Remembrance of Things Past

In Paris last week a septuagenarian beauty sat among Europe's social ruins and dreamed of the evil old days when life had been gay.

Cleo de Merode is a part of Europe's past. It was a time when the snowy shirtfronts of gentlemen and the polished shoulders of ladies gleamed under gaslight, when young bloods drank champagne from the slippers of reigning beauties and hauled their carriages in triumph through the streets. In England, nice people never mentioned sex, or a lady's legs; on the Continent, they mentioned very little else, but with subtlety and circumlocution.

Cleo de Merode tiptoed to fame (and royal favor) as a ballet dancer. One night, when he was over 60, big-nosed, silken-bearded King Leopold II saw Cleo dance at the opera in Paris. He held up the show for half an hour while he talked to her in the lobby. Next day the town was buzzing.

Leopold was a man of many amours, and he took them the way a child eats candy. But his infatuation for Cleo caused as big a buzz as Ludwig of Bavaria's fling with Lola Montez. Proletarians denounced it in dingy bistros, and bourgeois canvassed it dreamily on the conjugal couch. Cleo became almost as scandalous as conditions in the Congo rubber jungles, which Leopold had also bequeathed his country. The king's enemies, of whom he had many, called him "Cleopold." L'affaire Cleo enlivened the otherwise boring business of Cabinet meetings.

Then the affair, after flashing briefly like Isolde's torch, flared out. But Cleo still had her art. After World War I, she retired, gave dancing lessons to the daughters of French aristocracy. In 1938 she returned to the stage to dance a few steps in a show called Revue de 1900.

Last week, in her chilly but elegant Paris apartment, Cleo, past 70, looked about 40. Her hair was still brown and luxuriant, parted demurely in the middle as it was in the great exotic days. She had no wrinkles on her face or hands--only her once incomparable neck was a somewhat ravaged column. She was just back in Paris from the provinces, where, like Gertrude Stein, she had sat out World War II.

Paris, which still admires Mistinguett's ancient legs, still admired Cleo's ancient beauty. But the world had become shabby. "The opera," she said, "isn't what it used to be. In the old days around 1900 the grand staircase and the lobby used to be a show in itself. Nowadays people go to the opera in their working clothes, and I am afraid that pretty soon they will go in their overalls."

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