The Short Reign of Pippin IV Read online

  “I have by various methods sought to avoid that,” said Uncle Charlie. “My child, in some things you may be able to assert your royal authority, but if you think you can be King of France without a mistress to enlighten your people with her extravagance and her charming unreliability, you are very much mistaken.”

  “But kings’ mistresses have kept the nation in hot water almost invariably.”

  “Of course, my boy. Of course, that is part of it. Has your astronomy robbed you of any sense of proportion or knowledge of history?”

  “I’ll get myself a minister,” said Pippin violently. “That’s what I’ll do! Somewhere I’ll find myself a Mazarin or a Richelieu and let him do the work.”

  “You’ll find that a minister worth his salt will be very firm about a mistress,” said Uncle Charles. “Figure it to yourself—it would be like going without your clothes. The French nation would not tolerate it.”

  “I don’t have any privacy,” said Pippin. “I am not even crowned yet and already I haven’t a moment of peace. And I must say you are not taking your hereditary duties very seriously. The report has come to me that you have uncovered a whole atticful of unsigned Bouchers.”

  “A man must live,” said his uncle. “But you must not imagine that I have deserted you. I have been thinking in your behalf. Pippin, I want your complete attention. In America a chief executive who has found the duties and requirements of his office in conflict with his interests has discovered an interesting and practical expedient. He has turned over details of his office or of his party to one of the great advertising agencies.

  “Now these companies, with their huge staffs and—how do you say it?—their ‘know-how’, are able to manage public relations, organization, correspondence, news releases, and appointments. If such a company can merchandise a president and a political party, why not a king? Consider their intelligence! In foreign relations their policy derives not from some disinterested public servant, but from doing the most profitable business with the principality in question. And who would be more tender and wise than an agency whose profits depend on its tenderness and its wisdom? If such a connection could be made, Pippin, you could go back to your telescope. The advertising agency would handle everything and would also see that proper reports were furnished to the press. Why, they would even take care of the career of your mistress.”

  “It sounds ideal,” said Pippin.

  “Oh! There is more than that, my boy. Consider the simple matter of a speech on television. I can foresee that you will have to appear on television as King of France.”

  “What do they do?”

  “Let us say the president must make a speech. Nothing is left to accident. He is rehearsed by an authority in speech, in pronunciation, and in emotion; coached by a man who has proved beyond doubt his—what they call 'draw’.”

  “Like Marilyn Monroe—”

  “Well, something like. But that is not all. He then is made up by the Westmore Brothers, the best. He does not just talk. Not at all. He has a stage manager, the scene is set. It is rehearsed. It rises to a glorious climax. If the man were simply speaking, he might be sincere, but he would not sound sincere, and this is important because the speaker did not write the speech, you see. The agency did. The duties of the office sometimes make it impossible for the president even to read the speech before he goes into rehearsal. I wonder—”

  “What?”

  “Do you have a dog?”

  “Marie has a cat.”

  “Never mind. Maybe it is not so important in France.” “Do you think one of those agencies would take the account, Uncle Charlie?” Pippin demanded eagerly. “Would it be worth their while?”

  “I shall make discreet inquiries, my child. At least it will do no harm to ask. Even if it were not as profitable as other accounts, a reputable agency might feel that the prestige of representing the King of France would be worth their while. It is called ‘institutional prestige’, I believe. I shall inquire, Pippin. We can only hope.”

  “I do sincerely hope,” said the king.

  The spring in Paris was traditionally beautiful. Production of all things royal and all things French caused factories to put on night shifts. An era of good feeling and security justified a reduction in wages.

  As might have been expected, Madame took the change in her status with realism and vigor. To her it was like moving from one apartment to another—on a larger scale, of course, but having the same problems. Madame made lists. She complained that her husband did not take his duties as seriously as he should.

  “You loll about the house,” she said to him, “when anyone can see that there are a thousand things to be done.”

  “I know,” said Pippin in the tone she knew meant he had not listened.

