It is in the nature of things, doubtless, that a temperament such as I have endeavoured to suggest should find the intensity of its own feelings reflected by those that it excites in others. One would expect to hear that the people who like Queen Anéli like her tremendously, and that the people who don’t like her tremendously don’t like her at all. And, in effect, that is precisely the lady’s case. She is tremendously liked by those who are near to her, and who are therefore in a position to understand her and to make allowances. They love the woman in her; they laugh at and love the high-spirited, whimsical, impetuous, ingenuous child. But those who are at a distance from her, or who meet her only rarely and formally, necessarily fail to understand her, and are apt, accordingly, neither to admire her greatly, nor to bear her much good will. And, of course, while the people who are near to her can be named by twos and threes, those who view her from a distance must be reckoned with by thousands. And this brings me to a painful circumstance, which I may as well mention without more ado. At Vescova—as you could scarcely spend a day in the town and not become aware—Queen Anéli is anything you please but popular.
“The inhabitants of Monterosso,” says M. Boridov, in his interesting history of that country, “fall into three rigidly separated castes: the nobility, a bare handful of tall, fair-haired, pure-blooded Slavs; the merchants and manufacturers, almost exclusively Jews and Germans; and the peasantry, the populace—a short, thick-set, swarthy race, of Slavic origin, no doubt, and speaking a Slavic tongue, but with most of the Slavic characteristics obliterated by admixture with the Turk.... Your true Slav peasant, with his mild blue eyes and his trustful spirit, is as meek and as long-suffering as a dumb beast of burden. But your black-browed Monterossan, your Tchermnogorets, is fierce, lawless, resentful, and vindictive, a Turk’s grandson, the Turk’s first cousin: though no one detests the Turk more cordially than he.”
“Well, at Vescova, and, with diminishing force, throughout all Monterosso, Queen Anéli is entirely misunderstood and sullenly misliked. Her husband cannot be called precisely the idol of his people, either; but he is regarded with indulgence, even with hopefulness; he is a Monterossan, a Pavelovitch: he may turn out well yet. Anéli, on the contrary, is an alien, a German, a Niemkashka. The feeling against her begins with the nobility. Save the half-dozen who are about her person, almost every mother’s son or daughter of them fancies that he or she has been rudely treated by her, and quite frankly hates her. I am afraid, indeed, they have some real cause of grievance; for they are most of them rather tedious, and provincial, and narrow-minded; and they bore her terribly when they come to Court; and when she is bored, as we have seen, she is likely to show it pretty plainly. So they say she gives herself airs. They pretend that when she isn’t absent-minded and monosyllabic, she is positively snappish. They denounce her as vain, shallow-pated, and extravagant. They twist and torture every word she speaks, and everything she does, into subject-matter for unfriendly criticism; and they quote as from her lips a good many words that she has never spoken, and they blame her savagely for innumerable things that she has never thought of doing. But that’s the trouble with the fierce light that beats upon a throne—it shows the gaping multitude so much more than is really there. Why, I have been assured by at least a score of Monterossan ladies that the Queen’s lovely brown hair is a wig; that her exquisite little teeth are the creation of Dr. Evans, of Paris; that whenever anything happens to annoy her, she bursts out with torrents of the most awful French oaths; that she quite frequently slaps and pinches her maids-of-honour; and that, as for her poor husband, he gets his hair pulled and his face scratched as often as he and she have the slightest difference of opinion. Monterossan ladies have gravely asseverated these charges to me (these, and others more outrageous, which I won’t repeat), whilst their Monterossan lords nodded confirmation. It matters little that the charges are preposterous. Give a Queen a bad name, and nine people in ten will believe she merits it.
“Anyhow, the nobility of Monterosso, quite frankly hating Queen Anéli, give her every bad name they can discover in their vocabularies; and the populace, the mob, without stopping to make original investigations, have convicted her on faith, and watch her with sullen captiousness and mislike. When she drives abroad, scarcely a hat is doffed, never a cheer is raised. On the contrary, one sometimes hears mutterings and muffled groans; and the glances the passers-by direct at her are, in the main, the very reverse of affectionate glances. Members of the shop-keeping class alone show a certain tendency to speak up for her, because she spends her money pretty freely; but the shop-keeping class are aliens too, and don’t count—or, rather, they count against her, ’the dogs of Jews,’ the zhudovskwy sobakwy!”
