Abroad with Mark Twain and Eugene Field/Mark Meets King Leopold—Almost
MARK MEETS KING LEOPOLD—ALMOST
A man with a top hat, long gray whiskers and a rapid-looking young woman on his arm came out of the Metropole Hotel in Paris as we passed.
"Poor seedy beggar," said Mark, "I wonder whether he would object to a five-sous piece?" And he put his hand in his pocket.
"Hold," I said. "That's King Leopold and Cleo de Merode."
"Impossible, with that get-up," objected Mark.
"Get-up?" I repeated. "Kings always wear frayed jeans when they travel incog."
"In that case, go and smash the old beast. You are younger than I, and heavier, too."
At the moment when Mark extended this thoughtful invitation, Swithins of the "New York Herald" hailed us. "Look at that chap," he said, pointing to the person I had called his Belgian Majesty; "he is the model who sat for L'Assiette au Beurre's caricature of King Leopold as Saint Anthony. Let's go inside and get a copy."
Mark bought a dozen or more to send to American friends. The caricature by D'Ostoya, if I recollect rightly, was an excellent likeness of both the King and of the beggar we had run across.
"Neither would take his hat off to Rothschild," said Mark; "Leopold, because his Congo savageries had made him enormously rich, the beggar because he wouldn't know the richest man from a mere million-pauper, like me."
D'Ostoya's cartoon represented Leopold in monk's habit, undergoing one of the several temptations immortalized by Flaubert's great novel. But it wasn't the Queen of Sheba who called—rather Mrs. Fat-and-Forty minus furbelows and things. No wonder Leopold, being artistically inclined, looks annoyed.
"Watch the virtuous indignation oozing out of the old rascal," said Mark. "The editor of the 'Ladies' Home Journal,' asked to do an essay on bruisers for the 'Police Gazette,' couldn't be shocked any harder."
When I told him about an article on Leopold I had done for the "New York World," which caused a Montreal editor, who stole it, to be jugged for libel ("Six months," said the judge of literature), Mark grew enthusiastic.
"Was that yours?" he cried. "Good boy! Come along and I will buy you dinner at one of those places where they are ashamed to put the price of dishes à la carte because they hate to confess that they charge less than 1,000 francs a pea."