RUMANIA: Playboy into Statesman

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A major operation is also being performed on the King's Palace which is to have two new symmetrical wings and, when completed, will look like a small Buckingham. To complete the work in record time, night shifts work under floodlights. Throughout the city, as new buildings go up, old ones have come down, but around the Palace whole blocks have been demolished to make a new Royal Square between the Calea Victoriei and Boulevard Bratianu, a quarter of a mile away. Centerpiece of this new square will be the equestrian statue of Rumania's first Hohenzollern King, Carol I. Meanwhile, Carol II is staying at Cotroceni Palace, his late mother's favorite home, on the outskirts of town.

Since 1938 Carol has not only been King but dictator of Rumania. That he should undertake all this reconstruction in such perilous times is perhaps proof enough of his faith in his ability to maintain Rumania as a going concern for some time to come.

Royal Rake. Carol's life is the story of the Rake's Progress in reverse, a tale of the dissipated, headstrong young man who got better as he got older, winding up a serious-minded, at times even enlightened, ruler. In point of fact, Carol was never a black sheep. He was as good a product as was likely to come out of the court in which he was reared—a court which reeked with corruption and vice, which was ruled by a conniving and ruthless camarilla, in which mother was pitted against son, brother against brother, sister against sister.

Carol's father, Prince (later King) Ferdinand, anticipated his son's later escapades by falling in love with a pretty young poetess, Helen Vacarescu; according to one version he eloped to Venice and renounced his right to the throne. Finally persuaded by his uncle, old King Carol I, to return to Bucharest, he was then married to Princess Marie, daughter of the Duke of Edinburgh and Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, granddaughter of Britain's Queen Victoria.

Plotting Mother. A blushing 17-year-old girl at her marriage, Princess Marie was not long in mastering the arts of Balkan intrigue. She quickly allied herself with the powerful bourgeois Bratianu family which had founded the modern Kingdom of Rumania by revolting against Turkish rule in 1877. Princess Marie's favorite soon became Prince Barbu Stirbey, Chamberlain of the King's Household and, more important, brother-in-law of Ion Bratianu. Prince Ferdinand came to the throne in 1914, a weakling from the start, and thereafter the real power in Rumania was lodged in the hands of the Bratianus, Prince Stirbey and Queen Marie.

No project was too ambitious or too devious for the Queen. She rode roughshod over her Hohenzollern husband's natural inclinations and brought Rumania into the Allied side of the World War. She later marched into the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919 and marched out with a treaty which doubled Rumania's size at the expense of Russia and Hungary.