End of a King

For His Catholic Majesty, King Alfonso XIII of Spain, the God in whom he devoutly believed had reserved the most painful death a man can die. Death came to him slowly last week with the agony that crept from his chest around his diaphragm, up into his neck and down to the tips of his slender, beautiful fingers. His physician, Professor Cesare Frugoni, had moved him from his bed to a chair to give him an injection, then had been afraid he could not survive the effort of being carried back to bed. He was propped up in the chair when Italy's King Vittorio Emanuele III and Queen Elena went into the room in the Grand Hotel in Rome to pay him a last visit.

"We came because we heard you were better," said the Queen.

"I only find it difficult to breathe," Alfonso said through the pain.

After the visitors had gone he sat there with his eyes closed, his breathing growing more labored. With him was the Queen from whom he had been estranged since 1934 ("The King tires of everything; some day he will tire of me," she had said). Near her sat the two of his four sons whom hemophilia had not killed: tall, goodlooking Don Juan (for whom he had renounced his claim to the throne) and deaf Don Jaime. Wild-eyed Infanta Beatriz was there, and Alfonso may have remembered that she had driven the car in which Son Gonzalo was riding the night a slight accident made him bleed to death (the King had paced his room that night, sobbing like a child). His plump, favorite daughter, Infanta Maria Christina, had not yet arrived from Turin. The others hoped she would get there in time.

One of the women began to sniffle. Alfonso opened his eyes. "Am I so bad? Then call the priest."

An unsentimental Austrian friend once said of Alfonso: "When the door of this room opens behind me, I need not turn round to see whether it is the King. I know it instantly by the sudden, strange feeling of his strong and very royal personality." Alfonso XIII had been born a king, six months after the death of his father in 1885. When he took over power from a regency on his 16th birthday he had already learned how to feel and behave as a king. He never felt or behaved any other way.

An aristocratic atavist, Alfonso never questioned his right to be a king, never ducked his regal responsibilities as he saw them. He had courage. In Paris once, when a bomb meant for him killed two of his carriage horses, he remarked that bombings were "only the risks of a king's business." In small things, too, he followed the aristocratic pattern, was a gourmet, a dandy, a lady-killer, with a pretty taste in motor cars--all with impeccable taste.

No dictator himself, he put his country in the hands of Dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera, ousted him too late to divert his people's resentment from himself and his office. When the Republicans sent him into exile in 1931 he drove his own car to Cartagena, jauntily boarded a cruiser. His exile changed nothing. He was merely a king on his travels in France, Austria, Switzerland, Italy. Almost daily, long dispatches came to him from Spain. He studied them, grew encyclopedic on Spanish affairs, awaited confidently his restoration as a constitutional monarch.

At the week's end, quiet as death in the chair he had not left for three days, Alfonso XIII received extreme unction, rallied enough next day to eat a few morsels, listen to Mussolini's speech on the radio. Still he lived on, breathing shallowly over the tight band of pain in his chest, dying with the dignity he expected of himself as a king.

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