Rasputin by Frances Welch Read Free Book Online Page B

about M. Philippe that she sent secret agents to France to investigate his background. She need not have worried. M. Philippe’s days at the Russian Court were, by then, already numbered. The turning point had come when the Tsarina, carried away by M. Philippe’s pronouncements, fell victim to a phantom pregnancy. It was believed that M. Philippe had hypnotised her; there were wilder rumours that she had given birth to a monster. Before M.Philippe was dispatched back to Lyon, he correctly predicted that the Tsar and Tsarina would one day have another ‘Friend’. He left the Tsarina an icon with a bell which he said would ring at the approach of enemies. He had one final success, prophesying the date on which he would die, in 1905. When the excitable younger Montenegrin Princess, Anastasia, heard of his death, she proclaimed that his spirit had entered her body.

    F or all the Black Sisters’ attachment to their previous men of God, they were particularly possessive of Rasputin. They had, after all, hosted the momentous tea at which Rasputin had first been presented to ‘the Tsars’. After that meeting, Militza had made Rasputin swear not to contact the Palace without consulting her. If he did, she warned obscurely, it would be the end of him. She may have been worried about future fallings-out: relationsbetween her and the Tsarina had already cooled since the days when the Black Princesses had been in charge of emptying the Imperial chamber pot.
    But Bishop Feofan was later to testify that his irrepressible protégé cared nothing for Militza’s warnings. Within a few months, Rasputin had contacted the Tsar independently and made several visits to the Palace with Feofan: three years after his encounter with Grand Duchess Militza in the woodshed, the mercurial Rasputin was developing a taste for high society.
    On July 18 1906, Rasputin enjoyed his second tea with the Tsar and Tsarina. He had written a sparse telegram: ‘Tsar father, I want to bring you an icon of Righteous St Simon of Verkhoturye.’ He brought each of the four young Grand Duchesses and the two-year-old Tsarevich an icon and a piece of consecrated bread. It was said that he challenged the Tsarina to lift a box of matches, having persuaded her that it weighed three tons. The impressionable Tsarina, unsurprisingly, failed to lift it.
    He returned to the Alexander Palace, on Friday October 12, and spoke to the Tsar and Tsarina at some length. The Tsar wrote enthusiastically to his most powerful minister, Peter Stolypin, saying that Rasputin ‘made a strong impression on Her Majesty and me – our conversation lasted well over an hour.’ The Tsar suggested Rasputin visit Stolypin’s daughter, who had lost a leg in a bomb attack. Stolypin agreed to allow Rasputin to give his daughter a blessing. But he remained grimly unconvinced by Anna Vyrubova’s claim that his daughter benefited from any kind of healing.
    One of the Tsar’s earliest favours to Brother Grigory was to allow him to change his name to Rasputin Novy – Rasputin had always wanted to distance himself from the association his name had with the word for debauchee, ‘
rasputnik
’. The request was granted in a record-breaking seven days, on December 22 1906. Later Rasputin would claim it was the little Tsarevich Alexis who had christened him ‘new’, having clapped his hands and greeted him with the shout ‘
novy
, novy’.
    In fact, throughout his life, Rasputin was usually referred to as Brother or Father Grigory by his supporters; ‘the Tsars’ called him, simply, Grigory. Feofan would certainly have introduced him into society as Brother Grigory. His early encounters with the aristocracy included evenings at the home of a Countess Ignatiev. Fortunately for Rasputin, the Countess’s salon was known for its outlandish guests as much as for its celebration of the autocratic principle. Next to the