  “You just sit around reading.”

  “I know, my dear.”

  “What are you reading that is so important at a time like this?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I said, what are you reading?”

  “History.”

  “History? At a time like this?”

  “I have been going over the history of my family and also the records of some of the families which followed us.

  Madame said tartly, “It has always seemed to me that the Kings of France, with singularly few gifts, have done very well for themselves. There are some exceptions, of course.”

  “It is the exceptions I am thinking of, my dear. I have been thinking of the Sixteenth Louis. He was a good man. His intentions and his impulses were good.”

  “Perhaps he was a fool,” said Marie.

  “Perhaps he was,” said Pippin. “But I understand him, even though we are not of the same family. To a certain extent I think I am like him. I am trying to see where he made his errors. I should hate to fall into the same trap.”

  “While you have been daydreaming, have you given a single thought to your daughter?”

  “What has she done now?” Pippin demanded.

  It cannot be denied that Clotilde had led a rather unusual existence. When, at fifteen, she wrote the best-selling novel Adieu Ma Vie, she was sought out and courted by the most celebrated and complex minds of our times. She was acclaimed by the Reductionists, the Resurrectionists, the Protonists, the Non-Existentialists, and the Quantumists, while the very nature of her book set hundreds of psychoanalysists clamoring to sift her unconscious. She had her table at the Café des Trois Puces, where she held court and freely answered questions on religion, philosophy, politics, and aesthetics. It was at this very table that she started her second novel, which, while never finished, was to be titled “Le Printemps des Mortes.” Her devotees formed the school called Clotildisme, which was denounced by the clergy and caused sixty-eight adolescents to commit ecstatic suicide by leaping from the top of the Arc de Triomphe.

  Clotilde’s subsequent involvement in politics and religion was followed by her symbolic marriage to a white bull in the Bois de Boulogne. Her celebrated affairs of honor, in which she wounded three elderly Academicians and herself received a rapier thrust in the right buttock, caused some comment—and all this before she was twenty. In an article in Souffrance, she wrote that her career had left her no time for childhood.

  She then reached the phase when she spent her afternoons at the movies and her evenings arguing the merits of Gregory Peck, Tab Hunter, Marlon Brando, and Frank Sinatra. Marilyn Monroe she found overbloomed and Lollobrigida bovine. She went to Rome, where she acted in three versions of War and Peace and two of Quo Vadis, but her notices threw her into such despair that her elevation to Princesse Royale came just in time. In this field the competition was less fierce.

  Clotilde began to think of herself, at least pronominally, in the plural. She referred to “our people,” “our position,” “our duty.” Her first royal act, that of turning on the fountains at Versailles, was followed by a detailed plan very dear to her heart and not without its parallel in history. She set apart an area quite near to Versailles
, to be called “Le Petit Round-Up.” Here there would be small ranch houses, corrals, barns, bunkhouses. Here branding irons would be constantly in bonfires and cayuses would leap wild-eyed against the barriers. To Le Petit Round-Up would come Roy Rogers, Alan Ladd, Hoot Gibson, Gary Cooper, the taciturn and the strong. They would feel at home at Le Petit Round-Up. Clotilde, in leather skirt and black shirt, would move about, serving red-eye in shot-glasses. If there were gun-play—and how can this be avoided where passionate and inarticulate men gather?—then the princess would be ready to stanch wounds and cool with her royal hand the pain-wracked but silent sufferer. This was only one of Clotilde’s plans for the future.

  It was at this time that she began to take her old Teddy bear to bed. It was at this time that she fell madly in love with Tod Johnson.

  Clotilde met him at Les Ambassadeurs, where she had gone with young Georges de Marine—the Comte de Marine, that is, who was seventeen and listless. Georges knew perfectly well that Clotilde knew Tab Hunter was in Paris. He knew also, because he belonged to the same fan club, that Tab Hunter would put in an appearance at Les Ambassadeurs sometime during the evening.

