Part 5

For the opinion held by Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt in regard to Russia was simply that it ought to be nothing else but a Colony of the vast German Empire, and she felt more pride at the thought that she might reduce it to this condition than at the idea that she had been chosen out of so many other women to become the Empress of that Realm.

VII

WHAT THE IMPERIAL FAMILY THOUGHT ABOUT THE EMPRESS

It would not have been human on the part of the Imperial Family to like the young wife of Nicholas II. in those early days which followed upon her marriage. The feminine portion of it especially could have been expected, before even the wedding of Alexandra Feodorowna had been solemnized, to look upon her with eyes full of criticism and with the desire to find fault with whatever she might say or do. Here she was, a young, lovely girl, in the full bloom of her beauty, put into the place of the first lady in the Realm, at a moment’s notice, before even she had gone through that period of probation which falls as a general rule to the lot of every Consort of a Sovereign when she is but the wife of the Heir to the Throne. Had the haughty Imperial ladies, who for so many years had ruled according to their fancies St. Petersburg society, found themselves in presence of a Grand-Duchess Czarevna whom they would have been able to advise, scold, or pet, according to their fancy, they might have taken, from the height of their own unassailable positions, a more indulgent view of her unavoidable mistakes. They would have thought of her as of a young niece who owed them respect and submission, and whom it was their duty to train according to the exigencies of Russian etiquette. It must be remembered that Nicholas II. to the very day of his accession had been treated by his family like a mere boy without any importance. All of a sudden he found himself a Sovereign and, what was even worse, his wife, the little Hessian Princess, upon whom everybody had looked down with pity mixed with contempt, was the Empress of All the Russias. This was more than the Romanoffs could endure, especially when they remembered the cool, authoritative manner which the late Czar Alexander III. had always adopted in regard to them, and when they thought it might be possible his successor would imitate him in that respect at least, if not in others.

They need not have been in any apprehension as to this last point. Nicholas II., though he detested his uncles, yet stood in such awe of them that he would never have dared assert himself in their presence, far less contradict them. But the Empress had a different character, and she very quickly realized that all her relatives were furious at the fact of her being placed so far above them in rank and position. Fully conscious as she was of that rank, she determined that she would use its advantages to crush those in whom she saw but enemies, which in some cases was not quite exact, because there were then still some persons who, had she only appealed to them, would have responded to her call for sympathy and put themselves at her disposal, if only out of the motive that in rallying around her they were at the same time establishing their own influence.

Alexandra had no tact, and she never could hide her feelings in regard to the people who surrounded her. This explains the number of her enemies and the antagonism to which her mere presence anywhere gave rise. She knew very well that it would be very hard, if not impossible, for her to overcome certain prejudices existing against her. Instead, however, of trying to make for herself friends in other circles than purely aristocratic ones, she applied herself to wound those in whom she saw adversaries, and to discourage her friends by her utter disregard of the warnings that the latter sometimes thought it their duty to give to her. Her relations with the Empress Dowager had begun by being very cordial and affectionate, and it was she who had proposed to the Czar to take their abode in the Anitchkoff Palace with his mother, until their own apartments in the Winter Palace had been got ready for them. The arrangement had not been a successful one, and it is probable that Marie Feodorowna would have got on better later on with her daughter-in-law had the two ladies not lived under the same roof for about half a year. As it was they grew to know each other “not wisely, but too well,” and the result was profound contempt on one side and sullen anger on the other. Servants’ gossip did the rest; and the two incidents which I have already described, concerning the Crown Jewels and the liturgy, added the last drop of venom in a cup already full to overflowing. The Dowager began to criticize discreetly the young Empress, together with some of her intimate friends. These did not scruple to repeat what they had heard to their own near chums, and soon it became common property. The Grand Duchesses took their cue from Marie Feodorowna, and in an underhand way lamented over the failings of “dear Alexandra,” her coldness, her want of politeness, and so forth, helping her in the mean while as much as they could to accentuate the shortcomings of an attitude which very soon came to displease everybody, even the people who had been the most enthusiastic about the young Empress.

As a proof of this fact I will relate a little incident which, at the time it occurred, proved the subject of much gossip in some select circles of St. Petersburg society. During one of the first receptions held at the Winter Palace, after the marriage of Nicholas II., there made her appearance an old lady who for the sake of convenience we shall call Madame A. She wished to be presented to the new Empress, an honor to which her own position, together with that of her late husband, gave her every right, besides the fact that she was one of the few ladies left in the capital who had adhered to the old Russian custom of keeping open house for her friends, and whose _salon_ was a social authority in its way. The Empress, upon being shown the list of the people about to be presented to her, wanted to know who they were, and, seeing near her her aunt, the Grand-Duchess Marie Pawlowna, the wife of the Grand-Duke Wladimir, asked her whether Madame A. was or was not a person of importance. The Grand Duchess, who for reasons of her own disliked the latter, replied to her niece:

“Oh, she is an old frump. Give her your hand to kiss, and she will be satisfied.”

