Part 4
From Vienna, the Russian Sovereigns went on to Copenhagen to pay to the aged King and Queen of Denmark their respects, but there also things did not go smoothly. The Russian Imperial Family had always been popular in Denmark, which the late Czar Alexander III. liked extremely, and where he used to spend happy weeks every summer. One had hoped that this tradition would continue, but after having seen Alexandra Feodorowna for three days Queen Louise had remarked that it would be just as well if she did not visit too often.
But what everybody in Russia looked forward to was the visits which Nicholas II. and his wife were about to pay to Balmoral and to Paris. In the first of these places they were made the objects of a warm and entirely homelike reception on the part of Queen Victoria. The latter had always been interested in the children of her favorite daughter, the Princess Alice, and had immensely rejoiced to see her youngest grandchild ascend the Throne of Russia. The Queen, however, was beginning to feel some misgivings as to the latter’s fitness for the high position that she had been thrust into. She was perhaps the best informed person in Europe as to all that went on in Foreign Courts, and she had heard, not without serious apprehensions, of the growing unpopularity of Alexandra Feodorowna. She took the first opportunity which presented itself to talk seriously to her granddaughter and to try and persuade her that she ought to make some effort to win the respect and the affection of her subjects. To Victoria’s surprise, the old lady never having been thwarted or contradicted, the Czarina replied that she did not know in the least what she was talking about, and that what Russians required was not amiable words but a sound administration of the whip. Under these circumstances the conversation very quickly came to an end, though the Queen, astounded as she was at Alexandra’s impertinence, tried, nevertheless, to renew it with the Czar. The latter simply replied that his grandmother must have been misinformed, because everybody loved the Empress. After that Victoria gave up the subject, and she would probably never have mentioned it to any one had it not subsequently reached her ears that the Empress boasted among her friends about the way in which she had snubbed her grandmother. This was rather more than the equanimity of the Queen could stand, and in her turn she related her unsuccessful attempts to make the young Czarina listen to reason, not making any secret of the fact that the future of the latter filled her with the greatest apprehensions.
In Paris, the Empress found herself more at her ease. Flattery was poured down upon her in buckets. All the newspapers praised her looks, her jewels, her general demeanor, and it was only here and there that a dissenting voice was raised, as in the person of a dressmaker who remarked on the want of taste which had presided at the confection of the dresses with which Alexandra Feodorowna tried to astonish the Parisian natives. On the whole the visit was a success, and it inspired with new zeal all the promoters of the Franco-Russian alliance, among whom the Empress was most certainly not to be reckoned.
Very soon after this triumphal journey, a second child was born to Nicholas II. and his wife; another girl, to the intense disappointment of everybody. I am informed that the first words of Alexandra Feodorowna upon being told of the sex of the infant were:
“What will the nation say, what will it say?”
As a fact the nation said nothing; it had already begun to lose interest in the family affairs of its rulers.
As time went on this indifference to the joys and the woes of the Reigning House grew and grew, until at last it became a recognized fact in the whole of Russia that, as far as Nicholas II. was concerned, whatever happened to him or to his relatives was an object which presented no interest whatever to the millions of Russian men and women, who all of them were looking forward for a change in the destinies and the Government of their country. When he had ascended the Throne, any amount of expectations had been connected with him and with his name. These were very quickly dashed to the ground by his first public speech--the one which he made in reply to the congratulations of the zemstvos, or Russian local assemblies, on his accession and marriage, when he told the representatives of these institutions that they must not indulge “in senseless dreams” or hope that he would ever sacrifice the least little bit of his Imperial prerogatives or autocratic leanings. The Revolutionary committees, which had begun at that time and from the very day of the death of Alexander III. to renew their political activity, addressed to him a letter which, read to-day in the light of the events which have happened during the last twelvemonth, seems almost prophetic. They warned him that the struggle begun by him would only come to an end with his downfall, and the whole tone of this remarkable epistle, which I have reproduced in my volume, _Behind the Veil of the Russian Court_, reminds one at present that the prophesied blow has fallen, of the writing on the wall which appeared during the banquet of the Persian King, warning him of his approaching ruin.
