Finally, at the beginning of 1919, King George V-after the incessant pleading of his mother Queen Alexandra-dispatched a British warship, HMS Marlborough, to rescue his aunt. The Dowager Empress, however, insisted that she would only board after all of those who also wished to leave had been allowed to do so; after much negotiating, the British naval officials agreed, and so Zenaide and her husband, along with Felix, Irina, and their four-year-old daughter, joined the ragged party of refugees that lined the crowded decks, watching as the Crimean shoreline slowly faded into the distance on their way to an uncertain future in exile.
The warship sailed to Malta, where the Yusupovs were forced to disembark. From here, they made their way to Rome, where Zenaide and her husband moved into a small apartment owned by a family friend. Felix and Irina left for Paris, leaving their daughter in Zenaide's care. For the next few years, as Felix and his wife moved from Paris to London and attempted to sell the few possessions and properties still left to them, Zenaide acted as surrogate mother, supervising young Irina's early education and playing with her in a nearby park. The young girl's parents-neither one particularly paternal-relished the freedom that came with Zenaide's care, and they saw their daughter only rarely. Then, in 1928, Count Felix died. He had been unwell for some time, and his wife had bravely nursed him through his final illness, at the same time caring for her granddaughter.
Her husband's death was a severe blow to Zenaide, and her son later remembered that she seemed to "lose much of her spirit" when confronted with widowhood. She moved to Paris, living in two rooms in a Mews house that her son had previously purchased, and for a time these four-mother, son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter-formed a happy, united family. Following his mother's example, Felix devoted himself to assisting fellow émigrés; he had little financial sense, however, and spent and gave away money as fast as it came in, often leaving the family in precarious situations. When Zenaide suffered a stroke at the beginning of the 1930s, Felix struggled to scrape together the funds to hire a nurse to help look after her.
Zenaide's last years, though surrounded by her small family, were lonely ones. She missed her husband, and-despite the fact that she had cared little for the wealth her birth had bestowed upon her-found it increasingly difficult to reconcile herself to life in exile. A second stroke left her half-paralyzed and barely able to speak. Unable to properly care for her, Felix reluctantly put his mother in a nursing home for Russian exiles in Sevres. It was here, far from the glittering world of palaces and extraordinary jewelry she had once known, that Princess Zenaide Yusupov finally died on November 24, 1939. She was buried next to her husband in the cemetery of Ste. Genevive des Bois at Essone, outside Paris. "She had been my friend," Felix wrote sadly, "my confidant, and my support for the whole of my life. She lived through extraordinary events, but she never lost that wonderful, infectious spirit of optimism that had charmed so many of her contemporaries. The crowd of those who genuinely mourned at her funeral was the best tribute to this remarkable woman."
