a country which accepted the civic equality of woman before the law, while in Western Europe they still remain bound to their husbands or in perpetual tutelage.

The memoirs of a woman who took a foremost part in the coup d’état of 1762, and who was a close witness of all the events from the death of Elizabeth to the Peace of Tilsit, are exceedingly important in Russian history, so poor in striking individualities; they are the more so as we know very little of our eighteenth century. We like to go much further back in history. We see the Varangians, the men of Novgorod, and the men of Kiev, and they block out our view of yesterday; the turreted walls of the Kremlin screen the flat lines of the Peter-Paul fortress from us. Going carefully through the royal records, we know little of what was being written in bad Russian in the Government offices of Petersburg, while sedition and tumult were roaring under the windows of the Winter Palace, menacing its inhabitants with Siberia and death, and the throne had not yet the strength and security which it gained not more than seventy-five years ago. To repeat the story of that period is very profitable, both for the Government, that it may not forget, and for us, that we may not despair.

I should like, however briefly, to explain what I mean.

All Europe and, what is far worse, all Russians accept the power of the Tsar in its present form as an eternal and immutable element of Russian life, which has the right to jeer at all rash assaults on it and boldly withstands every onslaught, resting firmly and securely on roots that spread far into the earth.

The power of the Tsar has, on the contrary, been firmly established only very recently. Even to this day it carries the traces of its revolutionary origin; in it, as in the strata of the earth, the granite of ancient times, the alluvial sands, the fragments casually brought down from above, or thrust up from below, in places tightly compressed together, but not chemically united, are mingled chaotically to this day.

The Byzantine necklet of Monomah, the throne of the Tsar Ivan the Terrible, the Uspensky Cathedral, lead us astray. Did not Napoleon array himself in the mantle of Charlemagne and put the iron crown on his head at Milan? That is all forgery in the style of Chatterton; the venerated emblems of what is old and past are borrowed to invest the new with respect, and to persuade us of its durability, of its eternity, so to speak.

The Russian Imperial autocracy developed from the power of the Tsar in response to the acute need for a different manner of life. It is a military and civil dictatorship with far more resemblance to the Caesarism of Rome than to a feudal monarchy. A dictatorship may be very strong and may absorb every power, but it cannot be permanent. It exists so long as the circumstances that have called it forth remain unaltered and so long as it is true to its destiny.

Of course, when, on landing from a steamer, one meets a freshly pipe-clayed, spick-and-span regiment of Guards, an unquestioning bureaucracy, galloping couriers, motionless sentinels, Cossacks with whips, policemen with fists, half the town in uniform, half the town standing at attention, and the whole town hurriedly taking off its hat, and when one reflects that they are all deprived of every kind of independence, and simply acting as the fingers, teeth, and nails of one man who combines in his own person every form of authority—that of landowner, priest and executioner, mother and sergeant—one may turn giddy, be terrified, perhaps feel moved to take off one’s hat oneself, and to bow down while one’s head is still on one’s shoulders. And it may even more forcibly make one wish to return to the steamer and sail away elsewhere. All that is so, and all that (except the last item) was felt by the worthy Westphalian baron, Haxthausen.

The Tsardom acquired this grimly gloomy, oppressive aspect of brute force especially in the thirty years of the reign of Nicholas; terrorism was with him a principle. But here we cannot avoid asking why Nicholas could not, in the course of those thirty years, forget the ‘bad quarters of an hour’ he spent during the defence of the Winter Palace on the 14th of December 1825. Why was it that he remembered that day on his deathbed and sent his thanks to the Guards for it?

It was because from the very beginning of his reign he grasped that his throne was only strong through force. By force alone he maintained his position, but he felt that there was no lasting security in bayonets and physical oppression; and he was seeking other means of support. The allies to which he turned his attention could be relied upon; beside autocracy he set orthodoxy and nationalism. But this was a reaction against the movement inaugurated by Peter the Great, the whole gist of which lay in the secularisation of the Tsardom and the diffusion of European culture. Nicholas stood in direct contradiction to the living principle of the Tsardom as it had been from the time of Peter the Great, and so there is nothing surprising in the fact that the immediate result of his reign was a dumb breach between him and Russia. If he had lived another ten years, his throne would have collapsed of itself; everything was ceasing to work, everything had grown slack and begun to wilt; the spirit had gone out of everything, the irregularities of the administration had reached monstrous proportions. He understood that, had he followed Alexander’s lead, he would inevitably have had to replace the autocratic power by more humane forms of government, but this he would not do, and he imagined that he was so far independent of the principles of Peter the Great that he could be another Peter without them.

He would have succeeded perhaps if the revolution wrought by Peter had really been, as Moscow Old Believers hold, the consequence of personal will and the caprice of genius. But it was not at all a matter of chance, it came in response to the instinctive craving of Russia to develop its forces. How else can its success be explained?

The political development of Russia moved slowly and was very late in coming. Russia lived from hand to mouth and, harried by Tatars, with difficulty gathered herself together into the ikon-like Suzdal-Byzantine kingdom of Muscovy; its political forms were clumsy and coarse, everything moved awkwardly, apathetically. The power of the Tsar was insufficient even for the defence of the country, and in 1612 Russia was saved without the help of the Tsar. And meanwhile something, that speaks to this day in the heart of every one of us, whispered that there was an immense vigour and strength under the old-fashioned burdensome garments. That something is youth, self-confidence, consciousness of strength.

The abrupt break with the old order wounded—yet pleased; the people liked Peter the Great; they put him into their legends and their fairy tales. It was as though the Russians divined that at all costs our sloth must be broken up and our slackness be braced by a strong political order. The inhuman discipline of Peter the Great, and of such of his successors as Bühren, aroused, of course, horror and loathing, but all that was borne with for the sake of the wide horizons of the new life. It was just as the Terror was endured in France.

The period initiated by Peter the Great was from the first more national than the period of the Muscovite Tsars. It has entered deeply into our history, into our manners, into our flesh and blood; there is something in it youthful and extraordinarily akin to us; the revolting mixture of barrack-room insolence and Austrian red-tape is not its chief characteristic. With that period the precious memories of our mighty growth, our glory, and our misfortunes are bound up; it has kept its word and created a powerful State. The people love success and strength.

One side of its ideal was accomplished when, in Paris, Alexander dictated the laws for all Europe. What was the next step? To go back again to the period before 1700, and combine a military despotism with a Tsardom bereft of everything human. This was what was desired by Nicholas and a dozen crazy Slavophils—and nobody else.

If the people hate the alien German Government, which fully deserves it, it does not follow that it loved the Muscovite rule; it forgot it in one generation and knows absolutely nothing about it.

After Peter the Great what hindered the return to the period that was only just over? The whole Petersburg system was hanging on a thread. Drunken and dissolute women, dull-witted princes who could scarcely speak Russian, German women and children, ascended the throne, and descended from it; the palace became the nearest way to Siberia and prison; the Government was in the hands of a handful of intriguers and condottieri. Yet through all this chaos we see no special desire to return to the earlier period. On the contrary, what remains constant through all these convulsive changes, what develops in spite of them and gives them a striking unity, is precisely the fidelity to the ideas of Peter the Great. One party overthrows another, taking advantage of the fact that the new régime is not yet in working order; but whoever gained the day, no one touched the principles of Peter the Great, but all accepted them—Menshikov and Bühren, Minih and even the Dolgorukys, who wanted to limit the Imperial power, though not by the old Boyar Duma.⁠[50] Elizabeth and Catherine II. flatter orthodoxy, and flatter nationalism in order to possess the throne, but, once securely seated on it, they keep to the same way, Catherine II. more so than any one.

The only opposition to the new order of things after its cruel installation we see in the unorthodox raskolniks and the passive lack of sympathy of the peasants. The obstinate grumblings of a few old men meant nothing. The crushed submission of all the ‘Old Believers’ was the admission of their impotence. If there had been anything living in their outlook there would certainly have been attempts, unsuccessful, impossible, impracticable perhaps, but they would have been made. All the Anna Leopoldovnas, the Anna Ivanovnas, the Elizabeth Petrovnas and Catherine Alexyevnas, found bold and devoted men ready to face the block and prison for their sakes. The Cossacks, faced with ruin, and the serfs, crushed under the heel of the nobility, had their Pugatchov, and Pugatchov his two hundred thousand fighting men; the Kirghiz-Kaisaks moved into China; the Crimean Tatars joined the Turks; Little Russia murmured loudly; everything injured or crushed by the Autocracy made its protest, but the Old Russian party in Russia never did. It had neither voice nor devoted followers, neither a Polubotok nor a Mazeppa!⁠[51]⁠

And it was not until one hundred and fifty years after Peter the Great that it found a representative and a leader, and that representative and leader was Nicholas. It would have been a calamity if he had, with the support of Church intolerance and nationalistic sentiment, succeeded in transforming the Autocracy, and changing it from a dictatorship into a purely monarchical or imperial government; but that was impossible. As soon as Nicholas was dead, Russia broke again into the path traced out by Peter the Great—not in the conquering or martial direction he had given it, but towards the development of its material and moral powers.

Peter the Great was one of the first of the leading figures of the great eighteenth century, and he acted in its spirit, he was saturated through and through with it, like Frederick II. of Prussia, like Joseph II. of Austria. His revolutionary realism gets the upper hand of his royal dignity—he is a despot, but not a monarch.

