ROMANTIC DEATH OF A RUSSIAN PRINCE.

Waikato Times, Volume XXIX, Issue 2400, 26 November 1887, Page 2 (Supplement)

ROMANTIC DEATH OF A RUSSIAN PRINCE.

Tilt; death is announced at the Chateau Iverle.on, near Breast, of Prince I’eter Wittgenstein, brother of the Princess Holieniolie. He had, since the death ef Ins wife, a fisher's daughter of Kcrleon. fallen into a moody state, ami lost all interest in life. She died a year ago, and he may be said to have lived ever since in the temporary mausoleum in which her remains were placed pending the erection of a permanent one. Prince Peter inherited from his mother, the Princess Stephanie de Radzivill. a fortune which was valued at 14,000,000 roubles. The lawsuits arising out of his determination to assert his wife’s rights wen- severe struggles, in which a special commission named by the Kmperor Alexandra I, the Russian Senate, and finally the Emperor Nicholas took part. In 1848 there were as many as 50,000 serfs on Ins estate. Prince Peter Wittgenstein was brought up at St. Petersburg as a page to the Czar, and entered the Russian Guard when a mere youth. He was military attache at the Russian Embassy at Paris during the Second Empire and the early years of the Republic, and remained in Paris during the siege in an official capacity. He was strikingly like the Emperor Nicholas and was of a very picturesque appearance, looking to great advantage in full-dress uniform at a review. After he retired from active service he put the Breton girl whom he resolved to marry to school, and bought a mansion in the Avenue Carnot, where, after he married her, they lived, in a beautiful place on the coast of Brittany. She never tried after fortune had favoured her in this brilliant manner to turn her back on her humble relatives and friends, and was really an angel of mercy to the orphans of drowned fishermen and sailors. Besides his Russian fortune. Prince Peter Wittgenstein was co-heir with the Princess Hohenlohe to a Polish estate worth about £‘JO,OOO a year. The Princess Hohenlohe becomes by Prince Peter’s death the richest lady in her own right in Germany, hut it is poss’ule that the recent ukase of tiie Czar forbidding Germans to hold real estate in certain western provinces may co-u e’. her to sell her Russian properties.