Updated
August 13, 1998.

© 1990-2006, Alceste

The Inquisitor

THE MISANTHROPE'S CORNER

FLORENCE KING

PAY no attention to what Burke's Peerage says about Princess Diana's lineage. Any woman who goes on television and discusses her affairs, betrayals, suicide attempts, and vomiting habits, and then says "I'm a very strong person," is an American.

The Enid Waldholtzing of the Princess of Wales and the debate over the future of royalty remind me of the running battle between my English father and my American mother that dominated my childhood and ultimately shaped most of the political opinions I hold today.

My parents dwelt on opposite sides of a yawning philosophical gulf. He would speak of his "betters" and she would snap "You're just as good as they are!" When he tried to explain the difference between the American usage of better and the English usage of betters, she automatically upped the ante to "You're better than they are!" without having heard a word he said.

Monarchy was a special sore point. He tried to explain why Edward VIII had to abdicate, going over each constitutional point in his precise way, but he got nowhere.

"Malarkey. He was the King, he could do anything he wanted, and if anybody didn't like it he could throw them in jail and cut off their head," said the great republican.

His favorite illustration of noblesse oblige was the story of Queen Alexandra, who sent a car for King Edward VII's mistress as he lay dying so the lovers could say goodbye. My Yankee-doodle-dandy mother was unimpressed.

"She should have sent a car to run over her."

They had their most memorable clash over the tiny pieces of lead sewn into the Queen's hems to keep her dress from flying up: Oh, for God's sake! Do they think she was born without knees? Of course she has knees, but we don't want to see them. Why not? Because she's the Queen. Oh, for God's sake!

I always sided with my father. The psychobabblers no doubt will say that I'm "threatened" by Princess Diana, that her lèse majesté has unearthed my "unresolved conflicts" and "buried anxieties." Maybe so, but a recent book claims that eccentrics have no unresolved conflicts or buried anxieties, and I have reason to believe the book. In any case, I am an unabashed anglophile; if Paris is worth a Mass, London is worth an Electra complex.

Currently, I side with Prince Charles and think he deserves a feminist award. Most men ditch their dear old Dutch for a trophy wife but he ditched the trophy wile for his dear old Dutch. No one gives him credit for preferring time-ravaged Lady Camilla Parker-Bowles to firm-fleshed Di, or realizes her ladyship's value to the state. Plebeianized England needs Queen Camilla: any woman can ride a horse but it takes a true aristocrat to look like one.

Charles is regarded as an odd duck because his hobbies of architecture and the cello fall outside the Pale du jour. Diana, on the other hand, is considered normal because her hobbies-throwing up, hurling herself into glass cabinets, hating her husband-conform to acceptable feminist standards of assertiveness and self-expression.

Actually she's one diamond short of a full tiara. Not like those royals of yore called the Mad and the Simple; full-bore insanity with its connotations of blue blood would offend our anti-elitist age. Democracy demands neurosis and Diana delivers. So far she has indulged in common-garden masochism, but falling through glass eventually loses its charm. Needing bigger and better crashes, she is courting self-destruction by assaulting what she dimly realizes is her only identity: the monarchy itself.

Diana the Masochist is history's most problematic regicide. Even if it were still possible to torture her in the Tower, it would be pointless because she already tortures herself on her Nordic Track. Safe from the scaffold, she insists upon losing her head on sound stages, mounting her coup d'etat by overthrowing herself on television. Edward II's adulterous consort was driven into exile by an outraged nation screaming "She-Wolf of France!" but when Diana admits the same sin the telly-paradise bleats, "She's only 'uman." It's a revolution for the Nineties: the clenched fist holds a sodden Kleenex. Diana will never tell viewers to eat cake because it's fattening, but it's only a matter of time before she demonstrates her technique for having her cake and eating it too, and who better to bring it up than Barbara Walters?

Diana is a monster of plebeianism who needs to take a leaf from the story of a woman who started out very much like herself.

Henriette-Lucie Dillon, daughter of an Irishman and a French noblewoman, was a lady-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette. Famed for her magnificent blond hair, she married the dashing Marquis de La Tour du Pin and threw herself into the pleasures of Versailles.

WHEN the Revolution began, the young couple fled at once to the United States. It was on this voyage that the giddy Henriette changed suddenly and completely. Finding her glorious hair so tangled and matted that she could not get a comb through it, she cut it off and tossed it into the sea. "I dropped my hair overboard," she wrote many years later, "and with it all the frivolous ideas which my pretty blond curls had given rise to."

The couple bought a farm near A1bany and the marquise went into the dairy business, making butter stamped with her family crest. She took great pride in producing only the best, showing herself to be, as Peter Gay noted, "the great lady she had always been."

When the Revolution ended she and her husband returned to France. On the voyage back, this sociological anomaly volunteered to be the crew's tailor, mending their clothing and generally making herself useful--and hence beloved. Where her new traits came from is one of the mysteries of personality, but what she did with them is called "making the best of things." She was not only a real aristocrat but a natural one as well.

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