Part 5

He was indeed happy, so much so that his gaiety infected everybody around him. Each of us felt that he had some small part in this frank happiness, in this touching romance; and we felt all its charm as though our hearts were but twenty years old again. The English themselves, forgetting that their princess was about to marry a Catholic sovereign and that she would have to forswear the Protestant faith--an essential condition of the marriage--the English, usually so strict in these matters, greeted this love-match with enthusiasm. One of the British ministers gave vent to a very pretty phrase. Someone expressing surprise, in his presence, at the acquiescence shown in this connexion by King Edward's government:

"Mankind loves a lover," he replied. "Especially in England."

The days that followed upon the betrothal were days of enchantment for the young couple, now freed from all preoccupation and constraint. One met them daily, motoring along the picturesque roads of the Basque country or walking through the streets of Biarritz, stopping before the shopwindows, at the photographer's or at the pastrycook's.

"Do you know, Paoli," said the King to me, one day, "I've changed the princess's name. Instead of calling her Ena, which I don't like, I call her Nini. That's very Parisian, isn't it?"

The royal lover, as I have already said, prided himself with justice on his Parisianism, as witness the following scrap of dialogue, which took place one morning in the street at Biarritz:

"M. Paoli."

"Sir?"

"Do you know the tune of the _Maschich_?"

"Upon my word, I can't say I do, Sir!"

"Or of _Viens, Poupoule_?"

"No, Sir."

"Why, then you know nothing. Paoli ... you're a disgrace!"

Thereupon, half-opening the door of the confectioner's shop where Princess Ena was making a leisurely selection of cakes, he began to hum the famous air of _Viens, Poupoule_!

It will readily be imagined that the protection of the King was not always an easy matter. True, it was understood that I should invariably be told beforehand of the programme of the day; but the plans would be changed an hour later; and, when the young couple had once set out at random, nothing was more difficult than to catch them up.

I remember one morning when the King informed me that he did not intend to go out that day. I thereupon determined to give myself a few hours' rest. I had returned to my hotel and was beginning to enjoy the unaccustomed sense of repose when the telephone bell rang:

"The King and the Princess have gone out," said the voice of one of my detectives. "It's impossible to find them."

Greatly alarmed, I was hurrying to the Villa Mouriscot, when, at a bend in the road, I saw the fugitives themselves before me, accompanied by the Princess Beatrice.

"I say!" cried the King, in great glee. "We gave your inspector the slip!"

And, as I was venturing to utter a discreet reproach:

"Don't be angry with us, M. Paoli," the princess broke in, very prettily. "The King isn't frightened; no more am I. Who would think of hurting us?"

The great delight of Alfonso, who is very playfully inclined, was to hoax people that did not know who he was. One day, motoring into Cambo, the delicious village near which M. Edmond Rostand's property lies, he entered the post-office to send off some postcards. Seeing the woman in charge of the office taking the air outside the door:

"I beg your pardon, madame," he said, very politely. "Could you tell me if the King of Spain is expected here to-day?"

"I don't know anything about it," said the little post-mistress in an off-hand way.

"Don't you know him by sight?"

"No."

"Oh, really! They say he's very nice: not exactly handsome, but quite charming, for all that."

The good lady, of course, suspected nothing; but when the King handed her his postcards, it goes without saying that she at once read the superscriptions and saw that they were addressed to the Queen Mother at San Sebastian, to the Infanta Doña Paz, to the Infanta Maria Theresa, to the prime minister.

"Why, it's the King himself!" she exclaimed, quite overcome.

Alfonso XIII was already far on his road.

The most amusing adventure, however, was that which he had at Dax. One morning, he took it into his head to motor away to the parched and desolate country of the Landes, which stretch from Bayonne to Bordeaux. After a long and wearing drive, he decided to take the train back from Dax. Accompanied by his friend Señor Quiñones de Leon, he made for the station, where the two young men, tired out and soaked in perspiration, sat down in the refreshment-room.

"Give us some lunch, please," said the King, who was ravenously hungry, to the woman at the bar.

The refreshment-room, unfortunately, was very meagerly supplied. When the two travelling-companions had eaten up the sorry fare represented by a few eggs and sandwiches, which had probably been waiting more than a month for a traveller to arrive and take a fancy to them, the King, whose appetite was far from being satisfied, called the barmaid, a fat and matronly Béarnaise, with an upper lip adorned with a pair of thick moustachios.

"Have you nothing else to give us?" he asked.

"I have a _pâté de foie gras_, but it's very expensive," said the decent creature, whose perspicacity did not go to the length of seeing a serious customer in this famished and dusty young man.

"Never mind, let's have it," said the King.

