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Updated: June 1, 2025
But, with his constitutional irresolution, he soon abandoned this plan, and, ordering the fortress of Oranienbaum to be dismantled, to convince Catharine that he intended to make no resistance, he wrote to the empress another letter still more humble and sycophantic than the first. He implored her forgiveness in terms of the most abject humiliation.
A cadet detachment from Oranienbaum nevertheless succeeded in getting by our military defence during the night and over the telephone we followed their further movements. The outer guard of the Smolny was strengthened by another company. Communications with all the detachments of the garrison went on continuously. The companies on guard in all the regiments were awake.
Catharine read the letter, but deigning no reply, sent back the chamberlain who brought it, with a verbal message to her husband that she could enter into no negotiations with him, and could only accept his unconditional submission. The chamberlain, Ismailof, returned to Oranienbaum. The tzar had with him there only his Holstein guard consisting of six hundred men.
But Peter was hopelessly incompetent to act. He would go back to Oranienbaum. He would negotiate. He arrived there to learn that Catharine was marching on him at the head of her regiments. On she came, her cap crowned with oak leaves, her hair floating in the wind. The soldiers had thrown off their Prussian uniforms and were dressed in their old garb.
Catharine tells many trifling, but interesting incidents, of various nature, in these Memoirs: of how, after the birth of her first child, she was left utterly alone and neglected, so that she famished with thirst for the lack of some one to bring her water; how her child was taken from her at its birth, and kept from her, she hardly being allowed even to see it; how it was always wrapped in fox-skins and seal-skins, till it lay in a continual bath of perspiration; how the members of the royal family itself were so badly accommodated, that sometimes they were made ill by walking through passages open to wind and rain, and sometimes stifled by over-crowded rooms; how at the imperial masquerades, during one season, the men were ordered to appear in women's dresses, and the women in the propria quae maribus, the former hideous in large whaleboned petticoats and high feathered head-dresses, the latter looking like scrubby little boys with very thick legs, and all that the Empress Elizabeth might show her tall and graceful figure and what beautiful things she used to walk with, which Catharine says were the handsomest that she ever saw; how in this court, where marriage was the mere shadow of a bond, it was yet deemed a matter of the first nuptial importance that a lady of the court should have her head dressed for the wedding by the hands of the Empress herself, or, if she were too ill, by those of the Grand Duchess; how Catharine used, at Oranienbaum, to dress herself from head to foot in male attire, and go out in a skiff, accompanied only by an old huntsman, to shoot ducks and snipe, sometimes doubling the Cape of Oranienbaum, which extends two versts into the sea, and how thus the fortunes of the Russian Empire, during the latter half of the eighteenth century, were at the mercy of a spring-tide, a gust of wind, or the tipping of a shallop.
In this letter he made a humble confession of his faults, and promised to share the sovereign authority with Catharine if she would consent to reconciliation. The empress was, at this time, at the head of her army within about twenty miles of Oranienbaum. During the night, she had slept for a few hours upon some cloaks which the officers of her suite had spread for her bed.
It was the morning of the 19th of July, 1762. Peter, at Oranienbaum, had passed most of the night, with his boon companions and his concubines, in intemperate carousings. He awoke at a late hour in the morning, and after breakfast set out in a carriage, with several of his women, accompanied by a troop of courtiers in other carriages, for Peterhof.
Indeed, it is no mere chance that the capital, the military harbour, and the chief Imperial residences should all have German names—Kronstadt, Oranienbaum, Schluessenburg, Petersburg, and Peterhof. Peterhof has been the Russian Potsdam. Petersburg has been the outpost of Germany in the Russian Empire, the feste Burg of Prussia until the eve of the war.
Well, Maret and Savary, what do you think of it? Do you deem it best that I should build the palace for the King of Rome in the style of a fortress, like that of Oranienbaum?" "Sire," exclaimed Savary, eagerly, "so precious a head cannot be sufficiently protected. In building a palace for the king, less attention should be paid to an attractive appearance than to safety and convenience."
The manifesto of the empress, which had been secretly printed, was distributed throughout the city, and a day appointed when the foreign embassadors would be received by Catharine. The revolution seemed already accomplished without a struggle and almost without an effort. From 1762 to 1765. Peter III. at Oranienbaum. Catharine at Peterhof. The Successful Accomplishment of the Conspiracy.
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