conviction that the hierarchic principle of God is incarnate in a King.
He tried to get back three times. Three times he appeared on the Rio Negro and set off up-river to cross the Cordillera. All three times he was thwarted and sent packing to France, once through Indian treachery, next through the vigilance of an Argentine governor (who saw through his disguise of short hair, dark glasses and the pseudonym of M. Jean Prat). The third attempt is open to different interpretations: either the gauchosâ unrelieved diet of meat caused an intestinal blockage, or some freemasons poisoned him for renouncing his vows. The fact is, in 1877 he appeared half-dead on the operating theatre of a Buenos Aires hospital. A Messageries-Maritimes steamer landed him at Bordeaux. He went to Tourtoirac, to the house of his nephew Jean, a butcher. For one painful year he worked as the village lamplighter, and then he died, on September tt)th 1878.
The later history of the Kingdom of Araucania and Patagonia belongs rather to the obsessions of bourgeois France than to the politics of South America. In default of a successor from the Tounens family, a M. Gustave Achille Laviarde interposed himself and reigned as Achille Ier. He was a native of Rheims where his mother ran a wash-house known locally as âThe Castle of Green Frogsâ. He was a Bonapartist, a freemason, an âactionnaireâ of Möet and Chandon, an expert on barrage balloons (which he somewhat resembled) and an acquaintance of Verlaine. He financed his receptions with his commercial enterprise known as the Royal Society of the Constellation of the South, never removed his court from Paris, but did open consulates in Mauritius, Haiti, Nicaragua and Port-Vendres. When he made overtures to the Vatican, a Chilean prelate said: âThis kingdom exists only in the minds of drunken idiots.â
The third king, Dr Antoine Cros (Antoine II) had been physician to the Emperor Dom Pedro of Brazil and died at Asnières after reigning a year and a half. He was an amateur lithographer in the style of Hieronymus Bosch and brother of Charles Cros, the inventor and poet of Le Coffret de Santal.
Dr Crosâs daughter succeeded and passed the crown to her son, M. Jacques Bernard. For a second time a monarch of Araucania went behind bars, for services to the Pétain Government.
M. Philippe Boiry, his successor, reigns modestly with the title of hereditary prince and has restored the house at La Chèze for use as a holiday home.
I asked him if he knew Kiplingâs story The Man who would be King.
âCertainly.â
âDonât you think itâs odd that Kiplingâs heroes, Peachey and Dravot, should also have been freemasons?â
âPurely a coincidence,â the Prince said.
9
I LEFT the Rio Negro and went on south to Port Madryn.
A hundred and fifty-three Welsh colonists landed here off the brig Mimosa in 1865. They were poor people in search of a New Wales, refugees from cramped coal-mining valleys, from a failed independence movement, and from Parliamentâs ban on Welsh in schools. Their leaders had combed the earth for a stretch of open country uncontaminated by Englishmen. They chose Patagonia for its absolute remoteness and foul climate; they did not want to get rich.
The Argentine Government gave them land along the Chubut River. From Madryn it was a march of forty miles over the thorn desert. And when they did reach the valley, they had the impression that God, and not the Government, had given them the land.
Port Madryn was a town of shabby concrete buildings, tin bungalows, tin warehouses and a wind-flattened garden. There was a cemetery of black cypresses and shiny black marble tombstones. The Calle Saint-Exupéry was a reminder that the storm in Vol de Nuit was somewhere in these parts.
I walked along the esplanade and looked out at the even line of cliffs spreading round the bay. The cliffs were a lighter grey than the grey
He tried to get back three times. Three times he appeared on the Rio Negro and set off up-river to cross the Cordillera. All three times he was thwarted and sent packing to France, once through Indian treachery, next through the vigilance of an Argentine governor (who saw through his disguise of short hair, dark glasses and the pseudonym of M. Jean Prat). The third attempt is open to different interpretations: either the gauchosâ unrelieved diet of meat caused an intestinal blockage, or some freemasons poisoned him for renouncing his vows. The fact is, in 1877 he appeared half-dead on the operating theatre of a Buenos Aires hospital. A Messageries-Maritimes steamer landed him at Bordeaux. He went to Tourtoirac, to the house of his nephew Jean, a butcher. For one painful year he worked as the village lamplighter, and then he died, on September tt)th 1878.
The later history of the Kingdom of Araucania and Patagonia belongs rather to the obsessions of bourgeois France than to the politics of South America. In default of a successor from the Tounens family, a M. Gustave Achille Laviarde interposed himself and reigned as Achille Ier. He was a native of Rheims where his mother ran a wash-house known locally as âThe Castle of Green Frogsâ. He was a Bonapartist, a freemason, an âactionnaireâ of Möet and Chandon, an expert on barrage balloons (which he somewhat resembled) and an acquaintance of Verlaine. He financed his receptions with his commercial enterprise known as the Royal Society of the Constellation of the South, never removed his court from Paris, but did open consulates in Mauritius, Haiti, Nicaragua and Port-Vendres. When he made overtures to the Vatican, a Chilean prelate said: âThis kingdom exists only in the minds of drunken idiots.â
The third king, Dr Antoine Cros (Antoine II) had been physician to the Emperor Dom Pedro of Brazil and died at Asnières after reigning a year and a half. He was an amateur lithographer in the style of Hieronymus Bosch and brother of Charles Cros, the inventor and poet of Le Coffret de Santal.
Dr Crosâs daughter succeeded and passed the crown to her son, M. Jacques Bernard. For a second time a monarch of Araucania went behind bars, for services to the Pétain Government.
M. Philippe Boiry, his successor, reigns modestly with the title of hereditary prince and has restored the house at La Chèze for use as a holiday home.
I asked him if he knew Kiplingâs story The Man who would be King.
âCertainly.â
âDonât you think itâs odd that Kiplingâs heroes, Peachey and Dravot, should also have been freemasons?â
âPurely a coincidence,â the Prince said.
9
I LEFT the Rio Negro and went on south to Port Madryn.
A hundred and fifty-three Welsh colonists landed here off the brig Mimosa in 1865. They were poor people in search of a New Wales, refugees from cramped coal-mining valleys, from a failed independence movement, and from Parliamentâs ban on Welsh in schools. Their leaders had combed the earth for a stretch of open country uncontaminated by Englishmen. They chose Patagonia for its absolute remoteness and foul climate; they did not want to get rich.
The Argentine Government gave them land along the Chubut River. From Madryn it was a march of forty miles over the thorn desert. And when they did reach the valley, they had the impression that God, and not the Government, had given them the land.
Port Madryn was a town of shabby concrete buildings, tin bungalows, tin warehouses and a wind-flattened garden. There was a cemetery of black cypresses and shiny black marble tombstones. The Calle Saint-Exupéry was a reminder that the storm in Vol de Nuit was somewhere in these parts.
I walked along the esplanade and looked out at the even line of cliffs spreading round the bay. The cliffs were a lighter grey than the grey
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