  Tod Johnson sat next to Clotilde in the banquette seats which faced the dance floor. She noticed him with a quickened breath, watched him with blood-pounding interest, and finally, under the roaring of violins, she leaned toward him and asked, “You are American?”

  “Sure.”

  “Then you must be careful. They will keep opening champagne if you do not tell them to stop.”

  “Thank you,” said Tod. “They already have. You are French?”

  “Of course.”

  “I didn’t think any French people came here,” said Tod. Georges kicked Clotilde viciously on the ankle, and her face reddened with pain.

  Tod said, “I hope you don’t mind. May I introduce myself? I am Tod Johnson.”

  “I know how you do these things in America,” Clotilde said. “I have been to America. May I introduce the Comte de Marine? Now,” she said to Georges, “you must introduce me. That is how they do it.”

  Georges squinted his eyes craftily. “Mademoiselle Clotilde Héristal,” he said evenly.

  Tod said, “That name rings a bell. Are you an actress?”

  Clotilde dropped her eyelashes. “No, Monsieur, except in so far as everyone is an actress.”

  “That’s good,” said Tod. “Your English is wonderful.”

  Georges spoke without inflection in the tone he considered insulting. “Does Monsieur perhaps speak French?”

  “Princeton French,” said Tod. “I can ask questions but I can’t understand the answers. But I’m learning. It isn’t all running together the way it did a few weeks ago.”

  “You stay a while in Paris?”

  “I don’t have any plans. Would you permit me to order champagne?”

  “If you will tell them to stop. You must not let them cheat you as though you were some Argentine.”

  That is how it started.

  Tod Johnson was the ideal American young man—tall, stiff-haired, blue-eyed, well dressed, well educated by going standards, well mannered, and soft-spoken. He was equally fortunate in his background. His father, H. W. Johnson, the Egg King, of Petaluma, California, was reputed to have two hundred and thirty million white leghorn chickens. Even more fortunate was the fact that H. W. was a poor man who had built his chicken kingdom by his own efforts.

  It will be seen that, although Tod Johnson was very rich, he did not suffer from lineage. At the end of his six months shakedown in Europe he was expected to go home to Petaluma and begin at the bottom of the chicken business, eventually to rise to the top and take it over.

  It was only after several meetings with Clotilde that he told her about his father and the egg empire. By then she was so warm and gooey with love that she forgot to tell him her own family news. Clotilde the novelist, the worldly, the Communist, the princess, had for the moment ceased to exist. At twenty she slopped into a fifteen-year-old love affair, all sighs and a full gassy feeling in the stomach. She was so vague and listless that Madame gave her an old country remedy that put her to bed in earnest and removed the necessity for a psychiatrist. Her body was so hard put to survive the remedy that her mind was left to take care of itself. When this happens the mind does very well. Her love remained, but she found she could breathe again.

  19—was a monster year for American advertising. BBD & O was up to its ears rewriting the Constitution of the United States and at the same time marketing a new golf-mobile with pontoons.

  Riker, Dunlap, Hodgson, and Fellows would have taken the French job in the fall, but could not pull its key people off promotion of Nudent, the dentifrice which grows teeth.

  Merchison Associates was busy with a trans-Atlantic pipeline, called in the public press “Tapal,” a twenty-four-inch main which ran under the sea from Saudi Arabia to New Jersey with floating pumping stations every fifty miles. The matter would not have been so difficult but for the constant meddling of Senator Banger, Democrat, New Mexico, with his nuisance questioning as to why Army and Navy personnel and material were being used by a privately owned corporation. Merchison Associates were in Washington most of the spring and summer. If any of these agencies had been free to function, the coronation of the King of France might have been run more smoothly.

  Who could set down all the drama, the pageantry and glories, and, yes, the confusion of the coronation at Reims on July 15? Newspaper coverage ran to many millions of words. Color photographs filled the split-page of every newspaper with a circulation of over twenty thousand.

