Rex Audax

Outside Rumania King Carol II cuts so sorry a figure that his potency inside Rumania is scarcely realized. Reigning peacock fashion as a Balkan Louis XIV, his favorite aphorism is: "I believe in Destiny."

Last week Bucharest's royal fop played the King more boldly than British George V (who despises him) would ever dare to do. In brief the Cabinet of peasant-born Premier Juliu Maniu "advised" His Majesty to dismiss from their jobs two of his special favorites, Col. Marinescu, Chief of Bucharest Police, and General Dumitrescu, Chief of Rumania's Gendarmerie. Instead of taking his Cabinet's advice, as George V would be bound to do, Carol II took his stand on Rumania's old-fashioned Constitution which gives the King broad powers, defied Premier Maniu and forced the Cabinet's resignation.

As a stop-gap King Carol turned to a mediocre Peasant Party politician, M. Alexander Vaida-Voevod, who served as Premier for a time last year, commanded him to form a Cabinet. To outsiders chief interest in this Rumanian shift lay in the fact that M. Vaida-Voevod. when last Premier, nearly signed a non-aggression pact with Rumania's long-standing foe, the Soviet union. With this pact negotiated--lying on the table, so to speak-- Moscow cocked a keen, expectant eye on Bucharest.

Meanwhile thousands if not millions of Rumanians slipped from hand to hand with many a smirk picture postcards which suddenly appeared throughout the Kingdom. They showed a man with the head of King Carol holding on his lap a woman with the head of His Majesty's mistress, Mme Magda Lupescu. Purple in the face, a Court spokesman spluttered that "dastard enemies of His Majesty the King have concocted these slanderous photographs from models on whom heads have apparently been superimposed."

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