Rasputin by Frances Welch Read Free Book Online Page A

to an exhaustingly long meeting with Mitya in his diary: ‘The Man of God Dmitri came to see us from Kozelsk near the Optina Pustyn Monastery. He brought with him an image drawn according to a vision he had had. We talked for about an hour and a half.’
    If members of the Imperial entourage had misgivings about this particular Man of God, Mitya certainly enjoyed the blessing of another unconventional characterat Court, a Tibetan healer called Peter Badmaev. The healer, subsequently accused of drugging the Tsar, insisted that Mitya ‘impressed me as an intelligent, religious peasant’. But Badmaev’s attempts, over two years, to treat Mitya’s catarrh were unsuccessful; the Man of God never shook off another of his sobriquets, Mitya the Nasal-voiced. Incidentally, Rasputin mistrusted Dr Badmaev: ‘That Chinaman would betray you for a kopeck.’
    The best known of Rasputin’s predecessors at the Court, however, was a French butcher – some said hairdresser – called M. Philippe Nizier-Vachod. He had been expelled from a college where he was studying medicine, and had then taken it upon himself to treat patients with what he referred to as ‘psychic fluids and astral forces’. He claimed to live on the borderline between two worlds. The French authorities set no store by his remedies: he was arrested five times for practising medicine without a licence.
    The Black Peril, Militza and Anastasia, had met M. Philippe in Cannes. In a great state of excitement, Militza reported back to the Tsarina that this new mystic could cure all diseases, including syphilis. She introduced the Tsar and Tsarina to M. Philippe when he followed the sisters back to Russia. According to some sources, the Tsar met M. Philippe during a visit to France. One of the Tsar’s grand duke cousins was horrified, insisting that M. Philippe had a ‘terrible southern French accent’. He added, in further disapproval, that the Tsar and Tsarina would return from sessions with M. Philippe, having ‘fallen into a mystical frame of mind’.
    M. Philippe was also able to summon the tirelessspirit of Tsar Alexander III and apparently shared Rasputin’s mastery of the weather, once tempering a storm to protect the Imperial yacht, the
Standart
. He even boasted that he could make himself and others invisible. On one occasion, Prince Yussoupov’s father waved at Grand Duchess Militza as he spotted her riding in a carriage with M. Philippe but she failed to wave back. When he later challenged her, she replied that he couldn’t possibly have seen her: M.Philippe had been wearing a hat that made his companion invisible.
    Of prime importance to the Imperial couple was M. Philippe’s claim to be able to determine the sex of an unborn baby through the ‘transcendental practice of hermetic medicine, astronomy and psychurgy’. Sadly, his fallibility in this direction was exposed when the Tsarina gave birth to her fourth daughter, Anastasia, in June 1901, rather than the predicted son. Upon the baby’s arrival, M. Philippe ungraciously accused the Tsarina of having insufficient faith. As the matter of an heir became more urgent, it was said that he installed himself in the Tsar and Tsarina’s bedroom. His capacity to make himself invisible would have proven invaluable.
    Aware of M. Philippe’s growing band of critics, the Tsar and Tsarina began calling him, cryptically, ‘our Friend’, as they would later do with Rasputin. The Tsar made several vain attempts to protect him: at one point requesting a medical diploma from the French Government. He finally gave M. Philippe a cursory title: ‘Inspector of port sanitary services’.
    But the disapproving Grand Duke was not to be appeased, noting: ‘The bad thing is that they cover theirvisits to Znamenka [Militza’s palace] in secrecy.’ The Tsar’s mother, the down-to-earth Dowager, became so anxious