Every spring and autumn the coming fashions were brought to the Empress, so that she might make her choice. She usually had about fifty dresses for each season, as I have had already occasion to explain, but whenever any unlooked for event occurred she would order special gowns to meet it. Her hats were generally made by Bertrand, a French firm in St. Petersburg; she ordered about twenty-five or thirty for the summer season and several fur toques for the winter. She liked white hats, which she often wore, and for a long time remained faithful to the small bonnets affected by Queen Alexandra of England in her youth. Later on she took to large hats, which were generally trimmed profusely with ostrich feathers. About these feathers the Empress was most fussy. The St. Petersburg climate is so very damp that it is almost next to impossible to keep feathers curled in summer, especially in Peterhof, on the Baltic shore, where the Court, as a rule, spent July and August. We had, therefore, to have the trimmings of the Empress’s hats seen to every day, and messengers used to go daily to St. Petersburg to carry to Madame Bertrand the different millinery as well as the feather boas of Alexandra Feodorovna to be freshened and rearranged. As a rule, the Czarina used to spend something like ten thousand roubles a month on her toilet, and sometimes even more than that. She was extravagant,—there is no doubt about it,—but then she was the Empress of Russia, and considered it part of her duties to appear magnificently attired. The Emperor, too, liked to see her well dressed, and especially richly dressed. The latter was easy, but the former more difficult, because of the peculiar ideas of my Imperial mistress in regard to her clothes. When her household was organised she was given eight maids to attend upon her, of whom there were to be always two on duty during the day, and two during the night, when they had to sit in a room in the near vicinity of the Imperial bedchamber, ready to be called in case of emergency. In the usual order of things they would have had to dress the Czarina’s hair morning and evening, but the latter hated to have different hands perform this task, so she arranged to have a hairdresser come each day to arrange her coiffure, which was never very elaborate except upon official occasions, when a diadem had to be fixed in her hair. I was always present when she dressed and undressed. It was part of my business to see that everything connected with her toilet was in order and that nothing she required was missing. She never twice wore the same pair of gloves, but liked old shoes and slippers. As for her stockings they were of the finest silk, and manufactured specially for her by the firm of Swears and Wells in London.