But the portents did not say Niki would not come back to me. They just could not say exactly when. The only way I could keep him thinking of me was by making a commotion at the theater. And so, I made a commotion. Many of them.
Magnificent Mathilde
I had occasion to, as Prince Volkonsky was appointed the new director of the Imperial Theaters. M. Vzevolozhsky had left the post to become director of the Hermitage Museum, to take up residence in a cramped office there with a view of the Neva through his small windows, charged with the care of the statues, objets, paintings created by the great European masters and collected over the centuries by the Romanovs—which left us at the Maryinsky to the abrasive Volkonsky, who immediately suggested I share my role in La Fille mal gardée with one of those imported Italians. I refused. The role was mine and a Maryinsky ballerina did not share her roles with anyone. When Volkonsky insisted that Henrietta Grimaldi dance the role, I complained to Sergei, who first spoke to Volkonsky and then, when he did not get satisfaction, sent him a blistering letter, saying, By wronging Mathilde Felixovna, you insult me! and promptly called the tsar who was visiting his mother’s family in Denmark. Niki had the minister of the court, the all-powerful Baron Freedericks, send a cipher telegram to Volkonsky with his order not to give my role to Grimaldi. What other dancer but me could complain of her treatment to the tsar, for as you remember, it is very high up to the tsar! No other dancer, and that is the truth.
And Volkonsky was from an old Russian family, the grandson of the Decembrist Prince Sergei Volkonsky, one of the guards who confronted the Iron Tsar, Nicholas I, in the Senate Square in 1825 in an effort to unseat him and was sent to Siberia for thirty years for his trouble. The Volkonskys had served the throne for generations, and yet the tsar sided with me, not with him. You would think that the great Volkonsky would have learned his lesson about who was the greater, but he was new to theater and had accepted the position only to please his father, and soon enough we locked horns again. When I balked at wearing a hooped petticoat beneath my skirt for La Camargo, explaining that such a billowing petticoat beneath the Louis XV–style costume would dwarf little me, Volkonsky insisted I wear it. Well, I did not! He even sent the theater manager to my dressing room before the performance to once again demand that I wear the hooped petticoat. I refused! By this time, every dancer in the company and half the audience out front had heard of our battle, l’affair of the hoops! I appeared on the stage in the requisite costume—and who would even know that I had left the petticoat behind had there not been such a fuss? But when Volkonsky fined me a trifling amount of rubles for an unauthorized costume change, a deliberate provocation, posting the notice on the hallway board as if I were some Near the Water girl, I wrote to the tsar myself, and not in French this time, and the tsar canceled the fine, ordering the director to post that notice on the board. At which point Prince Volkonsky resigned his post, and I became known as Magnificent Mathilde.
And I was magnificent—both powerfully connected and powerfully talented. At twenty-seven, I had mastered all the specialties of those Italian ballerinas who had performed in Peter for the last hundred years, even Legnani’s astonishing series of thirty-two fouettés, one leg whipping the body round like a top over and over and over. And so I asked the tsar to clear the theater of Zambelli, Legnani, Grimaldi, and their like. We didn’t need them anymore. The theater had me. And I wanted to be the one onstage when the tsar came to the Maryinsky on his Sunday nights.
Yes, I kept the tsar very busy with matters of the ballet.
And he was also kept very busy, apparently, with matters of the bedroom, for in 1899 the tsar had yet another daughter, his third, Marie. Tant pis. So much the worse. So much the worse for Alix.
In 1900 I was asked to dance at the tsar’s private theater, the Hermitage Theater in the museum attached to the Winter Palace, for the first time. Was the juxtaposition of the birth of Marie and my invitation to the Hermitage a coincidence? I didn’t think so. How many daughters could a tsar endure? This intimate theater had been built by Catherine the Great, who had her gilt and upholstered armchair dragged right up to the rim of the orchestra pit to better enjoy the spectacles her artists had concocted just for her. Tsar Nicholas II and his family sat before the stage in the gilt armchairs now and the court of 1900 sat behind them in the wide semicircular pews to watch the private entertainments created for their pleasure alone. The ballets performed there were always trifles devised for the occasion and danced only by the finest artists in the company, its soloists and ballerinas, never by the corps de ballet. Yet I had never been invited to the Hermitage before. But now, I supposed, with all those Italians sent home, my name stood at the top of the list and Alix could not draw a line through it without looking petty. Or perhaps Niki expressly requested my presence, in which case, she could not say no.
The stage of the Hermitage Theater was a small one, the wings crowded with wooden wheels to raise the scenery and with bellows to blow wind or smoke, but from it I knew I would be able to see the royal family at close range. And then, after the performance, we artists would be invited to sup with the imperial family and their guests in one of the Hermitage picture galleries. It was like being stabbed with a steak knife to hear those dinners described by the dancers lucky enough to have been invited here before: the caviar on shaved ice, the hot stuffed mushroom caps, the smoked salmon and sturgeon, the salted cucumbers, sausages, blini, the lobster bisque, the steaming borscht, the liver pâté of the Lota fish, the filet mignon, suckling pig, roasted partridge and quail with croutons, lamb in cream sauce, venison and veal, the pyramids of pineapples, watermelons, grapes, strawberries and cherries, the Italian fruit cake flavored with violets, frosted bowls of chocolate, vanilla and fruit-flavored ice creams and sorbets, pastries and tortes, the decanters of whiskey, cognac, sherry, champagne, and cassis, the silver jugs of lemonade and milk flavored with almonds and the vodka flavored with lemon peel or cranberries. At the end of the meal, the tsar would dispense a small gift, a gold medallion, the imperial eagle stamped on the back, to each of the artists.