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Gossip began to accuse her of intrigues, which, if the truth be said, were not absolutely foreign to her nature. She liked to make herself important, to be thought the principal personage in Russia, to be considered as the person who had the greatest influence over her nephew Alexander II. It was a very innocent little weakness, but it made her sometimes ridiculous, and certainly her opinions would have had greater weight had she not talked so much, and especially restrained her friends from talking so much, about her influence and her importance. She aspired to the position of a Richelieu, and did not realise that it was rather as that of his councillor, the famous Père Joseph, she could have attained more easily her goal, which was that of governing and reforming Holy Russia.

With all this, however, she exercised a great influence on St. Petersburg Society; she was a really great lady, a princess of the old style, pure and proud, who looked upon the world from an ivory chair, who never allowed herself any meanness, any petty vengeance, or forgetfulness of the position she filled in the world. She was an incomparable hostess, though her evening parties were thought dull by those whose powers of conversation were limited, or who cared only for small talk. No one knew better than she how to receive her guests or to put them at their ease, and though slander or gossip were excluded from her conversation, yet she sometimes unbent, and would relate with much spirit anecdotes concerning her arrival in Russia, and the first years of her married life. This reminds me of one occasion when she told us the following amusing story of the Emperor Nicholas’s sternness in all questions of military service. It was so funnily related that I entered it in my diary as soon as I got home, and I will repeat it now, as I heard it from her lips on that day. The conversation had centred by accident on the Emperor, and someone said that he had been capable of very cruel things. The Grand Duchess instantly protested with energy.