Word: leopold
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...talk like that." The Duke worked in his shirtsleeves ("I can't think in my coat"), with six pipes close at hand. At the start, he rarely settled down to work until 11:30 a.m., and he generally broke; up the afternoon for such engagements as golf with Leopold of the Belgians. At the end, he was on a strict 9-to-6 regimen...
...tragical-comical hero is Leopold, barkeep in a war-damaged town. Leopold, a man of directness, folk wit and occasional sentimentality, attends to his business, drinks a fabulous quantity of wine, affectionately abuses his wife, and is instinctively contemptuous of all fanatics. When bombed-out schoolchildren recite Racine in his bar, used as a part-time classroom, tears creep down his vast purpled cheeks. Fancying himself a tragic poet, he works now & then on the first scene of a drama of which he is to be the hero. Sample...
Down with Politicians. But Leopold's life is complicated by the political intrigues that zigzag through the town. When a loudmouthed rascal who has found refuge in the local branch of the Communist Party denounces him as a protector of a fascist, Leopold is thrown into jail. There he suffers agonies because he is deprived of his wine. When he is finally released, he bellows his denunciation of all politicians-Communists, Gaullists, "the whole bloody country"-in the town streets. A war profiteer whom he has mocked gets Leopold arrested again. While resisting, he is shot and killed...
Politically, he has been no more distinguished than his hero Leopold. During the war he acted as if there were no war, contributed stories to collaborationist papers. When others, writing in French magazines, denounce his wartime course, he shrugs them off as "professionals of the Liberation." His friends have tried to excuse him by saying that he wrote anti-racist stories which the Nazi censor rejected, but he himself offers no defense for what he did or did not do. As a practicing pessimist, he prefers to meet such, questions, as he does most others, merely with a silent stare...
Belgium's royal question became last week a question of the royal word. Exiled King Leopold had agreed, if he were allowed to return to Brussels, to transfer the throne temporarily to his son Prince Baudouin. This was acceptable to anti-Leopoldist Socialists and Liberals, if Leopold would guarantee not to interfere with Baudouin's regency. Some suggested that the monarch might stay in the Belgian countryside and devote himself to golf; others proposed the Congo. Then from Switzerland Leopold himself cut in huffily: "It is not necessary that I be asked for guarantees, which can add nothing...