Gyula Krúdy

How the Prince of Wales Spent his Time at the School of Life in Pest

 

 

Back in the days when officers of the Guards still wore scarlet collars, golden buttons and white military coats, not this present pike-grey, began Count Esterházy, who had gone into well-deserved retirement as Colonel of the Guards, it happened that I received an order from the highest authority, directing me to escort the heir to the English throne round Budapest...
...There was a little Viennese coffee-house where the retired colonel would resort with a few other ex-officers for a bite. The arches, the Biedermeier style cash-desk and the vanilla coloured curtains of the café strongly resembled those of the Korona in Budapest where superannuated gentlemen would likewise gather for a chat, and where most of them had their own individual pipe and tobacco kept for them by the lady cashier. The elderly officers were as keen on ritual as was the major of Pendennis, and we may be quite sure that every one of them could have written his own novel for they had all spent longer or shorter periods at the court. (Officers of the Guards always regarded themselves as different from all other officers-at-arms; perhaps only those who had served as military attachés at a major embassy would have been in a position to compete with them in exclusivity.) These old officers would resort to the coffee-house in the afternoon - unfortunately I have forgotten the name of the establishment and only recall that it was near the Votivkirche - and during the war they sat there waiting to hear who were the latest to fall in the various theatres of war, and when, therefore, they might be called into service again. In the meantime they discoursed on the good old days whose helmeted heroes were, by this time, mostly interred in the military cemetery. It was in this coffee-house, and in another one that I will mention later, that I collected my notes regarding the time when Victoria, Queen of England and Empress of India dispatched her heir to Budapest, among other places, to complete his education for life.

What did the Prince of Wales mean to Pest?
His stay represented the gilded youth of Budapest. It was the period that extended from the eighties through to the nineties, from the national exhibition in 85, when Budapest, and indeed all of Hungary, passed the necessary examinations regarding its riches and general readiness for life. It's the time when they start paving Outer Kerepesi Road, which ran roughly from Autumn (nowadays Szentkirályi) Street, though they only got round to the side streets a little later, for Hirsch & Co, the road surfacing company, was making a fortune perfectly happily without them. On hearing of the arrival of the heir to the English throne, Mayor Ráth made a vigilant pedestrian tour of the city to discover potential faults in the paving thereof, for nowadays we can have no idea how important an issue road surfacing was in Pest then. The gentry were already wearing light shoes summer and winter, a fashion introduced by Count István Károlyi, who liked to walk the distance between his palace in Museum Street and his club, the National Casino, if only to exercise his legs a little. So the mayor paid particular attention to the Magnates' Quarter behind the Museum and down Hatvani Street, for, there was no denying, it was the frock-coat brigade (in other words the magnates) that ran Pest, however much Gyula Verhovay, the anti-Semitic newspaper editor might rumble against them.
So the Museum District, extending to the riding school, was just as lovely then as it is now, and indeed no further palatial developments have been required since. And above the palace gardens, the faces of young aristocratic ladies continue to glow in the spicy breeze wafting up from below, much as do the faces of the white-bearded porters beneath. Aged countesses with ancient grooms do their eternal rounds, in carriages which ferry them from one port of call to another... I don't know if there has been any writer in the last fifty years who, given a glimpse, could thoroughly chronicle the true inner life of those palaces behind the Museum. (It is said that the handsome Lajos Kuthy might at one time have succeeded in penetrating as far as the chamber-maids' and nannies' quarters.)
One might think of the district as the Moscow of Hungary, as opposed to St Petersburg-Budapest with its furiously rapid construction. But we know a little of Moscow from the intimate descriptions of Turgenev and Tolstoy who, in their youth, moved in the most exclusive circles. Todays's authors can sigh and roam the streets behind the Museum as much as they like, hoping to uncover fascinating material, but they are wasting their time. No, not even Lenke Bajza, Mrs Beniczky, was properly acquainted with affairs thereabouts, albeit that lady of most dove-like spirit knew Francis Joseph well enough to arouse a pang or two of jealousy in the Empress Elizabeth, with ot without cause.
This is where the arrival of the English heir was most keenly anticipated. For, finally, after the dull Shah of Persia, or Milan Obrenovic, who was given to consuming passions, a member of the European royalty was to reside in Pest, one who was bound to bring with him the refined manners that English gentlemen back in his island home had had so much time to cultivate from the age of Shakespeare to the present day, manners such as could cheer even the "bored to death" Lady Dedlock "down in Lincolnshire, where the melancholy sky broods and the fog sits sluggish in its place."
Apart from obliging the seamstresses of Pest to sew themselves half-blind at wardrobes preparing for the arrival of the Prince of Wales, it did not occur to any of the Duchesses and Countesses of the district behind the National Museum, to make any closer enquiry concerning his appearance, manner, habits and other qualities. There was only one lady in New World Street (though she was not an appropriate person for fine ladies to know, at most their husbands might have made her acquaintance) who, through her personal grapevine, discovered that the favourite poet of the future King of England was Alfred Lord Tennyson, and had therefore endeavoured to get some of his poems off by heart...

