Pout Royal

Some months ago, a tall, erect, blond, young man of severely military carriage and aristocratic mien, was invited to a garden party at one of the most sumptuous villas of which modern Rome can boast. There he was introduced to a slight, dark-eyed girl olive-skinned, graceful as a faun, warm with the lambent inner radiance of the Italian heart.

The tall erect young man was smitten both with love and with a consciousness of his inferiority; he was only Prince Philip of Hesse. The slight brown-eyed girl, likewise swept into love by the fatal attraction of opposites, be-shrewed daintily the day that she was born Mafalda, Princess of Italy, and resolved to wheedle King Vittorio Emanuele into letting here stoop to her tall lover.

"I didn't want to be a Queen," she insisted whenever a reigning monarch or the crown prince of an empire was proposed, as her future husband. Disturbed, her father cast a piercing Italian glance after his daughter as she strolled, one afternoon at Bordighera, with a tall blond young man whom King Vittorio thought he recalled having seen before.

"Do you think such a marriage would make you happy?" he asked Mafalda that evening.

"Oh, si!"

"Do you know that this Hessian is not a Catholic and that the Pope would refuse to let you marry him, even should I give my consent?"

"Oh, si! But il Papa sometimes grants dispensations."

That, according to court gossip, was the beginning of as determined a siege as has been laid these many years to the Holy Office, at the instance of a pair of brown eyes and two lips imperiously pouting.

For weeks the omnipotent Vicar would have nothing to do with a marriage which Italians high and low rejoice to call a love match. At last Mafalda and Philip were forced to sign a long petitior in which they promised that any children that may be vouchsafed to them will be reared as strict Catholics. Behind his thick spectacles il Papa, "prisoner" of the nation whose princes must bow to him in matters spiritual, pondered well the petition. Eventually his lips formed the affirmative command of the Caesars. "Fiat!" said il Papa. "Fiat!" echoed King Vittorio, modern Caesar, in puny imitation. "! ! !" cried Mafalda.

A new fieldmarshal's uniform was promptly ordered for King Vittorio Emanuele. Thus militantly attired, he was scheduled to give the bride away at "a ceremony to be celebrated in strict solemnity in the private chapel of the royal castle at Racconigi. . . . The celebration will end . . . with a fireworks display."

Amid this excitement small notice was taken of Mafalda's brother, H. R. H. Umberto Nicola Tommaso Giovanni Maria, Prince of Piedmont and Heir Apparent to the Throne of Italy. Yet Umberto was active, meanwhile. He was creeping up to the age of 21. When he reached it, last week, he became automatically a Senator --the youngest* in Italy.

-Senatorial candidates must be 40 in order to be eligible.