had unusually gone to dinner late. She told painter Henry Jones Thaddeus about her experience. She explained that she was late to the dinner because one of her children was ill. At the palace, Alexander II delayed going to the dining room to ask about her child. She recalled that, "At this moment the most awful explosion rent the air. The dining-room vanished from our view, and we were plunged into impenetrable darkness. A poisonous gas filled the room, suffocating us, as well as adding to our horror." She reflected that "It really seemed as if the hand of Providence had delayed the Czar’s arrival; otherwise we should have shared the same fate [as the dining room]." Marie was close to her father-in-law, Alexander II. She recalled that he was "devoted to her" and "kindness itself." However, she incurred his anger by refusing to accept his second wife, Catherine Dolgorukov. She privately criticized Alexander II for his obsession with Catherine: "The creature... seems to have him bound as in a spell, to make him deaf and blind." She resented him for forcing his family to accept Catherine, and she expressed her anger in a letter to the late Empress Maria's brother, Louis III, Grand Duke of Hesse and by Rhine: “The Tsar has commanded us as his subjects to be friendly with this wife; if not he would force us to it. You can imagine the internal conflict that agitates us all, and the perpetual struggle between feelings, duty, and external pressure.” Marie had a distant relationship with her sister-in-law, Maria Feodorovna. Maria Feodorovna disliked Marie because of her German origins. Marie openly declared that her husband would make a better Emperor than Maria Feodorovna's husband, Alexander III of Russia. After the Borki train disaster in which Alexander III, Maria Feodorovna, and their children narrowly escaped death, Marie allegedly said, "We shall never have such a chance again." Marie had an antagonistic relationship with Emperor Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra, because of her ambitions for her own sons. On 14 June 1897, the Boston Daily Globe reported that she had "consulted a gypsy fortune teller, who had predicted that one of her sons would sit on the throne of Russia." At this time, Empress Alexandra had given birth to her third daughter Grand Duchess Maria. As girls were ineligible for the Imperial Throne, Emperor Nicholas' heirs were his two unmarried,