Gradually, the passionate, ambitious man, still only fifty-two, became calm; those around him watched him dying in serenity. He begged everyone to forgive him for any pain he might have caused them. They must promise to convey to the empress his humblest gratitude for everything she had done for him. When a new message arrived from her he wept. He agreed to try quinine but could not hold it down. He began to faint; he was conscious only half the time; he felt that he was suffocating. He wrote to Catherine, “Matushka, oh how sick I am!” He asked to be moved from Jassy to Nikolaev; its cooler air might do him good. On the day he started out on the journey, he dictated a note to Catherine: “Your most gracious Majesty. I have no more strength to endure my torments. My only remaining salvation is to leave this town and I have ordered myself be taken to Nikolaev. I do not know what is to become of me.”
At eight on the morning of October 4, he was carried to his carriage. He went a few miles and said that he could not breathe. The carriage stopped. Carried into a house, he fell asleep. After three hours’ rest, he talked cheerfully until midnight. He tried to sleep again but could not. At daybreak, he asked that the journey resume. The procession had gone only seven miles when he ordered it to stop. “This will be enough,” he said. “There is no point in going on. Take me out of the carriage and put me down. I want to die in the field.” A Persian carpet was unrolled on the grass. Potemkin was placed on it and covered with the silk gown Catherine had sent him. Everyone searched for a gold coin to close his eye in the Orthodox fashion, but no gold coin was found. An escorting Cossack offered a copper five-kopeck piece and with this his eye was covered. At midday on Sunday, October 5, 1791, he died. A message went to the empress: “His Serene Highness the prince is no longer on this earth.”
At five in the evening on October 12, a courier bringing the news reached the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. Catherine collapsed. “Now I have no one left on whom I can rely,” she cried. “How can anybody replace Potemkin? Everything will be different now. He was a true nobleman.” The days passed and her secretary could only report: “Tears and despair … tears … more tears.”
Art, Architecture, and the Bronze Horseman
THE FOUNDATION of the superb collection of art in St. Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum today was laid by Catherine only a year after she reached the throne. In 1763, she learned that a collection of 225 paintings accumulated by a Polish art dealer in Berlin who regularly supplied pictures to Frederick II had not been paid for. The dealer had been buying and holding the paintings for the king’s Potsdam palace, Sans Souci, but Frederick had decided that he could not afford them. His finances, personal and national, had been ravaged by the cost of the Seven Years’ War, and the need to pay his army and to begin reconstruction of his devastated country took precedence over the purchase of paintings for his palace walls. The art dealer was, therefore, deeply in debt and urgently needed a customer. Catherine stepped forward and, without serious bargaining, bought the entire collection.
There may have been an element of spite in her purchase of a collection originally destined for Frederick. When Elizabeth was on the throne, Russia had been at war with Prussia; then Peter III had succeeded his aunt, had switched sides, and had become Frederick’s ally. Now, pulling Frederick’s paintings out from under him would partially balance the ledger. Not all of her new paintings were masterpieces, but they included three Rembrandts, a Franz Hals, and a Rubens.
When the paintings arrived in St. Petersburg, Catherine was so pleased that she sent word to her ambassadors and agents in Europe to be alert for other collections that might come up for sale. Fortunately, the Russian ambassador in Paris was Prince Dmitry Golitsyn, a polished Enlightenment figure, a friend of Voltaire’s and Diderot’s, and a habitué of the intellectual and artistic salon of Madame Geoffrin. Golitsyn arranged Catherine’s purchase of Diderot’s library in 1765 and continued to buy paintings for Catherine as long as he remained in Paris. When he left France to become Russian ambassador in The Hague, Diderot agreed to become Catherine’s scout, selecting and buying paintings for her. The most prestigious and best-informed art critic in the world now was acting for the richest and most powerful woman in the world.
