CHAPTER XI
THE CZARINA AND HER MOTHER-IN-LAW
I have heard that many different tales have been circulated concerning the relations of my mistress with the Dowager Empress. It is useless to pretend that they were pleasant, but, on the other hand, neither of the two ladies gave vent to open manifestations of hostility, whatever they may have thought in the interior of their hearts. During the first months following the marriage of the Czar things went smoothly, because it was impossible to show more deference to any one than Alexandra Feodorovna displayed in regard to her mother-in-law. But the latter was still too young to care to be suddenly called upon to play second fiddle, and she missed the power which she had exercised over Alexander III., who used to consult her in regard to everything he did. She had had enormous influence over him, and, if the truth be told, over the whole course of affairs in Russia, but she had exercised it with such tact, and so secretly, that it had never been suspected; on the contrary, the Empress had been described as a frivolous woman who cared only for dress, dances and parties. In regard to the Consort of Nicholas II. things were very different. She arrived in Russia with the reputation of being a clever woman, with strong opinions, and of course found the public prepared either to accept them or else to start up opposition against her. German princesses were not liked, and it had been hoped that the heir to the throne would avoid choosing a wife in a German court. The Dowager Empress was Danish by birth, a fact that had contributed most certainly to the great popularity she had immediately acquired. There was a powerful party behind her, quite ready to back her up against her daughter-in-law, and, unfortunately, the latter was apprised of it, which had the effect of setting her against any advice she received from quarters which she suspected of intriguing against her. As I have said before, if the Emperor and his young bride had been able from the beginning to set up an establishment of their own, perhaps things would not have fared so badly, and I have often wondered why this was not done. With the immense Winter Palace standing empty, or almost so, it would not have been difficult to arrange some apartments for the newly married pair, until those they were to occupy definitely had been got ready. There were the rooms which had been occupied by the Empress Marie Alexandrovna, which, with small expense, might have been made habitable in a few days. They at least would have made a fitting establishment for a Sovereign, whilst the two small closets (for they can hardly be called anything else) which were assigned to Nicholas II. and his wife in the ground floor of the Anitschkoff Palace, were so inappropriate, so ugly and so uncomfortable that it is no wonder the latter felt depressed the whole time she was compelled to occupy them. Then, as I have said, the servants gossiped, and repeated to the Dowager Empress everything that her daughter-in-law was doing, a fact of which the latter became aware through remarks made to her by the elder lady, and the result was most disastrous. The arrival of the children, whose advent obliged Alexandra Feodorovna to set up a nursery, which she tried to model after those she had seen in England, did not improve conditions that already had become strained, because, as one daughter after another appeared, Marie Feodorovna grew to think that her daughter-in-law would never give an heir to the throne and to look up towards her second son Michael as the future Emperor. This was gall and wormwood to my mistress, who often lamented the fact, and, when she had taken me into her confidence, complained of the want of consideration with which her mother-in-law made her feel that she was a nobody and had not fulfilled the duty which was expected of her, that of providing future Emperors for Russia. Other reasons also contrived to add to this state of latent irritation which had established itself in the bosom of the Imperial family. There was the question of the crown jewels; of the order in which the names of the two Empresses were to be introduced into the church liturgy; and many others, small and great. The Dowager was far too tactful to complain about the domestic relations of her son, but she contrived to let people guess her sentiments on the subject, and took to spending more and more of her time in Denmark, which after all was perhaps the best thing she could have done.
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Grand Duke Michael
The Japanese war, however, brought her back to Russia, and it was during its course that there happened the one great event in the life of Alexandra Feodorovna—the birth of her only son.
Great were the rejoicings when this small boy made his appearance in a world which was not to prove too kind to him, as we all know. His advent, however, disturbed the equanimity of several people, whilst it raised the hopes of others. For one thing, the Grand Duke Michael, the only brother of the Czar, lost all the importance with which he had been endowed in the eyes of the public as the eventual heir to the Russian throne. It also took away some of that of his mother, who was supposed to exercise considerable control over him, and of course the feelings of the latter on the subject were very much mixed, because though on the one hand she could not but rejoice at seeing the succession secured in the direct line, yet, on the other hand, she had accustomed herself, as had many others, to the idea that her eldest son would never become father to a boy, and it required a certain time before she could get accustomed to the changes which the birth of the little Alexis had brought about.
Furthermore, the young Empress, feeling at last secure of her own position, began to assert herself far more than she had ever done before, and she tried to win for herself partisans. Unfortunately she looked for them among people who turned out afterwards to be her worst foes, and the liberty which she imagined she had acquired to live her own life without any regard to the trammels of etiquette or other consideration, transformed the dislike she had hitherto inspired into something very much akin to hatred.
Her boy proved a delicate child, and when the fact became known it awakened the hopes of the party antagonistic to Alexandra and raised those of the people attached to the fortunes of the Grand Duke Michael. His sister-in-law, when she found this out (and there were but too many people eager to inform her of it), grew in her turn to dislike the Grand Duke, and to think how she could get rid of him. According to the family statute of the Romanoffs, he would have been Regent of the Empire in case the Czar had died before his heir had reached his majority, and the Empress, in that case, would have been more or less subjected to him and to any commands he would have deemed it necessary to issue to her. Most likely the first thing he would have done would have been to deprive her of the custody of her son and to surround the latter with men of his own choice. The very thought of such a contingency made Alexandra Feodorovna wild, so when the Grand Duke contracted the morganatic marriage which brought upon him the wrath of his brother she seized upon the occasion to try to get rid once and forever of a personage whom she considered her worst enemy.
