The Short Reign of Pippin IV Read online

  “Poof!” said M. Flosse flatteringly.

  “And, too, I have been busy with—” He gestured upward. “Madame doesn’t bother me with news when I am preoccupied. You see, gentlemen, I am taken off guard.” “You must be crowned at Reims,” cried M. Flosse, and his eyes brimmed with emotion. “We must follow the old customs. France needs you, Sire. Will you deny your country the security of your great bloodline?”

  “My bloodline?”

  “Are you not directly descended from Pippin the Second?”

  “Oh! Is that what it’s all about? But there have been so many other royal houses since—”

  “But you do not deny your descent?”

  “How could I? I believe it is a matter of record.”

  “Do you forbid us, Sire?”

  “That’s silly,” said Pippin. “How can I forbid anything a republic might take it into its head to do, even destroy itself? I am the broken tip of a long dog’s long tail. Can I wag that dog?”

  “France needs—”

  “And I need sleep, gentlemen. Please leave me now and I will awaken some hours hence, hoping that you have been a dream.”

  And while he slept what has been called in the press the “Historic Nap,” students from the Sorbonne marched up the Champs Elysées, shouting “Vive le roi!” and “Saint Denis pour la France.” Four of them climbed the girders of the Eiffel Tower and raised an antique royal standard on the very top, where it fluttered triumphantly among the wind gauges.

  The citizens boiled into the streets, dancing and singing with excitement.

  Barrels of wine from the cooperative warehouses up-Seine were rolled through the streets and broached on the street corners.

  The Lords of the Couture rushed to their drawing boards.

  Schiaparelli, within the hour, announced a new perfume called “Rêve Royale.”

  Special editions of L’Espéce, Cormoran, Paris Minuit, L’Era, and Monde Dieu rolled from the presses and were snatched up.

  The royal standard of Charlemagne appeared like magic in shop windows.

  The American Ambassador, with instructions from his government, sought in vain for someone to congratulate.

  The wave overflowed Paris, and concentric circles spread into the provinces, lighting bonfires and raising flags.

  And through it all, the king slept. But Madame made hourly visits to the kiosk for the new editions and piled them neatly on his desk for his perusal.

  Pippin might well have slept through the night and into the next day had not the anti-aircraft batteries disposed about Paris fired a royal salute at two-thirty in the morning. Five citizens were killed and thirty-two were wounded by the fallback. The thirty-two wounded made loyal and enthusiastic statements from their hospital beds.

  The firing of the anti-aircraft guns awakened Pippin. His first thought was, It must be Clotilde coming in. What has she stumbled over now?

  A second salvo of anti-aircraft guns brought him up on his elbow, his left hand thrashing about, seeking the bed reading light. “Marie!” he called. “Marie! What is that?” Madame opened the door. Her arms were loaded with newspapers. “It is the Royal Salute,” she said. “L’Espéce says there will be one hundred and one guns.”

  “My God!” said Pippin. “I thought it was Clotilde.” He looked at his watch, then raised his voice to be heard over the guns. “It is three, less fifteen minutes. Where is Clotilde?”

  Madame said coldly, “La Princesse, on a motor scooter, is leading her loyal subjects to Versailles. She is going to start the fountains.”

  Pippin said, “Then it was no dream! When the Minister of Public Works hears of this, I smell the guillotine. Marie, these people seem to mean this nonsense. I want to talk to Uncle Charlie.”

  In the early dawn the king and his uncle faced each other in the rear of the gallery in the Rue de Seine.

  Pippin had battered on the shutters of Charles Martel’s establishment until that gentleman, clad in a long nightgown and a tarboosh, ill-tempered with sleep, peered out at him. After a time of grumbling, of making his morning chocolate, and of pulling on his trousers, Uncle Charlie settled back on his dusty Morocco armchair, adjusted the green-shaded reading light, polished his glasses, and prepared for business.

