The Days of the King

Title Page

Table of Contents

Copyright

Dedication

1. Farewell

Belated Prologue

2. The Captain's Shadows

3. Stained Sheets

4. The Dwarf on the Tightrope

5. Footwear for Dolls

6. Hubbub and Babies

7. Hurried Times

8. The Parade

Notes

Copyright © 2011 by Filip Florian
Translation copyright © 2011 by Alistair Ian Blyth

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,
write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,
215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

www.hmhbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Florian, Filip.
[Zilele regelui. English]
The days of the king / Filip Florian ; translated from
the Romanian by Alistair Ian Blyth.
p. cm.
ISBN
978-0-547-38835-9
1. Dentists—Fiction. 2. Friendship—Fiction. 3. Kings and rulers—Fiction.
4. Illegitimate children. 5. Bucharest (Romania)—History—19th
century—Fiction. I. Blyth, Alistair Ian. II. Title.
PC
840.416.
L
64
Z
5513 2011
859'.335—dc22 2010049821

Book design by Linda Lockowitz

Printed in the United States of America
DOC
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Luca, my son,
who knows what joy is

T
HE FAREWELL EVENING
in Berlin concluded just as it ought to have concluded: with the scrawny body of the dentist sprawled across the bed, his head buried in that moist, gigantic breast whose mate had long ago been sliced off by the saber of a drunken hussar. Previously, he had drained six mugs of beer, bought a drink for anyone who entered the tavern, clinked glasses, hugged friends and strangers (what a commotion!), and won one last round of whist, to the cheers of the kibitzers, mainly because his fellow card players had connived to make him emerge triumphant, not cheating in broad daylight but by the light of the candles on the tables and shelves. He departed from Der Große Bär after nightfall, letting them think that he would quickly return from the latrine and order another round for one and all; in any case, he left his coat on the back of his chair, a scuffed overcoat, rather short in the sleeves, that had not found a place in his luggage for Bukarest and now eased his exit from the scene. Later, at the brothel, they welcomed him with whoops and tears, in the way whores do when they take an occasion to heart. The establishment did not shut up shop in his honor, it is true, but the girls were able to bid their farewells one by one, plundering minutes from other customers and lavishing on him slices of time as sweet and filling as slices of cake. It was a night on the house. Fräulein Helga even cracked open some champagne, and in her capacity as madam she kissed him on the brow and gripped him by his fly, begging him to forget their teeth, but remember their tits. In Rosa's room, as she was oiling her skin with an infusion of jasmine (with her right hand), now and then stroking her bottom (with her left), the girls entered one by one and allowed him to take a leisurely leave. He nibbled a plump earlobe, with its stud of blood-red glass imitating ruby, hidden beneath chestnut locks; with his lips he circled a pair of rounded knees; he ran the tip of his tongue along the spine of a lean and milky back, having first sprinkled it with cinnamon; he bit two fleshy buttocks; and he slowly breathed warm air over a rosy belly until he found its button and desired to swallow it. His fingers, like ten little snakes, slid over calves and thighs, nestled in the folds of hips and armpits, twined among curls dyed purple (beneath the pubic bone, where the snakelings slithered over moist burrows, snuffled them, but did not slip inside), lashed nipples with their tails, ten nipples in all, curled around them, and bade them farewell. Before gluing his nostrils to the eleventh nipple, the largest and most imposing of any he had ever come across, Joseph Strauss urinated for a long time into a chamber pot as large as a cauldron, behind an arras. Then, biography and all, he sank between Rosa's thighs, trying to abandon there his past.

