The Re-Gifted King

Ever get one of those presents that while it was nice enough, there just wasn’t a place for it in your home, but then you remember you've been invited to that wedding of people you don’t really know but still need to give a present?  With a new card and some wrapping paper, the problem is solved.

This is kind of like that fruit cake that used to make the rounds during the holidays.  I’m convinced there was actually only one of them in the country, each recipient just passed it along to the next poor victim.  If you were wondering why you haven’t seen that fruit cake in a while, that tinned monstrosity is sitting in a police evidence locker, marked Exhibit A in a Yuletide assault case.  

Our regifting story starts with King Louis XVI of France, an indecisive foolish king and a prime example of royal inbreeding, Louis had ascended to the throne at the age of fifteen, and promptly married the fourteen-year-old Marie-Antoinette, his cousin, from Austria. The king was ridiculed throughout the country because it took him seven years to consummate his marriage and France being France, this lapse damn near qualified as treason.

Adding to the general dissatisfaction among the peasants, as an ally of Austria during the Seven Years War, France had lost the war.  Quelle surprise! La France a perdu une guerre!  Forced to pay an indemnity he could not afford, the king promptly raised taxes again.  The peasants were revolting—in every sense of the word—and the king and the queen rather quickly became short with each other.  Sort of lost their heads over taxes, so to speak.

Poor Louis had spent a little money wisely, at least from the American point of view.  The king had sent money and arms to support the American Revolution.  Louis certainly wasn’t a fan of democracies, but he was wholeheartedly in favor of anybody who wanted to fight the British.  Because of this, when John Rogers Clark founded a new city in Kentucky, he named it after Louis, though a recent survey showed that most residents of the city incorrectly believe the city was named after Louis XIV a far more capable monarch.

Eventually, France tried to collect the entire set of governments, passing quickly through absolute monarchy, republic, anarchy, dictatorship, Imperial monarchy, and eventually reinstalling the same original inbred royal family back on the throne.  As we say in Texas, they went around three sides of the barn to get at the horse at the end of the rope in their hand.

With her uncle safely on the throne, Princess Marie-Thérèse, the eldest daughter of Louis and Marie-Antoinette toured France, and while visiting Montpellier promised the city a special gift—a larger than life statue of her father.  Evidently second prize would have been two such statues.  The people of Montpellier were too polite to refuse, so in 1829, the large marble statue was erected in the center of town, where it stayed for an entire year before France had yet another revolution that overthrew the monarchy.  

The statue of Louis was crated up and placed in a military dungeon where it was promptly forgotten while France once again played musical chairs with various forms of government, eventually settling for a parliament of prostitutes and bloated plutocrats.  In 1899, a military officer doing an inventory rediscovered the crated statue and it was promptly dragged from the dungeon and gifted to the town’s mayor.

Nobody really wanted a statue of Louis—a monarch so incredibly inept that he touched off the terrors of the French Revolution.  As far as I can tell, the only other statue of the king is the memorial to Louis and Marie-Antoinette above their graves at the Basilica of St Denis.  People were not exactly lining up in Montpellier to see the statue, so the mayor gave it to the town’s university, who sent it to the university museum, who promptly sent it back to the city, where it stood in the basement of the city archives, serenely watching over dusty bookcases and bundles of slowly rotting paper.

More than half a century later, the city of Montpellier became a sister city to Louisville, Kentucky, and someone remembered the unwanted chunk of white marble littering the basement of the city archives.  If Louisville liked old Louis that much, they would just love to have his statue, which was promptly dragged out of the cellar and trucked to Marseilles, where the United States Navy obligingly stowed it in the cargo hold of an aging old freighter, the USS Aldebaran.

Unloaded at Norfolk, the statue spent a week on the pier before the city of Louisville had it trucked to the city square.  Wisely, the people of Montpellier had not told the mayor of Louisville about the present in advance.  Just before Christmas 1966, Louis was erected in the center of town, close to the statue of Thomas Jefferson. The two statues stand with their backs to each other—ironic, since in life the two were friends.

Louis, finally having found a permanent home, was left alone for more than fifty years.  Recently, when statues across the country have been attacked and destroyed to make the country safe from…. something, an angry mob once again attacked the poor king.  Paint was splashed over him, and once again, the monarch felt the sting of a cold blade.  This time, instead of his head, Louis lost a foot and his right hand.  

Currently, the city of Louisville is having the statue repaired, with the intention of once again placing the King back near his old post in the center of town.  I have a suggestion for the people of Louisville.  In the last fifty years, they have also become the sister city of Quito, Ecuador, and I would bet anything the people of Quito would just love a Christmas present.  Just don’t tell them about it advance, let it be a surprise.

Oh, and one more thing:  It is incorrect to say that Louis XVI lost his head.  He knows exactly where it is, since, when France finally buried his coffin in St Denis, his head was carefully placed between his feet.