Carol Travels

Servitors flitted excitedly about the Hotel de la Ville, Milan. While an adept facchino hastily pasted the establishment's labels on a small mountain of luggage, he grinned to observe a dictatorial Roumanian gentleman who fumed with the proprietor over the last items of a considerable bill. Suddenly a petite red-haired young woman emerged from the hotel lift with the abdicated Crown Prince Carol of Roumania. Before them scurried the Roumanian gentleman, dictatorial no longer, to usher Mme. Magda Lupescu and the former Crown Prince into an automobile which sped to the great Stazione Centrale.

Other motors followed them. They contained pressmen whose blase hearts were a-thumping. Was Carol, after dwelling sub rosa in Milan with Mme. Lupescu for nearly two months (TIME, Jan. 18 et seq.), about to return to Bucharest? Was he going to resume his abdicated rank? Would Mme. Lupescu attempt to go with him, or would she merely see him off? ...

The correspondents became vexed when "M. Scarlat Mondstireanu" (Carol's incognito) and Mme. Lupescu were shepherded into the Paris Train de Luxe by Carol's officious Roumanian secretary. Throughout the night, all persons concerned jolted and jounced in the crosswise cubicles of that admirable and omniscient concern, La Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-restaurants et Wagons-lits et des Grands Express Europeens.*

During the trip Carol neglected to shave before the ingenious folding washstand provided in the individual compartments of all wagons-lits. The correspondents, thoroughly out of humor by morning, reported that "this Hohenzollern scion had obviously not even washed." They further added to his troubles by wiring ahead for whole platoons of cameramen. At Paris the last wheeze of the air-brakes was drowned amid the boom of flashlight powders.

Thoroughly annoyed, Carol threw his companion's mink coat over his arm, seized her bouquet of roses, and requested her, in Roumanian, to leave the wagon-lit by a door at the opposite end from that whence he descended. The cameramen, torn between the two good shots thus offered, exploded their flashlights frantically, cursed vociferously, literally stalked their photographic game on the run. . . .

Outside the station a sleek limousine belonging to the Roumanian Embassy waited. Into it stepped Mme. Lupescu, whose toque was brown. Into it stepped Carol, "whose princely Adam's Apple bounced up and down on his long scrawny neck," according to the now frankly vexed pressmen.

A few moments later, at the Hotel Chambord in the Champs-Elysees, Carol sharply replied to questions as to whether he is about to resume his royal rank. He emitted a single sentence in six languages: "I cannot answer you!" His tormentors exulted over this "admission."

By night they had patched up a new rumor that Carol is in Paris for an "important secret conference which is to prepare the way for his return to Bucharest."

*The International Dining-car and Sleeping-Car Company Operating through European Express Trains. Incidentally about the only concern on friendly terms with all European Governments.

Said by the scurrilous pressmen to have been given her by the hotel servants at Milan, who often reward ladies of the half-world in this fashion, hoping for future patronage.