F
IRST OF ALL,
however, as a sign that kings are anointed by the Lord, not elected by mortals, it came to pass that the young Count of Flanders was laid low by a catarrh. In an armchair by the fireplace that warmed his bones and his eight Christian names—Philippe, Eugène, Ferdinand, Marie, Clément, Baudouin, Leopold, and George—the count rotated a globe between his palms, opened atlases and travel books, sipped an eggnog, dabbed his brow with mentholated tinctures, sighed, and sucked sticks of licorice (
Lakritze,
as he called it, although
réglisse
or
zoethout,
according to his French- and Flemish-speaking subjects respectively) but sweats, fever, sneezes, and the winter beyond the windows made him imagine the throne of the United Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia as a knobbly stool, cold as ice. Perhaps in other circumstances, had he been in good health, riding or hunting, spurred by springtime to audacious desires and gestures, he might not have hastened to turn down the proposition from the east; he might not have viewed the Romanian crown as something paltry. It was 1866, at the beginning of the second fortnight in the month of February, and the counsels of his worldly-wise
father would not have gone amiss. But Leopold had abandoned his realm and family at Christmastide, his body having been lowered into the royal crypt of the Notre Dame Church in Laeken and his soul having ascended to the heavens. The biography he left behind him was blue like a seascape, except that the hue was not marine or cerulean but the deeper blue of royal blood. Born in the Bavarian castle of Ehrenburg, son of the Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, he was a colonel in the Imperial Russian Izmailovsky Regiment at five, a general at twelve, a field marshal at twenty-five (after the campaign of 1815 against Bonaparte), ruler of his native duchy at a tender age, thrice married (to Princess Charlotte Augusta, sole legitimate child of the future King of England, George IV, then to the actress Caroline Bauer, who had hastily been given the title Countess of Montgomery, and finally to Princess Louise-Marie d'Orléans, daughter of King Louis-Philippe I of France), twice a widower, he embarked upon old age amid the tumult of a sordid affair (with Arcadia Claret, paid off with the title Baroness of Eppinghoven), father of six sons and one daughter, stern patriarch, gentle monarch (the first of that newly formed and trilingual state, Belgium), unwavering in the face of military threats and Dutch territorial claims, tenacious in carrying his plans through to the very end (such as the construction of the continent's first railroad, the Brussels-Mechelen line, inaugurated on May 5, 1835), influential adviser to Queen Victoria of England (and author, behind the scenes, of her marital alliance with his nephew, Albert), adept at neutrality in the storm-tossed year of 1848, a man somewhat extravagant in his choice of a future for his only daughter, Marie-Charlotte Amélie, sent across the ocean to be the wife of the Emperor Maximilian of Mexico. In short, a man with ever more strands of gray hair, which later turned altogether white.

It is highly likely that out of this whole series of events, dates, conjunctures, opportunities, calculations, and abilities, the Count of Flanders was thinking of an earlier episode in the life of his father, what one might call a track switch in the life of that prince so preoccupied with railroads. In 1830, at a time when he was not yet called Leopold I of Belgium but merely Georges Chrétien Frédéric of Saxe-Coburg, the duke had spurned another nation's need to bolster itself with powerful characters, titles, and honors, when he declared himself uninterested in the crown of Greece, which had been offered to him on a platter. Now his son, sunk in an armchair, his forehead aflame and his cough worsening as evening fell, administered himself that Balkan precedent as medicine. A physic all the more welcome since he had just discovered that in the northern part of the peninsula, where the map showed the lower course of the Donau
(le Danube)
and some tallish mountains, the Karpaten
(les Carpathes),
philosophy and the belles arts were not much heard of, the balls were modest, and mathematics mostly served for tallying sheep. And so, before dinner, he wrote a letter (in violet ink) rejecting the decision of the two chambers in Bucuresci, the Elected Assembly and the Senate, which, on February 11, at one o'clock, pressed by the lunchtime recess and the national interest, had held a joint meeting and voted unanimously to elevate him to the throne, rechristening him Filip I. In an epoch when not even the swiftest postilion or the most reliable homing pigeon could have made the journey to Brüssel in less than a week, the epistle descended upon the banks of the Dîmbovitza with the speed and force of a bolt of lightning, inducing shudders in three gentlemen and a prime minister, who thus saw their immediate plans thwarted and their longer-term civilizing project hung out to dry.

In the end, those gentlemen, N. Golescu, L. Catargiu, and N. Haralamb—a triumvirate of expedience and members of the Princely Lieutenancy—and I. Ghika, president of the Council, commenced anew their rummaging through the foliage of illustrious genealogical trees, in search of another prince capable of founding a dynasty and taming history. First, however, wearied by events and reversals, fearful lest the disapproval of the future be directed against them, and hopeful that sleep would be a wise counselor, they went to bed, sleeping long but fitfully. They had spent the previous night at the palace persuading Prince Alexandru Ioan Cuza I to sign the act of his abdication, summarily pack his bags, and proceed to the border, escorted by a platoon of alpine troops.

