Meanwhile, downriver in Kherson, Joseph had arrived and was waiting. A man who loved to travel unencumbered, Joseph was once again traveling incognito as Count Falkenstein. With little baggage, and accompanied by a single equerry and two servants, he usually arrived early on his travels. In Kherson, he tired of waiting and decided to go upriver by land to meet Catherine in Kaidek, where her fleet of galleys would halt on reaching the first of the Dnieper cataracts. When the galleys arrived in Kaidek, Catherine was informed that Count Falkenstein was waiting downriver at Kherson. Soon, further news arrived that he was already on his way by road to meet her. Determined not to be outdone, Catherine hastily disembarked and hurried by carriage to intercept her ally. The two met by the road, and, riding together in her carriage, returned the twenty miles to Kaidek. Joining her traveling party, Joseph insisted on maintaining his incognito, attending the empress’s levees with other gentlemen of the court, and always being introduced as Count Falkenstein. He was delighted to see his friend and army commander, Ligne, and to strike up a new friendship with Ségur. He spoke admiringly to the French ambassador about the vitality of the extraordinary woman ten years his senior who had become his ally, but he had few compliments for Mamonov. “The new favorite is good-looking,” Joseph wrote, “but does not appear to be very brilliant and seems astonished to find himself in this position. He is really no more than a spoiled child.”
After twenty-four hours at Kaidek, Catherine and Joseph left to the courtiers and diplomats the pleasure of shooting the rapids by galley, and traveled together by carriage to the site where Potemkin intended to build the new city of Ekaterinoslav. There, with Joseph at her side, Catherine laid the foundation stone of the city’s new cathedral. The emperor, dubious about building a large church before there was a town or a population, wrote to a friend in Vienna, “I performed a great deed today. The empress laid the first stone of a new church, and I laid—the last.”
Once the galleys had passed safely through the rapids and the two sovereigns reembarked, they made their entry into Kherson by water. Nine years before, when Potemkin had first chosen this site twenty miles up the estuary from the Black Sea, Kherson had been no more than a few huts in a marsh. Now it was a fortified city with two thousand white houses, straight streets, shade trees, flower gardens, churches and public buildings, barracks for twenty thousand men, crowds in the streets, shops filled with goods, and a thriving shipyard with warehouses along the quays and two completed ships of the line and a frigate ready to be launched. More than a hundred ships, many of them Russian, were riding at anchor in the port. On May 15, Catherine and Joseph launched the three warships, including the ship of the line
The proximity of the Turks loomed in the minds of both sovereigns. They saw the arch Potemkin had erected over the entrance to the town, provocatively emblazoned with the inscription in Greek “This is the way to Byzantium.” They met Yakov Bulgakov, the Russian minister in Constantinople, who had come to report to the empress and remind her of what she and Potemkin already knew: that the Ottoman Empire had never fully accepted the annexation of the Crimea or, indeed, any Russian presence on the Black Sea. The Turks were only biding their time, Bulgakov warned. Catherine and Potemkin understood, and because Russia would not be ready for war for at least two years, they urged Bulgakov to be conciliatory.
Catherine herself was now obliged to be cautious. Originally, she had hoped to travel the full length of the Dnieper, which meant going from Kherson down the estuary all the way to the Black Sea. The Turks forestalled this final stage of her river voyage by sending four men-of-war and ten frigates to cruise in the estuary. It was a reminder that the Dnieper was not yet fully open.
Despite this disappointment, Catherine was determined to impress her imperial ally and the foreign ambassadors by taking them on a tour of the Crimea. Leaving Kherson and the Dnieper on May 21, they traveled overland by carriage. Once out on the steppe, Joseph was astonished when twelve hundred Tartar horsemen suddenly appeared in a cloud of dust; here were tribesmen, only recently conquered, now considered to be sufficiently loyal to serve as an imperial guard of honor. Impressed by what he was seeing, Joseph left the encampment at dusk one evening and walked with Ségur out into the flat wasteland of grass stretching to the horizon. “What a peculiar land,” the emperor said. “And who could have expected to see me with Catherine the Second, and the French and English ambassadors wandering through a Tatar desert? What a page of history!”
