This book has two clear trajectories: (a) the brief life and early death of Princess Charlotte, and (b) the birth, childhood, and reign of Queen Victoria until her first son was born, securing the throne. One would probably not have existed without the other, which is why these stories need to be told in tandem. It’s not a full biography of either woman, but it’s definitely everything you need to know to understand how and why the throne passed to Victoria.

As a super-quick recap, Princess Charlotte was the only daughter and heiress of King George IV. Because of his deep and abiding loathing for his wife, there was never any possibility of a sibling for Charlotte. She survived the trials and tribulations of childhood and grew up a strong-willed, tomboyish child starved for affection. Both of her parents used her in their epic battles with each other and with the royal family at large (her grandfather was King George III and her grandmother was Queen Charlotte, of Bridgerton fame).

It’s a miracle this kid grew up any kind of sane – but she did. And after refusing to marry her father’s choice of husband, the Prince of Orange, she drifted from fling to fling and finally settled on Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg. Handsome, grounded, and willing to move to England full-time, Leopold was just what Charlotte needed. His steadiness calmed her down, and his affection gave her confidence. She, in turn, charmed him, helped him loosen up, and gave him an identity and a purpose beyond an impoverished younger son. Until, that is, she died giving birth to their first child, who was stillborn.

Suddenly, with the only heiress to the throne gone, all Charlotte’s uncles raced to the altar and then the bedroom to try and provide a legitimate heir. Victoria’s father won that race, and the rest, as they say, is history. The Victoria section of the book goes into detail about how her mother, the Duchess of Kent, tried her hardest to keep Victoria’s public image squeaky clean – and to keep herself in the limelight as long as humanly possible. With, as you’d guess, the expected deleterious result to her relationship with her daughter. As with Charlotte, it’s a bit of a miracle this kid turned out sane, too. Luckily, her determination to do the right thing was stronger than her mother’s greed.

If you want a more complete story about the madness of King George and how it affected his family, read A Royal Experiment by Janice Hadlow. That book really sets the stage for this one – and both are incredibly readable. Princesses by Flora Fraser also covers a lot of the same territory, from the point of view of the aunts Charlotte loathes.

Should You Read It?

Yes. This is a fascinating look at first Charlotte and then young Victoria. I didn’t find much new information, but Williams’s telling felt full and complete.

Tidbits

• Princess Charlotte’s mother, Caroline of Brunswick, didn’t exactly kill it on the European marriage market. Years before, when Queen Charlotte heard that her brother – the Duke of Mecklenburg-Strelitz – was considering proposing to Caroline, she wrote to him and was like, nope, don’t do it, for the love of God, don’t do it. And he didn’t. But when the next prospective bridegroom was her own son, Charlotte kept her mouth shut since Caroline’s mom was also her sister-in-law. (16)
• Think your ex is petty? Prince George – later George IV – hated Caroline of Brunswick so much that he “removed chairs from her private dining room, saying he could not afford to pay for them, and took back the pearl bracelets he had given her on their wedding day, presenting them instead to his beloved Lady Jersey.” (24) What a dick.
• Williams’s description of the Prince of Orange cracked me up. “’Slender Billy,’ as the Prince of Orange was known by his fellow soldiers, had never cut much of a dash…He had returned to Holland in 1813 as crown prince, a short, skinny, and ugly youth with buck teeth and wispy blond hair, and a diffident and indecisive character.” (78)
• Charlotte had a crush on Emperor Alexander I of Russia. “My ears are very ugly, but I would give them both to persuade the Emperor to come to me to a ball, a supper, any entertainment that he would choose.” Except that when Charlotte saw him, he told her to marry the Prince of Orange. Facepalm. (87)
• Napoleon had declared Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg “the handsomest man who had ever entered his Palace of the Tuileries,” according to Williams. (89)
• Princess Mary (one of Charlotte’s many single aunts) had the hots for Leopold, too. Once Charlotte realized this, it made her more attracted to him.
• When Charlotte’s baby was born dead, Williams notes: “The infant was taken directly to St. George’s Chapel and not given any service, according to the principle that stillborn children had no soul and thus needed no prayers.” (138) This struck me as so sad.
• Tsar Alexander of Russia said he wanted to be a godparent to the Duke of Kent’s new baby, which traditionally meant the baby had to bear his name. That’s why Victoria’s real first name was Alexandrina. The parents had wanted to name her Victoire Georgiana Alexandrina Charlotte Augusta, but the Prince Regent (future George IV) was like, nope, don’t like it, you can’t use that. At the christening, he said the child’s name should be Alexandrina. He vetoed Kent’s suggestion of Elizabeth for a second name, and said they could use the mother’s name, but only if it didn’t come before the emperor’s. Hence…Alexandrina Victoria. (157-8)
• I chuckled at Princess Lieven’s comment after the Duke of Kent’s death, regarding the twice-widowed 32-year-old Duchess of Kent: “She kills all her husbands.” (163)
• Victoria is a girl after my own heart. Once, when the Duchess of Clarence (future Queen Adelaide) asked her what she wanted for her birthday, Victoria said she wanted the windows at Kensington Palace cleaned. I want my windows cleaned for my birthday, too. I feel seen. (172)

What’s It About?

This book is about the struggle for control of the city and fortress of Przemyśl in 1914-1915. Located near the border between present-day Poland and Ukraine, the city was home to permanent residents and garrison members who were a multi-lingual, multi-ethnic cross-sample of the Austro-Hungarian Empire: German Austrians, Hungarians, Jews, Croatians, Hungarians, Ukrainian-speaking Ruthenians, and more. Their struggle with the invading and besieging Russian army is fascinating. Without spoiling things, there was an initial battle, a siege, a takeover, and another takeover. Both sides committed atrocities based on racial lines, which is what most reviewers commented on as new information to them.

Watson did an absolutely amazing job of finding primary source material that highlighted more than the commanders – the pilots, the regular people, the nurses, the sex workers, the rank and file, and more. One thing I really enjoyed was the female perspective that cropped up in Watson’s chosen source material. Normally, in my head, I think of war books as “boy books” because there are almost never women in them. Watson solved that problem by choosing a good number of primary sources by or referring to women. Countess Ilka Künigl-Ehrenburg, Helena z Seifertów Jabłońska, Wanda Zakrewska, and Eva Anna Welles all produced primary sources Watson consulted. Can I just say how refreshing this is?

Should You Read It?

Maybe – it depends whether you fall asleep when reading about battles or battle strategy. There’s plenty of human detail in this book – and, surprisingly, female perspectives – but if military history leaves you cold, even Countess Ilka’s diary entries might not save it for you. And there aren’t nearly enough maps, so after awhile, I just kind of gave up on actually understanding the movements described and just tried to go with the flow of the story.

