[Illustration: THE CZAREVITCH IN THE PARK OF TSARSKOÏE-SELO.
[Illustration: THE FOUR GRAND-DUCHESSES. (CRIMEA, 1909.)
(From left to right: Anastasie, Tatiana, Marie, Olga).
October, 1905, which summoned the Duma. The Czarina was sitting in a low chair near the window. She struck me instantly as absent-minded and preoccupied. In spite of all she could do, her face betrayed her inward agitation. She made obvious efforts to concentrate her thoughts upon us, but soon relapsed into a melancholy reverie in which she was utterly lost. Her work slipped from her fingers to her lap. She had clasped her hands, and her gaze, following her thoughts, seemed lost and indifferent to the things about her.
I had made a practice, when the lesson was over, of shutting my book and waiting until the Czarina rose as a signal for me to retire. This time, notwithstanding the silence which followed the end of the lesson, she was so lost in thought that she did not move. The minutes passed and the children fidgeted. I opened my book again and went on reading. Not for a quarter of an hour, when one of the Grand-Duchesses went up to her mother, did she realise the time.
After a few months the Czarina appointed one of her ladies-in-waiting, Princess Obolensky, to take her place during my lessons. She thus marked the end of the kind of trial to which I had been subjected. I must admit the change was a relief. I was far more at my ease in Princess Obolensky’s presence, and besides, she gave me devoted help. Yet of those first months I have preserved a vivid recollection of the great interest which the Czarina, a mother with a high sense of duty, took in the education and training of her children. Instead of the cold and haughty Empress of which I had heard so much, I had been amazed to find myself in the presence of a woman wholly devoted to her maternal obligations.
It was then, too, that I learned to realise by certain signs that the reserve which so many people had taken as an affront and had made her so many enemies was rather the effect of a natural timidity, as it were--a mask covering her sensitiveness.
I will give one detail which illustrates the Czarina’s anxious interest in the upbringing of her children and the importance she attached to their showing respect for their teachers by observing that sense of decorum which is the first element of politeness. While she was present at my lessons, when I entered the room I always found the books and notebooks piled neatly in my pupils’ places at the table, and I was never kept waiting a moment. It was the same afterwards. In due course my first pupils, Olga and Tatiana, were joined by Marie, in 1907, and Anastasie, in 1909, as soon as these two younger daughters had reached their ninth year.[2]