But handsome and gallant and popular as he was, the overtures of his ministers were coldly received by one Royal house after another.  Milan might be a reigning Prince and a charming one to boot, but it was not forgotten that the first of his line had been a common herdsman, and the blood of Hapsburgs and Hohenzollerns could not be allowed to mingle with so base a strain.  Even a mere Hungarian Count, whose fair daughter had caught Milan’s fancy, frowned on the suit of the swineherd’s successor.  But fate had already chosen a bride for the young Prince, who was more than equal in birth to any Count’s daughter; who would bring beauty and riches as her portion; and who, after many unhappy years, was to crown her dower with tragedy.

It was at Nice, where Prince Milan was spending the winter months of 1875, that he first set eyes on the woman whose life was to be so tragically linked with his own.  Among the visitors there was the family of a Russian colonel, Nathaniel Ketschko, a man of high lineage and great wealth.  He claimed, in fact, descent from the Royal race of Comnenus, which had given many a King to the thrones of Europe, and whose sons for long centuries had won fame as generals, statesmen, and ambassadors.  And to this exalted strain was allied enormous wealth, of which the Colonel’s share was represented by a regal revenue of four hundred thousand roubles a year.

But proud as he was of his birth and his riches, Colonel Nathaniel was still prouder of his two lovely daughters, each of whom had inherited in liberal measure the beauty of their mother, a daughter of the princely house of Stourza; and of the two the more beautiful, by common consent, was Natalie, whose charms won this spontaneous tribute from Tsar Nicholas, when first he saw her, “I would I were a beggar that I might every day ask your alms, and have the happiness of kissing your hand.”  She had, says one who knew her in her radiant youth, “an irresistible charm that permeated her whole being with such a harmony of grace, sweetness, and overpowering attraction that one felt drawn to her with magnetic force; and to adore her seemed the most natural and indeed the only position.”

Such was the high tribute paid to Servia’s future Queen at the first dawning of that beauty which was to make her also Queen of all the fair women of Europe, and which at its zenith was thus described by one who saw her at Wiesbaden ten years or so later:  “She walked along the promenade with a light, graceful movement; her feet hardly seemed to touch the ground, her figure was elegant, her finely cut face was lit up by those wonderful eyes, once seen never forgotten—­brilliant, tender, loving; her luxuriant hair of raven black was loosely coiled round the well-set head, or fell in curls on the beautifully arched neck.  For each one she had a pleasant smile, a gracious bow, or a few words, spoken in a musical voice.”  No wonder the Germans, who looked at this apparition of grace and beauty, “simply fell down and adored her.”