But do you imagine Queen Anéli minds? Do you imagine she is hurt, depressed, disappointed? Not she. She accepts her unpopularity with the most superb indifference. “What do you suppose I care for the opinion of such riff-raff?” I recollect her once crying out, with curling lip. “Any one who has the least individuality, the least character, the least fineness, the least originality—any one who is in the least degree natural, unconventional, spontaneous—is bound to be misconceived and caluminated by the vulgar rank and file. It’s the meanness and stupidity of average human nature; it’s the proverbial injustice of men. To be popular, you must either be utterly insignificant, a complete nonentity, or else a timeserver and a hypocrite. So long as I have a clear conscience of my own, I don’t care a button what strangers think and say about me. I don’t intend to allow my conduct to be influenced in the tiniest particular by the prejudices of outsiders. Meddlers, busybodies! I will live my own life, and those who don’t like it may do their worst. I will be myself.”
“Yes, my dear; but after all,” the King reminded her, “one has, in this imperfect world, to make certain compromises with one’s environment, for comfort’s sake. One puts on extra clothing in winter, for example, however much, on abstract principles, one may despise such a gross, material, unintelligent thing as the weather. Just so, don’t you think, one is by way of having a smoother time of it, in the long run, if one takes a few simple measures to conciliate the people amongst whom one is compelled to live? Now, for instance, if you would give an hour or two every day to learning Monterossan....
“Oh, for Heaven’s sake, don’t begin that rengaine,” cried her Majesty. “I’ve told you a hundred million times that I won’t be bothered learning Monterossan.”
It is one of her subjects’ sorest points, by the bye, that she has never condescended to learn their language. When she was first married, indeed, she announced her intention of studying it. Grammars and dictionaries were bought; a Professor was nominated; and for almost a week the Crown Princess (Krolevna), as she then was, did little else than grind at Monterossan. Her Professor was delighted; he had never known such a zealous pupil. Her husband was a little anxious. “You mustn’t work too hard, my dear. An hour or two a day should be quite enough.” But she answered, “Let me alone. It interests me.” And for almost a week she was at it early and late, with hammer and tongs; poring over the endless declensions of Monterossan nouns, the endless conjugations of Monterossan verbs; wrestling, sotto voce, with the tongue-tangling difficulties of Monterossan pronunciation; or, with dishevelled hair and inky fingers, copying long Monterossan sentences into her exercise book. She is not the sort of person who does things by halves.—And then, suddenly, she turned volte-face; abandoned the enterprise for ever. “It’s idiotic,” she exclaimed. “A language with thirty-seven letters in its alphabet, and no literature! Why should I addle my brains trying to learn it? Ah, bien, merci! I’ll content myself with French and English. It’s bad enough, in one short life, to have had to learn German, when I was a child.”
And neither argument nor entreaty could induce her to recommence it. The King, who has never altogether resigned himself to her determination, seizes from time to time an opportunity to hark back to it; but then he is silenced, as we have seen, with a “don’t begin that rengaine.” The disadvantages that result from her ignorance, it must be noticed, are chiefly moral; it offends Monterossan amour-propre. Practically, she does perfectly well with French, that being the Court language of the realm.
No, Queen Anéli doesn’t care a button. She tosses her head, and accepts “the proverbial injustice of men” with magnificent unconcern. Only, sometimes, when the public sentiment against her takes the form of aggressive disrespect, or when it interferes in any way with her immediate convenience, it puts her a little out of patience—when, for instance, the traffic in the street retards the progress of her carriage, and a passage isn’t cleared for her as rapidly as it might be for a Queen whom the rabble loved; or when, crossing the pavement on foot, to enter a church, or a shop, or what not, the idlers that collect to look, glare at her sulkily, without doing her the common courtesy of lifting their hats. In such circumstances, I dare say, she is more or less angered. At all events, a sudden fire will kindle in her eyes, a sudden colour in her cheeks; she will very likely tap nervously with her foot, and murmur something about “canaille.” Perhaps anger, though, is the wrong word for her emotion; perhaps it should be more correctly called a kind of angry contempt.