I paid a lot of attention to the youngest daughter of the imperial couple, the Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolajevna. She was not very pretty, but had a colossally lively and expressive face and her eyes were extremely mobile with a very humorous and mischievous expression. You could see that she understood everything very quickly and saw it from the humorous side. This feeling grew within me in a very short time into a really serious one and had a far-reaching influence on my entire development. I imagined that one could get engaged at such a young age, as I had read in a biography of Henry IV of France that he was engaged to Marguerite de Valois when he was 8 or 10 years old. I heard a lot of talk about how the Emperor and Empress often talked about how difficult it would be for them to marry their daughters abroad and to be separated from them. At the beginning of 1914, one of the emperor's nieces, the daughter of his sister, the Grand Duchess Xenia Alexandrovna and the Grand Duke Alexander Michailovic, was to marry Prince Yusupov. In terms of age, I was only two years older than the little Grand Duchess. I said to myself, I was 14 years old, why shouldn't such an engagement be possible when Henry IV was already engaged when he was 8 or 10? And now something began that might seem crazy at first glance, but in reality became the beginning of my prayer life. I prayed intensively for this fantastic engagement to come about, systematically with almost physical effort.
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I usually left Petersburg by train around three o'clock and was in Carskoye after half an hour. A cozy tea awaited me and sometimes Ssandik there until it was finally time to go to the Imperial Cathedral for the evening service. There we stood in the low choirs, in a kind of box. In the middle of the church stood the Cossacks of the escort and the soldiers. Next to us stood various personalities of the entourage, such as Generals Komarov and Vojeykov, who was the palace commander at the time. The emperor arrived almost unnoticed from a side door and positioned himself to the right (from the epistle side) of the central gate of the iconostasis. The Empress stood more to the right and could not be seen. During the service, the little Grand Duchess turned around very often, which from time to time provoked comments from her older sisters.
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At the end of the service the emperor came out from his place in the middle to kiss the cross. He was followed by the Empress and then her daughters. When it was Anastasia Nikolajevna's turn, she looked at me very quickly, so one of her sisters pushed her so that she could get to the cross more quickly. Then they all got into a car and drove straight to the train station.