International Film Service
The ex-Czarina of Russia and Her Four Daughters
When the state of her health allowed her to do so, Alexandra Feodorovna went for long walks in the park surrounding the Palace, with the Emperor and her children. She was inordinately fond of the open air, and was never so happy as in the Crimea, where she could indulge in her taste for it. There she spent hours arranging her rose garden and generally beautifying this lovely place, to which she hoped she would one day be able to retire. It is not generally known, but a fact, that both the Emperor and herself nursed the idea of abdicating in favour of their son as soon as the latter should be old enough to assume the government of the country, and of retiring to Livadia for the rest of their days. Neither Nicholas II. nor his Consort ever dreamt that this abdication would be imposed upon them by events the magnitude of which no one in the whole of Russia could have been able to foresee.
Very few visitors ever came to enliven the solitude of Czarskoi Selo, but at Livadia the Empress would make a point of inviting to dinner and to small dances given for her daughters, all the people living in the neighbourhood, or staying in the various hotels on the Crimean coast, who had been presented to her. The officers of the Imperial yacht, the Standard, were also bidden to these parties, and they were almost the only persons with whom the Empress ever conversed freely. She was very fond of the sea, and during the cruises which she took every summer in the Finnish waters she grew to know by name all the crew of the vessel on which she found herself, and she took pleasure in talking with the officers and men, the former of whom were afterwards always welcomed by her wherever she was.
But in general she did not care for society. Her Mistress of the Robes was about the only woman admitted to her intimacy as long the post was occupied by the Princess Galitzyne, but after the death of the latter and the appointment of Madame Narischkine, the relations of the Empress with the head of her household became purely formal, and the only real confidante she possessed during the last six or seven years which preceded the war and the Revolution was a woman who was destined to do her an infinity of harm and whom she would have done much better to have kept at arm’s length—the too famous Madame Wyroubieva, about whom I shall have something to say later on.
CHAPTER IX
THE COURT AND ATTENDANTS OF THE CZARINA
When the Empress married, her household was formed in a hurry, which was a great pity, because it was not composed entirely of the best people from an intellectual point of view. The Empress Dowager was so absorbed by her grief that she could not give to the subject the attention she otherwise would have done. The Emperor, on the other hand, knew very little about St. Petersburg society, and especially about its gossip. When the name of the Princess Galitzyne was mentioned to him as that of the best lady for the difficult position of Mistress of the Robes, and chief adviser of his young wife, he accepted it as a matter of course, having only in mind the great name and the prominent position of the Princess.