Royal Notes

BELGIUM

P: The heroic city of Mons is known to smart Belgians as the seat of a somewhat narrow-minded and Mrs. Grundyish local aristocracy. Therefore when Swedish-born Crown Princess Astrid of Belgium visited Mons some weeks ago, she was believed to have committed a thoroughgoing faux pas by producing her small gold cigaret case, at the close of a Civic High Tea, and snapping her cosmopolitan lighter.

However, Belgian court circles were relieved, last week, by tidings from Mons, to the effect that pretty Princess Astrid's example is now being followed by Mons maidens and young Mons matrons of highest social standing.

P: His majesty King Albert of the Belgians appeared as a petitioner by proxy, last week, before the august British Courts of Chancery. Humbly the Royal Petition was handed up by Solicitor Arthur Trowbridge Keeling. His Majesty besought that the Courts would now distribute the -L-173,824 ($844,785) English estate of his late aunt, the Empress Charlotte of Mexico, to her heirs, of whom His Majesty is one.

Since Charlotte of Belgium and Mexico died insane (TIME, Jan. 31, 1927) intestate, her Pounds Sterling can be touched by King Albert only through the humbling technicality of petition to the courts of a foreign Power.

P: Princess Marie Jose, sole daughter of Their Majesties, performed upon the cello, last week, before a most select and royal audience. Next day loyal Brabant news organs "learned" that H. R. H.'s performance was "in the highest degree creditable." But scurrilous sheets of the separatist Flemish persuasion "wondered" if H. R. H. does not run through sonatas "rather too often, to the accompaniment of M. Eugene Ysaye, the fiddler."

Since a lady-in-waiting is always present at the meetings of the Princess and 70-year-old Fiddler Ysaye, Brabanters considered the phrase "too often" outrageous and uncalled for.