  “You must study calmness, Pippin,” he said. “For years I have recommended calmness. When you burst in here with your comet, I suggested that the stars would wait on a cup of chocolate. When Clotilde had her small difficulty with the gendarmes about the improper use of firearms at the shooting gallery, did I not recommend calm? And it came out all right, you remember. You paid for a few light globes she shot from a carousel, and Clotilde sold her life story to an American magazine. Calm! Pippin. Calm! I recommend calm.”

  “But they have gone insane, Uncle Charlie.”

  “No, my boy, abandon that theory. The French do not go insane unless there is some advantage in it. Now you say that the delegation was composed of all parties, and you further say that they mentioned the future well-being of France.”

  “They say France must have a stable government.”

  “Hmmm,” said Uncle Charlie. “It has always seemed to me that this is the last thing they want. It is possible, Pippin, that the parties have chosen a direction, but for different reasons. Yes, that must be it, and you, my poor boy, have been chosen for the role of what the Americans call a ‘patsy.’ ”

  ‘What can I do, Uncle Charlie? How can I avoid this—this patsy?”

  Uncle Charlie tapped his glasses on his knee, sneezed, poured himself a fresh cup of chocolate from the saucepan on the gas ring at his elbow, and slowly shook his head.

  “With time and calm,” he said, “I could possibly work out the political background. But right at the moment I cannot see any escape for you unless you wish to retire with dignity to a warm bath and cut your wrists.”

  “I don’t want to be king!”

  “If suicide does not appeal to you, dear boy, you may relax in the certainty that in the near future there will be attempts at assassination and, who knows, one of them may succeed.”

  “Can’t I say no, Uncle Charlie? No, no, no, no! Why not?”

  Uncle Charlie sighed. “I can think of two reasons now. Later, several more will come to me. In the first place, you will be told that France needs you. No one has ever been able to resist such a suggestion, here or elsewhere. Let a man, old, sick, stupid, tired, cynical, wise, even dangerous to the future of his country, be told that his country needs him and him alone, and he will respond even though he must be carried to the rostrum on a stretcher and take the oath and Extreme Unction simultaneously. No, I can see no escape for you. If they tell you that France needs you, you are lost. You can only pray that France is not also lost.”

  “But maybe—”

  “You see, said Uncle Charlie, “you are already caught. The second force is more subtle but no less powerful. It is the overwhelming numerical strength of the aristocracy. Let me develop this.

  “Aristocracy thrives and breeds most luxuriantly under democratic or republican regimes. Whereas in a kingdom the aristocrats are screened and controlled, even eliminated for one reason or another, in republican climates the noblesse breed like rabbits. At the same time, the lower orders seem to become sterile. You will find the best proof of this in America, where there is no single individual who is not descended from an aristocrat, where there is not even an Indian who is not a tribal chief. In republican France, to only a slightly lesser degree, the aristocracy has shown a fecundity beyond belief.

  “They will be down on you like sparrows on a- No, I won t complete that simile. They will demand privileges unremembered since Louis the Ugly, but more than that, my dear child, they will want money.”

  Pippin said miserably, “What am I to do, Uncle Charlie? Why couldn’t it have waited a generation or two? Isn’t there a collateral branch of the family who might—”

  “No,” said Charles, “there isn’t. And if there were, the combination of reason num
ber one, plus Madame, plus Clotilde, would pull you under. And there’s another thing. If every Frenchman should oppose your accession to the monarchy, every Frenchwoman would force you to reign. Too long have they looked with craving eyes across the channel, sneered at the frumpiness of British royalty, and envied it.

  “Pippin, my child, you are sunk,” said Charles. “You are the royal patsy. I suggest that you search deeply in the situation for something to enjoy. And now I know you will excuse me. A client is coming in with three unsigned Renoirs.”

  Pippin said, “Well, anyway, I don’t feel so alone, knowing that you will have to assume your titles.”

  “Name of a thrice-soiled name!” cried Uncle Charlie. “I had forgotten that!”

