KING AND HIS TOYS

Evening Star, Issue 21504, 31 August 1933, Page 1

KING AND HIS TOYS

PASSIONS AND FOLLIES OF MAD LUDWIGS King Otto of Bavaria reigned for thirty years in a straitjacket. And that was not so lorg ago. It was in 1916, when Europe had other Calvaries to endure, that this strange monarch cpiietly slipped his cable and drifted out into eternity. You may rosd of him, and of his fatal and fantastic line, in ‘ The Ludwigs of Bavaria,’ by Henry Channon, a book just published. He kept a strange court of doctors ard gaolers who called him Majesty, and endured as best they might this “ enormously fat animal who tore his food with his lingers,” and spent the warm days in swatting Hies. He played with toys—sate toys that the Government had provided; sometimes he startled the countryside with shrill maniacal shrieks; and then, into the head which he had been battering on the wall of his cell would enter dim notions of his cloudy majesty and ho would strut and utter his commands. A STRANGE RACE. A strange race, these Wittclsbachs, accustomed for centuries to make throne their footstools, to have the dispositions of crowns and mitres, and to penist like a rock in uninterrupted sovereignty when other dynasties were coming and going like tides. In (his book they arc put on parade by anhistorian who has wrung out the last essence of their madness and their charm, “ Fascinating, brooding, gifted, bored,” they move through these pages Taeir dark nervous beauty, their crutl fates, their passion for the arts, ther follies and madness, make theii one of the most fascinating families in history. Easy to see that, but not so easy to do what Mr Channon has done here; cormy to the w'ritten page the dark and Ireamlike texture of ancientry dissolviig in the mists of mania and hallucination. LOST CROWN .FOR LADY. He has concentrated more particularlyon the Ludwigs. On that first Ludwig who gave his yonta to the cold charms of classical sculpture and his old age to the warm enclantment of the dancer Lola Montez,;for whoso sake he lost a crown. On the second Ludwig, brother of thelmacl Otto who succeeded him, and liiniclf mad and melancholy—mad on Wagner and most melancholy in selfimiosed loneliness that ended in a deiih struggle with his doctor. ind then the last Ludwig who became Hegent in 1912 and King in 1910 —T a short, fat figure looking like Father Christmas with his round, hoiest face, white beard, and friendly smile.” He abdicated in 1918.