We all know how Peter crushed the old order and how he built up the new. To the burdensome, immovable Byzantine decorum he opposed the manners of the pothouse, the tedious Granovitaya Palata was transformed under him into a palace of debauchery; instead of the legal succession to the throne he, on one occasion, endowed the Tsar with the right of appointing his successor; on another occasion, wrote to the Senators that they should themselves select the most suitable one in case he should perish in a Turkish prison, and thereupon took the crown from his own son to give it to the servant-girl who, after passing through many men’s hands, had come into his. He left vacant the post of the most holy Patriarch, forbade the display of holy relics, and wiped dry all the sorrowing tears of the wonder-working ikons. In the land of unalterable precedence, he placed above all the rest the plebeian Menshikov, he associated with foreigners, even with negroes, got drunk in the company of skippers and sailors, rioted in the streets—in fact, in every way outraged the rigid propriety of the Old Russian life and the dignified formality of a Tsar.

He set the tone. His successors maintained it, exaggerating and distorting it; for half a century after him, there was one unbroken orgy of drink, blood, and debauchery—l’ultimo atto, as an Italian writer expresses it, d’una tragedia representata nel un lupanar.

Where was orthodoxy, where was the principle of monarchy and chivalry, in all this?

If in the second half of the reign of Catherine the tragic character pales, the locale remains the same; the history of Catherine II. cannot be read aloud before ladies. Versailles, corrupted in the monarchical style, looked with as much astonishment at the debauchery of the Russian court as at the philosophical liberalism of Catherine II., for the French court did not understand that the foundations of the Imperial power in Russia were utterly different from those on which the Royal power of France was founded.

When Alexander said at Tilsit to Napoleon that he did not agree with the significance which the latter ascribed to the hereditary character of the Tsardom, Napoleon thought that he was deceiving him. When he said to Madame de Staël that he was only a ‘happy accident,’ she took it for a phrase. But it was a profoundly true saying.

Moved to wrath by the cowardice of the German sovereigns, the Emperor Alexander said in his proclamation of 22nd February 1813 to their subjects: ‘Terror restrains your Governments, do not let that hold you back; if your sovereigns, under the influence of cowardice and servility, do nothing, then the voice of their subjects must be heard and must compel the rulers who are leading their peoples into slavery and misery to lead them into freedom and honour.’

The fact is, that Alexander retained a full understanding of the tradition of Peter the Great; he was too close to the first period of Imperial rule to pose as the military pope of all the reactions. Indeed, it was with obvious doubt and uncertainty that he read the police reports of Sherwood and Mayboroda.

With no doubt and no reflection, Nicholas sat down in his place and made of his power a machine which was to turn Russia back in her tracks. But the Tsardom ceased to be strong as soon as it became conservative. Russia had given up everything human, she had given up peace and freedom, and had gone into the German bondage only to escape from the cramped and stifling condition which she had outgrown. To turn her back by the same means was impossible.

It is only by going forward towards real objects, it is only by more and more actively promoting the development of the national forces with humane education, that the Tsardom can maintain itself. The oil with which the engines on the new railways are greased will be better for anointing the Tsars at their coronation than the holy unguents of the Uspensky Cathedral.

Whether our interpretation of the Imperial rule is correct will be clearly and vividly shown by the excellent memoirs of Princess Dashkov.

Our object will be fully attained if our brief sketch of its contents drives readers to open the book itself.

In the year 1744, the Empress Elizabeth and the Grand Duke Peter stood godfather and godmother to Ekaterina, the baby daughter of Count Roman Vorontsov, brother of the great Chancellor. The Vorontsovs belonged to that small number of oligarchic families which, together with the paramours of the Empresses, ruled Russia at that time as they liked, while the country passed abruptly from one reign to another. They played the master in the Empire, just as nowadays in the houses of wealthy landowners house-serfs govern districts far and near.

The Empress Elizabeth was loved, not at all because she deserved it, but because her predecessor, Anna Ivanovna, had kept Bühren, a German, as steward, and we Russians cannot endure German stewards. She was nearer to the people than Anna Ivanovna and Anna Leopoldovna; in addition to the blood of Peter, she had all the defects of the Russian character—that is, she sometimes had regular drinking bouts, and every evening drank till she could not wait for her maids to undress her, but ripped her laces and her dresses off. She used to go on pilgrimages, fasted, was superstitious and passionately fond of fine clothes—she left fifteen thousand dresses; above all, she loved precious stones, as our wealthy merchants’ wives do, and probably had just as much taste as they, of which we can judge by the fact that she had a whole room decorated with amber.

The gentry in those days lived on quite a different footing with their serfs from now; there was a certain intimacy and familiarity between them, and, in spite of outbursts of domineering, they felt the novelty of their power and the necessity of support.

All of a sudden, for instance, Elizabeth takes Shuvalov and drives with him to Count Vorontsov’s to drink tea, to try on his Hungarian jacket, to gossip with him a little, while if any one told lies too wildly she would clip or cut out his tongue according to the degree of his guilt; and all this in a motherly, homely way without fuss, while she refused from motives of humanity to sign a single death-warrant.

When the Empress’s god-daughter had reached the age of fourteen she had measles: measles and smallpox were no joke in those days, and almost reached the proportions of a political crime; measles or smallpox might attack Paul, that future hope of all Russia! A special Imperial decree forbade families in which there was this terrible illness to have any contact with the court. Our sick countess was hurriedly packed up and sent off into the country some fifty miles away; it must be assumed that the air there was not bad for the measles. With the countess were sent an old German lady and the rigidly decorous widow of a Russian major: the clever, plucky, and lively girl, on recovering from measles, almost died of boredom with her two companions; luckily, she found in the country a fairly good library. At fourteen our young countess knew four languages besides Russian, which she did not know, but after her marriage learnt thoroughly to please her mother-in-law. She did not attack novels but Voltaire, Bayle, and so on. Reading became a passion with her, yet books did not dispel her depression; she pined, and went back to Petersburg languid and unwell. The Empress sent her own doctor to her—and that doctor was Boerhaave; he said there was nothing wrong, that she was physically well, but that her imagination was ailing—in fact, that she was fourteen.

After Boerhaave, relations from all parts pounced on the poor girl, and with inexhaustible cruelty undertook to entertain her, to distract her mind, to feed her up; they tormented her with questions and advice. While she only asked for one thing, to be left in peace; she was at the time reading Hélvetius’ De l’Entendement.

The remedy soon arrived of itself.

One evening the young countess, who was fairly free to make her own arrangements, went to Madame Samarin’s and stayed to supper, ordering the carriage to be sent to fetch her home. At eleven o’clock the carriage drove round and she came out; but the night was so fine and there was no one in the streets, so she went home on foot, accompanied by Madame Samarin’s sister. At the corner they met a tall graceful, man, who was acquainted with her companion; he began talking to the latter, and addressed a few words to the young countess.

The countess arrived home and dreamed of the handsome officer. The officer arrived home in love with the handsome countess.

No need to lose precious time; the countess was no longer a child (it was 1759), and she was fifteen; the officer was young, handsome, brilliant, and very tall, he was in the Preobrazhensky regiment, and belonged to an old family. The relations blessed the match, the Empress sanctioned it, and they were married. And so our young countess became Princess Dashkov.

A year and a half after their wedding, being on the eve of her second confinement, she remained alone in Moscow, while her husband went to Petersburg. His furlough was over, and he was asking for an extension of leave. The Grand Duke was at that time in command of the Preobrazhensky regiment; he would have given Dashkov the extension of leave at once, but the position was serious, and he wanted to make friends with his officers. The Empress was almost breathing her last; the Shuvalovs, the Razumovskys, and the Panins were intriguing with and without the Grand Duchess in favour of Paul, even in favour of the luckless Ivan—and most of all in their own favour. The Grand Duke was not liked; he was not a bad man, but he had every quality that the Russian temperament detests in the German—gaucherie, a coarse heartiness, a vulgar tone, a pedantry and a haughty self-complacency bordering on contempt for everything Russian. Elizabeth, though herself perpetually tipsy, could not forgive him for being drunk every evening. Razumovsky hated him for wanting to make Gudovitch Hetman; Panin for his guard-room manners; the Horse Guards for preferring his Holstein soldiers to them; the ladies for his inviting actresses and German women of all sorts to sit down at his banquets beside them; while the clergy detested him for his undisguised contempt for the Orthodox Church. Seeing that Elizabeth’s end was near, and afraid of being deserted by every one, the tactless Peter attempted to make up to his officers and win their favour, and set about it with excessive clumsiness. Among others he wanted to make sure of Dashkov, who was in command of a company; and therefore, without refusing him his leave, he invited him to Oranienbaum.

Dashkov, after his interview with Peter, set off for Moscow; on the way he was taken ill with a sore throat and feverishness. Anxious not to worry his wife, he bade them take him to his aunt, Madame Novosiltsov, for he fancied that the pain in his throat was somewhat easier, and that his voice was coming back a little; instead of that, the illness turned out to be quinsy, and he was soon in a high fever.

