heart remained cold?
La Chétardie was at last recalled by his government, and he
was preparing for his final audience before leaving the palace
when Elizabeth called him in and spontaneously suggested that
he accompany her on the pilgrimage she wished to make to the
[Holy Trinity] Troitsky-St. Sergievsky Monastery, just north of
Moscow.* Flattered by this return to grace, the ambassador trav-
eled with her to this high holy place. Lodged very comfortably
with the tsarina’s retinue, he did not leave her side for eight days.
To be frank, Elizabeth was delighted by this discreet
“companionship.” She took La Chétardie with her to visit the
churches as well as in the drawing rooms. The courtiers were al-
ready whispering that the “Gaulois” was about to replace Maurice
of Saxony in Her Majesty’s favor.
But, as soon as the little imperial band returned to St. Peters-
burg, La Chétardie had to admit that once more he had begun to
rejoice too soon. Getting a hold on herself after a brief and very
feminine lapse, Elizabeth once again took a very cool, even distant,
tone with La Chétardie, as in their earlier conversations. Time
in Russia and, indeed, helped to concentrate power in Moscow during the
Middle Ages
< 144 >
and again, she made appointments with him and then broke them,
and one day when he complained to her about Bestuzhev, whose
ostracism of France was close to an obsession (according to the
Fernchman), she set him in his place with a few sharp words. “We
do not condemn people before proving their crimes!”6 However,
the day before La Chétardie’s departure, she sent him a snuffbox
studded with diamonds, with her portrait in miniature in the
middle.
The day after this necessary separation from a character who
charmed and irritated her by turns, Elizabeth was as sad as if she
had lost a dear friend. While La Chétardie was stopped at a
stagehouse along the way, an emissary from Elizabeth caught up
with him. The man handed him a note in a sealed envelope, bear-
ing only the words: “France will be in my heart forever.”7 That
sounds like the wail of a lover who has been forsaken — but by
whom? By an ambassador? By a king? By France itself? Her feel-
ings must have been quite confused, by now. While her subjects
may have been entitled to dream, that innocent diversion was off
limits for her. Abandoned by someone whom she had always
claimed was of no importance, it was time to come back to reality
and to focus on the succession to the throne, rather than thinking
about her life as a woman.
On November 7, 1742, she published a proclamation sol-
emnly dubbing Duke Charles Peter Ulrich of Holstein-Gottorp
Grand Duke, crown prince and Imperial Highness, under the Rus-
sian name of Peter Fyodorovich. She took this occasion to con-
firm her intention not to marry. In fact, she was afraid that if she
married a man of lower rank, or a foreign prince, she would be let-
ting down not only the brave men of the
Russians who were so attached to the memory of her father, Peter
the Great. Better to remain unwed, she thought. To be worthy of
the role that she intended to play, she would have to forego any
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union officially sanctioned by the Church and remain faithful to
her image as the maiden-tsar, “the imperial Virgin,” already cele-
brated by Russian legend.
On the other hand, she was beginning to see that the youth
whom she had selected to be her heir, whom she had had baptized
into the Orthodox faith under the name of Peter Fyodorovich and
who had so very little Russian blood in his veins, was never going
to forget his true fatherland. In fact, despite the efforts of his
mentor, Simon Todorsky, Grand Duke Peter always returned in-
stinctively to his origins. Besides, it was hard not to continue
worshiping his native Germany when everything about the soci-
ety, the streets and the shops of St. Petersburg reflected its influ-
ence so strongly. It was clear that the majority of influential peo-
ple in the palace and in the ministries spoke German more flu-
ently than Russian, and along the very luxurious Nevsky Prospect,
many of the stores were German; elsewhere, signs of the Han-
seatic League were in evidence, and there were plenty of Lutheran
churches. When Peter Fyodorovich showed up at a barracks
guardroom, during a walk about town, the officer he addressed
would often answer him in German. And with every reminder of
his homeland, Peter regretted being exiled in this city that, de-
spite its splendors, meant less to him than the most trivial village
of Schleswig-Holstein.
Forced to acclimatize himself, he took an aversion to the
Russian vocabulary, Russian grammar, and Russian ways. He re-
sented Russia for not being German, and he took to saying, “I was
not born for the Russians, and I do not like them!” Living at the
center of this great land of foreigners, he chose his friends from