But, Alice, what an hour was that,
When after roving in the woods
('Twas April then), I came and sat
Below the chestnuts, when their buds...

Who was this gentlewoman of Pest who so boldly set up in competition with the aristocratic ladies of Pest, not only in their husbands' affections, but - would you believe it? - by daring to cast her eye at the heir to the English throne and greeting the royal personage currently travelling across Europe, not with new dresses, not (as the landlord of the Casino restaurant did) with cuts of the finest bloodiest beef, but with genuine English verses?
If Boz-Dickens could have walked the streets of Pest by night as he once did the streets of London he would not have found much change in the houses of New World Street opposite The Golden Eagle Inn. There was music every night at the Eagle, and the dandies of County Pest exhorted the fiddlers to gallop through their rather risqué repertoire. Her single storey house on the other hand closed its gates as religiously each evening as any convent, although by day the most eligible gentlemen of the country would call, which same gentlemen would later be found at the nearby National Casino, as deadly bored there as Lord Deadlock in Bleak House, nor would it have occurred to them to disturb that most amiable lady, their star, the beloved of the National Casino, for that mortal star tended to follow the healthy peasant habit of calmly resorting to her bed as soon as the Mower's Star appeared in the sky.
But Dickens's old gentleman would also have noticed in the course of his perambulations through the Pest of those times that from the day the Prince of Wales set foot in Budapest, the lights of the house in New World Street were blazing every night. So there was, after all, someone for whom the lady in question was prepared to give up her beauty sleep.
This lady came from Pilis in County Pest and had made her way to the capital from there. She started as a flower girl in a florists on Szervita Square, where, through her charming manners and rare beauty, but chiefly through her razor-sharp natural wit, she quickly established a reputation with the gallants to be found in the streets of the inner city who would often drop in at the florists, it being the done thing then to sport a cornflower or violet buttonhole matching one's chequered trousers. All it took was a few lessons, a dose of culture, and a few trips abroad for the flowerseller's wit fully to blossom, a process in which the solicitude of Count Albert Apponyi, who still occupied a place in the miserable rank of bachelors, was of inestimable help. In a very short time the wit and grace of the simple girl from Pilis rivalled that of the female characters in French plays that ingenues used to play at the old National Theatre. For that reason she became known as The Lady of the White Camelias, in homage to Dumas' heroine. And, just as the Prince of Wales was due to arrive, lo and behold, it appeared that the one-time grisette was capable not only of catering to the discriminating tastes of Paris, but to the more robustly clad, more substantial, solemn-as-sterling English style too.
And so Albert, heir to the throne of England, often accompanied by Esterházy, the Colonel of the Guards, became a frequenter of Róza's salon, long after the aged countesses in the palaces behind the Museum, who had got themselves up as imitations of Queen Victoria, waited in vain for him to call, as did the young countes-ses who looked to establish their credentials as Anglophiles by perfecting the handshake, a rather masculine gesture, firm and directed downwards, that became fashionable throughout Hungary on the occasion of the visit of the Prince of Wales.
It was not in vain, then, that the lady in New World Street, learned to quote a few verses from 'The Idylls of the King' and 'The Princess'.

