The Princess Aline: A Chase Across Europe for a Face
Richard Harding Davis follows a young New Yorker who falls for a princess he has never met and sets out to be introduced.
Richard Harding Davis's The Princess Aline is a short society romance built on a single, faintly absurd premise: a young man decides he is in love with a woman he has only seen at a distance, and organises his considerable leisure around the project of meeting her. That woman is H. R. H. the Princess Aline of Hohenwald; the young man is Morton Carlton, wealthy, unattached and, as the book takes some care to establish, a person for whom life has so far been comfortable.
The opening chapter is unhurried about setting him up. We are told he came into his money and independence early, that the world had rewarded what he had done, and that he was ready to spend that credit on whatever he liked. This is the sort of hero who can afford a whim, and the Princess is his whim. The book is honest about the mechanics of that: Carlton's pursuit is less a courtship than an exercise in access and introductions.
A romance about logistics
What is unexpected here is how much of the story is about arranging things rather than feeling them. In the second chapter, questioned by his companion Miss Morris about how he intends to proceed, Carlton lays out a plan that sounds more like a social manoeuvre than a passion.
"To-morrow morning I will go to the Row; I will be sure to find some one there who knows all about them--where they are going, and who they are seeing, and what engagements they may have. Then it will only be a matter of looking up some friend in the Household or in one of the embassies who can present me."
Miss Morris is disappointed by this, and she says so, complaining that it is a commonplace ending to something that began romantically. That exchange is the book being a little wry about itself: the narrative even notes that Carlton's plan goes wrong because an introduction, like a bargain, requires more than one willing party. The comedy is gentle rather than sharp, and the reader who wants sustained emotional heat will find the temperature kept low on purpose.
The texture: talk, travel and taste
The prose is fluent and conversational, and Carlton is given long stretches of talk. Arriving near Athens in the third chapter, he delivers an enthusiastic set-piece about beauty, health and antiquity, recommending the city as a cure for the noise of modern life the way one might recommend a spa.
"You have only to drink in the atmosphere and you are cured. I know no better antidote than Athens for a siege of cable-cars and muddy asphalt pavements and a course of Robert Elsmeres and the Heavenly Twins."
That passage shows both the charm and the limits of the book. It is a supple, unforced piece of writing, and it moves easily from statues to blue sky to a theory of what makes great art. But it also dates the book: the offhand references to particular novels of the day, and the confident equation of straight limbs and marble pillars with civilisation, belong to a specific late-Victorian mood. A modern reader can enjoy the rhythm of the speech while noticing that its assumptions are of their period.
Who it will reward
- Readers who like light, well-mannered romance where the pleasure is in the talk and the travel rather than in suspense.
- Anyone curious about the leisured, transatlantic social world these characters move through, sketched with an easy hand.
- Readers happy to sit with an old-fashioned tone and vocabulary, including attitudes that read as dated now.
It will bore anyone hoping for a fast plot or deep interiority. The stakes are small by design, and the object of Carlton's affection is for much of the book more a goal than a person. The ending, though, does something quietly humane: the last we see is the Princess herself, tearing up a piece of paper and, in the book's final words, admitting that she is a little homesick and wants to go home to Grasse.
It is a modest book that knows it is modest, told with polish and a light touch of self-mockery. Taken on those terms, it is an agreeable few hours; taken as anything more ambitious, it will disappoint.
The book, free to read
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