This letter will, in all probability, reach you on the day of our parting (one year ago), it seems so near and yet again as if centuries had passed since then.
It is seven months that we have been here. We see Ysa[17] only through the windows, and Madeleine (the Empress’s lady’s-maid, Madeleine Zanotti) too. They have been here for three or four months to-day, I am told. I must give that letter at once.
I kiss you and Titi tenderly, Christ be with you, my dearest ones. Greeting to Mother and Grandmother. The children kiss and love you, and he (the Emperor) sends his very best wishes.
Your old Godmother.
. . . . .
L’ENVOI
The first idea of writing this book occurred to me some time after my arrival in England. I had always known that the Empress had been grossly misrepresented in Russia, but I had not attached much importance to the fact, as I had seen the Revolutionary propaganda, and I fully realized the methods of the Revolutionaries in relation to the Imperial Family.
I was, however, astonished and horrified to discover that the same ideas were current in the broad-minded and enlightened country which has afforded me and so many other fugitives such kindly sanctuary.
If possible, I think the Empress has been more universally condemned in England than in Russia. I have scarcely heard her name mentioned without its being coupled with the degrading attributes of treachery, sensualism, hysteria, and religious mania. To one who knew her intimately and who loved her devotedly, such a state of things is unspeakably painful. I accidentally saw a film which was the grossest libel on her character and her personality, the mind of the producer having been apparently bent upon presenting the Empress as a combination of the chief forms of lurid wickedness which appeal to patrons of the cinema. I have also read novels about her which, whilst enraging me as mendacious chronicles, have considerably enlightened me as to the capacity for invention of which the human imagination is capable. More serious works have condemned the Empress in a courteous manner, but they have been none the less scathing in their judgment. Some writers, after the story of Ekaterinburg was authentically given to the world, have been more tolerant and more pitying in their censure, but it has been always censure.