CHAPTER 1La Tournée des Grands Ducs


In Paris during the summer of 1900, there was no more select place for Le Tout-Paris (a popular expression referring to those in fashionable French high society) to be than the Hôtel Ritz on place Vendôme, where they could be seen taking afternoon tea amid the elegant statues, urns, and fountains of its shady gardens. During a season when Paris was packed with tourists for the Exposition Universelle and the Second Olympiad, this quaint English tradition for “le five-o-clock,” as the French called it, was a magical ritual hour in the social round enjoyed by the superwealthy upper crust of Paris.

Afternoon tea at the Hôtel Ritz was also de rigueur for any well-heeled foreign visitor. In the Ritz garden you would see the best-dressed women in Paris in their fine gowns and enormous picture hats, presenting an image of “a large aviary full of multicolored birds.”1 The hats might obscure the view somewhat, but if you looked hard enough you would soon be sure to pick out a Russian grand duke or grand duchess, a prince or princess, a count or countess, among the chosen few. For the French-speaking Russian aristocracy, Paris for the last forty years or more had been a home away from home, a safe haven in winter from the bitter cold of the northern Russian climate and the rising threat of revolution that was increasingly targeting their class. So much so that by the beginning of the new twentieth century, Paris was fast becoming “the capital of Russia out of Russia”—for those with plenty of money.2

The Russian discovery of the French capital in fact goes back to the time of the modernizing tsar, Peter the Great, who made a visit to Paris in 1717 and fell in love with Versailles. He had favored all things French in the construction of his own “window on the West”—the Russian capital St. Petersburg. Catherine the Great—the wife of Peter’s grandson—and herself an avowed Francophile, was, during her reign from 1762 to 1796, the most vigorous promoter of Franco-Russian cultural links. She ordained that French be the official language at court and entered into an extensive correspondence with the writers Voltaire and Diderot. Her patronage of French arts and crafts was everywhere to be seen in her palaces in St. Petersburg and Tsarskoe Selo.

The beginning of the nineteenth century had brought a downturn in political relations between the two countries, with the French and Russians on opposing sides during the Napoleonic Wars, culminating in the ignominy for the French of Tsar Alexander I riding in triumph into Paris on March 31, 1814, after the rout of the Grande Armée from Russia. The two countries were at odds again during the Crimean War of 1853–56. But as relations recovered in the 1860s, the Russian aristocracy and moneyed classes returned to Paris in droves. Many made Paris their home, such as the writer Ivan Turgenev—familiar to Parisians since the mid-1850s in frenchified transliterated form as Tourgenieff. He had become an almost permanent resident in Paris after 1847, having left Russia in pursuit of his obsessive love for the married French opera singer Pauline Viardot. Turgenev lived for many years in an apartment in the same building as Viardot and her husband on the rue de Douai, till his death in 1883. So beloved was he by the French that he had by then become an unofficial cultural ambassador for Russia in Paris and a friend of some of its leading contemporary writers—Dumas, Zola, Maupassant, Flaubert, and George Sand.

The Exposition Universelle of 1867 brought a huge influx of twenty thousand Russian visitors into Paris. So many were now traveling to Paris on a regular basis that Tsar Alexander II donated 200,000 francs to help build a new and dedicated place of worship for them—the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, which opened on the rue Daru in the 8th arrondissement in 1861. After the disruptions in Europe caused by the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 and Russia’s estrangement from Germany and Austria-Hungary after the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78, the first seeds of a new golden age of rapprochement with France were sown. By then the French were showing an increasing interest in Russian literature and culture, thanks to their promotion in French journals by the diplomat and critic Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé.3 But during the reign of the authoritarian and straitlaced Alexander III, who came to the throne after his father’s assassination in 1881, reaction set in. For the pleasure-seeking Romanov grand dukes (including Alexander’s own brothers: Vladimir, Alexis, and Paul) the temptation to self-indulgence in the pleasure domes of Paris became even greater, along with trips to the luxurious hotels and casinos of Biarritz on the Atlantic coast and the French Riviera.4