But if you’re interested in why in holy hell Austria-Hungary performed so poorly in the war, this book will give you a very detailed snapshot that explains everything.

Tidbits

• Austria-Hungary’s chief strategist, Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, had competing priorities. He should have had extra motivation not to suck because he was super afraid that the embarrassment and shame of losing the fortress would also lose the love of his married girlfriend, Gina. He wrote, “If I fail, then I shall also lose this woman; an appalling thought for me, for then I would have to withdraw into solitariness for the rest of my life.” (49)
• The Austro-Hungarian supply chain was…shitty. This resulted in the entire garrison receiving only 4,300 cloaks and 6,000 “calf-skin rucksacks” prior to the siege. What the hell were the men meant to do with rucksacks? Well, a division of Hungarian infantry figured out how to turn them into vests. That detail made me smile. (153)
• The first ever air strike against a civilian urban population? Yep, that happened in Przemyśl in December of 1914. Russians dropped 275 bombs on the city and its surrounding area. (155)
• Conrad launched an offensive to try and relieve the fortress on January 23, 1915. He sent 175,000 soldiers up and over the Carpathian Mountains – some as high as 2,600 feet. It was a freaking disaster. The Third Army lost 2/3 of its men in two weeks, half through frostbite or illness. One man who survived later said, “Religious souls visualize hell as a blazing inferno with burning embers and intense heat. The soldiers fighting in the Carpathian Mountains during that first winter of the war know otherwise.” (192)
• The original drop-dead date for running out of food during the siege was February 18. But by getting creative, the Austrian military lengthened that about a month longer. They cut rations, slaughtered and ate horses, and diluted flour with turnip, bran, or 20% birch wood. (*gulp*) (207)
• When the Russians took over the fortress after the Austrian surrender, they expelled all the Jewish residents. It was the “largest single forced removal of a community perpetrated by the Russian military on occupied soil.” Later, Austrian authorities estimated that 17,000 Jews were forced out of the town, fortress, and surrounding area. (258)

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What’s It About?

Long story short: This book covers two generations of Wernhers: Julius, the father, who was instrumental in developing gold and diamond mines in South Africa, and Harold, the son, who married Zia, Grand Duke Michael Mikhailovich’s daughter. Julius became incredibly wealthy, catapulting his wife and three sons into the British social hierarchy. His good works, philanthropy, and incredible business sense helped him earn the respect of his peers – although because most of his business partners were Jewish, he was assumed to be Jewish as well (he wasn’t). As with any stratospheric social or financial rise, the family wasn’t without its detractors, who nitpicked Julius’s wife for her extravagant fashions. Of Julius’s three sons, the youngest died in World War I, the oldest frittered away all his money, and the second (Harold) became his heir, inheriting the palatial estate of Luton Hoo.

Harold married Zia Torby, daughter of Grand Duke Michael Mikhailovich. It didn’t seem to be a love match on her part, although Harold would later write that he’d been in love with Zia since age 15. After the Russian Revolution, Zia’s parents were strapped for cash and there was family friend Harold, incredibly rich. Zia had other suitors, including the future King George II of Greece, but her family refused to consider that marriage. After Zia and Harold married, he did indeed have to support her family periodically. The couple’s relationship had its ups and downs, but they remained firmly committed to each other, their kids, and the life they built together. Some of the most amusing anecdotes in the whole book are of Zia as an old woman, imperious to the last, demanding her daughter go make Queen Elizabeth II hurry when she was late for dinner.

Should You Read It?

Yes, if you’re interested in any of the following: the history of South Africa, the diamond business, late Victorian industry, British horse racing, or Grand Duke Michael Mikhailovich, his wife, Sophie Countess of Torby, and their descendants. There’s also a fair amount about Harold Wernher’s contribution to D-Day and the floating harbor project. As you can see, the book covers a surprisingly diverse amount of subjects. And you won’t find a ton of gossip here – scandals are hinted at rather than explored in detail, with the exception of Derrick Wernher’s gambling/debt problems.

Tidbits

• In 1898, Julius was named one of the Life-Governors of De Beers. Yeah, that De Beers. (116)
• The author does get one thing wrong – he says Grand Duke Friedrich Franz III of Mecklenburg-Schwerin jumped out a window in Cannes to kill himself. Nope. It wasn’t a window, and it was never confirmed that he died by suicide. (205)
• When Julius Wernher died in 1912, his widow kept the letters of condolence from Princess Helena and Princess Louise (Queen Victoria’s daughters). Louise had sent Julius cornflowers while he was sick so they would remind him of where he grew up in Germany. Isn’t that sweet? (247)
• Countess Torby sold Queen Mary a diamond and sapphire necklace, which Mary later gave to her daughter (the Princess Royal) as a wedding present. It was believed to have belonged to Empress Elisabeth (although the author doesn’t specify which one – presumably Alexander I’s wife and not Peter the Great’s daughter). (282)
• According to Harold, it was his sister-in-law, Nada, who encouraged Princess Marina to marry Prince George (later Duke of Kent). (338)
• When Julius’s wife, then Lady Ludlow, died, she left Queen Mary several things from her vast collection of British porcelain. Mary returned the peacock and peahen to Harold, saying she was superstitious about them and hoped he wouldn’t be offended. (399)
• Grand Duke Michael had a number of eccentricities. He couldn’t stand the sound of rustling paper, and neither could Zia. She forbid the wrapping of Christmas presents and instead, called the family to her bedside on Christmas morning. Their presents were buried in the folds of her bedding. (431)

What’s It About?

This book is about the late 19^th century trend of rich American women marrying titled British men. In many cases, the men were in need of a cash infusion to save their ancestral estates. The so-called American “Dollar Princesses” had the cash they needed, and – often – mothers who were anxious to see their daughters get a title in return. As this book shows, the mothers often needed their daughters’ social success to create or boost their own.

Unfortunately, in most cases, these marriages were unhappy.

American society and British society functioned differently in terms of the expected role of women. In American society, women ran things while the men worked. In British society, the men ran politics, the government, and society at large while the women ran their husband’s house and not much else. American girls who’d grown up seeing their mothers in positions of social power and experiencing power themselves (over doting fathers and lovestruck suitors) found themselves with less freedom and power. No longer the belle of the ball or a cosseted daughter, these women often struggled to replicate the free and easy lifestyle they’d had in America.

