The Romanov Sisters (Four Sisters) (13 page)

even sent to ‘beat the forest and search every copse and thicket’ for undesirables. The chateau where Nicholas and Alexandra stayed was

searched ‘from garret to basement’ and plain clothes detectives

mingled with the staff.72

The imperial couple seemed clearly devoted, but there was an

air of unmistakable melancholy about Alexandra. At a public

reception Margaret Cassini, daughter of the Russian ambassador

to Washington, thought her withdrawn air very marked. She

looked luminous, as usual, dressed in white and wearing exquisite

jewels ‘mostly pearls and diamonds, from ears to waist’. But, as

Cassini could not help noticing, ‘she wears them without joy’.

The French found the sombre Russian empress hard to fathom:

‘Oh, la la!
Elle a une figure d’enterrement
,’
*
they complained. Her sadness, thought Cassini, was a reflection of her being ‘a mother

only of girls’. ‘Have you children?’ Alexandra would ask of ladies

presented to her at court, only for sadness to descend whenever

the lady in question replied as she curtsied, ‘A son, Your Majesty.’73

‘Nicholas would part with half his Empire in exchange for one

Imperial boy’, remarked the travel writer Burton Holmes that year,

wondering ‘Will one of the dear little duchesses some day ascend

the throne of Catherine the Great?’74

But privately the imperial couple had not given up hope. Barely

a month after Anastasia’s birth a new person was in evidence within

their inner circle at Peterhof and was being referred to by them as

‘our friend’. A certain ‘Maître Philippe’ – a fashionable French faith healer cum mystic – had arrived in Russia at the invitation of Grand Duke Petr and his wife Militza, and was staying with them at their

*

‘She looks like someone at a funeral.’

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home, Znamenka, not far from the Lower Dacha.75 It was there that

Nicholas and Alexandra – who had met Philippe briefly in March

– soon became locked into long evenings of earnest conversation

with this mysterious French visitor. In their desperation for a son

they were now turning to faith healing and the occult.

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In the Russian imperial family there was a custom, whereby all brides on the night before their wedding would go to St Petersburg’s Kazan

Cathedral to pray before the wonder-working icon of the Mother

of God. According to Russian superstition, failure to perform this

ritual would lead to infertility or the birth of only girls. When the tsaritsa had been told this before her wedding in 1894 – so the

gossip in St Petersburg went – she had refused to go, saying that

she had no intention of kowtowing to obsolete practices.1 For the

highly superstitious Russian peasantry it seemed clear, by 1901, that

‘the Empress was not beloved in heaven or she would have borne

a son’.2 God was angry.

Under such intense pressure, Alexandra was naturally susceptible

to the insidious influence of men such as Nizier Anthelme Philippe.3

His background was shadowy and medically dubious. The son of

peasant farmers from Savoy, he had been working in his uncle’s

butcher’s shop in Lyons, when at the age of thirteen he began

claiming extra-sensory powers. Aged twenty-three, and without

completing any formal medical training, he set himself up in prac-

tice without a licence, offering treatment with mysterious ‘psychic

fluids and astral forces’.4 In 1884 Philippe had presented a paper

‘Principles of Hygiene Applicable in Pregnancy, Childbirth and

Infancy’ in which he had claimed he could predict the sex of a child

and, even more outlandishly, that he could use his magnetic powers

to change its sex inside the womb.5 Philippe’s occult medicine was

geared to hypnosis sessions with patients and business prospered,

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despite his being fined several times for practising illegally; by the late 1890s his consulting rooms in Paris were besieged by fashionable French society. The Russian aristocracy too was becoming

interested in mysticism and the occult at this time; in the south of

France the Montenegrin princess, Militza, had solicited Philippe’s

help in treating her sick son Roman.6 So convinced were she and

her husband Grand Duke Petr of Philippe’s supposed miraculous

powers of healing, that they invited him to St Petersburg. On 26

March 1901 they introduced him to Nicholas and Alexandra. ‘This

evening we met the amazing Frenchman Mr Philippe’, Nicholas

recorded in his diary. ‘We talked with him for a long time.’7

Militza soon began badgering Nicholas to arrange for Philippe

to be allowed to practise in Russia, despite objections from the

medical establishment. A medical diploma was contrived for him,

under duress, from the Petersburg Military Medical Academy and

Philippe was given the rank of State Councillor and the uniform of

an imperial military doctor, complete with gold epaulettes. Close

relatives – including Xenia, Maria Feodorovna and Ella – were

alarmed and warned Nicholas and Alexandra to stay well away from

Philippe, but all attempts to discredit him in their eyes failed. Even a report on his dubious practices, sent to Nicholas by the Okhrana

in Paris with the connivance of Maria Feodorovna, had no effect;

Nicholas promptly dismissed the agent who had prepared it.8

Convinced that at last they had found a sympathetic ear, the

couple hung on Maître Philippe’s words of pseudo-mystical wisdom

at every opportunity. When he returned on a twelve-day visit in

July they went to see him daily, making the short drive from the

Lower Dacha to Znamenka, and often staying late into the night.

‘We were deeply moved listening to him’, wrote Nicholas; ‘what

wonderful hours’ they spent with their friend.9 They even cut short

a visit to the theatre on the 14th to go straight to Znamenka and

sit talking to Philippe until 2.30 in the morning. The evening before Philippe left they all sat and prayed together and said goodbye with

heavy hearts. During their brief visit to Compiègne Nicholas and

Alexandra contrived to see Philippe again, and snatched another

meeting with him when he returned to Znamenka in November.