But it is not only in the salons of Budapest that a high-spirited prince may be educated for life: there are other places worth visiting.
Elemér Batthyány was even then in the curious habit of sending a servant from the National Casino home to his apartment in Badger Street to fetch him something warm to wear, because he would occasionally fancy a little night ramble. (The noble count, I hear, is still liable to indulge himself in this manner.) István Károlyi would never go out in search of entertainment at night, not at least since the trouble with his liver, after which his face had turned a vague tobacco-colour: he was capable, at most, of spending an occasional night at the National Casino as and when necessary, particularly when, as occasionally happened amongst gentlemen, a matter of honour had to be settled. But what will a hospitably minded Hungarian man not do to please the heir to the throne of England? He would certainly join the company if the Prince of Wales fancied spending the night at the Blaue Katz in King Street. (This place of entertainment should not be confused with the later Red Cat, in which the finickety Janette Waldstein would certainly not set foot, nor the rest of the Viennese lady-artistes, who could only afford a fourth-class railway ticket - for such existed then! - when travelling from the Austrian capital to Pest where they would swank and swagger about with the usual vigour of ladies tearing themselves away from Vienna to visit Budapest.)
What lessons in life did the Prince of Wales, the future King of England, learn at the Blaue Katz? He certainly saw things there he would not have seen in Oxford or Cambridge. He saw bold young swells fighting with powerful coach-drivers and even stronger brewery-boys. He saw tipsy country rakes (from the Hungarian fen-country) signing promissory notes to ever-present money-lenders so that they could carry on having fun. He saw gentlemen of Pest settling to their usual tables, night after night, with such familiarity that you would not think they had anything else to do than spend the night carousing.
It would have been in vain for Baron Üchtritz (who was accounted the wisest man at the National Casino) to explain that these unbounded amusements were all for the sake of the visiting Prince of Wales. The youthful, bustling city had no other way yet of demonstrating its admiration for its rare guest but by putting on a show, somewhat like the clown in Anatole France, who turned somersaults before the image of the Virgin Mary. Pest was young and enthusiastic - smart society did not think it sufficient to name an inner city hat shop in honour of the Prince of Wales, nor was it content that Parisian and Viennese fashions in menswear should, at a blow, yield place to those of London, as if to validate those London noblemen, advisers to the great Empress, who had suggested that she send her son on a continental tour. The appearance of the Prince of Wales in Budapest was really one of the finest advertisements for the city. The peaked canvas caps worn by the English colonial regiments came into such fashion that even the gentry, who in deference to Francis Joseph had adopted the kaiser-hut of Graz instead of the top hat wore them. The tailors of Crownprince Street quickly removed from their window-displays the starched and crossed neckties invented by some Austrian industrialist in order to help those who were not always fastidious about the condition of their shirts. The cobblers of Paris Street rapidly learned to stitch thick-soled shoes lined with cork, as if Budapest suffered from the same damp climate as London. Haberdashers' shelves were suddenly laden with tartan Scotch material that its wearers would still be sporting twenty years later in order to show that they had had their garments made of such when the Prince of Wales visited Pest... It was indeed a far from idle visit from industry and commerce's point of view, even if the English embassy in Vienna reported little to London of the Prince of Wales's sojourn, bar the fact that every night the heir was drawing lots at the Blaue Katz. (It is to be hoped that the embassy did not inform the somewhat prudish Victoria of what went on in the side-rooms once the lottery-master had packed up and been shown out.)
Every royal visitor introduced a range of fashion items to Budapest but no range was as profitable as that introduced by Albert of Wales. A true gentleman in Pest would at that time clad himself, head to foot, in such outer apparel that you'd think he'd stepped out of one of Thackeray's novels, fresh from the meadow at Epsom where gentlemen in top hats watch the Derby, dressed in a manner appropriate to that special equestrian occasion. And rural Hungary (the "country") had likewise to bend the knee before fashions from England. Only the most ancient of hunters now dressed as Turgenev's novels had once taught them to. Drivers of coaches and riders drove their horses with English whips, wearing English riding gloves. Skins, saddles, hunting bags, all the colour of autumn leaves, are daily expected from London. Anglomania! declare the chroniclers of the time. Those making elegant journeys by train travel with such enormous English cases you'd think they were on their way to India rather than Debrecen. Gentry everywhere dispose of the narrow, close-fitting trousers in which the various Hungarian Jorrocks and Allworthies had hunted and adopt baggy britches, tight about the knees, such as pictured in English fashion-plates, along with all the other country gentlemen, even when they are only going to their clubs.
No-one nowadays has the opportunity of gaping at such wonders, for Hungarian men's fashions have changed since the visit of the heir to the English throne. But some of us have seen old men who clung to their tobacco-coloured, braided Atilla coats and their Hungarian military-style pants with ribbons, rather than sporting britches: as they grew older their coat-tails might have grown a little longer but their trouser-legs remained tight right until they kicked the bucket. Ah, those times, when the goatskin tobacco-pouch was being replaced by the English rubber version, and the short-stemmed pipe ousted the long-stemmed one! Everything, from door-lock to stable-roof, went English in Hungary then, when the Prince of Wales amused himself with us, and enjoyed as good companionship and fortune at the National Casino as at the dives in King Street and the brightly lit house in Grid Street.