At that very time, Prince Dashkov’s mother, with her sister, Princess Gagarin, was sitting in our young princess’s bedroom, together with a midwife, expecting the birth of the child in a few hours. The young mother was still able to move about, and she went to fetch something in another room, where her maid had long been awaiting her. The girl told her in secret of her sick husband’s return, saying that he was at his aunt’s, and begging her mistress not to betray her, as all were strictly forbidden to tell her the news. The young princess uttered a shriek at these unexpected tidings; recovering herself, she went upstairs to the bedroom, as though nothing had happened, assured them that they were all mistaken, that her confinement was not coming so soon, and persuaded them to go and rest, promising by all that was holy to send for them if anything should happen.

No sooner had the old ladies retired than the young princess flew with all the impetuosity of her character to entreat the midwife to take her to her husband. The kind-hearted German thought she had gone out of her mind, and began trying in her Silesian accent to dissuade her, continually adding: ‘No, no, I shall have to answer to God afterwards for the slaughter of the innocent.’ The princess told the midwife resolutely that, if she would not accompany her, she should go alone, and no force on earth should stop her. The old woman was worked upon by terror, but when the young lady told her that they must go on foot that her mother-in-law might not hear the crunch of the sledge-runners, she again resisted and stood motionless, ‘as though her legs had sent down roots into the floor.’ At last this difficulty, too, was overcome; but on the stairs the young princess’s pains returned, and so violently that the midwife tried to dissuade her, but, clutching on to the stair-rail, she was not to be turned from her resolution.

They walked out of the gate, and in spite of the pains reached the Novosiltsovs’ house. Of the interview with her husband she remembered only that she saw him pale, ill, lying unconscious, that she only had time to take one look at him, and fell in a swoon on the floor. In this condition the Novosiltsovs’ servants carried her on a stretcher home, where, however, no one had suspected her absence. Fresh and more acute pains restored her to consciousness, she sent for her husband’s mother and aunt, and an hour later gave birth to her son Mihail.

At six o’clock in the morning her husband was brought into the house; his mother put him in another room, forbidding any intercourse between the two sick-rooms on the pretext that the young mother might catch the quinsy, though in reality from a petty jealousy. The young couple at once began a sentimental correspondence, which was, of course, attended with much more risk for the young mother than quinsy, which is not in the least infectious, could be; they were writing notes to each other at all hours of the day and night, till the old lady found them out, scolded the maids, and threatened to take away pens, pencils, and paper.

A woman who was capable of such love and such determination in getting her own way in spite of danger, fear, and pain was bound to play a great part in the times in which she lived and in the circle to which she belonged.

On the 28th of July 1761, the Dashkovs moved to Petersburg. ‘The day,’ she said, ‘which twelve months later became so memorable and so glorious for my country.’

In Petersburg she found awaiting her an invitation from the Grand Duke to move to Oranienbaum. She did not want to go, and her father had difficulty in persuading her to take his summer villa not far from Oranienbaum. The fact is that by then she could not endure the Grand Duke, while she was sincerely devoted to his wife. Before she had left her father’s house she had been presented to the Grand Duchess; Catherine had been gracious to her, the clever and highly cultured girl had taken her fancy. With the smile, the abandon with which Catherine for thirty years fascinated all Russia, and the diplomatists and learned men of all Europe, she won the devotion of Princess Dashkov for ever. From the first interview the young girl loved Catherine passionately, ‘adored her’ as schoolgirls adore their elder companions; she was in love with her as boys are in love with women of thirty.

On the other hand, she felt as genuine an aversion for her godfather, Peter. And a pleasant person he was, there is no denying. We shall see it directly.

Her own sister, Elizaveta Romanovna, was openly Peter’s mistress. He considered that Saltykov and Poniatowski, the fortunate predecessors of the Orlovs, Vassiltchikovs, Novosiltsovs, Potyomkins, Lanskys, Yermolevs, Korsakovs, Zoritches, Zavodovskys, Mamonovs, Zubovs, and a whole phalanx of stalwart virorum obscurorum gave him the right not to be over-niggardly in his affairs of the heart, and not to conceal his preferences.

His attitude to his wife was already such that, on Princess Dashkov’s first being presented to him, he said to her: ‘Allow me to hope that you will bestow upon us no less time than upon the Grand Duchess.’

For her part the impetuous young princess did not dream of concealing her preference for Catherine. The Grand Duke observed it, and a few days later led the young princess aside, and said to her, ‘in the simplicity of his head and the kindness of his heart,’ as she puts it: ‘Remember that it is safer to have to do with simple, honest people like your sister and me than with great intellects who squeeze every drop out of you and then throw you out of window like the skin of an orange.’

Princess Dashkov evasively observed that the Empress had expressed her urgent desire that they should show respect equally to the Grand Duchess and to His Highness.

Nevertheless, she could not avoid sometimes attending the Grand Duke’s drinking-parties. These festivities were of a German barrack-room character, coarse and drunken. Peter, surrounded by his Holstein generals (that is, in her words, by corporals and sergeants of the Prussian army, sons of German artisans whose parents did not know what to do with them, and sent them for soldiers on account of their dissolute habits), with the pipe always between his lips, sometimes went on drinking till his flunkeys carried him out.

At one such supper-party in the presence of the Grand Duchess and numerous visitors, the conversation turned on Tchelishtchev, a sergeant of the Guards, and his supposed liaison with the Countess Hendrikov, a niece of the Empress.

Peter, who was already very drunk, observed that Tchelishtchev ought to have his head cut off as a warning to other officers not to get up love affairs with the female relations of the royal family. The Holstein sycophants expressed their approval and sympathy by every possible token, while the young princess could not refrain from observing that it seemed to her very inhuman to inflict the death penalty for so trivial a crime.

‘You are still a child,’ answered the Grand Duke, ‘your words prove it; otherwise you would know that to be sparing with the death penalty means to encourage insubordination.’

‘Your Highness,’ answered Princess Dashkov, ‘you are trying to frighten us; with the exception of the old generals, all of us who have the honour to be sitting at your table belong to a generation which has never seen the death penalty in Russia.’

‘That does not signify,’ retorted the Grand Duke; ‘fine sort of order there has been in everything in consequence. I tell you, you are a child and know nothing about these things.’

All remained silent. ‘I am ready,’ the young princess replied, ‘to acknowledge that I am incapable of understanding you; but I cannot help rejoicing when I think that your aunt is still on the throne and is still well and strong.’

All eyes were turned upon the bold young woman. The Grand Duke did not answer in words; he confined himself to putting out his tongue—a charming trick to which he often resorted instead of a verbal reply, especially when he was in church.

This conversation, which was the beginning of Princess Dashkov’s political career, was the more remarkable for the fact that these Nero-like speeches were uttered by the mildest man in the world, who had never put any one to death. There were a large number of the officers of the Guards and of the cadets sitting at the table, and Princess Dashkov’s words were carried with lightning swiftness all over the town. They gave her a great notoriety, which at first she was far from appreciating, and which made of her one of the centres, and almost the principal one, round which discontented officers rallied. At first the young princess was delighted that the Grand Duchess was exceedingly pleased by her answer. ‘Time,’ she mournfully adds, ‘had not then taught me how dangerous it is to tell the truth to sovereigns; if they can sometimes forgive it, their courtiers never do.’

Her affection for Catherine increased. Elizabeth was then living at Peterhof, and there the Grand Duchess was permitted once a week to see her son. On her way back from the Palace she usually drove to the Dashkovs’, took the princess with her, and kept her for a whole evening. When it was impossible to visit her, Catherine wrote a brief note to her; from this there sprang up the friendly, intimate correspondence between them which lasted even after the Dashkovs had left the summer villa. They write about literature, about their day-dreams, about Voltaire, and about Rousseau, in verse and in prose.

‘Such verse and such prose!’ writes Catherine, ‘and at seventeen! I entreat you not to neglect such a talent. Perhaps I am not altogether an impartial critic; your flattering attachment to me is to blame for your having chosen me for the subject of your poem. Blame me for pride if you like, but still I will say that it is long since I have read such correct and such poetical work.’

Catherine, too, sends her essays and very emphatically insists that they are to be shown to no one. ‘In the circumstances under which I am compelled to live, everything serves as a ground for unpleasant suppositions.’ She is so anxious that she begs Princess Dashkov to have letters addressed to her maid, Katerina Ivanovna, and burns them when she has read them. What she calls ‘trifling grounds’ may be surmised from one letter in which she again speaks of her manuscript. The young princess had returned it to her with much praise, assuring her that she had never let it go out of her own hands. Not a word is said of the contents of the manuscript, but it is evident from the following words (letter 21): ‘You relieve me of my duties in regard to my son; I see in that a fresh proof of the goodness of your heart. I was profoundly agitated by the tokens of devotion with which I was greeted by the people on that day. I have never been so happy.’

That letter was written soon after Elizabeth’s death, but we have not yet reached that stage of our narrative.

Towards the end of December 1761, there was a rumour that Elizabeth was very ill.

Princess Dashkov was lying in bed with a very bad cold when the news reached her. The thought of Catherine’s danger struck her; she could no more lie still in bed with it than with the thought of her husband’s illness; and so, wrapped in a fur coat, on the frosty night of the 20th of December, she set off for the wooden palace on the Moika, where the royal family lived at that time. Not wishing to be seen, she left the carriage at a little distance from the Palace, and walked towards the little entrance at the side of the Grand Duchess’s apartments, though she did not know the way to them. Fortunately she met Katerina Ivanovna, the Grand Duchess’s maid; the latter said that the Grand Duchess was in bed; but Princess Dashkov insisted on being announced, saying that she absolutely must see her at once. The maid, knowing her and her devotion to the Grand Duchess, obeyed. Catherine, who knew the Princess Dashkov was seriously ill, and so would not have come out at night in the frost without specially important reasons, ordered her to be shown up.