  In a daze, Pippin left the gallery. He wandered blindly up-Seine on the Left Bank, past Notre-Dame, past warehouses, past wine storage, over bridges, past factories, and he did not look around until he came to Bercy.

  During his long and slow peramble it is more than possible that his mind, like a rat in a laboratory maze, sought every possible avenue of escape, explored runways and aisles and holes, only to run against the wire netting of fact. Again and again he butted his mental nose against the screen at the end of a promising passage, and there was the fact. He was king and there was no escaping it.

  In Bercy he stumbled wearily into a cafe, sat at a small marble table, observed, without seeing it, a passionate domino game, and, although it was not yet noon, he ordered a Pernod. He drank so rapidly and ordered another so promptly that the domino-players thought him a tourist and guarded their language.

  With his third Pernod, Pippin was heard to say, “All right, then. All right, then.” He swallowed his drink and waved for another and, when it came, he addressed his glass.

  “So you want a king, my friends? But have you considered the danger? Do you know what you might have conjured up?” He turned to the domino-players. “Will you do me the honor of drinking a toast with me?” he demanded.

  Sullenly they accepted. For an American, they thought, he spoke excellent French.

  When they were served, Pippin raised his glass. “They want a king! I drink to the King! Long live the King!” He drained his glass. “Very well, my friends,” he said. “It is just possible that they will get a king—and that’s the last thing in the world they want. Yes, they may find they have a king on their hands.” He got up from his table and moved to the door. It was noted that he had a slow and regal step.

  It is not so easy as might appear on the surface to reactivate a monarchy. There is the matter of what kind of monarchy you are going to have. Pippin leaned strongly toward the constitutional form, not only because he was a liberal man at heart, but also because the responsibility of absolutism is very great. He owned himself too lazy to make all the effort for success and too cowardly to take all the blame for mistakes.

  The meeting of all parties called to determine procedure constituted itself, at Pippin’s request, a deliberative body. A troubling question was introduced by the king very early in the discussion. What would the American government think of the change, and would the American State Department be likely to continue to recommend the same financial aid to the Kingdom as it had to the Republic of France?

  M. Flosse, representing both Right and Left Centrists, was able to put any such doubts at rest. “It is the nature of American foreign policy to distrust liberal governments and strongly to favor the more authoritarian, which it considers the more responsible.”

  M. Flosse named Venezuela, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, Trans-Jordan, Egypt, Spain, and Monaco as examples of this American peculiarity. He went even further, proving that the People’s Republics of the USSR, plus Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, China, and North Korea, also had in the past shown a strong preference for dictatorships and absolute monarchies over democratically elected governments.

  It was not necessary to inquire into the reasons for these preferences, said M. Flosse. Indeed, it might even be embarrassing. The fact that such preference was a historical fact was sufficient. In the case of America, he went on, there was, in addition, a sentimental attachment for the throne of France.

  “When the American colonics were alone in their war for independence, who came to their aid with men, money, and material? A republic? No, the Kingdom of France. Who crossed the ocean to serve in the armies of America? Common people? No, aristocrats.”

  M. Flosse suggested that the king’s first official act should be to request a subsidy for his government from America for the purpose of making France strong against Communism, and an equal subsidy from the Communist nations in the interests of world peace.

  The enthusiastic response from both the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is proof enough that M. Flosse had properly assessed the situation. It is history by now that not only did the American Congress advance more money than was requested, but also that the Lafayette Fund, collected from school children, made possible the beginning of the refurbishing of the royal quarters at Versailles.

  After the first explosion of enthusiasm there was some worry among government functionaries: the postmen, the inspectors, the myriads of little officials, public toilet keepers, national monument guardians, custom inspectors, inspectors of inspectors; all of whom feared on second consideration that their livings might be curtailed. A general proclamation from the king, freezing the status quo, however, put all minds at rest and created a passionate loyalty among the concessionaires.

