The little Balkan kingdoms immortalized as Ruritania or Graustark were once very real, last strongholds of those privileged monarchies that bloomed so exotically all over Europe and grew particularly fanciful as the Danube wound eastwards towards the Black Sea. Now, all over a greying world, former royal residences stand shuttered and dusty, or are put to more practical uses. Pekin's summer palace swarms with tourists; the marble halls of the Rajput maharajahs are crumbling under fierce suns. Everywhere, great gilded and mirrored perspectives echo to the shuffle of felt-slippered sightseers. The northern palaces of Tzardom have become museums; their Crimean mansions sanatoriums. The sober magnificence of Marlborough House is given over to Com­monwealth Conferences. The Emir of Bokhara's summer palace and the garden of his harem, where the peacocks still trail their glories, has become a clinic for kidney complaints, starched white hospital aprons replacing the gauzy finery of the odalisques.

     Perhaps the most evocative of all lesser royal residences, (apart from such monuments of self-indulgence as Linderhof, built by the mad King Ludwig of Bavaria) is the tiny summer palace, hardly larger than a pavilion, which Queen Marie of Roumania built for herself on the Black Sea coast, at Balcic, and where she was able to express the more untrammelled aspects of her temperament and imagination; where the woman rather than the Queen—even the superb Ruritanian Queen she was­—could sometimes live entirely in the picturesque manner she favoured. However much she was photographed in peasant costumes, with richly patterned aprons, a weaving shuttle in her hand, her preference was, in fact, for something more exotic. By the time she built Balcic her taste had crystallized, and the little villa was, like her style of dresses, a highly personal blend of Byzantine luxury and a note of unmistakably Elinor Glyn romanticism.

     This queenly retreat was still much discussed in the. People's Balkans, when we arrived there, in 1946. Many of the peasants still clung to the after-glow of Royalty, while the Party condemned it, but both were intrigued. The royal pavilion assumed a legendary quality, like the stately pleasure dome that Kublai Khan decreed. During the Queen's life-time it had been scarcely less legendary, being shrouded in mystery and in­nuendo. Only the most privileged ever penetrated there. But eight years after the Queen's death—after World War II and the establishment of another way of life, the Roumanian Government used to lend it, on occasions, to those they favoured. Anyone who visited the place always returned with lively descriptions of its octagonal room with the alcove bed. I grew tired of hearing how various high-ranking Allied generals, chiefs of missions and ministers all slept well there—loved the bathing—the boating-the shooting—the Gypsy music…

     None of them heard its echoes, or made more than a casual reference to the woman, whose turbulence and majesty had stirred even the Balkans, and who had conceived the little palace as her refuge from reality: for even Ruritania had its own brand of such.

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     This pavilion, or folly, and the larger but less imaginative Chateau of Euxinograd (faux French-Renaissance, turreted and pompous) which was built by a neighbouring ruler, the Tzar Ferdinand of Bulgaria were places we came to know well while en paste ill Sofia. Both were haunted houses, haunted by phantoms of princes and privilege.

     Euxinograd is a pin-point on the map. There is no village, but the little plage, or private bathing beach belonging to the chateau has one end of its sickle scoop emphasized by a miniature jetty and lighthouse. The plage, though that is perhaps too worldly a name for so unpretentious a shore, was still private property when we were there, being then reserved for high-ranking Party members, or Bulgarian Government officials. In 1946 the Allied Control Commission was still in being in Bulgaria, and the military missions and legations had requisitioned villas all along the coast, while some of the Corps Diplomatique, ourselves among them, were able to taste the paradisiacal delights of both Euxinograd and Balcic.

     Euxinograd was Arcadia and Ruritania in one. The tiny bay was backed by cliffs tangled in tropic vegetation, and sloping, by way of the palmy, still perfectly trimmed royal gardens, to vineyards edging down on to the sands, so that it was possible to reach up out of the water and pick a bunch of enormous, egg-sized grapes which are said to yield a particularly fragrant white wine. Looking inland from the jetty, the fluffily wooded coast, sparsely dotted with villas was rather as the French Riviera must have been in its far away, uncorrupted past. In the middle of the white sand beach stood a ridiculously ornate little wooden pavilion, an orange painted chalet, divided into six or seven cabins, where once the royal bathers used to shuffle in and out of their clothes. A narrow gangplank, with stout hand rails, ran down to the sea, but it was rusted and rotting now, half buried in the loose sand.

     I imagined the Tzar Ferdinand and his Ruritanian Court, frisking down it to the water's edge, 'Foxy Ferdi' to his detractors, his tiny ferret eyes set too close to his far too long nose, smiling his curiously sly smile as he led his guests, in a barrel-striped bathing suit, his plump, white, over-manicured fingers for once bare of the precious stones he loved with such oriental abandon. I saw the ladies of the party dressed up for their dip, in black stockings and mackintosh mob-caps, bobbing up and down, keeping their pink and white complex­ions and tong-waved coiffures high and dry, while shrieking and simpering in the shallows.

