Nicholas II. and his wife; another girl, to the intense disappointment
of everybody. I am informed that the first words of Alexandra Feodorowna
upon being told of the sex of the infant were:
“What will the nation say, what will it say?”
As a fact the nation said nothing; it had already begun to lose interest
in the family affairs of its rulers.
As time went on this indifference to the joys and the woes of the
Reigning House grew and grew, until at last it became a recognized fact
in the whole of Russia that, as far as Nicholas II. was concerned,
whatever happened to him or to his relatives was an object which
presented no interest whatever to the millions of Russian men and women,
who all of them were looking forward for a change in the destinies and
the Government of their country. When he had ascended the Throne, any
amount of expectations had been connected with him and with his name.
These were very quickly dashed to the ground by his first public
speech--the one which he made in reply to the congratulations of the
zemstvos, or Russian local assemblies, on his accession and marriage,
when he told the representatives of these institutions that they must
not indulge “in senseless dreams” or hope that he would ever sacrifice
the least little bit of his Imperial prerogatives or autocratic
leanings. The Revolutionary committees, which had begun at that time and
from the very day of the death of Alexander III. to renew their
political activity, addressed to him a letter which, read to-day in the
light of the events which have happened during the last twelvemonth,
seems almost prophetic. They warned him that the struggle begun by him
would only come to an end with his downfall, and the whole tone of this
remarkable epistle, which I have reproduced in my volume, _Behind the
Veil of the Russian Court_, reminds one at present that the prophesied
blow has fallen, of the writing on the wall which appeared during the
banquet of the Persian King, warning him of his approaching ruin.
Neither the Czar nor his Consort thought about these things. As time
went on, the attention of the latter became more and more concentrated
on the one fixed idea of having a son. She imagined that the secret of
her unpopularity, which she had at last discovered, lay in the fact that
she had not been able to give an Heir to the Russian Throne. Four times
in succession daughters were born to her, each one received with
increased disappointment, as the years went on, bringing into prominence
the youngest brother of Nicholas II., the Grand-Duke Michael, whom the
Empress began hating with all her heart and soul. She imagined that
wherever she went she was greeted with reproaches for having failed to
fulfil the first duty of a Sovereign’s Consort, that of assuring his
succession in the direct line. The hysterical part of her temperament
rose to the surface more and more with each day that passed. She locked
herself up in her private apartments, refusing to see the members of her
family and denying herself to all visitors, until at last it began to be
whispered in Court circles that Alexandra Feodorowna’s mind was getting
unhinged and that she was suffering from religious mania, mixed up with
the dread of persecution from her relatives. She used to sob for hours
at a stretch, when no one could comfort her, and during those attacks of
despair one cry continually escaped her lips, and was repeated until she
could utter it no longer, out of sheer excitement and fatigue:
“Why, _why_ will God not grant me a son?”
VI
THE EMPRESS’S OPINIONS ABOUT RUSSIA
One of the points about which there has been the most discussion in
Russia is as to whether the Empress Alexandra had ever cared for the
country which had become her own. Her friends have repeatedly asserted
that she had become an ardent Russian patriot, and that her great,
particular misfortune was that every action, word, or thought of hers
had been misunderstood and this willingly.
As for her enemies, they declared, from the very first days which
followed upon her unlucky marriage, that she had arrived in Russia
imbued with the feelings of the deepest contempt for the country and its
people, and that all her efforts had been applied toward making out of
the Empire over which she reigned a vassal of her own native land.
It seems to me, who have had the opportunity to approach her personally,
as well as that of hearing about her from persons who nourished no
animosity against her, that neither the one nor the other of these two
opinions was absolutely correct, though both were right, each in its
way. When one attempts to judge the personality and the character of
Alexandra Feodorowna, one must first of all take into account the fact
that she belonged to that class of individuals who, while being fools,
nevertheless think themselves clever. To this must be added a highly
strung, hysterical temperament and the fact which was unknown in Russia
at the time of her marriage, that madness was a family disease in the
House of Hesse, to which she belonged by birth. The circumstances
attending her rearing and education also had a good deal to do with the
strangeness of her conduct after she had reached the years of
discretion. She had been a mere baby, five or six years old, when she
had lost her mother, the charming, clever, and accomplished Princess
Alice of Great Britain, and she had been brought up partly at Windsor by
Queen Victoria and partly at Darmstadt, where, however, she had not
found any of the good examples its Court might have afforded her had her
mother remained alive. She was the youngest member of her family, and as
such treated with negligence and made to give way to her elder sisters,
who were neither kind nor affectionate in regard to her--a fact which
must have helped her a good deal to develop the haughty, disagreeable
temper which was later on to play her so many bad tricks in life. On
the other hand, the person who had charge of her education, as well as
of that of the other Princesses, had conceived a great and most
ill-advised affection for her; ill-advised in so far that she used to
repeat to her that she was handsomer and cleverer than her sisters, and
that she ought not to mind any slights which the latter might try to put
upon her, because she was sure to make a better marriage than they.
