Princess Catherine Radziwiłł was born in St. Petersburg as Ekaterina Adamovna Rzewuska, a member of the House of Rzewuski, a Polish family of warriors, statesmen, adventurers and eccentrics.

She was the only child of the Russian General Adam Adamowicz Rzewuski (1801–1888), who took part in the Crimean War, and his second wife, Anna Dmitrievna Dashkova (1831–1858), a daughter of the writer Dmitry Dashkov, Tsar Nicholas I's minister of justice.

Catherine's father married for a third time and provided her with three half-brothers, including Stanislaw Rzewuski, who became a novelist and literary critic.

In 1884, Nouvelle Revue published a series of articles written as letters to a young diplomat by the elderly Count Paul Vasili.

[2] Count Paul Vasili was a fictional character and a subsequent investigation indicated Auguste Gérard, the empress' French reader, as the author.

When her father died in Russia in April 1888, Radziwiłł decided to stay in St. Petersburg where her youngest son, Casimir, was born the same year.

Estranged from her husband and children, she moved to London and earned some money writing articles for hungry American magazines and newspapers chronicling British society, but she accumulated debts.

To conceal her situation Radziwill left "Crail" and took up residence at a small house at Kalk Bay near Simons Town in Feb.1901 until her child, Alexi, was born in July 1901 of this liaison.

She was a fine specimen of the lady adventurer of detective fiction and we may expect her reappearance in a roman à clef dealing with South Africa.

[4] Her Solicitors, SilberBauer, Wahl & Fuller failed to convince the jury of her innocence in the 24 counts of fraud against her, including the forging of Rhodes' name/signature.

Radziwiłł was sentenced after three days of trial, 14.Nov.1901 to two years at the Roeland Prison (without hard labour) where she occupied herself in writing but was released 14.Mar.1903.

Alexi grew up in New York but eventually turned up in Durban, South Africa in 1971 seeking contact with his father Harry, who had recently died in Jan.1971.

Radziwiłł played a minor role in exposing The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, but not before being accused in 1919 by lawyer Samuel William Jacobs of claiming that Jews were behind the Bolshevik Revolution during a speaking tour of Western Canada.

Radziwiłł's statements were cited during the Berne Trial by Russian witnesses in 1934 and by experts in 1935; they gave evidence that her date of 1905, when Matvei Golovinski would have shown her a manuscript of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion ("with a big blue ink spot on the first page") in Paris, is obviously an error of chronology, possibly caused by a typo in her article published in The American Hebrew and reprinted by The New York Times.

[9] Research by historian Michael Hagermeister casts serious doubts on the Paris origins on the Protocols, and of the truth in Radziwill's Berne testimony, noting her history of fraud and self-serving deception.