The woman brought her _pâté_, which was none too fresh; but how great was her amazement when she saw the two travellers devour not only the liver, but the fat as well! The pot was emptied and scraped clean in the twinkling of an eye.

Pleased with her successful morning's trade and encouraged by the King's ebullient good-humour, the barmaid sat down at the royal table, and began to tell the King her family affairs and questioned him with maternal solicitude. When, at last, the hour of departure struck, they shook hands with each other warmly.

Some time afterwards, the King was passing through Dax by rail and, as the train steamed into the station, said to me:

"I have an acquaintance at Dax. I'll show her to you: she is charming."

The plump Béarnaise was there, more moustachioed than ever. I will not attempt to describe her comic bewilderment at recognising her former customer in the person of the King. He was delighted and, giving her his hand:

"You won't refuse to say How-do-you-do to me, I hope?" he asked, laughing.

The thing turned her head; what was bound to happen happened: she became indiscreet. From that time onwards, she looked into every train that stopped at Dax, to see if "her friend" the King was among the passengers; and, when, instead of stepping out on the platform, he satisfied himself with giving her a friendly nod from behind the pane, she felt immensely disappointed: in fact, she was even a little offended.

The Cambo post-mistress and the Dax barmaid are not the only people who boast of having been taken in by Alfonso XIII. His turn for waggery was sometimes vented upon grave and serious men. Dr. Moure, of Bordeaux, who attended the young monarch when his nose was operated upon, has a story to tell. He was sent for, one day, to San Sebastian and was waiting for his illustrious patient in a room at the Miramar Palace, when the door opened quickly and there entered a most respectable lady, dressed in silk flounces and wearing a wig and spectacles. Not having the honour of her acquaintance, he made a deep bow, to which she replied with a stately courtesy.

"It must be the _camerera-major_," he thought to himself. "She looks tremendously eighteenth-century."

But suddenly a great burst of laughter shook the venerable dowager's frame from head to foot, her spectacles fell from her nose, her wig dropped likewise and a clarion voice cried:

"Good-morning, doctor! It's I!"

It was the King.

The chapter of anecdotes is inexhaustible. And it is not difficult to picture how this playful simplicity, combined with a delicacy of feeling and a knightly grace to which, in our age of brutal realism, we are no longer accustomed, made an utter conquest of the pretty English princess. When, after several days of familiar and daily intimacy, it became necessary to say good-bye--the princess was returning to England to busy herself with preparations for her marriage, Alfonso to Madrid for the same reason--when the moment of separation had come, there was a pang at the heart on both sides. And, as I was leaving with the princess for Paris:

"You're a lucky man, M. Paoli, to be going with the princess," said the King, sadly, as I was stepping into the railway-carriage. "I'd give anything to be in your place!"

While the Court of Spain was employed in settling, down to the smallest particular, the ceremonial for the King's approaching wedding, Princess Ena was absorbed, at one and the same time, in the charming details of her trousseau and in the more austere preparations for her conversion to Catholicism. This conversion, as I have already said, was a _sine quâ non_ to the consent of Spain to her marriage.

The princess and her mother, accompanied by Miss Cochrane and Lord William Cecil, went and stayed in an hotel at Versailles for the period of religious instruction which precedes the admission of a neophyte within the pale of the Roman Catholic Church; and it was at Versailles, on a cold February morning, that she abjured her Protestantism in a sequestered chapel of the cathedral. Why did she select the town of Louis XIV in which to accomplish this important and solemn act of her life? Doubtless, because of the peaceful silence that surrounded it and of the past, filled with melancholy grandeur, which it conjured up; perhaps, also, because of the association of ideas suggested to her mind by the city of the Great King and the origins of the family of the Spanish Bourbons of which it was the cradle. The heart of woman sometimes provides instances of this delicacy of thought.

The last months of the winter of 1906 were spent by the engaged pair in eager expectation of the great event that was to unite them for good and all and in the manifold occupations which it involved. The date of the wedding was fixed for the 31st of May. A few days before that I went to Calais to meet the princess. It was as though nature, in her charming vernal awakening, was smiling upon the royal bride and had hastily decked herself in her best to greet the young princess, as she passed, with all her youthful gladness. But the princess saw nothing: she had bidden a last farewell to her country, her family and her home; and, despite the happiness that called her, the fond memory of all that she was quitting oppressed her heart.

"It is nothing, M. Paoli," she said, when I asked the cause of her sadness, "it is nothing: I cannot help feeling touched when I think that I am leaving the country where I have spent so many happy days to go towards the unknown."

She did not sleep that night. At three o'clock in the morning, she was up and dressed, ready to appear before her future husband, before the nation that was waiting to welcome her, while the King, at the same hour, was striding up and down the platform at Irun, in a fever of excitement, peering into the night so as to be the first to see the yellow gleams of the train and nervously lighting cigarette upon cigarette to calm his impatience.

