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gaiety which has little in common with the period of Lent."
    During this quieter period, Nicholas stayed home, dined with his mother and played cards with his friends. A telephone was installed in his room at the palace so that he could listen to Tschaikovsky's opera Queen of Spades over an open line direct from the stage. He regularly accompanied his father on hunting parties, leaving the palace at dawn to spend a day in the forests and marshes outside the capital, shooting pheasants and hares.
    Nicholas was never happier than when he was sitting on a white horse outside the Winter Palace, his arm frozen in salute as squadrons of Cossacks trotted past, their huge fur caps sitting down on their eyebrows, pennants fluttering from their lances. The army, its pag-
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    eantry and history fascinated him all his life, and no title meant more to him than the rank of colonel awarded him by his father.
    At nineteen, Nicholas was given command of a squadron of Horse Guards and went with them to Krasnoe Selo, the great military camp outside St. Petersburg used by regiments of the Imperial Guard for summer maneuvers. Installed in a private bungalow with a bedroom, study, dining room and a balcony overlooking a small garden, he lived the pleasant, mindless existence of any wealthy aristocratic young Russian officer. He participated fully in the life and chatter of the messrooms and his modesty made him popular among his fellow officers.
    "I am happier than I can say to have joined the army and every day I become more and more used to camp life," he wrote to his mother, Empress Marie. "Each day we drill twice—there is either target practice in the morning and battalion drill in the evening or the other way round—battalion drill in the morning and target practice in the evening. . . . We have lunch at 12 o'clock and dine at 8, with siesta and tea in between. The dinners are very merry; they feed us well. After meals, the officers . . . play billiards, skittles, cards or dominoes."
    The Empress worried that the eager subaltern would forget that he was also the Tsarevich. "Never forget that everyone's eyes are turned on you now, waiting to see what your first independent steps in life will be," she wrote. "Always be polite and courteous with everybody so that you get along with all your comrades without discrimination, although without too much familiarity or intimacy, and never listen to flatterers."
    Nicholas wrote back dutifully, "I will always try to follow your advice, my dearest darling Mama. One has to be cautious with everybody at the start." But to his diary he confided more fully: "We got stewed," "tasted six sorts of Port and got a bit soused," "we wallowed in the grass and drank," "felt owlish," "the officers carried me out."
    It was as a young officer in the spring of 1890 that Nicholas first met a seventeen-year-old dancer in the Imperial Ballet, Mathilde Ksches-sinska. A small, vivacious girl with a supple body, a full bosom, an arched neck, dark curls and merry eyes, Kschessinska had been rigorously schooled in ballet for ten years and in 1890 was the best dancer in her graduating class. By chance, that year the entire Imperial family attended the. graduation performance and supper.
    In her memoirs, Kschessinska recalled the arrival of Tsar Alexander III, towering over everyone else and calling in a loud voice, "Where is Kschessinska?" When the tiny girl was presented to him, he took
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    her hand and said to her warmly, "Be the glory and adornment of our ballet." At supper, the Tsar first sat next to Mathilde; then he moved and his place was taken by the Tsarevich. When Kschessinska looked at Nicholas, she wrote, "in both our hearts an attraction had been born impelling us irresistibly towards each other." Nicholas's entry in his diary that night was more laconic: "We went to see the performance at the Theatre School. Saw a short play and a ballet. Delightful. Supper with the pupils."
    From that moment, Kschessinska