At present the Grand Duke Nicholas is persona grata with the Sovereign, perhaps on account of the brutality for which he is famous.
He is also supposed to like his sisters, but these are of too little importance to be reckoned with as serious factors in the general situation.
No monarch has ever led such a secluded existence as the present Tsar. Life at Court, which used to be so bright and cheerful, is now sad and dull. Festivities there are none, except one reception on New Year’s Day, at which the young Empress never appears, and even that did not take place in 1913. Balls are no longer given, and foreign princes, when they arrive upon a visit to the Russian Court, are received at one or other of the country residences of the Sovereign. The Winter Palace, once so animated, has taken the appearance of a lumber room, and presents to the visitor an unkempt, forlorn, dirty, neglected sight.
No reign in Russia from the time of Peter the Great has been so unfortunate as the present one. Calamities have followed its course from the very beginning. The prestige of the country, which was so great when Alexander III. died, has been seriously impaired by the failure of the Japanese campaign and the Revolution that followed upon it. Discontent is rife and becoming stronger every day; and though the financial prosperity of the country has certainly increased and reached hitherto unknown proportions, yet it has not done away with dissatisfaction.
The most curious feature of this situation is the total lack of respect and consideration the public feels for the person of Nicholas II. and for his family. Formerly, Grand Dukes were considered as something quite apart from the rest of mankind, and as for the Emperor—one stood in awe of him, whether one loved him or not. Now, no one thinks about them at all; they simply do not exist either in the public or the social sense. Respect has gone, and familiarity has not arrived. The presence of a member of the Imperial Family at a ball or party is no longer considered as an honour, and is not looked upon as a pleasure.
No misfortune has been spared to Nicholas II., and had he only understood their importance, he would have been the most unhappy man in the whole of his vast Empire. War has humiliated his country, revolution has enfeebled it, bad and tainted politics have dishonoured it, the blood of thousands of people who perished quite uselessly cries out for revenge, the tears of other thousands of unhappy creatures who languish in prisons or in hopeless exile appeal to Heaven for the chastisement of those in authority who sent them to a living death. Danger surrounds him, treason dogs his footsteps; his nation dislikes and distrusts him; his family is hostile to him; his only brother is banished, his mother is estranged from him, the wife of his bosom is the victim of a strange and mysterious malady; his only son, and the successor to his Throne and Crown, is smitten with an incurable illness. He has no friends, no disinterested advisers, no Ministers whose popularity in the country could add something to his own. And amid these ruins he stands alone, a solitary figure, the more pathetic because he does not realise the tragedy of his own fate.
CHAPTER III
THE EMPRESS ALIX
When the Princess Alix of Hesse left Darmstadt for the Crimea in order to be present at the death-bed of the Emperor Alexander III., there was one paper in Germany that dared to print what was spoken of in secret among many people, and to express some apprehension as to the fate that awaited the young bride in that distant country whither she was speeding in quest of an Imperial Crown.
Her marriage was not popular among her own country folk. The Protestant feelings of the German people revolted against the change of religion to which she would have to submit, and moreover there existed at that time a terrible prejudice in Hesse against Russia and everything that was Russian. The union which the Princess was about to contract was not popular, and, rightly or wrongly, it was firmly believed that she was being forced into it against her will; that, left to herself, she would have preferred to end her days in the peace of the little Darmstadt Court than to live among the splendours of St. Petersburg. It was this feeling that she was about to be sacrificed to reasons of State which inspired for her a pity that was freely expressed in the article already referred to and which is quoted hereunder:—
“It is only with feelings of deep grief and pity that the German people can follow during her journey to Russia the gracious and beloved Princess Alix. I cannot banish from