On June 14 (June 26 N.S.), 1899, Empress Alexandra delivered a third child, HIH Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaievna, another girl. Her name meant "bitter sea," but her merry attitude was far from it. She had lush-blond hair, big, luminous blue eyes titled "Maria's saucers," and was broad-boned like her grandfather Alexander III.

        From the start, Maria did not exactly get along well with her sisters. When she had advanced to age two, Olga and Tatiana, already joined together pretty much, were four and six. They shunned their little sister from their play, and were in all not very nice. Finally, Maria, fed up, went over one day and firmly slapped both her elder sisters! Olga and Tatiana had learned their lesson; they explained, "She really couldn't help hitting us." Nevertheless, things grew easier when Anastasia came along.

        Maria, called "Mashka," "our angel," and "Mandrifolie," was good, nearly angelic at times. Nicholas joked that he was relieved when he found she was only human - "I had always been afraid of the wings growing." Her sisters, for all their unity, still teased her when she was older. They called her "our stepsister" because she was much better than they, and laughed at her slight plumpness. The weight wore off as she reached puberty, but one thing remained: she was clumsy. Not graceful like Olga or Tatiana, and not in control of her limbs as Anastasia. No, she had to be clumsy - "fat bow wow," as her sisters put it. She was continually knocking things over, much to her chagrin.

        Maria never grew old enough outside of captivity for her character to really show. However, one of her talents was painting, and she did well in this field. An oddity was that she always painted with her left hand instead of her usual right. Another favorite pasttime of hers was to dream about the day she would become a wife and mother. She had a maternal instinct, and loved to be around children. If Maria had lived, she would have made someone a wonderful wife. It was certainly fortunate that her many crushes on young officers were short-lived, as nanny M. Eager remembered in amusement.

        "One day, the little Grand Duchess Maria was looking out of the window at the regiment of soldiers marching past, and exclaimed, 'Oh! I love these dear soldiers; I should like to kiss them all!' I said, "Maria, nice little girls don't kiss soldiers." She made no remark. A few days afterwards we had a children's party, and the Grand Duke Constantine's children were amongst the guests. One of the them, having reached twelve years of age, had been put into the Corps de Cadets, and came in his uniform. He wanted to kiss his little cousin Maria, but she put her hand over her mouth and drew back from the proffered embrace. 'Go away soldier,' said she, with great dignity. 'I don't kiss soldiers.' The boy was greatly delighted at being taken for a real soldier, and not a little amused at the same time."

        Even though older than Anastasia, two years younger, Maria felt controlled by Anastasia's dominating personality. At sixteen, people remarked that she acted younger than her age. This was due to Anastasia's influence on her.

        While Olga had her cat, Tatiana had her French bulldog Ortino, Anastasia had her dog Shvizbik, and Alexei had his spaniel Joy, Maria's only pet - aside from the hamsters and fish that overran the Alexander Palace - was a mouse that lived in her bedroom wall.

        Maria was not always the angel she seemed to be. She played her own pranks, but, like most things she did wrong, the stunts originated from Anastasia's constantly-stirring mind. One of the "Little Pair's" favorite pasttimes was to make their mother perplexed and, often, embarrassed. At Tsarskoe Selo, since the Empress's Formal Reception Room was right below the younger grand duchesses' bedroom, the two girls would wait, angelically silent, until an important visitor or foreign dignitary came into the reception room with Alexandra. Then, they would turn up the volume on their phonograph as loud as it would go, and sit on the chairs, stomp around, dance crazily, and altogether make the poor person below's ears hurt.

        In 1917, Maria was the second to last to get sick with measles. Always the healthiest, she recovered quickly, with her usual rosy glow, and Charles Sidney Gibbes, the English tutor, wrote in his thumbnail sketch of her in Tobolsk:

        "The Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaievna, aged eighteen, was very strong and broadly-built and could easily lift me from the ground. Good-looking, with light grey eyes, she too grew very thin after her illness. She could paint and draw, and played the piano competently; less well than Olga or Tatiana. Maria was simple and fond of children; a little inclined to laziness; probably she would have made an excellent wife and mother. She liked Tobolsk and told me she could have made herself quite happy there."

        In early 1918, the lot fell to Maria, "our darling Mashka," to leave for Ekaterinburg with Nicholas and Alexandra. Because Olga was too pensive and thin to go, Tatiana was needed for the ill Alexei and to look after the household, and Anastasia, though sixteen, was "too young" to be considered, and because Maria was healthy and in good spirits, she left Tobolsk with her parents.