and commercial ambitions in the peninsula. The French indignantly
repudiate the suggestion that they are coercing the Montenegrin King.

"How absurd!" exclaimed the officials with whom I talked. "We holding
King Nicholas a prisoner? The idea is preposterous. So far as France is
concerned, he can return to Montenegro whenever he chooses."

Still, their protestations were not entirely convincing. Their attitude
reminded me of the millionaire whose daughter, it was rumored, had
eloped with the family chauffeur.

"Sure, she can marry him if she wants to," he told the reporters. "I
have no objection. She is free, white, and twenty-one. But if she does
marry him I'll stop her allowance, cut her out of my will, and never
speak to her again."

Because it has been my privilege to know many sovereigns and because I
have been honored with the confidence of several of them, I have become
to a certain extent immune from the spell which seems to be exercised
upon the commoner by personal contact with the Lord's anointed. Save
when I have had some definite mission to accomplish, I have never had
any overwhelming desire "to grasp the hand that shook the hand of John
L. Sullivan." To me it seems an impertinence to take the time of busy
men merely for the sake of being able to boast about it afterward to
your friends. But because, during my travels in Jugoslavia, I heard King
Nicholas repeatedly denounced by Serbian officials with far more
bitterness than they employed toward their late enemies and oppressors,
the Hapsburgs, I was frankly eager for an opportunity to form my own
opinions about Montenegro's aged ruler. The opportunity came when, upon
my return to Paris, I was informed that the King wished to meet me, he