Illustrations from ""This King Business" (The Century Company)

ROYALTY IN AN EMBROIDERY FACTORY

less than one hundred francs in his grand ducal pockets and only one extra shirt.

"How did I live?" The young man smiled at the directness of my question. "How did all my class live? We knew nothing, that is, how to do nothing. We had no money. But, my dear sir, we had friends! The first year, I made a loan. Last year, I made a loan. But I could not go on that way. This year, I am working on such a grand plan-a plan to pay back my loans and live."

saying; "two million human beings being driven from their homes and being scattered throughout the world." It is difficult for us in America to comprehend the misfortune which has befallen these erstwhile nobles. But Frederick L. Collins, in his new book, "This King Business" (The Century Company), tries to give us some idea of the situation by declaring that "it is as if the President of the United States, the governors of all the States, most of the doctors and teachers and judges and preachers and bankers and manufacturers and merchants of Kansas City and Chicago and Seattle and New York and every other American city, most of the big men of the small townswith their wives and grown children and little babies-were to be suddenly expunged from our American life and dumped without warning or resources into foreign lands and foreign conditions. It is as if you and I and all the people we know were pauperized and exiled."

Paris, the center of so many activities in Continental Europe, was the Mecca toward which many of the outcast Russian nobles instinctively turned upon their hegira, altho as told in our issue for March 17, "the largest group of Royalist refugees that ever left Russia" is said to have been on board that strange squadron which the Russian Admiral Stark led into Manila harbor early this year. The present article describes how some of the exiles who went to Paris fared. Many and amazing are the tales which have been told from time to time about the way these refugees managed to eke out a scanty livelihood. There is, for example, the Grand Duke Dimitri, first cousin of the late Czar, and the one who is credited with killing "that old rascal Rasputin." Mr. Collins informs us that Dimitri is recognized in some circles as the hope of Russian Imperialism and is, in his slender, well-groomed person, all that a Grand Duke should beespecially if you like a Grand Duke young, clean-shaven, and concave at the waist-line. The Grand Duke told the author about his escape from Russia after the collapse of the Imperial Army, his wanderings about Europe and his arrival in Paris with

"And what is the plan?"

"Floating a company, monsieur." The Grand Duke smiled as he used the current American phrase, and I smiled too, but not at his facility in the idiom so much as at the thought of this untried, unworldly aristocrat embarking on the stormy sea of commercial endeavors. "But I can not tell you what kind of a company it is until I see if it is successful. . . ."

I asked my French friends about "the grand plan," the company that this ingenuous young man was trying to "float," and they shook their wise old Gallic heads. "A dressmaking establishment," it is said, and then they would wink to indicate that the monseigneur was probably more interested in the dressmaker than the dressmaking. I saw visions of a gilt-chaired establishment on the Rue de la Paix or the Rue de Royale, where the Grand Duke's reputation would be capitalized to lure the unwary dollar and the more conservative crown. It wasn't until I met the Grand Duke's brother-inlaw that I learned the truth. I didn't find Prince Poutiatine in any gilded Rue de la Paix establishment, but in a little embroidery factory which he and his wife, the Grand Duchess Marie Pavlovna and her brother Dimitri of the "grand plan" had started in the servants' ell of a modest house in the Harlem of Paris. This little embroidery factory was the "dressmaking establishment" of current

PERSONAL GLIMPSES

Continued

as forewoman and saleswoman of its exquisite products. We are told that

Sixty-five she was, and tired and thin and silently sad except when her eyes lighted up over some beauty in her daughterin-law's designs or some prospect of aiding financially the wonderful work in which she was engaged. I asked her if she wanted to go back to Russia. Her face clouded.

"No, no," she said, almost violently; "I have here my husband and my son. I am content."

"Your husband?"

"Yes, monsieur." She reached down into the pile of embroideries and brought up a pattern of exquisite workmanship. "My husband's design. He is our hardest worker. We live here, in the shop, sleep here, eat here, my husband and I."

Her fine old eyes had strayed from me to the embroidery in her hand, and thence through the open door, up two rickety steps into a room where a man was vigorously ironing engaged, as I afterward learned, in transferring designs from the patterns to the cloth. But this workman was drest as a retired banker might be drest of a late afternoon at his home on Chicago's North Side, in a clean, starched collar, a light silk tie, and a well-cut buff-colored summer suit. His face, his whole head, was like the late King Edward's, a high noble forehead above a closely clipt, white beard. He was the most significant figure I had yet met.

