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Catherine’s real complaint against Natalia was not financial, but that after two and a half years of marriage, her daughter-in-law showed no signs of producing an heir. These complaints were forgotten, however, when, in the fall of 1775, the grand duchess believed herself to be pregnant. “Her friends are, with reason, very anxious that she should prove so,” reported the British ambassador. A month later, it was officially announced that Natalia was pregnant; a baby was expected in the spring. By March 1776, Natalia’s pregnancy was proceeding so smoothly that the empress ordered wet nurses for the coming infant. Frederick II’s brother, Prince Henry of Prussia, was on his way from Berlin to be present at the important dynastic event.

At four on Sunday morning, April 10, Paul awakened his mother to tell her that his wife had been in labor since midnight. Catherine rose, put on a robe, and hurried to the bedside, and, although serious contractions had not yet begun, she stayed with the couple until ten in the morning. She left to be dressed and returned at noon, when the contractions became powerful and Natalia was in such pain that birth seemed imminent. But the afternoon and evening passed without result, and pain alternated with exhausted sleep. Monday was the same. On Tuesday, the midwife and doctors announced that there was no possibility of saving the child; all agreed that the baby was probably dead. On Wednesday, the thirteenth, they also despaired of saving the mother, and Natalia was given last rites. Toward six in the evening on Friday, April 15, after five days of agony, Natalia died.

Catherine and Paul had both remained with her through the five days. “Never in my life have I found myself in a more difficult, more hideous, more painful position,” the empress told Grimm. “For three days, I neither ate nor drank. There were moments when her suffering made me feel that my own body was being torn apart. Then I went stony. I, who am tearful by nature, saw her die, and never shed a tear. I said to myself, ‘If you cry, others will sob. If you sob, others will faint.’ ” Catherine’s anguish was magnified by the knowledge that her dead grandchild had been a “perfectly formed boy.” The autopsy revealed that the baby had been too large to pass through the birth canal; the cause was an inoperable malformation of the bone, which the empress was told would have prevented Natalia from ever giving birth to a living child. After the young woman’s body was opened after her death, Catherine reported that “it was found that there was only a space of four fingers’ breadth; the child’s shoulders were eight fingers wide.”

Despite fatigue, Catherine maintained her presence of mind. She had to; Paul, in a frenzy of grief, was refusing to allow his wife to be removed, and insisting on remaining beside her body. He did not attend the burial at Alexander Nevsky Monastery. His mother was accompanied by Potemkin and Gregory Orlov.

Beyond Natalia’s death and Paul’s uncontrolled grief, Catherine now faced the fact that three years of marriage and a pregnancy had produced no heir. Further, the grand duke’s emotional state was such that no one could predict when he would be willing and able to fulfill his dynastic duty. At one moment rigid with grief, the next sobbing and screaming, throwing himself around the room, smashing furniture, threatening to kill himself by jumping out a window, he refused ever to think of marrying again.

To subdue this emotional storm, Catherine chose a cruel remedy. She broke into Natalia’s desk. There, as she expected, she found the love letters exchanged by the dead woman and Andrei Razumovsky. Furious at seeing her son weep over a wife who had betrayed him with his best friend, Catherine decided to use the letters to wrench him back to reality. She thrust the pages under Paul’s eyes. He read the proof that the two people he had loved most had deceived him; he did not even know whether the dead child had been his. He groaned, wept—and then erupted with rage. He demanded that Razumovsky be sent to Siberia, but the empress, loyal to Andrei’s father, refused and simply ordered Andrei to leave the capital immediately. Exhausted, almost unable to function, Paul then agreed to all of his mother’s decisions. He was ready to marry again immediately, long before the year of official mourning had passed. To Grimm, Catherine wrote, “I have wasted no time. At once, I put the irons in the fire to make good the loss, and by so doing I have succeeded in dissipating the deep sorrow that overwhelmed us. The dead being dead, we must think of the living.”