2.

My first meeting with Leopold II dates back to 1896. The King had prone to the Riviera, accompanied by his charming daughter, Princess Clémentine, now Princess Napoleon, who, from that time onward, filled in relation to her father the part of the Antigone of a tempestuous old age. I shall never forget my surprise when the King, who had made the long railway-journey from Brussels to Nice without a stop, said to his chamberlain, Baron Snoy, as they left the station:

KING LEOPOLD II.

"Send away the carriage, monsieur le chambellan. We'll go to the hotel on foot. I want to stretch my legs a bit!"

We walked down the Avenue Thiers, followed by an inconvenient little crowd of inquisitive people. Just as we were about to cross a street, a landau drove up and obliged us to step back to the pavement. As it passed us, the King solemnly took off his hat: he had recognised Queen Victoria seated in the carriage and apparently astonished at this unexpected meeting.

When we reached the Place Masséna, again the King's hat flew off: this time, it was the Dowager Empress of Russia entering a shop.

"The place seems crammed with sovereigns," he said, with his mocking air. "Whom am I going to meet next, I wonder?"

I saw little of him during this first short stay which he made at Nice, for I was at that time attached to the person of the Queen of England and had to transfer the duty of protecting King Leopold to one of my colleagues. I used to meet him occasionally—always on foot—on the Cimiez road; I would also see him, in the afternoon, taking tea at Rumpelmayer's with his two daughters, the Princesses Clémentine and Louise, and his son-in-law, Prince Philip of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. These family meetings around a five o'clock tea-table marked the last auspicious days of peace which was more apparent than real among those illustrious personages.

When Leopold II returned to the Riviera two years later, he had quarrelled, in the meanwhile, with his daughter Louise, who herself had quarrelled with her husband; he had ceased to see his daughter Stéphanie, who had married Count Lonyay; and he met his wife, Queen Marie Henriette, as seldom as he possibly could. Princess Clémentine was the only one who still found favour with this masterful old man, who was so hard upon others and so indulgent to himself; and she continued, with admirable devotion and self-abnegation, to surround him with solicitous care and to accompany him wherever he went.

I never met a more smiling resignation than that of this princess, who took a noble pride in the performance of her duty. Nothing was able to discourage her in the fulfilment of her filial mission: not the rebuffs and caprices which she encountered on her father's side, nor the frequently delicate and sometimes humiliating positions which he forced upon her, nor even the persistency with which, until his dying day, he thwarted the secret inclinations of her heart.

It has been said that, at one time, he thought of giving her the Prince of Naples—now King of Italy—for a husband and that he abandoned the idea in consequence of the stubborn opposition which the plan encountered on the part of exalted political personages. I do not know if he ever entertained this plan; on the other hand, I feel pretty sure that, some years ago, he would have liked the Count of Turin for a son-in-law and that negotiations were even opened to this effect with the Italian court. But the most invincible of arguments—the only one that had not been taken into account—was at once opposed to this project: the princess's affections were engaged elsewhere. She loved Prince Victor Napoleon and had resolved that she would never marry another man. Of course, I was not present at the scene which the plain expression of this wish provoked between father and daughter; but I understand that it was of a violent character. From that day, the Prince's name was never mentioned between them. The Princess continued, as in the past, to fill the part of an attentive and devoted daughter; she continued scrupulously to perform her duties as "the little Queen," as the Belgians called her after 1904, the year of her mother's death, when she began to take Marie Henriette's place at official functions; she continued to succour the poor and nurse the sick with greater solicitude than ever; and she was seen, as before, driving her pony-chaise in the Bois de la Cambre. Only, in the privacy of her boudoir, the moment she had a little time to herself, she would immerse herself in the study of historical memoirs of the Napoleonic period.

To tell the truth, I believe that if Prince Victor had not possessed the grave fault, in Leopold's eyes, of being a pretender to the French throne, the King would have ended by giving to the daughter whom he adored the consent for which she vainly entreated during six long years. But the King was an exceedingly selfish man; he was eager, for the reasons explained above, to preserve good relations with the French Republic; and he refused at any price to admit the heir of the Bonapartes into his family. The result was that he ended by conceiving against the Prince the violent antipathy which he felt for any person who stood in his way and interfered with his calculations. I remember realising this one morning at the station at Bâle, where I had gone to meet him. The King was waiting on the platform for the Brussels train, when I suddenly caught sight of Prince Victor leaving the refreshment-room. I thought it my duty to tell the King.

