Video: Fatal muse of Carl Faberge: why the jeweler's last love nearly cost him his freedom
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
May 30 marks the 171th anniversary of the birth of the founder of the family jewelery firm Carla Faberge … His famous collection of Easter eggs, created for the imperial court, is known all over the world. Much less known to the majority is still the story of his fatal love. In the last years of his life, serious espionage passions flared up around Carl Faberge. And the fault was the adventurer, from whom he lost his head.
In 1902, the 56-year-old jeweler in Paris met the 21-year-old café singer Joanna-Amalia Kriebel and fell in love with her without memory. At that time, he was an exemplary family man and the father of 4 children. However, Faberge was not going to abandon his wife Augusta, so he found a kind of way out: every year he went to Europe for 3 months on business and spent all this time with his mistress. And the other 9 months, the girl traveled to different countries and led a very free lifestyle, which attracted the attention of not only her many fans, but also the Russian counterintelligence.
Ioanna Amalia (her reliable image has not survived) was Czech by nationality, together with her parents they moved first to France, and then to Austria. It was there that she often visited to visit relatives. The girl often visited Russia, where she performed in the Aquarium cafe. Her regular travels from one country to another raised suspicions of involvement in espionage.
In 1911, after performances in Tiflis, Ioanna Amalia suddenly married the 75-year-old prince Karaman Tsitsianov, after which she immediately left Tiflis and never returned there. To Faberge, she explained this fictitious marriage by the need to have Russian citizenship in order to freely come to the jeweler in St. Petersburg. But according to the counterintelligence officers, her lover was not the only reason for her visits, and the marriage was a subtle game of the Austrian intelligence, expanding its agents in Russia.
During the First World War, the adventurer left for Italy, then through Serbia she moved to Bulgaria, and then persuaded the jeweler to help her return to Russia. The position of Faberge himself at that time was very precarious. His ancestors were originally from France, but in the 17th century. moved to Germany, and in Russia they were considered real Germans. For some time, Card Faberge headed the German Society of St. Petersburg. It was at that time that the struggle against German dominance in the Russian economy began, all enterprises owned by the Germans were liquidated. In 1914, Faberge was saved only by the fact that he fulfilled the orders of the imperial family and transferred all his funds from foreign banks to Russian ones. In such conditions, for a jeweler to send money abroad to a former Austrian citizen and to bother her to move to Russia meant exposing himself to the blow and incurring suspicion of espionage.
In the spring of 1915, Ioanna Amalia's plan came true: she arrived in Petrograd and settled in the Evropeyskaya Hotel. At the same time, the involvement of the administration of this hotel in military espionage was a confirmed fact. Of course, the woman was under surveillance.
The report of the chief of counterintelligence said: "In the" European "hotel from April 1915.there lives a certain princess Ioanna-Amalia Tsitsianova (born Kribel), she is Nina Barkis, 32 years old, of the Roman Catholic faith, who attracts attention by her wide life and trips to Finland … She speaks English, French, German and Russian well, makes an impression very a cunning and cautious woman … At the present time, she allegedly cohabits with the famous manufacturer-jeweler Faberge and, despite this, has constant meetings with other persons, and these meetings are designated by her with a special conspiracy … assists Tsitsianova, who is apparently engaged in espionage."
Carl Faberge was also summoned for interrogation. Once again risking his own reputation, he vouched for the reliability of his mistress. While all his friends and acquaintances were, as he wrote, "either expelled abroad, or as prisoners of war subjected to expulsion." Tsitsianova's involvement in espionage was confirmed only by circumstantial evidence, nevertheless, in 1916 she was sent to Yakutsk. In Siberia, her trace was lost, and Faberge knew nothing about the further fate of his last love. He himself was included in the list of unreliable for contact with a spy.
After the revolution, the jeweler's property was confiscated and he had to emigrate. In 1920, in Lausanne, he passed away, never seeing John Amalia again. He had to go through the path from worldwide fame to poverty: the tragedy of Faberge
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