The Emperor Nicholas II and the Empress Alexandra were very nearly the only members of the Russian Imperial family whom I did not yet know. At the time when they made their first journey to Paris, to celebrate the conclusion of the Franco-Russian alliance, I was in Sweden as the guest of King Oscar, His Majesty having most graciously invited me to spend a period of sick-leave with him; and it was on the deck of his yacht, at the end of a dinner which he gave me in the Bay of Stockholm, that the news of the triumphal reception of the Russian sovereigns had come to gladden my patriotism and his faithful affection for the country which, through his Bernadotte blood, was also his. On the other hand, I had repeatedly had the honour of attending the grand-dukes; and I was attached to the person of the Tsarevitch George at the time of his two stays on the Côte d'Azur, in the villa which he occupied at the Cap d'Ail, facing the sea, among the orange-trees and thymes. I had beheld the sad and silent tragedy enacted in the mind of that pale and suffering young prince, heir to a mighty empire, whom death had already marked for its own and who knew it! He knew it, but had submitted to fate's decree without a murmur. Resigning himself to the inevitable, he strove to enjoy the few last pleasures that life still held for him: the sunlight, the flowers and the sea; he sought to beguile the anxiety of those about him and of his doctors by assuming a mask of playful good-humour and an appearance of youthful hope and zest. Lastly, at the same Villa des Terrasses, I had known the Dowager-Empress Marie Feodorovna, whom her great green-and-gold train had brought to Russia with her children, the Grand-duchess Xenia and the Grand-duke Michael, at the first news of a slight relapse on the part of the illustrious patient. For two long months, I took part in the inner life of that little court; and more than once I detected the anguish of the mother stealthily trying to read the secret of her son's hectic eyes, peering at his pale face, watching for his hoarse, hard cough, as he walked beside her, or dined opposite her, or played at cards with his sister, or stroked with his long and too-white hands the head of his lively and slender greyhound, Moustique. These memories were already four years old. How much had happened since then! The Tsarevitch George had gone to the Caucasus to die; the Franco-Russian alliance, the realisation of which was contemplated in the interviews that took place at the Cap d'Ail between the Dowager Empress and Baron de Mohrenheim, the Russian ambassador in Paris; this alliance might almost already be described as an old marriage, in which the heart has its reasons, of which the reason itself has become aware.