The Romanov Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra(17)

At the end of May Nicholas and Alexandra decamped to Peterhof to await the arrival of their second child, which came on 29 May 1897, with Ott and Günst once more in attendance. The labour was less protracted this time, and the baby was smaller too, at 8? lb (3.9 kg) although forceps were once more needed.78 But it was another girl. They called her Tatiana. She was exceptionally pretty, with dark curly hair and large eyes, and she was the image of her mother.

It is said that when Alexandra came round from the chloroform administered during delivery, and saw the looks on the ‘anxious and troubled faces’ around her, she ‘burst into loud hysterics’. ‘My God, it is again a daughter,’ she was heard to cry. ‘What will the nation say, what will the nation say?’79

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chapter Three


MY GOD! WHAT A DISAPPOINTMENT!

. . . A FOURTH GIRL!

N

On 10 June 1897 (NS) Queen Victoria sent a trenchant note to her daughter, Princess Beatrice: ‘Alicky has got a 2nd daughter which I fully expected.’1 While the queen may have been gifted with the art of prophecy, Nicholas accepted the arrival of a second daughter with quiet equanimity. It was, he wrote, ‘the second bright, happy day in our family life . . . God blessed us with a little daughter – Tatiana’.2 His sister Xenia visited soon after: ‘I went in to see Alix, who was nursing the baby girl. She looks wonderful. The little one is so dear, and she and her mother are like as two peas in a pod!

She has a tiny mouth, so pretty.’

But elsewhere in the Russian imperial family a sense of gloom prevailed; ‘everyone was very disappointed as they had been hoping for a son’, admitted Grand Duke Konstantin. From the Caucasus, where he was taking the cure for his tuberculosis, Nicholas’s brother Georgiy telegraphed to say that he was disappointed not to have a nephew to relieve him of his duties as tsarevich: ‘I was already preparing to go into retirement, but it was not to be.’3

‘The joys of the Czar have been increased, but scarcely with satisfaction’, observed one British paper in response to the news.

‘The Czarina has yesterday presented his Imperial Majesty with a second daughter, which, to a monarch praying for a son and heir, is not comforting. Little wonder if the Court party is shaking its head, and the hopes of the Grand Dukes are rising.’4 While Nicholas





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MY GOD! WHAT A DISAPPOINTMENT! . . .

showed no public signs of disappointment, a few days later the Boston Daily Globe reported that the tsar was ‘taking it very hard that he had yet again been denied a male heir’, and stated – totally erroneously – that he was ‘sunk in melancholia’. Meanwhile, it was claimed that the ambitious Maria Pavlovna, wife of Grand Duke Vladimir – and herself the mother of three boys – ‘had consulted a gypsy fortune teller, who had predicted that one of her sons would sit on the throne of Russia’.5

It is little wonder that Nicholas and Alexandra detached themselves from such insidious gossip and kept well out of sight at Tsarskoe Selo. Alexandra was exhausted, though she recovered from this pregnancy rather quicker than the first. Now that she had two children to mother, the focal point of family life at the Alexander Palace increasingly became her Meltzer-designed mauve boudoir, the room where she spent most of her day. In it, as her family grew, Alexandra accumulated an eclectic mix of sentimental objects, and aside from occasional redecoration, nothing in the room would be altered in the twenty-one years that followed.

Two high windows looked east, out on to the Alexander Park and the lakes beyond. Within and close to the windows was a large wooden plant holder full of vases of freshly cut, heavily scented flowers – in particular the lilac Alexandra adored. In addition there were roses, orchids, freesias and lilies of the valley – many specially grown for Alexandra in the palace hothouses – and ferns, palms and aspidistras, and other flowers in abundance filling vases of Sèvres and other china placed around the room.

Simple white-painted lemonwood furniture, cream wood panelling and opalescent grey and mauve silk wall coverings and draped curtains were all carefully chosen to match the lilac hues of Alexandra’s upholstered chaise longue cum daybed with its lace cushions. This bed was concealed behind a wooden screen to keep away draughts. Further into the room were a white upright piano and a writing desk, and the tsaritsa’s personal library of favourite books. But always, too, a basket of toys and children’s games were at hand, for this is where the family would usually gravitate in the evenings.6





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FOUR SISTERS

In August of 1897, on a reciprocal visit to Russia in furtherance of the Franco-Russian alliance, President Faure was eager to see ‘La Grande Duchesse Olga’ once more. He took great delight in dandling her on his knee – far longer, it was said, than ‘arranged for by the Protocol’ – and he held baby Tatiana in his arms as well.7

The president brought with him an expensive gift of a Morocco leather trunk emblazoned with Olga’s initials and coat of arms, containing three exquisite French dolls.8 One of them had a ‘complete trousseau: dresses, lingerie, hats, slippers, the entire equipment of a dressing-table, all reproduced with remarkable art and fidelity’.9 She was dressed in blue surah silk trimmed with the finest Valenciennes lace and when a spring was pressed on her chest her waxen lips would open and say ‘ Bonjour ma chère, petite mama! As-tu bien dormi cette nuit? ’10