Читать книгу Behind the Veil at the Russian Court - Catherine Radziwill - Страница 9

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The two most prominent families during the reign of Alexander II. were those of Count Adlerberg and Count Schouvaloff. The former, of German origin, did not boast of many ancestors, but had for two generations enjoyed the confidence of their Sovereigns. Old Count Vladimir Adlerberg, who received the title from Nicholas I., was not only Minister of the Imperial Household, but a personal friend of that monarch. His son Alexander was educated with the Emperor’s sons, and in his turn was entrusted with the same post as his father had occupied, after the latter’s death. No one could have filled that delicate position with more tact, more intelligence, and more kindness than he did. Admirably educated, he possessed a perfect knowledge of the French and German languages, and it was he who generally had the task of composing the letters which Alexander II. had occasion to address to other Sovereigns on important political matters. It was said that Count Alexander Adlerberg knew more secrets, both State and private, than any other man in Russia, and his discretion was beyond all praise. No lips were ever more securely sealed than his, and no man ever had his talent to forget what he had heard or seen. For the whole quarter of a century that the reign of Alexander II. lasted, that friend of his youth never left him; and although during the last months of the Emperor’s life their relations became strained through the influence of the Princess Yourievsky, yet the Emperor would not dispense with the Count’s services, so well did he appreciate the fact that nowhere would he find such a devoted and true friend. How devoted, the world perhaps did not guess. It could not have imagined that an occasion would arise when Count Adlerberg, who was supposed to have acquired his great position owing to flattery, would through his affection for his Sovereign risk his position in telling him the truth in a matter most near to his heart. Yet so it befell. When, after the death of the Empress Marie Alexandrovna, Alexander decided to unite himself in marriage to his mistress the Princess Dolgorouky, he asked Count Adlerberg to be present at the ceremony. The old statesman refused, and earnestly begged Alexander II. to abandon the idea. The Emperor was greatly incensed, and for a time it was thought that the Minister’s position was shaken. He was urged by the entourage of the Tsar to give way, and as he could prevent nothing, at least to acquiesce to what was about to become an accomplished fact; but he remained firm in his resolution, declaring that his duty as Minister of the Imperial Household made it imperative for him to maintain the dignity of the Crown, and that he believed this was going to be compromised by the step which the Emperor was about to take.

Alexander II. was very vindictive, as all know, yet whatever he might have thought, he did not, save by a certain new reserve of manner, express his displeasure at Adlerberg’s conduct. Perhaps even the reasons which the latter had given to him against the marriage had some weight, for when his valet asked him what uniform he wanted to wear for the ceremony, he told him to put out plain evening clothes, which he never wore save when he was abroad, adding that as his marriage was a private affair, he wanted to give it a private appearance. This incident was very differently commented upon at the time, and some saw in it a desire to reassure Count Adlerberg as to the intentions of the Sovereign and his determination not to put the Crown of the Romanoffs on the head of the woman for whom he had so deeply offended his first wife and all her children. But the shrewd Minister well knew that such a resolution, if really taken, would not be kept, and, as a matter of fact, it was only the intervention of death that prevented the justification of his opinion.

Count Adlerberg had married a lady of considerable culture, and one who never used her great position except to do good. She was by birth a Mademoiselle Poltawtsoff, the sister of Madame Skobeleff, the mother of the famous general. Countess Adlerberg at one time kept open house, and her parties were quite a feature of the St. Petersburg winter season. She was a great lover of music, and generally all the famous singers that visited the northern capital were to be heard at her Tuesday receptions. These were brilliant and animated, attended by all the wealth, beauty and fashion of the city. Invitations to them were eagerly sought, and as eagerly accepted. The hostess had for everybody a pleasant smile and word, and no one could have believed that the day would come when the very people who crowded her lofty rooms would desert them and would forget the many kindnesses which they had accepted at those receptions.

So it was, however, for Count Adlerberg’s preferment lasted only as long as Alexander II. lived. His successor had always hated the Minister of the Imperial Household with a bitter hatred. Well informed people ascribed it to an incident in the life of the Grand Duke, in which the young Princess Mestchersky had played a part. This lady—who was maid of honour to the Empress—had inspired a violent passion in the Grand Duke, who at the time had no prospect of ever ascending the Throne, and he proposed to marry her. The death of his brother, however, with the change in his position that it entailed, put an end to all these plans. Count Adlerberg was the first one to represent to the Emperor the necessity for his eventual successor to make a match in conformity with his rank, and strongly urged the accomplishment of the last desire of the dead Tsarevitch, to see his brother united to the Princess Dagmar of Denmark, whom he had been about to marry himself when his illness intervened and made havoc of all his plans. The Count did more. He induced a very rich man, well known in society, M. Paul Demidoff, to marry the Princess Mestchersky, to whom he also explained the necessity for sacrificing herself for the welfare of Russia and of the Imperial Family. The young lady understood, and in spite of the entreaties of the Grand Duke Alexander, allowed herself to be united to Demidoff. She died in child-birth the next year, and the Heir to the Throne consented at length to be married to the Princess Dagmar, whom later on he was to love so tenderly; but he never forgave Count Adlerberg his intervention at the time, and his first care when he became Emperor was to dismiss the old servant of his father and grandfather. Moreover, he did this with the utmost brutality.