At first she showered reproaches on the princess for not taking care of herself, and, seeing that she was cold, said to her: ‘Dear princess, first of all you must get warm; come, get into my bed’; and only after tucking her up, she asked her at last what was the matter.

‘In the present position of affairs,’ said Princess Dashkov, ‘when the Empress has only a few days, perhaps a few hours, to live, you must, without loss of time, take measures against the danger with which you are threatened and steps to avert it. For God’s sake, trust me; I will show you that I am worthy of your trust. If you have any definite plan, make use of me, dispose of me, I am at your service.’

Catherine burst into tears and, pressing her friend’s hand to her heart, said: ‘I assure you that I have no plan whatever; there is nothing I can do, and I imagine that all that is left me is to await the course of events with fortitude. I resign myself to the will of God, and rest all my hopes on Him alone.’

‘In that case your friends must act for you. As for me, I feel I have strength and energy enough to carry them all with me; and believe me, there is no sacrifice which would hinder me.’

‘For God’s sake,’ Catherine interrupted, ‘do not expose yourself to danger in the hope of resisting evil which seems really inevitable. If you ruin yourself for my sake, you will only add an everlasting grief to my unhappy lot.’

‘All that I can tell you is that I will not take a step which could possibly involve you, or put you in danger. Whatever happens, may it come upon me, and, if my blind devotion to you leads me to the scaffold, you shall never be its victim.’

Catherine would have protested, but Princess Dashkov⁠[52] interrupting her, took her hand, pressed it to her lips, and, saying that she was afraid to continue the conversation, asked leave to withdraw. Deeply touched, they remained for some minutes in each other’s arms, then the princess cautiously went out, leaving Catherine in great agitation.

We must add to this affecting scene that Catherine had all the same deceived the princess; she had not entrusted her fate to God alone, but also to Grigory Orlov, with whom she had thought out her plan, and Orlov was already secretly trying to enlist the co-operation of the officers.

At Christmas the Empress died. Petersburg received the news gloomily; and Princess Dashkov herself saw the Semyonovsky and Izmailovsky regiments march sullenly past her house with muffled murmurs.

Peter III., proclaimed Emperor, paid no regard to decorum; the drinking bouts went on. A few days after Elizabeth’s death he visited the father of Princess Dashkov, and through her sister announced his displeasure at not seeing her at court. There was no escaping it; she went. Peter III., dropping his voice, began telling her that she would end by drawing upon herself his anger, and might very bitterly repent of it later on, ‘because there may easily come a time when Romanovna’ (that was what he called his mistress) ‘will be in that woman’s place.’

Princess Dashkov made a show of not understanding, and hurriedly took her place at Peter III.’s favourite game. In this game (campis) each player has several counters; the player who keeps one till the last wins the game. Every one put down ten imperials, which, considering Princess Dashkov’s income at that time, was not a trifling sum for her, particularly as, when Peter III. lost, he used to take a counter out of his pocket and lay it on the pool, so that he almost always won. As soon as the game was over, the Tsar proposed a second; she refused. He pestered her so much to play that, taking advantage of her ‘position as spoilt child,’ she told him that she was not rich enough to lose for certain, that if His Majesty played like other people she would, at any rate, have a chance of winning. Peter III. responded with his ‘usual buffooneries,’ and the princess made her bows and withdrew.

As she walked through the suite of rooms filled with courtiers and persons of various grades, she felt as though she were at a masquerade, there was no one she could recognise. She could not help laughing when she saw Prince Trubetskoy, who was seventy, for the first time in his life dressed up in a military uniform, standing at attention, in high boots with spurs, all ready, in fact, for the most desperate battle. ‘The pitiful little old man,’ she adds, ‘pretending to be ill and suffering, as beggars do, lay in bed while Elizabeth was dying; he felt a little better when Peter III. was proclaimed, and, learning that everything had gone off well, he leapt up at once, armed himself from head to foot, and showed himself like a hero in the Izmailovsky regiment to which he was attached.’

Apropos of uniforms, the fatal passion for them was handed down from Peter III. to Paul, from Paul to all his children, to all the generals, staff and higher officers; Panin, who supervised the education of Paul, complained that Peter III. was never present at his examinations. The Holstein princes, his uncles, persuaded Peter to attend one at least; he was very much pleased, and promoted Panin to be a general in the infantry. To perceive the full absurdity of this, one must picture the pale, sickly figure of Panin, who liked to be correctly dressed and scrupulously groomed, and was rather like a courtier of the days of Louis XIV. Panin detested Peter III.’s barrack-room tone, he hated uniforms and all that nonsense. When Melgunov brought him the joyful tidings that he was a general, Panin would have fled to Switzerland and lived there in preference to wearing the uniform. News of this reached Peter III.; he transferred him to the corresponding civilian grade. He never got over his surprise at Panin. ‘Why,’ he used to say, ‘I always thought Panin was a sensible man!’

While Peter III. was dressing his courtiers up as heroes, the usual funeral ceremonies were taking place. The Empress did not leave her rooms, and only appeared at the requiem service. Peter III., too, only rarely showed himself, and then always behaved improperly, whispering with the ladies, laughing with his adjutants, mocking at the clergy, scolding the officers, and even the common soldiers, over buttons or some such trifle. ‘The new Emperor,’ the English ambassador, Keith, said to Prince Golitsyn, ‘is beginning his reign imprudently; if he goes on like this he will come to be despised by his people and afterwards to be hated by them.’

Peter III. did everything as though on purpose to arouse this hatred. One evening, when Princess Dashkov was present, the Tsar was holding forth, as his habit was, on the subject of his respect for Frederick II., and suddenly turning to the Secretary of State, Volkov, who had been Chief Secretary of the Privy Council under Elizabeth, he asked him whether he remembered how they used to laugh over the perpetual failure of the secret instructions sent to the army in the field. Volkov, who together with Peter, then Grand Duke, had communicated to the Prussian King all the army orders, and so stultified them, was so taken aback by Peter III.’s words that he almost fainted. But the Tsar went on, jocosely describing how in time of war they had betrayed to the enemy the country in which he was heir to the throne.

At the conclusion of the peace with the Prussian King, in which he shamefully yielded everything that had been won by Russian blood, there was no end to the delight and rejoicing. There was festivity after festivity. Among others Peter III. gave a great dinner, to which all the ambassadors and members of the three first grades were invited. After dinner the Tsar proposed three toasts, which were drunk to the firing of cannon—to the health of the Imperial Family, to the health of the Prussian King, to the permanence of the peace that had been concluded.

When the Empress drank the toast to the Imperial Family, Peter III. sent his adjutant, Gudovitch, who was standing by his chair, to ask her why she did not stand up. Catherine answered that since the Imperial Family consisted only of her husband, her son, and herself, she had not supposed that it would be His Majesty’s pleasure that she should stand up. When Gudovitch repeated her answer, the Tsar bade him go back and tell the Empress that she was ‘a fool,’ and ought to know that his uncles, the Holstein princes, belonged to the Imperial Family too. This was not enough; afraid that Gudovitch would soften his rudeness, he repeated what he had said across the table, so that the greater number of the guests heard it. For the first minute the Empress could not refrain from shedding tears, but, anxious to end the scandal as quickly as possible, she turned to the kammerherr, Strogonov, who was standing behind her chair, and begged him to begin some conversation. Strogonov, who was himself deeply shocked, began babbling something with a show of liveliness. As he went out of the palace, he received the command to go to his country estate, and not to leave it without permission.

This incident was exceedingly prejudicial to Peter III. Every one pitied the unfortunate woman, who had been grossly insulted by a drunken boor. Princess Dashkov was naturally bound to take advantage of this state of public feeling. She became a desperate conspirator, persuading, sounding, enlisting sympathisers, and at the same time she went to balls and danced to avoid arousing suspicion. Prince Dashkov, insulted by Peter III., made him some answer on parade. The princess, afraid of the consequences, succeeded in procuring him a commission to Constantinople, and gave him the advice to ‘make haste slowly’ with it. Having sent him off, she surrounded herself with officers who put the fullest confidence in their eighteen-year-old leader.

There were other people about Peter III. who were dissatisfied, but owing to their age and position took no part in the conspiracy; they were glad to take advantage of a change, but the risk of losing their heads on the scaffold was too much for a Razumovsky or a Panin. The real conspirators were Princess Dashkov with her officers, and Orlov with his adherents.

Of Razumovsky Princess Dashkov says: ‘He loves his country as much as the apathetic man can love anything. Sunk in the bog of wealth, surrounded by marks of respect, well received at the new court, and liked by the officers, he has dropped into indifference and grown sluggish.’

Panin was a statesman and looked further ahead than the rest; his aim was to proclaim Paul Tsar and Catherine Regent. So doing he hoped to curtail the power of the Autocracy. Moreover, he thought to attain his object by legal means through the Senate.

