She was a woman with a past in which had figured most of the jeunesse dorée of St. Petersburg. She had been married when quite a girl to a man much older than herself, and had very rapidly found a number of people willing to console her for the great difference of age which existed between her and her spouse. He had made her an indulgent husband, and by reason of his great standing, riches, and other worldly advantages, had constantly sheltered her from the evil effects of the gossip which was but too often busy with her name. When she had become a widow, she had mourned him quite sincerely, but had pretended a grief greater than she had really experienced. It was discovered that he had left his business affairs in an entangled condition, and the Princess had retired to her country estates, to try to bring some kind of order into their management. She had an only daughter, already married, who became the object of her greatest care and affection. When the post of chief adviser to the young bride of Nicholas II. was offered to her by one of her former admirers, Baron Fredericks, then already Minister of the Imperial Household, she had snatched at the chance with alacrity, seeing in it a possibility of re-establishing, quicker than by a strict economy, her shattered finances.
She was a haughty, selfish, self-centred woman who soon made for herself numerous enemies, thanks to the offhand manner with which she treated all those with whom she found herself thrown in contact. She never applied herself to the task of teaching her young mistress the difficult lesson of trying to make herself popular, but on the contrary tried to inspire within her the same prejudices in regard to the people she disliked that she herself entertained. She was about the worst adviser a newly married Sovereign could have had, and one can only wonder why this fact was not recognised earlier than it was; for it ultimately became a question as to who was the more disliked, the Empress or her Mistress of the Robes.
The Princess Galitzyne, nevertheless, soon became a power at Court. She contrived to obtain large grants of money which the successive ministers of finance who took over the succession of Count Witte, were but too happy to arrange for her, in return for her protection. She was greedy and avaricious, cruel and cold hearted, and utterly devoid of scruples. In the Palace she was heartily disliked, yet no one dared to say a word against her, because it was well known that eventually she could become a terrible enemy of those of whom she thought she had reason to complain.
The Princess died a year or two before the great war, and for some time her place remained empty, until at last it was offered to Madame Narischkine, an intimate friend of the Empress Dowager, and one of the most respected women in St. Petersburg society.
Madame Narischkine was quite a different woman from her predecessor. She was kind, polite, amiable, and highly principled, as well as conscientious. She would never have hurt a fly, and she had always applied herself to smooth the path in life of all the people in whom she had happened to be interested.
Unfortunately she was not sympathetic with the Empress Alexandra, and the latter could never bring herself to treat her with the same familiarity as she had done the Princess Galitzyne. Then Madame Narischkine objected to Rasputin, and of course this was sufficient to prevent her being a persona grata. The Grand Duchess Elizabeth also did not care for her; perhaps because she felt that the new Mistress of the Robes had never quite approved of her. Madame Narischkine was a very discreet woman, but at the same time she could very well convey to persons whom she did not think fit to be upon terms of intimacy with her what she thought of them. The Empress never took to her, which was a great pity, and sometimes treated her with great rudeness and with an astonishing lack of consideration. But in spite of these difficulties with which her path was beset, Madame Narischkine behaved magnificently when the hour of danger sounded. When the Revolution broke out, she immediately repaired to Czarskoi Selo and never left the Empress through those days of sorrow and anxiety which saw the latter taken prisoner in her own palace. She volunteered, in spite of her advanced age (she is over seventy) to accompany her mistress into exile, but the request was declined by the provisional government, and Madame Narischkine had perforce to submit, but she was the last one to bid good-bye to the Empress and to the young Grand Duchesses before they entered the train which was to carry them away to the solitudes of Siberia. It is likely that if Madame Narischkine had, from the outset, been with the Czarina, many of the mistakes committed by the latter would have been avoided. As it was she followed the advice given her by the Princess Galitzyne, and this was never wise advice, because the Princess, who was a born flatterer, was most careful never to say to Alexandra Feodorovna anything which she knew or feared might displease her. Under her guidance the unfortunate Empress had not a chance to succeed in winning the affections of her subjects. Besides the Princess, there were four maids of honour attached to the person of the young Czarina. The first was the Countess Lamsdorff, with whom the Sovereign could not get on and to whom she took a violent dislike. Then came the Princess Bariatinsky, who also resigned her functions with a certain amount of “fracas,” and who made no mystery of the fact that she could not stand the lack of consideration with