The Bucharest Du Barry

JOHN GUNTHER

Strange goings-on in Rumania, where the lush Lupescu perpetuates the grand tradition of the royal favorite

They say in Bucharest, those who know (and in Bucharest there are plenty who know), that old Papa Lupescu came to his daughter Magda some months ago, walking the hundred yards that separate his automobile accessories shop from the royal palace, and proceeded to lecture her smartly. There was scandal in Bucharest. The amorous court was being amorous again. King Carol had settled, as it were, down. But his younger brother Nicholas was acting up. Nicholas was about to commit marriage with a girl not exactly regal. "Daughter, daughter!" old Lupescu scolded, "What kind of a family are you getting mixed into!"

Indeed, the point might be made that Magda Lupescu, the King's Favorite, is the most respectable person in Rumania. She lives in a country monstrously corrupt and monstrously licentious, but her fidelity to King Carol, a scamp, is notorious. She sins in the flesh but shines in the spirit; she is loyal, she is discreet, and she has character. Being a King's Favorite is one of the most conspicuous jobs going, and inside Rumania she fills it unostentatiously. She is the most famous female in the kingdom, but probably not twenty people outside her immediate circle have ever seen her.

Magda Lupescu is a striking anachronism. Kings are dull folk these days. Royal mistresses, like court jesters, have practically been driven from the field by the cruel rationalizations of the twentieth century. Magda Lupescu is a last, but not forlorn, survivor. Yet, conservatively speaking, there must be about 100,000,000 women in the world today who cherish the secret, perilous wish to be mistress to a king. Lupescu alone has made the grade.

Louise de La Valliere was the daughter of an officer; Magda Lupescu of a Jewish junk-dealer. Nell Gwynn sold oranges in Drury Lane; Lupescu frequented that most inveterately Balkan of hotels, the Athena Palace of Bucharest. Lola Montez was born in Limerick, Ireland, went to Spain and India, and was mistress of Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria; Lupescu's stage has been smaller, but she picked a king who isn't, for all his peccadillos, crazy. Her mileage is good. Montez lasted a year as King's Mistress; Du Barry five years; La Valliere seven years. Lupescu has been with Carol since 1924.

She met him, so the gossips say, by a pleasant bit of trickery. She knew that he was returning to Bucharest one fine evening after dinner in Sinaia, and she contrived to ambush him along the lonely mountain road. She planted herself there, tore off some of her clothes, let down her red hair, and staggered into the searchlights of his car. He lurched to a stop, "rescued" her, and carried her back to Bucharest and destiny.

Her flaming hair and vigorous good looks burst for the first time in the tabloids of the world a year later, when Carol "abdicated." It has been said that he gave up his crown for her, but this is not exactly true. Carol was the victim of a frameup, and the comely person of Lupescu no more than a lever in the hands of his enemies, the Bratianu brothers, who really ruled Rumania. They were out to "get" Carol, the unruly crown prince. They did. Carol was shipped out of the country to attend the funeral in London of Dowager Queen Alexandra, in 1925, and he took Lupescu with him. Reaching Milan on his return, he found messages from the Bratianus to come back to Rumania at once, without his mistress, or forfeit the crown. Carol had been victimized in other matters by the Bratianus and he lost his temper, telegraphing them to go to hell. The Bratianus persuaded King Ferdinand and Queen Marie, Carol's parents, to accept the renunciation at its face value; Carol was instantly disinherited and his royal honors removed, and the "abdication" accepted. Thus began the five years of his exile, during which Lupescu never once left his side.

They lived first at Neuilly, near Paris, and then on the Riviera. They did not have much money. Newspaper men have seen Lupescu on the back porch of a modest villa, doing the family washing. Her hold on Carol grew. She made him forget his first wife, Zizi Lambrino, and his second, Helene of Greece; she. made him remember, when Ferdinand died and his son Michael took the throne, that he was still King of Rumania. When Carol flew back to Bucharest in June, 1930, and grabbed the crown from Michael's head, she followed him in a week or two—smuggled across the frontier in a black wig.

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The situation was piquant. Queen Helene had divorced Carol in exile. He made her tentative offers of reconciliation, because he wanted coronation, and he could not be crowned without a queen. Helene would accept only if Carol promised to give up Lupescu. This he resolutely refused to do. Irritated at Helene, he presently removed her from the country, and Lupescu became the queen in everything but name. Ever since, she has been the virtual ruler of Rumania.

Lupescu was installed in a comfortable villa on the outskirts of town. Officially, Carol could not he seen with her. So a sort of double court grew up; inside the regular circle Carol and Lupescu founded an inner camarilla. Carol spent less and less time in the official court. He could not bear to be separated from Lupescu. Soon the double domicile in Bucharest became a nuisance, and he came to prefer residence in Sinaia, the summer capital. In Bucharest he was hemmed in by whispers and whisperers; in Sinaia, a lovely mountain village a couple of hours from Bucharest, he created a sort of private Zenda all his own. Carol spends most of his time in Sinaia now. Sinaia became the headquarters of the Lupescu clique.

Lupescu is practically an ideal mistress. She has* no desire to marry Carol. She could, if she wanted to, at the snap of a finger; 'but she knows full well that this might mean the end of the dynasty. She is not avaricious, and he has never given her more than normal gifts. She lets him play around—a bit—when he wants to. She has not burdened him with children (and Madame de Montespan, be it remembered, inflicted on Louis XIV no fewer than seven). She is a sensible adviser on politics. Her influence on him is enormous.

Politics may, however, be her doom, and if she falls Carol may fall with her.

