A word with the Emperor of Russia

At Yalta word came that the Emperor of Russia would receive us at his summer palace at Livadia, a few miles up the coast. This threw the ship into a condition. The pilgrims had been brought up to believe that a king was a sort of sin, and here was the greatest of them asking us to tea. A committee was formed. The committee decided we must present the Emperor with an address. The committee then decided I must write it, on the grounds that I was the only person aboard who did not seem to mind making a fool of himself.

The address

I worked on it for two days. I put in everything a republic would want to say to an Emperor: that we were a plain people, and he was a great one, and that we admired him for freeing the serfs, and that America would never forget his friendship, and could he possibly lend us a horse. The committee took out the horse. Then they took out the plain people. Then they added three paragraphs about Providence, and handed it back to me, and I did not recognise it, and nor would my mother.

We are a private party of private citizens of a private republic, travelling for our private pleasure, and we wish to assure Your Majesty publicly that we are delighted.

The Emperor stood on the lawn in a white cap and listened to the whole of it read out by our consul, and he did not laugh, which shows he was a great man. Then he shook hands with everybody, and the Empress talked to the ladies, and the Grand Duchess Maria, who was fourteen, asked me whether everybody in America was as tall as I was, and I said only the ones who wrote addresses.

We were shown the whole palace, the bedrooms included, and then sent across the hill to the Grand Duke Michael's, where we were given lunch, and I ate more Russian bread than is good for a democrat. We went back to the ship that evening very full and very quiet. Not one of us had ever been treated so handsomely by a king before. It was a great shock to our principles. We got over it at sea.

Read nextThe Acropolis by night, without permissionThe week before: the other way we were received by a government.