TRAGEDY 0F RUSSIA.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 16780, 8 July 1922, Page 15

TRAGEDY 0F RUSSIA.

TWO LOVE CALAMITIES. WOMAN WHO ONCE DICTATED A NATION’S DESTINIES. (“ San Francisco Ohroncile.”) They found her dead body on the floor of a saloon on the edge of the Da tin Quart ier where she had reigned as a queen of the gay life. It was lying between the bodies of two pets—an ape and a huge black cat. Millionaire, many times multiplied, in name; penniless in fact! And penniless because, for the love of a prince whose heiress she was, and whose inamorata she had been, she declined to use her wonderful beauty and charm for the winning of another prince whose fortunes had escaped the damning blight of the great evolution in world affairs called the war. That was the last chapter in the story of Mdme Gaillard, once darling of the night life of Paris, where champagne corks fire regal salutes to those upon whom fortune smiles, and where other oorks, firmly wire-lield, await the coming of the next celebrity to turn loose their merry salvoes, unmindful of the fate of those who have gone before. ANOTHER PICTURE. And at Nice, where the fashionable go for the warmer days and the brighter skies when Paris has fallen under the spell of those days when the sun is hailed as an event, and the clouds canopy a city which never relaxes its nightly gaiety, Katherine Mikhailovna Dolgorouka, once the morganatic wife and then the recognised wife of Czar Alexander 11. of Russia, has just passed away in exile, although in peace. She had seen four generations of the Riomanoft's go to tragic graves. She had wielded more power at the Russian court than any other person, not excepting the dark-visaged Rasputin who hovered like some great cloud over the last of the race to rule the mysterious empire that is now the world’s chief problem in government and n economics. Banished by the grandson of the Czar she had loved and swayed, she found quiet in Switzerland and France while he was bayonetted to death with his family in a hut to which an enraged proletariat had whisked him in the blood-red days of the revolution. A TRAGIC DRAMA. And from these two striking scenes from world life one draws the material for tho most tragic drama that has been created by the uprising of the Russian peasant and his demand for a government of which he knows little but from which he has been led by daring souls to hope much. It is the. ignorant, whiskered peasant o <- the Steppes, weary of a burden that was centuries old, who has written tho two stories and painted the two pictures, and in them is the whole of the story of an Empire That Was.

lii the days when the Russian court was the most lavish on the Continent, and her nobles went into other lands with retinues and roubles that were then worth their face value, there came to Paris the Prince Dobridinc. He was the owner ot vast estates in the Ukraine, that Texas of southern Russia in which great wheat fields border lands that have mineral wealth as yet untouched by the hand o.f development The Ural mountains, with their mines, afforded still further interests that wore held by the prince by parents from the empire, dated back to the days even of Peter the Great. And the prince’s name was high among those who held shares in the greatest industrial institutions that had come to the stage of development in the immense domain. His name was the synonym for wealth and for power. ♦Seventy-five millions of roubles, compnViVig with the great for tunes of America, were stacked up against the name of the great land-owner and powerful industrialist of his time. Naturally, he drifted to Paris for amusement, as all the world drifts there at one time or another. And naturally, with his charm and his wealth, ho encountered the charm of Mdrao Ga.illard. It was in one of the great places of the ante-bellum period that ho spied first tfie dazzling woman whose costumes, whose wit and whose, beauty were the rage in the period between 7 o’clock of an evening and the pink dawn tliat checked off another day which had been sacrificed to the god of pleasure and of extravagance. He sought an introduction. Prom it came one of the great love stories of the continent. Folk said that the prince took her to Russia and there went through with some form of religious ceremony that was accepted by the Russian church as a marriage. However, that might be. the unity of the couple was complete. No longer was she the gay companion of any rich set which held for the time the interest of the maitre d s hotel, and the subservient atontion of the liveried seekers after golden favour.

SCORNED A WEDDING RING. Mdmo Gaillard became a one-man woman. a type that is not so rare in the midst of the great whirl of fashion and wealth as one might suppose- For lierselt, she made, no pretensions. She claimed no wedidng ring. She scorned it as one of the things that were not essential when the heart and the mind had b rought two souls together. T am merely the best friend the prince has in all the world,” she said. Hut the delicate character of that friendship no man doubted. The love lasted to the day of the death of the prince during the first year of the war. It coin tinned, .so far as she was concerned, up to t;ho minute when she called a veterinary to her apartments and demanded that ho give her a deadly injection for her two pets. When the Bolsheviki seized the vast estates of the prince, she was left in Paris with onlv the funds that the prince had established in his banks for her. The prince, making his will, left to her all of his vast estates, and she was, on paper, the mistress of /0,000.000 of roubles—not in the value ot to-day, but in the actual properties that must bo counted in its good worth But the Bolsheviki had confiscated the property. Being a citizen of France. Mdmo. Gaillard was entitled to her inheritance regardless of the revolution.'mirier every French contention, and she became one of the factors in the greatest problem that now rocks the brain of Europe the assumption by the new Russian government ot the financial liabilities of the old regime with regard to foreigner?. BECAME PART OF AN INTER - N ATION A L PR 013 LEAI Since one out of every four persons in all France holds some part of the Russian obligati ons. and the issue is the underlying difficulty that pre.-ent-itself with regard to the Genoa Conference at which world finances are to be adjusted, if possible, she was automatically made a part of the problem of all France, and her own fostjaue became indissolubly interwoven wft*ftr Hie biggest international question of the time. But being a. part of an international problem pays no rent.

(Mdme Gaillard was compelled to support her aged mother from her funds, and she resorted to the idea of a trip to Brazil in order to avoid unusual expense and to seek rest. Other princes 7>aid court to her, but the memory of the man she had loved wais too strong; for a new alliance, even when it brought along the prospect of unlimited wealth and new luxury. Boe returned to X'avis. She sat at her quaint writing desk, an ornate creation that had done service for some fair favourite during the days of Louis XIV. She penned a note to the police. “ The money is going too fast,-’ she wrote, ‘‘ and 1 have given up all hope of finding another prince through my affection for him.” She called a. veterinary. “ I wish that you would give me poison to kill my pet ape and my pet cat,” she commanded. The veterinary complied. “ Now.” she said, “give me an injection of morphine that is strong enough to kill me.” The veterinary refused. She shrugged her shoulders and made a pretty mouth. A GRIM DENOUEMENT. “ Never mind,” she retorted. ” 1 suppose that I can attend to that.” She sat for a long time thinking of her past while her pet monkey toyed with the poison that was to end their lives and her long, sleek, sable cat pulled at her skirts. Then, with deliberate fingers, she set about constructing the scene that was to mark her last few moments of life. It was a scene that might have been taken from the fevered, gruesome pages of some Edgar Allan Poe. Those who found her body broke in upon a sight of unmitigated horror. On a. tiger skin that she had spread upon the floor lay her two pets—both dead both drawn and twisted. She had fallen between them and her cold rouged lips, still holding their crimson hue, were like a streak of blond upon the stark white petal of a lily. She had poisoned herself and thus finis was writen after the love story of a prince.

Takewi.se, upon the very threshold of the conference that might haws resstorcd to her the princely estate that had come to her through her long period with the man. twice her own age, who, adored her, vanished the Trench claim to the millions that lav in the .great Ukraine. T oila ! It i s the habitude of Paris !