But the simple anecdotes of a few ancestors are insufficient for us to grasp the significance of the Prince of Wales and his stay in Budapest. The visit had serious commercial consequences. The City of London could not have entrusted a better man to represent its interests over the channel than the heir to the throne. Eventually, the London traders also noticed the increase in orders from Hungary. In Vienna, however, they took a decidedly poor view of the fact that their foppish patchwork colours, round straw-hats, chamois-beard hats, and the entire Wiener Mode went into almost permanent decline following the visit of Welsh royalty. Compared to the remarkable results achieved by the Prince, the entertainment in Budapest of ex-king Milan produced nothing worthy of note. (The turbaned ornamental head that every gentlemen pinned to his tie when the Shah paid a visit proved to be a short-lived fad.) The unfortunate King Milan might as well have been representing the makers of Egyptian cigarettes as the producers of his own forsaken country. Back at home, in the land of commerce, the Prince of Wales had no reason whatever to be embarassed by his adventures in Budapest, not even once, adopting the name Edward, his own likeness began to appear on the golden sovereigns. Róza P., Janette Waldau and the rest of his female acquaintance failed to find a place in the gazette in which the affairs of English kings are summarised. On the other hand, the commercial outcome of the future king's visit to a hardly-known country far in the east somewhere, received generous mention. Who knows, who could know, why the current heir to the English throne undertakes his various international tours?

After the visit of the Prince of Wales, the unbounded energy of Budapest nightlife, both its gilded youth and its older, age-resisting element, entered a quieter phase, as if it had, for a while at least, amused itself to exhaustion. Viennese lady artistes, the daughters of suburban janitors, discovered occasional local rivals who could waltz as well as they did. The Blaue Katz closed down because the strong coachmen and the loud-mouthed guests drifted off to another dive, one owned by a man called Somosy, who replaced the then fashionable atmosphere of the tap-room with a certain European ambience in his orpheum. Nevertheless, looking back at those days, it seems as though there was less partying in Pest after the Prince's departure, or, at any rate, that the parties were quieter... There is less need for hair-of-the-dog, morning-after treatment in Hungary, the English steel blade begins to rival the popularity of the fisherman's pocket-knife produced in Szeged. Cecilia Carola, the new star of Budapest nightlife, is less prone than her predecessors to pour champagne into her slipper so that her gallant admirers may drink from it.
(1925)

Translated by George Szirtes

Gyula Krúdy
was the most original of Hungarian prose writers of the twentieth century. He published his first story at the age of fourteen. His huge and still uncollected oeuvre consists of dozens of novels, hundreds of short stories and a huge amount of journalism, including this piece.