While Rome Burns

Alexander Woollcott

Description

"This is Woollcott speaking."...America's favorite raconteur here offers a generous selection of his best horror stories, anecdotes, personal portraits, legendary tales and reminiscences, including celebrated tales of murder as only he could tell them, his memorable profiles of the great and near-great, the exciting accounts of his journeys to far places, his war experiences, and much more. 

Sujets

• Autobiography
• Rich
• Famous
• Biography
• Lettres et linguistique

Informations

• Publié par: Rare Treasure Editions
• Date de parution: 06 novembre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781774643433
• Langue: English

Extrait

While Rome Burns
by Alexander Woollcott

First published in 1934
This edition published by Rare Treasures
Victoria, BC Canada with branch offices in the Czech Republic and Germany
[e-mail]
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, except in the case of excerpts by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

While Rome Burns




by
Alexander Woollcott
To Beatrice Kaufman

THE chapter which Brand
Whitlock should have written
(but might not write) about the
great and gallant Marquis of
Villalobar, sometime Ambassa-
dor from Spain to Belgium.

IN THAT STATE OF LIFE
IN THAT STATE OF LIFE
A stray on a spring evening in the old library of Williamand Mary at Williamsburg in Virginia and admonishedto silence by the grim female in charge,who kept warning me at the top of her lungs that all aboutme the young were at their studies, I took down from a shelfthe fat volumes of Brand Whitlock’s Belgium and renewedan old acquaintance with the stirring story he had to tell.From this reunion, I came away with fresh enthusiasm forone character in that story, a great gentleman from Spainwhose odd, stiff little figure moved jerkily across the stage ofthe World War and seems to me now, through the dust andsmoke still hanging in the air, as near to a hero as walked theearth in that time.
He was the Marquis of Villalobar. As Spanish Ambassadorto Belgium when the rest of the world took up arms, heshared with Whitlock the extra burdens which the war depositedon the doorsteps of the two great neutral embassies inthe cockpit of Europe. Fastidious, sensitive, chivalrous, proud,witty, sardonic, the little Marquis, in his huge English carwith his chauffeur brave in a livery of red and green, moveslike a thread of relieving color through the somber fabric ofWhitlock’s story. But not once in the two volumes is there somuch as a hint of the dreadful and magnificent truth aboutVillalobar which must have filled Whitlock with wonder andpity and awe every time he saw him, every time he thoughtof him.
When, still at his post in Brussels, Villalobar died in thesummer of 1926 and the news was cabled to America, theobituary in the New York Times next day told all the routinefacts about him—his ministry to Washington, his services inthe great war—but left untold that single salient fact whichstill shapes the lingering legend about the man and puts upon the wall of every chancellery in the world a portrait donein whispers. Now surely the full story can be told. Now,while in Tokyo and Constantinople and Berlin, in Washingtonand Brussels and Madrid, there still be men who mightbear witness; above all, while I, myself, am still here to readthat story, I hope it will be told.
For the little Marquis had been born, they say, with agreater blight laid upon him than was the portion even ofSir Richard Calmady. An aging few must still recall LucasMalet’s extraordinary novel of that unhappy baronet who, inobedience to a curse laid upon his line in olden days, was borninto the world with the head and torso of a young god, butwith feet that came above where his knees should have been—agrotesquely truncated figure that stumbled and scrambledacross the world while the heartless laughed and the pitifulturned away. Well, according to the legend I still hope to seefilled out and documented, that very curse had been laid alsoupon the Villalobar line, and this heir to the great house, whowas born in 1866, came into the world misshapen in the selfsamefashion. They say there were even heavier odds againsthim. For his head was hairless and he had only one hand hecould let anyone see. The other he carried, whenever possible,thrust into the bosom of his coat. It was, they say, a kind ofcloven claw.
I do not know by what heavy and intricate contrivanceVillalobar raised himself to the stature of other men and manageda kind of locomotion. It was serviceable enough, however,to carry him to the ends of the earth, and his will lenthim seven-league boots. Furthermore, it was so deceptive toone who did not see him move that when first he appearedat court in Madrid, a fledgling diplomat already booked forsome minor post in Washington, a great lady—some say theQueen Mother, but I do not believe that part of the legend—turnedquickly when she heard his name and told him howas a girl she had visited in his part of Spain and how she hadalways wondered whatever became of the Villalobar monster.It seems she had heard curious countryside tales of amonster born to the Villalobar line, just such a one as shadowedGlamis Castle in those days and shadows it today. Sucha fascinating story, my dear Marquis. Quite gave one thecreeps. One heard it everywhere. Had the creature died? Orbeen killed? Or what?