In France expatriate Russians could now bask in the burgeoning Franco-Russian friendship, which reached its pinnacle with a series of political alliances in the 1890s, much to the annoyance of Kaiser Wilhelm, who had tried hard to drive a wedge between the two countries. This newfound relationship was sealed by the hugely popular five-day state visit of Tsar Nicholas II and his wife, Alexandra, along with their ten-month-old baby daughter, Olga, to Cherbourg and Paris in October 1896. The family had sailed to France from Scotland after a visit to Queen Victoria at Balmoral. According to the tsaritsa’s close personal friend Baroness Buxhoeveden, “The Russian Sovereigns, from the moment they set foot on French soil, were the objects of an unceasing ovation”; on entering Paris, their reception “became positively delirious.”5 Cries of “Vive le bébé et la nounou” greeted even little Olga and her nanny as they drove in an open carriage down a Champs-Élysées festooned with decorations and artificial blooms in the chestnut trees. During that hectic “Russian Week,” Paris’s population, then 2 million, swelled with 930,000 visitors. President Fauré accompanied Nicholas and Alexandra on a whistle-stop tour of the Paris Opera, the Louvre, and Notre Dame, the mint, and the Sèvres factory. Nicholas also laid the foundation stone of a bridge—Le Pont Alexandre III—in his father Alexander III’s honor.

Throughout the visit security was very tight, for the tsar was the number one target of Russian revolutionaries and anarchists. There was no time for a shopping walkabout as Alexandra had hoped. But she and her husband were at least able to thrill, in splendid isolation, at the beauties of Versailles and be entertained in style at a sumptuous banquet followed by a theatrical performance from the French actress Sarah Bernhardt. Throughout the tour the Romanov couple’s every move was closely followed and described in detail in the French press; Alexandra’s fashion sense and beauty were widely commended. Everything Russian or pseudo-Russian was snapped up in the shops: commemorative china, “Le Tsar” soap, Russian flags and emblems, portraits of the Romanov family, Russian bear toys, and cabinet-card photographs of Nicholas, Alexandra, and baby Olga. A special Franco-Russian cheese was created; Russian-style clothes were labeled as a “Gift from the Tsars.”6 In the wake of the imperial visit, “Paris went joyously Rooski” as one contemporary observed.7 The French birth registrars were soon recording increasing numbers of little Ivans, Dimitris, Olgas, and Serges.

Of all the expatriate Russians who haunted Paris during the season at this time, none reveled more in all that the capital had to offer than the colorful, if not notorious, Russian grand dukes. Such had been their predilection, since the 1860s, for visiting under cover of darkness all that the Parisian underworld of eroticism, not to say vice, had to offer that the concept of La Tournée des Grands Ducs (The Grand Dukes’ Tour) had become a feature of the off-the-map Paris tourist trail. The tour—taken after midnight, when the theaters turned out—provided paying customers with the frisson of experiencing the red-light district’s fashionable brothels; the gambling dens and bars of Belville, Montmartre, and Les Halles; and the cabarets of La Butte. It became part of the Belle Époque mystique.8 There was even a novel on the subject, La Tournée des grands ducs: Moeurs parisiennes, published in 1901 by Jean-Louis Dubut de Laforest, a prolific French author and publisher of erotica who had been prosecuted for obscenity in 1885.

