THE QUEEN WHO LIVES IN EXILE.

Dunstan Times, Issue 3145, 27 November 1922, Page 2

THE QUEEN WHO LIVES IN EXILE.

(By Hugh Polla-rd.) Zita, ex-Empress of Austria', lives now at Lequietio, an unknown haven in the Pyrenees l . It is an odd' mediaeval town miles away from anywhere; no railway intrudes a modern presence, and tourists are neither desired nor welcomed. You get to the place over mountain roads, through hairpin defiles, where the sun only strikes at noon, the people talk Basque, and 1 despise the Spaniards in whose realm they live, and at last, coming to the lip of the blue Bi6cayan sea, even the stranger may taste the ealt bitterness 1 of exile. Lequietio is a little jfeown or village set in a covei not unlike to Falmouth) on our pleasant Cornish coast. The grey rock scarps, rise to forbidding heights, and! thle mouth of the harbor is blocked by ai granite island rising grey and green backed against the deep blue of the Bay of Biscay. This grey and sun-bleached port of exile rustles secretly to the tread of cream-garbed Carmelites. Suave Jesuits from Loyola, the birthplace of the great Company of Jesus, come across the hills a bare twenty miles of mountain country. The inns— it would be an anachronism to call them hotels — throb with an unaccustomed traffic of disguised Hungarian loyalists; there are couriers in motor cars and gallant, if impoverished, courtiers afoot. Her Catholic Majesty has brought romance hot-foot to Lequietio. Bun grey rock, the stm-pareheA-green of the stunted trees, and the blue of the rough Biscay an sea; a fish dead fish —scented air. ' That is the atmosphere and the unchanging hori- ? zon that greets one who was Empress of the Dual Monarchy. And the people, the stern, self-centred Basques—what have they to say of the "princesa" who is in exile among them? "A foolish woman," they say. "She is agood Catholic but foolish," and ber husband paid the full cost of her caprice." They shrug their shoulders, for what is an ex-Empress of Austria to the Basques ? Yet—and they are a curious "and a fine old folk, these Basques—since her ex-Catholic Majesty came to the place moth-eaten old Carlist banners hang from window, blazoning old but honorable traditions of loyalty to an ideal. Ant-like the friars and clerics swarm about the hot stone quays. The little princes come gambolling down to bathe like common children in the surf, audi the word passes, "There i 6 the Emperor " And, sublimely ridiculous as it may seem in this heyday of democracy, you, if you are the right sort of fellow—well, wish the youngster all the best of,luck.