`Stat rex
indignatus.' He does try to assert himself now--does strive, by day
and by night, poor petrefact, to rip off these fell and clownish
integuments. Of his elder brother in Paris he has never heard; but he
knows that Lazarus arisen from the tomb did not live in grave-clothes.
He forgets that after all he is only a statue. To himself he is still
a king--or at least a man who was once a king and, having done no
wrong, ought not now to be insulted. If he had in his composition one
marble grain of humour, he might... but no, a joke against oneself is
always cryptic. Fat men are not always the best drivers of fat oxen;
and cryptic statues cannot be depended on to see cryptic jokes.
If Umberto could grasp the truth that no man is worthy to be
reproduced as a statue; if he could understand, once and for all, that
the unveiling of him were itself a notable disservice to him, then
might his wrath be turned to acquiescence, and his acquiescence to
gratitude, and he be quite happy hid. Is he, really, more ridiculous
now than he always was? If you be an extraordinary man, as was his
father, win a throne by all means: you will fill it. If your son be
another extraordinary man, he will fill it when his turn comes. But if
that son be, as, alas, he most probably will be, like Umberto, quite
ordinary, then let parental love triumph over pride of dynasty: advise
your boy to abdicate at the earliest possible moment.
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