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Whilst her mother-in-law lived, Marie Alexandrovna never asserted herself in the least, but later on she developed a great interest in the numerous charitable institutions placed under her patronage, and especially in the education of young girls belonging to the poorer nobility. So long as her health permitted her to do so, she regularly visited the various institutions where they were brought up, and personally superintended the yearly examinations, knowing the schoolgirls by name and later on following them in their future careers. She was very reserved, very religious, very good, excessively conscientious, and devoted to everything Russian and orthodox. During the months preceding the Turkish War of 1877, she openly supported the Slavonic party, and was very much under the influence of a certain coterie, of which the most prominent members were her confessor, Father Bajanov, and one of her ladies-in-waiting, the Countess Antoinette Bloudoff, about whom we shall have something more to say later on. Very unhappy in her married life, she sought in religion a comfort for the deceptions which she felt very bitterly, but nevertheless was too proud to admit. Extremely cultured, she used to read a great deal, and was au courant with everything that went on either in the literary or the scientific world. Politics interested her greatly, though she would never express a political opinion in public.