All this was far from being approved by Princess Dashkov. Moreover, the dissatisfaction and murmuring among the soldiers were growing. The disgraceful peace, on the one hand, and the insane war with Denmark which with no serious object Peter III. wanted to wage over Holstein, exasperated men’s minds. This war became an insane obsession with him; even Frederick II. tried by letter to persuade him to defer it.

It is said that the young conspiratress used peculiarly eloquent weapons to induce stubborn Panin to co-operate with her party. Panin was so attracted by her intelligence, her energy, and, above all, her beauty, that, old as he was, he fell passionately in love with her. Princess Dashkov rejected his love with mirth, but finding no other means of persuading him she made up her mind to bribe him with herself. After this Panin was in her hands. It is only just to say that in two passages of her memoirs she denies this rumour with indignation.⁠[53]⁠

Although the conspirators could reckon on Razumovsky and Panin, and, what was more, on the Archbishop of Novgorod, and although a number of officers adhered to the conspiracy, they had no definite plan of action. Though at one in a common object, they could not agree on the steps to be taken; Princess Dashkov, devoured by burning energy, was angry with their deliberateness, did not know what to do, and at last went off to her summer villa at Krasny Kabak. This summer villa was the first possession she had entirely of her own: she at once set to work rebuilding, digging ditches, laying out gardens. ‘In spite,’ she said, ‘of the affection I had for that first bit of ground which was my own, I did not want to give it my name, as I wished to dedicate it to the name of the saint on whose day success crowns our great enterprise.’ ‘Make haste and give a name to my villa,’ she writes to the Empress, when laid up with a fever, which she had caught through riding up to her waist in a bog. Catherine could make nothing of it, and thought that her friend was delirious.

But it was Peter III. who was really delirious; while Princess Dashkov was planting acacias and clearing paths, he was moving rapidly on his downward path; one folly succeeded another, one unseemly vulgarity was followed by another twice as unseemly. Keith’s prophecy was coming true: public feeling was passing from contempt into hatred.

The Austrian persecution of the Greek Church in Serbia had driven many Serbs to appeal to the Empress Elizabeth, begging her to assign them lands in the south of Russia. In addition to lands, Elizabeth ordered a considerable sum of money to be given them for the expenses of their moving and resettlement. One of their agents, Horvat, a wily, intriguing fellow, took possession of the lands and money and, instead of carrying out the conditions on which the land was given, began to dispose of the emigrants as though they were his serfs. The Serbs presented a complaint, Elizabeth ordered an enquiry, but before it was over she died. Horvat, hearing of her death, went to Petersburg and began by giving two thousand gold pieces to each of the three persons who were in closest relations with Peter III.—L. Naryshkin, who was something in the way of a court buffoon, General Melgunov, and the Prosecutor-General Glyebov. The two latter went to the Tsar and told him straight out of the bribe. Peter III. was much pleased at their openness, he praised them for it, and added that if they would give him half he would go himself to the Senate and command them to decide the case in favour of Horvat. They divided the spoils, the Tsar kept his word, and for two thousand gold pieces lost hundreds of thousands of new settlers; seeing that their comrades had been cheated by the Government, those who had not yet started did not venture to move.

When the case was over, Peter III. heard that Naryshkin had concealed his bribe, and, to punish him for this lack of friendly confidence, took the whole sum from him. And for a long time afterwards he used to tease Naryshkin by asking him what he was doing with Horvat’s gold pieces.

Here is another charming anecdote of Peter III. One day the Tsar returned home with Razumovsky after parade, much pleased with the Izmailovsky regiment; suddenly he heard a noise a little way off; his favourite negro was fighting with the fencing-master. At first Peter III. was delighted with the spectacle, but all at once he pulled a solemn face and said: ‘Narcisse exists no longer for us.’ Razumovsky, who could make nothing of it, asked what had so suddenly distressed His Majesty. ‘Why, don’t you see,’ he cried, ‘that I cannot keep a man about me who has fought with a fencing-master? he is disgraced, disgraced for ever.’ Razumovsky, pretending to enter into these deep considerations, observed that the negro’s honour might be restored by passing him under the flag of the regiment. This idea delighted Peter III.; he at once called the negro, bade him pass under the flag, and, feeling this was not quite sufficient, ordered that he should be scratched with the lance of the flag that he might wash out his offence with his own blood. The poor negro almost died of fright, the generals and the officers could hardly restrain their indignation and laughter. Only Peter III. performed the whole ritual of the negro’s purification with perfect solemnity throughout.

And this buffoon was Tsar!... But not for long!

On the evening of the 27th of June Grigory Orlov came to Princess Dashkov to tell her that Captain Passek, one of the most desperate conspirators, was arrested. Orlov found Panin with her; to lose time, to procrastinate, was now impossible. Only the lymphatic, slow, and cautious Panin counselled waiting till the morrow, and first finding out how and why Passek was arrested. This did not please Orlov or her. The former said that he would go to find out about Passek. Princess Dashkov asked Panin to leave her, pretending that she was excessively tired. As soon as Panin had driven off, she threw on a man’s grey overcoat and set off on foot to see Roslavlev, one of the conspirators.

Not far from home she met a man on horseback galloping full speed. Although she had never seen Orlov’s brothers, she guessed that it was one of them; when she reached him, she called his name. He pulled up the horse, and she made herself known to him. ‘I was coming to you,’ he said. ‘Passek has been seized as a political criminal. There are four sentries at the doors and two at the window. My brother has gone to Panin, and I have been to Roslavlev.’

‘Is Roslavlev much alarmed?’

‘He is indeed.’

‘Send word to our men, Roslavlev, Lasunsky, Tchertkov, and Bredihin to gather at once to the Izmailovsky regiment, and to make ready to receive the Empress. Then say that I advise your brother or you to ride as fast as you can to Peterhof for the Empress; tell her that I have a carriage ready, tell her that I beseech her not to delay, but to drive full speed to Petersburg.’

On the previous evening Princess Dashkov, who had heard from Passek of the great discontent of the soldiers, and was afraid that something might happen, had by way of precaution written to the wife of Catherine’s kammerdiener, Shkurin, telling her to send a carriage with four post-horses to her husband at Peterhof, and to bid him await her in his yard. Panin laughed at this unnecessary fuss, supposing that the coup d’état was not so imminent; events proved how necessary Princess Dashkov’s precautions were.

On parting from Orlov, she returned home. In the evening a tailor was to have brought her a man’s dress, but did not bring it, and she was not free enough dressed as a woman. To avoid rousing suspicion, she dismissed her maid and went to bed; but half an hour had not passed before she heard a knock at the outer door. It was the youngest Orlov, who had been sent by his elder brothers to ask her whether it was not too soon to disturb the Empress; Princess Dashkov was beside herself, and showered reproaches upon him and all his brothers: ‘As though it were a question,’ she said, ‘of disturbing the Empress; better bring her unconscious, fainting, to Petersburg than expose her to imprisonment or to sharing the scaffold with us. Tell your brothers that some one must go this very minute to Peterhof.’

The young man agreed with her.

Then followed agonising hours of solitude and suspense; she trembled for her Catherine, and pictured her pale, worn out, in prison, going to be beheaded, and all ‘through our fault.’ Exhausted and feverish, she waited for news from Peterhof. At four o’clock it came: the Empress had gone to Petersburg.

How Alexey Orlov went in the night to the pavilion to where Catherine was calmly asleep; how, though, like Princess Dashkov, she did not know the younger Orlov by sight, she instantly determined to set off in the carriage that was waiting for her at Shkurin’s; how Orlov sat on the box-seat as coachman, and knocked the horses up by his driving, so that the Empress was obliged to walk with her maid; how they afterwards met an empty cart; how Orlov hired it, and brought Catherine to Petersburg in democratic style—all that is well known.

The soldiers of the Izmailovsky regiment received Catherine with enthusiasm; they were told that Peter III. had tried that night to kill her and her son. With shouts and uproar the soldiers escorted her from the barracks to the Winter Palace, proclaiming her the reigning Empress as they passed through the streets; they met with no hindrance of any kind. The people flocked in crowds to the Palace, the leading noblemen gathered together in the Cathedral, and the Archbishop, surrounded by clergy, awaited the new sovereign with holy water.

When, after terrific efforts, Princess Dashkov succeeded in reaching Catherine, they rushed into each other’s arms, and could only say: ‘Well, thank God, thank God!’ Then Catherine told her how they had driven from Peterhof, then they fell to embracing each other again. ‘I do not know,’ writes Princess Dashkov, ‘whether a mortal has ever been happier than I was at that minute!’

‘And,’ she adds, ‘when I think by what extraordinarily small means this revolution was effected, with no thought-out plan, by men who were not agreed among themselves, who had different aims in view, and were not in the least alike either in breeding or character, it is clear to me that the finger of Providence was in it.’

The revolution, of course, was essential, but if the finger of Providence was so directly concerned in it, then the divine hands were far from being clean on that day.

After they had kissed each other to their hearts’ content, Princess Dashkov noticed that the Empress was wearing the Catherine and not the Andrew ribbon; she ran at once to Panin, took off his ribbon, put it on the Empress, and put the Catherine ribbon and star in her pocket.

The Empress expressed a desire to put herself at the head of the troops and to march to Peterhof. At the same time she ordered the princess to accompany her. The Empress took a uniform from Captain Talyzin, Princess Dashkov one from Sergeant Pushkin. Both uniforms were of the old Preobrazhensky pattern. As soon as the Empress had arrived in Petersburg, the soldiers had, of their own initiative, cast off their new uniforms and put on their old ones.