Now this was the one thing which would not have satisfied Madame A. at all, who considered herself entitled to quite special consideration. Alexandra Feodorowna, believing her aunt, executed the latter’s advice to the letter. She extended her much-bejeweled fingers to the astonished old lady, and then coolly turned her back upon her and passed on without having said one single word. The scandal was immense, so immense that the whole ballroom rang with it within a few minutes, and one of the Empress’s ladies in waiting actually went up to her and tried to enlighten her as to the extent of the enormity which she had committed, advising her at the same time to seek out the irate Madame A. and to make her some kind of apology, under the pretext that she had not heard her name when it had been mentioned to her.

Alexandra Feodorowna in her turn, and with a certain amount of reason, became furious against the Grand-Duchess Marie Pawlowna for having thus led her into a snare, and, boiling with rage, she crossed the room, went up to where Madame A. was discussing with volubility, together with some of her friends, the slight to which she had been subjected, and told her quite loudly:

“I am sorry, Madame, not to have treated you with the respect to which you are entitled, but it was the Grand-Duchess Marie Pawlowna, my aunt, who had advised me to do it.”

One may imagine the effect produced by this short sentence, which, instead of soothing the ruffled feelings of Madame A., added to her indignation. She turned round and replied quite distinctly, so that all the people standing near her heard her plainly:

“_Ce n’est pas à l’aide d’une trahison, Madame, que l’on excuse une impolitesse!_” (“It is not with the help of a treachery, Madame, that one can excuse a rudeness”).

And making a deep courtesy to the discomfited Sovereign, Madame A. proudly retired and drove away from the Palace, leaving the Empress with the consciousness that in the space of five short minutes she had contrived to make for herself two mortal enemies.

The whole of the Imperial Family took up the cause of the Grand-Duchess Marie Pawlowna. The latter’s husband, the Grand-Duke Wladimir, went to the Emperor and complained bitterly of the conduct of Alexandra Feodorowna. The other Grand Duchesses declared that, dating from that day, they would have nothing to do with her, except when the necessities of etiquette compelled them to appear at Court, but that personal relations with a person capable of such a grave piece of indiscretion were quite out of the question. The Grand-Duchess Marie swore that she had never meant to advise her niece to show herself rude to such a respectable personage as Madame A.; that her words had been a mere joke, to which she had never imagined that any importance could be attached, and that it had been a cruel thing to denounce her in such a ruthless way to the worst gossip and most malicious tongue in St. Petersburg.

Even the Dowager Empress expressed herself as shocked beyond words at her daughter-in-law’s behavior, but when she had tried to speak with the latter on the subject Alexandra Feodorowna had exclaimed that she recognized the right of no one to criticize her actions, and forthwith produced for her mother-in-law’s edification a caricature which she had drawn of the Emperor in swaddling-clothes, seated at a dinner-table in a high-backed chair, with his uncles and aunts standing around him, and threatening him with their fingers, adding that she was not going to follow the example of her spouse, and that if he chose to forget before his relatives that he was the Emperor of All the Russias, she would not do so for one single minute. After this the conversation came to an end, as was to be expected, but its consequences survived, with a vengeance into the bargain.

Of course incidents of the kind could not be productive of good relations. It did not take a long while before the general public, which, at that time, looked very much for its inspirations toward the Imperial Family, had come to the conclusion that the young Empress was a capricious, rude, and most disagreeable kind of person to whom it was preferable to give a wide berth. Once this legend had been transferred into the domain of history, every action, every word, every gesture of Alexandra Feodorowna was watched with attentive and critical eyes, always ready to make capital out of all her mistakes and to amplify all her errors into crimes. The fact of her having no son added to the resentful feelings of the nation against her, and that of her undisguised German sympathies did not contribute to make her popular. She in her turn, angry with her family, furious with St. Petersburg society, unable to seek friends among the Russian people, all of whom seemed in her inexperienced and prejudiced eyes to be more or less savage, set herself a task to show her contempt and dislike to those persons whom she had found so ready to throw stones against her on occasions when her conscience had told her that she did not deserve the insult. She retired more and more into the seclusion and privacy of her home at Tsarskoye Selo, and she announced to whoever wished to hear her that she did not see why she should spend her money in giving balls and entertaining a society that seemed to have made up its mind to insult her on every possible occasion. The words were repeated, and immediately taken up by the public in the light of another affront. One declared that for a penniless Hessian Princess to talk about “her money” was, to say the least, ridiculous, and one added that she ought to remember that it was part of the duties of a Russian Empress to entertain her subjects and to give them some pleasures in return for their fidelity.

