

E-text prepared by Christine Bell & Marc D'Hooghe
(http://www.freeliterature.org)



MAJESTY

A Novel

by

LOUIS COUPERUS

Newly Translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos

With a Preface by Stephen McKenna







New York
Dodd, Mead and Company
1921




PREFACE


The betting-book in one of London's oldest and most famous clubs
contains a wager, with odds laid at one hundred sovereigns to ten, that
"within five years there will not remain two crowned heads in Europe."
The condition--"in the event of war between Great Britain and
Germany"--was imposed by the date of the wager, for one member was
venturing his hundred to ten at a moment when another was dining with
him to kill time before the British prime minister's ultimatum took
effect: the imperial German government had to deliver its reply before
midnight, by Greenwich time, or eleven o'clock, by Central European
reckoning.

Since the fourth of August, 1914, the King of the Hellenes, the Czar of
Bulgaria, the Emperor-King of Austria-Hungary, the German Kaiser and a
host of smaller princes have abdicated and sought asylum in countries
left neutral by the war; the Czar of All the Russias also abdicated, but
was executed without an opportunity of escape. Thus, though republican
and royalist may protest that the wager was too sanguine or too
pessimistic, the challenger must have taken credit for his prescience,
as three of the great powers and two of the lesser converted, one after
another, their half-divine sovereign into their wholly material scapegoat;
by no great special pleading he might claim that the bet was won in
spirit if not in fact when the morning of Armistice