Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [80]
Much greater problems were waiting for the peacemakers, but there was something fascinating about Montenegro. The country, a spot on the map between Croatia and Albania so small that few people could find it, was absurd and heroic, remote and beautiful. According to Montenegrin legend, when God was creating the world he had its mountains in a sack which broke and rained them down in a crazy jumble on what became their homeland. The Montenegrins themselves matched their mountains. They were perhaps the tallest people in Europe, handsome, proud, brave and indolent, given to endless drinking of coffee and the rehashing of old victories and blood feuds. The intrepid traveler Edith Durham took against them when she inadvertently looked into the bag of one noble warrior to discover his booty of sixty human noses; from that point on she transferred her considerable loyalties to the Albanians. 21
Their legends had it that Montenegrins were descended from the Serbs who had fled from the invading Turks in the fourteenth century, and it is true that they were Orthodox like the Serbs and spoke a version of Serbian. From their mountains they had fought the Turks to a standstill and so had remained an autonomous Christian island in the Turkish Muslim sea. Their rulers, until the middle of the nineteenth century, had been warrior bishops. The modern dynasty was established by the last bishop of the line in 1851, when he tired of being celibate and married. His nephew, Nicholas II, had been on the throne since the 1860s.
Nicholas himself, as it happened, was in Paris, living on a dwindling pension from Britain while his daughters worked as dressmakers. Opinion was divided as to whether he was a cunning buffoon (Rebecca West’s view) or a great warrior king (the opinion of Edith Durham, who spent a happy evening with him before the war swapping toasts). There was a whiff of the Middle Ages about King Nicholas: his insistence on leading his own troops into battle, on dispensing justice from his seat under an ancient tree, even the magnificent medals he awarded himself and his friends so copiously. His capital, Cetinje, was a large village, the Bank of Montenegro a small cottage, and the Grand Hotel a boardinghouse. The Biljarda, his old palace, was named after its much prized English billiard table, which had been hauled up the mountainside, and looked like an English country inn. His new palace was more like a German pension, with the royal children in folk costume doing their lessons with their Swiss tutor while the king sat on the front steps waiting for visitors. Franz Lehár used Montenegro as the model for Pontevedria in The Merry Widow.22
In fact, Nicholas was not quite the quaint figure he seemed. He had been educated, in France, among other places, and he had maneuvered with such success in the tangle of Balkan politics before the war that he had enlarged the size of his tiny state four times. He had also married his children well, two daughters to Russian royal dukes, one to the king of Italy and yet another to the king of Serbia. He had dreamed of Montenegro’s absorbing Serbia; it was not meant to happen the other way round. He still hoped, in 1919, that he could regain the throne he had lost during the war.
Montenegro had been dragged into war when Austria invaded in 1916; Nicholas fled to Italy with what many on the Allied side thought was surprising alacrity. The suspicion that he had done a quiet deal with the Austrians followed him