- Project Runeberg -  Diplomatic Reminiscences before and during the World War, 1911-1917 /
402

(1920) [MARC] Author: Anatolij Nekljudov - Tema: Russia, War
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39° A VISIT TO PETROGRAD [chap. xxi.

was in Paris in 1904 and 1905 ; their son, whom I had
watched growing up, now an officer in the Hussars of
the Guard, and resting at Tsarskoe after having been a
year in the trenches; one or two intimate friends of the
family; suddenly like a whirlwind in came the
Grand-Duchess Marie, ex-Princess William of Sweden, in her
nurse’s uniform ; she was as frank and simple in manner
as ever, and for a quarter of an hour she and I talked of
Stockholm, which at heart she still loved just as she had
been loved there.

When I learnt the horrible fate of the Grand-Duke
and his unfortunate morganatic son, I recalled vividly
that last luncheon-party at Tsarskoe; with it mingled
other memories—of Paris, Florence, Constantinople—
right back to those far-away days, so far away that they
seemed as a dream or as a tale that is told, when in
Moscow, in 1866, about a dozen of us small "boys used
to go on Sundays to share in the games of the little
Grand-Dukes Serge and Paul; days of real fun and wild
pranks in the big park and the fine suburban palace of
Neskutchnoye, under the strict supervision of the old
mentor of the Grand-Dukes, Khrenoff, formerly a
noncommissioned officer of the Guards, who never let us
out of his sight and whom we all adored. The
Grand-Duke Paul was then a very attractive child of seven
years of age, with pink cheeks, lively but always good ;
who could have foreseen for him that ghastly end,
preceded by the most terrible privations and the vilest
cruelty ?

But I must return to Tsarskoe. At two o’clock I
went to see the Empress Alexandra, who, in my honour,
had discarded her usual sister’s uniform and donned her
smartest clothes : it was quite the Empress receiving
her Minister Plenipotentiary. I had not been near Her
Majesty since February, 1911, when, beautiful, charming
and good tempered, she had received me and my wife
and eldest daughter in that same bright drawing-room
filled with flowers. I found the Empress changed. She
had a deep vertical wrinkle between her eyebrows which

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