The Jolly Little King of Yvetot—And His Nightcap

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 92, 9 July 1927, Page 24

The Jolly Little King of Yvetot —And His Nightcap

aMONG the hundred and six French towns in which the office of subprefect was abolished several months ago, is Yvetot in Normandy. Of all the townships whose pretensions have been dampened by this administrative decree, Yvetot is the one which points most wistfully the moral, sic transit gloria mundi. For Yvetot has know distinction in the past, and privileges of a very special kind. Memories are still rife there of the titular kings of Yvetot,

who fought the English and the infidel and held themselves proudly free from homage to the kings of France. To-day, however, Yvetot is a sleepy republican town of some 7,000 inhabitants, writes Rose Lee in the New York “Times,” conspicuous only for its dairy products and its traditions. It has been ruled by kings, and. now is not important enough to justify even a sub-prefecture, while throughout France every adult and every school child smiles at the once-proud name, associating it with the “jolly little King of Yvetot” —the Old King Cole of France.

Yvetot to-day is a place whose reputation hangs upon a song—the witty and light-hearted song of Beranger, whose charm is not at all impaired by the fact that it was intended as satire upon the current Bourbon of the day. It celebrates a monarch whose insignificance was only matched by his good humour; a paragon of the bohemian virtues, as far removed from the reactionary Charles X as from the courtier-kings of medieval Yvetot: There flourished once a potentate, Whom history doesn’t name; He rose at ten, retired at eight, And snored unknown to fame. A nightcap for his crown he wore, A simple cotton thing, Which Jeanneton to his bedside bore, This jolly little king. Ho, ho, ho, ho! Ha, ha, ha, ha! This jolly little King!

From all signs, the King was a practical philosopher, who made the most of life. He was free from self-import-ance, that costly vice of rulers, and wasted no coin in keeping up appearances. His revenues went for solid benefits, not for show; his appetite verged on the heroic. The new eggs and moist cheeses, and the excellent plump fowl, which still stack the stalls on market days in Yvetot, could hardly have sufficed for the royal table. The King banqueted four time a day and dispensed with cavalcades: No cumbrous state his steps would clog, Fear to the winds he’d fling;

His only escort was his dog, This jolly little King.

Mounted upon a jackass, he would ride through the parishes of Yvetot, Saint-Clair-sur-le-Mont and Saint- Ma-rie-aux-Champs, which formed his little kingdom. And peasant girls in wooden shoes and high Norman bonnets would run -to the roadside to call out their respects. Maybe he would ride out in the springtime, majestically slow and fat, his cotton nightcap brushing the low-hung apple boughs, his hand outstretched to receive the liquid tribute of his subjects;

He only owned to one excess— He doted on his glass; But when a King gives happiness. His way of life will pass.

There is, of course, the Gallic touch which distinguishes the King of Yvetot from his Teutonic brother, Old King Cole. But so far as posterity is concerned, the two Kings are brothers, born of the same gay Muse. They are fantastic and immortal. They spring from a common impulse to exalt the hearty vagabond; the man who hr.s wit enough to devote himself to tne good things of living, and make no embarrassing demands upon the world.

It is perfectly true that such a figure is more widely appreciated in retro-

spect that in the flesh. When the character of good-humoured wastrel is applied to a living man, he is apt to regard it as libel. Charles X was certainly sensitive on this point. Supposing himself to have been the immediate inspiration of the song, he set his political police upon the impudent author. “The King of Yvetot’’ was one of the chief grounds for the suppression of that volume of Beranger’s songs in which it appeared. Now, a century later, the hymn to the King of Yvetot has lost its power to insult. It lingers on the lips of Frenchmen when the name of Charles X has become immaterial. It has en-

veloped the little town of Yvetot in a Bacchic legend, and has obscured those historical facts of Yvetot which are nearly as quaint as fiction. All the same, it is a pity to forget the history of this tiny kingdom, which parodies the pretensions of royalty on somewhat the same scale as Swift in his Voyage to Lilliput. During the fifteenth century there were really Kings of Yvetot, goodhumoured gallants, but fine lords as well, certainly not satisfied to wear a simple cotton bonnet. There was Jehan IV, the first to employ his kingly title. He owned a house in Paris and enjoyed the favour of Charles V of France, whose steward he was. It is told how Charles V, touring Normandy, paid a visit once to the castle of his regal steward. Arrived at the boundaries of little Yvetot, he turned graciously to his archers: “Put down your bows,” he said, “for there is no more a King of France!” There was Martin, tne son of Jehan IV, who ruled beyond his means and was forced to sell out to the Chamberlain of Charles VI. Martin was the last of those hereditary seigneurs of Yvetot, of whom one distinguished himself at Hastings and another embarked in 1363 with Peter, King of Cyprus, to storm the City of Alexandria. We find him at the head of a minature army, picked and outfitted by himself, assisting at the wars in inlanders. King Martin was proud of his office and omitted none of the trimmings, if we are to judge from a seal preserved in an ancient charter of Yvetot. He is shown seated upon a throne, a modest throne without a back, and his long hair is filleted with a crown. Dressed in a belted suit of mail, he is conferring the accolade upon one of his subjects. Presently, he attempted to coin money and, lacking the needful bullion, presented the world with a weird and freakish currency—-brass, stamped with the head of a nail! But inflation ruined him, as it -.as many a mightier ruler. To pay for his delusions of grandeur he ceded his kingdom on May 2, 1401, to Pierre, the Stammerer, Chamberlain of France, who authorised the deal.

The last sovereign of Yvetot was Martin du Bellay, a monarch by marriage. He is remembered for having rebuilt the church and the chateau, for having introduced running water into Yvetot. He put up a brave battle for independence, but was finally f ceu uy Francis I and Parliament to curtail his State.

Of the royalty of Yvetot hardly a trace remains to-day. The first street that you take on leaving the station is the Rue de la Republique.

The kingly chateau was battered stone from stone at the time of the French Revolution. The church has been burned and rebuilt in modern style.

The only thing which might recall the Kings of Yvetot and their legal battles is the frequency of lawyers whose neat signs decorate so many of tne house-fronts. Certainly there 're no historic monuments, as the guidebook will tell you. Yvetot, with its straight, unshuttered houses of concrete and its hard-working, stuubornminded citizens, suggests neither a royal nor a ribald past. One murt go elsewhere in France, to the valley of the Peronne—where Pierre Louis Beranger would gather with a band of his intimates known as the “eouvent de sans-souci”—to find an effigy of a King of Yvetot.