"Oh, indeed!" he said. "Let's go and look at the engines."

And he strode away.

Can it have been because he was sure of meeting neither Prince Victor nor the members of his family on the Riviera that he resolved, at the end of his life, to fix one of his chief residences in the south of France? I will not go so far as to say so. I am more inclined to believe that the old King, who was a passionate lover of sunshine, flowers and freedom, found in that charming and easy-going country the environment most in harmony with his moods and tastes.

As early as 1898, he resolved to lay out for himself a paradise in that wonderful property, known as Passable, which he had purchased near Nice, with its gardens sloping down to the Gulf of Villefranche. He devoted all his horticultural and architectural knowledge, all his sense of what was beautiful and picturesque to its embellishment. Tiberius achieved no greater success at Capri. Year after year, he enlarged it, for he had a mania for building and pulling down. He also had the soul of a speculator. None knew better than he how to bargain for a piece of land: he would bully, threaten and intimidate the other side until he invariably won the day. Thereupon he used to indulge in childish delight:

"It's all right," he would say, with a great chuckle. "I have done a capital stroke of business!"

And I am bound to admit that he spared neither time nor energy when he scented what he called a "capital stroke of business."

I can still see him, one afternoon, leaving M. Waldeck-Rousseau's villa at the Cap d'Antibes, near Cannes, where he had gone to pay the prime minister a visit, and perceiving, on the road leading to the station, a magnificent walled-in park that looked as if it were abandoned:

"Who owns that property?" he asked, suddenly.

"An Englishman, Sir, who never comes near it."

"We have time to look over it," said the King, "before the train leaves for Nice. Somebody fetch the gardener!"

The gardener was not to be found, but the gate was open. Leopold II walked in, without hesitation, followed by Baron Snoy, my colleague, M. Olivi, and myself, hurried along the deserted paths and praised the beauty of the vegetation; but, when it became time to go, we discovered, to our dismay, that someone had locked the gate while we were inside. There was no key, no possibility of opening it. We called and shouted in vain. Nobody appeared. The train was due before long; the King began to grow impatient. What were we to do? Olivi had a flash of genius. He ran to a shed, the roof of which shewed above the nearest thicket, and returned with a ladder:

"If Your Majesty does not mind, you will be able to get over the wall."

The King accepted impassively and the ascent began. Baron Snoy went first, then I; and the King, in his turn, climbed the rungs, supported by Olivi. Baron Snoy and I, propped up on the top of the wall, hoisted the King after us. We were joined by Olivi; and then a dreadful thing happened: the ladder swayed and fell! There we were, all four of us, astride the wall, swinging our legs, without any means of getting down on the other side.

"We look like burglars," said the King, with a forced laugh.

There was nothing for it but to jump. The distance from the top of the wall to the slope beside the road was not great; and Baron Snoy, Olivi and I succeeded in falling on our feet without great difficulty. The King, however, who limped in one leg and lacked agility, could not think of it.

Then Olivi, who certainly proved himself a most resourceful man that day, solved the problem. He suggested that the King should climb down upon our shoulders. The King, accordingly, let himself slide down on to the shoulders of Baron Snoy, who passed him on to Olivi's back, while I caught hold of his long legs and deposited his huge feet safely on the ground!

Some years later, seeing Olivi at the station at Nice:

"I remember you, M. Olivi," said Leopold II. "You took part in our great gymnastic display at Antibes."

"I did, Sir."

"Well, do you know, M. Olivi, there is no need for me to climb the wall now. I have the key: the property belongs to me!"

The whole man is pictured in this anecdote. Even as he gave numberless signs of avarice and meanness in the details of material life, so he displayed an almost alarming extravagance once it became a question of satisfying a whim, although he would carefully calculate the advantages of any such whim beforehand. Now to increase the number of his landed properties was with him a genuine monomania, a sort of methodical madness.

At the bottom of his character lay certain precepts which belonged to the great middle class of 1840 and which had survived from the middle-class education imparted to him in his youth. It was thus that he was brought to think that the amount of a man's wealth is to be measured by the amount of real estate which he possesses. He fought shy of stocks and shares because of the frequent fluctuations to which they are subjected. On the other hand, he felt a constant satisfaction—I was almost saying a rapturous delight—in the acquisition of land, in turning his cash into acres of soil and investing his fortune in marble or bricks and mortar, because he looked upon these as more solid and lasting.