Neither the Czar nor his Consort thought about these things. As time went on, the attention of the latter became more and more concentrated on the one fixed idea of having a son. She imagined that the secret of her unpopularity, which she had at last discovered, lay in the fact that she had not been able to give an Heir to the Russian Throne. Four times in succession daughters were born to her, each one received with increased disappointment, as the years went on, bringing into prominence the youngest brother of Nicholas II., the Grand-Duke Michael, whom the Empress began hating with all her heart and soul. She imagined that wherever she went she was greeted with reproaches for having failed to fulfil the first duty of a Sovereign’s Consort, that of assuring his succession in the direct line. The hysterical part of her temperament rose to the surface more and more with each day that passed. She locked herself up in her private apartments, refusing to see the members of her family and denying herself to all visitors, until at last it began to be whispered in Court circles that Alexandra Feodorowna’s mind was getting unhinged and that she was suffering from religious mania, mixed up with the dread of persecution from her relatives. She used to sob for hours at a stretch, when no one could comfort her, and during those attacks of despair one cry continually escaped her lips, and was repeated until she could utter it no longer, out of sheer excitement and fatigue:
“Why, _why_ will God not grant me a son?”
VI
THE EMPRESS’S OPINIONS ABOUT RUSSIA
One of the points about which there has been the most discussion in Russia is as to whether the Empress Alexandra had ever cared for the country which had become her own. Her friends have repeatedly asserted that she had become an ardent Russian patriot, and that her great, particular misfortune was that every action, word, or thought of hers had been misunderstood and this willingly.
As for her enemies, they declared, from the very first days which followed upon her unlucky marriage, that she had arrived in Russia imbued with the feelings of the deepest contempt for the country and its people, and that all her efforts had been applied toward making out of the Empire over which she reigned a vassal of her own native land.
It seems to me, who have had the opportunity to approach her personally, as well as that of hearing about her from persons who nourished no animosity against her, that neither the one nor the other of these two opinions was absolutely correct, though both were right, each in its way. When one attempts to judge the personality and the character of Alexandra Feodorowna, one must first of all take into account the fact that she belonged to that class of individuals who, while being fools, nevertheless think themselves clever. To this must be added a highly strung, hysterical temperament and the fact which was unknown in Russia at the time of her marriage, that madness was a family disease in the House of Hesse, to which she belonged by birth. The circumstances attending her rearing and education also had a good deal to do with the strangeness of her conduct after she had reached the years of discretion. She had been a mere baby, five or six years old, when she had lost her mother, the charming, clever, and accomplished Princess Alice of Great Britain, and she had been brought up partly at Windsor by Queen Victoria and partly at Darmstadt, where, however, she had not found any of the good examples its Court might have afforded her had her mother remained alive. She was the youngest member of her family, and as such treated with negligence and made to give way to her elder sisters, who were neither kind nor affectionate in regard to her--a fact which must have helped her a good deal to develop the haughty, disagreeable temper which was later on to play her so many bad tricks in life. On the other hand, the person who had charge of her education, as well as of that of the other Princesses, had conceived a great and most ill-advised affection for her; ill-advised in so far that she used to repeat to her that she was handsomer and cleverer than her sisters, and that she ought not to mind any slights which the latter might try to put upon her, because she was sure to make a better marriage than they.
When she was about twelve years old there occurred in the Grand-Ducal Palace of Darmstadt the tragedy or romance, call it as one likes, of the Grand Duke’s morganatic union with a lovely Russian, Madame Kolémine, which came to such a sad end, owing to the interference of Queen Victoria and to the stupidity of the Grand Duke himself, who, in any case, ought first of all to have made careful inquiries as to the past life and conduct of his intended bride, and then--once he had plighted his troth to her--to have held the promises which he had made to her. He allowed her to be sent away from his Court and country in disgrace; the lady herself would have been but too willing to come to honorable terms with a man for whom she could no longer feel any esteem or affection, because in the whole long story of his intercourse with her Grand-Duke Louis never showed himself otherwise than the true German he really was. Of course, the object of his transient affections was represented to his children as being merely an intriguing, base woman who had tried to make a great marriage and to supplant their mother. Whether the elder Darmstadt Princesses believed this calumny to have been the truth remains a matter of doubt. Judging impartially, this would seem to be hardly likely if one takes into consideration the fact that their ages hovered between eighteen and twenty-two, and that consequently one could reasonably assume that they knew what they were about when they showered one proof of affection after another on Madame Kolémine, and when they declared to her in many letters that there was nothing they wished for more than to see her become their father’s wife.
This whole story, together with its heroine, is about one of the most perplexing affairs that ever occurred in any Royal House, and everything connected with it is to this very day shrouded in mystery. Madame Kolémine, who (this by the way) married again, after her divorce from the Grand Duke, a Russian diplomat, may or may not have been a bad woman. I hold no brief for or against her. Many people assert that in regard to certain scandals connected with the time of her early married life she was more sinned against than sinning, and that she became the victim of calumnies launched against her by unscrupulous enemies. But, true or not, the breath of suspicion had hovered around her good name to a sufficiently strong degree to have absolutely justified the objections of Queen Victoria to her becoming even the morganatic wife of the Grand Duke of Hesse.