While Princess Dashkov was changing her dress, Catherine was presiding over an Extraordinary Council, consisting of the highest dignitaries and senators who happened to be on the spot. The sentinels stationed at the doors admitted to it a young officer with a bold carriage and reckless air. No one but the Empress recognised him as Princess Dashkov; she went up to Catherine and said that the guard was very inefficient, that they would perhaps admit Peter III. himself if he should suddenly appear (how little even she knew the buffoon!); the guard was immediately strengthened; meanwhile, the Empress, who was dictating a manifesto to Tyeplov, broke off to tell the members of the Council who this young officer was who had come up sans façon, and begun whispering to her. All the senators stood up to greet her. ‘I blushed to my ears at this honour,’ says the charming sergeant, ‘and indeed I was rather embarrassed by it.

‘Then, after taking the necessary measures to ensure the tranquillity of the capital, we mounted our horses, and on the road to Peterhof reviewed ten thousand men, who cheered the Empress with enthusiasm.’

At Krasny Kabak the insurrectionary army halted: the men, who had been on their legs for twelve hours, needed a rest. Catherine and Princess Dashkov, who had not slept at all the last few nights, were much exhausted. The princess took an overcoat from Colonel Kar, spread it over the solitary sofa in the little room they had taken at the inn, and stationed sentries; then she and Catherine stretched themselves on the sofa, not taking off their uniforms, but firmly resolved to get a little sleep; they could not sleep, however, but spent the whole time talking, making plans, and entirely forgetting the danger they were in.

There is no denying that there is something extraordinarily fascinating in this daring exploit of two women, who changed the destinies of an empire, in this revolution wrought by a handsome, clever woman, surrounded by young men in love with her, and with the leading figure among them a beauty of eighteen on horseback in the Preobrazhensky regiment, with a sabre in her hand.

The unlucky Peter was meanwhile driving from Oranienbaum to Peterhof, and from Peterhof to Oranienbaum, unable to think what to do or to decide upon anything. He looked for Catherine through all the rooms of the pavilion, behind doors and cupboards, as though she were playing ‘hide-and-seek’ with him, and, not without complacency, repeated to ‘Romanovna’: ‘There, you see I was right; I was sure she would do something; I always said that woman was capable of anything.’

The old champion, Minih, still stood by him, all Russia and part of Petersburg was still not against him, but he had already lost his head entirely. Displaying incredible cowardice at Cronstadt, he bade the Imperial yacht sail not to the fleet, but back to Oranienbaum; the ladies were afraid of sickness and the sea, he was afraid of everything. It was a calm moonlight night; the pitiful Tsar hid in the cabin with his courtiers, while the two heroes, Minih and Gudovitch, sat in gloomy brooding on deck, with shame and anger and sorrow in their hearts; they saw that there is no saving people against their will. At four o’clock in the morning they reached Oranienbaum again, and crestfallen stealthily returned to the Palace. Peter sat down to write a letter to Catherine.

At the same time two fiery steeds were being saddled, one for Catherine, the other for Princess Dashkov, and again, full of gaiety and energy, they were at the head of their soldiers, who set off on the march at five o’clock, and halted to rest at the Troitsky Monastery. Then Peter’s envoys began appearing one after another, bringing proposals each more foolish than the last; he abdicated from the throne, begged leave to go to Holstein, and owned himself to blame and unfit to rule. Catherine insisted on his unconditional surrender to avert greater troubles, and promised in return to arrange his life as comfortably as possible in whichever he preferred of the palaces away from the town.

Catherine’s troops calmly occupied Peterhof; Orlov, who had ridden on to reconnoitre, had found no one there. The Holsteiners, who were about Peter in Oranienbaum and were devoted to him, were ready to die for him, but he told them to make no defence; he meant to flee, ordered a horse to be brought, but did not mount it; instead, he got into a carriage with Romanovna and Gudovitch, and mournfully went to surrender to his guilty wife. He was led secretly into a remote room of the Palace. Gudovitch, who even then behaved with extraordinary dignity, was arrested, together with Romanovna; Peter was given food and drink, and taken to Ropsha in the escort of Alexey Orlov, Passek, Baryatinsky, and Baskakov. He selected Ropsha himself; it had belonged to him when he was Grand Duke. Other authorities state, however, that he did not go to Ropsha at all, but was on the estate of Razumovsky.

Princess Dashkov saw his letters to Catherine. In one he speaks of his abdication, in another of the persons he would like to keep about him, and enumerates everything he needed for his daily life, making special mention of a store of Burgundy and tobacco. He asked further, it is said, for a violin, a Bible, and various novels, adding that he meant to become a philosopher.

On the evening of the day when Peterhof was taken, Princess Dashkov, coming back from the Princess of Holstein’s to the Empress’s apartments, came upon Orlov, who was lying at full length on a sofa in one of the Empress’s inner rooms. He apologised for doing so, alleging that he had hurt his foot. He was opening a big envelope; Princess Dashkov had seen such envelopes in the hands of her uncle, the Vice-Chancellor; they were used for the most important affairs of state communicated from the Privy Council to the Tsar.

‘What are you doing?’ she asked, with amazement.

‘The Empress told me to.’

‘Impossible,’ she answered. ‘You have no official status for doing it.’

At that moment word was brought that the soldiers had broken into the cellars, and were drinking Hungarian wine in their helmets, taking it for mead. Orlov did not stir. Princess Dashkov at once went downstairs, assumed a threatening air, and with her thin girlish voice restored discipline. Pleased with her success, she distributed among them all the money she had on her; then, turning her purse inside out, told them that her means were less than her goodwill, but that on their return to Petersburg they should have leave to drink at the Government’s expense; after this she went back.

Beside the sofa on which Orlov was lying she found a table laid for three. The Empress came in, took her seat, and invited the princess to sit down. All this so impressed the latter that she could not conceal her emotion. The Empress noticed it, and asked her what was the matter.

‘Nothing,’ she answered; ‘most likely I am tired from sleepless nights and excitement.’

Catherine, wishing to draw the princess into being civil to Orlov, told her that in spite of her urgent wishes he was giving up military service, and begged the princess to help her to dissuade him. ‘I shall be charged,’ she said, ‘with horrible ingratitude if he leaves the army.’ But Princess Dashkov, mortified by her discovery, answered that Her Majesty had so many means of rewarding his services that she had no need to constrain him.

‘It was only then,’ she adds, ‘that I was convinced there was une liaison between them.’

It has been thought that she was mortified at this through jealousy, and it is not a mistake. Only, she was not jealous on Orlov’s account; she never liked and never respected either him or his brothers; she was jealous over the Empress; she liked neither the choice nor the tone; moreover, her dreams of exclusive confidence, of romantic friendship, of all-powerful influence, paled and vanished at her discovery. And as a fact, from that evening she had a rival and an enemy; she felt that the very day after the coup d’état.

Crazy Peter’s saying about the orange skin began coming true with extraordinary rapidity. The very day after ascending the throne the Empress began appraising and rewarding Princess Dashkov’s services, she began to be grateful—that is, ceased to be her friend.

After her triumphal entry into Petersburg, Princess Dashkov went away to see her father, her uncle, and, most of all, to have a look at her little one. It must not be forgotten that our Preobrazhensky sergeant had a little daughter Nastya, whom she passionately loved, and with whom she longed to play, after having played enough with the Tsar’s crown. Her father’s house was full of soldiers, stationed there partly for his protection, and partly because ‘Romanovna’ had been brought to his house. Vadkovsky sent to ask the officer on duty whether all the guard was needed; Princess Dashkov, speaking to him in French, told the officer that half of the soldiers were not needed, and that she was dismissing them.

When she went back to the Palace, Catherine received her with a look of displeasure; the officer of the guard was present and was talking to Orlov. The Empress reprimanded Princess Dashkov for acting on her own initiative, and even observed that she had spoken French before the soldiers. The princess, deeply wounded, listened to the reprimand, made no reply, and, to change the conversation, gave Catherine the ribbon and the order which she had put in her pocket the day before.

‘Not so fast, not so fast,’ said the Empress. ‘I had to reprimand you for your impetuosity—you had no right to dismiss the soldiers on your own authority; but I must also reward you for your services.’ With this she put around her neck the ribbon that had been restored.

Instead of kneeling down before the Empress, as is done on such occasions, Princess Dashkov said to her sorrowfully: ‘Your Majesty, forgive me for what I want to say; the time is coming when truth must be banished from your presence; before it comes, I beg you to take back that order: as a decoration I cannot sufficiently value it; if it is a reward—however great it might be, it could not reward my services, they cannot be paid by anything, for they were not to be bought.’

‘But,’ said the Empress, embracing her, and leaving the ribbon, ‘friendship has its claims; surely I am not deprived of them now?’

Princess Dashkov, pleased again, kissed her hand, and the spirits of a girl of eighteen got the upper hand; half a century later she does not forget to add with pleasure: ‘Fancy me in a uniform, with a spur on one high boot, looking like a boy of fifteen, with the red Catherine ribbon across my shoulder.’ The new cavalier galloped back again to Nastya, to show herself to the baby, to be present at her supper, and at last undressing flung herself into bed; but this time, too, sleep fled from her fretted nerves, or terrified her with dreams: the amazing scenes of the preceding days, which she had not merely lived through, but had partly brought about, passed incessantly before her imagination.

