Sauvage first stole the British royal family’s family jewels, then forced the-then still alive British queen Elizabeth the 2nd (which, I know, sounds like the name of an ocean liner) to abdicate – by threatening her corgis to death, no less – and, finally, was a George the 5th whisker away from owning the sceptre of that sceptred isle.
But as the jolly English idiotic idiom goes: You can have a Rishi in 10 Downing, but you can’t have a noble Sauvage heading the state. It’s about one gene pool against another, and Prince Pascal may have positively had the right rhesus bloodline, but certainly the wrong accent. So, merde, no British crown.
Inarguably the most tragic moment in 21st century royalnama, Prince Pascal’s touching moment where he touched the British crown, placed it on his head to feel how it would sit on his head – uneasily – uttering the famous three words while trying on different angles – ‘Yes? No? Maybe?’ – encapsulates the grandeur of the tragi-comic moment that is never to come. Watch it for yourself here at bit.ly/42ad6OY and silently weep.
For those of you who fail to understand the value, the poise, the old world charm that the Marvel universe of British royalty holds – think Barbie-Ken meets Rashtrapati Bhavan with a dash of Merchant-Ivory slathered in crushed quiche – it would be as pointless as trying to make you appreciate the beauty of a doily when you scoff at the very idea of high tea. For those who do find a quiet grandeur in all this coronation kitsch – a deep kitsch with a crisp, light pasty case and delicate flavours of equestrian spinsters, broad bin bags and fresh tarragon – the thrill of having watched a near-coronation must have been as keen as it was scrumptious.
For us in India, the pleasure of binocularing Britwit royalty is two-fold. For one, local royalty has been consigned to coffee table books and has long become part of the extended hospitality industry – half-5-star-hoteliana, half-zum-zum-zamindari phantasmagoria. Buckingham Palace innards still provide any desi daffodil worth his or her Wordsworth and born on the wrong side of ‘God Save the Queen’ – no, no, not the variation of the current British national anthem that Liverpool fans joyfully boo to before a game at Anfield, but the punk anthem concocted during the British queen’s ‘silver jubilee’ by the tutak-tutak tukde-tukde haijjo maro Sex Pistols gang in 1977 – some mulligatawny comfort.
For another, it’s about a variation of what the Palestinian-American pianist Edward Said said – not Orientalism, the West’s depiction of eastern cultures as a stereotypical monolithic ‘thing’, but Occidentalism, the Anglophonic desi’s quaint, quite bathetic depiction of the West as a monolithic thing. In this case, a Kiplingering world that denies a post-Beatles, post-Branson, post-Brexit and certainly post-Blyton Britain, In this Gilbert and Sullivan Netflix series, scones and split-infinitives are still to be mmm-ed while Buck Pal, the royal hotel, is the genteel napkin-dabbed-at-the-corner-of-the-mouth riposte to Silicon Valley, where they horrifyingly spell ‘flavour’ as ‘flavor’ and pronounce ‘route’ as ‘rowt’. It’s a pity that there could be no King Pascal Sauvage. A heavily French-accented Brit king would have whittled down all the Rajmatazz. The tourism and the money from coronation towels and mugs may have then gone where they belong – at least to yesterday’s Premier League games that had to be rescheduled because of some plant-whisperer becoming the king of England town. (We all know what they thought of him in Wales when he was prince of Wales: cachu. Look it up in Google translate.)
But then, it turns out, Prince Pascal Sauvage was a character in the 2003 movie, Johnny English. So Charlie and his chocolate factory it is.