It was quite unnecessary to send a messenger ordering the Count to return at once all the documents of State which he had in his possession; or, worse insult still, to appoint a Commission to inquire into the financial state of the Privy Purse of the late Emperor, which the Count had administered. Those who advised Alexander III. to this course were only covered with confusion, for affairs were found to be in perfect order; indeed, the late Minister of the Imperial Household had effected economies amounting to 380 millions of roubles. But the news that such an inquiry was about to take place was sufficient excuse for all those who had spent their lives in the Adlerbergs’ house to turn their backs upon them and never again to visit them. The Count, who knew human nature better than most men, was not affected by this change, and no one could have borne himself with greater dignity.

He lived six years or so after leaving the political arena, yet he was never heard to utter one single word of complaint as to the treatment which he had received. When he died his body was barely cold when a legal functionary from the Emperor arrived to seal up all the papers of the former Minister, and his widow was hardly given the necessary time to remove herself from the house where she had lived since her marriage. Under a clause in the will of Alexander II., the Count had been given the right to use the house during his lifetime, and people were of opinion that this right might have been continued to his widow. It is certain that Alexander III. was neither just nor generous in his treatment of one of the foremost among the statesmen of his father’s reign, and of one whose devotion to his Imperial master had never been questioned.

The Countess Adlerberg resented the treatment bitterly, and allowed herself to make remarks about the ingratitude of Sovereigns in general, and of Alexander III. in particular. She tried to gather around her all the elements of opposition to the new regime, but this did not succeed. She was aunt to General Skobeleff and to the Duchess of Leuchtenberg, who was a great favourite with the new Empress, and she thought that these alliances would give her back some of the importance she had lost. When the “White General” was recalled to St. Petersburg after his Paris speech, the Countess went to meet him at the station with an immense bouquet of flowers, and thereby made herself ridiculous, and added to the resentment which was cherished against her in Court circles. It was her last public manifestation. Very soon after that her nephew died suddenly in Moscow, and after Skobeleff’s disappearance the name of the Countess Adlerberg disappeared also from the public ken. She was one of the Dames à Portrait of the Empress, and took her place at Court when it was necessary, but she soon left off doing even that, and at last settled in Tsarskoye Selo, near St. Petersburg, where she died in 1910, utterly forgotten by the world over which she had queened it for so long.

The Schouvaloffs also played an important part, and had considerable influence, during the reign of Alexander II.—influence which, in the case of Count Paul at least, continued under his successor. They were nobles belonging to the proudest in Russia, who had always ranked among favourites of the Sovereign. In the latter part of last century this old family was represented by two brothers, Count Paul and Count Peter Schouvaloff, who were among the most influential personages of the Empire. Count Paul married, in his early youth, a Princess Belosselsky, the sister of the celebrated Princess Lison Troubetzkoy—so well known in Paris during the first years of the Third Republic, when she passed for being the “Egeria” of M. Thiers. He followed a military career, and was in command of the Corps de la Garde when the Turkish War broke out. Against the wish of the Emperor, who would have liked him to stay in St. Petersburg, where his corps remained, Count Paul volunteered for a command at the front, where soon he obtained immense popularity and won great distinction. He was an extremely pleasant and cultured person, a man of the world, full of tact, and gifted with singular diplomatic instincts.

When relations between Russia and Germany became strained after the Berlin Congress, and the two Ambassadors who had been sent there, M. d’Oubril and M. Sabouroff, had failed to improve them, Prince Orloff was asked to leave Paris in order to try to mend matters. He was well known to Prince Bismarck, who had expressed the desire to see him appointed to the German Court; but Prince Orloff, when he reached Berlin, was already attacked with the illness, to which he succumbed a few months later, and the post was vacant once more.

It was felt on all sides that upon the judicious choice of a successor to Prince Orloff depended the continuation of good relations between the two countries. The old Emperor William expressed the wish that a general should be appointed. The difficulty was to find one. It was then that Alexander III., with his usual common sense, said: “Let us send Paul Andrieievitch; he is a real soldier and a thorough gentleman.”

This choice was entirely successful, and Count Schouvaloff very soon made for himself quite an exceptional position in Berlin. He was a grand seigneur of that old school in which William I. had himself been brought up; he had tact, and he knew how to hold his own, as well as maintain the dignity of his Court and of his country. During the long years that he remained in Germany he made for himself many friends, and managed to come with honour out of many a difficult situation. He was generally respected and liked in all circles, military as well as diplomatic, and when he was recalled and appointed Governor-General of Warsaw and the Polish provinces there was general regret at the departure of Count and Countess Schouvaloff.

