From Marshal Romanzoff’s Headquarters in Poland.
8th June 1788.
“If you inquire, my dear Charles, how I am, I shall reply: Always the same. I am continually with the armies and the marshals, trying to make them do something. But the devil is with them, in spite of all their Russian signs of the cross.
“The best thing I have done is to have left that quiz, that maker of compliments, my admirer, as he calls himself, for Kaminiecz. Ah! if I still had a heart, how terribly in love I should be! The governor’s wife,[70] that magnificent Greek, known and admired all over the world, drove me in a berlin within half a cannon’s range of Choczim, from whence a few shots were fired over our heads.
“I confess that I felt more inclined to find out her weak point of attack than to reconnoitre that of the fortress.
“I stay at her house; but what an infernal row goes on! A rattle of chains all night; I thought there were ghosts. The fact is that her husband, who is commandant of Kaminiecz, has all his work done by convicts. What a contrast between their rascally countenances and the beauty of her whom they serve, under the sway of the rod! Even the cook is a convict; it is economical, but dreadful.
“I wish, my dear Charles, that Oczakoff (I must return to Potemkin, for I am still more incapable of moving this man) may procure me something glorious in your style. I shall be killed on your account, for you must have a father worthy of you. You thought of me, you say; you are sublime and touching. You have worked for me; I will work for you. I send you a tender farewell from these five or six hundred leagues distance.”
The Prince found Potemkin and his army just as he had left them, and he writes to his son, who had recommended a Prussian officer to him:——
From the Camp in the Deserts of Tartary.
Before Oczakoff, 30th July.