And a little p.s. Where did the information about Natalie's supposed rape came from? I couldn't find any references to it in Jean-Noel Liaut's book, unless I've missed something... she did become distant and could only maintain friendships with men who looked physically like her brother Vladimir for a while, but does that necessarily mean that she was sexually assaulted? There is quote that explains her state of mind in the time that followed the events of the revolution, when she entered a private school in Switzerland and couldn't mix with everybody else because she felt different:
"At twelve, French girls were still reading Robinson Crusoe and watching Douglas Fairbanks movies. At twelve, I was taking some bread to my father in jail. How could I have been like them? I was mute, I would not play. But I was reading a lot. I had faced death, so close. My father executed, my brother, my cousins, my uncles, executed, all Romanov blood splashed on my adolescence. This gave me a taste for sad things, poetry, the icy and lightning antechamber of death. Soon, my classmates understood me. And respected the way I was, as strange as it have may seemed."
I may be wrong, of course and my French, I'm afraid, is not what you would call impeccable, but where did that came from?