Then came the whirlwind of festivals at which the King invited me to be present, the sumptuous magnificence of the marriage-ceremony in the ancient church of Los Geronimos. It was as though the old Court of Spain had regained its pomp of the days of long ago. Once more, the streets, all dressed with flags, were filled with antiquated chariots, with heraldic costumes, with glittering uniforms; from the balconies draped with precious stuffs, flowers fell in torrents; cheers rose from the serried ranks of the crowd; an intense, noisy, mad gaiety reigned in all men's eyes, on all men's lips, while, from behind the windows of the state-coach that carried her to the church, the surprised and delighted princess, forgetting her fleeting melancholy, now smiled her acknowledgments of this mighty welcome.

A tragic incident was fated brutally to interrupt her fair young dream. Finding no seat in the church of Los Geronimos, the dimensions of which are quite small, I took refuge in one of the Court stands erected along the route taken by the sovereigns; and I was watching the procession pass on its return to the palace, when my ears were suddenly deafened by a tremendous explosion. At first, no one realised where it came from. We thought that it was the report of a cannon-shot fired to announce the end of the ceremony. But suddenly loud yells arose, people hustled one another and rushed away madly, shouting:

"It's a murder! The King and Queen are killed!"

Terrified, I tried to hasten to the street from which the cries came. A file of soldiers, drawn up across the roadway stopped me. I then ran to the palace, where I arrived at exactly the same moment as the royal coach, from which the King and the young Queen alighted. They were pale, but calm. The King held his wife's hand tenderly in his own and stared in dismay at the long white train of her bridal dress, stained with great blotches of blood. Filled with horror, I went up to Alfonso XIII:

"Oh, Sir!" I cried, "at least both of you are safe and sound!"

"Yes," he replied. Then, lowering his voice, he added, "But there are some killed. Poor people! What an infamous thing!"

Under her great white veil, the Queen, standing between Queen Maria Christina and Princess Henry of Battenberg, still both trembling, wept silent tears. Then the King, profoundly moved, drew nearer to her and kissed her slowly on the cheek, whispering these charming words:

"I do hope that you are not angry with me for the emotion which I have involuntarily caused you?"

What she replied I did not hear: I only saw a kiss.

Notwithstanding the warm manifestations of loyalty which the people of Spain lavished upon their sovereigns on the following day, Queen Victoria is said to have been long haunted by the horrible spectacle which she had beheld and to have retained an intense feeling of terror and sadness from that tragic hour. But, God be praised, everything passes. When, later, I had the honour of again finding myself in attendance upon the King and Queen at Biarritz and in Paris, I recognised once more the happy and loving young couple whom I had known at the time of their engagement. Alfonso XIII had the same gaiety, the same high spirits as before; and the Queen's mind seemed to show no trace of painful memories or gloomy apprehensions.

In the course of the first journey which I took with them a year after the murderous attempt in Madrid, the King himself acquainted me with the real cause of this happy quietude so promptly recovered. Walking into the compartment where I was sitting, he lifted high into the air a pink and chubby child and, holding it up for me to look at, said, with more than a touch of pride in his voice:

"There! What do you think of him? Isn't he splendid?"

III

THE SHAH OF PERSIA

1.

Must I confess it? When I was told, a few weeks before the opening of the International Exhibition of 1900, that I should have the honour of being attached to the person of Muzaffr-ed-Din, King of Kings and Shah of Persia, during the whole duration of the official visit which he contemplated paying to Paris, I did not welcome the news with the alacrity which it ought doubtless to have evoked.

And yet I had no reason for any prejudice against this monarch: I did not even know him. My apprehensions were grounded on more remote causes: I recalled the memories which a former Shah, his predecessor, had left among us. Nasr-ed-Din was a strange and capricious sovereign, who had never succeeded in making up his mind, when he came to Europe, to leave on the further shore, so to speak, the manners and customs of his country or to lay aside the troublesome fancies in which his reckless despotism loved to indulge. Was it not related of him that, while staying in the country, in France, he caused a sheep or two to be sacrificed every morning in his bed-room, in order to ensure the Prophet's clemency until the evening? And that he had the amiable habit of buying anything that took his fancy, but neglecting to pay the bill?

Lastly, this very delicious story was told about him. The Shah had asked whether he could not, by way of amusement, be present at an execution of capital punishment during one of his stays in Paris. It so happened that the occasion offered. He was invited to go one morning to the Place de la Roquette, where the scaffold had been erected. He arrived with his diamonds and his suite; but, the moment he saw the condemned man, his generous heart was filled with a sudden tenderness for the murderer:

"Not that one. The other!" he ordered, pointing to the public prosecutor, who was presiding over the ceremony.