It is said that the catchphrase had originated with two particular Russian grand dukes—Vladimir and Alexis, sons of Tsar Alexander II—who had, since their youth, been regular visitors to Paris in search of its darker pleasures and the gourmet food that they both so enjoyed. Grand Duke Vladimir, Nicholas II’s most senior uncle (and, until the birth of the tsarevich in 1904, third in line to the throne), had been the focal point of an “avuncular oligarchy” that dominated court in the years up to the 1917 revolution.9 Darkly handsome, with his “immense height … piercing eyes and beetling brows,” Vladimir was the most powerful of the grand dukes. He was a most imposing if not frightening figure, as was his worldly and equally formidable German-born wife, Maria Pavlovna (originally, Marie of Mecklenburg-Schwerin).* Vladimir never quite came to terms with the fact that he was not emperor himself (though his wife certainly nurtured that hope for their sons after his death). If he couldn’t be tsar in Russia, then at least he could play the grand seigneur to the hilt during his regular biannual visits to Paris, traveling there from St. Petersburg via Berlin in his own lavishly upholstered wagon-lit complete with a full-size bed.10 Once installed at his favorite Hôtel Continental on rue Castiglione opposite the Tuileries, Vladimir would indulge his libidinous and sometimes violent behavior, his colossal appetite for gourmet food and wines, and his extravagant spending habit (a trait that rubbed off on his son Boris). His wife, “who only demanded of life that it should amuse her,” could, when she accompanied him, quietly feed her own passion for shopping and (when in Monte Carlo) a flutter on the gaming tables.11 It is hard to comprehend today the prodigious wealth Vladimir enjoyed, thanks to an income from the imperial treasury of $350,000 (equaling something like $10 million in 2022) that was further bolstered by his personal fortune, his lands, forests, and mines, as well as salaries from various military and other sinecures. It was indeed fair to say at the time that Vladimir’s wealth was equal to that “of several of the Great Powers.”12 At his 360-room palace in St. Petersburg, he kept volumes of recipes he had obtained from the best chefs in Russia, France, and Austria. He reputedly had the finest wine cellar in the city and thought nothing of ordering prime sturgeons from beyond the Urals and the best black caviar by the barrel. So well known was he in Paris as a hard drinker and gastronome that Vladimir was nicknamed “Le Grand Duc Bon Vivant” and you could find filet de sole Grand Duke Vladimir on most menus there.13

Even though Vladimir’s cupidity went before him, he was redeemed by his exemplary good taste. He was keenly intelligent and cultured, a man whose refinement thus raised him above the level of merely an “old buck about town.”14 He was extremely erudite—history and art being his passions—an amateur painter of some talent, and a collector of icons. In St. Petersburg he served from 1876 to his death as president of the Imperial Fine Arts Academy and enjoyed an extremely influential position in the art world. Russian money was always welcome in Paris and, as British ambassador’s daughter Meriel Buchanan recalled, Grand Duke Vladimir “did not merely engage in reckless extravagance” when in Paris, “but … spent many hours at museums and art galleries, collecting paintings and antiques.”15

The Russian aristocracy fitted in perfectly with Le Tout-Paris of the Belle Époque, which operated as one large private club with its own rules. The French press regularly titillated readers with stories of the vices and eccentricities of the grand dukes, particularly tales of their behavior at Maxim’s restaurant, “where everybody except the épouse légitime [legitimate spouse] went” for a rollicking night out. Here you could just as easily rub shoulders with “Prince Galitzine, Prince Karageorgevitch, Prince George of Greece, and, of course, Vladimir and his sons.”16 A tale was also told of a cousin of Vladimir’s, Grand Duke Sergey Mikhailovich, who was well known for gambling for high stakes in Cannes. At Maxim’s one evening, Grand Duke Sergey presented his mistress, Augustine de Lierre—one of Paris’s grandes cocottes (high-class prostitutes)—“with a 20-million franc necklace of pearls tastefully served on a platter of oysters.”17 Other grand dukes vied over the favors of her fellow courtesan, the Spanish dancer La Belle Otero, who on one occasion returned from a trip to St. Petersburg with a traveling case full of diamonds, emeralds, and rubies.

Grand Duke Vladimir was as lavish in his tips as his spending, even “adding a number of unmounted gems to the gold coin tossing” at Maxim’s on one occasion. As his cousin Grand Duke Alexander—better known as Sandro†—later recalled, Vladimir’s visits to Paris “meant a red-letter day for the chefs and maîtres-d’hotel of the Ville Lumière, where, after making a terrific row about the ‘inadequacy’ of the menus he would invariably finish the evening by putting a lavish tip in every hand capable of being stretched out.”18

By the late nineteenth century, so popular were the wealthy Russians in Paris that they were nicknamed “the Boyars.” At his famous cabaret in Montmartre, the singer Aristide Bruant would yell out “Here come the Cossacks” whenever the Russians descended for an evening’s carousing.19 On such occasions the Russian grand dukes tended to favor the private rooms—or cabinets particuliers—in which to enjoy the charms of French courtesans. But sometimes when the Boyars were out for a whirl, their behavior got out of hand: one particular count was “partial to making pincushion designs with a sharp-pronged fork on a woman’s bare bosom,” and a group of Russian officers “played an interesting little game with loaded revolvers. They’d turn off all the lights, then fire in every direction. The extent of the human damage was hushed up but the material damage was stupendous, and their equerries paid royally for the frolic.”20