When she was about twelve years old there occurred in the Grand-Ducal
Palace of Darmstadt the tragedy or romance, call it as one likes, of the
Grand Duke’s morganatic union with a lovely Russian, Madame Kolémine,
which came to such a sad end, owing to the interference of Queen
Victoria and to the stupidity of the Grand Duke himself, who, in any
case, ought first of all to have made careful inquiries as to the past
life and conduct of his intended bride, and then--once he had plighted
his troth to her--to have held the promises which he had made to her. He
allowed her to be sent away from his Court and country in disgrace; the
lady herself would have been but too willing to come to honorable terms
with a man for whom she could no longer feel any esteem or affection,
because in the whole long story of his intercourse with her Grand-Duke
Louis never showed himself otherwise than the true German he really was.
Of course, the object of his transient affections was represented to
his children as being merely an intriguing, base woman who had tried to
make a great marriage and to supplant their mother. Whether the elder
Darmstadt Princesses believed this calumny to have been the truth
remains a matter of doubt. Judging impartially, this would seem to be
hardly likely if one takes into consideration the fact that their ages
hovered between eighteen and twenty-two, and that consequently one could
reasonably assume that they knew what they were about when they showered
one proof of affection after another on Madame Kolémine, and when they
declared to her in many letters that there was nothing they wished for
more than to see her become their father’s wife.
This whole story, together with its heroine, is about one of the most
perplexing affairs that ever occurred in any Royal House, and everything
connected with it is to this very day shrouded in mystery. Madame
Kolémine, who (this by the way) married again, after her divorce from
the Grand Duke, a Russian diplomat, may or may not have been a bad
woman. I hold no brief for or against her. Many people assert that in
regard to certain scandals connected with the time of her early married
life she was more sinned against than sinning, and that she became the
victim of calumnies launched against her by unscrupulous enemies. But,
true or not, the breath of suspicion had hovered around her good name to
a sufficiently strong degree to have absolutely justified the objections
of Queen Victoria to her becoming even the morganatic wife of the Grand
Duke of Hesse.
It ought also to have influenced the latter into not admitting the
fascinating Russian into the intimacy of his young daughters, which was
precisely what he did. The girls could not be told every kind of gossip
going about in the world, but they ought to have been shielded from the
possibility of contracting friendships likely to lead them into
unpleasantnesses in the future. On the other hand, considering the fact
that this intimacy had once been established, one does not very well see
how any of the Darmstadt Princesses could have been led to believe,
after the three years or more that it had lasted, that Madame Kolémine
was base and intriguing and cared only for a great marriage. Because
this last accusation, leaving aside all others, was absolutely false, a
fact no one was better able to know than themselves, who had repeatedly
begged and implored her to accept their father’s offer and to make him,
together with themselves, happy people.
I have had some of these letters in my hands, and can therefore vouch
for the truth of this last assertion, and to put an end to the
questions of a suspicious public that may wonder how it came that such
a correspondence was ever communicated to me, I will say at once that
the reason for it was that I am a blood relation of Madame Kolémine, who
after her divorce had thought I might be of some help to her in her
troubles, and had herself asked me to read them. The impossibility in
which I found myself to be of any use to the poor woman, whom I had
never seen in my life before, and of interfering in a business which did
not concern me in the very least, led her to take a most bitter attitude
in regard to me and to become my enemy, so that in trying to take her
part to-day I am doing so out of a feeling of justice and nothing else.
I have mentioned the story in general only because it explains to a
certain degree the undisguised aversion of the Empress Alexandra for
everything that was Russian or that had anything to do with Russia. She
had never shared her sisters’ admiration for Madame Kolémine; on the
contrary, she had always nourished a pronounced antipathy for the lady,
and whatever the three other Darmstadt Princesses may have felt in
regard to the woman whom their father was to marry and divorce on the
same day, she, at least, had made no secret of her hatred for her. One
of the first remarks which she made after she had become acquainted with
St. Petersburg society was:
“I shall never like it; all the women remind me of Madame Kolémine.”
