The Paleys Return to Russia
In January 1912, Grand Duke Paul returned to favor with Emperor Nicholas II. After more than a decade of exile, the latter, on the eve of the celebrations of the tercentenary of the Romanov dynasty, finally decided to forgive the disobedience of his uncle, the only surviving brother of his father, Alexander III. To legitimize this decision, he named him, by imperial ukase, honorary leader of the seventy-ninth Kourinsky infantry regiment.
Quite naturally, from then on, the Grand Duke wished to leave France in order to return definitively to Russia with his family. During the same year, he went to Tsarskoye-Sélo – where the Tsar and his family resided –, in order to have a palace built there. Inspired by his home in Boulogne-sur-Seine, it was built and decorated by workers who came especially from France and was not yet completed when the family moved in May 1914.
The furniture arrived by train from their Parisian home, the paintings, the display cases, all the objects bought during trips to Italy, Germany...
For Natalie, then almost nine years old and who, until that moment had only left Boulogne to travel to Bavaria, to Biarritz - they spent several weeks each year in their Villa Coquette - or to spa towns like Vichy, such a journey was a real adventure. Of all her familiar entourage, only Miss Theureau and Miss White accompanied Natalie to her new life. Nothing could have prepared her to face this country, both archaic and wonderfully civilized.
"One morning, we were horrified to see, along the Volga, a group of peasant women, strapped like prisoners, trying to haul a barge with great difficulty; the next day, when we returned from a sleigh ride in a countryside dazzling with whiteness, a servant rushed to dust the snow from our clothes with a brush reserved for this only use. That was his only function," recalled Irina Paley.
We can easily imagine her amazement upon discovering Saint Petersburg, where Natalie stayed for a while in her father's palace at the English Embankment, while the family waited to move to Tsarskoye-Sélo. (...) When she arrived in Tsarskoye Selo - the railway linking the Tsar's village to Saint Petersburg, completed in 1837, was the first to be built in Russia - the memory of Pushkin was still ever present (...)
The residence of Grand Duke Paul was surrounded by a French garden and a black wrought iron gate where the letter P. in Cyrillic was inlaid in a series of gilded bronze medallions surmounted by an imperial crown. Lanterns decorated with acanthus leaves were lit - the town had been the first in all of Europe to receive electricity - from dusk and provided an iridescent light on the snow in winter.
A series of salons - the Countess of Hohenfelsen organized the lives of her family from the pink salon for which she had brought all his favorite objects - a ballroom which was never used, a ceremonial dining room - pieces of silverware sparkled in the windows and crystals from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries shone and of course a spacious library... such was the new setting in which Natalie now moved.
The return to Russia was an opportunity for her to discover a large, almost unknown family: her maternal grandmother, Olga Vassilievna Meszaros, whom everyone called Babaka, her half-sisters Marianne and Olga, as well as their brother Alexandre, without forgetting her cousins the Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Marie and Anastasia, daughters of Emperor Nicholas II. (...)
They met at church or on walks, either in the gardens of the Alexander Palace, which formerly sheltered elk and wild boars intended for hunting parties organized to entertain the court, or in the park of the Grand Palace, where a delightful Chinese Theater red and gold, a whim of Catherine II, rose among the pines.
During the first weeks, life resumed its normal course. Every Sunday, Natalie and her parents attended mass as always, most often at the Féodorovski Sobor, where the sovereigns also went. The little girl met her godfather there, Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich, and many of their acquaintances.
"Natalie Paley: princesse en exil" - Jean Noel Liaut
