Written into a copy of Once a Grand Duke is a comment on its author, Alexander Michailovitch, by Lord Hardinge, the British diplomat: "Before I arrived in Paris for the Peace Conference [in 1919], the Grand Duke, having left his wife the Grand Duchess Xenia in the Crimea, applied to Lord Derby for permission to proceed to England. This Grand Duke, who had held a high post in the Russian Navy, had always been most hostile to Great Britain and had made no secret of his sentiments during the seven years I had spent in St. Petersburg, where I had known him well. He was leading quite publicly a disreputable life in Paris …………. In view of his persistence the King [George V] expressed the wish that, on my arrival in Paris, I should seek an interview with the Grand Duke and explain to him the impossibility of his coming to England at that juncture. This I did as soon as I got to Paris and the Grand

Duke received my explanations quite courteously." On the next page is a slightly different picture, Madame Prunier's memories of the five Russian Grand Dukes as pre-war patrons of her restaurant in Paris. "They always stayed at the Hotel Continental, which runs between the rue de Rivoli and the rue de Castiglione. They did not come to Paris to be quiet and a 'Grand Dukes' night out' became a byword for an evening's entertainment that went on till dawn and beyond …. Their last halt but one was almost always the Pré-Catalan restaurant and their last was invariably Prunier's. More often than not they would arrive before the Maison was open, at eight o'clock …. Their order was always the same, a dozen Burnham oysters each and as many bottles as were needed of the best vintage on the wine list of Heidsieck Monopole. Within a few minutes of their arrival the whole staff was impeccably dressed and the laughter and the toasts would go on till one of the party looked at his watch and suggested that perhaps it would be as well to turn in for an hour or two's sleep before beginning the revels anew."

Quotations relating to the Imperial Russians are, however, mainly sad. Lord Hardinge of Penshurst was at a dance on the yacht Standardt when the Russians and their English cousins were together on board. "I happened to wander round the other side of the deck," he reports. "I heard sobs and found the Empress sitting alone and weeping and on my offer to obtain help, she asked to be left alone." Princess Marie Radziwill wrote, on September 29th, 1909: "They say the Empress of Russia has become quite mad. The latest attack took place in Livadia some days ago. Specialists were promptly sent for from St. Petersburgh and there is a question of getting others from abroad, and whether they might have to shut her up." Axel Munthe, who accompanied the Swedish King and Queen to a rendezvous with the Tsar and Tsarina in Finland in 1913, reported that "the ceremonial did not prevent him from noticing almost at once that the Empress Alexandra needed meical attention far more than his own Royal patient, who was at that time tolerably well: the Empress was literally obsessed by fears of assassination."

Princess Victoria of Schleswig-Holstein told Sir Edward Cadogan years later that in 1912 George V had briefed her before a visit to Russia "to impress upon the rulers of Russis the peril of their situation unless they could be persuaded to enlist public opinion on their side. Her mission proved futile: she could make no headway against the Czarina's obscurantism." (quoted from Before the Deluge). An article on Mrs. Pankhurst, printed in a 1967 Guardian, reveals that, when that lady visited Russia in 1917 for talks with the Provisional Government, she had an invitation to tea with Nicholas and Alexandra, then under house arrest at Tsarskoe Selo. She had to turn it down for reasons of diplomacy. That would have been a tea worth attending. *Not so many years later Elizabeth Cerruti was shown round the children's rooms at Tsarskoe Selo, as she recounts in Ambassador's Wife : "It was heart-rending to see the clothes still hanging in the wardrobes, four different sets of dresses and their straw hats in boxes. This was the last of the rooms in that villa of memories and I thought I had surely seen the worst, but, as we passed a door leading to the garden, I saw a small wheel-chair upholstered in red velvet. It was easy to guess it had belonged to the unfortunate little Crown Prince and that in that throne of torment he had been wheeled out into the garden. On the velvet the contours of his small head and body could still be seen."

The Sunday Times of March 9th, 1980, attracted Miss Gray's attention with a paragraph about the enigmatic Moura Budberg who was married to Baron Budberg, the Tsar's Court Chamberlain. She was a favourite of the Empress and knew Rasputin, before befriending Kerensky and becoming the mistress of Maxim Gorky. She was later a personal friend of Stalin, but migrated and became a literary celebrity in Britain and secretary to H. G. Wells. I have long thought she merits an article in this magazine. Another cutting from the Daily Telegraph of November 3rd, 1981 reports the canonisation of Nicholas II and his family in New York by a Russian Orthodox sect there. This was denounced as 'schismatic' by the Orthodox branch loyal to the Moscow Patriarch. After the ceremony one Michael Goleniewski, one of those who claimed to be the Tsarevich, also denounced the canonisation, since it partly rested on the idea that he had died in 1918.

Count Potocki is quoted as thinking "the Empress Zita was too harshly judged. Highly intelligent, she inherited much of her family's taste for over-subtle diplomacy and its usual accompaniment, naivety of approach. No-one who knew her, however, could suspect her motives. She acted, as she conceived, in the best interests of Austria and she feared the consequences of a blind adherence to the German cause. In this matter history has vindicated her."

As late as 1971, according to another cutting from the Daily Telegraph, the Liberal MP David Bessell, described as "an amateur historian", could still tell that paper's Communist Correspondent that he "was now satisfied beyond all reasonable doubt that the last Tsar of Russia and his family were not assassinated in 1918 but escaped to a country of relative safety". He told The Times at the same time that the Tsarina died soon after the escape, the Tsar lived into the 1950s and none of the children married.

Our collector occasionally went overboard about some peripheral character. Prince Christopher of Greece, in his lightweight but readable Memoirs mentions Miss Gaby Deslys, whose photograph always attracted me in Mr. Macqueen-Pope's theatrical books. She was born in Marseilles in 1884 and alternated the stage with a series of very high profile lovers, before dying at the early age of 36. According to a cutting here from Helena Rubinstein, she died of a throat ailment which could have been cured by surgery, but she preferred death to scarring. "She showed as much of her bosom as was socially safe," Rubenstein adds. "She made a point of displaying her lovely legs, too, in the sheerest of lace stockings and she wore incredibly high heels studded with rhinestones." Amongst her lovers was King Manoel of Portugal, whose subjects disliked the liaison so much they virtually threw him out on her account. Shortly after their affair began, she began wearing fabulous strings of pearls and her press agent put it around that the King had given her these, despite the poverty in Portugal. She admitted afterwards that it was mere publicity and they came from a rich Argentinian. This enlightenment comes from Charles Graves in None But the Rich. There is also a note of a colourful description of her in Norman Hartnell's Silver and Gold and a story or two told of the Deslys-Manoel affair by Lady Houston which does not bear repeating in these pages.

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