This episode in the career of the Grand Duke of Hesse brought about, as
might have been expected, a change in his relations with Queen Victoria,
and he was no longer such a desired guest at Windsor or Balmoral as had
been the case. His elder daughters married in quick succession, the
second one wedding the Grand-Duke Sergius of Russia. The little Alice
was left alone at home, and though she was often requested by her
grandmother to join her in England, she did not care so much for these
invitations as formerly. The fact was that she was gradually acquiring a
considerable influence over her father’s mind, whose weakness of
intellect rendered him an easy tool in his enterprising daughter’s
hands. She became the virtual mistress of his house, and developed
during those years, where she remained absolutely without any feminine
control over her, the imperious, disagreeable temper which was to play
her such sorry tricks in the future. Small as was the Hessian Court, it
yet was administered with that strict respect for etiquette always in
vogue in Germany, and it pleased the Princess Alix to find herself the
first lady in the land in her father’s Dukedom. She preferred it to
being the second in Rome.
It was during those years that she was taken on a visit to the Russian
Court. This did not turn out a success, because no one in St.
Petersburg was in the very least impressed by the beauty of the young
girl. Russia, being celebrated for the loveliness of its women, would
have required something more than she possessed to fall on its knees and
worship her. Then, again, she was dressed with bad taste, her manners
left much to be desired, and the rumor which began to circulate at the
time of the possibility of her wedding the Heir to the Russian Throne
did not appeal to public feeling. Alice thought herself slighted, and
returned to her beloved Darmstadt more anti-Russian than she had ever
been.
Two years went by, and the Grand Duke of Hesse died, carried off by a
disease of the brain, difficult to account for if one takes into
consideration the fact that he had never had any brains to lose. His son
succeeded him, and, together with his sister, continued to inhabit the
Darmstadt Palace, where nothing was changed except the master of the
house, whom no one missed. For eighteen months Princess Alice reigned
supreme, as she had done before; then one fine morning her brother
announced to her that he was about to ask their cousin, the Princess
Victoria Mélita of Coburg, to become his wife. A fit of hysterics
followed upon this announcement. Alice could not resign herself to the
necessity of playing second fiddle at her brother’s Court, where she
had been the center of attraction for such a long time. The fact that
her future sister-in-law was just as young and more beautiful than she
did not help her to get over her mortification. She was of a terribly
jealous character and temperament, and she began from that very day to
hate, with a ferocious hatred which went on increasing as time passed,
the innocent girl for whom this Hessian marriage was to prove the source
of so much sorrow. But about this I shall speak later on.
It was at this precise moment that talk about a Russian marriage for her
began again. Many people wished for it. The Berlin Court was actively
intriguing in favor of it, and during the whole of that winter of
1893-94 the newspapers were busy with it. The chancelleries of the
different European capitals were very much preoccupied as to whether or
not it would take place.
Perhaps few people will believe me when I say that had it not been for
her brother’s engagement nothing in the world would have ever decided
the Princess Alice to give her consent to a union for which she did not
feel the least sympathy. She was not at all dazzled by the prospect of
becoming the Empress of Russia, because in her vanity and with her ideas
of German grandeur she thought herself far superior to the Romanoffs,
thanks to her long and unbroken line of ancestry. Her unimpeachable
quarterings seemed to her to be so immeasurably above their doubtful
ones that she considered it would be she who would do him an
incommensurable honor by accepting as her wedded husband the Heir to the
Throne of All the Russias. She would have infinitely preferred going on
queening it in Darmstadt, or in any other small German town, than to
have been chosen as the bride of the future Nicholas II., for whom she
felt neither sympathy, affection, nor esteem.
But her brother’s prospective marriage changed considerably her
position. She would no longer occupy the position of the first lady of
her beloved Hesse; she would find installed in the place which had been
her own for so many happy years a woman younger than herself, with an
independent character, a determined mind, a woman who would most
probably grow very quickly to impose herself and her ways of thinking,
not only on the whole Hessian Court, but also on the Grand Duke, whose
sister was condemned beforehand to be neglected and treated as a
negligible quantity.
This was gall and wormwood to the passionate, selfish girl, and this
feeling of hers, which she allowed her cousin the Kaiser to guess, was
very cleverly exploited by the latter in view of a marriage which none
desired more ardently than himself. Next to his own sister, there was no
one in the whole world whom he would have more ardently wished to
become Empress of Russia than his cousin Alix. He invited himself to
Darmstadt for a short visit, and while there took the first opportunity
to discuss the subject with her. He told her what very few people knew
at the time, and what the general public was entirely ignorant of--the
serious nature of the illness with which Alexander III. was attacked, an
illness which gave no hope whatever of recovery. By marrying the young
Grand-Duke Nicholas the Princess would find herself but for a short time
in a so to say subordinate position. A few months would see her raised
to one of the greatest thrones in Europe, from the height of which she
would be enabled to look down with contempt and pity on the cousin who
was about to take at the Darmstadt Court the place she had occupied so
long she had grown to consider it as her very own.
