Prince Bojidar Karageorgevitch

Who he was

Prince Bojidar Karageorgevitch (Serbian Božidar Karađorđević) was born on 11 January 1862 and died of typhoid fever at Versailles on 2 April 1908; he is buried at Père-Lachaise. He was the second son of Prince George Karageorgevitch (1827-1884), a member of the senior line of the Serbian dynasty that had lost the throne in 1858, and of Sara (Sarka) Anastasijević (1836-1931), daughter of the Serbian magnate Miša Anastasijević. His elder brother was Alexis (1859-1920); a younger sister, born in 1862, died in childhood (the English Wikipedia article on Bojidar gives 1867 and notes that her name is not recorded). The family lived in exile in France. In the diary the mother is Princess Karageorgevitch, the father usually "le vieux prince", and the whole family "les Karageorgevitch" (#Karageorgevitch); Marie also speaks of "les Bojidar" for the family (101.0380).

The Serbian throne was then held by the rival Obrenović house. When Marie wrote, Bojidar's cousin Prince Peter Karageorgevitch (1844-1921), son of the deposed Prince Alexander, was the family's candidate; he became King Peter I in 1903. Bojidar's own hopes of a royal role came to nothing: according to the English Wikipedia article he travelled to Serbia in the late 1890s to sound out opinion and was disillusioned after 1903 by the way King Peter treated him.

He grew up and was educated in Paris, passed his baccalauréat in November 1879 (086.0534) and his licence in law in July 1883 (100.0444), and drifted toward art. He studied engraving and painting, gave singing and drawing lessons, and later made his living as an art critic, translator and journalist. He wrote for Le Figaro, the Revue de Paris, the Revue des Revues and the London Magazine of Art, translated Tolstoy and the Hungarian novelist Mór Jókai, travelled widely (he published Enchanted India, New York, 1899, after a journey through India), and in his last years worked as a designer, silversmith and decorative painter in the circle of the Nabis. Among his writings is the article on Marie Bashkirtseff in the eleventh edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (1911), signed "B. K." in the contributors' table. His life was the subject of Stevan K. Pavlowitch's Bijou d'art (Lausanne, 1978).

Marie and Bojidar

First meetings (1878-1879). The family appear early: on 19 April 1878 Maman talks to "la princesse Karageorges et son fils" whom the Bashkirtseffs had met at Nice and Ostend (079.0459), and on 27 October the princess calls with "son fils, blanc-bec de dix-huit ans" (083.0058). Bojidar was sixteen then and Alexis nineteen, so the unnamed son of 1878 may be Alexis; Marie does not say. Bojidar is first named on 15 April 1879, when he comes to dinner and helps arrange her books, "un petit poseur bon enfant" (084.0669). The families were dining at each other's houses by March 1879, when Marie, bored at the Karageorgevitch table, found the prince "maladif et ordinaire" and the princess "simple" (084.0476). The summer at Dieppe in August 1879, where the family were also staying, was an intense holiday of beach, theatre and charades (086.0067, 086.0071). Marie sketched him (086.0097) and noted "Bojidar est amoureux de moi. Vous savez que j'ai de la chance" (086.0141). His mother, she says, still treated her sons as small children and he slept in her room (086.0083).

The "père Couvelet" (1879). They invented a running joke, writing to each other as "la mère Arnaud" and "le père Couvelet" (085.0500, 085.0513); Marie's mock invitation of 11 July 1879 to the Fourteenth of July is preserved (085.0527). In October 1879 she began to teach him to draw before sending him to Julian's studio (086.0370), where he was soon going every day (086.0592). The evening of 14 December 1879, when he followed Marie and Berthe through the Latin Quarter, "tout fier d'avoir accompagné deux dames chic", is one of the diary's happiest pictures of him (086.0664).

Helper and escort (1880-1881). In the winter of 1880-1881 he arranged her library and helped hang the studio before the party of 9 January 1881 (090.0557). On 20 March 1881 he went with the porters who carried her large picture to the Palais de l'Industrie, "heureux que les passants le supposent l'auteur du tableau" (091.0325; the picture is L'Atelier Julian). It was Bojidar who brought her the news, on 20 May 1881, that the Salon jury had lingered over Breslau's picture (092.0027).

The Soutzo quarrel (December 1880 and May 1882). On 13 December 1880 the princess called on the Bashkirtseffs to patch up a rupture over Soutzo, a Romanian prince Marie had been flirting with; Bojidar waited in the hall and, as Marie and his mother agreed, had been jealous (090.0341 and the paragraphs that follow). In May 1882 the quarrel was reopened, and Marie turned against the whole family: "des gens bien embêtants avec leurs mœurs slaves... ils font des histoires de tout" (095.0058).

Sarah Bernhardt (1881-1883). Bojidar worshipped the actress Sarah Bernhardt: in August 1881 "Bojidar est tout à Sarah" (093.0022). In March 1882, at Nice, he telegraphed her to offer a room in the Bashkirtseffs' villa (094.0353; she thanked him and declined, 094.0361), and when she married the actor Jacques Damala (Marie writes "Daria") in London on 4 April 1882 he took it as a personal blow and wanted to send her back the keys of her house, which he had been keeping (094.0365, 094.0367). In August 1883 Marie put his melancholy down to the same attachment (101.0221).

