The Short Reign of Pippin IV (18 page)

“Nine out of ten of them do nothing,” said the king.

“Oh, my child,” said Uncle Charlie. “My poor bewildered child. You are not going to fall into the old trap, are you? Study the British. When the present Duke of Windsor was king he went down into a coal mine just once and the resulting shock not only caused questions in Parliament but nearly lost the prime minister a vote of confidence. Pippin, my dear, dear child, I order you to desist!”

The king sat down in a little chair and it became a throne.

“I did not ask to be king,” he said, “but I am king and I find this dear, rich, productive France torn by selfish factions, fleeced by greedy promoters, deceived by parties. I find that there are six hundred ways of avoiding taxes if you are rich enough—sixty-five methods of raising rent in controlled rental areas. The riches of France, which should have some kind of distribution, are gobbled up. Everyone robs everyone, until a level is reached where there is nothing left to steal. No new houses are built and the old ones are falling to pieces. And on this favored land the maggots are feeding.”

“Pippin, stop it!”

“I am a king, Uncle Charlie. Please do not forget that. I know now why confusion in government is not only tolerated but encouraged. I have learned. A confused people can make no clear demands.

“Do you know what a French workman or peasant says when he refers to the government? He calls it ‘them.'
They
are doing this.
They, they, they.
Something set apart, nameless, unidentifiable, and so unattackable. Anger dwindles down to grumbling. How can you force redress from something which does not exist?

“And consider the intellectuals, the dried-up minds. The writers in the past burned the name ‘France' on the world. Do you know what they are doing now? They're sitting in huddled misery, building a philosophy of despair, while the painters, with few exceptions, paint apathy and jealous anarchy.”

Uncle Charlie sat on the edge of one of the brocaded chairs and he rested his head in his cupped hands and he swayed from side to side like a mourner at a funeral.

Tod Johnson stood at the fireplace, warming his back. He asked quietly, “Have you got the capital and organization to change it?”

“He's got nothing,” Uncle Charlie moaned. “Not one person. Not one sou.”

“I have the Crown,” said Pippin.

“They'll have you in the tumbril. Don't think the guillotine is beyond recall. You'll fail before you start. They'll destroy you.”

“You use the word yourself,” said Pippin. “
They, they,
the nameless
they
. It seems to me that even though the king may know he will fail, the king must try.”

“Not so, my child. Not so. There have been many kings who simply sat back and—”

“I don't believe it,” said the king. “I believe they tried, whatever was said of them. They must have tried; every one of them must have tried.”

“How about a war?” Charlie suggested.

The king chuckled. “I know you have my welfare at heart, dear Uncle.”

“Come on, Tod,” said Charles Martel. “Let's get the hell out of here.”

“I want to talk to Tod,” said Pippin. “Good night, dear Uncle. You can go down that staircase in the corner and avoid the aristocrats. Creep out through the garden. Give the Royal Guard a cigarette!”

After Charles had gone, Pippin raised a corner of the blanket and peered out. The chill night was full of frog sounds and the carp were burping and spluttering in the ponds. He saw his unfortunate uncle moving along the path, his arm clutched by an elderly nobleman who spoke earnestly and loudly in Gothic type into Charles's ear.

The king sighed and dropped the blanket and turned back to Tod. “Such a pessimist,” said Pippin. “He never married, you know. He always said that by the time he knew the woman well enough to marry her, he knew better.”

“He's an operator,” said Tod. “But you know he didn't really want to enlarge his business. I had to guarantee it wouldn't be any work or trouble to him.”

The king pressed the edge of the blanket against the chill from the window. “The frames are shrunk,” he said. “Marie hates to have me put the blanket up—but I get cold.”

“How about plastic wood?” said Tod. “It's a kind of putty.”

Pippin observed, “Modern repairs for an old structure. Now that's one of the reasons I asked you to wait. Perhaps my memory is a little cloudy about our last meeting.”

“But sir—”

“It was very pleasant and it did help me. I believe you lectured me about American corporations—”

“I don't know much about them, sir, but, you see, our family
is
a corporation and so naturally—”

“I understand. Now your government is a democracy—a system of checks and balances. Is that not right?”

“Right, sir,” said Tod.

“And within that structure you have great corporations which themselves have somewhat the nature of governments. Is that not also right?”

“You're ahead of me, sir, but I guess that's right. You've been burning brain juice.”

“Thank you. I guess I have. Is it not so that there is in a corporation a, shall we say, flexibility, one does not find in your government? I mean, could not a change of policy be carried out quickly and effectively in a corporation, let us say by an order from the chairman of the board, without consulting all of the stockholders, an order which is presumed to be for the good and profit of the shareholders?”

Tod regarded the sovereign with speculative eyes. “I see what you're getting at, sir.”

“What would be the procedure?”

“You think you might get further as chairman of the board than as king?”

“I am asking, perhaps, a leading question.”

“Well, let me think, sir. If it was a big change the chairman would put the question up to the board members, and if they agreed the order would go out. If they split, they'd have to call on the stockholders.”

“I guess that's out of the question, then,” said the king. “I can't get even two of our people to agree.”

“You see, sir,” said Tod, “each member of the board represents a certain amount of stock. If there's a rhubarb, the members vote proxies from the stockholders. The one with the most proxies gets control. Then the unions must be consulted if they have a beef.”

“Oh, dear! Even for a program obviously good and desirable?”

“Yes, sir. You might say particularly then.”

The king sighed. “Apparently a corporation isn't much different from a government.”

“Well, it's a little different. It depends on how the stock is held. All the stock in our corporation is held by our family. Remember when we talked about selling titles in America?”