Dimitri, for instance, was still young. There was hope in his future day. Poutiatine's son was strong and busy, and, in a way, happier than he would have been in a less active life. Even the old Princess, with her armful of embroideries, was a woman doing a woman's work-and, besides, she was content. But this courtly old gentleman, for whom there could be no future day, no active career, no congenial occupation, bent over an ironing-board like a tailor's apprentice-here was the picture of a race declassed! . . .

of

The old Prince led me up another narrow, gray flight of stairs to the workroom, where a dozen embroidery machines not unlike the old-fashioned sewing machine that mother kept in the spare bedroom-were ticking off thousands minute stitches. Bent over these machines, their eyes scarcely leaving their work as we interviewed them, were a dozen members of the Russian nobility-working for a wage of two francs an hour! A franc at the moment was worth about eight cents. Two franes were a tip to the boy who carried your bag. Eight hours of this exacting work produced a wage of a dollar and a half. But it was enoughand this was the point-to keep that fragile young woman in the widow's veil, the Countess Apracsine, from starvation. It was enough to support, in part, at least, the families of those other ladies of the Czar's own household.

The venerable Princess confided to Mr. Collins that she and her royal associates learned the embroidery art by hiring "what you call professionals, two Frenchmen," but that in two weeks' time they could outwork the professionals. Fascinated by the cryptic word Yteb in silver letters on the street door of a fashionable

dressmaking establishment, to which the Grand Duchess Marie sold some embroidery work, the author entered and learned that Madame Yteb was in reality the Baroness Wrangel, sister-in-law of the General Wrangel who had failed in his campaign against the Bolshevik Army. Mr. Collins remarks:

In the most Parisian of Parisian atmospheres I had stumbled once more upon these inevitable Russians. I had followed their trail for weeks through most of the capitals of Europe, only to land at last in a French dressmaking salon-French in appearance and French in location, but Russian-owned and Russian-operated. . .

I looked with new eyes at the efficient young business woman in front of me, for I knew that this was the famous Princess Kougoucheff, who, through her courage and devotion, had saved her mother and her old governess and her two young children from the horrors of Bolshevism; who was personally responsible for the care of 48,000 refugees and the distribution of more than 300,000 articles of clothing in Constantinople, in those dark days following the Russian hegira. I was familiar with every detail of this young woman's heroism, for it is on the lips of thousands of Russian émigrés from the Black Sea to the Atlantic.

"That young woman over there," said the Princess, "is the Countess Gourno. She has become one of the best fitters in Paris." The Countess had just brought in on her arm a finished garment from the workroom, and was hanging it affectionately in a wardrobe behind one of the long mirrors that lined the pale gray room. "And several of the mannikins are also Russian women of the nobility. We have had many such in the house, the two Baronesses Meinard, for instance. Madame is very kind. She gives our people a chance whenever she can. But she is fair," she added proudly, "the Russian ladies can not keep their places unless they are goodas good as the Frenchwomen."

But Russian refugees are also finding employment of a very different sort. For instance, Mr. Collins discovered that three charming girls belonging to the exiled nobility were making a living by dancing in the chorus of the Folies Bergère, that center of the night life of Paris, which is half-way up the Montmartre. We read:

Behind the scenes at the Folies Bergère

in a glittering confusion of paint and powder, tramped on by hurrying choruses of flower-girls and Roman beauties-sits a dear old lady, in a bonnet. You think you have seen the motherly face before, the kind wide eyes, the friendly smile; perhaps in your own home, long ago; perhaps in "Cranford." Perhaps her name is Mary Wilkins or Alice Brown. No, she is, or was, a lady of the Romanoff court. And her three young daughters, noblewomen like herself, are dancing in the Folies chorus!

I saw them that night in gorgeous pearl and silver trappings, dancing with the American première danseuse, Miss Nina Payne, and in black and white costumes of velvet and fur, which made the spectacular "snow scene" a dazzling glory. Every night, as they prance down the stage through tinsel snows, they must turn back their memories to another night, another snow scene, far from the footlights of the