  The New York Daily News front page carried a headline, of which each letter was four inches high, that read: FROGS CROWN PIP.

  Every by-line writer and commentator in America was in attendance.

  Conrad Hilton took this occasion to open the Versailles- Hilton.

  The life story of every aristocrat in France was bought in advance.

  Louella Parsons had a front-page box headed: will CLOTILDE COME TO HOLLYWOOD?

  The reader should consult back issues of newspapers for accounts of the great day at Reims and Paris—the cathedral crowded to the doors, the cries of the scalpers, the stands of ceramics, the miniatures of royal coaches, the crush of people in the square, the traffic jam on the road to Reims, unparalleled even at the finish of the Tour de France. One company made a small fortune selling miniature guillotines.

  The coronation itself was a triumph of disorder. It was discovered at the last moment that horses had not been provided to draw the state coaches, but this lack was filled by the abattoirs of Paris, even though their gesture made certain sections of Paris meatless for three days. Miss France, representing Joan of Arc, stood beside the throne, banner in one hand and drawn sword in the other, until she fainted from heat and the weight of her armor. She crashed with the sound of falling kitchenware during the royal oath. However, six altarboys quickly propped her against a Gothic column, where she remained forgotten until late in the evening.

  The Communists, acting purely from habit, painted “Go Home Napoleon” on the walls of the cathedral, but this slip both in history and in manners was taken by all with good humor.

  The coronation was completed by eleven in the morning. Then the wave of spectators rushed back to Paris for the parade which was to move from the Place de la Concorde to the Arc de Triomphe. This state procession was scheduled for two o’clock. It started at five.

  The windows along the Champs Elysées were sold out. A place at the curb brought as much as five thousand francs. The owners of stepladders were able to extend their vacations in the country by a week or more.

  The procession was artfully arranged to represent past and present. First came the state carriages of the Great Peers, decorated with gold leaf and tumbling angels; then a battery of heavy artillery drawn by tractors; then a company of crossbowmen in slashed doublets and plumed hats; then a regiment of dragoons with burnished breastplates; then a group of heavy tanks and wea
pon-carriers, followed by the Noble Youth in full armor. A battalion of paratroopers followed, armed with submachine guns, leading the king’s ministers in their robes of office, and behind them a platoon of musketeers in lace, knee-breeches, silk stockings, and high-heeled shoes with great buckles. These last moved along regally, using their musket crutches as staffs.

  At last the royal coach creaked by. Pippin IV, an uncomfortable bundle of purple velvet and ermine, with the queen, equally befurred, sitting beside him, acknowledged the cheers of the loyal bystanders and responded with equal courtesy to hisses.

  Where the Avenue de Marigny crosses the Champs Elysées, a crazed critic fired a pistol at the king, using a periscope to aim over the heads of the crowd. He killed a royal horse. A musketeer of the Rear Guard gallantly cut it free and took its place in harness. The coach moved on.

  For this loyal service the musketeer, Raoul de Potoir by name, demanded and received a pension for life.

  The procession moved on: bands, ambassadors, professions, veterans, peasants in nylon country dress, leaders of parties, and loyal factions.

  When at last the royal coach reached the Arc de Triomphe, the streets about the Place de la Concorde were still blocked with marchers waiting to get into the parade. But all of this is a matter of public record and of unparalleled newspaper coverage.

  As the royal coach paused at the Arc de Triomphe, Queen Marie turned to speak to the king and found him gone. He had propped up his royal robes and crept away unnoticed In the crowd.

  It was an angry queen who found him later, sitting on his balcony, polishing the eyepiece of his telescope.

  “This is a fine thing,” she said. “I have never been so embarrassed in my life. What will the papers say? You will be the laughingstock of the world. What will the English say? Oh, I know. They won’t say anything, but they’ll look, and you’ll see in their eyes that they remember how their queen stood and sat, stood and sat for thirteen hours without even going to the—Pippin, will you stop polishing that silly glass?”