     But these are tougher times. We used to lie on the sand, baking ourselves to crackling, watching a party of lean, black-brown Bulgarians; the men in their tiny loincloths, the women with a bandana handkerchief brassiere added, as they swam far out to sea, the flail-like precision of the crawl stroke churning the dark blue water.

     Perched half-way up the cliff, there was a little gazebo, a ruined summer-house, with trellised arches, and a thatched roof. We used to pause there, as we climbed the path on our way home, at sunset. The lilac bushes almost hid it from the path: there were old cobwebs, with dead wasps entangled, and sometimes a snake slithered away as we approached. Sitting there, looking through the lattice-work at the fading blue of the sea, and the tiny dots which were fishermen's boats, still out after the few fish which live in this part of the Black Sea, I used to think again of the little Ruritanian Court which had vanished.

     No doubt the summer-house was a favourite rendezvous for those complicated picnic teas beloved of the Edwardians and their contemporaries. I imagined the paraphernalia; the parasols and cushions, the royal ladies and their ladies-in-waiting in tussore dustcoats, buttoned boots and enormous hats with tulle veils which they furled on to the bridge of their rice-powdered nose preparatory to sipping tea. There would be gentlemen—plenty of gentlemen—with whom to flirt, for in that world, few worked except at pleasure. The gentlemen would be wearing white flannels, blazers and straw boaters, or panama hats, for one still dressed formally out of doors. They would be very highly born... the younger Russian grand dukes, a smattering of Hapsburgs, Hungarian nobles and the German princelings, Saxe-Meiningens, Coburgs and Hesses, a stock which peopled the courts of Europe, bringing their blazons and their hereditary taints to each fresh alliance.

     While panting footmen staggered along the cliff paths with picnic baskets filled with an elaborate tea, cucumber sandwiches and puffed-up patisseries and spirit lamps and sugar tongs and lace napkins and all the fiddle-de-dee of the drawing-room, there would be a lot of tittle-tattle within the perimeter of the Almanach de Gotha. Once in a while a lady would glance down over the still blue bay and someone would be sure to say it was just the colour of her eyes. And then, someone else would light a cigarette, a perfumed Balkan cigarette, held in a pale, kid-gloved hand, gloved, even in Arcadia.

     O! gazebo, thy name is nostalgia! All over Europe the gazebos and arbours of past dalliance are ruins, now: memorials to an irresponsible, yet charming way of life—charming for those who lived it, that is. Charming for Great Catherine, 'the Semiramis of the North', lying in her favourite's arms, in a Chinese pagoda, at Tzarskoe Selo; for the aristos in the Hameau at the Petit Trianon; for Charles II and his zenana of beauties, as he moored a State barge-load of them beside the landing-stage at Hampton Court.

     A mixture of Paul Pry-ism and tourist zeal made us accept an invitation to visit Balcic. The town, we heard, was nothing special—a few fishing boats, a squalid Gypsy mahalla or settlement, and a few modern villas: but there was Queen's Folly. We left Euxinograd on a lambent August morning, and drove east, into the fierce sun, mounting the hairpin bends which connect one great tableland with the next in a series of slab-like plateaux. This is the Dobrudja: chalky wastes, white dust, white oxen, sheep and a blinding blue sky. There are great, plains, dotted with dusty scrub, and many miles of giant sunflowers with heads like lolling dinner-plates. They are grown for their oil; the seeds, or semki, are the Slav equivalent of chewing gum. We stopped to pick some, and went on our way chewing, crossing the old Roumanian frontier, a sort of Balkan Maginot line, sunken fortifications and camouflaged gun-turrets embedded in white rocks.

     The Dobrudja has always been a bone of contention between Bulgaria and Roumania; it has always been fought over, ceded by one treaty and retracted by another. There is a wild admixture of races here, Turks, Gagaoutz and Tartars. The Gagaoutz are centred in this part of the Dobrudja; they were always very much favoured by the Turks, who considered the whole area, particularly the great forest of Deli Orman, to be a natural frontier defence against the Russians.

     In Turkish, Deli Orman means 'The Mad Wood'. Nothing could be better named. The huge tracts of forest—flat forest—sprawl across the plain. The trees writhe in a never-ceasing wind which howls round them by day and night, winter or summer, a restless, maddening wind blowing straight from the steppes, before it rages on, to cross the Black Sea, strike the shores of Turkey and whip the waters of the Bosphorus.

