by Frank Harris
I hope I have caused you no inconvenience. I should hate to do that for you are always charming to me.
Yours sincerely,
Edward.
"There," said the lady, flouncing into her husband's room about twelve o'clock next day, "that is what comes of your silly principles. I wish all your principles were at the bottom of the sea. They make life not worth living."
But Lord Brougham was full of self-content till he found that a good many people who gave zest to life did not care to meet him after they had heard the story; in fact, he began to wish that his principles had not been so rigid when it was too late, for one peculiarity of Edward was that he never forgot or forgave a slight to his dignity. His vanity was at least as imperious as Lord Brougham's principles. From that time to the day of his death he never dined in the Villa Eleonore.
Edward was most generous and kindly so long as things went in accord with his wishes. At a reception by the Vyners one night, the Prince walked up and down the room with his arm on my shoulder while I told him one or two new stories. Suddenly I said to him, "You know, Sir, I mustn't accept any more of your kind invitations as commands because I must get to work; I must withdraw from all this London life and try to make myself a writer."
"A little gaiety will do you good from time to time," he replied.
"No, Sir," I said. "Please believe what I say; I must get to work."
He seemed huffed, greatly put out. "You are the first," he said, "who ever spoke to me like that."
"It's my necessity, Sir," I said, "that drives me to work. I shall always be proud of your kindness to me."
"A strange way of showing it," he said, and turned away.
Once later at Monte Carlo I was talking to Madame Tosti, the wife of the well know London musician, when the Prince came directly across the room to speak to us. I don't know why, but I felt sure he meant to be rude to me, so I took the bull by the horns and copied Beau Brummel's famous word to King George. "Now I leave you," I said to the lady, "to your stout friend." And I turned away, but I could see that the Prince was furious.
I must end these stories of the Prince with the wittiest thing I had ever said.
One night he went to the house of the Duchess of Buccleuch, whose husband didn't like him because he thought him a loose liver. The Prince was in extraordinarily good form and won everyone-really found a kindly and appropriate word for twenty or thirty people, one after the other. I told him his success had been as astonishing as Caesar's at the battle of Zela, when he afterwards wrote to his friend Amantius, "Veni, vidi, vici" (I came, I saw, I conquered). "Of course," I went on, "that's not what Caesar really said; what he really said was, 'I saw, I conquered, and-I came!'" The Prince laughed heartily. "You are incorrigible," he said. So I was encouraged to tell him the famous witticism of Degas. Some one spoke condemning Minette or Muni, as it is often called in French, meaning the kissing of the woman's sex. Degas replied with the old saying: "Quelle triste vieillesse vous vous preparez!" (What a dreary old age you are making for yourself!) The Prince pretended not to understand what I meant, and when it was explained, thought the practice unmanly.
To atone, I told him another story which pleased him a little more. A married woman took her young sister of twelve for the first time to the theatre. The child sat entranced, though the play was a poor melodrama to the third act, when the hero asks the heroine to marry him: she will not; again he asks her and she refuses. "If you refuse again," he cried, "I'll make you my paramour!"
At once the little cockney girl exclaimed, "'Ark at the swine!"
Then I told him another story which pleased him better. "At the end of one of my lectures in New York," I began, "a man in the audience rose and evidently as a joke said:
"'The lecturer spoke of "virgin" once or twice; would he be kind enough to tell us just what he means by "virgin"?' "'Certainly,' I replied, 'the meaning is plain; "vir," as everyone knows, is Latin for a man, while "gin" is good old English for a trap; virgin is therefore a mantrap.' "Everyone laughed and a lady in the hall rose and kept up the game.
"'I believed,' she said, 'that all traps were usually open and afterwards closed, while the reverse seems to be the case with the mantrap.' "The laughter grew and finally a man got up: 'I have another objection,' he said. 'Traps are always easy to enter and hard to get out of, whereas this trap is hard to enter and easy to get out of.' "
The Prince, laughing, said, "You made those two answers up, Harris, I'm sure."
"I give you my word," I replied, "that the definition was all I invented."