Alexander II_ The Last Great Tsar - Edvard Radzinsky [16]
That is how the old Kschessinska described the scene.
But it could be done more prosaically. Her father simply apprised her of the condition upon which the other father, who stood at the head of both the country and the family, had permitted the liaison: the tsarevich’s marriage must mean an immediate finish to all their relations. In this game, too, the emperor remained a good family man.
——
So she had vanquished, but her victory was the beginning of the end.
“We arranged a housewarming.… The tsarevich gave me a water service—eight gold glasses encrusted with precious stones….
“He brought me gifts quite often. I used to refuse to accept them, but he grieved so … so I had to accept them.”
She had ceased to be a dream, and he pined more and more for his distant beauty. Life and dream: accessible Mathilde and the sublime, regal princess. Little K. disappeared from his diaries.
Yet another year of his life came to an end.
“31 December [1892]. Dear Anichkov sparkled with electricity. We went to mass at 7.30. At 12 the three of us, Papa, Mama, and I, greeted the New Year. God Grant it be just like this one.”
Little K. was dancing part after part. But that was as it should be: the premier young man of Russia should have the premier ballerina for his mistress.
When the great ballet master Marius Petipa chose her to dance Esmeralda, he asked: “Are you in love?” “Yes.” “Are you suffering?” “Certainly not!” Petipa explained to her that only an artist who has known suffering can dance Esmeralda. “I understood that later,” Mathilde recalled sadly, “and then Esmeralda became my best role.”
Her time would come to understand that. She was seeing Nicholas less and less often. But she still clung to her old ties: Nicky’s dear friend Sandro and Nicky’s sister Xenia held a merry engagement party in her home.
In April 1894 Nicholas went to Coburg to attend the wedding of Alix’s brother Ernie. Soon after, the newspapers were writing about the tsarevich’s engagement to Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt. After his return from Coburg he never went to see Little K. again.
They exchanged letters. Farsighted, she asked his permission to turn to him if necessary. He replied that the days he had spent by her side would ever be the most beautiful memories of his youth. She could always turn to him.
At his request Mathilde named a place for their last meeting: the main road between Petersburg and Krasnoe Selo. She arrived from town in a carriage; he, on horseback, from camp. “As always in such instances, I found it hard to say anything—choked with weeping and lost for the right words.” She watched him recede into the distance, constantly turning around in the saddle. Thus she described the end.
——
But was this indeed the end? Although Kschessinska ceased to be Nicholas’s mistress once he became engaged to Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt in 1894, she remained a presence in the Romanov family for the rest of her life, as she recounts in her memoir, Dancing in Petersburg.
Kschessinska very quickly turned to her longtime admirer Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich, who as head of the Theatrical Society and the Russian ballet could secure her former position in the ballet. For of all her lovers she remained faithful to only one: the ballet.
Kschessinska’s shadow next crossed the palace threshold in May 1896 in conjunction with Nicholas’s coronation, which was to be followed by a brilliant gala concert. The dowager empress, the new tsar’s all-powerful mother, had no intention of allowing Little K. to perform, and her scandalous name was crossed off the list of performers. However, when the astonished public saw the program, there was the name: Mathilde Kschessinska, dancing the lead!
They had done everything—both his mother and the minister of the court—to convince Nicky not to permit this scandal, but Mathilde knew her old lover too well.