NATALIA OF SERBIA , BECAME NUN 15 May 1859 – 8 May 1941

 

NATALIA OF SERBIA , BECAME NUN  

15 May 1859 – 8 May 1941

The whiplash of an angry cabdriver laid across the face of a gentle nun has revealed the forgotten experience of ex-Queen Natalie of Serbia, the most tragic Queen in Europe.The cabdriver was brutally beating an old horse on a street of the Montparnasse quarter – a horse cab in Paris, by the way, is a strange survival from the past.

A crowd began to gather.  Among them was an elderly woman in the garb of a Sister of Mercy. As the lash fell upon the miserable beast she stepped forward and held up a hand in protest, gently rebuking the cab man and bidding him stop.For an answer, he diverted the blow intended for the horse, and laid the lash cruelly against the nun’s face!

Now the crowd interfered, and gendarmes dragged the driver from his seat.  The Sister of Mercy went with them to the police station.  There she simply gave her name as Sister Natalie.  She asked mercy for the cab man, if he would promise to give that same mercy thereafter to his horse.  The cab man, sobered now, promised, and was let off with a reprimand.

There the matter might have rested had not the enterprising correspondent of a Budapest newspaper, the Reggel, thought there was a romance behind the episode and followed the nun to the little community of sisters near the Luxemburg Gardens.

There he learned that she was really ex-Queen Natalie of Serbia, and at last the mystery of that unhappy Queen’s disappearance from the world was explained.  For years she had sought peace and forgetfulness in the shelter of the convent, and when she was asked why she did not write her memoirs she answered:

‘Memoirs require memories.  In order to forgive everything I have forgotten everything.’

Queen Natalie has had much to forgive, and her life has been as overpoweringly cruel as a Greek tragedy.  As a girl she was considered wonderfully beautiful, according to the standards of Eastern Europe, where women are more robust than in France or America.  It was a dazzling elevation for the young girl when she became a Queen – the bride of King Milan of Serbia.

But her triumph was short lived, for Milan treated her with incredible brutality, and she was forced to leave him.  Then followed one calamity after another – loss of child, country, home, wealth – every form of suffering.

The death of her beloved son, King Alexander, was a tragedy that might have bereft any mother of her reason, for he was slashed to pieces by an infuriated mob, and his naked, mutilated body thrown out of a window with as much regard as if he were a mad dog.

She was only a girl of sixteen when she was brought to Belgrade as the bride of King Milan of Serbia.  She was the daughter of a Rumanian nobleman, who was a Colonel in the Russian army, and was, of course, of unsuitable rank to be the bride of the King of even a minor State.  King Milan married her against advice of his counsellors.

Milan was the descendant of a fierce swineherd, who made himself Prince of Serbia in the Middle Ages.  He seems to have had the most savage characteristics of his ancestors.  But as a very young man he was handsome and winning.

His own kinswoman, Princess Marthe Bibesco, a noblewoman of Rumania, has given startling revelations of his brutality.  Immediately after marriage he began to treat the lovely young bride after the fashion of a drunken cavalry trooper ravaging an enemy country.  Her honeymoon was a nightmare.

On the return from this honeymoon, it is related, Natalie, with a childish eagerness to please him, had dressed herself in a pale blue satin and seated herself in her boudoir in the palace at Belgrade to await Milan’s return from the council chamber.

The room was richly carpeted in spotless white, the furnishings were ivory.  In this setting the loveliest girl in Serbia, in her pale blue gown, must have made a charming picture.  Milan entered the room smoking a pipe.  He leered at the girl with a shockingly brutal expression, removed the pipe from his mouth and deliberately spat on the white carpet at Natalie’s feet.

The only surviving child of this union was the decadent and repellent creature who eventually ascended the throne as King Alexander of Serbia after having scandalized all Europe by his escapades, which were fully as shocking as those of his father.  He broke his mother’s heart by his dissipations and especially by his liaison with a woman who had been one of the objects of her charity.

This woman, Draga Mašin, was the middle aged widow of a petty Czech official.  With supreme effrontery, Alexander married her and placed her beside him on the throne of Serbia.

Natalie’s life tragedy was enacted against a background of necromancy and supernatural hocus-pocus worse than that of the Imperial Russian Court, and almost, incredible as having existed in Europe only a generation ago.  It is more like a chapter from some medieval Gothic romance.  The major events of her life hinged on the forecasts of crystal gazers and clairvoyants.

Only fourteen years after Natalie entered it, she was thrust crownless from the palace at Belgrade, a divorced wife.  And this outrage was perpetrated by King Milan at the insistence of his mistress, Arthemisia Christich, the daughter of a Greek timber merchant.

Natalie fled from Serbia with her little son, Alexander, known as Sasha.  Already this Sasha was starting to exhibit the vicious and despicable traits which made him, a few years later, as King Alexander of Serbia, an object of contempt to the civilized world.  But then, and to the day of his wretched death, he was to his loving mother always, her little Sasha.  The poor Queen had reached a point in her flight where she thought it safe to rest.  She paused for the night at a small seaside villa.  There King Milan’s agents found her and literally tore young Sasha from her arms.

