After Whom the Deluge?

To celebrate his return to the U.S., Ambassador Josiah Marvel Jr. thought he would give the kind of party Copenhagen's diplomatic corps would not so soon forget. It was a costume ball at which the guests came in the peasant garments of their native land. To set the proper mood, the ambassador had tethered a live cow in the hall of "Rydhave," the stately ambassadorial lodge.

This, thought Denmark's Communist daily, was too good to overlook. The ambassador's "escapist" party, crowed Land og Folk, pointed an ugly moral. Said Land og Folk: "It makes one think of other festivals where aristocrats amused themselves by dressing up as plain peasants --that was in the period preceding the French Revolution [when] the people of Versailles fled from reality into a rustic idyll . . . [Today again] exploited masses are rising and claiming their right--but our aristocrats do not want to hear it."

Next day when other Danish papers printed guest lists of the party, it turned out that Land og Folk had in its haste forgotten to clear the story in the proper place. High up among the feckless "aVisto-crats" who plugged their ears to the revolution's rumble was portly Andrei Plakhin, Soviet Ambassador to Denmark, who came to Marvel's party dressed as an estate manager in Czarist days. Not to be outdone as an escapist, Mine. Plakhin looked fetching as a simple peasant maid.

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