With his unfinished Parisian education in medicine and law, a '48 revolutionary, but first and foremost a freemason, governor of the port of Galatzi, minister of war in the Jassy government, and a proponent of Romanian unification, liberal in his outlook, Cuza had been too much enamored of throne and mistress, forgetful that beyond a certain point some things become scandalous. He had overlooked the farrago in the administration, the plundering of public finances and, more to the point, Russo-Turkish preparations to chant a funeral dirge over the United Romanian Principalities. He had allowed the whitish clouds that continually rose from the land's roads, not only in the wake of carts, carriages, and gigs, but also when little children ran and skipped or hens scrabbled before a rain shower, to settle in a thick layer on the proclamations of the ad hoc Divans. Nine years had passed since the enlightened minds had assembled in frock coats at the urging of the Great Powers, and laying aside intrigue and enmity had examined every facet of the situation, made their calculations, and—weighing every word in order that their will might be clear—placed at the head of their political program two brief statements: "
We desire Unification, but we desire as ardently a foreign prince
" (on the Moldavian side) and "
It is necessary that the ruling prince be chosen from one of the sovereign families of Europe; and this need is imperative and absolute
' (on the Wallachian side). Such were the texts that had been left to gather dust in desk drawers, cupboards, and chests until little by little people began to recollect them, and to fear that this vessel on which they had all embarked might run aground. And the leaders of the lifesaving operation, having risen from their sheets refreshed and clearheaded, quickly changed their strategy. Having burnt their lips and their peace of mind on a soup of Brussels sprouts, the four—General Nicolae Golescu, minister of the interior and of foreign affairs under Bibescu Voda, member of the 1848 revolutionary committee, the provisional government, and the first Princely Lieutenancy; Lascar Catargiu, with his wolflike senses, honed until then only in appointments as prefect and
en famille;
Colonel Nicolae Haralamb, landowner, son of a court victualler from Craiova; and Ion Ghika, bizarre Turkophile revolutionary of 1848, long-time Bey of Samos—were now so prudent that they would have blown even on a bowl of yogurt before tasting it. Consequently, they did not hasten to pronounce a new name, but extended long, unseen feelers toward the royal courts of the west. They had decided to replace the politics of intuitions, hopes, and
faits accomplis
with one of cautious soundings and discretion. Wandering by circuitous routes over a continent scattered with forests, marshes, snowy mountains, brigands, and military patrols, many of their feelers got bogged down in the wilderness, but others, few in number, found the beaten track to Paris. It was there, in any case, that the conference of the Great Powers was underway, at which the Sublime Porte, intrigued by the rather permissive wind blowing from the principalities, wished to make use of stipulations laid down in the
firman
of November 1861, whereby unification was to be recognized only for the duration of the reign of A. I. Cuza, which was limited to seven years. There were days when one might rightly have said that the souls of the gentlemen from Bucharest quivered like leaves, and the plenipotentiaries of France, l'Angleterre, Turkey, Prussia, Russia, Austria and Sardinia used tones and inflections of voice rarely encountered, resembling the clank of arms. It was also at the close of that February, while ice floes and garbage floated down the Seine, that two of the feelers spread by the Romanian government, the emissaries Ion C. Brătianu and Ion Bălăceanu, gave proof of their skill at snaking through salons, swimming like fishes in the waters of high society, and gaining ingress to all-but-inaccessible bureaus, libraries, and boudoirs. They managed to enchant and flatter. They soothed self-regard, touched sensitive cords, intuited desires and took pains to meet them halfway. And their efforts to elicit sympathy were not in vain, particularly among the ladies, where the decisions that count always come to ripeness. And so it was that the influential Hortense Cornu, the emperor's foster sister, skillfully set in motion a succession of sympathies, first of all drawing into the game the Baroness de Franque. Touched by the fate of that faraway little country, which had barely come into being but was already about to unravel, with its throne vacant and pagans trampling its southern frontier, the baroness passed on the tale with as much passion as if it were a sad novel in which a malnourished and quite possibly consumptive orphan is cast out into the street by villainous bailiffs. Such a narrative could not help but arouse feelings of solidarity, compassion, and affection in her close friend Mathilda Drouyn de Lhuys, wife to none other than the minister of foreign affairs, who happened to be president of the conference now about to come to the boil. It was then a mere formality that, through the long polished mechanisms of conjugal life, the message should be conveyed further. At last, informed and prepared by a creature dear to him, beside whom, as a newborn, he had suckled from the same breast, and persuaded by the chief of his own diplomatic corps, Napoleon III categorically opposed any Ottoman intervention north of the Danube and lent a benevolent ear to the proposals for a Romanian crown. Among the names put forward, four in number, he inclined to the only one allied with the French imperial line as well as the Prussian royal house. Karl Eitel Friedrich Zephyrinus Ludwig of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen was about to celebrate his twenty-seventh birthday, and as a lieutenant of dragoons in Berlin, he had been waiting for almost a decade to be promoted to captain. Because of the chill he had suffered on a frosty firing range his left jaw had swollen around a decayed molar. The pain was dreadful and, though dizzy, and without consulting his father or Ministerpräsident von Bismarck, he found himself asking the man who was incising his gums with a scalpel whether he would like to follow him to Bukarest, permanently.