It ought also to have influenced the latter into not admitting the fascinating Russian into the intimacy of his young daughters, which was precisely what he did. The girls could not be told every kind of gossip going about in the world, but they ought to have been shielded from the possibility of contracting friendships likely to lead them into unpleasantnesses in the future. On the other hand, considering the fact that this intimacy had once been established, one does not very well see how any of the Darmstadt Princesses could have been led to believe, after the three years or more that it had lasted, that Madame Kolémine was base and intriguing and cared only for a great marriage. Because this last accusation, leaving aside all others, was absolutely false, a fact no one was better able to know than themselves, who had repeatedly begged and implored her to accept their father’s offer and to make him, together with themselves, happy people.
I have had some of these letters in my hands, and can therefore vouch for the truth of this last assertion, and to put an end to the questions of a suspicious public that may wonder how it came that such a correspondence was ever communicated to me, I will say at once that the reason for it was that I am a blood relation of Madame Kolémine, who after her divorce had thought I might be of some help to her in her troubles, and had herself asked me to read them. The impossibility in which I found myself to be of any use to the poor woman, whom I had never seen in my life before, and of interfering in a business which did not concern me in the very least, led her to take a most bitter attitude in regard to me and to become my enemy, so that in trying to take her part to-day I am doing so out of a feeling of justice and nothing else.
I have mentioned the story in general only because it explains to a certain degree the undisguised aversion of the Empress Alexandra for everything that was Russian or that had anything to do with Russia. She had never shared her sisters’ admiration for Madame Kolémine; on the contrary, she had always nourished a pronounced antipathy for the lady, and whatever the three other Darmstadt Princesses may have felt in regard to the woman whom their father was to marry and divorce on the same day, she, at least, had made no secret of her hatred for her. One of the first remarks which she made after she had become acquainted with St. Petersburg society was:
“I shall never like it; all the women remind me of Madame Kolémine.”
This episode in the career of the Grand Duke of Hesse brought about, as might have been expected, a change in his relations with Queen Victoria, and he was no longer such a desired guest at Windsor or Balmoral as had been the case. His elder daughters married in quick succession, the second one wedding the Grand-Duke Sergius of Russia. The little Alice was left alone at home, and though she was often requested by her grandmother to join her in England, she did not care so much for these invitations as formerly. The fact was that she was gradually acquiring a considerable influence over her father’s mind, whose weakness of intellect rendered him an easy tool in his enterprising daughter’s hands. She became the virtual mistress of his house, and developed during those years, where she remained absolutely without any feminine control over her, the imperious, disagreeable temper which was to play her such sorry tricks in the future. Small as was the Hessian Court, it yet was administered with that strict respect for etiquette always in vogue in Germany, and it pleased the Princess Alix to find herself the first lady in the land in her father’s Dukedom. She preferred it to being the second in Rome.
It was during those years that she was taken on a visit to the Russian Court. This did not turn out a success, because no one in St. Petersburg was in the very least impressed by the beauty of the young girl. Russia, being celebrated for the loveliness of its women, would have required something more than she possessed to fall on its knees and worship her. Then, again, she was dressed with bad taste, her manners left much to be desired, and the rumor which began to circulate at the time of the possibility of her wedding the Heir to the Russian Throne did not appeal to public feeling. Alice thought herself slighted, and returned to her beloved Darmstadt more anti-Russian than she had ever been.
Two years went by, and the Grand Duke of Hesse died, carried off by a disease of the brain, difficult to account for if one takes into consideration the fact that he had never had any brains to lose. His son succeeded him, and, together with his sister, continued to inhabit the Darmstadt Palace, where nothing was changed except the master of the house, whom no one missed. For eighteen months Princess Alice reigned supreme, as she had done before; then one fine morning her brother announced to her that he was about to ask their cousin, the Princess Victoria Mélita of Coburg, to become his wife. A fit of hysterics followed upon this announcement. Alice could not resign herself to the necessity of playing second fiddle at her brother’s Court, where she had been the center of attraction for such a long time. The fact that her future sister-in-law was just as young and more beautiful than she did not help her to get over her mortification. She was of a terribly jealous character and temperament, and she began from that very day to hate, with a ferocious hatred which went on increasing as time passed, the innocent girl for whom this Hessian marriage was to prove the source of so much sorrow. But about this I shall speak later on.
