THE KING COMES TO CALL

CHARLES AND CAMILLA IN PARIS

The Windsors and the Macrons.

King Charles and Queen Camilla came to town yesterday, though nobody knew much about it. A previous visit was cancelled due to some riot or another, and this time they were taking no chances. As the BBC put it, “it wasn't liberté, egalité, fraternité but securité, securité, securité.”   I happened to be passing through central Paris that afternoon with some American friends, and all we saw was a contingent of police on motor cycles, blue lights flashing, and some large tricolors and Union Jacks flapping above the lawns in front of the Hotel des Invalides.

There was a state banquet, of course, with both first ladies looking more chic than some of their predecessors. Both wore that colour the French call blue foncé and the British Royal Blue. Watching on TV, a post-Brexit Britain would have enjoyed the spectacle less than the French, who are mostly gloating about how much better the split has turned out for them than for the UK. I thought of Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes and its two fanatical cricket fans Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne, trampling foreign sensibilities ("Third rate country. No wonder they have revolutions") in pursuit of the latest test match score. Make it rugby, not cricket, and you wouldn’t go far wrong.

A century ago, Charle’s great uncle David, the former Edward VIII, made his home here, bribed to stay away with a generous allowance and the title Duke of Windsor. But like his Duchess, who wore clothes by Elsa Schiaparelli, Christian Dior and Paco Rabanne but otherwise remained remote from the French, the Duke scorned his hosts. When invasion forced him even further into exile, first to Spain, then to the Bahamas as Governor General, (a posting the Duchess compared to Napoleon's imprisonment on St Helena), he told a friend that France capitulated to the Germans because it was "internally diseased."

Depending on the time of year, between 200,000 and 400,000 British people live in France, about 20,000 of them in Paris. Many more settled on the Riviera, "a sunny place for shady people" in the words of one of them, novelist William Somerset Maugham. James Thurber, a journalist on the Riviera in 1925/6, wrote nostalgically that “Nice, in that indolent winter, was full of knaves and rascals, adventurers and imposters, pochards  and indiscrets, whose ingenious exploits, sometimes in full masquerade costume, sometimes in the nude, were easy and pleasant to report.” 

There was no motorcade yesterday but had there been, it would surely have avoided the tunnel under Pont d’Alma where Charles’s first wife died in 1997.  In 1989,  to celebrate Franco-American friendship, a model of the Statue of Liberty's torch was installed on a small plaza just above. It looked like becoming a white elephant but Diana's death gave it new purpose. They renamed the site Square Princess Diana, and the torch, its American connection forgotten, became a reminder of a British life passed, as Elton John sang at her memorial service, "like a candle in the wind."