After the Romanovs: Russian Exiles in Paris from the Belle Époque Through Revolution and War

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These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. 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. 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).

In exile, White Russians sought to overthrow the Bolshevik regime from afar, and double agents plotted from both sides.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. 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. 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. 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.

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. 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. Many of the elite Russians fled with only what they could carry with jewelry being the most portable valuable but doomed to be sold into an oversupplied market. Paul and Olga’s subsequent affair resulted in an illegitimate son, Vladimir, born in 1897, and an enormous scandal at the Russian court.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.