Confessions of the Czarina

by Princess Catherine Radziwill

“But you are not nervous or ill,” exclaimed the Grand Duchess. “How does it come, then, that you avoid us, your sisters, and even our mother just as much as does your wife. What have we done to you, except to love you, for you to treat us as if we were strangers?”

Nicholas II. pulled his mustache, but would not explain himself further, and Olga Alexandrowna had to own herself baffled.

The Empress heard of this conversation and it did not reconcile her to her sisters-in-law. She was in that morbid state of mind which gives an undue importance to the smallest incident which would not arrest for five minutes the attention of any normal person. The predisposition to insanity which existed in the Hesse-Darmstadt family had probably something to do with her condition, because she most certainly suffered from the mania of persecution; being a Sovereign, and a powerful one into the bargain, she imagined that the best use she could make of her unlimited power was to crush those in whom she persisted in seeing enemies bent on her destruction.

Rumors had reached her ears that some members of the Imperial Family (it had been the Grand-Duke Nicholas Nicholaievitch, in fact) had said that her place ought to be in a convent rather than on the Throne, and she had immediately made out of the remark a desire on the part of her kinsman to shut her up in a monastery, as had been done in the Middle Ages with other Russian Czarinas, so as to give the Emperor the possibility to marry another woman who could bear him a son.

The supposition was a preposterous one, because such an idea had never crossed the Grand Duke’s mind, but it could not be driven away out of the imagination of Alexandra Feodorowna. Hence her continual efforts to estrange her husband from his people, and to keep him entirely in her own hands, far away from any influence hostile to herself or to her daughters. There was, after all, some method in her madness. As things turned out, she was given several opportunities to exert her vengeful feelings in regard to the Imperial Family by the conduct of a few of its members.

I will here mention briefly two or three occasions when her intervention caused any amount of trouble and brought upon her head storms of abuse and indignation. The first one was the morganatic marriage of the Grand-Duke Paul, the Emperor’s uncle. This event was brought about principally through the want of tact and the stupidity of the people concerned in it, and it would have been far better for the Empress not to have interested herself in it at all, considering the fact that the personages concerned in this affair were certainly beneath her notice.

The Grand Duke had been upon terms of intimate friendship with a lady very well known in social circles of St. Petersburg, the wife of one of the officers of the regiment of which he was the commander. The thing had been going on for a number of years, and society had turned away its head and affected not to notice it; the more so that the husband of the lady in question seemed to ignore it, and to keep his eyes firmly closed as to her indiscretions. But one fine day the Grand Duke thought to make to Madame Pistolkors a present of some jewels which had belonged to his mother first, and to his wife afterward, and which had been locked up in a safe since the latter’s death. This again might have passed unnoticed, had Madame Pistolkors not thought to put them on at a Court reception to which she was bidden. The Empress Dowager, who was present, recognized the unlucky ornaments, and, burning with wrath, forgot for once her strained relations with her daughter-in-law, and went up to her to draw her notice to the “scandal,” as she termed it. Alexandra Feodorowna, as we know, had never been a tactful woman. She called a chamberlain and ordered him to invite Madame Pistolkors to leave the Palace immediately, and to escort her to her carriage. The next day Colonel Pistolkors, finding that matters had gone too far, introduced an action for divorce against his wife, and the latter, shunned by all her former friends, utterly disgraced before the world, had to flee abroad to hide her diminished head and her lost social prestige, in the solitude of a small Italian town. But then the unexpected, or rather the expected, occurred. The Grand-Duke Paul took the only course left to him compatible with his honor as a gentleman. He followed the lady to Italy and married her there without asking anybody’s leave, to the general scandal of St. Petersburg society, who declared that the incident with the diamond necklace that had been the primary cause of the catastrophe had been artfully engineered by its heroine in view of the result which was ultimately achieved.

The Emperor was furious; his mother equally so, but it is not likely that anything would have been done, or in general any notice taken of the action of the Grand Duke, had it not been for the intervention of the young Empress, who insisted on her uncle-by-marriage being deprived of his rank in the army and exiled abroad. It was the first time that she had the opportunity to satisfy her instincts of hatred and of revenge in regard to a member of her husband’s family, and she took a special delight, not only in doing so, but also in letting the world know that such was the case. Fate, for once kind to her, had delivered one of her enemies into her hands, and she was but too ready to seize this occasion for scoring her personal real or imaginary wrongs.

A few years later another incident of the same kind afforded her a second opportunity of exercising her powers of retaliation in regard to a Romanoff. The eldest son of the Grand-Duke Wladimir, the young Grand-Duke Cyril, the same who had nearly perished during the Japanese war in the catastrophe of the ship Pétropawlosk, married also without law or leave his first cousin, the divorced Grand Duchess of Hesse, the former sister-in-law of the Empress. The latter had always hated her, ever since the day that she had been obliged to play second fiddle to her at Darmstadt, and she had done her best to bring about an estrangement between her and her husband. This had not been difficult, because anything more brutal than the Grand Duke of Hesse had never existed. His young wife had had more to bear than the public knew, or that she cared herself to relate, but her own conduct had always been beyond reproach, and she had carried herself with remarkable tact and dignity. When at last she obtained her divorce, her only child, a little girl, was not even left entirely in her custody, but had to spend half of the year with the father. The latter did not well know what to do with the baby and most probably would never have availed himself of his rights had not his sister, the Empress Alexandra, interfered and persuaded him to confide to her own care the small Elisabeth, knowing very well that this would be about the most painful thing that could happen to the divorced Grand Duchess.

In accordance with this wish, the Grand Duke of Hesse brought his daughter to Spala in Poland, where the Russian Imperial Family were spending the autumn. The child sickened a few days later, and soon her condition became desperate. The doctors declared that the mother ought to be warned and asked to come, the more so that the little girl kept continually crying for her. But to this the Empress would never agree, until she knew it was positively too late. At last a telegram was sent to the Grand-Duchess Victoria Mélita; it preceded but by a few hours the one advising her that her journey would be useless, as the end had come. One may imagine the feelings of the heartbroken mother and the natural resentment she must have felt at this piece of heartlessness on the part of her former sister-in-law. For a long time she would not be comforted, but at last she was induced to listen to her cousin, the Grand-Duke Cyril, and she married him at Tegernsee in Bavaria, without the Czar’s consent to this union having been so much as asked.