Not all grand dukes came away unscathed, however. One such unnamed but very wealthy one had spent the night at a restaurant with a couple of ladies of the night, only to be overcome by tiredness. While their victim slumbered, his companions had helped themselves to all his personal possessions, including his clothes, leaving him only his white tie, which they tied round his neck before departing. When the maître d’hôtel went to the room a couple of hours later to check on his guest and present his bill, he discovered “a stark naked figure snoring heavily on the sofa.” On being aroused, the grand duke was presented with a bill for five hundred francs, but had no means of paying. The police were sent for and, wrapping the grand duke in a tablecloth, put him in a cab to take him to the police station. It took some persuasion for them to relent and take the grand duke instead to the Russian embassy.21

Another grand duke who was a regular patron of Paris nightlife was Vladimir’s bachelor brother Grand Duke Alexis,‡ who in 1897 had bought a luxurious apartment at 38 rue Gabriel on the Seine’s Right Bank. Good-looking, and fairer than Vladimir, Alexis was remembered by Queen Marie of Romania as “a type of the Vikings who would have made a perfect Lohengrin, as Wagner would have dreamed of him.”22 Tall, like all the Romanov grand dukes, Alexis was, however, heavily built and prone to being overweight, with a loud voice and larger-than-life manner to match his size. Like his brother Vladimir, he was an uninhibited pleasure-seeker. He made no bones about his love of wine, women, and carousing with gypsies, his unrepentant motto being “you must experience everything in life.”23 His cousin Sandro dubbed him “The Beau Brummell of the Imperial Family.”24 He certainly was the archetypal man-about-town; in fact, the burly Alexis bore no little resemblance to his hedonistic fellow royal, King Edward VII, who had also taken the sexual and culinary delights of Paris to his heart as Prince of Wales. Alexis was no intellectual or aesthete like his brother Vladimir, but rather a plain-speaking, good-natured navy man who could be an interminable bore on the subject of his glorious past days in sailing ships (equally, he would draw a veil over his incompetence as an admiral of the fleet during the naval battles of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05). As Sandro quipped, “His was a case of fast women and slow ships.” Alexis made frequent extravagant trips to Paris with Vladimir—so much so that it was a common joke in St. Petersburg that “the ladies of Paris cost Russia at least a battleship a year.”25 There was much gossip about money destined to fund the construction of new battleships and cruisers for the Imperial Navy making its way into Alexis’s pockets during his tenure as commander in chief of the Imperial Fleet—but he was not alone in his brazen siphoning off of money from the treasury; this was but one of many “gigantic swindles” that helped boost the revenues of the unscrupulous Russian grand dukes.26

Alexis’s comfortable life in Paris went some way in consoling him for the loss of the love of his life—Zina, Countess Beauharnais, who was married to his first cousin and friend, the Duke of Leuchtenberg—and with whom Alexis had conducted an unhappy ménage royal à trois.27 When Zina died of throat cancer, Alexis comforted himself for his loss with a string of actresses and dancers; on one occasion, he arrived at the legendary Moulin Rouge with his suite, surrounded by police protection agents, demanding whether any of the dancing girls could dance the “russkaya” (presumably he meant the Cossack dance the lezginka). His request was derided with howls of laughter by the clientele. Instead, the resident star dancer, La Goulue (immortalized in the paintings of Toulouse-Lautrec), danced a cancan for him, after which Alexis is said to have literally covered her body with banknotes. He invited her to a tête-à-tête dinner later at Maxim’s, where they ate Beluga caviar and celebrated the Franco-Russian alliance in style.28

Eventually, Alexis transferred his affections and his money to a French-Jewish actress, Elizabeth Balletta, who was popular with the French theater company in St. Petersburg. He lavished her with jewelry from elite Parisian establishments such as Cartier, thanks to his generous naval sinecure. But after Russia’s catastrophic naval defeats by the Japanese, the imperial court was outraged to see La Balletta parade a new diamond and ruby cross that had set Alexis back $22,600 (the equivalent of more than $700,000 now)—and promptly nicknamed it “The Pacific Fleet.” La Balletta had, they complained, “cost the Russian people more than the Battle of Tsushima”—a naval debacle that had forced Alexis’s resignation.29

