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David Wilson's Literary Quiz
A new literary quiz each week or so, usually with a theme. This week: However good a republican one may be, there is inevitably
a certain frisson when one first encounters a royal personage. Here are ten examples, from both fiction and (more-or-less)
fact. Identify them, for the usual glittering prizes. Put not your trust in Princes, nor, indeed, in any proper names you
may find in the extracts.
The quotations in these quizzes reflect my own tastes - Dead White Males, for the most part (Jane Austen,
of course, counts as an honorary DWM). There will never be anything wilfully obscure. If you're the sort of person who sneers
at the naïveté of the reviewers in the TLS and New York Review of Books, you'll recognize them at once.
I welcome suggestions and insults. You'll find an e-mail tag lying around somewhere. Please put QUIZ in the subject line.
David J Wilson.
Quiz No. 73
1)
Presently there was the slight hush and edging away which follows the entry of a royal party. I saw
my wife curtsey and heard her say: “Oh, sir, you are sweet”; then I was led into the clearing and the Duke of
Clarence said: “Pretty hot out there I should think.”
“It was, sir.”
“Awfully clever the way you've hit off the impression of heat. Makes me feel quite uncomfortable
in my great-coat.”
“Ha, ha.”
When they had gone my wife said: “Goodness, we're late for lunch. Margot's giving a party in
your honour,” and in the taxi she said: “I've just thought of something. Why don't you write and ask the Duchess's
permission to dedicate Latin-America to her?”
“Why should I?”
“She'd love it so.”
“I wasn't thinking of dedicating it to anyone.”
“There you are; that's typical of you, Charles. Why miss an opportunity to give pleasure?”
Answer
2)
The meeting took place shortly after the middle of March. Court etiquette did not allow Smith to sit
down, but Victoria herself remained standing throughout the entire hour and a half of their interview, leaning over the back
of a sofa. Gracious though the gesture was, she could do so with less strain than if she had been an ailing man with a swollen
foot. Under like circumstances the preceding year, Carlyle had bluntly announced that he was a feeble old man and helped himself
to a chair. But except in private surroundings Smith's pride would have driven him to collapse before he would have yielded
to an infirmity.
Answer
3)
One morning about daybreak I found a canoe and crossed over a chute to the main shore - it was only
two hundred yards - and paddled about a mile up a crick amongst the cypress woods, to see if I couldn't get some berries.
Just as I was passing a place where a kind of a cowpath crossed the crick, here comes a couple of men tearing up the path
as tight as they could foot it. I thought I was a goner, for whenever anybody was after anybody I judged it was me
- or maybe Moses. I was about to dig out from there in a hurry, but they was pretty close to me then, and sung out and begged
me to save their lives - said they hadn't been doing nothing, and was being chased for it - said there was men and dogs a-coming.
They wanted to jump right in, but I says:
“Don't you do it. I don't hear the dogs and horses yet; you've got time to crowd through the
brush and get up the crick a little ways; then you take to the water and wade down to me and get in - that'll throw the dogs
off the scent.”
Answer
4)
The visits to Claremont were frequent enough; but one day, on a special occasion, she paid one of
a rarer and more exciting kind. When she was seven years old, she and her mother and sister were asked by the King to go down
to Windsor. George IV, who had transferred his fraternal ill-temper to his sister-in-law and her family, had at last grown
tired of sulking, and decided to be agreeable. The old rip, bewigged and gouty, ornate and enormous, with his jewelled mistress
by his side and his flaunting court about him, received the tiny creature who was one day to hold in those same halls a very
different state. “Give me your little paw,” he said; and two ages touched. Next morning, driving in his phaeton
with the Duchess of Gloucester, he met the Duchess of Kent and her child in the Park. “Pop her in,” were his orders,
which, to the terror of the mother and the delight of the daughter, were immediately obeyed. Off they dashed to Virginia Water,
where there was a great barge, full of lords and ladies fishing, and another barge with a band; and the King ogled Feodora,
and praised her manners, and then turned to his own small niece. “What is your favourite tune? The band shall play it.”
“God save the King, sir,” was the instant answer. The Princess's reply has been praised as an early example of
a tact which was afterwards famous. But she was a very truthful child, and perhaps it was her genuine opinion.
Answer
5)
The room had gone very quiet.
I turned to see what the man was looking at and got a glimpse of a woman being introduced to a group
of guests, and I knew from her diamonds and the size of her head that she was the Queen.
“That reminds me, I must buy some stamps,” I said.
