THE CZARINA AND HER MOTHER-IN-LAW
I have heard that many different tales have been circulated concerning
the relations of my mistress with the Dowager Empress. It is useless
to pretend that they were pleasant, but, on the other hand, neither of
the two ladies gave vent to open manifestations of hostility, whatever
they may have thought in the interior of their hearts. During the
first months following the marriage of the Czar things went smoothly,
because it was impossible to show more deference to any one than
Alexandra Feodorovna displayed in regard to her mother-in-law. But the
latter was still too young to care to be suddenly called upon to play
second fiddle, and she missed the power which she had exercised over
Alexander III., who used to consult her in regard to everything he did.
She had had enormous influence over him, and, if the truth be told,
over the whole course of affairs in Russia, but she had exercised it
with such tact, and so secretly, that it had never been suspected; on
the contrary, the Empress had been described as a frivolous woman who
cared only for dress, dances and parties. In regard to the Consort of
Nicholas II. things were very different. She arrived in Russia with the
reputation of being a clever woman, with strong opinions, and of course
found the public prepared either to accept them or else to start up
opposition against her. German princesses were not liked, and it had
been hoped that the heir to the throne would avoid choosing a wife in a
German court. The Dowager Empress was Danish by birth, a fact that had
contributed most certainly to the great popularity she had immediately
acquired. There was a powerful party behind her, quite ready to back
her up against her daughter-in-law, and, unfortunately, the latter was
apprised of it, which had the effect of setting her against any advice
she received from quarters which she suspected of intriguing against
her. As I have said before, if the Emperor and his young bride had
been able from the beginning to set up an establishment of their own,
perhaps things would not have fared so badly, and I have often wondered
why this was not done. With the immense Winter Palace standing
empty, or almost so, it would not have been difficult to arrange
some apartments for the newly married pair, until those they were to
occupy definitely had been got ready. There were the rooms which had
been occupied by the Empress Marie Alexandrovna, which, with small
expense, might have been made habitable in a few days. They at least
would have made a fitting establishment for a Sovereign, whilst the
two small closets (for they can hardly be called anything else) which
were assigned to Nicholas II. and his wife in the ground floor of the
Anitschkoff Palace, were so inappropriate, so ugly and so uncomfortable
that it is no wonder the latter felt depressed the whole time she was
compelled to occupy them. Then, as I have said, the servants gossiped,
and repeated to the Dowager Empress everything that her daughter-in-law
was doing, a fact of which the latter became aware through remarks
made to her by the elder lady, and the result was most disastrous. The
arrival of the children, whose advent obliged Alexandra Feodorovna to
set up a nursery, which she tried to model after those she had seen in
England, did not improve conditions that already had become strained,
because, as one daughter after another appeared, Marie Feodorovna
grew to think that her daughter-in-law would never give an heir to the
throne and to look up towards her second son Michael as the future
Emperor. This was gall and wormwood to my mistress, who often lamented
the fact, and, when she had taken me into her confidence, complained of
the want of consideration with which her mother-in-law made her feel
that she was a nobody and had not fulfilled the duty which was expected
of her, that of providing future Emperors for Russia. Other reasons
also contrived to add to this state of latent irritation which had
established itself in the bosom of the Imperial family. There was the
question of the crown jewels; of the order in which the names of the
two Empresses were to be introduced into the church liturgy; and many
others, small and great. The Dowager was far too tactful to complain
about the domestic relations of her son, but she contrived to let
people guess her sentiments on the subject, and took to spending more
and more of her time in Denmark, which after all was perhaps the best
thing she could have done.
[Illustration: _International Film Service_
GRAND DUKE MICHAEL]
The Japanese war, however, brought her back to Russia, and it was
during its course that there happened the one great event in the
life of Alexandra Feodorovna—the birth of her only son.
Great were the rejoicings when this small boy made his appearance in
a world which was not to prove too kind to him, as we all know. His
advent, however, disturbed the equanimity of several people, whilst
it raised the hopes of others. For one thing, the Grand Duke Michael,
the only brother of the Czar, lost all the importance with which he
had been endowed in the eyes of the public as the eventual heir to
the Russian throne. It also took away some of that of his mother,
who was supposed to exercise considerable control over him, and of
course the feelings of the latter on the subject were very much mixed,
because though on the one hand she could not but rejoice at seeing the
succession secured in the direct line, yet, on the other hand, she had
accustomed herself, as had many others, to the idea that her eldest
son would never become father to a boy, and it required a certain time
before she could get accustomed to the changes which the birth of the
little Alexis had brought about.
Furthermore, the young Empress, feeling at last secure of her own
position, began to assert herself far more than she had ever done
before, and she tried to win for herself partisans. Unfortunately she
looked for them among people who turned out afterwards to be her worst
foes, and the liberty which she imagined she had acquired to live her
own life without any regard to the trammels of etiquette or other
consideration, transformed the dislike she had hitherto inspired into
something very much akin to hatred.
Her boy proved a delicate child, and when the fact became known it
awakened the hopes of the party antagonistic to Alexandra and raised
those of the people attached to the fortunes of the Grand Duke Michael.
His sister-in-law, when she found this out (and there were but too
many people eager to inform her of it), grew in her turn to dislike
the Grand Duke, and to think how she could get rid of him. According
to the family statute of the Romanoffs, he would have been Regent of
the Empire in case the Czar had died before his heir had reached his
majority, and the Empress, in that case, would have been more or less
subjected to him and to any commands he would have deemed it necessary
to issue to her. Most likely the first thing he would have done would
have been to deprive her of the custody of her son and to surround
the latter with men of his own choice. The very thought of such a
contingency made Alexandra Feodorovna wild, so when the Grand Duke
contracted the morganatic marriage which brought upon him the wrath of
his brother she seized upon the occasion to try to get rid once and
forever of a personage whom she considered her worst enemy.
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.