The Empress herself did not deny the important share Princess Dashkov had taken in the revolution of the 28th of June; on the contrary, when the wily old Bestuzhev was presented to her, she said to him: ‘Who could have imagined that the daughter of Roman Vorontsov would have helped me to ascend the throne!’

The news of the murder of Peter filled Princess Dashkov with horror and aversion; she was so distressed and revolted by this stain on the ‘revolution which has not cost one drop of blood,’ that she could not bring herself to go next day to the Palace. She omits in her memoirs all the details of the revolting proceeding, in which three officers, one of whom was of gigantic stature, were at work for half an hour stifling with a napkin the poisoned prisoner, as though they could not wait for a quarter of an hour. She assumed that Catherine did not know beforehand of Alexey Orlov’s design;⁠[54] it is more probable that she simply had no idea of the connivance of Catherine, who could carefully conceal her wishes. Not only Panin and the other conspirators knew nothing of her intrigue with Grigory Orlov, but, as we have just seen, Princess Dashkov had not suspected it.

Catherine perceived what was in the latter’s heart, and when she saw her began to speak with horror of what had happened.

‘Yes, your Majesty,’ answered Princess Dashkov, ‘this death has come too quickly and too soon for your fame and for mine.’

As she walked through the drawing-room, she said in a loud voice before every one that, of course, Alexey Orlov would spare her his acquaintance. For over twenty-five years they did not bow nor say a word to each other.

It is very possible that Catherine had not given instructions to murder Peter. Alexander went further: he positively insisted that they should not kill Paul, when he sent a gang of the rebel nobles to him. We know from Shakespeare how these orders are given by a glance, a hint, a silence. Why did Catherine entrust the care of the pusillanimous Peter to his worst enemies? Passek and Baskakov had meant to kill him several days before the 27th of June, and did not she know that? And why were the murderers so shamelessly rewarded?

Princess Dashkov quotes in Catherine’s defence a letter from Orlov, written immediately after the murder, which the Empress showed her. This letter, she says, bore unmistakable traces of uneasiness, distress, consternation, and tipsiness. It was preserved by the Empress in a special case, together with other important documents. After her death Paul ordered Prince Bezborodka to go through these papers in his presence; when they got to this letter, Paul read it aloud to the Tsarina in the presence of Madame Nelidov.⁠[55] Then he ordered Rastoptchin to read it aloud to the Grand Dukes.

I have heard what the letter contained from a trustworthy man who had read it himself; it was in this style: ‘Little Mother, Empress, how am I to tell you what we have done! such a misfortune has happened! We came to see your husband, and were drinking with him; you know what he is like when he is drunk; word followed word. He so insulted us that we came to blows. All of a minute he dropped dead. What is to be done? Take our heads if you like, or, merciful Little Mother, think that what is done cannot be undone, and overlook our offence.’⁠[56]⁠

Princess Dashkov, carried away by her love for Catherine, believed, or professed to believe, that Mirovitch,⁠[57] too, acted without her knowledge; and the worst, most disgraceful and loathsome story of her whole reign, the abduction by Alexey Orlov and De Ribasse of Princess Tarakanov,⁠[58] she does not mention at all.

It was, among other things, because she believed and wanted to believe in the ideal Catherine that she could not maintain herself in favour. And she would have been a splendid minister. Though indisputably gifted with political insight, she had besides her enthusiastic temperament two great defects which hindered her from making a career: she could not be silent, her tongue was sharp and biting, and it spared no one except Catherine; moreover, she was too proud, and she could not, and would not, conceal her antipathies—in short, she could not ‘abase her personality,’ as the Moscow Old Believers express it.

As a matter of fact, a friendship between Catherine and Princess Dashkov was impossible. Catherine wanted not only to be sovereign by the Imperial power, but to rule over every one in the world by her genius and her beauty; she wanted to attract the attention of all to herself alone; she had an insatiable desire to please. She was still in the full flower of her beauty, but she was thirty. She could probably have borne to have about her a weak woman, lost in the radiance of her glory and adoring her, not very handsome and not very clever. But she could not endure at her side the vigorous Princess Dashkov, who spoke of her own fame, with her wit, her fire, and her nineteen years.

She withdrew herself from her with the rapidity of truly royal ingratitude. In Moscow, after the Coronation, the old sinner Bestuzhev proposed writing an address to the Empress, and begging her, in the name of all her subjects, to take another husband. Grigory Orlov, who had already been created a prince of the Empire, dreamed of being Tsar. This roused the indignation of all decent people. Chancellor Vorontsov asked for an audience, and warned Catherine, on the supposition that she did not know what was being done. Catherine was surprised, and wanted to reprimand Bestuzhev.

Hitrov, one of the devoted conspirators of the 27th of June, loudly declared that he would sooner kill Orlov, or go to the scaffold, than acknowledge him Emperor. It need hardly be said that Princess Dashkov’s voice, too, was heard in the general murmur of displeasure; her words were carried to Catherine. Suddenly one evening, Tyeplov, the secretary of the Empress, came to Prince Dashkov and demanded to see him. The Empress had written him the following note: ‘I sincerely desire not to be compelled to consign to oblivion the services of the Princess Dashkov on account of her imprudent behaviour. Tell her to remember this next time she permits herself an indiscreet freedom of language amounting to threats.’

Princess Dashkov did not answer a word to this letter; she held herself aloof, and after the death of her husband in 1768 asked leave to visit foreign lands. ‘I might very well go without question,’ she said (probably never dreaming that in another eighty years a stupid law would almost completely deprive Russians of the right of crossing the frontier, and still less, that the Government would force every traveller to pay ransom), ‘but my position as a lady of the court lays upon me the obligation to ask the sanction of the Most High.’

Receiving no answer, she went to Petersburg, and at her first reception asked Catherine to allow her to go abroad for the sake of her children’s health.

‘I am very sorry,’ answered Catherine, ‘that such a distressing cause obliges you to go. But, of course, Princess, you are perfectly free to make what arrangements you like.’

Where was the time when they had lain in one bed, under one quilt, and had wept and embraced each other, or, lying on Colonel Kar’s overcoat, had dreamed for a whole night of political reforms?

Abroad Princess Dashkov revived, and became again the same proud, indefatigable, indomitable, active woman, interested in every one and throwing herself into everything.

On the wall in the hotel at Dantzig there hung a big picture representing some battle between Prussians and Russians, in which, of course, the Russians were being beaten. In the foreground there was a group of our soldiers on their knees before the Prussians begging for mercy. Princess Dashkov could not stand this. She induced two Russians to creep by night into the room, with oil-paints and brushes, locked the door, and set to work with her companions to repaint the uniforms, so that by the morning the Prussians were on their knees begging the Russians to spare them. When she had finished the picture, she sent for post-horses, and before the hotel-keeper had grasped the situation, she was racing along the road to Berlin, laughing at the thought of his amazement.

In Hanover she went to the Opera alone with Mlle. Kamensky. They were so unlike the worthy German women that the Prince of Mecklenburg, who was the chief authority in the town, sent to find out who they were. His adjutant went unceremoniously into the box in which there were also two German ladies, and asked our Russians whether they were not foreigners. Princess Dashkov said ‘Yes.’

‘His Highness,’ added the adjutant, ‘wishes to know with whom I have the honour of speaking.’

‘Our name,’ answered Princess Dashkov, ‘can be of no interest either to you or to the Duke; as women we have the right not to say who we are, and not to answer your question.’

The adjutant went away in confusion. The German ladies, who had from the first felt involuntary respect for our ladies, gazed at them with awe when they heard Princess Dashkov’s valiant answer. Seeing that the Germans took them for very great ladies, Princess Dashkov, turning courteously to them, said that though she would not answer the Prince’s impudent question, she had no reason to conceal from them her identity. ‘I am an opera-singer, and my friend is a dancer; we are both out of a job, and on the look-out for a good engagement.’ The German ladies opened their eyes wide, blushed to their ears, and not only abandoned their polite attentions, but tried so far as the size of the box permitted to sit with their backs turned on them.

In Paris Princess Dashkov was surrounded by all the celebrities and made friends with all of them except Rousseau; him she would not go to see on account of his hypocritical humility and affected originality. Diderot, on the other hand, became an intimate friend, spent whole evenings tête-à-tête with her, and discussed everything under the sun with her. Princess Dashkov proved to him that serfdom was not so bad as was supposed, trapped him into contradictory statements, and the susceptible Diderot was ready to agree with her instantly.

A servant came in and announced that Madame Necker⁠[59] and Madame Geoffrin⁠[60] had arrived. ‘Don’t receive them!’ cried Diderot, without asking Princess Dashkov’s wishes; ‘say that she is not at home.’

‘There is not a better woman in the world than Madame Geoffrin, but she is the greatest gossip in Paris; I positively won’t have her talking all sorts of nonsense about you before she has time to know you properly. I won’t have blasphemy against my idol.’ And Princess Dashkov sent word that she was unwell.

Rulhière,⁠[61] who was writing about Russia and the year 1762, also urgently wished to see her. Diderot would not have him received either: he wanted to keep Princess Dashkov to himself.