Beyond this inner sanctum, Nicholas and Alexandra’s association

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with Philippe was a closely guarded secret, though rumour at the

time was rife. It was alleged that Philippe ‘carried out experiments

in hypnotism, prophecy, incarnation and necromancy’ in the im perial

couple’s presence and that utilizing his own particular combination

of ‘hermetic medicine, astronomy and psychurgy’ he had claimed

to direct ‘the evolution of the embryonic phenomena’.10 Psychobabble

or not, during his visit in July Philippe had won the confidence of

the empress and penetrated her intensely private world; after his

departure he continued to offer advice to the imperial couple on

achieving the birth of an heir, as well as overtly political prognos-

tications, advising that Nicholas should never grant a constitution,

‘as that would be the ruin of Russia’.11

By the end of 1901, and within five months of giving birth to

Anastasia, the tsaritsa had once more fallen pregnant. It seemed a

total vindication of Philippe’s prayers and powers of autosuggestion.

They kept the news of the pregnancy from their family as long as

they could, but by the spring of 1902, it was clear that the tsaritsa was getting fatter and had stopped wearing a corset. Xenia, who by

now was also pregnant – for a sixth time – did not find out for

certain until April, when Alexandra wrote to her, admitting that

‘now it begins to be difficult to hide. Don’t write to Motherdear

[the dowager empress], as I want to tell it to her when she returns

next week. I feel so well, thank God; in August! – My broad waist

all winter must have struck you.’12

Philippe spent four days in St Petersburg in March of 1902,

staying with Militza’s sister Stana – another devoted acolyte – and

her husband the Duke of Leuchtenburg, where once again Nicholas

and Alexandra visited. ‘We listened to him over supper and for the

rest of that evening until one a.m. We could have gone on listening

to him for ever’, Nicholas recalled.13 Philippe’s hold over Alexandra was such that he advised her not to allow any doctors to examine

her, even as her due date approached. But by the summer she was

showing worryingly little physical sign of what should have been an

advanced state of pregnancy. Nevertheless, in August manifestos

announcing the birth were made ready. When Dr Ott took up

residence at Peterhof for the delivery, he immediately realized some-

thing was wrong. It took considerable persuasion before Alexandra

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would agree to his examining her, upon which Ott immediately

announced that she was not pregnant.

Alexandra’s ‘phantom pregnancy’ provoked considerable conster-

nation in the imperial family: ‘From 8 August we have been waiting

every day for confirmation of the Empress’s pregnancy’, wrote Grand

Duke Konstantin. ‘Now we have suddenly learned that she is not

pregnant, indeed that there never was any pregnancy, and that the

symptoms that led to suppose it were in fact only anaemia! What

a disappointment for the Tsar and Tsarina! Poor things!’ A deeply

distressed Alexandra wrote to Elizaveta Naryshkina, who had been

anxiously awaiting news at her estate in the country: ‘Dear Friend,

do not come. There will be no christening – there is no child – there is nothing! It is a catastrophe!’14

Such had been the level of rumour that an official, face-saving

bulletin on the tsaritsa’s health was published by the court physicians Ott and Gustav Girsh on 21 August: ‘Several months ago there were

changes in the state of health of Her Imperial Highness the Empress

Alexandra Feodorovna, indicating a pregnancy. At the present time,

owing to a departure from the normal course of things, the preg-

nancy has resulted in a straightforward miscarriage, without any

complications.’15

Alexandra’s true condition had, however, been an unusual one

that was never made public. In a secret report submitted to Nicholas, Dr Girsh gave the precise details. Alexandra had last menstruated

on 1 November 1901 and had genuinely believed she was pregnant,

anticipating a birth at the beginning of the following August, even

though, approaching her due date, she had not significantly increased in size. Then on 16 August she had had a bleed. Ott and Günst had

been called in but Alexandra had refused to let them examine her;

on the evening of the 19th she experienced what seemed like early

labour pains and had another show of blood that continued till the

following morning. But when she got up to wash, she suffered a

discharge – of a spherical, fleshy mass the size of a walnut, which

when examined under the microscope by Ott was confirmed as a

dead fertilized egg in the fourth week of gestation. In his opinion

the tsaritsa had been suffering from a condition known as ‘Mole

Carnosum’ (hydatiform mole) – and the loss of blood had flushed

the egg out.16

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The news that the tsaritsa had ‘miscarried’, far from winning

sympathy for her among the Russian people, sadly had the reverse

effect. It sparked a wave of merciless vilification and all kinds of

outlandish rumour that the tsaritsa had given birth to some kind of

deformed child – a monster, ‘a freak with horns’. Such was official

paranoia about this that part of the libretto of Rimsky-Korsakov’s

opera
The Tale of Tsar Saltan
, referring to how ‘the tsaritsa gave birth in the night not to a son, nor a daughter, nor a dog, nor a frog but

– some kind of unknown wild creature’, was censored.17 As far as

the suspicious Russian people were concerned, the hand of God lay

heavy on their ill-fated sovereigns. The absence of a son was the

tsar’s punishment, many said, for the Khodynka tragedy of 1896,

when thousands had been trampled to death during a stampede at

the coronation festivities in Moscow.18

In England, the
Anglo-Russian
responded, albeit with a jaundiced eye, to the growing criticism being heaped on the unfortunate tsaritsa for failing to produce an heir, by striking a blow for a female Russian monarch:

Once again the Tsaritsa has disregarded the Salic law and disap-

pointed the sex-biased Russian populace, who even show dislike

amounting to hatred toward the gifted mother . . . yet a little

knowledge of natural law and of history would demonstrate that

‘a perfect woman nobly planned’ is ‘Nature’s Crown’, and a

female sovereign has often been the salvation of a people,

denoting their era of greatest material and social progress.19