even attempt to break through the barriers it had erected around her, and which divided her from the rest of mankind. CHAPTER III BIRTH OF GRAND DUCHESS OLGA The uncomfortable winter which followed upon the marriage of the Czar came at last to an end without his young bride having been much seen in public. The ladies prominent in St. Petersburg society were presented to her during a great reception which she held in the Winter Palace, but this presentation consisted simply in their passing before her with a curtsey, whilst her Mistress of the Robes, the Princess Galitzyne, whispered their names into her ear. She spoke to no one, and of course no one spoke to her, and for the influence that this reception had upon her relations with that society over which she had to preside, it might just as well never have taken place. There were, it is true, a few old ladies whose husbands either had been, or still were, in high official positions, who were received by the Empress in private audience, but these interviews were generally of short duration, and consisted in the exchange of a few banalities in the way of conversation. The Empress did not speak French well, and English at that time was not the fashionable language of the upper class, as is the case at present. Ill-natured people commented on the mistakes made by the young Sovereign in her use of the French idiom, and ridiculed them. She became aware of the fact, and it hurt her deeply, and added to the natural diffidence of her character. In those early days of her married life, Alexandra Feodorovna was striving still for popularity, but doing it in a clumsy, mistaken manner. She felt afraid of being called pro-German, and exaggerated in consequence her manifestations of amiability in regard to everybody and everything that was connected with France, to such an extent that she was accused of want of frankness, not to use a more emphatic word. It was the same thing with her sympathies for the autocratic régime. At the time of her marriage, people hoped that her influence over her husband would result in his granting to Russia that constitution which everybody had been sighing for, for years. But the Imperial family, from the very first hour of her arrival in the country, had repeated to her that it was her duty to uphold the principles of that autocracy which Alexander III. had so successfully maintained during the whole time of his reign. She accepted this bad advice, and, in her dread of being thought adverse to it, she applied herself to persuade the Czar that he ought to make some public declaration of his intentions to govern according to the principles that had inspired his deceased father. She partly succeeded, but the attempt was not a happy one, because the famous speech of Nicholas II. to the zemstvos, where he affirmed his resolve to govern despotically, and characterised as senseless dreams the aspirations of his people, contributed more than anything else to make him, together