Their Majesties as I Knew Them: Personal Reminiscences of the Kings and Queens of EuropePaoli, Xavier
History
Their Majesties as I Knew Them: Personal Reminiscences of the Kings and Queens of Europe
Paoli, Xavier
Europe -- Kings and rulers
No doubt. Queen Helena's "manner" was entirely different from that
of Margherita of Savoy, whose highly-developed and refined culture,
whose apposite wit, whose engaging mode of address, built up of shades
that appealed to delicate minds, had attracted to the Quirinal the
pick of intellectual, artistic and literary Italy and held it bound
in fervent admiration. Educated at the court of her father, Prince
Nicholas, Helena of Montenegro had grown up amid the austere scenery
of her native land, in constant contact with the rugged simplicity of
the Montenegrin highlanders; her wide-open child-eyes had never rested
on other than grave and manly faces; her girlhood was decked not with
fairy-tales, but with the old, wild legends of the mountains, or else,
with epics extolling the heroism of those who, in the days of old,
had driven the foreign invader from the valleys of Antivari or the
lofty plateaux of Cetinje. At the age of twelve, she was sent to St.
Petersburg to finish her studies. There, in the promiscuous intercourse
of a convent confined to young ladies of gentle birth, she had known
the charm of friendships that removed all differences of social rank
between her fellow schoolgirls and herself, while her mind opened to
the somewhat melancholy beauties of Slav literature. On returning to
her country, she enjoyed, in the fulness of an independence wholly
undisturbed by the demand of etiquette, the healthy delights of an
open-air life, which she divided between water-colour drawing, in which
she excelled, and sport in which she showed herself fearless.
When, therefore, she saw Italy for the first time in 1895 and saw it
through the gates of Venice, where her father had taken her on the
occasion of an exhibition; when, one evening, in the midst of the
fanciful and to her novel scene of the lagoon arrayed in its holiday
attire, she saw the homage of a glowing admiration in the eyes of
the then Prince of Naples, it will readily be conceived that she was
flurried and a little dazzled. When, lastly, in the following year,
she bade farewell to her craggy mountains and to the proud highlanders,
the companions of her childhood, and saw the gay and enthusiastic
nation of Italy hastening to welcome her, the twenty-years-old bride,
with the hopes and promises which she brought with her, it will be
understood that she at first experienced a sense of confusion and
shyness.
The shyness, I am told, has never completely worn off. On the other
hand, in the absence of more brilliant outward qualities, Queen Helena
has displayed admirable domestic virtues; she has known how to be a
queen in all that this function implies in regard to noble and delicate
missions of devotion and goodness to the poor and lowly. And she has
done better than that: she has realised her engrossing duties as wife
and mother; and they are sweet and dear to her.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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