During their exile, Cecilie and her family depended on the generosity of their foreign relatives, in particular Marie Bonaparte (who offered them accommodation in Saint-Cloud) and Lady Louis Mountbatten (who supported them financially).

Soon after, the princess and her family embarked on a trip to the United Kingdom, where they were to attend the wedding of her brother-in-law Louis, Prince of Hesse and by Rhine to Margaret Campbell Geddes.

The third daughter of Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark and Princess Alice of Battenberg, Cecilie was born at Tatoi Palace, near Athens, on 22 June 1911.

[22][23] Forced to reside in German-speaking Switzerland, the small group first stayed in a hotel in St. Moritz,[24][25] before settling in Lucerne,[26] where they lived with uncertainty about their future.

[28][29] Shortly after these events, the Grand Ducal family of Hesse, to which Cecilie was closely related through her mother, was overthrown along with all the other German dynasties during the winter of 1918–1919.

[35] For Cecilie, who now formed a duo with her younger sister Sophie,[35] exile was not only synonymous with sadness; it was also an opportunity for long family reunions and walks in the mountains.

[42] The joy that surrounded this birth, however, was obscured by the absence of Prince Andrew, who joined the Greek forces in Asia Minor during the Occupation of Smyrna.

[43] Despite worries about the war, Cecilie and her siblings enjoyed life at Mon Repos, where they received a visit from their maternal grandmother and their aunt Louise in the spring of 1922.

[41] In July 1922, they went to the United Kingdom to be bridesmaids at the wedding of their uncle Louis Mountbatten to the wealthy heiress Edwina Ashley,[46][47] whose beauty fascinated Cecilie.

[64] Deprived of their Greek nationality after the proclamation of the Second Hellenic Republic in March 1924, Cecilie and her family received Danish passports from their cousin King Christian X.

[4] Cecilie and her siblings continued their studies in private institutions,[67] and, during their free time, their father took them regularly to Paris or to the Bois de Boulogne.

Cecilie and her family also regularly met Prince Nicholas of Greece and Denmark and his wife Elena Vladimirovna of Russia, who had also chosen France to spend their time in exile with their daughters.

[4] Considered by her maternal grandmother, the Dowager Marchioness of Milford Haven, as the prettiest of the four daughters of Andrew and Alice,[48][73][74] Cecilie made her debut in the United Kingdom, during the summer of 1928.

Aged 17, she took part in her first ball at the Earl and Countess of Ellesmere's Bridgewater House, before attending the Cowes Week and then being invited by King George V to stay a few days in Balmoral, Scotland.

[75] Although her two elder sisters were still single, and the relative poverty of her parents was not unrelated to this situation,[76] Cecilie's family did not give up on finding a good match for her.

Since her childhood, Cecilie had in fact been in contact with her cousins, Princes Georg Donatus and Louis of Hesse, whom she first met in 1919, while she was living in exile in Switzerland.

[80] The happiness of the princess was however clouded by the situation of her mother, whose mental health deteriorated sharply after the celebration of her silver wedding anniversary with Prince Andrew, in 1928.

[75] Struck by a mental health crisis, the princess convinced herself that she possessed healing powers and that she was receiving divine messages about potential husbands for her daughters.

[82] He took advantage of his family's stay in Darmstadt, on the occasion of the celebration for Cecilie's official engagement in April 1930, to send Alice to a psychiatric hospital located in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland.

To the surprise of the foreign guests, who expected a much colder welcome from a population that had dethroned Grand Duke Ernest Louis in 1918, the wedding aroused the enthusiasm of the people, who gathered in droves to attend the event and cheer their former princely family.

[94] However, Alice was angry with those close to her for having her institutionalized and her anger manifested itself in fits of rage, which pushed her, for example, to tear up the photograph that Cecilie sent her after the birth of her first child.

[101][102][103] For their part, the princes of Hesse kept their distance from the far-right party for a long time because the Grand Duke Ernest Louis had no sympathy for the Führer's ideas.

[N 1][104][105] While in Germany the establishment of the Nazi regime prevented any plans to restore the monarchy,[106] in Greece the republic collapsed after the putsch of General Georgios Kondylis in November 1935.

[101] With Prince Louis' wedding approaching, Cecilie and her family went to Frankfurt on 16 November 1937 to get on board a plane of the Belgian company Sabena which was to take them to London, via a stopover in Ostend where it was planned to pick up two other passengers.

After the wedding, which took place in a climate of extreme gloom, the couple went to Belgium to collect the remains of Cecilie and her family, kept until then at the civil hospital in Ostend.

[123] Once back in Darmstadt, Louis and his wife adopted their niece Johanna, the only child of Cecilie and Georg Donatus not to have taken part in the plane trip due to her very young age.

On 16 November 2017 in Darmstadt, the Hessian State Archives, in collaboration with the Foundation of the House of Hesse (Hessische Hausstiftung), held a commemorative ceremony in honor of the victims of the accident in Ostend.

[132] The plane crash that caused the death of Princess Cecilie and her family was recounted in the sixth episode of the documentary series Mémoires d'exil (1999) by Frédéric Mitterrand.

In this fictionalized version, the accident in Ostend is caused by the KGB, which wants to recover the jewels of Tsarina Alexandra Fedorovna, bequeathed to the House of Hesse-Darmstadt after the Russian Revolution.