Some of the people covered are:

• Alva Vanderbilt Belmont & Consuelo Vanderbilt, future Duchess of Marlborough
• Consuelo Yznaga, future Duchess of Manchester and Devonshire
• The three Jerome sisters (but especially Jennie, future Lady Randolph Churchill)
• May Goelet, future Duchess of Roxburgh
• Adèle Beach Grant, future Countess of Essex
• Anna Gould, future Countess de Castellane
• The “marrying Wilsons”: Grace, May, Belle, and Richard
• Cornelia Bradley-Martin, future Countess of Craven
• Minnie Stevens, future Lady Paget
• Virginia Bonynge, future Viscountess Deerhurst
• Maud Burke, the future Lady “Emerald” Cunard
• Tennessee Claflin, the future Viscountess of Monserrate

Caveat

In terms of organization, this book felt a little disjointed. I suspect it’s made up of chapters written at separate times for separate purposes cobbled together into a book. At times, information is repeated, which is what made me think some chapters might have been written as stand-alone articles intended for other publications. People are mentioned, dropped, then discussed again 50 or 75 pages later. Some people are only mentioned in the chapter devoted to them, such as Virginia Bonynge. Some chapters cover what it was like to live in the Gilded Age; others cover individual stories or themes. In general, the book follows a chronological timeline, but there’s lots of jumping around between people’s stories and general information about the period.

Should You Read It?

If you can get it from your library or buy the Kindle version ($3.99, as of this writing), yes. There are some great stories in here, like the chapter on Virginia Bonynge. I wish there were an entire book about Virginia’s family story – it’s worth the price of this book alone.

What’s It About?

This book tells a very scary story: how typhus resurfaced during Napoleon’s march into Russia, decimated his army, and contributed greatly to the failure of his campaign there. Typhus had been around for centuries, if not millennia, but was little understood. It cropped up when armies marched across countries and continents. It had appeared in the 15^th century, when Ferdinand and Isabella fought to force the Moors out of Spain. And it had cropped up again in the 16^th, when Francis I of France had tried to conquer Italy.

The disease produced similar symptoms in its victims: lethargy, fatigue, fever, and spots on the torso and legs (but not the face and hands). It not only affected soldiers on the move, but people in the countryside around them – the people who fed them, housed them, and nursed them. But germ theory was not common knowledge, so people believed this disease was spread by bad smells in the air, or just the air in general.

They didn’t know it was the common louse, jumping from victim to victim.

All they knew was that the disease was killing incredible numbers of the men of Napoleon’s Grande Armée. Of course, disease wasn’t the only thing killing them. Cold, hunger, thirst, and starvation took their tool, too. But this book’s argument is that typhus left those other factors in the dust.

Here are a few stats Talty provides on page 252:

• Between 550,000 and 600,000 French soldiers crossed the Niemen onto Russian territory.
• About 100,000 were captured.
• Total dead are estimated between 400,000 – 540,000, depending on the source.
• Less than 25% of those died fighting.

Of course, it’s not possible to show how many men died specifically from typhus, as opposed to hypothermia or starvation. But those numbers alone show how devastating this campaign was, and how important it is to take every factor into consideration when talking about why it failed.

Should You Read It?

Yes – I found this book fascinating and easy to read. It doesn’t have the detail of, say, Dominic Lieven’s book on the Russian campaign, but that’s not what its purpose is. You have to understand how the campaign unfolded to see how the disease took hold, so there’s enough information to understand how, where, and why the army moved where it did. Plus, it’s written for a general audience, so you don’t need to know anything about germ theory or Napoleonic warfare to enjoy the story.

What’s It About?

First things first - information about Maria Dorothea is hard to come by. Neither the Habsburgs nor the Württemberg family has any documents on her, according to the author. The archives of the former palatine of Hungary no longer exist. A couple of Hungarian-language biographies and some church archives/biographies had most of the information available on her. So needless to say, this is a short biography but it covers what it’s possible to know about her.

Born in 1797 in Carlsruhe, Silesia, Maria Dorothea married Palatine Joseph of Hungary, the brother of Emperor Franz II of Austria. As one of only two Protestants who married into the Habsburg family, she had a rough time of it. They didn’t trust her, and worried she would try to convert the Hungarians her husband governed in the emperor’s name. She did all she could to support the existing Protestants in Hungary, but knew better than to openly defy her husband’s family. Still, when he died, the emperor recalled her to Vienna, unwilling to let her stay in Hungary. She was too dangerous, they all thought. In reality, she was a devout and pious woman who wanted to help anyone who needed it. The move to Vienna nearly broke her heart – she loved Hungary and the Hungarians. She died unexpectedly while on a visit to Hungary in 1855 and is buried in Budapest.

Should You Read It?

If you (a) read German, and (b) are obsessively interested in the Habsburgs, Hungary, or the Württemberg royal family, then yes.

If not, this might be a little arcane for you.

Because of the lack of information on Maria Dorothea, some parts of this biography are thin. Other times, the author tells you something but doesn’t provide any evidence or support. For example, after Maria Dorothea moved to Vienna as a widow, he writes of Emperor Franz Josef: “The young, educated and upright monarch adored the Protestant woman. Even as a young man, he often visited the Augarten with his brother Maximilian, who later became Emperor of Mexico.” (117) Okay, that’s great, but how do we know this? Did Franz Josef write to her? Praise her to others? This is all we get, a tidbit in passing. I have no doubt it’s true – the author did a great deal of research just to get us this far. But I wish there was more backup or detail for statements like this.

Tidbits

• Her dad, Duke Louis Eugene of Württemberg, spent money like water. At one point, he was in debtors’ prison in Warsaw and his brother, the king of Wurttemberg, had to negotiate for his release. That brother, Friedrich I, and his sister Empress Maria Feodorovna of Russia, had to help him out with periodic cash payments. (15)
• Maria Dorothea’s sister Pauline married King Wilhelm I of Württemberg (her cousin).
• Maria Dorothea’s brother Alexander married Countess Claudine Rhedey morganatically – their children became the Counts and later Dukes of Teck (and, through Princess Mary of Teck, ancestors of Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain & Ireland).
• In 1819, she became the third wife of Archduke Joseph, the Palatine of Hungary (brother of Emperor Franz II, both nephews of Marie Antoinette). His two previous wives had died in childbirth. His second wife left him with a set of twins, Stephen and Hermine.
• None of Joseph’s 3 wives were Catholics. This did not make for smooth sailing in the Habsburg family. When he married Maria Dorothea (a staunch Protestant), Emperor Franz II is supposed to have said: “I would like to pray for the life of this woman myself, because if she dies, your fourth wife will surely be a Jewess.” (32)
• Maria Dorothea learned Hungarian and fell in love with her adopted country. She spent just about every dime she had on charity that benefited the people of Buda and/or Hungary.
• The court in Vienna talked a lot of smack about her because, apparently, she did super weird things like let her kids see her and talk to her whenever they wanted. Perish the thought.
• Her daughter Maria Henriette married King Leopold II of the Belgians. They had a disastrous marriage, which sucks considering how happy her parents’ marriage was and what a good childhood and upbringing she had.
• After the emperor forced her to move to Vienna as a widow, she had to resort to underhanded methods to stay in touch with Protestants in Hungary. Franz Josef’s mother pressured her to convert to Catholicism, but she refused. She slipped letters to her Protestant friends using go-betweens like a ship’s campaign, doctor, and chambermaid. (101)

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This book is a French-language biography of Empress Maria Feodorovna of Russia, born Sophia Dorothea of Württemberg. She married Catherine the Great’s son Paul as his second wife. Their early years of marriage were happy ones, with Maria giving Paul the emotional support and love he’d never gotten from his mother. Of their ten children, a whopping nine survived childhood. But as time passed, Paul’s mental state became problematic – worsening dramatically after he became tsar late in 1796. By 1798, his relationship with Maria Feodorovna had disintegrated almost completely; Maria lived in isolation and saw her husband for formal court-mandated events only. Why? Because courtier friends of Paul’s had convinced him that his wife and mistress were controlling him – and if there was one thing Paul absolutely couldn’t stand, it was being controlled by a woman.

