Of one man who had been thus kind she made a General on the spot; the friendly priest was given a highly paid post at Court; high rank in the army was given to many of his humble relatives; and a husband was found for a favourite niece in Count Ryoumin, the Chancellor's son.
As for Alexis himself, nothing was too good for him. Although he had probably never handled a gun in his life she made him Field-Marshal and head of her army; and, at her request, Charles VII. dubbed him Count of the Holy Roman Empire, a distinction which Gregory Orloff in later years prized more than all the honours Catherine II. showered on him; while the estates of which she made him lord were a small kingdom in themselves. Alexis, the shepherd's son, was now, beyond any question, the most powerful man in Russia. If he would, he might easily have taken the sceptre from the yielding hands of the Empress and played the autocrat, as Patiomkin played it under similar circumstances in later years. But Alexis cared as little for power as for rank and wealth. He smiled at his honours. "Fancy," he said, with his hearty laugh, "a peasant's son, a Count; and a man who ought to be tending sheep, a Field-Marshal!"
When courtly genealogists spread before him an elaborate family-tree, proving that he sprang from the princely stock of Bogdan, with many a Grand Duke of Lithuania among his lineal ancestors, he laughed loud and long at them for their pains. "Don't be so ridiculous," he said. "You know as well as I that my parents were simple peasants, honest enough, but people of the soil and nothing else. If I am Count and Field-Marshal and Viceroy, I owe it all to the good heart of your Empress and mine, whose humble servant I am. Take it away, and let me hear no more of such foolery."
Such to the last was the unspoiled, child-like nature of the man who so soon was to be not merely the first favourite but husband of an Empress. Probably Alexis would have lived and died Elizabeth's unlicensed lover had it not been for the cunning of the cleverest of her Chancellors, Bestyouzhev, who saw in his mistress's infatuation for her peasant the means of making his own position more secure. Elizabeth was still a young and attractive woman, who might pick and choose among some of the most eligible suitors in Europe for a sharer of her throne; for there were many who would gladly have played consort to the good-looking autocrat of Russia.
Such a husband, especially if he were a strong man, might seriously imperil the Chancellor's position; might even dispense with him altogether. On the other hand, he was high in the favour of the shepherd's son, who had such a contempt for power, and who thus would be a puppet in his hands. Why not make him husband in name as well as in fact? It was, after all, an easy task the Chancellor thus set himself. Elizabeth was by no means unwilling to wear a wedding-ring for the man who had loved her so loyally and so long; and any difficulties she might raise were quickly disposed of by her father-confessor, who was Bestyouzhev's tool. Thus it came to pass that one day Elizabeth and Alexis stood side by side before the village altar of Perovo; and the words were spoken which made the shepherd's son husband of the Empress. The secrecy with which the ceremony was performed was but a fiction. All the world knew that Alexis Gregorovitch was Emperor by right of wedlock, and flocked to pay homage to him in his new and exalted character.
He now had sumptuous apartments next to those of his wife; he sat at her right hand on all State occasions; he was her shadow everywhere; and during his frequent attacks of gout the Empress ministered to him night and day in his own rooms with the tender devotion of a mother to a child. Two children were born to them, a son and a daughter, the latter of whom, after a life of strange romance and vicissitude, ended her days in a loathsome dungeon of the fortress of Saints Peter and Paul, the victim of Catherine II.'s vengeance—miserably drowned, so one story goes, by an inundation of her cell.
On Elizabeth's death, in the year 1762, her husband was glad to retire from the Court in which he had for so long played so splendid a part. "None but myself," he said, "can know with what pleasure I leave a sphere to which I was not born, and to which only my love for my dear mistress made me resigned. I should have been happier far with her in some small cottage far removed from the gilded slavery of Court life." He was happy enough now leading the peaceful life of a country gentleman on one of his many estates.
Catherine II. had mounted the throne of Russia—the Empress who, according to Masson, had but two passions, which she carried to the grave—"her love of man, which degenerated into libertinage; and her love of glory, which degenerated into vanity." A woman with the brain of a man and the heart of a courtesan, Catherine's fickle affection had flitted from one lover to another, until now it had settled on Gregory Orloff, the handsomest man in her dominions, whom she was more than half disposed to make her husband.
This was a scheme which commended itself strongly to her Chancellor, Vorontsov. There was a most useful precedent to lend support to it—the alliance of the Empress Elizabeth with a man of immeasurably lower rank than Catherine's favourite; but it was important that this precedent should be established beyond dispute. Thus it was that one day, when Count Alexis was poring over his Bible by his country fireside, Chancellor Vorontsov made his appearance with ingratiating words and promises. Her Majesty, he informed the Count, was willing to confer Imperial rank on him in return for one small favour—the possession of the documents which proved his marriage to her predecessor, Elizabeth.
On hearing the request, the ex-shepherd rose, and, with words of quiet scorn, refused both the request and the proffered honour. "Am not I," he said, "a Count, a Field-Marshal, a man of wealth? all of which I owe to the kindness of my dear, dead mistress. Are not such honours enough for the peasant's son whom she raised from the mire to sit by her side, that I should purchase another bauble by an act of treachery to her memory?