*                    *                    *

     The little town of Balcic is reached by a sudden descent, through lime-stone crags. It lies basking at the foot of the cliffs, sheltered from tempests, and indeed, from life itself. It is quite improbable, having a toy-like quality, as if designed as a backcloth for Mr. Pollock's celebrated Juvenile Drama, the 'Penny Plain and Two Pence Coloured' sheets which enchanted Victorian children. Act II Scene 3. A Pirates' Port on the Illyrian Coast. Ramshackle, doll-sized houses, pink and blue and yellow, cling to the cliffs giddily. The miniature harbour, with its douane, shop and inn are set down between perpendicular white crags and hummocks looking like toy volcanoes. Lemon and fig trees burst from the fissures. One or two over-ornamented but cardboard-like buildings, the town hall among them, are pressed against the rocks in tiers, and there are a couple of blue-domed Orthodox churches and a little mosque with coloured-glass lozenges to trim its windows. Everything seemed to come out of a box of children's bricks.

     On the cliffs above we found clots of shack dwellings and the ever-irresistible mahalla where the Gypsies live; the women in ragged chintz trousers toned down to a faint pastel by the all-pervading white dust. They squatted on their haunches searching their children's heads intently, while the children, a beautiful and dissipated-looking lot, picked ticks off the heaving flanks of the sheep which were tethered by every door. At a haughty distance we saw a line of modern luxury villas, once owned by the rich Roumanians who used to follow their Queen's lead and flock to Balcic in the summer. But they were standing shuttered and empty now. Turning our steps towards another abandoned dwelling, we left the pretty paste-board town and followed a road beside the cliff, towards Queen Marie's summer palace... the legend we had come to see.

*                    *                    *

     It is no secret that the Queen built this villa as an amorous retreat. Her heart was buried in the Byzantine chapel by the lily garden. In spite of all its highly coloured implications, and the exoticism of its architecture and setting (near-Turkish), this royal folly retains a muted, tomb-like quality. But the loneliness, so apparent to us now, was, I believe, always there, echoing, along with self-conscious voluptuousness, some melancholy strain of the Queen's own nature. Although she was generally surrounded by adulation, she remained, in herself, an exile; from that overwhelming love she craved; from her English background, and from the pomp and power which was also her birthright, and which she only achieved to a much lesser degree in her adopted country. These under-currents of sadness, of regret and a quality of defiant bravery are apparent throughout her Memoirs. They are a remarkable achievement, quite certainly her own; they bear no traces of the ghost-writer's sickly hand, so abundantly evident in other autobiographies of high-born personages. Her portraits are brilliant; she sees very clearly for one of her rank; it is 'Missy' the unconventional Englishwoman writing, rather than a queen. Even when describing her children, she retains her penetrating judgement; Elizabeth, a silent, cold child with steel-strong little hands, not perhaps a sympathetic character; Mignon, like a full-blown peony, easy-going, loving, and giving, 'one of those luminous bridges back to hope, which are given to us occasionally... after great darkness…'. Carol, the Crown Princeling, at once taken away from her to be brought up by others; brought up wrong. And Ileana, the angel child. 'If Mignon was the child of my flesh, Ileana was certainly the child of my soul.' She is a passionately loving mother, but she is not blinded; she is a queen, her children must share the burdens of monarchy. It is said that during the last stormy days of King Carol II's rule, when a bitter quarrel with his brother Prince Nicolas brought them to the shooting-point, the Queen Mother rushed between her sons, flung her body across that of Carol, the King and so, stopping the bullet believed she had saved the monarchy. But it was lost, one way or another, and she herself never fully recovered from the wound.

     Two great rulers were her grandparents, Queen Victoria on her father's side; the Tzar Alexander II, 'the Liberator', on her mother's side. As Queen of a newly formed, insignificant Balkan country she felt faintly declassee. She was irresistibly beautiful, illustriously born… a great catch among the royal princesses. Yet she was married off at sixteen, since her mother, the Duchess of Edinburgh, believed any royal crown, however small, was preferable to a mere ducal one; 'Princesses must be. married off young, otherwise they begin to think for themselves', was one of her beliefs. She herself had not been happy in her marriage; as the only daughter of the mighty Tzar Alexander II, she had felt keenly her loss of prestige at the British Court; she had detested what seemed to her its middle-class aspects; she spent much time abroad, wearing dull clothes, the magnificent jewels of her dowry unused; her only link with the barbaric splendour of her youth were the glittering ikons which adorned her rooms, and the rich vestments of the priest and two chanters who followed her everywhere to maintain the mystic rituals of her Orthodox faith.