But Paul did more than sabotage his personal relationships. He sabotaged his political ones, too, veering from an enemy of Napoleon to a friend, which really pissed off the British. With nutty plans in place to march across Asia to threaten the British in India, Paul seemed to be coming unhinged. Someone had to do something. And a group of conspirators finally did, murdering Paul in March of 1801 with the tacit approval of his son, now Tsar Alexander I. Of course, Alexander had insisted the conspirators merely dethrone his father, but…you know…shit happens.

No one knows what Alexander said to Maria Feodorovna the first time they saw each other after Paul’s murder. But from that day forward, Alexander deferred to her on anything that concerned family business. The near-universal conclusion was that his guilty conscience didn’t allow him to refuse his mother anything when it came to the aforementioned family business. He didn’t let her near politics, but she retained her iron control over court functions and protocol throughout Alexander’s reign, to the detriment of Alexander’s wife, the reigning empress. As dowager empress, she continued the work she’d been doing as reigning empress: running a slew of charities and schools. When Tsar Alexander died in late 1824, she was devastated. She died in 1828, having outlived five of her ten children.

So, other than a general Romanov fascination, why did I pay $93 for this book? Well, Maria Feodorovna was the grandmother of the six grand duchesses I hope to write about (Maria, Olga and Alexandra Nikolaevna and Maria, Elizaveta, and Ekaterina Mikhailovna). And although she died while they were all still quite young, she did so much to shape their parents, Nicholas and Michael. So I’ve been studying up on her as this grande dame of the family.

In many 19^th century sources, she’s lionized – an icon of generosity, so caring, so kind, a nurturing mother, a supportive and loving wife even when wronged, a submissive daughter-in-law, yadda yadda. In others…not so much. A handful of authors paint her as a petty, shallow, ambitious woman – yes, she did wonderful charity work, but that shouldn’t erase her significant character flaws, they imply. The truth, I believe, lies somewhere in the middle.

Since this book had a hefty page count (457), I was hoping it would shed more light on that complicated personality. It didn’t quite do that for me, but it’s still the most comprehensive source on her you can get (especially since Shumigorski’s Russian-language biography only covers up to 1796).

Caveats

Remember that page count of 457? Only 207 of them are the actual biography. The rest of the book contains snippets of Martin’s sources, printed from archives or reprinted from previously published sources. It was cool to see some of those archival sources – bits of letters, mostly – but at the same time, I wish I’d known the biography portion of the book was on the short side. It just didn’t have the depth that a full 400-page bio would have. It focuses heavily on her childhood and education in Étupes, charity work, and the palace of Pavlovsk, which reflected her taste in art, her European travels, and her overall aesthetic. I was really looking for something that focused on her relationship with her kids and her political career. But, at the end of the day, it’s still the most comprehensive resource you can find on her, which made it worth the hassle of finding.

Should You Read It?

If you read French, are Romanov-obsessed, and can get a hold of it, yes. If any of those things are not the case, probably skip this one.

Tidbits

• Some things about Maria Feodorovna’s life will forever remain a mystery. Why? Because her will asked her for her personal papers to be burnt, including her diary and her correspondence with her son, Tsar Alexander I.
• “Similarly, when Marie-Antoinette arrived in France in 1770 to marry the future Louis XVI, the Württemberg family, for reasons of protocol, refused to attend the ceremonies of her reception in Strasbourg: other princes would have taken precedence over them.” (34)
• Catherine the Great on Sophie Dorothea as a potential bride for her son: “She also has flaws, in particular having eleven siblings, but they are all minor…” (36)
• On changing her religion and her name to marry Grand Duke Paul: “As for the change of first name, she could have kept that of Sophia, which appears in the Orthodox calendar and which Catherine II also originally bore, but a long-lived tradition considered it harmful in the imperial family, because of the detestable memory left by the regent Sophie, sister of Peter the Great. The Empress chose for her new daughter-in-law the first name of Maria Féodorovna, under which she would henceforth be designated.” (50)
• Madame Campan, Marie Antoinette’s first chambermaid, had this to say about Maria Feodorovna as a young woman: “The Countess of the North, of a good size, very fat for her age, with the stiffness of the German bearing, educated and making it known perhaps with too much confidence, had not obtained in the first days the same success with the Queen [that Paul had with King Louis XVI].” (59)
• When Maria Feodorovna complained to Catherine the Great about a mistress of Paul’s: “The empress, in response, hands her daughter-in-law a mirror, reminds her that her rival is a ‘little monster,’ and advises her to have more confidence in herself.” (93)
• In 1807, she created the first school for deaf and non-verbal children in Russia, at her estate of Pavlovsk. (131)
• She funded many of her schools and charitable endeavors with a particular form of income: the sale of playing cards. She was granted a monopoly on this by her husband, Tsar Paul, in 1798. In 1819, her son Tsar Alexander I renewed this contract. (135)
• When the French army invaded Russia in 1812 and reached Moscow, Maria Feodorovna “gave in to fear, thinking above all of organizing a retreat in Finland for herself and for the students of her dear Institutes. Alexander called her back to calm: her flight would amplify the panic.” (171)

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What’s It About?

If you know anything about Marie-Thérèse, it is probably this: she is the sole survivor of her immediate family, who all perished during the French Revolution. Both of her parents, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, went to the guillotine. Her younger brother, Louis-Charles, died while imprisoned. Only Marie-Thérèse survived.

In 1795, the French government traded her to Austria, her mother’s country, in a prisoner swap. Her Austrian uncle, Emperor Franz II, was keen for her to marry his younger brother, Karl. You know, keep all that money, jewelry, and pro-royalist PR in the family. But Marie-Thérèse wasn’t having it.

