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.
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.
This system of having eight maids was continued for about ten years or
so, then one of them died, and another one asked to be relieved from
her duties, and they were never replaced. The Czarina thought that it
was quite sufficient for her to have six attendants, and she abolished
the night waiting, which had always been so irksome to the people
concerned in it. She used to dismiss her maids at eleven o’clock and
then retire to her bedroom, where she read or worked alone, but did
not require any more attendance, except in case she felt ill or one
of her children was indisposed. She was exacting, but never unjust or
cruel, and she hated to be the cause of inconvenience to other people.
At first she had never dared to alter anything in the customs of the
Russian Court, but later on she asserted herself and made many changes
in the interior arrangements of the Palace, all of which were practical
and tended to the amelioration of the condition of her numerous
servants, who nevertheless did not show themselves grateful to her for
her anxiety about their welfare, and who in the hour of her misfortune
mostly abandoned her, or turned with alacrity against her.