struggled to put herself in Nicholas's line of vision. Knowing that Nicholas and his sister Xenia often stood on a high stone balustrade of the Anitchkov Palace watching passers-by on the Nevsky Prospect, Kschessinska strolled past the building every day. In May, on Nicholas's birthday, she decorated her room with little white, blue and red Russian flags. That summer she was selected to join the troupe which danced in the wooden theatre for officers at Krasnoe Selo, where the Tsarevich was on duty with the Guards. He came every day to watch Kschessinska's performance. Once when Tsar Alexander III saw them talking, he said to her with a smile, "Ah, you must have been flirting."
As the Tsarevich and the dancer were never alone, the romance that summer did not go beyond flirting. "I thought that, without being in love with me, he did feel a certain affection for me, and I gave myself up to my dreams," she wrote. "I like Kschessinska very much," Nicholas admitted to his diary. A few days later he wrote, "Gossiped at her window with little Kschessinska." And just before leaving the camp, he added, "After lunch, went for the last time to the dear little theatre at Krasnoe Selo. Said goodbye to Kschessinska."
Nicholas did not see Mathilde again for almost a year. In Ocotober 1890, he set out with his brother George on a nine-month cruise which took them from the Mediterranean Sea through the Suez Canal to India and Japan. In George's case, his parents prayed that the weeks at sea in warm sunshine and salt air would clear his congested lungs. For Nicholas, they intended a royal grand tour, an education in diplomatic niceties and an interval which would help the Tsarevich forget the young women who had begun to complicate his life.
Kschessinska was not the only one. Nicholas found the dancer appealing; she was close at hand; she was pretty; and she was letting him know in every way possible how much she Uked him. But his feelings for a tall, golden-haired German princess, Alix of Hesse, were more serious. Princess Alix was a younger sister of Grand Duchess Elizabeth, the twenty-five-year-old wife of Nicholas's uncle Grand Duke Serge. Elizabeth, called Ella, was a gay young woman
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whose skating parties and family theatricals had brought a youthful bounce into the Imperial family. Nicholas was a frequent visitor in the home of this young aunt; when Ella's sister Alix came to St. Petersburg, Nicholas's visits became even more frequent. Serious and shy, Alix burned with inner fires. When she set her blue-gray eyes on Nicholas, he was overwhelmed. Unfortunately, she lived far away in Hesse-Darmstadt and his parents saw little to recommend their matching a Russian tsarevich with a minor German princess.
Leaving St. Petersburg in a gloomy mood, Nicholas and George went to Athens, where they were joined by their cousin Prince George of Greece. There the three cousins, accompanied by several young Russian noblemen, including Prince Bariatinsky, Prince Obo-lensky and Prince Oukhtomsky, boarded a Russian battleship, the Pamiat Azova. By the time the battleship reached Egypt, the cruise had turned into a traveling house party and Nicholas's spirits had soared. On the Nile, they transferred to the Khedive's yacht and began a trip up the river. In the broiling heat, Nicholas stared at the riverbank, "always the same, from place to place, villages and clusters of palm trees." Stopping in towns along the river, the youthful Russians became increasingly interested in the local belly dancers. "Nothing worth talking about," Nicholas wrote after watching his first performance. But the following night: "This time it was much better. They undressed themselves." The travelers climbed two pyramids, dined like Arabs, using their fingers, and rode on camels. They got as far as the first cataracts of the Nile at Aswan, where Nicholas watched Egyptian boys swimming in the foaming water.
In India, Bariatinsky and Oblensky each killed a tiger,
Mark Russinovich, Howard Schmidt