Olga was known for her compassion and kindness from when she was young. But she also had a quick temper and often spoke what she thought plainly. Once, when she was a small child, she became impatient while posing for a portrait painter and told him, "You are a very ugly man and I don't like you one bit!" Pierre Gilliard, her French teacher, said that when he first saw Olga when she was 10 years old, she was "very fair, and with sparkling, mischievous examined me with a look which seemed from the first moment to be searching for the weak point in my armor, but there was something so pure and frank (truthful) about the child that one liked her straight off."