Love affairs of the Courts of Europe

by Thornton Hall

And in his own kingdom the favourite companions of his debauches were common soldiers and servants.

"He chose his friends among the common herd; looked after his household like any shopkeeper; thrashed his wife like a peasant; and sought his pleasure where the lower populace generally finds it." His female companions were chosen rather for their coarseness than their charms, and pleased him most when they were drunk. It was thus fitting that he should make an Empress of a scullery-maid, who, as we have seen in an earlier chapter, had no vestige of beauty to commend her to his favour, and whose chief attractions in his eyes were that she had a coarse tongue and was a "first-rate toper."

It was thus a strange and unhappy caprice of fate that united Peter, while still a youth, to his first Empress, the refined and sensitive Eudoxia, a woman as remote from her husband as the stars. Never was there a more incongruous bride than this delicately nurtured girl provided by the Empress Nathalie for her coarse-grained son. From the hour at which they stood together at the altar the union was doomed to tragic failure; before the honeymoon waned Peter had terrified his bride by his brutality and disgusted her by the open attentions he paid to his favourites of the hour, the daughters of Botticher, the goldsmith, and Mons, the wine-merchant.

For five years husband and wife saw little of each other; and when, in 1694, Nathalie's death removed the one influence which gave the union at least the outward form of substance, Peter lost no time in exhibiting his true colours. He dismissed all Eudoxia's relatives from the Court, and sent her father into exile. One brother he caused to be whipped in public; another was put to the torture, which had its horrible climax when Peter himself saturated his victim's clothes with spirits of wine, and then set them on fire. For Eudoxia a different fate was reserved. Not only had he long grown weary of her insipid beauty and of her refinement and gentleness, which were a constant mute reproach to his own low tastes and hectoring manners—he had grown to hate the very sight of her, and determined that she should no longer stand between him and the unbridled indulgence of his pleasure.

During his visit to England he never once wrote to her, and on his return to Moscow his first words were a brutal announcement of his intention to be rid of her. In vain she pleaded and wept. To her tearful inquiries, "What have I done to offend you? What fault have you to find with me?" he turned a deaf ear. "I never want to see you again," were his last inexorable words. A few days later a hackney coach drove up to the palace doors; the unhappy Tsarina was bundled unceremoniously into it, and she was carried away to the nunnery of the "Intercession of the Blessed Virgin," whose doors were closed on her for a score of years.

Pitiful years they were for the young Empress, consigned by her husband to a life that was worse than death—robbed of her rank, her splendours, and luxuries, her very name—she was now only Helen, the nun, faring worse than the meanest of her sister-nuns; for while they at least had plenty to eat, the Tsarina seems many a time to have known the pangs of hunger. The letters she wrote to one of her brothers are pathetic evidence of the straits to which she was reduced. "For pity's sake," she wrote, "give me food and drink. Give clothes to the beggar. There is nothing here. I do not need a great deal; still I must eat."

It is not to be wondered at, that, in her misery, she should turn anywhere for succour and sympathy; and both came to her at last in the guise of Major Glebof, an officer in the district, whose heart was touched by the sadness of her fate. He sent her food and wine to restore her strength, and warm furs to protect her from the iciness of her cell. In response to her letters of thanks, he visited her again and again, bringing sunshine into her darkened life with his presence, and soothing her with words of sympathy and encouragement, until gratitude to the "good Samaritan" grew into love for the man.

When she learned that the man who had so befriended her was himself poor, actually in money difficulties, she insisted on giving him every rouble she could wring, by any abject appeal, out of her friends and relatives. She became his very slave, grovelling at his feet. "Where thy heart is, dearest one," she wrote to him, "there is mine also; where thy tongue is, there is my head; thy will is also mine." She loved him with a passion which broke down all barriers of modesty and prudence, reckless of the fact that he had a wife, as she had a husband.

When Major Glebof's visits and letters grew more and more infrequent, she suffered tortures of anxiety and despair. "My light, my soul, my joy," she wrote in one distracted letter, "has the cruel hour of separation come already? O, my light! how can I live apart from thee? How can I endure existence? Rather would I see my soul parted from my body. God alone knows how dear thou art to me. Why do I love thee so much, my adored one, that without thee life is so worthless? Why art thou angry with me? Why, my batioushka, dost thou not come to see me? Have pity on me, O my lord, and come to see me to-morrow. O, my world, my dearest and best, answer me; do not let me die of grief."

Thus one distracted, incoherent letter followed another, heart-breaking in their grief, pitiful in their appeal. "Come to me," she cried; "without thee I shall die. Why dost thou cause me such anguish? Have I been guilty without knowing it? Better far to have struck me, to have punished me in any way, for this fault I have innocently committed." And again: "Why am I not dead? Oh, that thou hadst buried me with thy own hands! Forgive me, O my soul! Do not let me die.... Send me but a crust of bread thou hast bitten with thy teeth, or the waistcoat thou hast often worn, that I may have something to bring thee near to me."