which she was being treated. A Caucasian lady, the Princess Orbeliani, took her place, and succeeded in retaining her difficult position until her death. Then there was a Princess Obolensky, who had much unpleasantness to bear, but who accepted everything with wonderful patience, thanks, it was said, to her attachment to the young Grand Duchesses, the daughters of Nicholas II. She is still with the Imperial family, and has accompanied them to Tobolsk, in spite of the opposition of her family, who would have liked her to leave the Empress. There was also another personage in the household who held there quite a privileged situation; this was Mademoiselle Schneider, whose duties consisted in reading to the Czarina, and who was the only attendant she had brought over with her from Darmstadt. Mademoiselle Schneider could enter the apartments of her mistress whenever she liked. She was the medium through whom Alexandra Feodorovna communicated with her relatives in Germany, to whom she always felt afraid to write by post, and she was also the one and only person with whom the Empress spoke German. We all liked her, because she was a quiet, unassuming person; but I shall not take it upon myself to say whether or not she gave to the German government information it would have been better to have withheld. Then again there was a private secretary, whose business it was to attend to the correspondence of the Empress, and who used to make reports to her every morning. The post was first filled by Count Lamsdorff, then by Count Rostavtsoff, and neither of these gentlemen was quite up to the task. They did not know how to interest the Czarina in their work, which they accomplished in a methodical manner devoid of any initiative. Among their duties was the administration of Alexandra’s private purse and the control of her charities until the time when she assumed it herself at the period of the Japanese war. It was part of the privileges of the private secretary to pay out the bills of the Empress or at least to give out their amount to the head maid, that is, to myself. Count Lamsdorff paid whatever I asked, without the slightest demur, but his successor used to ask for explanations, and to make his comments, which sometimes was most annoying. The private accounts of the Czarina were settled on the 22nd day of every month, when the expenses of the thirty preceding days had to be balanced and adjusted. She was most particular about this, and hated being in debt to any one. But at the same time she absolutely ignored the meaning of the word economy, bought and ordered whatever she liked without a thought as to how her expenses were to be met, and more than once I have had to appeal, unknown to her, to the Czar, and to ask him to give orders to settle his wife’s bills without her being worried about the matter.
Every spring and autumn the coming fashions were brought to the Empress, so that she might make her choice. She usually had about fifty dresses for each season, as I have had already occasion to explain, but whenever any unlooked for event occurred she would order special gowns to meet it. Her hats were generally made by Bertrand, a French firm in St. Petersburg; she ordered about twenty-five or thirty for the summer season and several fur toques for the winter. She liked white hats, which she often wore, and for a long time remained faithful to the small bonnets affected by Queen Alexandra of England in her youth. Later on she took to large hats, which were generally trimmed profusely with ostrich feathers. About these feathers the Empress was most fussy. The St. Petersburg climate is so very damp that it is almost next to impossible to keep feathers curled in summer, especially in Peterhof, on the Baltic shore, where the Court, as a rule, spent July and August. We had, therefore, to have the trimmings of the Empress’s hats seen to every day, and messengers used to go daily to St. Petersburg to carry to Madame Bertrand the different millinery as well as the feather boas of Alexandra Feodorovna to be freshened and rearranged.
As a rule, the Czarina used to spend something like ten thousand roubles a month on her toilet, and sometimes even more than that. She was extravagant,—there is no doubt about it,—but then she was the Empress of Russia, and considered it part of her duties to appear magnificently attired. The Emperor, too, liked to see her well dressed, and especially richly dressed. The latter was easy, but the former more difficult, because of the peculiar ideas of my Imperial mistress in regard to her clothes.
When her household was organised she was given eight maids to attend upon her, of whom there were to be always two on duty during the day, and two during the night, when they had to sit in a room in the near vicinity of the Imperial bedchamber, ready to be called in case of emergency. In the usual order of things they would have had to dress the Czarina’s hair morning and evening, but the latter hated to have different hands perform this task, so she arranged to have a hairdresser come each day to arrange her coiffure, which was never very elaborate except upon official occasions, when a diadem had to be fixed in her hair. I was always present when she dressed and undressed. It was part of my business to see that everything connected with her toilet was in order and that nothing she required was missing. She never twice wore the same pair of gloves, but liked old shoes and slippers. As for her stockings they were of the finest silk, and manufactured specially for her by the firm of Swears and Wells in London.