5.
Although from the time of leaving Dunkerque, I had taken up my duties, which, as the reader knows, consisted more particularly in ensuring the personal safety of the Empress, I had as yet only caught a glimpse of that gracious lady. A few hours after our arrival at the château, chance made me come across her and she deigned to speak to me. I doubt whether she observed my state of flurry; and yet, that evening, without knowing it, she was the cause of a strange hallucination of my mind.
I had left the procession at the entrance to the drawing-rooms, in order to go and ascertain if our orders had been faithfully carried out in and around the imperial apartments. Gradually, as I penetrated into the maze of long silent corridors, filled with my own officers, impassive in their footmen's liveries, a crowd of confused memories rose in my brain. I remembered a certain evening, similar to the present, when the palace was all lit up for a celebration. I, at that time, still a young student, had come to see my kinsman, Dr. Conneau, physician to the Emperor Napoleon III. We went along the same corridors together, when, suddenly holding me back by the sleeve and pointing to a proud and radiant, fair-haired figure which at that moment passed through the vivid brightness of a distant gallery, he said:
"The Empress!"
Now, at the same spot, forty years after, another voice, that of one of my inspectors, came and whispered in my ear:
"The Empress!"
I started; in front of me, at the end of the gallery, a figure, also radiant and also fair, had suddenly come into view. Was it a dream, a fairy-tale? No, there was another empress, that was all; in the same frame in which, as a boy, I had first set eyes upon the Empress Eugénie, I now saw the Empress Alexandra coming towards me. I was so much taken aback that, at first, I stood rooted to the spot, seeking to recover my presence of mind. She continued her progress, proceeding to her apartments followed by her ladies-in-waiting. When she was at a few yards from the place where I stood motionless, her eyes fell upon me; then she came up to me and, holding out her white and slender hand:
"I am glad to see you, M. Paoli," she said, "for I know how highly my dear grandmother, Queen Victoria, used to think of you."
What she did not know was how often Queen Victoria had spoken of her to me. That great sovereign, in fact, cherished a special affection for the child of her idolised daughter, the Grand-duchess Alice of Hesse. The child reminded her of the happy time when the princess wrote to her from Darmstadt, on the day after the birth of the future Empress of Russia:
"She is the personification of her nickname, 'Sunny,' much like Ella, but a smaller head, and livelier, with Ernie's dimple and expression."
Then, a few days later:
"We think of calling her Alix (Alice they pronounce too dreadfully in Germany) Helena Louisa Beatrice; and, if Beatrice may, we would like her to have her for godmother."
And these letters, so pretty, so touching, continued through the years that followed. The baby had grown into a little girl, the little girl into a young girl; and her mother kept Queen Victoria informed of the least details concerning the child. She was anxious, fond and proud by turns; and she asked for advice over and over again:
"I strive to bring her up totally free from pride of her position, which is nothing save what her personal merit can make it. I feel so entirely as you do on the difference of rank and how all important it is for Princes and Princesses to know that they are nothing better or above others save through their own merit and that they have only the double duty of living for others and of being an example, good and modest."
Next come more charming details. Princess Alice, returning to her children at Darmstadt after a visit to England, writes to the Queen:
"They eat me up! They had made wreaths over the doors and had no end of things to tell me....
"We arrived at three and there was not a moment's rest till they were all in bed and I had heard the different prayers of the six, with all the different confidences they had to make."
Elsewhere, interesting particulars about the education of Princess Alix, an exclusively English education, very simple and very healthy, the programme of which included every form of physical exercise, such as bicycling, skating, tennis and riding, and allowed her, by way of pocket-money, 50 pfennigs a week between the ages of 4 and 8; 1 mark from 8 to 12; and 2 marks from 12 to 16 years.
In the twenty-nine years that had passed since the first of these letters was written, what a number of events had occurred!
Princess Alice, that admirable mother, had died from giving a kiss to her son Ernie, when he was suffering from diphtheria; the royal grandmother, in her turn, had died quite recently. Of the seven children whose gaiety brightened the domestic charm of the little court at Darmstadt, two had perished in a tragic fashion: Prince Fritz, first, killed by an accidental fall from a window, while playing with his brother; and Princess May, carried off in twenty-four hours, she, too, by diphtheria caught at the bedside of her sister "Aliky," the present Empress of Russia. As for the other "dear little ones," as Queen Victoria called them, they had all been dispersed by fate. "Ella" had become the Grand-duchess Serge of Russia; "Enric" had succeeded his father on the throne of Hesse; two of his sisters had married, one Prince Henry of Prussia, the other Prince Louis of Battenberg; and the last had become the wearer of the heaviest of all crowns. And now chance placed her here, before me.
I looked at her with, in my mind, the memory of all the letters which an august and kindly condescension had permitted me to read and of the gentle emotion with which the good and great Queen used to speak of the Princess Alice and of her daughter, the present Empress of Russia. Her features had not yet acquired, under the imperial diadem, that settled air of melancholy which the obsession of a perpetual danger was to give her later; in the brilliancy of her full-blown youth, which set a gladsome pride upon the tall, straight forehead; in the golden sheen of her queenly hair; in her grave and limpid blue eyes, through which shot gleams of sprightliness; in her smile, still marked by the dimples of her girlish days, I recognised her to whom the fond imagination of a justly-proud mother had awarded, in her cradle, the pretty nickname of "Sunny."
She stopped before me for a few moments. Before moving away, she said:
"I believe you are commissioned to 'look after' me?"
"That is so," I replied.
"I hope," she added, laughing, "that I shall not give you too much worry."
I dared not confess to her that it was not only worry, but perpetual anguish that her presence and the Tsar's were causing me.