People say freely in Bucharest that Michael will again be king before Carol dies—that it would not be utterly surprising if Carol should skip, if things get too hot, again in Lupescu's company. It takes a lot of dreary work to be a king, even in Rumania. Ciro's and Chantilly were ever so much more fun. Lupescu may prefer ironing shirts to ironing out the incessant contradictions of Rumanian domestic politics. Not that she would need to do the washing nowadays. If Carol hasn't saved something from his pretty civil list, all Rumania's a fool.

But more likely than voluntary departure is the possibility—still remote —that Carol may he kicked out, and largely on Lupescu's account.

In February, 1933, the battle against Lupescu reached its first climax. The Jesuit Transylvanian leader, Julius Maniu, was prime minister at the time, and he demanded the dismissal from office of two men high in the Sinaia camarilla. Carol proved stronger in this first fierce clash. The king's cronies were retained in their posts, and Maniu was dismissed.

During the next year a formidable revolutionary movement grew in Rumania, partly encouraged by Maniu's party. An organization known as the Iron Cuard (or Knights of the Archangel Michael) mustered 200,000 fanatics pledged to the "cleansing of Rumania," the rebirth of its national life—and the extermination of the Jews. It was one of the sub-Hitler quicksilvers streaming across Europe. It sought to put Rumania into Fascist hands. An Iron Guardist assassinated the prime minister, Jon Duca, on December 30, 1933, and the country (which is unused to such masculine deeds) all but expired in panic.

The Iron Guard movement was so particularly dangerous for Carol because it had a concrete object for its antisemitism—Lupescu. The King's Mistress is Jewish. Lupescu came to incarnate the discontent of the rich, sprawling country. Rumania was smothering under its glut of grain. Salaries were unpaid. The budget was split wide open. The peasants were starving. For these ills Lupescu, a conspicuously shining target for calumny, came to be blamed. Violent outbursts against her began—because she is Jewish, because she is the heart of the camarilla, because she keeps the King out of Bucharest, because on account of her he cannot be crowned.

The Duca killing left Rumania shaken. Foreign office functionaries showed their fright with disconcerting candour. Carol's Sinaia palace was guarded by frozen-faced sentries every hundred yards. Carol missed a great opportunity to show that bullets which could kill a prime minister could not scare a king when, at the last moment, he funked appearing at Duca's funeral. It was said that the Iron Guardists had prepared a death list of twenty or thirty people doomed to assassination —with Lupescu as Number One.

Enter, then, Monsieur Nicolas Titulescu, the smartest living Rumanian, the only Rumanian with real international prestige, and a character of peculiarly fabulous quality. He refused to enter the new government as its foreign minister until Carol promised some drastic housecleaning. For a week a titanic struggle took place behind the scenes between Lupescu, the King's Mistress, and Monsieur Titulescu, who is not interested in mistresses, royal or otherwise. Carol was torn between the woman he loved and the man whose services were indispensable. Titulescu demanded that he break up the Sinaia clique, and discharge not only the two men whom Maniu had tried to get rid of the year before, but even Ceneral Stangaciu, the chief of police, and young Poui Dimitrescu, Carol's own private secretary, and next to Lupescu the most powerful personage in all backstairs Rumania. Carol was confronted with the necessity of dismissing his cronies in order to get what he needed more —a government. Titulescu is a voluble and pertinacious man. He won. Carol's friends went. Titulescu consented to enter the government, and Rumania, such as it is, was saved.

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Behind this struggle, the core of which was the person of Lupescu, much more than the petty warfare of Ins and Outs in Rumania was at stake. What was at stake was the position of Rumania in Europe. Traditionally a loyal member of the Little Entente and an ally of France, the Rumanians had begun to veer toward Germany. The Iron Guard was Fascist. The army was discontented with French policy. Carol himself is, after all, a Hohenzollern. Like all countries, Rumania is in the business of nationhood for what it brings her, and it seemed, at the turn of the year, that affiliation with Germany might bring her most, as Germany began to supersede France as the European power.

Even Titulescu did not dare ask the dismissal of Lupescu herself. He is no fool, Titulescu. He realizes that no one can ask Carol that and survive. Moreover, he represents a strong pro-French tendency, and so does Lupescu because she remembers happily her years in Paris and because she knows that a pro-Hitler, anti-Semite government in Rumania would give her short shrift indeed. The other Du Barry perished on the guillotine. Lupescu and Titulescu, emotional antagonists, became strategic allies. While the clique was blown up and most of Carol's intimates exiled, Lupescu stayed.

Then, in April, 1934, thirty army officers were suddenly arrested, charged with a fantastic plot to murder Lupescu and the King. The chief conspirator was none other than Colonel Vladimir Precup, the brilliant officer who had engineered Carol's return to Rumania in 1930, and one of his best friends. Precup, the story goes, went to the palace, and demanded that the King dismiss the lovely Magda. The King threw him out and ordered him shadowed. It was known that the army was being corrupted by Iron Guard influence. A military court had freed the Iron Guardists responsible for the Duca murder. Precup, desperate, organized a conspiracy to kill not only Lupescu but the whole royal family, by bombing them at Easter service in Bucharest cathedral. Only in this way might Rumania be "cleaned," he and his fellow officers thought. But Precup was caught, and after a sensational trial he and his confederates got ten years in prison. Presumably Carol and Lupescu may now live in peace.

Carol, his friends say, will never give her up. Her own fidelity is likely to be as constant, even though, as Emerson said, every hero becomes a bore at last. She has had an amusing life and has proved that in Rumania at least vice is its own reward, and very sweet, too. She has no wedding ring; but Carol has given her a kingdom. Du Barry lost her head, but smart Magda Lupescu will never lose hers, even in the non-decapitory sense.

Over the body of Nell Gwynn the prelate who became Archbishop of Canterbury preached the funeral sermon. All the patriarchs of Rumania would do like service for Lupescu. But she is probably not to be tempted by spiritual rewards.