Another actor on the world-stage whom I had encountered more than once before was the “heroic” King of Montenegro.  He often crossed my path during the Conference, and set me musing on the marvelous ups and downs of human existence.  This potentate’s life offers a rich field of research to the psychologist.  I had watched it myself at various times and with curious results.  For I had met him in various European capitals during the past thirty years, and before the time when Tsar Alexander III publicly spoke of him as Russia’s only friend.  King Nikita owes such success in life as he can look back on with satisfaction to his adaptation of St. Paul’s maxim of being all things to all men.  Thus in St. Petersburg he was a good Russian, in Vienna a patriotic Austrian, in Rome a sentimental Italian.  He was also a warrior, a poet after his own fashion, a money-getter, and a speculator on ’Change.  His alleged martial feats and his wily, diplomatic moves ever since the first Balkan war abound in surprises, and would repay close investigation.  The ease with which the Austrians captured Mount Lovtchen and his capital made a lasting impression on those of his allies who were acquainted with the story, the consequences of which he could not foresee.  What everybody seemed to know was that if the Teutons had defeated the Entente, King Nikita’s son Mirko, who had settled down for the purpose in Vienna, would have been set on the throne in place of his father by the Austrians; whereas if the Allies should win, the worldly-wise monarch would have retained his crown as their champion.  But these well-laid plans went all agley.  Prince Mirko died and King Nikita was deposed.  For a time he resided at a hotel, a few houses from me, and I passed him now and again as he was on his way to plead his lost cause before the distinguished wreckers of thrones and regimes.

It seemed as though, in order to provide Paris with a cosmopolitan population, the world was drained of its rulers, of its prosperous and luckless financiers, of its high and low adventurers, of its tribe of fortune-seekers, and its pushing men and women of every description.  And the result was an odd blend of classes and individuals worthy, it may be, of the new democratic era, but unprecedented.  It was welcomed as of good augury, for instance, that in the stately Hotel Majestic, where the spokesmen of the British Empire had their residence, monocled diplomatists mingled with spry typewriters, smart amanuenses, and even with bright-eyed chambermaids at the evening dances.[1] The British Premier himself occasionally witnessed the cheering spectacle with manifest pleasure.  Self-made statesmen, scions of fallen dynasties, ex-premiers, and ministers, who formerly swayed the fortunes of the world, whom one might have imagined capaces imperii nisi imperassent, were now the unnoticed inmates of unpretending hotels.  Ambassadors whose most trivial utterances had once been listened to with concentrated attention, sued