After the Romanovs: Russian Exiles in Paris from the Belle Époque Through Revolution and War

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Alexis’s comfortable life in Paris went some way in consoling him for the loss of the love of his life—Zina, Countess Beauharnais, who was married to his first cousin and friend, the Duke of Leuchtenberg—and with whom Alexis had conducted an unhappy ménage royal à trois. Rappaport's account works well as an introduction to a complicated year, but is most valuable for its record of the impressions of those who lived through it.

She is also a member of the Royal Historical Society, the Genealogical Society, the Society of Authors and the Victorian Society. Initially, the couple lived in a grand apartment at 11 avenue d’Iéna, a lovely tree-lined avenue in the 16th arrondissement, where their daughters Irina and Nataliya were born in 1903 and 1905 and where they held their first salons and receptions. He was extremely erudite—history and art being his passions—an amateur painter of some talent, and a collector of icons. He had become an almost permanent resident in Paris after 1847, having left Russia in pursuit of his obsessive love for the married French opera singer Pauline Viardot.So many were now traveling to Paris on a regular basis that Tsar Alexander II donated 200,000 francs to help build a new and dedicated place of worship for them—the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, which opened on the rue Daru in the 8th arrondissement in 1861. Stories of flight about Russians caught in in Revolution of 1917 and trying to make a living in Paris after losing their wealth to the Bolsheviks.

I've read every memoir of this period available in French and English, so I may be a slightly jaded reader. It was an opportune time, for Russophilia still ruled in the city in the wake of the Franco-Russian alliance. Very readable and informative it is, in the last analysis, a bit depressing but truly reflects the realities of one of the many forced migrations of the twentieth century. Readers will be swept up in the author’s leisurely yet informative narrative as she sheds new light on the lives of the four daughters. Petersburg his wife might be a shamed woman, a persona non grata, but in Paris Olga would become the meteoric star of French high society.Grand Duke Vladimir was as lavish in his tips as his spending, even “adding a number of unmounted gems to the gold coin tossing” at Maxim’s on one occasion. Political activists sought to overthrow the Bolshevik regime from afar, while double agents from both sides plotted espionage and assassination.