It goes without saying that, during his long visits to the South, he escaped as much of the official and social drudgery as he could. He saw very little of his illustrious cousins staying on the Riviera; avoided dinners and garden-parties; and, when not at work, spent his time in long and interminable walks, or else went and sat on a bench in some public garden or by the sea and there steeped himself in his reflexions. Sometimes, when he was in a hurry to get back, he would take the tram or hail a fly, always picking out the oldest and shabbiest.

One day, at his wish, I beckoned to a driver on the rank at Nice.

"No, no, not that one," he said. "Call the other man, over there: the one with the horse that looks half-dead."

"But the carriage seems very dirty, Sir," I ventured to remark.

"Just so: as he drives such an uninviting conveyance, he must be doing bad business; we must try and help him."

Leopold II had a trick of performing these sudden and unexpected acts of kindness.

He was a sceptic to the verge of indifference and yet entertained odd antipathies and aversions. For instance, he hated the piano and was terrified of a cold in the head. Whenever he had to select a new aide-de-camp, he always began by asking two questions:

"Do you play the piano? Do you catch cold easily?"

If the officer replied in the negative, the King said, "That's all right," and the aide-de-camp was appointed; but if, by ill-luck, the poor fellow returned an evasive answer, his fate was doomed: he went straight back to his regiment.

This inexplicable dread of the corizza had attained such proportions that, during the last years of the King's life, the people about him—including the ladies—discovered a simple and ingenious expedient for obtaining a day's leave when they wanted it: they simply sneezed without stopping. At the third explosion, the old sovereign gave a suspicious look at the sneezer and said:

"I sha'n't want you to-day."

And the trick was done.

On the other hand, he showed himself very indulgent towards his younger officers' adventures in the world of gallantry. I remember his chaffing one of them, one morning, at Nice. Captain Binjé, an officer whose intelligence, activity and devotion had earned his appreciation, was a little late on duty that morning; and moreover his clothes emitted a very strong scent. The King at once began to sniff:

"Oof! Oof!" he said. "I'll wager you struck a flower on your road here!"

"Y-your M-majesty," stammered the officer.

"All right, all right, my boy: you can't help it, at your age!"

He had idiosyncrasies, like most mortals. For instance, he used to have four buckets of sea-water dashed over his body every morning, by way of a bath; he expected partridges to be served at his meals all the year round; and he had his newspapers ironed like pocket-handkerchiefs before reading them: he could not endure anything like a fold or crease in them. Lastly, when addressing the servants, he always spoke of himself in the third person. Thus he would say to his chauffeur, "Wait for him," instead of, "Wait for me." Those new to his service, who had not been warned, were puzzled to know what mysterious person he referred to.

A strange eccentric, you will say. No doubt, although these oddities are difficult to understand in the case of a man who displayed the most practical mind, the most lucid intelligence and the shrewdest head for business the moment he was brought face to face with the facts of daily life. But, I repeat, to those who knew him best, he appeared in the light of a constant and bewildering puzzle; and this was shown not only in the peculiarity of his manners, but in the incongruity of his sentiments. How are we to explain why this King should feel an infinite love for children, this stern King who was so hard and sometimes so cruel in his treatment of those to whom by rights he ought never to have closed his heart nor refused his indulgence? Yet the tall old man worshipped the little tots. They were almost the only creatures whose greetings he returned; and he would go carefully out of his way, when strolling along a beach, rather than spoil their sand-castles. How are we to explain the deep-seated, intense and jealous delight which he, so insensible to the softer emotions of mankind, felt at the sight of the fragile beauty of a rare flower? How are we to explain why he reserved the kindness and gentleness which he so harshly refused to his wife and daughters for his unfortunate sister, the Empress Charlotte, whose mysterious madness had kept her for forty-two years a lonely prisoner within the high walls of the Château de Bouchout? And yet, every morning of those forty-two years he never failed, when at Laeken, to go alone across the park to that silent dwelling and spend two hours in solitary converse with the tragic widow. Each day, with motherly solicitude, he personally supervised the smallest details of that shattered existence.

Lastly, what an astounding contrast was offered in Leopold II, who was considered insensible to the weaknesses of the heart, by the sudden blossoming of a sentimental idyll in the evening of his life!