The Last Tsar: Emperor Michael II Read Online Free PDF Page A

saying that it was far too big — ‘I don’t even have the furniture’, she told him. ‘To live on my own in an empty house is very depressing’. 7 Nevertheless she moved in, and tackled the business of turning the echoing apartment into a comfortable home, though it was one few would ever visit.
     
    Michael’s determination to be seen openly supporting her did not, however, greatly help matters, ‘for the whole of society turned its back on her as it had done before. To please the Court no one wanted either to recognise her or to receive her at their home.’ 8 St. Petersburg was always going to be a disaster for Michael and Natasha, which is why neither had wanted to be there. Moscow had been a different story, since that was Natasha’s home and she had family and a wide circle of supportive friends there; but she had never lived in St. Petersburg, and other than the few who stood by her, or rather stood by Michael, she knew almost no one.
     
    Unfortunately, everyone knew her. Eyes stared through her when she walked in the street, and even in the Chevalier Gardes, Michael’s own regiment, the officers shunned Natasha; none would ever dine in her apartment, and none ‘would bow to her’ if they encountered her in public. 9
     
    In the hope of making her life more tolerable, Michael decided to move her back to Gatchina, the town where they had met, and which he preferred anyway. He bought her a villa at 24 Nikolaevskaya Street, ‘a charming, simple, pleasant two-storeyed wood house, sunk in a verdant garden’, 10 but it was also an illusion of tranquillity. So long as the capital delighted in its slights and backbiting, there could be no hiding place in Gatchina, which took its lead from the capital and whose salons simply repeated what was being said there.
     
    Moreover, the Blue Cuirassiers, which dominated local society, had neither forgotten nor forgiven that she had been the price of their losing Grand Duke Michael and the favour of their colonel-in-chief the Dowager Empress. The rule in the regiment — and obeyed by officers’ wives no less — was that no one who encountered Natasha in the street or elsewhere should acknowledge her, or even utter her name, and one young lieutenant who broke that commandment, was drummed out of the regiment. The charge against him, a meeting of senior officers was told, was that he had appeared in a theatre box ‘among a small company which included a certain lady who is well known to you’. 11
     
    The Blue Cuirassiers also took their war against Natasha into the capital. Remembering the fate of that young cashiered lieutenant, a drunken Cuirassier went up to Natasha during the interval in another theatre, and loudly berated her for having ‘compromised’ the Grand Duke. 12 It was the worst kind of public scene, and Natasha, cheeks red, was left fighting back her tears.
     
    She could not go on like that, and neither, when he found out about it, could Michael. Absent on manoeuvres he wrote to her immediately, telling her that he had reached the end of the road. He had given his word not to marry Natasha, but the quid pro quo was that she should be treated with respect, as the woman he loved, and as the mother of his son. In his mind therefore the contract had been broken. He would marry her, because he had been given no other choice.
     
    ONE concession which had not been taken away from Michael was his right to go abroad with Natasha incognito . Nicholas had agreed to that in 1910, while insisting that Michael and Natasha did not appear together in public in Russia — for example, at a theatre. However, without telling his brother, Nicholas had ordered the secret police, the Okhrana, to trail them wherever they went, and to make sure that Michael did not sneak off and marry ‘that woman’. Alexandra was sure he would if he could; the Okhrana’s job was to make certain that even if he would, he couldn’t.
     
    The Okhrana chief, Major-General Aleksandr