It did not matter. No one heard anything that was said.
But she was not the portrait on the postage stamp; she was a small, muffin-faced woman in a blue gown
of stiff gauze. She had a shy but warm smile, not the fixed grin of the politician. Diamonds were clamped to her hair in a
tiara, and more diamonds around her neck. On one wrist was a diamond bracelet and on the other a diamond-studded watch. They
were dazzling stones, small in size but so many of them, and in such clusters, they made you think of electric circuits. The
Queen's wire-frame eyeglasses looked banal on the royal face. The room was hushed, as though no one dared speak while the
Queen was present, yet she was saying little.
Answer
6)
When Queen Elizabeth, whose literary adviser was Osbert Sitwell, sent the Royal Messenger to Secker
and Warburg for a copy in November [1945], he found them utterly sold out and had to go with horse, carriage, top hat and
all, to the anarchist Freedom Bookshop, in Red Lion Square, where George Woodcock gave him a copy. [Of which book?]
Answer
7)
The king! His women cleared a path for me, moving slowly from my way, and I saw him at the opposite
end of the room, extended on a green sofa about ten feet in length, crescent-shaped, with heavy upholstery, deeply pocketed
and bulging. On this luxurious article he was fully at rest, so that his well-developed athletic body, in knee-length purple
drawers of a sort of silk crepe, seemed to float, and about his neck was wrapped a white scarf embroidered in gold. Matching
slippers of white satin were on his feet. For all my worry and fever I felt admiration as I sized him up. Like myself, he
was a big man, six feet or better by my estimate, and sumptuously at rest. Women attended to his every need. Now and then
one wiped his face with a piece of flannel, and another stroked his chest, and one kept his pipe filled and lit and puffed
at it for him to keep it going.
Answer
8(Translation)
Blenkinsop did not know or remember how he ran to his place and mounted. Instantly his regret at not
having been in action and his dejected mood amid people of whom he was weary had gone, instantly every thought of himself
had vanished. He was filled with happiness at his nearness to the Emperor. He felt that this nearness by itself made up to
him for the day he had lost. He was happy as a lover when the longed-for moment of meeting arrives. Not daring to look round
and without looking round, he was ecstatically conscious of his approach. He felt it not only from the sound of the hoofs
of the approaching cavalcade, but because as he drew near everything grew brighter, more joyful, more significant, and more
festive around him. Nearer and nearer to Blenkinsop came that sun shedding beams of mild and majestic light around, and already
he felt himself enveloped in those beams, he heard his voice, that kindly, calm, and majestic voice that was yet so simple!
And as if in accord with Blenkinsop's feeling, there was a deathly stillness amid which was heard the Emperor's voice.
Answer
9(Translation)
At the very outset, indeed, there was a little twofold imbroglio. No sooner had I entered the drawing-room
than Count von Schleswig, without even allowing me time to shake hands with the Countess, led me, as though to give a pleasant
surprise to the person in question to whom he seemed to be saying: “Here's your friend! You see, I'm bringing him to
you by the scruff of the neck,” towards a lady of smallish stature. Well before I arrived in her vicinity, the lady
had begun to flash at me continuously from her large, soft, dark eyes the sort of knowing smiles which we address to an old
friend who perhaps has not recognised us. As this was precisely the case with me and I could not for the life of me remember
who she was, I averted my eyes as the Count propelled me towards her, in order not to have to respond until our introduction
should have released me from my predicament. Meanwhile the lady continued to maintain in precarious balance the smile she
was aiming at me. She looked as though she were in a hurry to be relieved of it and to hear me say: “Ah, dear lady,
of course! How delighted Mamma will be to hear that we've met again!” I was as impatient to learn her name as she was
to see that I did finally greet her with every indication of recognition, so that her smile, indefinitely prolonged like the
note of a tuning-fork, might at length be given a rest. But Count von Schleswig managed things so badly (to my mind, at least)
that it seemed to me that only my own name was mentioned and I was given no clue as to the identity of my unknown friend,
to whom it never occurred to name herself, so obvious did the grounds of our intimacy, which baffled me completely, seem to
her. Indeed, as soon as I had come within reach, she did not offer me her hand, but took mine in a familiar clasp, and spoke
to me exactly as though I had been as aware as she was of the pleasant memories to which her mind reverted. She told me how
sorry Albert (who I gathered was her son) would be to have missed seeing me. I tried to remember which of my school friends
had been called Albert, and could think only of Rubinstein, but this could not be Rubinstein's mother since she had been dead
for many years. In vain I struggled to identify the past experience common to herself and me to which her thoughts had been
carried back. But I could no more distinguish it through the translucent jet of her large, soft pupils which allowed only
her smile to pierce their surface than one can distinguish a landscape that lies on the other side of a pane of smoked glass
even when the sun is blazing on it. She asked me whether my father was not working too hard, if I would like to come to the
theatre some evening with Albert, if my health was better, and as my replies, stumbling through the mental darkness in which
I was plunged, became distinct only to explain that I was not feeling well that evening, she pushed forward a chair for me
herself, putting herself out in a way to which I had never been accustomed by my parents' other friends. At length the clue
to the riddle was furnished me by the Count: “She thinks you're charming,” he murmured in my ear, which felt somehow
that it had heard these words before. They were the words the Duchess of Hentzau had spoken to my grandmother and myself after
we had made the acquaintance of the Queen of Saxony. Everything was now clear; the present lady had nothing in common with
the Queen of Saxony, but from the language of the man who served her up to me I could discern the nature of the beast. She
was a royal personage.