It was at this precise moment that talk about a Russian marriage for her began again. Many people wished for it. The Berlin Court was actively intriguing in favor of it, and during the whole of that winter of 1893-94 the newspapers were busy with it. The chancelleries of the different European capitals were very much preoccupied as to whether or not it would take place.
Perhaps few people will believe me when I say that had it not been for her brother’s engagement nothing in the world would have ever decided the Princess Alice to give her consent to a union for which she did not feel the least sympathy. She was not at all dazzled by the prospect of becoming the Empress of Russia, because in her vanity and with her ideas of German grandeur she thought herself far superior to the Romanoffs, thanks to her long and unbroken line of ancestry. Her unimpeachable quarterings seemed to her to be so immeasurably above their doubtful ones that she considered it would be she who would do him an incommensurable honor by accepting as her wedded husband the Heir to the Throne of All the Russias. She would have infinitely preferred going on queening it in Darmstadt, or in any other small German town, than to have been chosen as the bride of the future Nicholas II., for whom she felt neither sympathy, affection, nor esteem.
But her brother’s prospective marriage changed considerably her position. She would no longer occupy the position of the first lady of her beloved Hesse; she would find installed in the place which had been her own for so many happy years a woman younger than herself, with an independent character, a determined mind, a woman who would most probably grow very quickly to impose herself and her ways of thinking, not only on the whole Hessian Court, but also on the Grand Duke, whose sister was condemned beforehand to be neglected and treated as a negligible quantity.
This was gall and wormwood to the passionate, selfish girl, and this feeling of hers, which she allowed her cousin the Kaiser to guess, was very cleverly exploited by the latter in view of a marriage which none desired more ardently than himself. Next to his own sister, there was no one in the whole world whom he would have more ardently wished to become Empress of Russia than his cousin Alix. He invited himself to Darmstadt for a short visit, and while there took the first opportunity to discuss the subject with her. He told her what very few people knew at the time, and what the general public was entirely ignorant of--the serious nature of the illness with which Alexander III. was attacked, an illness which gave no hope whatever of recovery. By marrying the young Grand-Duke Nicholas the Princess would find herself but for a short time in a so to say subordinate position. A few months would see her raised to one of the greatest thrones in Europe, from the height of which she would be enabled to look down with contempt and pity on the cousin who was about to take at the Darmstadt Court the place she had occupied so long she had grown to consider it as her very own.
Moreover, she would be able to win back Russia and its ruler to the cause of the German alliance, and thus accomplish one of her duties as a loyal German woman. He appealed to her worst instincts while seeming to call on her noblest ones to assert themselves, and once more he won the day.
In St. Petersburg, too, Hohenzollern influence and intrigues had worked actively, until at last the Czar, feeling perhaps that his days were numbered and perhaps also no longer strong enough to resist perfidious advice given to him by interested people, yielded the point, and when his eldest son started for Coburg to attend there the Princess Victoria Mélita’s wedding, he authorized him to ask for the hand of Alix of Hesse.
As I have related, the marriage was at once announced, and we have seen already its first results. The reason why I have once more returned to its subject was to explain some of the causes which led the Empress Alexandra to conceive such a bad opinion about Russia, and to detest so cordially the Russian people. Her early dislike for Madame Kolémine had given her a natural antipathy for everything connected with the latter country; her visits there had strengthened this feeling; her vanity had been hurt by finding that St. Petersburg’s society had paid absolutely no attention to her; and her slow, commonplace mind had been utterly unable to understand the refinement and high breeding of the Russian upper classes. Her natural coldness and ignorance had been repulsed instead of attracted by the simplicity but genuine kind-heartedness of the lower ones. She thought the nation one of savages and she made no secret whatever of that opinion, expressing her intention of correcting those “awful Russian manners,” which had seemed to her young and inexperienced eyes so very dreadful when she had first become acquainted with them.
It is most likely that if she had married a small German Prince or Potentate she would have put herself out of the way to please his subjects. But she did not think the Russians worth her while. She considered that they ought to feel themselves highly honored by the fact that she had consented to come and reign over them, and in her own mind she did not attach any more importance to the judgments they might be inclined to bestow in regard to her person than she would have done to the criticisms of the first beggar in the street. She arrived in her new country despising it, together with its people, determined to ignore the wishes it might have or the necessities it might require. She arrived there prejudiced and bigoted, and so full of contempt for the land that hailed her as its Queen that she did not admit the possibility of treating it as one inhabited by human beings, but determined to apply to it some of the methods used by the Germans in their treatment of their Colonies.