The Romanov's Third Daughter
At last, the terrible day came when she could no longer walk, and Marie became the victim of her own devotion. Aged only seventeen at the time, she had spent herself completely for her mother and sisters, their last pillar of strength in these terrible times. Her constitution was excellent as always, but she had all she could to survive the onslaught of the fever. She was still frail when the family was taken into the darkness of Siberia.
Even here, she found a way to bring sunshine to those around her. She spoke congenially with the soldiers who guarded her family -- her captors, if we must say the truth, and yet, eventually, her friends. After confinement in Tobolsk, when her mother and father were taken ahead of the children to Ekaterinburg, it was she who dared to come with them rather than waiting her turn together with her brother and sisters. She knew that her mother needed her, and thus she chose to brave the Golgotha of the Red Urals at her mother's side. Calmly and efficiently, she went to work preparing the prison house for the arrival of her siblings to make the change easier on them.
On the night of July 17, 1918, she was killed along with her father Nicholas, her mother Alexandra, her elder sisters Olga and Tatiana, her baby sister Anastasia and her little brother Aleksei. She was nineteen.
The Romanov girls -- Olga, Tatiana, Anastasia, Marie.
She was never married, never had a baby, never saw her twentieth birthday and never wore a wedding dress. There were so many things she had wished for in her short, devoted life, and never got. Though her elder sisters had been hounded by the media, she had been the third girl and the first disappointment of the country, and relatively unknown. Today, she is the one that is most often slighted when the Romanov sisters are described -- we know the mystery of Anastasia, we know about Olga, the Tsar and Tsarina's first child,
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