To compensate for their all-too-brief courtship, Prince Victor Emmanuel decided that their honeymoon should be protracted, and far from the eyes of the curious. To accomplish this they went at once to the distant isles of Greece, to the romantic coast of Sicily, to wherever waters are emerald, skies azure blue and the days golden. In their own yacht they managed to escape from all public vision, and so weeks and months were spent like a prolonged summer idyl. Never were lovers more secluded, more care-free, more at ease, less trammelled to live with and for each other, as fiercely and as intensely as the flame within them burned. The world heard little of them on this long honeymoon trip of theirs. Sometimes a message came from an Algerian or Tunisian port, or from a remote Mediterranean spot like the Island of Monte Christo, where they spent untold happy weeks.
This Island of Monte Christo, belonging to Victor Emmanuel, is very secluded. Only the members of the household are allowed thereon. The Prince liked being there free of all responsibility and unrestrained to enjoy absolute liberty.
As a bride Elena gave herself to a unique régime for a Royal Princess—she shared in the household work, performing with her own hands the duties of the home. This policy was adopted because the young couple dreaded to have others, even servants, about them, and this lonely island was, perhaps, the only place where they could find absolute seclusion and isolation.
This Royal property, which for a certain time was called Gombo, was the favourite residence of the grand dukes of Tuscany. It formed a part of the private estate of Victor Emmanuel II, who, as an indefatigable hunter, used to make there a hecatomb of deers and fallow-deers. About 1865 he ordered the building surrounded at a distance of twenty yards from the shore by a wood fence posed on pillars; he often spent there the night, lying on a couch in order to hear, on his awaking, the rocking song of the waves.
Once during their protracted honeymoon Elena and her Prince went on a great hunting trip far up in semi-Arctic regions around the White Sea. I have heard tales of this trip from the lips of a Montenegran artist who was one of the party, and I have seen photographs of Elena and her Prince-bridegroom skurrying across frozen ice packs, bringing down Arctic game with their rifles, fishing through the ice for great deep sea fish—filling the days and weeks with pure pleasure, storing up joy against the years when the cares and responsibilities of state should hold them ever close to home. For four years this dream life went on. Then, in the summer of 1900, they were on one of their long cruises among the Greek Islands when they were rudely awakened. News reached them of the assassination of King Humbert! Both Elena and Victor Emmanuel knew what this meant. Their yacht was quickly turned toward Italy. This was their last care-free cruise.
At this time Victor Emmanuel shut up within his heart the tortures he was enduring, to meet as a courageous man the duties imposed on him by that misfortune. But Elena, who had become devoted to her new family, was completely overcome and abandoned herself wholly to her sorrow, weeping and crying aloud: “My father!” “My good father!”
On their journey to Monza, the scene of the tragedy, and on their arrival at the station at Naples, Elena, weeping bitterly, pressed on the bosom of her Lady-in-Waiting. Victor Emmanuel, by the side of the Duke of Genoa, looked almost overpowered by sorrow, but he bore up bravely. He invited the Prefecto and General Brusate to come near him. He shook hands with them and talked to them with a heavy voice veiled by tears. “It seems to me,” said he to them, “that I am under the effect of a dream; such a horrible murder seems to me impossible!”
With the tragic death of King Humbert, Prince Victor Emmanuel became king, and his Montenegran Princess Elena, Queen of Italy. In nearly every country where kings and queens sit upon thrones, the Coronation ceremony is a spectacle of great splendour and magnificence, but in Italy it is scarcely a ceremony at all. So far as the Queen is concerned, it amounted to nothing, while the King merely appears before the Parliament and takes his vows of allegiance and devotion to Italy and the Italian people. The simplicity of this sacred occasion is in peculiarly fitting keeping with the mind and character of Victor Emmanuel.
For four years he and his bride had basked in the sunshine of love and romance. They had led the most ideal and romantic of lives. With their accession the more serious business of life began. Elena presently became a mother, first of a girl, then of another girl, then of a son, and then of a third daughter.