Prince Dimitri Dmitrievich Gallitzin was born into a world of inherited privilege at The Hague. His father, Prince Dimitri Alexeievich (1735-1803), the Russian ambassador to the Netherlands, was an intimate friend of Voltaire and a follower of Diderot. So was his mother, the former German Countess Adelheid Amalie von Schmettau, until a severe illness in 1786 led her back to the Catholic Church, in which she had been nominally reared.