Hello, everyone! This is my first post as a new member (after lurking around and learning so much from all you brillant people for a long time now). Hopefully I am doing this correctly 
I am very interested in how the Yussupovs lived in exile, particularly Zinaida, but also Felix and Irena. What type of homes did they have? Servants? What was their daily routine like? We always hear how they "lost it all" but I would assume they still maintained a certain level of comfort - just not on the grand scale they had before the revolution. Correct?
Thank you.
The Youssoupoff standard of living in exile was varied to say the least from a elegant house with private theatre & gate keepers lodge to a tiny flat with no bedroom for their daughter..but ended for Felix & Irina (thanks to MGM money principally) in a comfortable house(now owned by their grandaughter) converted from a barn & with staff quarters in the chic 16th district of Paris...
For Zenaida home till 1926 was a villa opposite the British Embassy in Rome..here attended by a small staff she nursed her paralysed husband till his death and poured the remainder of her resources into charitable enterprises for fellow russian emigrees.
After her husband died ahe joined her son in Paris and with two servants and her dog settled in the small lodge of his house...Declining finances resulting even in the cutlery occassionally being pawned and baliffs calling meant the house was sold....Zenaida would have been homeless but was offered a three room flat in a home for refugees in the much less fashionable Serves district....here with her maid and dog and surrounded by mementoes she lived till the last few weeks of her life when she was taken into a nursing home.The MGM victory meant that after 1934 the last few gems were redemed from pawn and Zenaida materially lacked nothing.
