#the grand duchess who wanted to be a chimney sweep 🫶🏻

[rosepompadour]

FAVORITE OTMA PHOTOS: ANASTASIA It was the first time I had seen any of the four. The two older ones were in simple white, each with a single string of small pearls, and with their heavy dark hair hanging over their shoulders looked very girlish and sweet. Olga carried a little bunch of violets, and Marie and the ten-year-old Anastasia had boxes of silver-wrapped chocolates. Anastasia sat down nearest me and gave me a demure little smile as she set the chocolates on the railing between us. She was not a beautiful child, but there was something frank and winning about her. Music behind the curtain was playing in a very low key, and she began to hum the air softly to herself. It was a haunting air, with a minor strain suggestive of the Volga Boat Song. "What is that song you are humming?" I asked. "Oh," she said, "it is an old song about a little girl who had lost her doll." The music faded out then, the people were crowding in from the foyer, and she was biting into another chocolate. Her white gloves were now quite hopeless, but when I went to sleep that night her song was humming away tantalizingly in my head. "The little girl who had lost her doll." That was more than forty years ago. - Post Wheeler, Dome of Many-Coloured Glass (1955)