Her French uncle, Louis XVIII (the Comte de Provence), told her that her parents had wanted her to marry her cousin, the Duc d’Angoulême. And Marie-Thérèse believed him, although it wasn’t true. It wasn’t that her parents hadn’t wanted the match; it was that the revolution had overtaken them before Marie-Thérèse was old enough to be married, so it obviously took a backseat until, well, forever. But Marie-Thérèse clung to the idea that that was what her beloved parents wanted her to do, and she refused to let Franz II strong-arm her into an Austrian marriage.

Finally, she got her way – Franz let her join Louis XVIII’s court in exile, where she married her cousin, Angouleme, son of the Comte d’Artois (her father’s youngest brother). This book then follows Marie-Thérèse and her Bourbon family through the turmoil of the Napoleonic years: exile, a peripatetic lifestyle, restoration in 1814, flight when Napoleon returned from Elba, and restoration again after Waterloo in 1815. One highlight of those years? When Napoleon returned, her uncle – Louis XVIII – fled instantly. You know who didn’t? Marie-Thérèse. She mustered troops in Bourgogne and made a valiant attempt to fight. It came to naught, but it earned her a nickname from Napoleon: “the only man in the family.”

I won’t spoil the rest of the story. If it seems like all the juicy stuff has already happened by this point, you’ve still got an assassination, a revolution, and blackmail coming your way. Suffice to say that Marie-Thérèse’s faith – in her god, in her country, and in her duty – are wondrous to behold. Parts of this book (about the family’s life during the revolution) are downright hard to read, because you imagine a teenage girl going through this and you can’t believe she turned out sane. It hardly seems possible. But neither does the so-called “switch” theory Nagel mentions. In short, contemporaries thought Marie-Thérèse might have switched places with someone either during her time in the Temple prison or on her way to Austria during the prisoner swap. Don’t fall for it. The number of people who commented on post-release Marie-Thérèse’s royal bearing, dignity, and carriage reminiscent of her mother are too numerous to discount.

Should You Read It?

Yes. It’s informative and enjoyable – with a few caveats.

• The presentation is a little biased, because Nagel clearly wants to present Marie-Thérèse’s side of things; her character flaws are downplayed, and her reactionary political beliefs are glossed over even as they stick out like a sore thumb in the decades after her return to France.
• Nagel lingers far too long on certain events, like the March on Versailles, which felt like it took forever to get through.
• We learn almost nothing about Marie-Thérèse’s husband: details about his feelings for her, what he did all day, what he believed about his uncle’s reign, if he looked forward to his reign, etc. He barely registers in this book, which felt odd to me.
• There were more mentions of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI being in Paris than I remembered from other biographies. My impression was that they were not there often. For example, Nagel notes after Marie Antoinette gives birth to Marie-Thérèse in 1779, “As she rode through the streets of Paris, ordinary citizens scowled at her not only for what they considered her disrespect for French tradition, but also because they perceived her to be insensitive to their hardships.” (27) That’s the point – exactly why she and Louis avoided Paris. And at about the same time, she writes that “it was widely discussed that the King visited Madame de Polignac at her townhouse and that hers was the only private house in Paris he visited since he had become King.” (30) Again, my memory could be totally out of whack, but I never got the sense from any other biographies that either one of them spent much time in Paris, outside of Marie Antoinette’s early days as dauphine when she went to costume balls incognito with Artois.

There are also a couple of odd assertions here that I don’t think I’ve seen in any other biographies of Marie Antoinette or Louis XVI. Nagel writes that Louis XVI had not one, but two illegitimate daughters: one with Marie Antoinette’s best friend, the Duchesse de Polignac, and one with a Versailles staff member, whom he slept with as an experiment to see if he could be at fault for the couple’s failure to conceive early in their marriage. YMMV, but neither of these ring true, like, AT ALL to me. Let’s set aside the fact that he was a devout Catholic who would have almost certainly shunned even the idea of adultery. Let’s set aside the fact that he loved Marie Antoinette. Even without those two things, Louis XVI never struck me as the type of guy to sleep with his wife’s best friend. And the whole experimenting-to-find-out-if-he’s-fertile thing seems pointless. He didn’t seem overly bothered by that possibility for, what, the first seven years of his marriage? And with two younger brothers, it wasn’t like the dynasty would die out if he didn’t have children, either. To me, he would have seen his fertility or lack thereof as God’s will.

Because there are no real footnotes in this book, we have no idea which sources made this claim. It’s frustrating, but I was so interested in Marie-Thérèse that I let it go as I read.

Tidbits

• One day, Marie-Thérèse’s little brother, Louis Charles, began to “boo” and “hiss.” When Marie Antoinette and a loyal servant, François Hüe, told him to stop, he said, “I did my lesson so badly that I’m booing myself.” Isn’t that the cutest thing? (41)
• I love this: “Reports from the borders tell of how chivalric Swiss men took pity on young women fleeing France and underwent marriages of convenience, thereby allowing the women to enter Switzerland with their escorts. In some cases, the ‘husbands’ were found to have married eighteen or twenty times.” (86)
• On the anniversary of the flight to Varennes, during an attack on the Tuileries, some of the people in the mob thought Madame Elisabeth, the king’s sister, was actually Marie Antoinette. “As the intruders lunged at the King’s sister, someone shouted that they had the wrong woman, to which Madame Elisabeth replied defiantly: ‘Do not undeceive them!’, declaring that she was willing to lay down her life for her sister-in-law.” (120)
• Marie-Thérèse and the Empress of Austria, Maria Theresa, disliked each other instantly. “Marie-Thérèse found her cold and believed that the Sicilian-born Princess thought herself superior to the daughter of the King of France, who ought to be grateful for her husband’s handouts.” (176) Yikes.
• Nagel notes that Archduke Karl “made it obvious to all that he too felt those sentiments [of affection] for his cousin. In fact, it appears that his appreciation had blossomed into romantic feelings for Marie-Thérèse.” (192) Would have been great to get a quote from him in a diary or letter to show this firsthand…
• Marie-Thérèse did not help Madame Ney, when she begged for Marie-Thérèse’s help to save her condemned husband. As a Napoleonic marshal, Ney was not someone she had an interest in helping or saving. However, after she read a book about Napoleon’s invasion of Russia that detailed Ney’s heroics in getting his soldiers out of Russia and across the Niemen, she said she had made a mistake. “If only I had known,” she said, and cried. (273)
• When Louis-Philippe took over the throne after the 1830 revolution, he “issued decrees reversing those of his Bourbon predecessors. It was now illegal to observe with reverence the anniversary of the death of Louis XVI; he also shut down the memorial to Marie Antoinette at the Conciergerie.” (324) Way harsh, bro.

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What’s It About?