     Her three daughters adored her and were in awe of her too. She allowed them a singularly unrestricted childhood… and then all of a sudden it was time to marry. She found herself betrothed to Ferdinand, 'Nando', a shy young Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen prince, heir apparent to the Roumanian throne then occupied by his uncle, King Carol I. King George V, then an inconsiderable young naval prince at Malta, under the command of the Duke of Edinburgh's squadron, had fallen a victim to the charms of Missy, the little Princess who rode and romped with him, but he was not taken seriously, he was only a second son; the English throne seemed remote. Who could have foreseen then that his elder brother, the Duke of Clarence, would die suddenly and he would find himself Heir Apparent? At sixteen 'Missy' became the Crown Princess of Roumania, and George, the Duke of York, married Princess May of Teck. Together they lived a long life of public glory and private happiness. But for all that it was known that 'May' never quite forgave 'Missy' for having been her husband's special weakness. Such beauty as Missy's always caused pangs all round.

     Queen Marie's ambitions grew to match the extravagance of her Ruritanian setting. She came to see herself as a Byzantine Empress figure, ruling over the entire Balkans; her dream, that of 'UNIRE' . . . unity, the wild dream of Roumanian patriots, scheming a Balkanic empire, Bulgaria, Serbia, Macedonia, Albania. . . all the territories stretching from Turkey to Austria, and all under her Roumanian rule. After the death of King Ferdinand, when King Carol relinquished his kingdom, a Council of Regency was to be appointed; two elder statesmen, the Patriarch and her anointed self. It was her hour of triumph. To become one with her people, she had been converted to the Orthodox faith, and now she would grasp that power which had eluded her during her long apprentice­ship as Crown Princess, and which, during her husband's reign, had not been as absolute as she desired. Her intentions were noble: she had become, over the years, an ardent patriot, a large-minded, courageous woman, a leader who had upheld her country magnificently in the years of battle and stress. But to many she remained the outsider: the Englishwoman, the frivolous beauty, the sorceress, the intriguer…. Even her conversion to the Orthodox faith did not win over her detractors.

     At the very hour when she was donning her robes of state, and all the veils and diadems and cordons by which she dramatized her official appearances, her enemies were de­nouncing her at the Parliament and invoking Salic law. Messengers rushed to the palace to warn her… it was im­possible that after such an attack, she could be sworn in. Once again, absolute power had eluded her. Her disappoint­ment was tragic, her fury unbridled. I have heard it said that she flung herself on the ground, rolling backwards and forwards in paroxysms of rage, her jewels scattered, her robes torn. Her Romanov blood seethed and overboiled; her quieter, more stubborn English reactions, which had sustained her through so many years of strife, were temporarily overcome and both gave place to purely Balkanic violence.

     This story, like so many others centred round the Queen, may be apocryphal; those who circulated it pursed their lips, as they so often did, discussing her unpredictable actions….

     Yet, regrettable, violent,… whatever they called it, it was in keeping with this figure, so much larger than life, in all her life-force, her beauty and daring. She was a queen who had come to identify herself with her adopted country and to assume not only the more theatrical aspects of the Crown, which such a people understood, but also to express her emotions in their uninhibited manner.

     Great queens—and in her age and setting I think she was such—have a way of epitomizing their country. She herself was aware of this. In her Memoirs, writing of the successive coronations of King Edward VII, her uncle, and King George V, her cousin, at Westminster Abbey she emphasizes in each case, the sense of sober, unquestioning magnificence.

The Queens' faces were severe, almost unmoved, the thrones they were mounting were, if I can so express it, seats of peace. . . .

     Queen Alexandra and Queen Mary: two serene figures. . . their crowns, although weighted by a hundred gems, did not seem to oppress them. . . there was an established security about these Queens which made you feel glad for them, not afraid!

     In contrast, in prophetic contrast, she saw her cousin the Tzar Nicholas II crowned in the Kremlin; beside him, the doomed Tzarina, the young Empress—standing rigidly upright, her golden robes flowing from her shoulders, her face flushed, her eyes tragic, her lips tightly set as though at bay.

If queens reflect the character of their country, no two better examples of Balkan romanticism, of a sort of stylized monarchy could be found, than Queen Marie and her predecessor, Queen Elizabeth, widely known as the poetess Carmen Sylva. By the time the Crown Princess Marie became Queen, in 1914, she had evolved her own style—Byzantine—but Carmen Sylva had been Wagnerian. Both were generally swathed in innumerable veils and indeterminate draperies. Both these ladies saw themselves as figureheads—symbols of monarchy. They were, each in their own way, monstres sacres. Both were 'artistic,' wrote poetry, painted, were musicians and fostered the beautiful peasant arts of Roumania. But whereas Carmen Sylva was intense, and had no gleam of humour, Queen Marie was able to laugh at everything, including herself—except over the matter of her clothes—and here, perhaps she was influenced by her wish to provide the peasant majority with a figure-head in their own terms.

