Last Years
Gabriel Constantinovich kept in touch with his Romanov relatives during his long years in exile. He supported the claims of the chief Romanov pretender, Grand Duke Cyril Vladimirovich of Russia. Cyril repaid the favour by ennobling Nesterovskaya as "Princess Romanovskaya-Strelninskaya". Gabriel himself was awarded the style of "Grand Duke" by Cyril's son Vladimir Cyrillovich on 15 May 1939. He was the only Romanov prince to be elevated to this style. The legality of these actions were controversial, since both Cyril and Vladimir's claims were contested. Other members of the Romanov family dismissed the new title turning Prince Gabriel’s elevation to Grand Duke into a source of amusement.
During the tumultuous years of World War II, Gabriel Constantinovich continued to live in Paris with his wife. The relationship between them never wavered, and they remained devoted to each other. Prince Gabriel's wife died on 7 March 1950 at the age of sixty. Gabriel Constantinovich not only survived his wife, but remarried the following year, on 11 May 1951. His second wife was Princess Irina Ivanovna Kurakina ( 22 September 1903 – 17 January 1993), a forty-eight-year-old exiled Russian noblewoman who was created HSH Princess Romanovskaya by Grand Duke Vladimir Cyrillovich. Prince Gabriel died four years later on 28 February 1955 in Paris. He had no children by either marriage and was buried in the Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois Russian Cemetery outside Paris.
Read more about this topic: Prince Gabriel Constantinovich Of Russia
Famous quotes containing the word years:
“Perfect present has no existence in our consciousness. As I said years ago in Erewhon, it lives but upon the sufferance of past and future. We are like men standing on a narrow footbridge over a railway. We can watch the future hurrying like an express train towards us, and then hurrying into the past, but in the narrow strip of present we cannot see it. Strange that that which is the most essential to our consciousness should be exactly that of which we are least definitely conscious.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)
“It’s no go the picture palace, it’s no go the stadium,
It’s no go the country cot with a pot of pink geraniums.
It’s no go the Government grants, it’s no go the elections,
Sit on your arse for fifty years and hang your hat on a pension.”
—Louis MacNeice (1907–1963)