Born in 1778, Mary Nisbet of Dirleton was a wealthy Scottish heiress, the great-granddaughter of the 2^nd Duke of Rutland. She married a fellow Scot, Thomas Bruce, the 7^th Earl of Elgin and 11^th Earl of Kincardine in 1799. That same year, they left for Turkey, where Bruce would be England’s new ambassador. But while in Turkey, it was Mary who took on the starring role in their partnership. She broke barriers by charming Sultan Selim III and befriending his mother, his Grand Vizier, and the Captain Pasha. She was the only Western woman invited to the Seraglio and Topkapi Palace. In a time when women were relegated to the harem, Mary shone like a star.

Their stay in Turkey is what gave Lord Elgin the proximity and permission to excavate and remove the famous Parthenon marbles from present-day Greece (then an Ottoman possession). He used Mary’s money to finance his passion for archaeology. Mary herself seems to have had little to do with it. Elgin ordered the excavation, paid for it with Mary’s money, and left her to handle the travel arrangements to get the marbles back to England.

But what’s more interesting about her life story is the way she tried to take control of her own body – and was put through the ringer for it. She didn’t enjoy being pregnant, and after an incredibly difficult pregnancy with her fifth child, she told her husband she absolutely wasn’t going to do that again. He didn’t accept her decision, told her he wanted another son, and the marriage disintegrated from there.

Of course, it didn’t help that Mary had also fallen in love with one of her husband’s old friends, Robert Ferguson. By this point, her husband was in “take no prisoners” mode. He decided to divorce Mary, which meant putting her and Robert on trial for adultery. The scandal rocked the entire country.

Mary and Ferguson were found guilty; an Act of Parliament divorced Elgin and Mary. Unfortunately, Elgin had thought he’d walk away with Mary’s money, too. Nope. Mary’s family used the legal system (their wills and good lawyers) to prevent that from happening.

After the scandal, Mary married Ferguson and they lived their lives exactly how they wanted – together, quietly, with no further pregnancies for Mary. It took decades for her to re-establish a relationship with her surviving children, but it happened eventually. As for Elgin? Without Mary’s money (and her ability to rein in his spending), he went broke and sold the Elgin marbles to the British government in 1816.

The marbles, although they feature in the book’s title, play almost no role in the story. They’re just the frame, and possibly the hook, to get you to read it. The rest of the story is what’s most rewarding.

Should You Read It?

Yes – because the story of Mary’s fight to control her own body was astonishing. The excerpts from her letters detailing how awful she felt during her pregnancies and how hard it was for her to recover were painful to read at points. You can’t help but root for her as she tells Elgin she won’t do it again. It’s worth reading just to know how hard a struggle it was for a woman to do something as simple as say “no” in those days.

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I enjoyed reading about these little-known royal women, from Lady Macbeth to Saint Margaret to Anne of Denmark. Marshall covers 31 women who reigned as consort or queen regnant from 1034, when Duncan I came to throne, to Queen Anne’s death in 1714. During Anne’s reign, Scotland and England were joined, meaning there were no more queens of Scotland as a stand-alone country.

Marshall begins with Lady Macbeth, the first Scottish queen whose name we know: Gruoch. (It’s unclear if King Duncan’s wife, Suthen, was alive when he succeeded to the throne in 1034.) When King Duncan was killed and her husband seized the throne, she became queen. There’s much we don’t know about her – did she love Macbeth? Was she ambitious, as Shakespeare depicted her? That’s the story about so many of the early queens of Scotland. We know they lived, we know if they had surviving children, but most other details have been lost to history. Whenever possible, Marshall provides their life stories and gives them the benefit of the doubt when there’s harmful gossip about them. Anne of Denmark was described as being stupid, for example, but Marshall makes it clear she had strong emotions, deep interests, and was a generous patron of the arts.

It’s pointless to summarize this cavalcade of women, who were all so different. So I’ll just give you a few facts from Marshall’s conclusion that help illuminate who we’re talking about:

• 27 were queens consort and 4 were queens in their own right
• 10 of 27 queens consort were the daughters of kings
• 9 were English
• 6 were French
• One was Anglo-Irish, 3 were Danish, one was Dutch, one was Portuguese, and one was Italian
• Only 4 of the 31 queens covered were Scottish
• The average age of the women when they married was 15.5
• The biggest age gap between husband and wife? Yolande, Countess of Montfort was 26 years younger than King Alexander III when they married in 1285
• 5 of the queens had already borne a son to their first husbands before remarrying a man who either was or became king: Gruoch, Ingebjorg, Matilda, Margaret Logie, and Mary of Guise
• None of the queens is known to have died in childbirth (one named Ingebjorg might have, but it’s unclear)
• 14 of the 31 queens died before their husbands, but 13 outlived them
• Two queens, Yolande and Catherine of Braganza, went back to their home countries after their husbands died

Caveats

Scottish history is turbulent, folks. The last flight I took that had this much turbulence ended with at least one attendant in tears and everyone else clutching a barf bag. The result? Total disorientation. In the first quarter of the book, kings and queens appear and vanish in paragraphs as they are chosen, anointed, dethroned, and/or buried in rapid succession.

We just don’t know much about these women or their lives, and recapping the bare bones of their lives and reigns often amounts to a few lines or a few pages. The dizzying succession of families and factions was hard to keep straight, so in the end, I just let my eyes drift over the words without being able to really absorb what was going on.

Will this happen to you? I can’t say – but until I got to the late medieval queens (Mary of Gueldres, Margaret of Denmark), I had zero ability to retain or follow the succession without more detail. But, in this case, that detail would have been extraneous to the book’s mission, so it was understandably omitted.

Beware OCR Errors

As I’ve mentioned in other reviews, big publishers routinely fail to proofread the results after scanning and converting print books to eBooks. This one is no exception. One of the most egregious errors? Referring to Mary, Queen of Scots (Mary Stuart) as “Mary Smart.” I shit you not. The first sentence of her chapter reads: “‘Queen of Scots’ was the title used by female monarchs and consorts of Scotland before 1603, but for most of us these words mean only one person, Mary Smart, the daughter of James V and Mary of Guise.” (126)

There are lots of errors like this throughout the book, although none as funny.

Don’t blame the author for these mistakes – this is entirely the publisher’s fault for failing to proofread the digital edition before taking your money. Because corporate greed and laziness aren’t already rampant enough in America.

What’s It About?

The story of Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson is well-covered elsewhere – so why another book? Andrew Lownie says his book is different because it’s the only one devoted specifically to what happened after Edward VIII gave up the throne and left Britain for good, transformed into the bumbling Duke of Windsor.

And as you can tell from the title, the book spends a lot of time on Windsor’s activities during World War II. How did he feel about Nazi Germany? What happened during his meeting with Hitler? Did he actively work against Britain’s war effort? The title gives you a clue as to the author’s conclusion. I won’t spoil his findings, but he made a persuasive argument.