     To be royal was to be, in a sense, theatrical: whether she believed, like her ancestors, in the divine right of kings or whether she moved with the times and sensed the growing artificiality of the metier, she dressed the part. Besides, she frankly liked dressing-up. With each change of costume she revealed another aspect or mood. The Princess in her Car­pathian castle, shadowy pillared halls, divans piled with bearskins, walls hung with rare ikons, and the Queen, splendid in her trailing robes and jewels, enthroned among her courtiers and admirers. The fairy-tale Roumanian Princess visiting her remote provinces on a shaggy pony, wearing top-boots and embroidered aprons, who will wave her wand, put on her golden crown and right all the wrongs. The lovely and fecund mother, joy of the dynasty, in a tea-gown, all softness, surrounded by her beautiful brood; the mature woman, the Mother Queen, Mama Regina to her soldiers, in a nurse's uniform, at the front in the hospitals—and here she was playing no part, but was flung into the tragic ordeals of her country, sharing, retreating, upholding with selfless devotion. In 1916, when everything seemed lost for Roumania, there was a question of exile, of forming a Roumanian colony in Kharkov, Poltava, or some other Russian province. She was aghast. Her country had become her life. 'This would mean complete exile', she writes in her journal. 'The thought is so utterly ghastly that one accepts it quietly, without words of complaint or protest, as one accepts the thought of death.' But she went on fighting furiously. And here she was playing no role, and needed no carefully devised costume. Her loathing of the German enemy was intense. Many of her relatives were Germans; her husband's sympathies and training had been as Germanic as his blood, and that of his predecessor, the old King Carol. She was the Roumanian, among them all. Perhaps her Russian ancestry helped her to love and under­stand the Balkans: something wild in her responded to its own wildness. In the mountains, she is remembered as an Amazon—she was unmatched as a horsewoman—galloping across tracks few could follow, riding astride, mounted on a wild Cossack horse, gift of a Russian admirer, and wearing a Circassian uniform (sent by another enslaved Slav), a dark-blue caftan braided with silver, over a scarlet under-tunic, silver cartouchières across the chest, and a dagger at her then very slim waist. She describes herself as an over-picturesque apparition. But how pleasing to both player and public. She was un­doubtedly narcissistic—delighted with herself—but not self-satisfied. There is a great difference.

     That style which might be described as basic Balkan Royal, veils and trailing draperies, which were, in a sense, Queen Marie's trademark, spread from one Balkan kingdom to the next. Her two elder daughters became respectively Queens of Greece and Yugoslavia, and followed the Roumanian tradition, floating about their own realms, similarly draped, the apotheosis of queendom. (It was left to their youngest sister, the Princess Ileana, married to an Austrian archduke and mother of a large family, to face life in exile in America, doing the housework uncomplaining, in tweeds.) But in the last afterglow of royal radiance before World War II, newsreels and press photographs recording great occasions east of the Danube were immediately recognizable, not so much by some distinguishing cathedral or monument, as by the trailing toilettes of the three queens. These bore no relation to fashion, nor indeed, did those equally stylized but less emotional costumes which Queen Alexandra and Queen Mary of England evolved. But all of them, in their own way, knew that the mystique of Royalty must be fostered by every means, and that a queen must have everything to do with pure style, and nothing to do with mere fashion; still less, must a monarchy appear middle-class.

     Even in her dying Queen Marie displayed that dramatic sense which lit her life. She had been born to the purple, and she asked that for her funeral Bucharest would be hung with purple rather than black. Thus the banal streets through which the cortege passed assumed a drama and beauty, draped in violet, lilac and the Byzantine purple she had always craved.

*                    *                    *

     Queen Marie loved and knew well the peasants; she did not make rounds of scheduled royal visits so much as a series of personal, impulsive, sorties among them; into their villages and houses, accompanied by one lady-in-waiting rather than a suite, or perhaps only one of her daughters, talking to the people in her broken Roumanian which always made them smile, but her heart going out to them in a manner they understood. She had, in fact, the common touch, without the patronage which that implies. She would appear unexpectedly in a village, share a peasant's meal with relish, discuss their crops and their hopes, listen to their legends, and allow herself to be, literally, taken to their ragged and often noisome bosoms. To such people she was never remote, though among the court she could quell at a glance, as she could charm. Writing of a pair of old crones, 'my two old witches', she relates being dragged into their arms and their quarrels. To the peasants she was always 'Mama Regina'. 'Your tiny dried up little heart is black as sin,' spat one witch to the other, then pointing to the Queen, 'but Mama Regina's heart is round and red and full of .love.'

     This was the sort of compliment she valued most, as she preferred the armfuls of wildflowers the ragged children brought her to all the formal bouquets with which her path was strewn. With the years, she and her husband had drifted far apart; 'Nando' had once been, as she says, 'almost cruelly in love'… but they always remained united in their patriotism and their passion for flowers. Nando was something of a botanist; they both flung themselves into gardening, and both continued to bring each other flowers of all kinds, marvelling at them, together, till the last.

