A GUARDIAN OF MONARCHS

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 238, 6 April 1912, Page 1 (Supplement)

A GUARDIAN OF MONARCHS

TALES OF KING EDWARD AND THE CZAR. Loudon, February 2. "Their Majesties" is the title chosen for the interesting book on Royal .personages by .M. Paoli, who, as the guardian of Kings, was frequently in their presence and became their confidant:

Two stories concerning the late King Edward bear repeating. One goes back to 1907, when King Edward, who had just finished his cruise in the Mediterranean, had announced his intention to visit Paris on May Day. The Socialists had announced great manifestations, and the French Government caused a hint to be given to Kin" Edward that it would be wiser to put oil' his arrival until the next day, but the King was not going to be put off. "Make your mind easy, Paoli," he said. "Nothing will happen. At most they will go and dine on the grass in the Bois du Boulogne, like a family party. You sec, I know your countrymen better than you do. The hour for bloody revolutions has gone by. They shout, threaten, sing, and then go to bed. 1 shall, therefore, arrive quietly in Paris. No one will pay any attention to 7ne, unless it be the journalists." As a matter of fact, this is exactly what happened.

"CHARMED TO HEAR IT!" M. Paoli explains why King Edward forsook Cannes and Nice, in which he had so long taken pleasure. Hts met too many princes there. Once at the Theatre des Capucines, in Paris, M. Paoli pointed out to King Edward, who was in a box, that King Leopold was in the stalls. "1 am charmed to hear it," replied Edward VII., but from that moment he looked no more in the direction of the Belgian Sovereign, and left before the play was over. M. Paoli stayed behind and paid his respects to King Leopold.

"Sire," he said, "this evening we have had a partem) of kings. Do you know that the King of England was also here? - ' "Indeed!" replied Leopold, with perfectly feigned astonishment. "I regiot I did not know it. 1 should have been happy to go and shake hands with him." But the director of the theatre confided to 11. Paoli soon after that Kin<* Leopold knew perfectly well that King Edward was in the theatre—"for I had told him so." added the director. RUSSIAN SECRET POLICE. A reminiscence of the visit of the Czar of Russia, Nicholas 11., is of special inteicst from the light that it throws on the devious methods of the Russian secret police. 'M. Paoli confesses that the intrigues of the Russian police inspired his French colleagues and himself with no less distrust than the terrorist plots. If the innumerable anonymous letters wJiicli we received at the Ministry of the Interior prior to the arrival of the Czar left us unmoved, on the contrary the apparition of several mysterious personages who came to consult us about the measures to be taken filled our minds the greater part of the time with secret terror.

"Not even the minutest precautions could reassure the Russian police; the watch kept around the Chateau of Conipeigne for a fortnight befort the arrival of the Czar and Czaritsa appeared to them altogether insufficient. 'What guarantee have you that your men will not be bribed?' 'But what more can we do?' 'Place at once in every cellar trusty men who will stay there night and day until the Majesties' departure, and see that, that they have no communication with the outside world. They will cook their meals for themselves.'" But the French police, according to M. Paoli, refused this ingenius solution. M. Paoli assures us that, during the two visits of Nicholas 11. to France his colleagues and himself were in constant terror. Once they discovered in time preparations for an attempt on the Czar's life, which was to be made while he was visiting Rheims Cathedral. The best of it was that the Anarchist who was to throw the bomb was no other than a spy in the pay of the Russian Police, who had been strongly recommended by the latter to the French authorities as being just the man to help the detectives in their watch over the Czar's safety while in the Cathedral."