was thinner and his eyes somewhat more protuberant, but both parted their hair in the middle and wore similar Van Dyke beards. Standing side by side, they looked like brothers and almost like twins. Several times during the ceremonies, the resemblance caused embarrassment. At a garden party, Nicholas was taken for George and warmly congratulated, while George was asked whether he had come to London only to attend the wedding or whether he had other business to transact. The day before the wedding, George, mistaken for Nicholas, was begged by one gentleman of the court not to be late for the ceremony.
After the wedding, Nicholas visited Windsor Castle and had lunch with Queen Victoria. “She was very friendly, talked a lot, and gave me the Order of the Garter,” he reported. He went to a ball at Buckingham Palace and, knowing his mother would be pleased, told her, “I danced a lot … but didn’t see many beautiful ladies.”
In St. Petersburg, meanwhile, little Kschessinska’s career as a dancer was gathering momentum. Already, at nineteen, she was dancing such roles as the Sugar Plum Fairy in Tchaikovsky’s
There were those, of course, who ascribed Mathilde’s early success primarily to her connection with the Tsarevich. Not that society regarded the liaison on either side with moral disdain. For the Russian aristocracy, ballet was a supreme art and the mingling of great titles and pretty ankles was a common thing. Many a deep-bosomed young dancer in the back row of the Imperial Ballet left the Maryinsky Theatre pulling her cloak about her shoulders, gathered her skirts and stepped into the plush velvet interior of a waiting coach to be whirled away to a private supper in one of the city’s elegant palaces.
Despite Mathilde’s success on the stage, the flame between her and Nicholas began to flicker. Nicholas had never hidden from Kschessinska his interest in Princess Alix. Early in 1894, he told Mathilde that he hoped to make Alix his fiancee. Later that year, Nicholas and Mathilde parted, saying goodbye at a highway rendezvous, she seated in her carriage, he astride a horse. When he rode away, she wept. For months, she went through “the terrible boundless suffering … of losing my Niki.” The great ballet master Marius Petipa consoled her by persuading her that suffering in love is necessary to art, especially to the great stage roles to which she aspired. “I was not alone in my grief and trouble.… The [younger] Grand Duke Serge … remained with me to console and protect me.” Serge bought her a
* Tolstoy had left the Church, and the excommunication was only a formal acknowledgment of this fact. Still, Pobedonostsev may have taken a personal satisfaction in expelling the great novelist. Since 1877, when Tolstoy completed
CHAPTER THREE
MY DREAM is some day to marry Alix H. I have loved her a long while and still deeper and stronger since 1889 when she spent six weeks in St. Petersburg. For a long time, I resisted my feeling that my dearest dream will come true.”
When Nicholas made this entry in his diary in 1892, he had not yet established his temporary little household with Kschessinska. He was discouraged about the prospects of his interest in Princess Alix. Russian society did not share Nicholas’s rapture for this German girl with red-gold hair. Alix had made a bad impression during her visits to her sister Grand Duchess Elizabeth in the Russian capital. Badly dressed, clumsy, an awkward dancer, atrocious French accent, a schoolgirl blush, too shy, too nervous, too arrogant—these were some of the unkind things St. Petersburg said about Alix of Hesse.
Society sniped openly at Princess Alix, safe in the knowledge that Tsar Alexander III and Empress Marie, both vigorously anti-German, had no intention of permitting a match with the Tsarevich. Although Princess Alix was his godchild, it was generally known that Alexander III was angling for a bigger catch for his son, someone like Princess Helene, the tall, dark-haired daughter of the Pretender to the throne of France, the Comte de Paris. Although a republic, France was Russia’s ally, and Alexander III suspected that a link between the Romanov dynasty and the deposed House of Bourbon would strengthen the alliance in the hearts of the French people.
But the approach to Helene did not please Nicholas. “Mama made a few allusions to Helene, daughter of the Comte de Paris,” he wrote in his diary. “I myself want to go in one direction and it is evident that Mama wants me to choose the other one.”
Helene also resisted. She was not at all willing to give up her Roman Catholicism for the Orthodox faith required of a future Russian empress. Frustrated, the Tsar next sent emissaries to Princess Margaret of Prussia. Nicholas flatly declared that he would rather become a monk than marry the plain and bony Margaret. Margaret spared him, however, by announcing that she, too, was unwilling to abandon Protestantism for Orthodoxy.
Through it all, Nicholas nurtured his hope that someday he would marry Alix. Before leaving for the Far East, he wrote in his diary, “Oh, Lord, how I want to go to Ilinskoe [Ella’s country house, where Alix was visiting] … otherwise if I do not see her now, I shall have to wait a whole year and that will be hard.” His parents continued to discourage his ardor. Alix, they said, would never change her religion in order to marry him. Nicholas asked permission only to see her and propose. If Alix were denied him, he stated, he would never marry.
As long as he was well, Alexander III ignored his son’s demands. In the winter of 1894, however, the Tsar caught influenza and began having trouble with his kidneys. As his vitality began to ebb alarmingly, Alexander began to consider how Russia would manage without him. Nothing could be done immediately about the Tsarevich’s lack of experience, but Alexander III decided that he could at least provide his heir with the stabilizing effect of marriage. As Princess Alix was the only girl whom Nicholas would even remotely consider, Alexander III and Marie reluctantly agreed that he should be allowed to propose.
For Nicholas, it was a great personal victory. For the first time in his life he had overcome every obstacle, pushed aside all objections, defeated his overpowering father and had his way.
Alix Victoria Helena Louise Beatrice, Princess of Hesse-Darmstadt, was born on June 6, 1872, in the medieval city of Darmstadt a few miles from the river Rhine. She was named Alix after her mother, Princess Alice of England, the third of Queen Victoria’s nine children. “Alix” was the nearest euphonic rendering of “Alice” in German. “They murder my name here, Aliice they pronounce it,” her mother said.
Princess Alix was born “a sweet, merry little person, always laughing and a dimple in one cheek,” her mother wrote to Queen Victoria. When she was christened, with the future Tsar Alexander III and the future King Edward VII as godfathers, her mother already called her “Sunny.” “Sunny in pink was immensely admired,” Princess Alice reported to Windsor Castle.
If the emotional ties between England and the small grand duchy of Hesse-Darmstadt were strong, those between Hesse and Prussia, ruled by the House of Hohenzollern, were weak and embittered. Only two years before Alix’s birth, Hesse had been forcibly incorporated into the newly created German Empire. As recently as 1866, Hesse had sided with Austria in an unsuccessful war against Prussia. Alix’s father, Grand Duke Louis of Hesse, hated Prussia and the Hohenzollerns, and throughout her life Alix shared his bitterness.
Darmstadt itself was an old German city with narrow cobblestone streets and steeply roofed houses covered with ornamental fifteenth-century carvings. The palace of the Grand Duke stood in the middle of town, surrounded by a park filled with linden and chestnut trees. Inside, Victoria’s daughter had filled its rooms with mementoes of England. The drawing rooms were hung with portraits of Queen Victoria, Prince Albert and all the living English cousins. Sketches of English scenes and English palaces lined the walls of the bedchambers. An English governess, Mrs. Orchard, ruled the nursery. Mrs. Orchard was not one for frills. The children’s bedrooms were large and airy, but plainly furnished. Meals were simple; Alix grew up eating baked apples and rice puddings. Mrs. Orchard believed
