The first floor, the piano nobile, of that east wing is occupied by the private apartments of the King and Queen.
I look across the quarter-mile of red-tiled housetops that separate me from their Majesties’ habitation, and I fancy the life that is going on within. It is too early in the day for either of them to be abroad, so they are certainly there, somewhere behind those gleaming windows: Theodore Krolt and Anéli Kroleva.
She, I would lay a wager, is in her music-room, at her piano, practising a song with Florimond. She is dressed in white (I always think of her as dressed in white—doubtless because she wore a white frock the first time I saw her), and her brown hair is curling loose about her forehead, her maids not having yet imprisoned it. I declare, I can almost hear her voice: tra-la-lira-la-la: mastering a trill; while Florimond, pink, and plump, and smiling, walks up and down the room, nodding his head to mark the time, and every now and then interrupting her with a suggestion.
The King, at this hour, will be in his study, in dressing-gown and slippers—a tattered old dingy brown dressing-gown, out at elbows—at his big wildly-littered writing-table, producing “copy,” to the accompaniment of endless cigarettes and endless glasses of tea. (Monterossan cigarettes are excellent, and Monterossan tea is always served in glasses.) The King has literary aspirations, and—like Frederick the Great—coaxes his muse in French. You will occasionally see a conte of his in the Nouvelle Revue, signed by the artful pseudonym, Théodore Montrouge.
At one o’clock to-day I am to present myself at the Palace, and to be received by their Majesties in informal audience; and then I am to have the honour of lunching with them. If I were on the point of lunching with any other royal family in Europe.... But, thank goodness, I’m not; and I needn’t pursue the distressing speculation. Queen Anéli and King Theodore are—for a multitude of reasons—a Queen and King apart.
You see, when he began life, Theodore IV. was simply Prince Theodore Pavelovitch, the younger son of a nephew of the reigning Krol, Paul III,; and nobody dimly dreamed that he would ever ascend the throne. So he went to Paris, and “made his studies” in the Latin Quarter, like any commoner.
In those days—as, I dare say, it still is in these—the Latin Quarter was crowded with students from the far South-east. Servians, Roumanians, Monte-rossans, grew, as it were, on every bush; we even had a sprinkling of Bulgarians and Montenegrins; and those of them who were not (more or less vaguely) princes, you could have numbered on your fingers. And, anyhow, in that democratic and self-sufficient seat of learning, titles count for little, and foreign countries are a matter of consummate ignorance and jaunty unconcern. The Duke of Plaza-Toro, should he venture in the classical Boul’ Miche, would have to cede the pas to the latest hero of the Beaux-Arts, or bully from the School of Medicine, even though the hero were the son of a village apothecary, and the bully reeked to heaven of absinthe and tobacco; while the Prime Minister of England would find his name, it is more than to be feared, unknown, and himself regarded as a person of quite extraordinary unimportance.
So we accepted Prince Theodore Pavelovitch, and tried him by his individual merits, for all the world as if he were made of the same flesh and blood as Tom, Dick, and Harry; and thee-and-thou’d him, and hailed him as mon vieux, as merrily as we did everybody else. Indeed, I shouldn’t wonder if the majority of those who knew him were serenely unaware that his origin was royal (he would have been the last to apprise them of it), and roughly classed him with our other princes valaques. For convenience sake, we lumped them all—the divers natives of the lands between the Black Sea and the Adriatic—under the generic name, Valaques; we couldn’t be bothered with nicer ethnological distinctions.
We tried Prince Theodore by his individual merits; but, as his individual merits happened to be signal, we liked him very much. He hadn’t a trace of “side;” his pockets were full of money; he was exceedingly free-handed. No man was readier for a lark, none more inventive or untiring in the prosecution of one. He was a brilliant scholar, besides, and almost the best fencer in the Quarter. And he was pleasantly good-looking—fair-haired, blue-eyed, with a friendly humorous face, a pointed beard, and a slight, agile, graceful figure. Everybody liked him, and everybody was sorry when he had to leave us, and return to his ultra-mundane birthplace. “It can’t be helped,” he said. “I must go home and do three years of military service. But then I shall come back. I mean always to live in Paris.”
That was in ’82. But he never came back. For, before his three years of military service were completed, the half-dozen cousins and the brother who stood between him and the throne, had one by one died off, and Theodore himself had succeeded to the dignity of Krolevitch,—as they call their Heir-Presumptive. In 1886 he married. And, finally, in ’88, his great-uncle Paul also died—at the age of ninety-seven, if you please—and Theodore was duly proclaimed Krol.