*                    *                    *

     In her early days in Bucharest the Princess had been pathetically lonely, cut off, in a strange setting, among strangers, very far from home, surrounded by rigid etiquette, a never-ending round of stern duties, of constraint, and criticism; but as she grew to sense her power as a Princess, as a beautiful woman, and to sense too the special flavour of her new country, she, sometimes showed an almost outrageous exuberance. Her craving for pleasure, sterner Court circles said, was dangerous in one so near the throne. It was a German-held throne, painfully earnest and austere and quite out of touch with the Roumanian national temperament. King Carol I, 'Der Onkel' to the young Crown Prince and Princess, had his hands full striving to raise the European status of his small kingdom, and to inculcate his own strict standards, first to his eccentric wife, Carmen Sylva, and then to his nephew and heir's wife, the Princess Marie. It was grudgingly admitted that she worked tirelessly at her duties, but she would dance till dawn… then dash off on one of those wild horses that only she could ride. She would know the most unsuitable people... painters, musicians, that fast international set, the Plesses, and all those Russian grand dukes… (cousins, but still…) True she was giving the nation a whole nursery full of splendid little princes and princesses. . . But she had some giddy strain… driving along the Chausee Kissileff at sunset!... (this was Bucharest's Bois de Boulogne, the elegant promenade for monde and demimonde alike). Not for our Crown Princess, said the critics, watching her open carriage bowl past as she smiled and bowed with that almost childish glee, her chic feathered or flowered hat framing those enormous blue eyes that worked such havoc. She wrote fairy stories, painted, built herself a house in the treetops, explored the street markets of Bucharest for antiques… it was all very unconventional. And then she would summon the Lauteri to her parties. They were the Gypsies whose hot­blooded violins were legendary, but particularly mal vue by the Court. Yet somehow they were always around, their emotional strains undermining Royal fanfares.

     Her giddiness, like her loneliness, is all recorded with remarkable objectivity in her Memoirs. But in the last volume, with the outbreak of the first world war, another depth, or dimension, is revealed. She has grown up, at last. Her country's desperate needs, as it was slowly abandoned, overcome, and fought back to victory, makes heroic reading. She does not spare us, as she did not spare herself. In Indian heat and Russian cold, which are the extremes of the Roumanian climate, she knew no rest. She was all over the country, wherever she could be of use. Beside the troops, retreating, in field hospitals where dead and wounded were piled on the mud-floored huts sanded over with lice; at headquarters, everywhere, she toiled day and night, with ferocity of purpose and tenderness of spirit, lashing at the politicians who dared speak of submission, or defeat; at a base hospital, feeding, for want of anything else, spoonfuls of jam to the gaunt soldiers. In the midst of disease, famine, and typhus epidemics she refuses to wear gloves ('They all want to kiss my hand… how can I ask them to kiss india-rubber?') Her journal records this terrible time as she battles on, fighting fatigue, despair, and lice too. And still her extraordinary animal vitality asserts itself. She enjoys, sensuously, the sight of a lime tree in flower; or a packet of ginger biscuits, conjuring the far-away securities of an English tea-table on the lawn at Osborne, with Grandmama Queen.

     But this is no time for nostalgia. Her tears are kept for memories of Mircea, 'my little Mircea', the baby who died at the beginning of the war, and whose grave she has had to leave untended when, with the King and the army, she retreats before the enemy. The thought of the lonely little grave torments her unceasingly. She goes to church, 'I wept, as only a broken-hearted mother can weep, the mother of a dead child, of dead hopes, the mother of a suffering people she has learned to love….' She organizes Prince Mircea canteens for the starving children, sends her elder daughters, the Princesses Elizabeth and Marie 'Mignon' off to work wherever they can help. Mignon is a humble worker: she will clean windows, sweep floors or hold a leg steady for amputation with the same self-effacing zeal. The King and the Crown Prince Carol are with the armies, her other two children Nicolas and Ileana are too small to do more than accompany her on some of her tours, but they can keep up the people's morale, and she does not shield them from horrors. Except for Ileana, her children are not of her mettle or stamina; Elizabeth collapses at one point, Marie at another; then Nicolas, and we sense her impatience… the exasperation of a very strong woman who cannot will others to her own degree of endurance. Perfect health and a good digestion 'my Russian digestion' as she describes it gratefully, sustained her through ordeals that felled others. But she had her courage; it runs like a thread of challenge throughout her life. And always, at all times, she is fiercely unresigned.

     All around her are horrors. 'A long long day dark with pain and revolt', she writes, as they fall back again. Every retreat is also measured by her heart, for its distance from Mircea's lonely grave. One among thousands now. 'We begin to speculate in which way we are to die', she writes, knowing that for her there can never be any thought of escape. Roumania is her life.

