TRAGIC LIFE STORIES.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXX, Issue 5491, 23 October 1929, Page 3

TRAGIC LIFE STORIES.

COLONY OF REFUGEES. “DIE LIKE GENTLEMEN.” In the South of France, in the neighbourhood of the town of Toulon, there is a strange and pathetic little colony of people, all the more pathetic because they are so cheerful and uncomplaining. It is a colony of refugees, and its members belong almost exclusively to the old Russian aristocracy. Pampered darling of fortune all, these men and women had, before the war, everything that money could buy and high birth give. There is one man among them who in, lovely colthes and jewels to wear, carriages and cars to drive about in, the best music, art, and literature at their command. Now they live in little tumbledown shanties and have no other .thought or care than to earn enough to keep the wolf from the door.

There were splendid palaces to live belongs to the family of the late Tsar. He bears the family name of Romanoff. His hands are knotted and swollen with hard work in the fields, for he is a market gardener in a small way and has no other helper than his wife. She, a celebrated beauty in the capital of her country in the days when it was still called St. Petersburg, now drives herself to Toulon market three times a week in a peasant cart which she afterwards washes with her own hands. For she has a stall in the market-place, where she sells eggs and butter and cheese.

Another, the widow of a general who fell in the war, goes out by the day as a general servant in order to be able to feed and educate her child. A third, an intimate friend of the late Empress, a brilliant, accomplished woman of the world, also works as a general servant. But there is one, perhaps, the saddest figure among them all, who, though capable and practical as well as an exquisite musician, is unable to get work because she is so beautiful that no one will believe she can be good for anything but to be looked at. She has come to hate her beauty, and her only hope is that the hardships she is enduring will soon destroy it so that it will no longer stand in the way of her earning her bread. Yet she talks lightly of her troubles and, like the rest of this little colony of exiles, shows a brave front to the world.

As one member of khe little colony smilingly put it: “We follow the example of the French aristocrats in the Revolution; if we cannot live like gentlemen we can at least die like them.”