Such was the position after Alexandra Feodorowna had been married three or four years. She might still at that time, had she attempted it in earnest, won back at least the respect if not the sympathies of the Russian nation. But to do so she would have had to bend down from the height of the Throne upon which she was seated, and to make some efforts to clear the misunderstandings which had arisen between her, her family, and her subjects. Unfortunately for her, the haughty Princess believed so firmly that she had been sinned against without having the least sin to her own credit that this “injustice,” as she called it, in the world’s judgments of her personality made her rebellious, and, not being clever enough either to forgive or to disdain it, she could find nothing else to do but to seek to revenge herself upon imaginary wrongs by making herself guilty of real ones.

VIII

SORROW AND UNEXPECTED CONSOLATION

It was not only her family and St. Petersburg society with whom the Empress could not agree. Her relations with her husband were also not of the best during the first years of her married life. Later on, when Alexandra Feodorowna had fallen into the hands of the clever gang of adventurers whose tool she was to remain until the final catastrophe which drove her from her Throne had taken place, she contrived to get hold of the feeble mind of Nicholas II., and to influence him absolutely, thanks to his love for his children, especially for his son.

During the first five years or so that followed upon his marriage the Czar, though he never quarreled with his wife, yet thought far less about her than he did about his mistress, the dancer Mathilde Krzesinska, a Pole of extreme intelligence, little beauty, but enormous attraction. Their friendship had begun when Nicholas was but a boy, or about that, rumor would have it, though I have reason for knowing

that in this rumor was mistaken, as happens so often to the old lady, that the dancer had been chosen by the Empress Marie herself as a fit friend for her eldest son. The fact was that this liaison had started almost immediately after the Grand Duke’s return from his journey round the world, which had had such a dramatic incident to enliven it in Japan, when a fanatic had attempted to take the life of the Heir to the Russian Throne, inflicting upon him a deep wound with his sword.

The Cesarewitsch had seen Mademoiselle Krzesinska on the stage of the Marinsky Theater, and had been very much impressed by her talent and grace. He had asked to be introduced to her, and had forthwith carried her off to supper at a fashionable restaurant called Cubat, where all the _jeunesse dorée_ of St. Petersburg used to meet, eat, drink, and be merry. This supper, in which had taken part several of Nicholas’s friends, officers in the same Hussar regiment where he was a captain, as well as one or two ladies of great beauty and doubtful reputation, had ended in a scandal, which for several weeks had been almost the only subject of discussion in the aristocratic _salons_ of the capital. The company had been enjoying itself so much that glasses and plates had been broken; when, at two o’clock in the morning, the owner of the restaurant had ventured to suggest that it would be high time the entertainment came to an end, he had been sent to mind his own business. This the poor man would have been but too glad to do, but police regulations were very strict at that time, and he knew that if a patrol should see light in his windows from the outside that he would be fined heavily, no matter who had elected to remain in his establishment after the curfew had sounded.

This was precisely what happened.

A police officer walked up and knocked at the door of the private room where the Heir to the Russian Throne and his companions were disporting themselves, and ordered them to get out. The Grand Duke’s aide-de-camp did not care to disclose the identity of his master, so he came out alone and tried to remonstrate with the man, asking him to give them another half-hour to finish their supper and pay for it. The officer refused and tried to force his way into the room, but was violently thrust aside. He had not the right to enforce his authority against a colonel in the army, which was the rank of the aide-de-camp, so he withdrew and telephoned to the Prefect of the town, General Wahl. The latter, who was an officious busybody, thought it a splendid occasion to assert his authority. He immediately proceeded himself to Cubat, where, in spite of the efforts made by the companions of the Grand Duke to keep him out, he rushed into the room, to find himself confronted by the Heir to the Throne. Nicholas became very angry and asked the General how he dared intrude upon his privacy. Wahl, furious in his turn, retorted that it was his duty to see that order was maintained in the capital, no matter who was troubling it, upon which, in one of the uncontrollable fits of rage to which he was sometimes subject, the Cesarewitsch seized hold of a dish full of caviar which stood on the table and threw its contents in the face of Wahl. A scene of indescribable disorder followed. At last Prince Bariatinsky, one of the generals in waiting on the Czar, who had accompanied the young Grand Duke during the latter’s journey round the world, was sent for. He succeeded in putting an end to an incident which reflected credit upon none of those who had taken part in it.

