The Crown

In Paris, busy workmen completed last week a $1,000,000 decoration of the capital to honor Their Britannic Majesties on a visit of State this week. At the Quai d'Orsay, splendid apartments in the Palace which houses the French Foreign Office were ready for the royal guests, completely redecorated, furnished with the rarest French antique furniture from Fontainebleau and Versailles, hung with a collection of tapestries conservatively valued at $5,000,000. The bed in which the Emperor Napoleon slept and the desk at which he worked at Fontainebleau were ready for George VI, King and Emperor; and Her Majesty was to sleep in the bed of Marie Antoinette, each carved wooden bed post formed as a quiver full of large cupid's darts. Meanwhile, at Windsor last week, His Majesty's physicians kept him in bed on a liquid diet, hopeful of quieting his upset stomach in time for the Sovereigns to leave on schedule for France.

Dowager Queen Mary filled in at London, making the scheduled royal progress by water from Westminster to the Tower of London which was to have been made by Queen Elizabeth, bereaved by the loss of her mother, the Countess of Strathmore. Last such royal progress by water was made more than 400 years ago by the then reigning Queen Elizabeth. It had been especially planned for the present Queen Elizabeth to revive the custom, but she stayed with King George, sitting at his bedside and offering him from time to time cups of warm milk. Presently, the fever induced by His Majesty's gastric disturbance abated, and propped up in bed on pillows he signed several State papers.

Still abed, King George had a five-minute long-distance telephone chat with the Duke of Windsor, just before the Duke and Duchess sailed from the French Riviera on the chartered yacht Gulzar for a pleasure cruise in the Adriatic. Filling in again, Queen Mary presided at a garden party of 2,000 swankest Britons inaugurating the restoration of famed Hampton Court Palace under wealthy and witty Sir Philip Sassoon, Commissioner of Works, who is said to have paid out of his own pocket the cost of installing concealed central heating. As a garden party anecdote, sprightly Sir Philip related a conversation he had as a young man with one of his uncles, a Rothschild. Said the sympathetic uncle to young Sassoon. "It must be awful to be a Jew and not be called Rothschild."

With a Court presentation party scheduled last week at Buckingham Palace, Queen Elizabeth, 20 days after her mother's death, was obliged to emerge from mourning and leave King George at Windsor, to discharge her royal duty of graciously receiving in London prominent British dowagers and debutantes. Meanwhile, Court circles buzzed with a stern stand taken by the Earl of Clarendon, new Lord Chamberlain, who has charge of presentations at Court. By express order of King George, Lord Clarendon is now investigating such want ads in London newspapers as this: "Peeress will chaperon girl for season in London, or would sponsor married woman. Very enjoyable time assured. Write Lady Z, Box 9014." Peeresses found to have inserted such advertisements are in course of being informed by Lord Clarendon that their presence "will not be required" at Court this year --i.e., they will be banished from the royal presence, their style as society racketeers cramped.

At week's end the King Emperor was pronounced "fully recovered." His Majesty drove up to London. As he was about to leave for France with Her Majesty aboard the yacht Enchantress it was revealed that Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and Premier Edouard Daladier had already exchanged warm personal letters affirming Anglo-French solidarity--letters of high policy comparable to those exchanged between Chamberlain and Mussolini.

In a letter to Buckingham Palace from the Stony Indians of southwestern Canada their Chief Walking Eagle beseeched George VI to "keep the white off our tribal land!" The Chief complained that white hunters and trappers now threaten "Great White Queen" Victoria's promise in 1877 that they "will have plenty game, tobacco, food."

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