Petersburg he served from 1876 to his death as president of the Imperial Fine Arts Academy and enjoyed an extremely influential position in the art world. There was even a novel on the subject, La Tournée des grands ducs: Moeurs parisiennes, published in 1901 by Jean-Louis Dubut de Laforest, a prolific French author and publisher of erotica who had been prosecuted for obscenity in 1885. For the French-speaking Russian aristocracy, Paris for the last forty years or more had been a home away from home, a safe haven in winter from the bitter cold of the northern Russian climate and the rising threat of revolution that was increasingly targeting their class. Petersburg from 1915 until the revolution), they spoke candidly of their fears for their home country. Her love of all things Victorian springs from her childhood growing up near the River Medway where Charles Dickens lived and worked.

Nijinsky, Diaghilev, Bunin, Chagall, and Stravinsky joined Picasso, Hemingway, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein in the creative crucible of the Années folles. We are experiencing delays with deliveries to many countries, but in most cases local services have now resumed. Alexis’s comfortable life in Paris went some way in consoling him for the loss of the love of his life—Zina, Countess Beauharnais, who was married to his first cousin and friend, the Duke of Leuchtenberg—and with whom Alexis had conducted an unhappy ménage royal à trois. In France expatriate Russians could now bask in the burgeoning Franco-Russian friendship, which reached its pinnacle with a series of political alliances in the 1890s, much to the annoyance of Kaiser Wilhelm, who had tried hard to drive a wedge between the two countries. By 1903, having spent some time in Italy, Paul and Olga decided to make a base for themselves in Paris.

One such unnamed but very wealthy one had spent the night at a restaurant with a couple of ladies of the night, only to be overcome by tiredness. The scandal of her adultery had found its fiercest critic in Nicholas’s highly moral wife Alexandra, who insisted that the countess should not be welcomed back at the Russian court for several more years. But during the reign of the authoritarian and straitlaced Alexander III, who came to the throne after his father’s assassination in 1881, reaction set in. After the disruptions in Europe caused by the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 and Russia’s estrangement from Germany and Austria-Hungary after the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78, the first seeds of a new golden age of rapprochement with France were sown.

There was much gossip about money destined to fund the construction of new battleships and cruisers for the Imperial Navy making its way into Alexis’s pockets during his tenure as commander in chief of the Imperial Fleet—but he was not alone in his brazen siphoning off of money from the treasury; this was but one of many “gigantic swindles” that helped boost the revenues of the unscrupulous Russian grand dukes. She also has written extensively on late Imperial Russia, the 1917 Revolution and the Romanov family. In exile, White Russian activists sought to overthrow the Bolshevik regime from afar, and double agents plotted from both sides, to little avail.President Fauré accompanied Nicholas and Alexandra on a whistle-stop tour of the Paris Opera, the Louvre, and Notre Dame, the mint, and the Sèvres factory. Cries of “ Vive le bébé et la nounou” greeted even little Olga and her nanny as they drove in an open carriage down a Champs-Élysées festooned with decorations and artificial blooms in the chestnut trees.

Paul and Olga’s subsequent affair resulted in an illegitimate son, Vladimir, born in 1897, and an enormous scandal at the Russian court. The author could not have known about current developments in the Ukraine when she wrote the book but she benefits from the good fortune of serendipity as the book is surprisingly excellent background in how Russian history has led to events of the day. After the Romanovs covers primarily the 1917-1940 experiences of displaced Russians in Paris with emphasis on former royalty. A tale was also told of a cousin of Vladimir’s, Grand Duke Sergey Mikhailovich, who was well known for gambling for high stakes in Cannes.

Rappaport's account works well as an introduction to a complicated year, but is most valuable for its record of the impressions of those who lived through it. He was extremely erudite—history and art being his passions—an amateur painter of some talent, and a collector of icons. World War II closed down the old emigre life, and the Russian community was targeted by the Gestapo, as thousands of Russians were arrested and sent to the camps. She is also a member of the Royal Historical Society, the Genealogical Society, the Society of Authors and the Victorian Society. She studied Russian Special Studies at Leeds University and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a specialist in Imperial Russian and Victorian history, and a frequent historical consultant on TV and radio.