In the summer of 1797 the Princess came to a momentous decision. The Emperor and Empress of Russia, whom she had known formerly at the French Court, having heard of her trials and of the not very enviable condition in which she was living, pressed her to come to Russia, where she would be cordially greeted. After long hesitation she decided to accept, but it was not without genuine heartburnings that she separated from her English friends, from her Charlotte most of all. She left London at the end of July, and arrived at St. Petersburg a fortnight later. Very soon afterwards she wrote Lady Atkyns an account of the journey and of her first impressions of her new surroundings.
The Emperor and Empress received her in their Peterhof palace with the utmost consideration. Appointed at once a lady-in-waiting on the Empress, she found herself in enjoyment of many privileges attached to this post. The house in which she was to live had been prepared for her specially by the Emperor’s command. Finally, she was decorated with the Order of St. Catherine, and the Empress on her fête day presented her with her portrait. Different indeed is her position from what it had been at Richmond.
“I never drive out without four horses, and even this is my own doing, for I ought not, as a lady-in-waiting, to have less than six. They tell me I shall be obliged to get myself made the uniform of the Order of St. Catherine, and that would cost me 1200 roubles, that is, 150 louis.”
But the very marked favour met with by the Princess could not but disquiet some of the courtiers at the Palace. Within a week of her arrival, one of the ladies in attendance upon the Empress, Mme. de Nelidoff, at the instigation of Prince Alexandre Kourakine, hastened to represent Mme. de Tarente’s conduct and the unusual honour that had been shown her under the most unfavourable light to her Majesty the Empress; and her jealousy thus aroused (so one of Mme. de Tarente’s friends tells the tale), she had no difficulty in settling matters with her husband, and when the Princess next entered the imperial presence, the Emperor neither spoke to her nor looked at her.
The snub was patent, but the Princess seems to have taken it nonchalantly enough. The friendly welcome accorded to her by St. Petersburg society, the kindness and affection she met with from the Golowine family, in whose house she soon installed herself, there to remain until her death, enabled her speedily to forget the intrigue of her enemies at the Court. The incident is barely alluded to in her letters to Lady Atkyns, which continue to be taken up chiefly with reminiscences of their beloved Queen.
Towards the end of 1798 the two friends are sundered by Lady Atkyns’ decision to return to France, impelled by the desire to be near those who had played so important a rôle in her life, and to meet again those friends who had co-operated in her work—perhaps also to meet and question those who might be in a position to enlighten her regarding the fate of the Dauphin. This decision she communicates to the Princess, who opposes it strongly, warning her against the imprudence she is about to commit. Lady Atkyns persists, and the Princess at last loses patience. “I have so often combated your mad idea,” she writes nobly, “that I don’t wish to say anything more on the subject.”
In the spring of 1814 the news came to St. Petersburg of the defeat of the armies of Napoleon and the accession of Louis XVIII. Immediately large numbers of exiles, who were but waiting for this, made haste back to France. Mme. de Tarente contemplated being of their number, but before she could even make arrangements for the journey, death came to her on January 22, 1814.
Hamburg, where our friends Mme. Cormier and the “little Baron” took refuge in 1795, was already a powerful city, rich by reason of its commerce, and its governing body, conscious of its strength, were not the less jealous of its independence. Its unique position, in the midst of the other German states, the neutrality to which it clung and which it was determined should be respected, sufficed to prevent it hitherto from looking askance at the ever-growing triumphs of the armies of the French Republic, and the Convention, too much taken up with its own frontiers, had done nothing to threaten the independence of the Hanseatic town.
This fact did not escape the émigrés, who were finding it more and more difficult to evade the rigorous look-out of the Revolutionary Government, and soon Hamburg was filled with nobles, ecclesiastics, Chouans, conspirators, Royalist agents, just as London had been some years earlier. Safe from surprises, and in constant communication with England, Germany, and Italy, this world of wanderers had discovered an ideal haven in which to hatch all their divers plots. Clubs were started by them, called after celebrated men. Rivarol was the centre of one set, noted for its intellectual stamp and its verve and wit. The publications also that saw the light in Hamburg enjoyed a wide liberty, and this it was that opened the eyes of the Republican Government to the state of things.