Word: baudouine
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...Belgium, where the flood waters spread over 40,000 acres and took a toll of 14 lives, 22-year-old King Baudouin, less royally gifted with a sense of fitness, raised another storm by leaving his country in mid-disaster to sojourn with his father, deposed King Leopold II, on the balmy French Riviera...
...King!" cried a child. "How do you know it's the King?" "It must be. He has such nice shoes." The children shyly touched the young man's raincoat. Older people stared as at a mirage. For this indeed was young (22) King Baudouin of Belgium, out among the poorest of his subjects, without guard or escort, in the company of Public Health Minister Alfred de Taeye and Abbé Eduard Froidure. It had all begun with the abbe's eloquent pamphlet on Brussels' slums, unnoticed by cabinet ministers but read by a shocked Baudouin...
...woman thought her visitors were public-health inspectors, pointed to a malodorous closet, exclaimed, "The proprietor's got a bathroom all in marble." In the growing darkness, Baudouin lit his way with a flashlight. Boys ran ahead of him calling, "The King is coming." In one crumbling house, when the King wanted to go upstairs, the residents were aghast...
...said, "it's too disgusting." Baudouin did not insist...
...accept her envelope, saying, "There are people worse off than I, monsieur." When the abbe told her the identity of her benefactor, she accepted. One man refused, saying, "I work for my living." It was night when Abbé Froidure drove the King back to Laeken Palace. Said Baudouin: "It's scandalous that people are living in such conditions." To Health Minister de Taeye he said: "Something must be done about it." Asked next day exactly what he was going to do about it, De Taeye said brightly: "The government is preparing plans. When will they be ready...