  At this time the Minister of National Monuments presented a bill to the king for three hundred thousand francs, an expense incurred when the Princess Clotilde not only turned on the fountains at Versailles but also made use of the floodlights during two whole nights. The princess herself had waved the bill aside regally.

  Pippin was able to prove that his total balance in the Chase Bank in the Rue Cambon was one hundred and twenty thousand francs. The first loan from America, however, solved the matter to everyone’s satisfaction.

  Complex as it was to establish the monarchy, the actual crowning of the king at Reims proved even more difficult. Charles had been correct in his estimate of the increase in the numbers of the aristocracy under the Republic. Not only had the noblesse multiplied beyond all belief, but they could not agree on the actual form of the crowning. That it should take an ancient and traditional form was conceded, but which ancient form?

  Vitally interested groups demanded that the crowning be put off until the summer. The Couture was swamped with orders for court dresses. The ceramics industries needed time to make the millions of cups and plates and ashtrays and plaques bearing not only the royal arms, but the profile of the king and queen. The summer would bring a tidal wave of tourists, which alone would make the whole venture profitable.

  Matters not previously contemplated became of vital importance. Newly appointed lords of protocol, kings-at-arms, nobles of the bedchamber, ladies in waiting, ran in circles, while the offices of the Royal Historians were lighted all night.

  The museums were ransacked for coaches, for costumes, for flags. The libraries were turned inside out. The coinage had to be changed. There was no artist whose brush and palette could not find employment in repainting coats of arms and armorial bearings. Such had been the progenitive activity of the nobility that every shield required new quarterings. By general agreement the bend sinister was abandoned, since its inclusion would have given a tiresome sameness to the bearings of the living and a lack of dignity to the hatchments of the deceased.

  Carriage-makers, unemployed for half a lifetime, were dragged out of senile retirement to swell the spokes and felloes of state coaches and to direct the replacement of leather springs.

  Armorers relearned the burnishing and lubrication of gauntlets, of greaves, of visors, of basinets, for many of the younger peers insisted on attending the coronation armed cap-a-pie, regardless of the weather.

  The nylon industry put on an extra shift in all plants to fill the demand for velvets and
artificial mothproof ermine.

  The actual crown presented a problem, since it did not exist. However, Van Cleef and Arpels, Harry Winston, and Tiffany's pooled their resources, their craftsmen, and their precious stones to create a diadem three feet high and so thickly jeweled that a support had to be built on the back of the throne, else its weight would have broken the neck of the monarch. This crown was carried by four priests and when, after the coronation, it was broken up and its individual stones properly attested, it sold for a profit of twelve million dollars and the firms which had created it were granted the right to display the royal arms and to use the title “Crown Makers to the King of France.”

  Apart from affairs of state, of finance, of international relations, and of protocol, a change from republic to monarchy involved a thousand details which might escape the ordinary citizen.

  In Paris schools sprang up to revivify lost arts and graces—Schools of the Walk (with or without staff), Schools of the Bow, of the Curtsy, the Hand Kiss; Schools of the Fan, Schools of the Insult, Schools of Honor. Fencing masters found their classes crowded. Old General Victor Gonzel, who is the world’s final authority on the proper use of the muzzle-loading pistol, gave daily instructions to half a hundred budding courtiers.

  On all of this preparation Pippin looked with consternation. A delegation proposing to establish a company of Life Guards armed with halberds made him miss an eclipse of the moon. The clamors of the Hereditary Royal Order of Dwarfs drove him to seclusion in the rear of Uncle Charles’s gallery.

  “The Folies Bergère is holding a competition,” he complained. “They are choosing a King’s Mistress. Uncle Charlie, in my young days when it was expected of me, I went along with our national practice even though it was expensive and, after a while, boring. But now—do you know they have entries from every nation in the world? I won't do it, Uncle Charlie. Even Marie has been after me about it. Damn it, Uncle Charlie, have you ever heard those girls talk?”