the winter palace a novel of catherine the great

She likes when we repeat that no head has been cut off since the day she took power but forbids us to mention the tongues and ears. She plucked the wailing baby Emperor from his crib and kissed his rosy cheeks before she handed him back to his mother and packed them both off to live in prison. True to her word, on the day of the coup, she stopped the Palace Guards from slashing Ivan’s infant throat. Nicholas the Maker of Miracles that no one under her rule would ever be put to death. The French call her “Elizabeth the Merciful.” For the day before she stole the throne of Russia from Ivan VI, she swore on the icon of St. They all thought Elizabeth Petrovna flippant and flighty then, entangled in the intricacies of her dancing steps and the cut of her ball dresses- all but a handful who kept their eyes opened wide, who gambled on the power of her father’s blood. There had been a fiance lost to smallpox, there had been other prospects derailed by political intrigues until everyone believed that, at thirty- two and without a husband, the youngest daughter of Peter the Great had missed her chance at the throne. Three years ago our bewitching Empress was but a maiden princess at the court of Ivan VI, the baby Emperor, and his Regent Mother. But frankness can be a mask, a disguise, as her predecessor has learned far too late. How kind and frank Empress Elizabeth Petrovna is, you have said. With the vivacity of her speech and gestures, her brisk impatience with etiquette. With her simplicity, the gentle touch of her hand, the tears she dried from her eyes at her first sight of you. She has charmed you already, our Empress. This place is where hopes shrivel and die. Do not be deceived by tender looks and flattering words, promises of splendor and triumph.

This court is a new world to you, I could have said to her, a slippery ground. Petersburg’s Summer Garden, this frail girl who would become Catherine. I could have warned her when she arrived in Russia, this petty German princess from Zerbst, a town no bigger than St.

The winter palace a novel of catherine the great