Marriage
In the summer of 1900, King Alexander suddenly announced his engagement to the widowed Madame Draga Mašin, formerly a lady-in-waiting to his mother. The projected union initially aroused great opposition: he did not consult with his father, who had been on vacation in Karlovy Vary and making arrangements to secure the hand of a German princess Alexandra zu Schaumburg-Lippe for his son, or his Prime Minister Dr. Vladan Đorđević, who was visiting the Paris Universal Exhibition at the time of the announcement. Both immediately resigned from their respective offices and Alexander had difficulty in forming a new cabinet. Alexander's mother also opposed the marriage and was subsequently banished from the kingdom.
Opposition to the union seemed to subside somewhat for a time upon the publication of Tsar Nicholas II's congratulations to the king on his engagement and of his acceptance to act as the principal witness at the wedding. The marriage duly took place in August 1900. Even so, the unpopularity of the union weakened the King's position in the eyes of the army and of the country at large.
Read more about this topic: Alexander I Of Serbia
Famous quotes containing the word marriage:
“Every relationship that does not raise us up pulls us down, and vice versa; this is why men usually sink down somewhat when they take wives while women are usually somewhat raised up. Overly spiritual men require marriage every bit as much as they resist it as bitter medicine.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“A marriage based on full confidence, based on complete and unqualified frankness on both sides; they are not keeping anything back; there’s no deception underneath it all. If I might so put it, it’s an agreement for the mutual forgiveness of sin.”
—Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906)
“Adultery is the vice of equivocation.
It is not marriage but a mockery of it, a merging that mixes love and dread together like jackstraws. There is no understanding of contentment in adultery.... You belong to each other in what together you’ve made of a third identity that almost immediately cancels your own. There is a law in art that proves it. Two colors are proven complimentary only when forming that most desolate of all colors—neutral gray.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)