Owing to the haste with which the royal wedding was celebrated there was no time to prepare in advance suitable apartments for the Czar and his bride in any of the Imperial palaces either in St. Petersburg or in Czarskoi Selo. The latter residence had from the very first been spoken of as the future abode of the young couple, being a favourite one with the new Sovereign. But the Alexander Palace, the only one which was more or less adapted to the exigencies of modern life, had not been inhabited since the death of the Empress Marie Alexandrovna, the Consort of Alexander II., and required to be entirely overhauled. The Winter Palace, too, was in want of renovation, and particularly unsuitable, as the young Empress had expressed a wish to have the apartments which she was to occupy newly furnished, according to her own tastes and ideas. The result of this state of things was that the newly married couple spent the first months of their wedded life in the Anitschkoff Palace, the residence of the Dowager Empress, in the small rooms which had been occupied by Nicholas II. as a bachelor, rooms that were anything but comfortable, and where there was not even sufficient place for the wardrobe of the bride, who, besides, found herself without a sitting-room of her own, and had to borrow that of her mother-in-law whenever she wished to receive any one. Of course this was not pleasant for her, and I will add that it put her from the very outset in a false position which she felt acutely. She was being treated like a child, and she would not have been human had she been pleased with the situation. During the first weeks of her marriage, when the whole court was still in deep mourning for the late Czar, it did not perhaps matter as much as it would have done later on, or under different circumstances, but still it was disagreeable. The Dowager Empress was, in her way, just such an authoritative character as was her daughter-in-law, therefore the two ladies soon found themselves in strong opposition, and, though they did not own to it, became heartily tired of each other. Six weeks after the wedding Alexandra Feodorovna persuaded her husband to go for one week to Czarskoi Selo, and when she returned to St. Petersburg I found that a considerable change had taken place in her manners and bearing, much of her former diffidence and shyness having disappeared. She began to decide for herself certain things she would not have dreamt of doing before without having consulted her mother-in-law, and she organised her personal existence after her own heart. The first changes which she introduced concerned her maids’ attendance upon her, and she called me into her presence one morning to discuss them at length, refusing to listen to some observations which I thought it my duty to make to her. In my opinion it would have been better to have waited until we had moved out of the Anitschkoff Palace before altering the rules which