The next day Alexander III. was apprised of what had taken place. History does not say what he told his son, but it was supposed that it had not been anything in the way of praise, because there was nothing that the Emperor hated more than a drunken brawl, and it must have been very painful for him to find that his Heir had become involved in one. But when General Wahl arrived, full of complaints and indignation at the treatment to which he had been subjected, the Monarch expressed to him his entire disapproval of his conduct, saying that he had had no right to intrude upon the privacy of the Grand Duke, and that he ought not to have forgotten the immense difference of rank which existed between him and the future Emperor of Russia. Wahl did not require to be told twice the same thing, and in the future he never attempted to interfere with the pleasures of any member of the Imperial Family.

People who were present at this ill-fated supper told afterward, when relating all the incidents which had made it a memorable one, that Nicholas wished to do something worse than pour the contents of a caviar-dish on General Wahl’s head, but that Mademoiselle Krzesinska had thrown herself between them. True or not, it is certain that after this night the Grand Duke took to visiting the beautiful dancer in her home, and very soon their relations became an established fact. She bore him two sons, which gave her distinct advantages over all the other flirtations in which her Imperial lover indulged from time to time, flirtations which she was far too clever and careful to notice. What she aspired to afterward was to become a power in the land, a _Maîtresse de Roi_, such as had been seen at the French Court during the reigns of the last Bourbons. Her Polish propensity for intrigue coming to her help, she very soon contrived to make for herself an excellent position in the world as well as to earn a considerable fortune. She was a very reasonable, matter-of-fact woman; she knew very well that Nicholas had to marry, whether he liked it or not, and her only preoccupation, if we are to believe all that was related in St. Petersburg at the time, was whether he should marry a clever or a stupid woman. It is not difficult to guess the one she would have preferred had the choice been left to her discretion.

When the betrothal of the Cesarewitsch with the Princess Alix of Hesse was announced Mademoiselle Krzesinska, far from objecting to it, applied herself, on the contrary, to persuading him that he had done quite right and that he could not have chosen a better wife. She imagined that the placid German temperament of the bride-to-be would look with innocent eyes on the continuation of her intrigue with Nicholas, in which supposition she was vastly mistaken, because Alice, though she did not care for the husband she had been compelled to marry, did not mean to let him wander away from the conjugal home in search of a happiness she believed herself quite capable of alone procuring for him. She tried to separate the Grand Duke from the clever dancer who held him in her bondage, and of course she failed.

Nicholas kept up his former habits of going to see Mademoiselle Krzesinska whenever he had the time to do so; what was even worse, he continued to consult her on many matters which he never discussed with his wife. The latter became very unhappy, and it was then that even her affection for her children was not sufficient to prevent her from uttering aloud her despair at having been obliged to leave her dear Darmstadt for a country where everything and everybody conspired against her and her peace of mind, and where she could not even win the love of the husband who had been imposed upon her.

Among the few people whom she used to see more frequently than others was the Montenegrin Princess Stana, who had been married to Duke George of Leuchtenberg, with whom she had led a most unhappy, uncanny sort of existence. Stana, like all the Montenegrin daughters of King Nicholas, was a charming and attractive woman, clever into the bargain. In spite of her unhappy conjugal experiences she had grown very fond of Russia, and especially of her position as a member of the Russian Imperial Family. She was very willing to divorce the miserable husband to whom she had been united, who had insulted and outraged her without the least compunction from the very first day of their marriage; but she would have liked to find another one whose affection, and especially whose worldly situation, were such that her future would be assured on even more brilliant lines than the present. Her elder sister, Princess Militza, was the wife of the Grand-Duke Peter Nicholaievitch, whose brother was that Grand-Duke Nicholas who was later on to acquire such a reputation as Commander-in-chief of the Russian armies during the first months of the present war. Grand-Duke Nicholas was not considered as a marriageable man, being bound by ties of close friendship since a good number of years with an attractive woman, Madame Bourénine. Nevertheless, Princess Stana made up her mind to marry him, an enterprise which seemed the more hopeless that it was against the canons of the Greek Orthodox Church for two sisters to marry two brothers. As we have seen, her sister was Grand-Duke Nicholas’s sister-in-law.