Ci-Devant

ALWAYS A GRAND DUKE--Alexander, Grand Duke of Russia--Farrar & Rine- hart ($3).

Alexander, onetime Grand Duke of Russia, cousin and brother-in-law of the late Tsar, died in February on the Riviera. In this posthumous book of post-Revolution memoirs he has told, with a cynical eye to U. S. readers, what it felt like to be a Romanoff in exile.

At first, on the British cruiser which carried him to safety in 1919, with a "horrible sense of acute humiliation . . . that a grandson of Emperor Nicholas I had to be rescued from Russians by Britishers," Alexander thought of suicide. Further humiliations were to follow. In Paris he was informed that he would not be allowed to enter England, for the time being. The landlord of his Paris apartment held him up for back rent. When he called on his old friend Arthur Balfour, in Paris for the Peace Conference, he saw Balfour running for an exit to avoid seeing him. Asked by Balfour's secretary if he would like to leave a message, Alexander replied, "Yes, by all means. Tell him that a man of his age should use the elevator."

Luckily Alexander still had his collection of antique coins; he sold them. His wife Xenia sold her pearls. The late notorious Alfred Lowenstein offered him $2,000 a week to act as social decoy, but

Alexander turned him down. Though he despised Lowenstein he liked the late, equally notorious Ivar Kreuger, would never admit that he was a crook. He fell in love with a young Englishwoman at Biarritz, but it came to nothing because she insisted on marriage and his wife would not give him a divorce. He became a spiritualist. Finally he did the accepted thing, went to the U. S. as a lecturer. At his first lecture (in a Baptist church in Grand Rapids) the unexpected strains of the Russian National Anthem made him blench. Nothing else in the U. S. seems to have offended him, but this tactless reminder was too much for even his cynicism: thereafter it was distinctly understood that the Anthem should never be played in his presence.

Alexander apparently delighted in shocking not only the bourgeois but his fellow Romanoffs. News of his two brothers' execution by the Bolsheviks did not prevent his attending a dinner party. No very ardent believer in the divine right of kings, he held the unpopular view that the Romanoffs were out of Russia for good; in 1919 he bet the members of the U. S. Delegation in Paris that "within the next 20 years nothing would be left of the Treaty of Versailles and that the Soviets were to endure in Russia."

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