* * *

During those final years of the Belle Époque, when Paris served the idle rich as a place to indulge themselves and be rejuvenated, it was a boom time for the luxury trades; for jewelers such as Boucheron, Chaumet, and especially Cartier, who could rival the best of Fabergé in St. Petersburg. The French couturier Charles Worth was a special favorite of the Russian grand duchesses, patronized for many years by the dowager empress Maria Feodorovna. Everywhere in Paris, the tills of the exclusive parfumiers, furriers, fine art dealers, and antiques emporiums rang to lavish amounts of Russian money. The Royal Suite at the Hôtel Ritz, with its empire-style decor “combining with the necessary pomp the maximum degree of comfort” was frequently used as a Paris headquarters by the Russians when they arrived on shopping trips.

Aside from Grand Dukes Vladimir and Alexis, Grand Duke Mikhail (Mikhailovich)§ visited regularly with his wife, the Countess Torby; Grand Duke Nikolay Nikolaevich came in 1900 and demanded guards be posted throughout the hotel for his protection. Thanks to him, the Ritz was turned into “a veritable royal fortress.”30 It regularly staged brilliant gatherings in its private reception rooms in honor of the visits Grand Duke Vladimir made with his wife. Head Chef Monsieur Gimon, who had previously worked at the Russian embassy in Madrid, was more than able to cater to the quirks of Russian taste in food and wine: “He could turn out such things as borscht, blinis, bitokes, and lobster aspics as masterfully as any chef at the Russian court.”31

From 1902, however, there was one Russian grand duke who rose to the fore in Paris and, with his wife, became the focus of expatriate Romanov Russia in Paris during the pre–World War I years. Grand Duke Paul Alexandrovich, the youngest of the four sons of Alexander II, was by far the most modest and democratic of the Russian grand dukes; his beautiful home at Boulogne-sur-Seine would become, thanks to the charm and social skills of his wife, Olga, Countess von Hohenfelsen, not just a magnet for the most cultured and influential on the French literary, musical, and political circuit but also effectively an “annex” to the Russian embassy in Paris.

Tall “like a column of marble,”32 slim and elegant in his uniform of commander of the Horse Guards—for he was a military man like his cousin Grand Duke Nikolay Nikolaevich—Grand Duke Paul was quietly handsome with a neat but large bushy mustache and gentle brown eyes that stared out of an austere, oblong face. The eyes bore a hint of seriousness and melancholy that was inherited by his son Dmitri Pavlovich. While his older brothers had achieved a notoriety at home and abroad with their libidinous behavior, Paul was far more restrained and private; as Romanovs went, he seemed uncharacteristically “high-minded, upright and loyal.” He disliked self-indulgence and excess and had a reputation for being kind, polite, and dignified.33

Paul was, however, a sad figure for many years, having lost his young wife, Princess Alexandra of Greece, in 1891 after only three years of marriage, leaving him with two young children, Maria and Dmitri. He had remained utterly inconsolable until he met and fell in love with a notable beauty at the Russian court—Olga von Pistohlkors. But she was already married—to a captain in the Horse Guards—and had three surviving children by him. Paul and Olga’s subsequent affair resulted in an illegitimate son, Vladimir, born in 1897, and an enormous scandal at the Russian court. Despite the fact that Tsar Nicholas was deeply fond of Paul, he had had no option but to follow the strict protocols then in force, and immediately ordered the couple from court. Olga, herself a most forceful personality, urged Paul to save her from the disaster of social ostracization, and with his brother Vladimir’s help, he managed to persuade Nicholas II to agree to granting Olga a divorce. Nicholas did so on the understanding that Paul would not marry her. But shortly afterward, he had defied that order, left Russia secretly, and like Grand Duke Mikhail before him, contracted a morganatic marriage with Olga, in Livorno, Italy. Nicholas’s predictable response was the same as that for Mikhail. Paul was stripped of his military honors, his assets were confiscated, and in 1902 he was banished from Russia. Far worse than this was that Paul’s children by his first wife were placed under the guardianship of his brother Grand Duke Sergey and his wife Ella (the tsaritsa’s sister). Nicholas had been firm about setting an example; as he told his mother, “In the end I fear, a whole colony of members of the Russian Imperial Family will be established in Paris with their semi-legitimate and illegitimate wives.”34

