In the summer of 1839, a young German musician was sitting in a café in Paris drinking armagnac and thinking uncharitable thoughts about the regime of King Louis Philippe. It was a hot day, armagnac is by no means non-alcoholic, and the German was fiercely Republican by temperament, so it was perhaps understandable that the intensity of his reaction to the crimes against freedom that were going on all around him led him to speak his thoughts out loud. Before he knew what he was doing he was discussing them with the man sitting at the next table.
“Kings,” said the young German, “are an anachronistic obscenity. Mankind will never be truly free until the last king’s head is impaled on the battlements of his own palace.”
If the young German had bothered to look closely at the stranger (which of course he didn’t) he would have seen a neatly-dressed weather-beaten man of absolutely average height and build, who could have been any age between a gnarled twenty-nine and a boyish forty. There was just a hint of grey in his short beard, and his eyes were as sharp as paper can be when you lick the gum on an envelope. He considered the German’s statement seriously, wiped a little foam off his moustache and replied that in his experience, for what it was worth, most kings were no worse than a visit to the dentist. The young German scowled at him.
“How can you say that?” he snarled. “Consider some of the so-called great kings of history. Look at Xerxes! Look at Barbarossa! Look at Napoleon!”
“I thought,” interrupted the stranger, “he was an emperor.”
“Same thing,” said the young German. “Look at Ivan the Terrible,” he continued. “Look at Philip of Spain!”
“I did,” said the stranger, “once.”
Something about the way he said it made the young German stop dead in his tracks and stare. It was as if he had suddenly come face to face with Michaelangelo’s David, wearing a top hat and a frock coat, in the middle of the Champs Elysées. He put down his glass and looked at the stranger.
“What did you say?” he asked quietly.
“Please don’t think I’m boasting,” said the stranger. “I don’t know why I mentioned it, since it isn’t really relevant to what you were saying. Do please go on.”
“You
“Just the once. At the Escorial, back in ‘85. I was in Madrid with nothing to do—I’d just got rid of a load of jute, you could name your own price for jute in Madrid just then, I think they use it in rope-making—and I thought I’d take a ride out to see the palace. And when I got there—took me all day, it’s thirty miles if it’s a step—Philip was just coming home from some visit or other. As I remember I saw the top of his head for at least twelve seconds before the guards moved me on. I could tell it was the top of
“How can you have
The stranger smiled; it was a very peculiar smile. “It’s rather a long story,” he said.
“Never mind.”
“No but really,” the stranger said. His accent was very peculiar indeed, the sort of accent that would always sound foreign, wherever he went. “When I say long I mean long.”
“Never mind.”
“All right, then,” said the stranger. “But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
The young German nodded impatiently. The stranger took a pull at his beer and sat back in his chair.
“I was born in Antwerp,” he said, “in 1553.” He paused. “Aren’t you going to say something?”
“No,” said the German.
“Funny,” said the stranger. “I usually get interrupted at this point. I’ll say it again. I was born in Antwerp in 1553. Fifteen fifty-three,” he repeated, as if he wished the young German would call him a liar. No such luck. He went on, “…And when I was fifteen my father got me a job with a merchant adventurer he owed some money to. The merchant was in the wool trade, like more people were then, and he said I could either work in the counting-house or go to sea, and since handling raw wool brings me out in a rash I chose the sea. Funny, isn’t it, what decides you on your choice of career? I once knew a man who became a mercenary soldier just because he liked the long holidays. Dead before he was thirty, of course. Camp fever.”
“Well, I worked hard and saved what I earned, just like you’re supposed to, and before I was twenty-seven I had enough put by to take a share in a ship of my own. Not long after that I inherited some money and bought out my partners, and there I was with my own ship, at twenty-nine. Dear God, I’m sounding like one of those advertisements for correspondence courses. Excuse me, please.”
