Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [90]
From her suite at the Ritz Hotel, she set out to conquer the powerful. She entreated Foch, with some success, to send weapons to Rumania, ostensibly for its fight against Bolshevism. She flattered House, who found her “one of the most delightful personalities of all the royal women I have met in the West.” The British ambassador in Paris dined with her: “She really is a most amusing woman and if she was not so simple you would think she was very conceited.” She asked Balfour prettily whether she should talk about her recent purchases or the League of Nations with Wilson. “Begin with the League of Nations,” he advised, “and finish up with the pink chemise. If you were talking to Mr. Lloyd George, you could begin with the pink chemise!” Lloyd George found her “very naughty, but a very clever woman.” Clemenceau was amused by her. He spoke to her frankly, though, about his displeasure with Rumania for having made a separate peace with the enemy, and about his dislike of Brătianu. When he accused Rumania of wanting the lion’s share of the Banat, Marie answered archly, “that is just why I came to see his first cousin, the Tiger.” Clemenceau shot back, “A tiger never had a child by a lioness.” 23
Her great failure was Wilson. She shocked him at their first meeting by talking about love. Grayson, Wilson’s doctor, agreed: “I have never heard a lady talk about such things. I honestly did not know where to look I was so embarrassed.” Marie then invited herself to lunch, “with one or two of my gentlemen.” She arrived half an hour late with an entourage of ten people. “Every moment we waited,” another guest noticed, “I could see from the cut of the president’s jaw that a slice of Rumania was being lopped off.” The queen thought the lunch went off very well; indeed, she felt that her time in Paris had done much to help her people. “I had pleaded, explained, had broken endless lances in their defense. I had given my country a living face.”24
She might have been better advised to spend more time on the subordinates of the great men. On March 18, the Rumanian commission divided up the prize of the Banat, with the western third going to Yugoslavia and most of the rest to Rumania. It also gave Yugoslavia about a quarter of the Baranya and well over half the Backa on the western end of the Banat. The American experts, concerned as always with ethnic fairness, insisted on a predominantly Hungarian area near the city of Szeged remaining with Hungary. On June 21, in spite of passionate protests from the Rumanians, the Supreme Council accepted the recommendations. The Yugoslavs briefly caused problems by refusing to evacuate an island in the Danube that had been awarded to Rumania, and in the autumn of 1919 there was tension between Rumania and Yugoslavia in the Banat. It was not until 1923 that the two countries grudgingly agreed to respect the award.
Yet the new line on the map could not tidy up the population. Almost 60,000 Serbs were left in Rumania, while 74,000 Rumanians and almost 400,000 Hungarians remained in Yugoslavia. In the new world of ethnic states which had triumphed in the center of Europe, the situation of such minorities was uneasy; they were too often treated as interlopers, even though they had been there for centuries. Rumania and Yugoslavia both pursued policies of assimilation. Yugoslavia eventually grouped its gains from Hungary together as the Vojvodina; Belgrade ruled, as it does today, with a heavy hand. Serbian was decreed the language of business; shop signs had to be in the Cyrillic