By 1903, having spent some time in Italy, Paul and Olga decided to make a base for themselves in Paris. It was an opportune time, for Russophilia still ruled in the city in the wake of the Franco-Russian alliance. Anxious to protect his assets, and anticipating the outcome of their forbidden marriage, Paul had deposited money in foreign banks and is said to have fled Russia with two suitcases containing three million in gold rubles (the equivalent of thirty million dollars at the time).35 In St. Petersburg his wife might be a shamed woman, a persona non grata, but in Paris Olga would become the meteoric star of French high society. Initially, the couple lived in a grand apartment at 11 avenue d’Iéna, a lovely tree-lined avenue in the 16th arrondissement, where their daughters Irina and Nataliya were born in 1903 and 1905 and where they held their first salons and receptions. But in order to achieve their desired position in Paris society, there was a pressing need for Olga, denied the use of the title grand duchess, to acquire a title suitable to her new station in life. For her difficult position as the morganatic wife of a senior Romanov created all kinds of problems of protocol and precedence at official functions. Thanks to the Prince Regent of Bavaria, she was invested with the title Countess von Hohenfelsen in 1904. This more lowly title still did not solve all the precedence issues, however, and Olga’s status remained a subject about which Paul was highly sensitive.

Events in Russia in 1905 caused both Grand Duke Paul and Countess von Hohenfelsen a great deal of anxiety. The slaughter in January 1905 by Cossack troops of innocent and unarmed protesters on a peaceful protest march for better wages and living conditions had brought shame and ignominy on the Russian tsarist system—both at home and abroad. Paul and Olga were horrified by the events of what became known as Bloody Sunday. Over dinner at their apartment on rue d’Iéna with French diplomat Maurice Paléologue (a future ambassador to St. Petersburg from 1915 until the revolution), they spoke candidly of their fears for their home country. All three were privy to the intense political gossip then swirling around the salons in St. Petersburg and Paris and aware of German intrigues to try to force Russia into an alliance against Britain. Olga and Paul were both convinced that the protests in St. Petersburg would be the downfall of the old Russia: “Well! We’re lost aren’t we?” Paul told Paléologue. “You can see for yourself: within and without, everything’s crumbling.”36

The assassination by an anarchist of Paul’s brother Sergey in Moscow barely a month later seemed to him a clear act of retaliation, and it confirmed how dangerous life in Russia was becoming for the Romanov family. Nicholas II had immediately commanded that Paul return to Russia for Sergey’s state funeral. But he crossed the border from Germany alone; Olga was turned back as an “undesirable alien”—a fact much reported by the British and French press.37 Despite his refusal to make concessions to Paul’s morganatic wife, Nicholas, in a private meeting with Paul after the funeral, informed his uncle that he had pardoned him and that he himself could return to Russia whenever he chose. His state appanage—worth several million francs a year—and his honors would be restored to him. But Paul was not allowed to reclaim his children from his widowed sister-in-law Ella, and Olga was not welcome. The scandal of her adultery had found its fiercest critic in Nicholas’s highly moral wife Alexandra, who insisted that the countess should not be welcomed back at the Russian court for several more years.38

It was now painfully clear that Paul and Olga must make their home permanently in Paris; but they needed a far more imposing residence and initially looked for somewhere near Versailles. Finally, they found the perfect home at L’Hôtel Youssoupoff¶ at 2 avenue Victor Hugo, Boulogne-sur-Seine, in the 16th arrondissement.39 It had been built in 1860–61 for Princess Zinaida Naryshkina, widow of Prince Boris Yusupov, when she had remarried to Comte Charles de Chaveau and settled in Paris. When the princess died in 1893, Prince Nikolay Yusupov in St. Petersburg inherited the mansion, but it had been empty for more than ten years when Paul and Olga found it.40


Copyright © 2022 by Helen Rappaport