“Madame,” said young Villalobar, with a malicious smiletwisting the rich curve of his lips, “I am that monster,” and,bowing low, he shuffled away, leaving her to wish she hadnever been born.
Whitlock has a hundred anecdotes of the Marquis in hisprime—tales of his exquisite tact, of his generous rages, ofhis devotion to the exiled Eugénie, who had been kind to himwhen he was a little boy, of his vain, scornful, passionate,night-long fight to save Edith Cavell from a German firingsquad. Whitlock tells about a time when a roaring Prussianmartinet bellowed at Villalobar only to have the little Marquis,who, of course, spoke German fluently, turn on him andsay with glacial calm:
“ Pardon, Monsieur, je ne vous comprends pas. Parlez lentement,poliment—et en français. ”
And about the time when he was halted in his rounds ofBrussels by another Prussian, who asked him brusquely whathe was doing there. Villalobar, with the accent of history anddoom, made answer:
“Sir, what are you doing here?” and stumped off about thebusiness of his king.
Whitlock tells all about the spotless, delicately perfumed,and beautiful embassy in the Rue Archimède, filled with theloot of Villalobar’s life, gifts from kings and queens, portraits,family silver, even his grandmother’s sedan chair. TheAmerican Ambassador could not imagine his own workadayforbears associated with a vehicle so elegant. The Italian Ambassadorhad no such difficulty. “Mine,” he said, “were here.”And he stepped between the shafts.
Whitlock envied Villalobar the lovely Louis XVI tablewhich served as a desk, with the row of silver dispatch boxesstanding like sentinels on its gleaming surface. The Marquissaid he had picked it up in a second-hand shop in Toledo.Whitlock sighed and murmured something about the luxuryof rummaging in these old European cities. Villalobar interruptedhim with a chuckle.
“Oh, it wasn’t in my Toledo in Spain,” he said; “it was in your Toledo in Ohio. That time I was there, you remember,for the carnival; I was going down that street—what’s it’sname? . . .”
Whitlock reports that on that desk and in that embassy, nopaper was ever, by any chance, out of place. But he says nothingabout the despotism, at once comical and terrifying,whereby that order was maintained. Nor does he tell withwhat bated breath the Marquis was always served. Nor howeach thread of the embassy life, however trivial, had to leadto Villalobar’s one available hand. Even when finally the vastconcerns of America and England were added to the Frenchand Spanish business, Villalobar would have only one telephonein the embassy. You see, he wanted to hear each message.It might be only the market calling up about the cauliflower.No matter. The Marquis would take the message. Itmight be a light-o’-love calling up the young third secretary.The Marquis would take that, too. If a picture postcard camefor the cook, the Marquis saw it before the cook did.
It was an embassy ruled by a crotchety bachelor. OnceWhitlock told Villalobar that had he been born in an unfeatheredAmerican nest, he might, with his many and variedtalents, have been anything he chose: lawyer, journalist, politician,artist, financier, and certainly as guileful a stage manageras Irving or David Belasco. If Whitlock wondered privatelywhether, had he so chosen, Villalobar might also havebeen a husband, he could scarcely have given voice to thatinevitable speculation. Yet when he was approaching sixty,Villalobar did marry. He married a cousin whom he hadwooed in vain when she was a young girl, and who came tothe shelter of his name and power when the long years hadplayed strange tricks on both of them.
But that is another story. What Whitlock saw was an embassyrun by a bachelor, and one thing all its staff knew wasthat the chief would tolerate no physical assistance while anyonewas looking. If, as sometimes happened, he fell, the secretarywho ventured to help him or even to notice the mishapwould go unthanked and soon be mysteriously recalled toMadrid for transfer to some other capital. Not everyone knewthis. It is part of the legend that on the night of a wartimeChristmas party at the British Embassy in Madrid, in a scuffleunder the mistletoe which hung from the chandelier, theMarquis came down with a crash. The lights were put outlest anyone see him getting to his pins. But in Brussels, theconsciousness of him was so acute that once when he wasmounting the grand stairway at a tremendous postwar receptionand slipped as he was nearing the top, a kind of catalepsyseized the whole sumptuous assemblage as over and over, overand over, over and over, that little figure rolled with a tremendousclatter to the foot of the stairs. In the distance anoblivious orchestra was fiddling away for dear life, but amongthe actual onlookers no one dared breathe. And that agonizedparalysis lasted whi