In London Princess Dashkov made the acquaintance of Paoli, but she did not like his ‘Italian grimaces,’ which were unbecoming in a great man. In Geneva she visited Voltaire and marvelled at him, though she could not help laughing with some doctor over the way Voltaire lost his temper at losing a game of draughts, and at the killing faces he made. The doctor, observing that it was not only Voltaire who could make such faces, bade his dog lift up his head, and Princess Dashkov could not control her laughter at the extraordinary resemblance. From Geneva she went to Spa; there she made great friends with Mrs. Hamilton⁠[62] and, when she parted from her, romantically swore to come again in five years to see her, if they did not meet before, and, what was even more romantic, actually came.

The feeling of the most ardent, most active affection was almost the strongest emotion in this proud and strong-willed woman. Deeply wounded by Catherine’s treatment of her,⁠[63] she looked prematurely old. Diderot says that she looked nearly forty, though she was at that time twenty-seven. Whether she loved any man after her husband’s death, or was beloved by one, is not to be seen from her Memoirs; but it may be said for certain that no man played a significant part in her life. After Catherine she attached herself, with all the ardour of a hungry heart, to Mrs. Hamilton. And in her old age an infinitely tender motherly affection brought warmth into her life; I am speaking of Miss Wilmot, who edited her Memoirs.

From Spa she went back to Moscow to the house of her sister, Madame Polyansky; this sister, with her humble, prosaic name, was no other than the notorious ‘Romanovna,’ who, if she had not been Madame Polyansky, might easily have been Empress of all the Russias.

The clouds which had overcast Princess Dashkov’s sky were beginning to clear away. The influence of the Orlovs had waned. The Empress, hearing of her arrival, sent her sixty thousand roubles to buy an estate.

But the princess was utterly unable to get on with the favourites, and there was no real intimacy between her and the court. Now she began to be deeply absorbed in the education of her son; an ardent admirer of England and English institutions, she made up her mind to go with her son to Edinburgh. Moreover, she saw that she was completely superfluous in the Winter Palace.

While she was preparing for this journey she betrothed her daughter to Shtcherbinin. On the way to the estate of the young man’s brother, to which she was going with the whole party, a servant fell off the box, and three sledges passed over him; he was badly hurt and stunned; he had to be bled, but how? Princess Dashkov had with her a case of surgical instruments bought in London; she took out a lancet, but no one would undertake to use it; the injured man lay unaided until, overcoming an intense feeling of disgust, she opened his vein, and after successfully performing the operation, almost sank into a swoon herself.

In Edinburgh she was soon surrounded by the leading celebrities, Robertson, Blair, Adam Smith, Fergusson. She wrote long letters to Robertson, and explained to him in detail her plan of education; she wanted her son, who was at that time fourteen, to complete his studies in two years and a half, and then, after making a tour of the whole of Europe, to go into the Service.

Robertson presumed that he would need four years; the mother thought that was too much. She wrote out in detail what her son knew already, and what he must know.

‘Languages:

Latin.—The initial difficulties are overcome.

English.—The prince has a very good understanding of prose, and to some extent of verse.

German.—He understands it perfectly.

French.—He knows like his mother tongue.

‘Literature: He is familiar with the best classical works. His taste is more formed than is common at his age. He has an excessive tendency to be critical, which is perhaps his only defect.

‘Mathematics: A very important branch of study. He has been fairly successful in the solution of advanced problems, but I should like him to go further in algebra.

‘Civil and Military Architecture: I want him to make a particular study of these subjects.

‘History and Political Institutions: He has a knowledge of general history, and particularly of Germany, England, and France, but he ought to go through a course of history more in detail; he can study it at home with a tutor.

‘Now this is what I want him to study: 1. Logic and the Philosophy of Reasoning. 2. Experimental Physics. 3. A little Chemistry. 4. Philosophy and Natural History. 5. Natural Law, International Law, public and private Law in its application to the legal systems of European nations. 6. Ethics. 7. Politics.’

This extensive programme she divides into five sessions, and then, as always, carries it out exactly. Her son passed his M.A. examination in 1779; it is commonly said that she exhausted him, and, certainly, he never did anything; moreover, he died very young, but whether his education is to blame for that it is hard to say.

After the examination Princess Dashkov went at once to Ireland, queened it in Dublin society, and composed church music, which was sung in the Chapel of Magdalen in the presence of a vast concourse of people, ‘desirous,’ as she expresses it, ‘of hearing how the bears of the North compose.’ Probably it was a successful experiment, for later on she was busy negotiating with David Garrick for the performance on the stage of her musical works. She was also writing long instructions to her son in the style of the counsels of Polonius concerning the conduct of his travels....

From England she went to Holland; in Haarlem she went to see a doctor of her acquaintance, and there met Prince Orlov, by now married and out of favour. The same day Orlov came to call on her, and just at dinner-time. His visit was to Princess Dashkov ‘as unexpected as it was disagreeable.’

‘I have come to you not as an enemy, but as a friend and ally,’ said Orlov, sitting down in a low chair. Then followed a silence on both sides. He looked intently at young Dashkov, and observed: ‘Your son is enrolled in the Cuirassiers, and I am in command of a regiment of the Horse Guards; if you like, I will ask the Empress to transfer him to my regiment; that will give him promotion.’

Princess Dashkov thanked him for his kind suggestion, but said that she could not take advantage of his offer, because she had already written on his behalf to Prince Potyomkin, and did not want without good reason to do anything in opposition to him.

‘What could there be disagreeable to him in it?’ asked Orlov, feeling the sting of this. ‘However, as you please; you may rely on me; your son will make a great career; it would be hard to find a handsomer young man.’

The mother flushed crimson with anger, and the conversation dropped. But at the next meeting Orlov, addressing young Dashkov, said: ‘What a pity that I shall not be in Petersburg when you arrive! I am certain that you will oust the present favourite as soon as you appear at court; I should be pleased to carry out my present duties—comforting the forsaken.’

Beside herself with indignation, Princess Dashkov sent her son out of the room, and told Orlov that she thought it extremely improper to speak to a boy of seventeen in that way, and that in so doing Orlov was compromising the Empress, whom she had brought her son up to respect; that, as for favourites, she begged him to remember that she had never known and never recognised one of them.

After that they parted. Orlov went to Switzerland, Princess Dashkov to Paris. Then we meet her inspecting the French fortresses with her son and Colonel Samoylov, by special permission of Maréchal de Biron.⁠[64] From France she went to Italy, and there was completely absorbed in pictures and statues, cameos and antiques, bought a picture of Angelica Kauffmann’s as a present for the Empress, went to see the Pope and Abbé Galiani,⁠[65] and finally returned to Russia through Vienna.

In Vienna she had a heated argument with Kaunitz, with whom she was dining. He called Peter the Great the political creator of Russia; Princess Dashkov observed that this was a European misconception. Kaunitz was not ready to yield his point; she was even less so. She admitted that Peter had done a very great deal for Russia, but thought that the material was ready, and that, together with his masterly use of it, he had inhumanly oppressed and distorted it.

‘If he had really been a great statesman, he would by his intercourse with other nations, and by trade, have gained without haste what he attained by violence and cruelty. The nobility and the serfs were both left worse off through his unbridled passion for innovations; from the latter he took the protective tribunal to which alone they could appeal in case of oppression, from the former he took all their privileges. And to what end was it all? To clear the way for a military despotism, that is, for the very worst of all existing forms of government. From simple vanity he was in such a hurry to build Petersburg that he sent thousands of workmen to die in the marshes. He not only forced the landowners to provide a certain number of peasants, but compelled them to build themselves houses according to his own plans, without asking whether they needed them. One of his principal buildings, the Admiralty and Docks, which cost immense sums, was constructed on the bank of a river which no human efforts could make navigable even for merchant vessels, much less for ships of the Navy.’

‘However,’ observed Kaunitz, ‘no one can help being touched at the sight of a monarch learning shipbuilding with the axe in his hand.’

The ruthless lady would not let this pass. ‘Your Excellency,’ she answered, ‘is doubtless joking. Who can know better than you how precious is a monarch’s time, and whether he has the leisure to practise a handicraft? Peter I. was in a position to command the services not only of shipbuilders, but even of admirals. To my mind, when he was wasting time in Saardam working with the axe and learning the slang of the Dutch market, and sailors’ words with which he distorted the Russian language, he was simply neglecting his duty.’

I foresee how the good Orthodox souls of our Moscow Slavophils will rejoice at reading these words; they certainly ought, on days for commemorating the dead, to keep the memory of our princess with pancakes and lenten oil.

Joseph II. was ill, and wanted Princess Dashkov to remain a few days longer, but she had received an invitation from Frederick II. for herself and her son to be present at his manœuvres. She had, however, an informal interview with Joseph II. in the study he devoted to natural history.

A week later Princess Dashkov was at the manœuvres at which Frederick II. drilled forty-two thousand men, and to which he had never before admitted women, but she was specially invited. The Prussian Princess herself drove to fetch her, brought her to the spot where the King was to meet her, and asked her to get out of the carriage, saying: ‘Dear Princess, as I have not the slightest desire to see the old grumbler, I will drive on,’ and Princess Dashkov was left to an innocent tête-à-tête with Frederick II., who took her and her son with him to a military inspection of the provinces.