If the truth be told, poor Michael had never been her enemy, however much he may have disapproved of some of her actions. The only thing he asked was to be left alone with the wife whom he had chosen and married against the opposition of the whole world and of his entire family, beginning with his mother. She was a lady by birth, the wife of one of his brother officers in a Cuirassier regiment quartered at Gatchina. The Grand Duke had become attracted by her principally on account of her sympathetic appearance and the patience with which she had listened to the tale of his affection for one of his sister Olga’s maids of honour with whom he had been passionately in love and whom he had wished to marry. The romance was quickly nipped in the bud by the interference of the Dowager Empress and the young lady packed away abroad with strict injunctions not to return to Russia until further notice. The Grand Duke had been very unhappy, but had submitted, and poured the story of his wrongs into the ears of Madame Wulfert. The latter was a charming woman, but she had had a first husband, from whom she had been divorced before marrying her present one. This alone would have made her undesirable as a wife for the only brother of the Czar, and when her union with Captain Wulfert was also dissolved, thanks to the relations which had established themselves between her and the young Grand Duke, this undesirableness was still further accentuated. But she had given birth to a son, and was moreover a person of considerable attraction and of unusual cleverness. Michael found out that he could not live without her, and married her in Vienna, without asking any one’s permission to do so, thereby bringing upon his head the wrath of all his relatives.
The Emperor, however, would have felt inclined to let the whole matter pass, or at least to make as if he ignored it. But neither his mother nor his wife would hear of it. The former wished some kind of punishment to be inflicted on her rebellious son, and the latter decided that this punishment should be a most rigorous one. She prevailed upon the weak-minded Czar to put his brother under restraint and to make him what is called in England a ward in chancery, assuming himself his guardianship and depriving him of the management of the large fortune he had inherited from the Czar Alexander III. This made him of course ineligible as a Regent should the Emperor die, and that was what the Czarina was aiming at. Of course she was wrong, and respectful as I was towards her, I could not help one evening, when she had broached the subject of her own accord, telling her that I thought she had made a great mistake in taking such a decided part in the chastisement of her brother-in-law, and that it would have been more politic on her part to keep outside the matter and to allow it to be settled between the Czar and the Dowager Empress, who, after all, were the only persons concerned in it. My mistress listened in silence to my words, then suddenly exclaimed with unusual violence: “I had to do it; I had to do it; he wanted to part me from my son; he had to be put out of the way!” There was nothing to reply to this outburst, but I could not help regretting that the Empress had allowed herself to be influenced by false reports, and that her common sense had not prevailed and stopped her from compromising herself so openly in this matter. My forebodings, alas, turned out to have been true ones, because the first person who was furious with the Czarina for the part she had played in this whole story was the Empress Dowager, who had not wished things to go so far, and who guessed at once the real reasons which had actuated her daughter-in-law. The breach between the two ladies was in consequence considerably widened, and as my mistress grew more and more addicted to those superstitious practices which proved her bane, Marie Feodorovna found real grounds for criticising her, so that it became at last a recognised fact that the worst adversary of the Empress was her own mother-in-law.
I am sure that the latter would have felt sorry had she known to what extent the strained relations which existed between her and her son’s wife were talked of in public. She possessed far more sense of dignity than Alexandra Feodorovna, and had moreover been reared in old Imperial traditions unknown to her daughter-in-law. But she did not like her, and on the other hand, this sense of dignity to which I have just alluded suffered in seeing the domestic life of her child, a child who was also her Sovereign, turned into ridicule by everybody, and causing him to be despised even more than disliked. Finding that the war did not allow her to go to her beloved Denmark, she finally retired to Kieff, where the Revolution found her, and whence she went to Livadia in the Crimea, where she still is to-day. When I think over these things, it seems to me that all these frictions, which turned out ultimately to have been far more important than they appeared at first, might have been avoided, at least in part, if the young Empress had restrained herself in the expression of her feelings. But she was too frank, too honest, too true, to be able to play a comedy, and diplomacy was an art utterly unknown to her. She had not been trained in dissimulation, and she despised this atmosphere of the Court where a curb on one’s thoughts and words was indispensable. In certain respects she was a child, with all a child’s impulsiveness and beautiful indifference to the judgments and appreciations of the world, and this innocence of her mind and heart made her no match against the intrigues that surrounded her. She had no one to love her except her children, and a husband who was not strong enough to protect her against attack, and whom in the bottom of her heart she must have secretly despised, as indeed he deserved to be, because, whilst an amiable and kind man, he was not suited for a Sovereign, and could no more control his own conduct than he could the destiny of the nation over which fate had set him to rule. He had absolutely no initiative and no strength of character. No efforts of his parents or of his tutors in his young days had been able to change his natural indolence and readiness to accept and to endorse as his own the ideas and opinions of every one he talked to, even if they differed diametrically from those he had himself expressed previously.
CHAPTER XII
THE CZARINA’S DAILY OCCUPATIONS
I have often been asked what the Czarina used to do with her days and whether it was true that she spent them in absolute idleness. And just as often I have wondered what could have given rise to such an opinion. The Empress was, on the contrary, one of those industrious women whose hands are never at rest, and who require to be always occupied in some way or another, either mentally or with some manual work which keeps their attention concentrated on its intricacies. At Darmstadt the Princesses were trained to make their own clothes and to wait upon themselves, and one of the great pleasures of my mistress was to embroider, cut, and make the different objects composing the layette and the wardrobe of her children. As I have already related, she had tried to arrange in Czarskoi Selo a Needlework Guild, but she did not meet with any enthusiastic response to her efforts in that direction. Nevertheless, until she left it, there was in the Palace where she had made her home a room set apart for the use of the ladies who used to come and work on certain days and hours on clothes for the poor which were distributed to the indigent of Czarskoi Selo and St. Petersburg at Christmas time. When the Japanese war occurred, a regular working room was established in the Winter Palace and never closed, because it became the centre of the Empress’s activity in the way of making garments for the poor. No Sovereign had ever thought of anything of the kind in Russia, and of course the action of Alexandra Feodorovna in that respect was discussed far and wide, and whilst many people applauded her for the initiative she had taken, others thought it was not dignified for a Russian Empress to cut flannels and knit stockings, even for the poor. They would have liked her to depend for her charities on other people, as her predecessors had done. In fact, in this as in so many other things, she was ignoring the traditions which governed all that went on in the Palaces of the Czars, and of course this was resented. But the poor population of the capital learnt to bless the Empress’s name, and for a time was grateful to her, until the days of the first Revolution, when everything that was connected with her became tinged with that unpopularity which had become attached to her name.
The Empress was a great reader, but only of serious books, and scientific ones were her favourites. She did not care for history, which she frankly owned bored her, because she could not interest herself in the sayings and doings of people long dead. But science held her enthralled, and every work which was published in English, French and German on astronomy, mathematics, and natural history was perused by her with avidity. She admired immensely Darwin’s “Origin of Species,” and had one day a furious battle with her Father Confessor, who remonstrated with her for keeping such a dangerous work in her rooms. Astronomy was also one of her hobbies, and she expounded it to her children whenever she found an occasion or opportunity to do so.
She embroidered wonderfully, and made some church ornaments which would easily have won a prize at any exhibition. But her great amusement was the drawing of caricatures which she executed with an incredible talent, having the knack of seizing the funny side of each thing or person she tried her pencil upon. This talent, however, caused her much annoyance, because the people whose ridiculous points she seized upon became aware of it and were deeply offended, as a matter of course, especially the members of the Imperial family, who, more than any others, had the misfortune to fall under her satirical pencil.