Picture the magistrate's face, while the Shah insisted and thought it discourteous of them not at once to yield to his wishes.

I therefore asked myself with a certain dismay what unpleasant surprises his successor might have in store for me. He seemed to me to come from the depths of a very old and mysterious form of humanity, travelling from his capital to the shores of Europe, slowly, by easy stages, as in the mediæval times, across deserts and mountains and blue-domed dead cities, escorted by a fabulous baggage-train of rare stuffs, of praying-carpets, of marvellous jewels, an army of turbaned horsemen, a swarm of officials, a harem of dancing-girls and a long file of camels.

I asked myself if I too would be obliged to assist at sacrifices of heifers and to console unpaid tradesmen, all to be finally pointed out by His Majesty as a "substitute" under the knife of the guillotine.

However, I was needlessly alarmed: in Persia, thank goodness, the Shahs succeed, but do not resemble one another. I became fully aware of this when I was admitted into the intimacy of our new guest. Muzaffr-ed-Din had nothing in common with his father. He was an overgrown child, whose massive stature, great bushy moustache, very kind, round eyes, prominent stomach and general adiposity formed a contrast with his backward mental condition and his sleepy intelligence. He had, in fact, the brain of a twelve-year-old schoolboy, together with a schoolboy's easy astonishment, candour and curiosity. He busied himself exclusively with small things, the only things that excited and interested him. He was gentle, good-natured, an arrant coward, generous at times and extremely capricious, but his whims never went so far as to take pleasure in the suffering of others. He loved life, was enormously attached to it, in fact; and he liked me too with a real affection, which was spontaneous and, at times, touching:

"Paoli, worthy Paoli," he said to me one day, in an expansive mood, fixing his round pupils upon me, "you ... my good, my dear domestic!"

When I appeared surprised and even a little offended at the place which he was allotting me in the social scale:

"His Majesty means to say," explained the grand vizier, "that he looks upon you as belonging to the family. 'Domestic' in his mind means a friend of the house, according to the true etymology of the word, which is derived from the Latin _domus_...."

The intention was pretty enough; I asked no more, remembering that Muzaffr-ed-Din spoke French with difficulty and employed a sort of negro chatter to express his thoughts.

2.

At the time of his first stay in Paris, he had the privilege of inaugurating the famous Sovereigns' Palace, which the government had fitted up in the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne for the entertainment of its royal visitors. The house was a comparatively small one; on the other hand, it was sumptuously decorated. The national furniture-repository had sent some of the finest pieces to be found in its historic store-rooms. In fact, I believe that the Shah slept in the bed of Napoleon I and washed his hands and face in the Empress Marie-Louise's basin; things that interested him but little. Great memories were a matter of indifference to him; he infinitely preferred futile realities in the form of useless objects, whose glitter pleased his eye, and of more or less harmonious sounds, whose vibrations tickled his ears.

His tastes were proved on the day of his arrival by two quick decisions: he ordered to be packed up for Teheran the grand piano which adorned his drawing-room and the motor-car which awaited his good pleasure outside, after hearing the one, trying the other and lavishly paying for both. He would not be denied.

His amazement was great when he visited the exhibition for the first time. The wonderful cosmopolitan city that seemed to have leapt into existence in the space of one of the thousand and one nights of the Persian legend stirred his eastern imagination, strive though he might to conceal the fact. The splendour of the exotic display exercised an irresistible attraction upon him; the glass-cases of jewellery also fascinated his gaze, although he himself, doubtless without realising it, was a perambulating shop-window which any jeweller might have longed to possess. On his long Persian tunic with its red edges and ample skirts creased with folds he wore a regular display of precious stones and one did not know which to admire the most, the gleaming sapphires that adorned his shoulder-straps, the splendid emeralds, the exquisite turquoises that studded the baldrick and the gold scabbard of his sword, the four enormous rubies that took the place of the buttons of his uniform, or the dazzling and formidable diamond, the famous Daria-Nour, the Sea of Light, fastened on to his _Khola_, the traditional head-dress, whence jutted like a fountain of light a quivering aigrette in brilliants. Thus decked out, Muzaffr-ed-Din was valued at thirty-four million francs net; and even then he was far from carrying the whole of his fortune upon his person: I have in fact been assured that, in the depths of the iron trunk of which four vigilant Persians had the keeping, there slumbered an equal number of precious stones, no less fine than the others and content to undergo the rigour of a temporary disgrace. At all events, in the guise in which he showed himself in public, he was enough to excite the admiring curiosity of the crowds.