Nicholas I on Alexander I's childlessness and conjectures about the Emperor's illness

The future Emperor Nicholas I wrote of Alexander I, on the occasion of his wife Alexandra Feodorovna's pregnancy with their daughter Maria: "The Sovereign began to say that he saw our family bliss with joy... That he had never known this happiness, blaming himself for a liaison he had had in his youth; that neither he nor his brother Konstantin Pavlovich had been brought up so as to know how to prize this happiness from youth; that the consequence for both was that neither the one nor the other had children whom they could acknowledge, and that this feeling was the heaviest for him."

It is generally held that Nicholas is hinting at a venereal disease which Alexander contracted as a result of some liaison. One view has it that the emperor's illness was the very reason for the childlessness of his marriage. Alexander himself, however, regarded Elizaveta Alexeyevna's difficult pregnancies and the deaths of their daughters as divine punishment for his part in the conspiracy against his father. As for Alexander's illegitimate children, to whom Nicholas alludes obliquely, these may be Zinaida, Sophia and Emmanuel, supposedly born to the emperor by Maria Antonovna Naryshkina.