Royal Women

LADY WU by Lin Yutang. 255 pages. Putnam. $4.95.

THE LAST GRAND DUCHESS by Ian Vorres. 264 pages. Scr/bner. $5.95.

"For the study of the good and the bad in women," Ambrose Bierce once remarked, "two women are a needless expense." Not always. In these new biographies of women of importance, one a Chinese empress and the other a Russian princess, some notable virtues and vices of the sex are acutely dramatized by contrast.

Beastly Nature. If the Devil is a woman, her name is undoubtedly Lady Wu. She was Cleopatra, Catherine the Great and Lucrezia Borgia rolled into one, and from A.D. 655 to 704, first as Empress and later as "female Emperor," she subjected China to a reign of unprecedented terror. In this lightly fictionalized and gruesomely readable account of her career, Lin Yutang dispassionately describes the nature of the beast and the events of an era that still stands as history's most horrible experience of petticoat government.

Lady Wu was born a commoner, the daughter of an army officer. At 14, she caught the Emperor's eye and became -a royal concubine. At 24, she seduced the Emperor's successor and became his favorite. The throne was now her goal. To attain it she strangled her own baby, the new Emperor's daughter, and blamed the crime on the reigning Empress. The Empress was deposed; Lady Wu took her place. Within a year she held all the strings of power, manipulated the Emperor like a puppet. On her secret instructions, the former Empress was horribly done to death--after a ferocious flogging, her hands and feet were cut off and she was left to drown in a vat of wine. In the next 35 years, sometimes as policy but always with pleasure, Lady Wu murdered five of the Emperor's sons (including two of her own), two of her brothers, one of her sisters, the sister's daughter and several hundred of her husband's relatives.

When the Emperor died, Lady Wu assumed the regnancy and soon transformed government by murder into government by massacre. Hundreds died every day in the torture chambers operated by her secret police; whole villages were wiped out by ambitious commanders who invented a sedition whenever they wanted a promotion. When all possible opposition was crushed, Lady Wu abolished the Tang succession, established the Wu dynasty, and in 690 had herself crowned as the first Wu Emperor. To everyone's amazement, she proved in most respects a model monarch. She demolished the apparatus of terror and installed a Cabinet of honest civil servants who ruled the country well. At 80, feeble but still formidable, she was persuaded to relinquish her male harem and was maneuvered into luxurious retirement. Less than a year later she died--without a care in the world, without a spot on her conscience. In her last will and testa ment, she declared that she "pardoned" all the people who had forced her to kill them.

Earned Oblivion. The Last Grand Duchess depicts a very different sort of royal lady--not a perpetrator but a victim of terror. Olga Aleksandrovna Ro manova, sister of Czar Nicholas II, started out in life as a fairy-tale princess. She spent her childhood in the palace at Gatchina near St. Petersburg, enclosed by 5,000 servants and 900 rooms. As a young lady still in her teens, she was given an income of $1,000,000 a year. To her, traveling "simply" meant moving with a retinue of 30 or more, often aboard an imperial yacht that was freighted with carloads of fresh roses.

Then, on one inhuman night at Ekaterinburg in 1918, Nicholas II, his wife and their five children died at the hands of the Bolshevik murderers. Olga Aleksandrovna escaped with her commoner husband to Denmark and later to Canada, where she sank gently into near poverty. She died five years ago at 78.

Author Vorres, art critic of the Toronto Globe and Mail, rescued Olga from the oblivion that she had long cherished and richly earned. One day in 1958, anxious only to borrow some of Olga's icons for an exhibit he was organizing, Vorres knocked on the door of her cottage in Cooksville, a Toronto suburb. The gracious and angular old woman admitted him not only to her cottage but to her confidence.

In her last years, she refused to accept any substantial help from distant relatives. Yet, wearing any old dress and shoes without stockings, the noble old woman commanded from her neighbors the respect that her brother never attained. "I just can't understand it," she said one Christmas season in Canada, leafing through cards that had arrived from royal kinfolk in Sweden, Germany, Denmark and Greece. "It is the first time I have not had a card from him." "From whom?" her visitor asked. "Oh, Mr. Shaw, my dear butcher. I do so hope he is all right."

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