While She Lay Dying, The Tsar Moved His Mistress Into the Rooms Above Her Bed

In the winter of 1879, inside the largest palace in Europe, an Empress lay dying. Maria Alexandrovna, wife of Tsar Alexander II of Russia, could not leave her apartments. Tuberculosis hollowed out her lungs over the course of a decade, reducing a woman who once presided over the grandest court on the continent to a bedridden invalid wracked by violent coughing fits. She could barely sit upright, and her physicians knew she would not recover.