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He was repeatedly approached on the subject, both by his father and the nation, but Draga held him in a firm grip. Enmeshed as he knew he was in hostile intrigues, surrounded by spies and traitors, and himself a fool at best, maybe the luckless youth regarded her indeed as the one human creature for whom he had any affection or trust.
Be that as it may Alexander, under her influence, promised his father and Vladan Georgevitch that he would marry if a suitable match could be arranged. He persuaded them to leave the country to visit a foreign Court with this object, and so soon as they had gone he publicly and formally announced his betrothal to Draga, and informed his father of the fact by letter.
The Paris Havas found Bozhidar Karageorgevitch more communicative and published an interview in which he pleasantly stated that the event had caused him no surprise as he had foreseen it ever since the marriage with Draga. On the 14th I drove down to Cattaro with my sister to see her off by steamer. Cattaro, as usual in the summer, lay panting at the water's edge.
The palace known as the Old Konak, where King Alexander and Queen Draga were assassinated under peculiarly revolting circumstances on the night of June 11, 1905, and from an upper window of which their mutilated bodies were thrown into the garden, has been torn down, presumably because of its unpleasant associations for the present dynasty, but only a stone's throw away from the tragic spot is being erected a large and ornate palace of gray stone, ornamented with numerous carvings, as a residence for Prince-Regent Alexander, who, when I was there, was occupying a modest one-story building on the opposite side of the street.
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."
If Alexander had lived he would have made an alliance with Austria and have stinted the army. The army and Great Serbia was the cry. They were all for Russia. As for the wretched Draga, the ladies told me that she had received them at some function or another with powder all over her face. Imagine having to kiss the hand of such a fallen woman! Nothing was too bad for her.
Milan, horrified, replied that the dynasty would not survive the blow, and that even a mere lieutenant would scorn such a match. The Russian Minister Mansurov, however, called at once to offer his congratulations to Alexander, and called also upon Draga. It has even been suggested that Russia arranged the affair, and that Draga was her tool. This is, however, improbable.
But Natalie was fated never to be happy long, and once more her evil Destiny was to snatch the cup from her lips, assuming this time the form of Draga Maschin, one of her own ladies-in-waiting, under the spell of whose black eyes and voluptuous charms her son quickly fell, after that first dramatic incident at Biarritz, when she plunged into the sea to his rescue and saved him from drowning.
Colonel Maschin, who had himself helped kill his sister-in-law Draga, was made head of the General Staff, and Colonel Damian Popovitch, the leader of the gang, who has since become notorious for atrocities, even in the Balkans, was given the command of the Belgrade-Danube Division, and King Petar obediently signed an amended Constitution, which greatly curtailed his own power.
The women raged against Draga, even saying "She ought to lie under the accursed stone heap!" a reminiscence of the fact that stoning to death was actually inflicted in Montenegro in the old days, upon women for sexual immorality. Vuk Vrchevitch records a case as late as 1770.
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