The book then follows the Duke and Duchess of Windsor for the rest of their lives, shifting after their deaths to a discussion of some of the many rumors about them. When I got near the end (when he covered their deaths) and realized Lownie hadn’t covered some of these sensitive topics, I was disappointed – and then a little ashamed for wanting all the dirty details. But then he did cover them, in a separate section of the book after he finished summarizing their lives. The part of me that still can’t resist the occasional episode of TMZ was satisfied.

Should You Read It?

Yes. I enjoyed this book – it walked that fine line between detailed research and gossip. There are a few salacious details here, but they’re tucked away toward the end of the book, rewarding you for making it through. Not that making it through was difficult, but I appreciated the author’s tact in putting them toward the end, almost as a reward. The Duke of Windsor is hard to take at times and difficult to like.

Just a Couple Tidbits

• Sir Charles Mendl, a press attaché at the British Embassy in Paris, was knighted in 1924 “for reputedly retrieving letters from a gigolo blackmailing the Duke’s brother George [Duke of Kent], but more likely for his espionage activities.” (62)
• The Duke of Windsor had an incurable case of foot-in-mouth disease. In 1926, at a dinner party: “He said Czechoslovakia was a ridiculous country – just look at it – how could anyone go to war for that? It isn’t a country at all, just an idea of the Wilsons.” (62) Its people, who felt like second-class citizens within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, might disagree.
• This book made me want to find a book about Princess Stephanie Hohenlohe. Here’s one tidbit about her, in 1940: “In December, Adolf Berle noted in his diary that he had seen an FBI report that ‘Sir William Wiseman and Fritz Wiedemann, the German consul general, were cooking up some peace moves together. Wiseman expects to do it through his contacts with Lord Halifax bypassing Lothian.’ Also involved as an intermediary was Stephanie Hohenlohe, Wallis’s former neighbour in Bryanston Court, a close friend of Bedaux and Goering and described by Berle as ‘an old hand at international intrigue.’” (147)
• This book also made me want to know more about the trip of Sir Owen Morshead and Anthony Blunt to Germany in the immediate aftermath of the war to seize paperwork and correspondence that might have revealed how pro-Nazi the Duke of Windsor was. Ostensibly, the purpose of the trip was to recover the 4,000 letters between Queen Victoria and Vicky, her oldest daughter, held at Schloss Kronberg. But, as Lownie writes, there was something more going on: “It looks like the trip to Kronberg was a cover for a fishing expedition, which suggests there was something else the Royal Family was worried about. ‘George VI had every reason to believe that the Hesse archives might contain a “Windsor file”, because Prince Philipp of Hesse had been an intermediary, via the Duke of Kent, between Hitler and the Duke of Windsor,’ claimed Prince Wolfgang of Hesse to the Sunday Times.” (240)

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This book opens with Napoleon’s arrival on Elba on May 4, 1814. The action unfolds in a panorama, with lots of first-person accounts as Napoleon settles on Elba, diplomats and royalty arrive in Vienna, insanely expensive entertainment ensues, Napoleon escapes Elba, and the Allies defeat him and settle the final peace in Paris after Waterloo.

The starring roles go to the wily diplomats Talleyrand and Metternich; their respective love interests – the sisters Dorothée, soon-to-be Duchess of Dino and Wilhelmina, Duchess of Sagan; and the most important rulers at the conference, Emperor Franz I, Tsar Alexander I, and King Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia. Throw in the British delegates - Castlereagh and Wellington – and you have an ensemble cast that’s ready for their close-up in what should be an HBO limited series.

Seriously.

There is so much sex and money and ego here, it’s unbelievable. I can’t believe this hasn’t been done yet.

Anyhoo, the book takes you through the diplomacy and negotiations that encapsulated the hopes, fears, and dreams of delegates from 200+ states and princely houses. The tidbits below give you a feel for the shenanigans that went on: parties, dances, masquerade balls, concerts, bed hopping, cash flashing, and maybe – if there was time – negotiating for the future of your country.

So what did the conference actually achieve? A mixed bag of things: redrawn maps, Swiss neutrality guaranteed, freedom of seas and international rivers proclaimed, diplomatic procedures established, the slave trade condemned, and stolen works of art restored. (Or not, if the hint about copies leaving the Louvre is true.)

There were lots of interesting little nuggets I didn’t know before. Check it out – random delegations went to the congress to pitch their ideas, including representatives of publishing firms who wanted to address the issue of “literary pirates” – they wanted to create an international copyright to protect intellectual property. How interesting is that?

Should You Read It?

Yes. This was just plain enjoyable to read. I’m thankful King didn’t go too deeply into the politics, which is a weird thing to say about a book that covers an inherently politically driven event. But I wasn’t interested in reading, say, thirty pages on the difficulties inherent in estimating the number of “souls” who lived on the left bank of the Rhine. I’d rather read a page on that and move on to the parties and spies and mistresses. And in this book, you get a little bit of everything: the people, the power, the folly, the money, and the lasting effects. Highly recommended.

Tidbits

• Emperor Franz I played the violin in the Habsburg family string quartet; sometimes Metternich would join them and play the cello. Franz’s other hobbies? Making candy and studying maps. (11)
• At the conference, 29-year-old Jacob Grimm represented Hesse-Cassel. Two years earlier, he and his brother Wilhelm had published what became known as Grimm’s Fairy Tales. (47)
• Some of the spies used by the Austrian chief of police, Baron Hager, have never been identified – including one known only by the infinity symbol, and the one who signed as ** (addressed by Baron von Hager as Your Highness). Who could this be? (69)
• During the first week of October, there was a concert conducted by Antonio Salieri, who had taught Beethoven, Schubert and Liszt. Remember Salieri? The narrator of the play and movie Amadeus? (82)
• Among the many lovely ladies at the conference, Princess Bagration and Wilhelmina, Duchess of Sagan competed to draw the most attention to their salons. And both women ended up broke because the conference went on so long. Wilhelmina had to sell a sapphire necklace to Emperor Franz, and Princess Bagration had to write home to her stepfather for cash after her cook refused to work on credit.
• While in Vienna, Eugène de Beauharnais (stepson of Napoleon) was spotted ducking into a jeweler’s shop and buying something for his latest mistress (whom the author doesn’t name, dang it). A police report submitted to Baron Hager said the bill was 32,000 ducats. Eugène paid in part with a cavalry saber Napoleon had given him. (126)
• The crown princes of Bavaria and Württemberg almost ended up in a duel. They had been playing blindman’s buff at the salon of Princess Thurn und Taxis when one accused the other of cheating. The king of Bavaria stopped the duel in time. (127)
• A banker from Geneva, Jean-Gabriel Eynard, confessed that at a party, he saw King Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia standing alone against the wall and thought he was a waiter. He almost asked him for a glass of champagne. LOL. (158)
• On December 23, Tsar Alexander I’s birthday, Beethoven gave a concert. It was the last time he ever played the piano in public. (182)
• On December 30, there was a party at Count Razumovsky’s to celebrate Russia and the tsar. But his palace caught fire in the early morning hours of December 31. His servants tossed as many of his valuable possessions out the windows as they could, but so much was lost: his entire gallery of Canova sculpture, and many Dutch paintings. Even worse, two chimney sweeps went back into the fire to try and rescue some of the Russian embassy’s paperwork…and didn’t make it back out. In the morning, the tsar found Razumovsky sitting along under a tree, crying. (191-2)
• Napoleon’s second wife, Archduchess Marie Louise, had been assured she would get the Duchy of Parma, as promised to her in 1814. But when Napoleon escaped from Elba, she worried that his breaking the 1814 treaty would give people a good excuse for taking Parma away from her. In discussing her inconvenient husband, Archduke Johann of Austria told her, “For your sake and ours, I hope that he breaks his neck!” (243)
• Did you know Metternich had mad pranking skills? His secretary, Gentz, was hella stressed out from doing most of the paperwork during the conference. Napoleon’s escape did not soothe Gentz’s nerves. And then, one morning, he woke up and saw an article in the Wiener Zeitung offering 10,000 ducats as a reward for his murder – signed by Napoleon, in retaliation for a conference document that had referred to him as an outlaw. Gentz freaked the hell out – like, packing a suitcase, panicking, almost in tears. It was left to Dorothée de Talleyrand-Périgord to tell him to look at the paper’s date. The paper was a custom job, created especially by his boss, Metternich. The date? April 1. (250)
• A member of the Sicilian embassy, Duke of Serra Capriola, came to the cash-strapped Princess Bagration’s rescue, guaranteeing her extensive bills would be paid. Who does that? (314)

