Many months earlier a clairvoyante at Paris had told Natalie, “Your Majesty is cherishing in your bosom a poisonous snake, which one day will give you a mortal wound.”  She had smiled incredulously at the warning, but she was soon to learn what truth it held.  Certainly Draga Maschin was the last person she would have suspected of being a source of danger—­a woman many years older than her son, the penniless widow of a drunken engineer—­a woman, moreover, of whose life, before Natalie had taken pity on her poverty, many strange stories were told—­how, for instance, she had often been seen in low resorts, “with the arm of a forester or a tradesman round her, singing the old Servian songs.”

But she had not taken into account Draga’s sensuous beauty, before which her son was powerless.  Each meeting left him more and more involved in her toils, until, to the consternation of Servia and the horror of his mother, he announced his intention of making her his Queen.  Even Milan, degraded as he was, was horror-struck when the news came to him in Paris.  “And this,” he exclaimed, “is the act of ’Sacha’—­my own son.  He is a monster, a thing of evil in the eyes of all men!  The Maschin will be Queen of Servia.  What a reproach!  What an evil!  A creature like her!  A sordid creature!  Could he not have put aside his love for this low-born woman?  But I could never make the fool understand that a King has duties; he has something else to think of but love-making.”

When taking leave of the friend who had brought him this evil news Milan said, “I shall never see Servia again.  My experience has been a bitter one—­everywhere treachery and deceit.  And now my own son—­that has broken my heart.”  A few months later, worn out by his excesses, prematurely old and broken-hearted, the man who had prostituted life’s best gifts drew his last breath at Vienna at the age of forty-six.

As for Natalie, this crowning calamity of her son’s disgrace did more than all her past sufferings to crush her proud spirit.  But fate had not yet dealt the last and most cruel blow of all.  That fell on that fatal June day of 1902 when her beloved “Sacha’s” mutilated body was flung by his assassins out of his palace window, to be greeted with shouts of derisive laughter and cries of “Long live King Peter,” from the dense crowds who had come to gloat over this last scene in the tragedy of the House of the Obrenvoie.

INDEX

Agenois, Duc, d’, 284, 285
Aisse, Mlle, 221-224
Albany, Count of, 13-20
  " Countess of, 15-22
Alberoni, Cardinal, 184
Alexander, King of Servia, 319-329
Alexander III., of Russia, 93
Alexis, Tsarevitch, 10, 255
Alfieri, Vittorio, 19-22
Anjou, Duc d’, 59
Anna, Empress, 26
Anne of Austria, 159, 163, 164
Arcimbaldo, 92
Aubigne, Constant d’, 240, 241
  " Francoise d’, 240-247
Audouins, Diane d’, 37
Augustus, of Saxony, 93-102
Austin, William, 205, 213
Auvergne, Comte d’, 235