CHAPTER X
THE CZARINA AND ST. PETERSBURG SOCIETY
At the time of her marriage St. Petersburg society was well disposed toward my unfortunate mistress, and it would have been easy for her to have made herself popular. Unfortunately she had, as I have said, a sarcastic tongue, and made no secret of her likes and dislikes; nor did she hesitate to ridicule certain customs to which old and important dowagers clung with persistency. She always feared to be thought too familiar, owing to the fact that the Imperial family, from the very first day of her arrival in Russia, had drilled into her ears the caution that St. Petersburg was not Darmstadt, and that the free and easy manners of a little German town would be out of place at the Court of the mighty Czar of All the Russias. She had therefore fallen into the other extreme, and disciplined herself to be as stiff as possible. The Empress Marie had been in the habit of receiving in her own private boudoir the ladies who craved an audience from her, and of asking them to sit beside her. Her daughter-in-law made it a point to give her audience standing, and to converse for a few minutes without ever offering a chair to the old women who had applied for the honour of an introduction to her. She coldly extended to them her hand to kiss, which further incensed them, and her natural shyness, added to this stiff reception, of course made her many enemies. She began to be criticized, and that in no friendly spirit. Unfortunately she became aware of this, and it set her from the very first against the people she ought to have tried to make her friends. Then gossip, and that mostly ill natured, too, did its work, and all kinds of anecdotes were put into circulation concerning the want of kindness of the young Empress. She was accused of being sarcastic and of making fun of old people whom age and past service ought to have preserved from the ridicule she was supposed to shower upon them. Then, again, the Czarina had the imprudence to express in public her disgust at what she called the loose manners of St. Petersburg society. She tried to become acquainted with all the gossip going about town, and declared that she was going to reform the morals of her empire, proceeding by striking off the list of invitations for a Court ball the names of all the women supposed rightly or wrongly to have had a flirtation of some kind. The result was that hardly any ladies appeared at this particular ball, with the exception of mothers with girls to bring out, and the whole of St. Petersburg rose up in arms against its Empress. It was decided to boycott her, which was done, and the Empress Mother was asked to interfere and to explain to her daughter-in-law that it was not her business to brand with any kind of stigma the names of ladies in regard to whom no open scandal had ever taken place. The incident assumed such proportions that the Czar was asked to interfere, and he decided that in future the list of invitations for Court festivities was to be submitted to his mother and not to his wife, who was still too great a stranger in Russia to know who ought or ought not to be invited to the Winter Palace.
As may be imagined, the little incident I have just narrated did not tend to improve the relations between the young Czarina and the Dowager, and the former’s popularity suffered from it to a considerable extent. On the New Year following upon this memorable tempest in a tea-cup, St. Petersburg ladies made up their minds not to put in an appearance at the great reception which followed upon divine service in the Winter Palace, a reception during which Court society offered its New Year’s wishes to the sovereigns. So about four of them, who by virtue of the official position of their husbands could not absent themselves, were the only ones who attended the function. This absence, en masse, could not but be noticed, and of course the Czarina was offended. But she was powerless to retort otherwise than passively, which she did by avoiding in the future showing herself in public, also by discontinuing her audiences and even the ball which had been considered as an indispensable feature of every winter season in the Russian capital. This manner of manifesting her displeasure only added to the bitterness of the feelings which she had inspired, as was to be expected, and soon fashionable ladies deserted St. Petersburg for the Riviera or Paris, where they felt happier and more at their ease than in their own country. One after another the big houses, which used to rival the Court itself by the splendour of their entertainments, closed their doors, and the “Palmyra of the North,” as the capital of the Czars used to be called, became one of the dullest cities in the whole world.
There were people who attempted to remonstrate with my mistress for this retirement in which she persisted in living. She was told that it would be relatively easy for her to regain some of her lost popularity if she would only allow people to eat, drink, and be merry in her presence. Alexander III., too, had hated society, and preferred his beloved Gatschina to all his other residences, but he had fulfilled the social duties he was expected to fulfill, and during his reign there had not existed in the whole of Europe a more brilliant Court than that of Russia. His daughter-in-law was advised to follow his example in this respect. But she would not do so.
I remember that one day whilst we were discussing the question of what kind of new clothes she would want for the coming winter, I remarked that she ought to order more evening dresses than she had done. The Empress interrupted me with the remark that she did not mean to have any more, because there would be no necessity for her to have them. I then observed that it would be a great disappointment to the many young girls about to make their appearance in society for the first time if no Court balls were given. Alexandra Feodorovna got quite angry, and, getting up with impatience, exclaimed, “I cannot understand why it is expected of me to amuse all the silly children their parents are bringing out.”