If the truth be told, poor Michael had never been her enemy, however much he may have disapproved of some of her actions. The only thing he asked was to be left alone with the wife whom he had chosen and married against the opposition of the whole world and of his entire family, beginning with his mother. She was a lady by birth, the wife of one of his brother officers in a Cuirassier regiment quartered at Gatchina. The Grand Duke had become attracted by her principally on account of her sympathetic appearance and the patience with which she had listened to the tale of his affection for one of his sister Olga’s maids of honour with whom he had been passionately in love and whom he had wished to marry. The romance was quickly nipped in the bud by the interference of the Dowager Empress and the young lady packed away abroad with strict injunctions not to return to Russia until further notice. The Grand Duke had been very unhappy, but had submitted, and poured the story of his wrongs into the ears of Madame Wulfert. The latter was a charming woman, but she had had a first husband, from whom she had been divorced before marrying her present one. This alone would have made her undesirable as a wife for the only brother of the Czar, and when her union with Captain Wulfert was also dissolved, thanks to the relations which had established themselves between her and the young Grand Duke, this undesirableness was still further accentuated. But she had given birth to a son, and was moreover a person of considerable attraction and of unusual cleverness. Michael found out that he could not live without her, and married her in Vienna, without asking any one’s permission to do so, thereby bringing upon his head the wrath of all his relatives.
The Emperor, however, would have felt inclined to let the whole matter pass, or at least to make as if he ignored it. But neither his mother nor his wife would hear of it. The former wished some kind of punishment to be inflicted on her rebellious son, and the latter decided that this punishment should be a most rigorous one. She prevailed upon the weak-minded Czar to put his brother under restraint and to make him what is called in England a ward in chancery, assuming himself his guardianship and depriving him of the management of the large fortune he had inherited from the Czar Alexander III. This made him of course ineligible as a Regent should the Emperor die, and that was what the Czarina was aiming at. Of course she was wrong, and respectful as I was towards her, I could not help one evening, when she had broached the subject of her own accord, telling her that I thought she had made a great mistake in taking such a decided part in the chastisement of her brother-in-law, and that it would have been more politic on her part to keep outside the matter and to allow it to be settled between the Czar and the Dowager Empress, who, after all, were the only persons concerned in it. My mistress listened in silence to my words, then suddenly exclaimed with unusual violence: “I had to do it; I had to do it; he wanted to part me from my son; he had to be put out of the way!” There was nothing to reply to this outburst, but I could not help regretting that the Empress had allowed herself to be influenced by false reports, and that her common sense had not prevailed and stopped her from compromising herself so openly in this matter. My forebodings, alas, turned out to have been true ones, because the first person who was furious with the Czarina for the part she had played in this whole story was the Empress Dowager, who had not wished things to go so far, and who guessed at once the real reasons which had actuated her daughter-in-law. The breach between the two ladies was in consequence considerably widened, and as my mistress grew more and more addicted to those superstitious practices which proved her bane, Marie Feodorovna found real grounds for criticising her, so that it became at last a recognised fact that the worst adversary of the Empress was her own mother-in-law.
I am sure that the latter would have felt sorry had she known to what extent the strained relations which existed between her and her son’s wife were talked of in public. She possessed far more sense of dignity than Alexandra Feodorovna, and had moreover been reared in old Imperial traditions unknown to her daughter-in-law. But she did not like her, and on the other hand, this sense of dignity to which I have just alluded suffered in seeing the domestic life of her child, a child who was also her Sovereign, turned into ridicule by everybody, and causing him to be despised even more than disliked. Finding that the war did not allow her to go to her beloved Denmark, she finally retired to Kieff, where the Revolution found her, and whence she went to Livadia in the Crimea, where she still is to-day. When I think over these things, it seems to me that all these frictions, which turned out ultimately to have been far more important than they appeared at first, might have been avoided, at least in part, if the young Empress had restrained herself in the expression of her feelings. But she was too frank, too honest, too true, to be able to play a comedy, and diplomacy was an art utterly unknown to her. She had not been trained in dissimulation, and she despised this atmosphere of the Court where a curb on one’s thoughts and words was indispensable. In certain respects she was a child, with all a child’s impulsiveness and beautiful indifference to the judgments and appreciations of the world, and this innocence of her mind and heart made her no match against the intrigues that surrounded her. She had no one to love her except her children, and a husband who was not strong enough to protect her against attack, and whom in the bottom of her heart she must have secretly despised, as indeed he deserved to be, because, whilst an amiable and kind man, he was not suited for a Sovereign, and could no more control his own conduct than he could the destiny of the nation over which fate had set him to rule. He had absolutely no initiative and no strength of character. No efforts of his parents or of his tutors in his young days had been able to change his natural indolence and readiness to accept and to endorse as his own the ideas and opinions of every one he talked to, even if they differed diametrically from those he had himself expressed previously.