HER IMPERIAL MAJESTY AND THE TSAREVITCH
Tsarevitch thoroughly enjoyed themselves, and busied themselves in the distribution of friendship’s offerings. The Empress had one curious fancy in connection with her Christmas trees: she always insisted upon blowing out the candles herself, and she was quite proud because she was able to extinguish the topmost candle by some extraordinary effort of breathing.
And now I feel I must speak of the real Tsaritsa, the Empress whose personality is known to so few—the Tsaritsa who was the most misjudged and unfortunate of human beings. I know in my heart that Time, the best historian, will make clear much that is dark. Even now, slowly, it is true, but none the less surely, people are beginning to wonder whether the Empress was in reality the pro-German and the hysterical exaltée she is supposed to have been. She did not deign to defend herself from the calumnies and lies which were scattered broadcast in Russia; to such a nature, these trials were sent by God—all that she had to do was to endure. But I saw her tears when she and the Emperor received the news of the loss of the “Hampshire” and the death of Kitchener. These were no Judas tears—hers was the grief of the woman and the Sovereign at the death of a brave soldier, and yet, whenever her name is mentioned in England, people say carelessly: “Oh, she saw to the torpedoing of the ‘Hampshire,’ and wasn’t she the mistress of Rasputin?”
A pro-German, and the mistress of Rasputin!! Must this then, be the epitaph of the friend whom I knew, and the Empress to whom I owed the respect of a subject? I am not blind to the knowledge that any vehement defence may do her memory still more harm, but, nevertheless, I am impelled to write of her as she existed in her home, and in our hearts.
I have read and heard almost all that has been laid to her charge; I am no skilled writer, I know little or nothing of politics, but I can lay claim to some knowledge of my own sex. During the awful days of the Revolution, the Empress spoke to me as woman to woman. Her mind constantly dwelt on the days of her girlhood, her life with her grandmother, and the unhappiness of her childhood at Hesse Darmstadt.
The Emperor was the love of her life. She told me herself that he was her first love, but, the greater her love, the greater her fear lest she would prove unworthy. She gave herself to Russia when she married, and she accepted Russia as a sacred trust; but she and the Emperor were always more husband and wife than Emperor and Empress—they lived the intimate life of happily married people, they liked simplicity, they shrank from publicity, and this love of retirement was the source of many of the evil reports which assailed the Imperial Family.
The Empress told me that when she cried at the marriage of her brother her tears were said to be tears of jealous rage at seeing herself dispossessed of authority.
“But, Lili, I was not jealous. I cried when I thought of my mother; this was the first festival since her death. I seemed to see her everywhere.”