The Dutch party left Brussels on September 8, 1824, traveling by carriage. The party consisted of Willem and Anna and their suites, which included cooks, maids, footmen, a farrier and saddler, and the luggage of all of the above. The ones who could travel faster – the men – did so, while the women and luggage often lagged behind. Overall, the party covered 1,400 English miles in 24 days. (22) The journey took them through swamps, sand, and mud – roads were not well kept, and there were no trains or passenger steamers yet. First, they went to Weimar for a brief visit with Anna’s sister, the Hereditary Princess of Saxe-Weimar. They were on the road again on September 20. On October 12, they crossed the border into Russian Poland. Anna’s brother Michael met them in Warsaw. About two weeks later, they finally reached Gatchina, on the outskirts of St. Petersburg, where Anna’s mother lived.

The rest of the trip – from October through the end of July – would be spent at or near Romanov palaces in the St. Petersburg area, from the Winter Palace to the Anichkov, the Tauride, Pavlovsk, Tsarskoe Selo, Peterhof, and more. Although Willem went to Moscow, Anna and her ladies did not.

So…what did they do? A lot of sightseeing, a lot of parties, a lot of accompanying Anna on visits to her family and members of the court. If you’re curious what it was like for an outsider to be plunged into society, from the food to the people to the parties and church services, you’ll get the full experience here through Cornélie’s eyes.

Should You Read It?

If you’re interested in travel writing, you’d probably like this.

Or if – like me – you’re just a little obsessed with the Romanovs – you’d like this.

My used copy was about $10 on Amazon, and it looks like there are a few more at or near this price, so even though it’s a short book (about 150 pages), you’re not out a lot of money to add it to your collection.

Tidbits

• Before Cornélie met Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna for the first time, in Gatchina, Anna had asked all her ladies to wear their best outfits. Turns out, Maria Feodorovna hadn’t wanted them to bother, saying, “I am not Empress here; I am Madame de Gatchina.” (37) Since Maria Feodorovna was a stickler for etiquette, this shows she’d unbent a little in the years since her husband’s reign.
  
  
• One night in January, Cornélie met Prince Yusupov, who had known Catherine the Great back in the day. Yusupov told a story about Catherine at the gaming table one evening. Suddenly, a messenger arrived from Warsaw with bad news. Yusupov watched Catherine read the messages, fold them back up, and finish her game without letting on what the news was or how bad it might be. When the game was over, she withdrew to her apartments and worked all night long. (77)
  
  
• Sliding down ice hills was a fun winter pastime in St. Petersburg. On February 18, Cornélie wrote: “The weather was pleasant and we set out by sleight, but it turned out that we had gone too early. The mountains were there but no one was sliding yet…So we drove back to the city…They were sliding down ice mountains there. Ordinarily these are built on the Neva but, though the ice was more than three feet thick, it was not thought strong enough, especially in view of the changeable weather.” (88-9) On March 11, Cornélie went to a different ice hill outside the city “for the upper classes…They are watered every evening so that the ice stays perfectly smooth…You put on a huge pair of red leather gloves because you have to steer your sledge by hand….As for myself, I did not venture, especially once I had seen the thing close to and heard the ladies scream when the descent was at its fastest. Even the ones who love this exercise will tell you they have the feeling of being thrown out of the window, and this is not an idea that appealed to me.” (93) Oh, Cornélie, you crack me up. I couldn’t have resisted trying it at least once.
  
  
• Cornélie was not a fan of the Russian cuisine served one night during Lent: “The dinner was as bad as possible for our heretic stomachs. It was entirely Lenten fare because of the attendant clergy. The only good dish I tasted was sterlet, a very expensive fish of exquisite flavor.” (100)
  
  
• Spring came late in 1825…or did it? On May 23^rd, Cornélie notes that she saw “a hint of green” in the Hermitage garden. And when she saw Mme. Naryshkin that night, the lady “assured us this year was exceptional and as a rule the month of May in St. Petersburg is charming. She asked M. Palmstierna, the Swedish minister, to bear witness to her statement. ‘I can assure you,’ he replied, ‘I have spent several years in St. Petersburg and I have never known a month of May to differ from this one.’” (119) LOL. I have found this true in the south, where no one seems to remember how often it snows or ices, and insists this instance is something totally out of the ordinary (when it snowed lightly, like, two or three times the previous winter).
  
  
• Postilions had a really hard time of it. A postilion rides the front-left-hand horse leading a carriage, guiding them. In imperial Russia, apparently, most postilions were young boys. There are constant references to postilions getting injured, like in this coach ride in early July: “On our way back to Pavlovsk in another carriage our postilion fell off his horse. The poor child screamed quite dreadfully and we could not even ask him where the pain was. Luckily the Grand Duchess Maria drove up and got us out of trouble. She had the child put in another carriage and driven off to Pavlovsk; he was all right in a few days. These poor little postilions have a wretched life and I think a lot of them die early. They are constantly exposed to every sort of weather and the accidents of their calling, and they are often only ten to twelve years old.” (140) Can we get some child labor laws here, please? And some health and disability insurance?