The first Christmas card has arrived, and, of course, it's not a Christmas card in the ordinary sense, but A Christmas Cracker by John Julius Norwich, sent by that wonderful bookshop G. Heywood Hill of Curzon Street, London. It is subtitled "being a commonplace selection", a fine miscellany, perhaps a bit sombre this time, thrawn even. But first a comical lesson in history. A hilarious daily report on Napoleon's progress after he escaped from Elba and marched on Paris. The French government newspaper Le Moniteur Universel gave brief daily reports on his progress. Such as: "The man-eater has come out of his lair; the ogre of Corsica has just disembarked at the Golfe of Juan; the tiger has arrived at Gap; the monster slept at Grenoble; the tyrant has passed through Lyon; the usurper has been seen sixty leagues from the capital. Bonaparte is advancing with great strides, but he will never enter Paris. Tomorrow Napoleon will be at our ramparts; the Emperor has arrived at Fontainebleau; His Imperial Majesty yesterday evening entered his castle, the Tuileries, among his faithful subjects." Amazing that the earlier editions of the newspaper survived. Still in France, the Cracker quotes an art critic, Matthew Prichard, who wrote to a friend: "In the English Church at Monte Carlo, it is impossible to give out a hymn with a number as low as 36, for fear lest the whole congregation leave the edifice to play the figure at the tables." And with our own Government's situation in mind, the words of Queen Victoria, quoted from Peter Vansittarts's book Memory of England, may strike a chord. She wrote: "These are trying moments, and it seems to me a defect in our much-famed constitution to have to part with any admirable government, like Lord Salisbury's for no question of any importance, or any particular reason, merely on account of the number of votes."
There is an excerpt from a Daily Telegraph of 1990 about His Highness Prince Johannes von Thurn und Taxis "who more than recouped the family fortune after the loss of six castles and some 200,000 acres in the wake of the second World War". He believed that aristocrats were different from ordinary mortals "and his own behaviour supported this notion". His sense of humour, for example. On his way to the Shah of Iran's extravagant celebrations in Persepolis, he secreted some coleslaw in a sickbag on the plane, feigned sickness during the flight, retched violently, and proceeded to the disgust of his unaristocratic fellowpassengers to eat the contents of the sickbag. Happy Christmas? There are cheerful bits; another day.