Moreover, she would be able to win back Russia and its ruler to the
cause of the German alliance, and thus accomplish one of her duties as a
loyal German woman. He appealed to her worst instincts while seeming to
call on her noblest ones to assert themselves, and once more he won the
day.
In St. Petersburg, too, Hohenzollern influence and intrigues had worked
actively, until at last the Czar, feeling perhaps that his days were
numbered and perhaps also no longer strong enough to resist perfidious
advice given to him by interested people, yielded the point, and when
his eldest son started for Coburg to attend there the Princess Victoria
Mélita’s wedding, he authorized him to ask for the hand of Alix of
Hesse.
As I have related, the marriage was at once announced, and we have seen
already its first results. The reason why I have once more returned to
its subject was to explain some of the causes which led the Empress
Alexandra to conceive such a bad opinion about Russia, and to detest so
cordially the Russian people. Her early dislike for Madame Kolémine had
given her a natural antipathy for everything connected with the latter
country; her visits there had strengthened this feeling; her vanity had
been hurt by finding that St. Petersburg’s society had paid absolutely
no attention to her; and her slow, commonplace mind had been utterly
unable to understand the refinement and high breeding of the Russian
upper classes. Her natural coldness and ignorance had been repulsed
instead of attracted by the simplicity but genuine kind-heartedness of
the lower ones. She thought the nation one of savages and she made no
secret whatever of that opinion, expressing her intention of correcting
those “awful Russian manners,” which had seemed to her young and
inexperienced eyes so very dreadful when she had first become acquainted
with them.
It is most likely that if she had married a small German Prince or
Potentate she would have put herself out of the way to please his
subjects. But she did not think the Russians worth her while. She
considered that they ought to feel themselves highly honored by the fact
that she had consented to come and reign over them, and in her own mind
she did not attach any more importance to the judgments they might be
inclined to bestow in regard to her person than she would have done to
the criticisms of the first beggar in the street. She arrived in her new
country despising it, together with its people, determined to ignore the
wishes it might have or the necessities it might require. She arrived
there prejudiced and bigoted, and so full of contempt for the land that
hailed her as its Queen that she did not admit the possibility of
treating it as one inhabited by human beings, but determined to apply to
it some of the methods used by the Germans in their treatment of their
Colonies.
For the opinion held by Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt in regard to Russia was
simply that it ought to be nothing else but a Colony of the vast German
Empire, and she felt more pride at the thought that she might reduce it
to this condition than at the idea that she had been chosen out of so
many other women to become the Empress of that Realm.
VII
WHAT THE IMPERIAL FAMILY THOUGHT ABOUT THE EMPRESS
It would not have been human on the part of the Imperial Family to like
the young wife of Nicholas II. in those early days which followed upon
her marriage. The feminine portion of it especially could have been
expected, before even the wedding of Alexandra Feodorowna had been
solemnized, to look upon her with eyes full of criticism and with the
desire to find fault with whatever she might say or do. Here she was, a
young, lovely girl, in the full bloom of her beauty, put into the place
of the first lady in the Realm, at a moment’s notice, before even she
had gone through that period of probation which falls as a general rule
to the lot of every Consort of a Sovereign when she is but the wife of
the Heir to the Throne. Had the haughty Imperial ladies, who for so many
years had ruled according to their fancies St. Petersburg society, found
themselves in presence of a Grand-Duchess Czarevna whom they would have
been able to advise, scold, or pet, according to their fancy, they
might have taken, from the height of their own unassailable positions, a
more indulgent view of her unavoidable mistakes. They would have thought
of her as of a young niece who owed them respect and submission, and
whom it was their duty to train according to the exigencies of Russian
etiquette. It must be remembered that Nicholas II. to the very day of
his accession had been treated by his family like a mere boy without any
importance. All of a sudden he found himself a Sovereign and, what was
even worse, his wife, the little Hessian Princess, upon whom everybody
had looked down with pity mixed with contempt, was the Empress of All
the Russias. This was more than the Romanoffs could endure, especially
when they remembered the cool, authoritative manner which the late Czar
Alexander III. had always adopted in regard to them, and when they
thought it might be possible his successor would imitate him in that
respect at least, if not in others.
They need not have been in any apprehension as to this last point.
Nicholas II., though he detested his uncles, yet stood in such awe of
them that he would never have dared assert himself in their presence,
far less contradict them. But the Empress had a different character, and
she very quickly realized that all her relatives were furious at the
fact of her being placed so far above them in rank and position. Fully
conscious as she was of that rank, she determined that she would use its
advantages to crush those in whom she saw but enemies, which in some
cases was not quite exact, because there were then still some persons
who, had she only appealed to them, would have responded to her call for
sympathy and put themselves at her disposal, if only out of the motive
that in rallying around her they were at the same time establishing
their own influence.