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Grounds of the Imperial Palace at Tzarskoié Sélo
Happily for her no one was present when she gave way to this fit of temper, but one may imagine how it would have been commented upon by any of her numerous enemies had they chanced to overhear it. This state of antagonism (for it can hardly be called by any other name) which existed between Alexandra Feodorovna and the smart set of her capital was not extended to other places. In the Crimea she liked to have people about her, as I have already related, and she even gave dances for her daughters. But though the Grand Duchess Olga had attained her eighteenth year during the winter which preceded the outbreak of the great war, her mother did not attempt to invite any one to the Palace of Czarskoi Selo to amuse her. The Empress Dowager had to arrange some entertainments in her own Anitschkoff Palace for her granddaughter’s benefit, but each time they were invited to attend them there was an explosion of grief on the part of their mother which completely spoilt their pleasure. The Czarina had a morbid fear of the sharp tongues of the ladies of the capital, and she was always expecting that her daughters would be subjected to the same kind of criticism which had been applied so liberally to her own self. This she wished to guard them against. The idea was a mistaken one, because everybody admired and liked the graceful girls, who had always an amiable word for those they met, and who seemed so happy and so delighted whenever they had an opportunity of enjoying themselves like all other girls of their age.
The only person who at one time was in possession of the confidence of the Czarina to a limited degree, the Grand Duchess Anastasia, wife of the Grand Duke Nicholas, tried, without success, to get her to look upon people with more indulgence, and not in such a morbid way. My mistress would not hear reason, and at last declared that it was useless to be an Empress of Russia if one could not do what one liked, and that all she craved was the privilege to be left alone and allowed to enjoy, unrestrained, her taste for solitude.
In that respect the Empress was certainly not quite normal, and at times she most undoubtedly suffered from what is called the mania of persecution. People abroad have attributed this abnormal condition of hers to the dread of revolution, the spectre of which was supposed to haunt her constantly. This, however, was not at all the case, because long before any one had an idea that revolution might break out, my mistress was already affected by that strange fear of seeing strangers approach her. The fact is that she had become morbid, thanks to the latent dislike which she knew but too well was felt in regard to her, and which worried her to the extent that she felt disgusted with the world in general and had come to the conclusion that it was not worth while to try to conciliate it, but that the best thing to do was to avoid seeing too much of it.
People have spoken at length of her tastes for occultism and spiritism, and said that she looked for consolation for imaginary woes to the practices of turning tables and other rubbish of the same kind. Unfortunately this was true to a certain extent, because it is a sad fact that the Empress liked to sit at tables for hours in the hope that they would begin turning, and she firmly believed that people could come back from the other world and manifest themselves to their friends. But what is not so generally known is that it was the Grand Duke Nicholas, the future generalissimo of the Russian armies, who first set her to do so. He it was who brought to the Palace of Czarskoi Selo a man called Philippe, who professed to be a powerful medium, and who certainly inspired the Czarina with great confidence. For a year or two he remained in favour, then was dismissed quite suddenly because he had been found out by accident, but so completely that even Alexandra Feodorovna could not defend him.
Some people have said that it was not without malicious intention that the Grand Duke Nicholas introduced this dangerous person to Czarskoi Selo. It has been reported that he wanted to bring about a scandal to the effect that the Empress should be declared, if not quite insane, at least afflicted with melancholia, and put under restraint. She was already at that time suspected of German leanings and sympathies, and supposed to influence her husband in favour of Germany and a German alliance. The Grand Duke Nicholas was a strong partisan of a close union with France, and of course he considered that my poor mistress was an obstacle to his views, so he would have been delighted had any circumstance arisen which would have put her aside. Certainly he was the means through which the Empress acquired her strange tastes for all things connected with occultism, and he was also the first person to draw the attention of the public and of the Imperial family to this peculiarity, and to insist on the dangers which it presented. The fact was that the Czarina was the only obstacle which the Grand Dukes and their party encountered in the realisation of their plans to take under their protection and to keep in their power the weak-minded Nicholas II., who, it was known but too well, always adopted the opinion of the last person who spoke with him, and was incapable of making any decision of his own accord. The Empress, thanks to the fact that she was always with him, had the best chance to make herself heard and listened to, and consequently she represented a formidable danger to the ambitions of those haughty Romanoffs who aspired, if not to dethrone, at least to keep in their own hands this feeble nephew, so devoid of initiative.
During the last two or three years which preceded the war, these different intrigues had assumed quite a dangerous character, and when the Rasputin incident occurred, they only grew in intensity. The Empress became the one great enemy, to the destruction of whom many applied themselves with the more energy that she began to do what she had carefully avoided before—to interest herself in politics, and to study them carefully, in view to being able to advise her husband amidst the growing difficulties of the international political position in general. The Grand Duke Nicholas, who headed the faction having for aim the removal of Alexandra Feodorovna, spared no means to destroy her influence, and to ruin her reputation as a Sovereign and as a woman. He partly succeeded, as we have seen, but at the same time he contributed to the fall of his own dynasty, and to the ruin of his country. It is a sad but certain fact that the Russian Imperial family never understood the meaning of the word “solidarity,” and perhaps it is thanks to this defect of theirs that the head of the House of Romanoff has been sent into exile and his race deprived of the throne which Peter the Great and Catherine II. had so gloriously occupied.