Answer
10)
Sollozzo arrived in Milan with his charge that night, and the next afternoon Dante had his first audience,
lasting an hour and a half, with the young King. Each was deeply moved - Vittore Emanuele, for all his sense of the dignity
of his office, feeling a slight embarrassment in the presence of this man of genius who had been his ideal for so many years,
while Dante was touched by the youth and virginal beauty of the King, the ardour of his boyish idealism, and the pathos inherent
in his obvious inexperience not only of kingship but of the world. The generous-hearted boy felt curiously and nobly shamed
by Dante's thanks for the assurance given him that not only would it be made possible for him to complete the Divina Commedia
but that he could count on a production of it answering in full to his desires. “He bent low over my hand”, the
King said a few days later to his cousin, the young Archduchess Sophia Carlotta, “and seemed moved by what was so natural:
he remained a long time in that position, without saying a word. I had the impression that our rôles were reversed.
I stooped down to him, and took him to my heart with the feeling that I was taking an oath to myself to be true to him to
the end of time.”
Answer
1)
Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh. Charles Ryder, the worst painter in the world, meets the soon-to-be King George
VI. Ryder is shortly to have his last illusions about his own work removed by Anthony Blanche.
Back to Question 1
2)
Charles Dickens, Edgar Johnson. Dickens was only seven years older than the Queen: he had less than three months to
live, while she had more than thirty years.
Back to Question 2
3)
Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain. A nice easy one - Huck's first meeting with the King and the Duke. What's that? You don't
think they really were the Duke of Bridgewater and King Louis XVII? Shame on you.
Back to Question 3
4)
Queen Victoria, Lytton Strachey. Another easy one: a famous encounter, matchlessly described.
Back to Question 4
5)
My Other Life, Paul Theroux. More difficult, this time! This is a novel, by the way, in case you were wondering - and
a brilliant one, too, although it may have put his honorary knighthood on the back burner.
Back to Question 5
6)
George Orwell, Bernard Crick. The book, which had made Orwell an instant celebrity, was, of course, Animal Farm.
Back to Question 6
7)
Henderson the Rain King, Saul Bellow. Henderson meets Dahfu, King of the Wariri. He little imagines that he is to be
Dahfu's successor ....
Back to Question 7
8)
War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy. Book Three, Chapter Ten: Nicholas Rostov, at the exact peak of his patriotic enthusiasm,
sets eyes on the young Tsar in 1805. This happy scene will soon be spoiled by the superior skill in manoeuvre of another Emperor.
Back to Question 8
9)
Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust. Le Côté de Guermantes II. Even through the Teutonic
veil I tried to cast over it, this was a pretty easy one! Marcel is introduced to the Princesse de Parme at the house of the
Duc de Guermantes. Sorry about the length of the extract, by the way - I always have the devil of a job stopping myself once
I start typing this stuff out.
Back to Question 9
10)
The Life of Richard Wagner, Ernest Newman. Not the most exciting moment in the most exciting book I have ever read.
Ludwig II's relationship with Wagner was far more than that of normal (however munificent) patronage. Wagner, who was no flatterer,
described Ludwig as his collaborator, and this was no exaggeration. Ludwig kept his oath. If there had been more “Mad
Kings” like him, there would be fewer republics today.
Back to Question 10
Don't bottle up your contempt and fury. Mail to davidjw@mindspring.com
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Last Updated: 27 May 2005
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