Dr. Botkin, the devoted friend and physician to the family, was introduced to me by Anna Virouboff, and I liked him exceedingly. He was a clever, liberal-minded man, and, although his political views were opposed to those of the Imperialists, he became so devoted to the Emperor that his once cherished views mattered little to him. I think, from my description, which possesses the merit of accuracy, that it will be recognised what simplicity of life surrounded the rulers of one of the greatest Empires the world has ever known. Simplicity characterised all their doings, the simplicity which was to prove their undoing. The Imperial pair wished to lead the lives of private individuals; they imagined that it was possible. In Russia it has never been popular or possible for a Tsar to be human; he was an emblem, a representative of crystallised traditions; he united in himself the rôles of the Father of his people and the splendid, all-conquering, unapproachable Tsar. An Emperor or an Empress in mufti, so to speak, never yet appealed to popular imagination, and, just as the English cottager preserved and venerated the horrible “royal” oleographs of Queen Victoria, so did the Russian peasant venerate similar oleographs of the Emperor and his Consort. Neither cottager nor peasant would have understood or cared to possess “family” photographs of their rulers. Popular imagination has ever been appealed to by scarlet and ermine, golden crowns, and kingly sceptres. It doesn’t understand or value anything else. In the March following the birth of Titi, the Empress wrote and told me that she was anxious to see her godson, then nine months old. So I went with him to Tsarkoe Selo, where the Grand Duchesses made much of him, and used to take it in turns to bath him. We took up our quarters in Anna’s house, where the Empress had personally superintended the arrangement of the baby’s room, and she sent his cot, of which she crocheted the hangings and coverlet herself. She spent hours with the child, playing with him, “snapshotting” him, and, after our first visit, I was constantly “commanded” to “come and bring the baby.” I remember that, when I once missed the train, and arrived too late for lunch, the Empress, who was waiting for me, noticed my fatigue, and ordered tea. She took Titi on her lap, and saying, “Well ... Lili, you do look hungry and tired,” she fed me with pieces of sandwiches, pressing them on me much in the same way that a mother soothes a tired child. But she was ever “plus mère que mère, plus Russe que Russe,” but her love of country was only for Russia and England. She had, and I say it with absolute conviction, no love for Germany as her “Motherland.” She liked Darmstadt, because to her it represented home, but she manifested no interest in any other part of Germany.