The Love Story of Duke Michael of Russia
How could an aristocrat close to the Russian court, a Grand Duke by trade, son of the Viceroy of the Caucasus, grandson of Tsar Nicholas I, at the beginning of the 20th century, enjoy the glory days of Mandelieu far from his native Russia?
No doubt because Michael Mikailovitch is the ugly duckling of his family. The one his mother and the Tsar call stupid, refusing him several marriages, either because there is misalliance given his rank as a Romanov, or because he is not, like his brothers and sisters, considered a very good catch despite being rich and handsome. Which in no way prevents him, at twenty years old, after having gone through a military career from which he emerged as a colonel, from being the darling of the gilded youth of Saint Petersburg and from multiplying his female conquests.
This quickly led his parents to distance him from the women he fell in love with by sending him abroad. And so he traveled to Prussia, Hesse, England, Scotland, and France. And it was here that his story took off with an episode worthy of a romance novel, set in 1891 in Nice.
During one of these mounted rides where the gentry rub shoulders, a horse bolts. Michael Mikailovitch, an accomplished rider and listening only to his courage, sets off in pursuit, stops the impetuous mount and saves the life of his rider, a certain Sophie von Merenberg. It doesn't take much for the two young people to fall in love. But this is a habit with the Grand Duke; the young lady is not of pure lineage in the eyes of the aristocrats of the time. Certainly, she belongs to the powerful ducal family of Nassau, but she is the product of the morganatic marriage of her father Nicholas with Natalia Pushkin, daughter of the great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, himself the great-grandson of Abraham Hannibal of Cameroonian origin. In short, as usual, Michael Mikailovitch is completely wrong.
The couple had to move heaven and earth to have Sophie given a title, that of Countess of Torby. Their marriage, celebrated in 1891 in San Remo, earned her permanent exile and a ban on setting foot in Russia again, as well as being banned from joining the Tsar's army during the First World War. This undoubtedly saved her life: three of her brothers, Serge, Nicolas, and George, like the imperial family, were executed there in 1918 and 1919 during the Russian Revolution. Until then, the banished couple could live in the lap of luxury, as the Grand Duke owned a very profitable mineral water bottling plant in Tiflis, in the Caucasus. This allowed him to buy the large pine forest where he built the Old Course at Mandelieu-La Napoule and to found his golf club.
To avenge the setbacks caused by his marriage, which was so poorly accepted by his peers, he wrote a transparent novel about morganatic marriage, published in 1908, Never Say Die, which can be translated as One Should Never Despair. A title which, in itself, perfectly sums up the life of Michael Mikailovitch of Russia.