The latter, a Mademoiselle Komaroff, whom the Count had married as his second wife, is still alive, and Mistress of the Household of the widowed Grand Duchess Vladimir. As for the Count, very soon after his appointment in Warsaw he was struck with apoplexy, and thenceforward dragged out a sad existence, incapable of moving, and yet retaining all the clearness of his intelligence and all the vivacity of his mind. He died one year later, and was generally mourned as one of the last gentlemen of that apparently bygone time, when gentlemanly deportment was considered before everything else to be indispensable.

His eldest son, who had married a daughter of Count Worontzoff Dachkoff, the present Viceroy of the Caucasian provinces, fell a victim to the Nihilist movement, being murdered in Moscow, where he held the position of Governor. He was a charming young man, who promised to follow in his father’s footsteps, and his tragic end created a great sensation at the time.

Very much like his brother in appearance, and yet totally different in disposition, was Count Peter Andrieievitch Schouvaloff, whose career was even more brilliant. He was a very superior man, more of a statesman than Count Paul, and with larger views, a keener sense of the importance of events, and with more independent opinions. He had, moreover, a quality very rare in Russia, that of not hesitating to take the responsibility for his actions, and of caring nothing for the judgment passed upon them by the public. He had been for years at the head of the famous Third Section, or secret police of the Empire, and it so happened that during his administration of that department the Nihilist troubles began. Actually he had been accused of having caused them by his extreme severity and acute sense of autocracy. I do not think that this accusation was a just one. If Schouvaloff kept the flag of absolutism aloft in Russia it was because he sincerely believed that it was the only way to prevent all the forces, known or unknown, which the reforms of Alexander II. had let loose from bursting out in an unreasoned, wild revolt against Society in general. In his difficult position he had shown admirable tact, and on several occasions had been an efficacious intermediary between the Throne and the people. Many a delicate affair had been confided to him, and many a social scandal had been avoided or hushed up through his intervention, which had ever been tactful and wise. But when a wave of Liberal ideas apparently swept away the remnants that were left of common sense in the entourage of Alexander II., the days of Count Peter Schouvaloff became numbered. The Emperor had to yield to the public feeling that would have it that the Count had served his day and epoch, and that his removal from the post of head of the Third Section was a necessity. But as it was out of the question to deprive the State of the services of so useful a man, he was appointed Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, where a Russian Princess, the Grand Duchess Marie Alexandrovna, the only daughter of the Emperor, was about to take her place as the wife of the second son of Queen Victoria.

This was the turning point in Count Schouvaloff’s career. After he left England he filled the place of second Russian plenipotentiary at the Congress of Berlin, and then disappeared altogether from the political arena. He had allowed himself to be outwitted by Lord Beaconsfield upon the question of Cyprus, and in the opinion of the Russian public, as well as of the Russian press, had not upheld sufficiently Russian interests during the Congress. He was made by an unjust public the scapegoat for all the mistakes of others, which he could neither foresee nor repair. Gifted with an exceedingly keen perception, he had realised that Russia had not the means whereby to retain the advantages of the war; and when he yielded to the necessities of the situation, it was with the knowledge that this would not be forgiven to him, but as a real patriot he had the moral strength to accept the responsibility for evils which he had not personally brought about.

His position in Berlin had been most painful and difficult. He was, as it were, between two fires. On the one hand he had to fight against the quiet but firm determination of Lord Beaconsfield, who would have gone to war rather than allow Russia to occupy Bulgaria and annex that province, and, on the other, he had to follow the instructions of Prince Gortschakov, whose extreme vanity blinded him to the difficulties of the situation. No one knew better than Count Peter Schouvaloff the state of public opinion in Russia; no one understood more thoroughly that after he had signed his name at the foot of the Berlin Treaty, he would never more be called upon to serve his country, but would end his days in an undeserved ostracism. Yet he did not hesitate, and courageously assumed the responsibility of an act that no one deplored more thoroughly than he did himself.

After his return to Russia he lived in St. Petersburg, and there continued to see his numerous friends, but never again took part in public life. Even when he died attacks against him did not cease, and I never remember more bitter criticisms uttered over a newly opened grave than those that were showered upon him.

It would be difficult to find a pleasanter man socially than was Count Peter Schouvaloff; not only was he liked by all those who had the privilege of his acquaintance, but he had many successes with women, who were quickly won by his chivalrous manner and the courtly grace with which he approached them. He had married a widow, the Countess Orloff Denissoff, but the marriage did not turn out so successfully as the courtship that preceded it, and the Count and Countess lived as much apart as might be without a formal separation. Physically, Count Peter Schouvaloff was extremely handsome; he had most aristocratic features and a wonderful bearing. I shall never forget him during the Berlin Congress, when he certainly was the most picturesque figure there, with his allures de grand seigneur, and a certain regality of manner that made everyone step aside to allow him to pass whenever he entered a room. Altogether, though I have met more intelligent men than Count Schouvaloff in the course of my life, I have not seen a more remarkable one.