Where did Catherine 2 go to the toilet?
The Empress was busy with business until noon. By this time she had already been on her feet for six hours and was scribbling on the paper. To get some rest, she should have changed her occupation: make a toilet and appear in public. In the inner restroom, hairdresser Ivan Kozlov was styling Catherine’s hair into a low, simple hairstyle with small curls behind the ears. The Prince de Ligne believed that if she had not pulled them up, but allowed them to “bloom around her face,” it would have suited her better. But Catherine had her own taste. Until old age, the Empress retained her long, thick dark brown hair, which fell to the floor when she sat in front of the mirror in a chair. When combed, sparks fell from them. The same electric charge remained on Catherine’s silk sheets. Sometimes shaking them gave the servants an electric shock[157]. Following the hairdresser, the chamberlains entered. The first, Kalmyk Marya Stepanovna Alekseeva, served ice to wipe the face. In those days, noble ladies did not wash their faces with water, but rubbed their skin with ice. Martha Wilmot reported home: “Every morning they bring me a plate of ice as thick as the glass of a glass, and like a real Russian, I rub it on my cheeks, which, they assure me, will give me a good complexion.”[158] During the morning toilet, it was customary to rinse your mouth and throat. Since the 80s, a toothbrush has come into use, causing a mixed reaction. A. N. Radishchev in “Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow” attacked secular women for their desire to “pull” their teeth with a brush, which does not make their breath fresher. The author contrasted them with peasant women who did not know such tricks, but were healthy and strong: “Come here, our dear ladies of Moscow and St. Petersburg, look at their teeth, learn from them how to keep them clean. They don’t have a dentist. They do not remove the shine from their teeth every day with either brushes or powders. Stand with whichever one you want, mouth to mouth; breathing none of them will infect your lungs. And yours, yours, may be the beginning of an illness in them.”[159] However, like everything fashionable, the brush quickly caught on, and already in Onegin’s office the reader sees “thirty kinds of brushes / For both nails and teeth.” Catherine, according to the old tradition, was still rinsing her mouth. Her Kalmyk girl Alekseeva was extremely slow: she forgot to heat the water or brought melted ice. The Empress just chuckled: “Tell me, Marya Stepanovna, or have you doomed yourself to live forever in the palace? Once you get married, you’ll lose the habit of your carelessness, because I’m not your husband. Really, think about yourself.”[160] However, all the “room women” who served the empress chose to remain old maids and not leave their mistress. The second chamberlain-jungfer, the Greek Anna Aleksandrovna Palakuchi (or Polekuchi), put a fleur-de-grass tattoo on her head or put on a cap. The Empress did not like to change servants; the entire nearby staff worked “from room to room” for many years. The chamberlains and valets grew old along with the mistress, and although by the end of the reign these were all already very elderly people who performed their duties not as quickly as in their best years (Palakuchi, for example, became deaf), Catherine preferred to keep them with her, not taking younger ones. The devotion of these servants redeemed both their dim eyes and their shaking hands. The commander of the chamber-jungfers was Marya Savvishna Perekusikhina, a remarkable personality in her own way. A poor Ryazan noblewoman, born in 1739, she came to St. Petersburg alone and, without patronage, managed to attract the attention of the empress. Catherine accepted her into the service. Soon Perekusikhina became one of her closest friends. In literature, Perekusikhin is often called a chamberlain Frau, which is incorrect, since she never married, and the prefix “Frau” means a married woman from the Empress’s servants. Until the end of her life, Marya Savvishna remained a Jungfer, that is, a girl. Catherine even gave her a ring with an enamel portrait of herself in a man’s suit and put a note in it: “Here is a groom who will never cheat on you.” A lot of bad things were said about Perekusikhina, since she was more privy to the personal affairs of the Empress than others. But Marya Savvishna behaved with great dignity. On the day of Catherine’s death, she showed herself not to be a courtier, rushing from the old sovereign to the new, but a true friend of the dying woman. “The strength of spirit of this respectable woman repeatedly attracted the attention of everyone in the bedroom,” Count F.V. Rostopchin wrote about her. “Busy only with the empress, she served her as if every minute she was expecting her to awaken, she herself constantly brought handkerchiefs with which the doctors wiped the matter flowing from her mouth, straightened her hand, then her head, then her legs.” After the death of Mrs. Perekusikhina, she quietly lived out her century in her St. Petersburg house, and when she happened to talk about the times of Catherine, she never touched on the personal secrets of the mistress. The empress’s toilet lasted no more than ten to fifteen minutes, during which she talked with someone who came. Being present at a “hair-brushing” was considered a special favor, just like an invitation to look at the monarch’s toilet at Versailles[161]. In the 70s, Grand Duke Pavel Petrovich visited his mother at this time. At the end of the reign, the Grand Dukes Alexander and Constantine came to my grandmother at noon, sometimes with their wives. Having joked and laughed with them, Ekaterina returned to the bedroom, where Perekusikhina and two other chamberlains – Avdotya Petrovna Ivanova and Anna Konstantinovna Skorokhodova – were helping their mistress change clothes for dinner. In the 70s, the Empress preferred strict silk dresses in the “polonaise” style with a short train and gold brocade bodice. With age, she began to choose comfortable, spacious outfits that hid her fullness. On weekdays, Catherine wore a lilac or light green (“wild”, as they said then) silk “Moldavian” over a thin white grodetour dress without orders. During festive appearances, it was replaced by a brocade or silk “Russian” dress with three order stars: St. Andrew’s, St. George’s and Vladimir. On special occasions, a small crown was placed on the empress.
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