Soon after the divorce King Milan abdicated the throne of Serbia.  He was maneuvered into this act by the Greek timber merchant’s daughter, who hoped thereby to make possible her marriage with him.  This marriage never took place.  But Sasha became the Boy King of Serbia.

When this young hopeful was eighteen he paid a visit to his mother at her villa in France. Living in the villa on the Queen’s bounty was Draga, a widow already in her middle thirties and of humble origin, her grandfather having been an exporter of pigs to the Hungarian markets.  Draga, seems, from the narrative of Princess Bibesco, to have started to ‘vamp’ the young King at first sight.  Probably the willful, violent and sensual boy needed little encouragement.  Natalie, always a woman of unblemished character, was finally forced to dismiss the widow with the hog and sow background.  But before long Sasha was back at Belgrade, flaunting his Draga in the face of the world, and Queen Natalie’s humiliation was complete.

Queen Draga excited the exasperation of the Serbian people by her conduct, and a certain desperate set among them determined that the only salvation was to destroy her and her mentally incompetent husband.  Draga was using her power and all the resources of the country for the benefit of her brother, Colonel Nikodije Milićević Lunjevica, an unscrupulous adventurer.  Queen Natalie fought with all her might, but could exert no influence on her son.  The deposed King Milan had already died in Paris from the effects of his debaucheries – a shocking example of the boulevards.

Queen Draga conceived a desperate plot to place her disreputable brother on the throne, as she could produce no children, and this brought the conspiracy against her to a climax.

At midnight the revolutionaries, supported by soldiers, smashed their way into the Konak, the Royal palace, and hunted down King Alexander and Queen Draga.  Shooting was too civilized a method to be employed by these children of the mountains.  They wanted to plunge their swords in flesh, and their rage attained a blind fury that astonished observers from less primitive countries.

The doors of the Royal suite were blown in with dynamite, the explosion breaking the electrical wiring and plunging the palace into darkness.  Lighting their way with candles, the assassins broke into the bedroom of the King and Queen.  The Royal couple fled around the large chamber, the assassins slashing at them with their swords.

The pigherder’s granddaughter, who had climbed to wear a crown, ran on wilding, clutching her nightdress about her, as her pursuers cut at her with their swords.  The subnormal and short sighted little King, who, to a tragic woman in the Convent of Notre Dame de Sion in Paris, had never ceased to be her darling little Sasha, darted like a frightened rat from balcony to alcove, falling in his panic over broken chairs, screaming like his disheveled Queen.

The assassins in their fury broke down the Royal bed, smashed the furniture and tore the clothing of the Queen to ribbons.  Many of these rags; were afterwards found thrown out of the windows and scattered far and wide.

At last the King and Queen were cornered in a clothes closet, where they hid behind some of Draga’s finery. The assassins slashed through the gowns in the semi-darkness and then at the whimpering creatures who crouched behind them.  They slashed and slashed until the shrieks and groans ceased to come.  The treatment of Queen Draga will not bear description.  It was like a scene from one of the most barbarous chapters of the Middle Ages.

When the assailants had completely satiated their appetite for vengeance they hurled the unclothed bodies from the bedroom window to the flagstones of the courtyard below just as a June dawn was starting to streak the sky behind Pančevo.

The killing of Queen Natalie’s son was an especially cruel blow to her, for she had helped in a way to bring it about.  She was the untiring enemy of Queen Draga and those who carried out the assassination had been her supporters.

This tragedy finally forced Queen Natalie to turn to religion as her only comfort.  She had learned that to harbor feelings of revenge, even for the greatest wrongs, may bring worse punishment on oneself than on one’s enemy.  Now she lives only to forget and forgive.

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August, 7, 1897

 The former queen Natalie of Serbia is to publish a book of aphorisms, according a report coming out of London. These aphorism apparently have come out of her own suffering. These comforting aphorisms include: "the dream of every brave soldier is to die for something great and to live for something nice" and "a girl is an angel. Take care that when she becomes a wife she is not changed into a devil."

The former Serbian queen died in 1941 at the Convent of Notre-Dame de Sion in Paris. She was the daughter of a Russian Colonel and a Roumanian princess. Natalie Petrovna Keskho married Prince Milan when she was only sixteen. She gave birth their son, Alexander, a year later. By 23, she was the queen consort of Serbia, but fed up with her husband's affairs and dissipated life, she fled Serbia, taking her son with her. But Milan was able to kidnap Alexander and bring him back to Serbia.

Milan divorced Natalie in 1888. The young prince was only 13 when he became king. Milan had abdicated, and retired to Paris. He died in 1901.

Natalie returned to Belgrade after her son married Draga Mashin, a widow with a past. who had once served as a lady-in-waiting to Queen Natalie.

It was rumored that she had poisoned her first husband. On June 10, 1903, Officers led by her former brother-in-law stormed the palace, and killed the royal couple in their bed. Their bodies were tossed from the window into the garden. Natalie may have witness this regicide. She fled to Paris, where she entered the convent. She died "an obese, forgotten woman who had spent her old age knitting for the poor," according to her obituary in Time magazine.

Another of Natalie's aphorisms concerned death: "it will be ... the beginning of my happiness."