King for Two Days

For 48 hours last week, France's bustling city of Nancy (pop. 113,000) became old Vienna. Dispossessed archdukes, counts, princes and out-of-work nobles by the score had been routed from the attics of exile to play their parts in a real-life operetta. A happy peasantry, as gay in their slightly frayed folk costumes as a Shubert chorus, swarmed about Nancy's little Church of the Cordeliers. Who, for the moment, wanted to remember that the Emperor who was to be married there had no empire, that he had met his bride in a refugee camp, and that her father had died a prisoner of the Communists? The considerate Nancy town council had even ordered the very French comfort stations removed from the public square, to avoid any possible offense to royalty.

In a Paris gown and a bridal veil that had once belonged to the Empress Maria Theresa, 26-year-old Princess Regina of Saxe -Meiningen - Hildburghausen walked slowly up the aisle under an arch of crossed swords, to take her place beside pale, 38-year-old Franz Joseph Otto Robert Marie Anthony Charles Maximilian Henry Sixtus Xavier Felix Renatus Louis Cajetanus Pius Ignatius, Emperor (by theoretical title) of Austria, King of Hungary, Bohemia and Jerusalem, Margrave of Moravia, Grand Voivode of Serbia, Duke of Lorraine and Auschwitz, Lord of Trieste, etc., etc. On the pretender's shoulders lay the jewel-studded collar of the Golden Fleece, symbol of Habsburg knighthood. Inside the cushion before him was scattered a handful of Austrian earth --all he had left of the land from which his house had been banished.

"Will you take this man?" the Bishop of Nancy asked the solemn-eyed bride in Latin. Princess Regina glanced demurely at her mother, who nodded permission. "Volo" (I will), said Regina. After the ceremony, which included the reading of a special benediction from the Pope, the couple left and were greeted by shouts of "Long live the Emperor!" from crowds of Frenchmen and the Austrians who had traveled to France especially for the great occasion. "Long live the Republic!" shouted French students gathered near by, and a handful of eggs hurtled toward the royal company. One egg crashed and broke on Regina's silken train; Regina stared proudly ahead as the page girls brushed the mess away. The crowd kept right on cheering.

A few hours later, in a gleaming blue Cadillac, Otto and his bride left Nancy for a honeymoon in Spain. "At least," sighed an old Viennese in the crowd watching the departure, "he has been a monarch for two days."

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