Later Chapters of My Life: The Lost Memoir of Queen Marie of Romania
This final volume, ‘Later Chapters of My Life’, a previously unpublished manuscript, was for a long time believed to have been destroyed by King Carol II after his mother’s death. Marie’s last private secretary, Christine Galitzi, knew ‘of the new book the Queen was writing as a sequel to The Story of My Life’. She believed that ‘after the Queen’s death Carol ordered the manuscript to be destroyed’.The writing of these last memoirs was undertaken on the basis of notes from queen’s diary. Short time after the publication of the first volume from ‘The Story of My Life’ the Queen was asked to continue the writing of her captivating recollections. The first mentions about starting of the fourth volume appeared during August 1934 in the correspondence between the Queen and Ray Harris Baker, the founder of Queen Marie’s Collection.The completion of this volume of memoirs by the Queen continued with many difficulties stemming from pressures from her son Carol II He was envying the queen because of her widely recognized prestige. The result was that she decided to hide her private papers. Also from 1931, as a measure of precaution against Carol’s intrusions, she arranged to have a part of her correspondence received through King Alexander of Yugoslavia, her son-in-law, in Belgrade and in Bucharest at the Yugoslav Legation.Documents confirm Marie’s fears during 1930s and her wish to place the diaries and other personal papers in a safe place at the British Legation in Bucharest. This was a political sensitive action and was possible only for a short time. The intention to keep her papers, material for her memoirs, in a safe place was paralleled by similar situation which occurred between Empress Frederick and her son Kaiser Wilhelm II. The same kind of restrictions and pressure resulted that her memoirs and Kaiser Frederick III’ s personal papers to be smuggled out of Germany by the British Embassy in Berlin and stored in England.