     She is photographed now in Red Cross uniform, standing defiantly, in contrast to the more soothing poses generally struck by other Royal ladies in other afflicted countries. While they are folding bandages, or visiting tidied-up bedsides, she is at clearing stations, where the wounded shriek and die. Unshrinking, she washes open the eyes of a shattered face, one last look of gratitude her reward, and torment. There are no more hospitals, no more guns, no more support from Russia, for the giant is collapsing in chaos and betrayal. Treachery is everywhere, even at home.

     Disbanded Russian troops straggle across Roumania's ravaged land, and are now only so many more mouths to feed. The pro-German clique is strong around the King, himself of German origin. The Queen is uncompromisingly pro-British, pro-French, pro-Allied. As granddaughter of 'the Tzar Liberator' she is half Russian. The Russian debacle appalls her. 'Nicky' abdicates at Mohilev. She knows him weak, a disastrous ruler, overpowered by Alix, whom she cannot like; but the abdication is, to her, betrayal of a sacred trust. No news comes out of Russia, now; as the Revolution takes hold, all is conjecture and rumour. She is anguished for news of her sister 'Duckie', wife of the Grand Duke Cyrill Vladimirovitch. The Red flag is hoisted over his palace in St. Petersburg, for at first he is in sympathy with any movement which will silence the Tzarina, 'the German woman', in her role as dictator and mouthpiece for the monk Rasputin.

     In Roumania the war drags on. The soldiers have no soles to their boots, now: no more guns, no more hope. Soon Roumania is abandoned by her Allies, and the Germans take possession. In August 1918, comes news that 'Nicky' and 'Alix' and their children have been killed at Ekaterinburg. There had been a moment, before the war, when it was hoped a marriage would be arranged between Prince Carol and the Grand Duchess Olga: the Russians made this flattering suggestion, but the young people showed no enthusiasm for each other, and the matter dropped.

     Roumania falls under German rule, and the Queen suffers torments of despair and humiliation. All the high offices in the country are held by her enemies, led by the pro-German Marghiloman. In September, she receives another blow. The Crown Prince Carol betrays his country, and his heritage, in her eyes, by crossing the frontier to Odessa, and marrying clandestinely, Mademoiselle Zizi Lambrino, a commoner.

     For Mama Regina this is a crushing defeat: but she is as fiercely unresigned as ever, and putting aside her personal tragedy, still opposes every hateful measure of the Marghilo­man Government, stilI stands as a rallying-point of patriotism.

     And stilI, she fights for beauty. She is aforce de la nature; sun, air, flowers, laughter, children, love, and beauty are still her aura. She is exhausted by her war-time struggles, and takes a few weeks off, now, to recuperate in a simple little wooden chalet in the forest, at Cotŏfănesti. But she cannot rest until she has contrived colour and harmony around her. An old ikon and some Gypsies' brass cooking pots filled with wildflowers help, but still craving a focal point of colour she dyes a bath towel orange and drapes it over the table: Even here, at this moment, she is still setting the stage. Those who criticized her for theatricality should recall that it was, rather, an innate sense of beauty—her own, and that of her surroundings: and when there were no luxuries, no Byzantine extravaganzas, she still created her own ambience out of nothing—or a packet of dye.

     She always loved to express herself through rooms and houses. She had many. She had pined in the dark, heavy Germanic-Royal Palace where she was sequestered in the early days of her marriage. But when at last she burst from the chrysalis, she was able to create Ruritanian splendours at Cotroceni, and Peleşor, both turreted castles in the romantic Balkan tradition. Then there was the F oisor, a small forest house at Sinaia, and an odd tree-top abode, a fairy-tale hut rocking in the pines, where astonished visitors found themselves struggling up ladder-like steps for a picnic tea served in flower cups painted by the Princess. Cotrocenis' Ruritanian overtones, bearskins, ikons, Romanesque arches and pillared halls were very different to Bicaz, near J assy, the Royal family's headquarters during the war, a thick-walled, low white building in the traditional style of a Roumanian country house. And lastly, there was Bran and Balcic, her most loved house. It was an amalgam of all her life; and then, too, it affirmed Roumania's repossession of the Dobrudja; it was an emblem of victory, and sovereignty, as well as a romantic retreat. Balcic reflected the country at its most exotic, and it was her own personal interpretation of romance. It was very far from the Court and its intrigues, but it breathed secrecy… a house for lovers meetings; yet I was told by one who had known it as her guest, that it always retained an air of indefinable magnificence: it was a Queen's lair.