Nice, early 1882 (carnet 094). At Nice in February-April 1882 he was part of the Bashkirtseff household for weeks: he drew beside her (094.0299), danced the cancan at the carnival (094.0285), joined Marie and Dina in wrestling matches and a stream of puns on names (094.0359), and planned with her a winter journey to Spain, Morocco and Tunis (094.0358). He confided that Sarah Bernhardt had once wept in her dressing-room in front of him and that he had fled for her maid (094.0360). Marie thought him unserious as an artist: "peu de tenue depuis qu'il se croit artiste" (095.0234).

Marriage thoughts (1882-1883). Marie asked herself on 25 April 1882 "Bojidar alors ?" (094.0451) and on 4 October 1882, listing her admirers, wrote "Vous ai-je dit que Bojidar est amoureux de moi ? Jamais. Que Morgan ou Wodzinsky ou Kiki ? Jamais" (096.0334). On 26 December 1882 she half-regretted that his family did not reign in Serbia: "je l'aurais épousé. Car il veut bien... La mère surtout que je choisisse Alexis ou Bojidar" (097.0293). On 5 August 1883 she weighed him against Saint-Amand as a possible husband: "Bojidar est un camarade, un petit garçon rangé, économe, maniaque même" (100.0497), adding that his cousin Peter's marriage to Princess Zorka of Montenegro (1883) might make Bojidar a crown prince (100.0498). On 18 April 1884 her uncle Étienne teased her about being "toquée" of him, and she recorded how impossible that would once have seemed (104.0012).

Salon year, 1883. In April 1883 Marie lists Bojidar and Alexis as "nos commissaires" (stewards) for an event she was organising, with other young men as "cavaliers" (099.0045); at the vernissage of 30 April Bojidar "ne nous quitte pas" (099.0254). On the morning of 24 May 1883 he met the family at the Salon door "rayonnant avec son père qui vient me féliciter", just before Marie found her picture rehung high above a dazzling canvas of tulips (099.0564); he and Dina went to complain to the administration, in vain, and he took down the card reading "mention honorable" and brought it to her (099.0594). In May he sprained his knee jumping about at the pantomime Pierrot peintre he had written for their circle (099.0318, 099.0332). In June he devoted himself to the first communion of the household's boy Louis, feeling himself the godfather "quand même" (100.0094), and was best man at the wedding of Marie's maid Rosalie on 28 June (100.0238).

Faults in Marie's eyes. Marie never decided whether she liked him. She called him a liar — "l'amour du mensonge ou plutôt de l'improvisation" — in a long portrait of his Slavic character (100.0187), "bête, menteur et mauvais" in a bad hour (102.0397), and noted the daily inventions on 21 December 1883 (102.0514). On 7 October 1883 she set out "de former Bojidar qui est tout à fait sauvage, il ne sait rien du vrai monde... et commet mille maladresses très naïves" (101.0527). On the other side of the balance he was always at hand: "Je ne puis me passer d'un être intime qui reste là prêt à tout écouter" (100.0229, 25 June 1883).

In Marie's art

Marie painted Bojidar twice in 1883. The large Portrait du prince Bojidar Karageorgevitch (National Museum of Serbia, Belgrade) was begun in April 1883 (099.0126), worked on in May and finished in October: on 7 October he "a posé toute la journée" (101.0523) and on the 8th Julian found it "très chic" (101.0541), and on the 9th, "un Manet savant", she was pleased by the balcony pose and the nasturtium he crumples in his fingers (101.0549, 101.0567). In December 1883 he sat as the young man in evening dress sucking his cane for the series of laughing heads, Les trois rires: "Toute la journée, Bojidar pose" (102.0475), head "repeinte et finie" on 16 December (102.0488). He went with her, on 1 November 1883, to the Seine island where she painted the fog landscape Automne (102.0086). A drawing "Bojidar" (no. 128) is listed in the 1885 memorial catalogue.

Last year (1884)

In July 1884 he arrived from "Bucarest, de Gastein, de partout" (105.0228) and sat behind her while she worked at the Panorama, believing he was painting (105.0263). He was with the Bashkirtseffs when they went to the rue Legendre to ask after the dying Jules Bastien-Lepage; Marie wanted him to enquire at the door, but Bastien-Lepage's brother Émile made her come up (105.0290). Over dinner on 24 July she was exasperated by Bojidar's boasting to Émile, including that he had known Gambetta, and feared he was making an enemy and an "intrigant" at the sickbed (105.0301, 105.0303). His father, Prince George, died at Bad Gastein in early August 1884 (Marie records it on 8 August, 105.0470). In September his mother stayed with the Bashkirtseffs for ten days (106.0084). The last mention is a pun from the first of October, "lady Man-quée" for Mrs Mackay (106.0138).

Related entries

Sources