It was at this time she formed a more intimate society, composed of her favourites and most trusty ladies and courtiers. This society met two or three times a week, under the name of the Little Hermitage. The parties were frequently masqued, and the greatest privacy prevailed. They danced, played at forfeits, joked, romped and engaged in all sorts of frolics and gambols. Leov Narishkin acted the same part there as Roquelaure at the court of Louis XIV; and a fool by title, Matrona Danilovna, seconded him. This was an old gossip, whose wit consisted only in uttering the most absurd vulgarities; and as she was allowed the common right of fools, that of saying anything, she was loaded with presents by the lower order of courtiers. Such foreign ministers as enjoyed the favour of the empress were sometimes admitted to the Little Hermitage. Ségur, Cobenzl, Stedingk, and Nassau chiefly enjoyed this distinction; but Catherine afterwards formed another assembly, more confined and more mysterious, which was called the Little Society. The three favourites of whom we have just been speaking, Branicka, Protasov, and some confidential women and valets-de-chambre, were its only members. In this the Cybele of the north celebrated her most secret mysteries. The particulars of these amusements are not fit to be repeated.
[1793 A.D.]
Catherine survived Potemkin but four years. The last ten years of her reign carried her power, her glory, and her political crimes to their highest pitch. When the great Frederick, dictator of the kings of Europe, died, she remained the eldest of the crowned heads of the continent; and if we except Joseph, all those heads together were unequal to her own. If Frederick was the dictator of these kings, Catherine became their tyrant. The immense empire which she had subjected to her sway; the inexhaustible resources she derived from a country and a people as yet in a state of infancy; the extreme luxury of her court, the barbarous pomp of her nobility, the wealth and princely grandeur of her favourites, the glorious exploits of her armies, and the gigantic views of her ambition threw Europe into a sort of fascination; and those monarchs who had been too proud to pay each other even the slightest deference felt no abasement in making a woman the arbiter of their interests, the ruling power of all their measures.
THE SUBJUGATION AND FINAL PARTITION OF POLAND (1796 A.D.)
The annihilation of Poland, long meditated, was now resolved on. The empress could never forgive that nation either for the act of the diet in 1788, which abrogated the constitution dictated by violence in 1775, or the alliance of Prussia accepted in contempt of her own, or, above all, the constitution decreed at Warsaw on the 3rd of May, 1791. Big with these ideas of revenge, she gave orders to Bulgakov, her minister at Warsaw, to declare war against Poland.
The diet being assembled received this declaration with a majestic calmness, which was rapidly succeeded by the generous enthusiasm of a nation roused to self-defence. The king himself pretended to share the feelings that animated his people; and the Poles had the weakness to believe that, having abandoned his former servility to Russia and his customary indolence, he was becoming the defender of their freedom. An army was collected in haste, and the command of it given to the king’s nephew, Joseph Poniatowski, an inexperienced young man, all of whose efforts were obstructed or misdirected by his traitorous uncle.
The Poles could have opposed the designs of Catherine with an army of fifty thousand men; but they never yet could be brought to unite their forces; and their different corps were soon after pressed between an army of eighty thousand Russians, who fell back from Bessarabia upon the territory which extends along the Bug, another of ten thousand collected in the environs of Kiev, and a third of thirty thousand, which had penetrated into Lithuania.
We shall not here attempt to draw the picture of the various battles that drenched the plains of Poland with blood, and which, notwithstanding some advantages obtained by the Poles, consumed the greater part of their troops. It was then that the illustrious Kosciuszko, who as yet was nothing more than one of the lieutenants of young Joseph Poniatowski, displayed qualities that justly obtained him the confidence of the nation, the hatred of the Russians, and the esteem of Europe.
During all this time Catherine, not trusting alone to the power of her own arms, had been negotiating with unremitted assiduity. She proposed the definitive partition of Poland to Frederick William, who was undoubtedly no less desirous of it than herself. She secretly won over to her views the two brothers Kassakovski, the hetman Branicki, Rejevuski, and particularly Felix Potocki, who, while flattering himself perhaps with the hopes of mounting the throne of Poland, became only the slave of Russia. She even insisted that Stanislaus Augustus should make a public declaration that it was necessary to yield to the superiority of the Russian arms. He submitted to this indignity; but was not on that account treated by the empress with greater indulgence.