     But to me, seeing it now, abandoned, or worse, inhabited by passing strangers, it was indeed a tomb, a last monument to Ruritanian queens and high adventure. As I sat on the Queen's loggia, watching the evening sky yellowing, the swallows wheeling round the minaret, I resented my own presence there, as the intrusion it was. The gardens were still kept up, much as the Queen had planned them. At every turn there were picturesque vistas; ornamental terraces, Romanesque cloisters, and Turkish fountains. Winding paths skirted grottoes and semi-secret nooks, and led to a venerable chestnut tree reefed by chains and hanging out at a right angle over the cliffs. In its green shade stood a white marble Byzantine throne, beside it a low table made from a truncated Roman column. 'Her Majesty's favourite seat for coffee', said the caretaker, a boldly handsome black-eyed man who had followed me to this ghost-ridden terrace.

     At a discreet distance from the main house, and deep in sub-tropical vegetation were several cottages, unseen but for their chimneys, peeping from the foliage like rabbits' ears, hidden but alert. These, said the caretaker, had been for the resident masseuse, hairdresser, and dressmaker. I recalled the Empress Elizabeth of Austria, whose sartorial exigencies required two tailors to sew her into her riding habit every morning. No doubt Queen Marie's trailing draperies were less demanding, but even so I fancy a resident dressmaker must have been a necessity rather than a luxury.

     Dotted about the gardens were other establishments for the Queen's children, who by the time she built Balcic were all old enough to be fully appreciative of her initiative. Princess Ileana, her favourite child, had a simple little house beside the mill race. Prince Nicolas, a rather streamlined atelier de luxe further along the cliffs. But I doubt if King Carol and Madame Lupescu were ever lodged in the Queen Bee's hive. However romantic her view of life, Queen Marie retained an even stronger belief in the Monarchy. Nothing, no weakness of body or spirit, must ever be allowed to jeopardize the Crown, and her son's second romantic lapse was a betrayal of her whole life's purpose. That she was equally aware of the mystical, practical, and theatrical aspects of her calling are revealed in many passages of her Memoirs. In particular, writing of her accession, describing the scene in Parliament, standing beside the new King, her husband, and smothered in mourning veils for the dead monarch…

     Suddenly my name rang through space; 'Regina Maria…

Regina Maria…!'

     Then I knew I must bare my face before the whole house, that I must turn towards them with no veil of mourning between them and myself… 'Regina Maria!'… And we faced each other, my people and I. And that was my hour… mine… an hour it is not given to many to live.

*                    *                    *

     'Did the Queen often come here?' I asked the caretaker, who was still hanging around eyeing me speculatively.

     'As often as she could. She loved it here,' he replied, 'when she fell ill the doctors said it was no good for her by the sea. They said she must go to the mountains. It broke her heart to leave. She never came back. She wanted to die here… but she told them to bury her heart here, beside the chapel. It's been taken away now, though…. Change… change… nothing's the same, except the flowers….'

     He snipped the heads off some dead marigolds, and stared at me again, his dark eyes bold and questioning.

     'You are interested in the Queen? You are English, as she was? You never knew her? But you like this place... the others who come here…', he shrugged, 'they only want to see the bedroom….'

     'Her Majesty used to watch the sunsets from the minaret,' he volunteered, 'there's a little staircase leading up beside her bedroom… the moon will be up before the sun is down… you should go up to the minaret,' and offering me a handful of dried sunflower seeds, he lounged off, chanting some sad-sounding song.

     The minaret was no doubt a merely secular, or architectural concession to the locale, having no religious significance, and being more in the nature of a look-out, or a setting for moonlight tête-à-têtes. I went into the house, so disarmingly small and simple in form. There are only three rooms; a big dining- or living-room, very Ruritanian-Elinor Glyn, and above, an octagonal bedroom with windows on five sides, jutting out towards the Black Sea. Beside it are dressing rooms and a domed white marble Turkish bath-house. The celebrated bed is on a dais in an alcove. There is a hooded fireplace, flanked by fine candelabra. Firelight, starlight and candlelight… a frame for loving. I climbed the tiny stone stairway to the minaret, and reaching the little balcony, surveyed the beautiful and muted domain below where the shadows were gathering. In the limpid evening sky one star joined a crescent moon; it was indeed the frame for love, as the Queen would have wished it. But is the frame enough? I fancy that when we have achieved the experience, the abandon, necessary to appreciate such a setting, we are too late; we have forgotten that the sort of love we seek does not require a frame. It is come-by-chance, born of the moment. Perhaps today's brisk matings, a kiss beside the collective tractor, and no emotional dalliance, is more real. I thought again of the departed Queen, the romantic figure whose ideals and setting time at last betrayed.

Away with Persian pomps and fineries,

And wreaths on linden withies nicely wound,

Search not the fading garden

For one forgotten rose.*

* Edward Marsh; translation of an Horatian Ode.