King Nikola in exile in Neuilly-sur-Seine, two years after he was forced to flee Montenegro following 61 years as the very visible ruler of his people. Gone are the traditional clothes he previously always sported in public, replaced with a simple dark suit and his ubiquitous cigarette; he’s speaking to someone off-camera, most likely in French. He looks…tired. Perhaps haunted, certainly deflated. He’s holding that morning’s edition of Le Matin, containing news of Germany’s ruinous state as well as a report on the official visit to Paris of his son-in-law, King Vittorio Emanuele III. One wonders if he received any satisfaction from reading the small article that day about how the Dutch government asked the similarly exiled Kaiser Wilhelm II to leave their territory (he was allowed to remain).
On his death at the villa Les Liserons in Cap d’Antibes in 1921, Le Figaro (03.03.1921) reported that when King Nikola launched the First Balkan War on 8 October 1912, it was the first time cannon fire had been heard in Europe since 1877. Celebrated in the West for hastening the demise of the Ottoman Empire and standing up to bigger neighbours, he couldn’t counter the territorial designs of Serbia – ruled by his son-in-law, Peter I – and was forced to flee Montenegro with his family in January 1916, arriving in Paris via Brindisi and Lyon before settling with Queen Milena in a villa in Neuilly at 58 boulevard Victor-Hugo.
He would have preferred living in Rome, near his daughter Queen Elena, but it was diplomatically problematic for the Italians to host an exiled king whose chief enemy, Serbia, was an ally. So Nikola chose France, which made sense since he’d been a pupil at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. Some historians contend that Nikola was never influenced by his youth in Paris, suggesting he maintained an unsullied Balkan outlook throughout his life, but isn’t that claim more than a little Ruritanian? The desire to exoticize has never been far from depictions of Eastern Europe, and Nikola, with his picturesque garb while still on the throne, was the perfect incarnation of all that the West wanted. That is, until he put on that dark suit and faded from the international scene.

Jay Weissberg