Here the enthusiastic traveller may visit a palace, built within thirty years or so, where the descendant of so long a line of kings keeps up a semblance of royalty; and he will be shown his jewels, gold head-dresses pyramidal and tinselly, a sacred sword, a sacred lance, and odd, old-fashioned ornaments presented to him by European potentates in the sixties; he may see a throne-room with a gorgeous gaudy throne surmounted by a huge white nine-tiered umbrella; he may see a wat, very spick and span and new, with a great deal of gilt about it and a silver floor; and should he have a well-furnished memory and an alert imagination he may amuse himself with sundry reflections upon the trappings of royalty, the passing of empire, and the deplorable taste in art of crowned heads.
But if rather than a serious traveller he is a silly flippant person he may amuse himself with a little story.
Once upon a time at the palace of Phnom-Penh there was a great function for the reception of the new French governor and his wife, and the king and all his court were dressed in their grandest clothes. The governor's wife was shy and new to the country and for something to say admired a beautiful and jewelled belt that the monarch wore. Etiquette and oriental politeness forced him immediately to take it off and offer it to her; but the belt was the only thing that kept up his royal trousers, so he turned to the prime minister and asked him to give him the belt, a trifle less grand, that he himself was wearing. The prime minister undid it and gave it to his master, but turned to the minister of war who stood next to him and asked him to give him his. The minister of war turned to the grand chamberlain and made the same request, and so it went on down the line from minister to minister, from one official to another, till at last a small page-boy was seen hurrying from the palace holding up his trousers with both hands. For he, the most insignificant of all that gathering, had found no one to give him a belt.
But the traveller before he leaves Phnom-Penh will be well advised to visit the museum, since here, probably for the first time in his life, he will see, among much that is dull and commonplace, examples of a school of sculpture that will give him a good deal to think about. he will see at least one statue that is as beautiful as anything that the Mayans or the archaic Greeks ever wrought from stone. But if, like me, he is a person of slow perceptions, it will not for some time occur to him that here, unexpectedly, he has come upon something that will for the rest of his life enrich his soul. So might a man buy a plot of land to build himself a little house and then discover that there was a gold mine underneath it.
+-mymaughamcollection.blogspot.com-+ | | | | \|/ | | \~|~/ | | ,#####\/ | ,\/§§§§ | | # #\./#__|_§_\./ | | # \./ # _|_§ \./ | | # #/ # | § \ | | # # # | `~§§§§§ | +--------mmccl.blogspot.com--------+