“Through a haze I remember it.”

“There's a fortune in it,” cried Tod. “Why, sir, it might solve this proxy business. Why don't you just put it in my hands? I can get a hundred thousand dollars for a little old knighthood. I'll bet I can sell a dukedom for anything I want to ask.”

The king held up his hand.

“Now wait,” said Tod, “listen to this. I can put it in the patent that you keep the proxy. Why, it's better than a stock division. I can get Neiman-Marcus in back of it. It will be bigger than Miss Rheingold and the Academy Awards and the Aquacade put together.”

The king said, “Don't you call that watering the stock?”

“Oh, no!” cried Tod. “It's better than that. More like a reissue—kind of refinancing. Maybe Billy Rose would produce it. He's looking around for something big.”

The king had sunk his head deep between his shoulders. He shivered. And then he chuckled. “I, Pippin the Fourth, King of France, find that I can only talk to a rich young tourist and an old nun who used to be a chorus girl.”

Tod asked, “Is it true what Uncle Charlie said, sir? Have you been going around in disguises?”

“It was a mistake,” said the king. “When I visited you no one saw me. The caps and mustaches and badges were a mistake.”

“Why did you do it, sir?”

“I thought it might be a good idea to know something about France. Have you noticed a chill in the air?”

“Well, in a way. There's a lot of talk.”

“I know,” said the king. “I've heard it.”

“There's one thing that makes me feel bad,” said Tod. “My father—”

“He is ill?”

“You might call it that. He's got duke fever—of all the people in the world.”

“Maybe there's a little of it in all of us, Tod.”

“But you don't understand—my father—”

“Perhaps I do—a little,” said the king.

As the autumnal days grew shorter, more and more private audiences were asked or even demanded of the king. Then he would sit behind his audience desk in a room that had been built and embellished for another king, while two or three representatives of faction or interest spoke to him privately. Each deputation was confident that the king was their partisan. They never came alone. The thought drifted through Pippin's mind that they did not trust one another. Every one of the representatives had the good of France at heart, but it was also true that the ultimate good of France rested on the primary good of faction—or even individual.

In this manner the king learned what was in store for France, what plans were being made. He sat silently and listened while Socialists proved that Communists must be outlawed, while Centrists showed beyond doubt that only if the financial backbone of France were bolstered and defended could prosperity trickle down to the lower orders.

Religionists and anti-Religionists each made their irrefutable points.

The king listened silently. And he emerged depressed.

Pippin's mind often sought shelter in the memory of his little balcony in the Avenue de Marigny. He could see and feel the dark and silent sky and the slow-flailing nebulae.

Outwardly he was calm and friendly. Now and then he nodded his head, which the audience took to mean the king's agreement and which was actually only the king's growing knowledge of government and of kingship.

He accepted loneliness, but he could not control a scurrying search for either solution or escape, and he did not find them anywhere.

Where the partisans left off the ambassadors continued. Sitting in his painted room, Pippin politely heard the neat and statesmanlike ambitions of other nations to use France, each for its own purpose—and again he nodded and gray depression fogged his soul.

On November 15 the various parties to be represented in the Constitutional Convention petitioned the crown to set the date for convening ahead to December 5. The king graciously agreed, and it was so ordered.

In the evenings Pippin took to making notes in the small lined copybooks which in other days he had used to log the heavens.

Madame Marie was worried about him. “He is so listless—so detached,” she told Sister Hyacinthe. “It's not like his old detachment. He asked me yesterday if I liked being queen—
liked!
”

“What did you say?” the nun asked.

“I told what is true, that I had never thought of it one way or another. I just do what each day demands.”

“Well, did you like
not
being queen?”

“It was perhaps easier,” said the queen, “but not much different. A clean, well-run house is the same everywhere, and husbands are husbands—kings or astronomers. But I think M'sieur is sad.”

 

 

Chill mornings came, with heartening sunshine in the midday. The leaves fell from chestnuts and plane trees, and the street-sweepers' brooms were busy.

The king went back to his original disguise, which was himself. Dressed in his corduroy jacket and espadrilles, he took to riding a motor scooter about the country. After two falls he added a crash helmet to his costume.

One day he scooted to the little town of Gambais, famous for its perfect if partly ruined Château de Neuville. Pippin ate his lunch beside the overgrown moat of the château. He watched an elderly man feeling about in the reedy water of the moat with a long-tined rake.

The old man made contact with a hard and heavy object, and dragged it up the bank. It was a mossy bust of Pan, horned and garlanded. Only when the ancient struggled to lift Pan to a granite pedestal on the moat's edge did the king get up and move to help him. The two of them heaved the heavy statue up on its base, and then they stood back and regarded it, wiping their green and slippery fingers on their trousers.

“I like it facing a little more east,” the old man said. The two of them edged it around. Pippin with his handkerchief wiped the crusted Panic face until the feral lips and the sly, lecherous eyes were visible.

“How did he get in the moat?” the king asked.

“Oh, someone pushed him in. They always do, sometimes two or three times a year.”

“But why?”

The old man raised his shoulders and spread his hands. “Who knows?” he said. “There's people that push things in the moat. Pretty hard work too. There's just people that push things in the moat. See those other stands along there? There's a marble vase and a baby with a shell and a Leda in the water down there.”

“I wonder why they do it—angry, do you think?”

“Who knows? It's what they do—creep in at night.”

“And you always pull them out?”

“I'm late this year. I've had too much to do, and rheumatism.”

“Why don't you anchor the statues to the bases?”