Some thoughts about public and private life
The current wave of media headlines that Charlotte Casiraghi is attracting for her latest intriguing romantic alliance has brought to the discussion in royal Instagram the romantic alliances of others in her family. I’m seeing comments touch on many strains of comparison and contrast. That’s what we do, humans; we compare and contrast. For all that I agree with the nobler comments about the bad habit of drawing such comparisons, I don’t see it going away anytime soon. As long as humans are driven by ego, there will be endless comparisons—of ourselves to others, of others against others. It is endless, the ways that we measure achievements and attributes, judge failures, and exhibit cruelty towards each other. Moreover, the ego loves gossip. It loves to feel superior, smarter, and ‘more together’ than others. The task of this article is to address one particular type of comment which I have noticed more than a few times in the wake of the Paris Match exhibition of Charlotte and the critically acclaimed novelist Nicolas Matthieu. (It’s an amusing article, decorated with photos of the couple on March 7, dining at the Restaurant à la Ville d’Epinal in the 10th arrondissement of Paris. (Paris Match does limit free views of their articles, but many libraries, even in my home in the USA, offer digital subscriptions. And may I just say a word about the interesting allusion to Epinal, the author’s native region of northeastern France? One of the funny notes in the article was the suggestion that Charlotte and Nicolas, carrying bags, looked more like students as they left the restaurant and walked to the train station.) People are saying, without meaning it as a compliment for once, “like mother, like daughter.” Here we go again with the criticism of Princess Caroline’s marriage, if we can call it that, to Prince Ernst. For over a decade now (in fact, nearly a decade and a half) Caroline and Ernst have been married in all but name. She lives in Monaco, he in Austria—or London, or Spain, or wherever. They are not living together, that’s the point. Not for many, many years. And yet she is still Her Royal Highness Princess of Hanover. The common assumption seems to be that she stays married in order to keep the title. “She must really like that HRH,” say the naysayers, “or why would she stay married to that man?” That man? The father of her child? Someone she fell in love with when he was technically still married to his first wife—although that marriage could not have been going so well, or why would he have capitulated to Caroline’s attentions? (It’s too common, of course, to shame the woman and forget the man’s role in such affairs.) Sometimes it is good to be a Princess of Monaco instead of the Princess of Wales; one gets to live as she sees fit, the other has to conform and do a sick dance with the British tabloid press. British royals have to answer for everything—the cost of clothing, the travel expenses, hospitalizations, and altered photos. Princess Caroline can just…um…not say anything. That’s exactly what she’s done with respect to her “marriage.” She doesn’t bring it up, and if you bring it up, well, let’s just say you are unlikely to be invited into her presence again. The press might be afraid too; let’s not forget how familiar Princess Caroline is with her legal rights. Ethically, she should not have to bring it up, and she should not have to face people questioning her about it. It is her personal business. If it was her brother in the same situation, I would align with the democratic instinct for transparency. It’s not the Sovereign Prince Albert, though. It is his sister, a side player in the monarchy. Unlike Albert’s marriage, Caroline’s marriage does not have constitutional implications. She plays a role in Monaco, but her activities are more philanthropic, even charitable, than stately.
Maybe she does like the HRH. Maybe that is why she keeps the marriage valid. Or maybe the divorce would be such a pain in the ass that it’s not worth it to her, or her loved ones, to open tiresome and expensive litigation. In 2009, the last year in which the pair were seen together in public, they had been married for ten years. Now it is over twenty years. If they got divorced now, there would be an epic clash of lawyers in what might be an awfully drawn out dispute over properties. They already sold the house in the Parisian suburbs; surely they split the difference on it, privately. Some of his properties are tied up in the Duke of Cumberland Foundation, presided over by his heir since 2013 and also tangled up in a litigious battle between father and son ever since. Whatever is due to his other children, surely, could be enough to tempt Caroline to endure the marriage. My point is, the Hanover-Grimaldi marriage is not easy to explain. Why Caroline stays married to the troubled Ernst is surely more complicated than just, “Oh, she must like the HRH.” They must have deep ties to each other, some of which cannot be obvious to outsiders. For more than two decades, their lives have intersected. There are assets, bank accounts, descendants—to say nothing of the emotional and psychological binds. There are undoubtedly secrets. Caroline and Ernst know what we don’t know. What we need to know is exactly zero because the bottom line is, their marriage is theirs. It is theirs to justify and they do not owe the public any explanations. Likewise, the end of Charlotte’s marriage is a story known only in her trusted inner circle. We could speculate, but why would we? I don’t know about you, but it has nothing to do with me. Having no stake in the interest, I suppose, frees me up to simply be intrigued. Nicolas is an incredible writer. Prix Goncourt, yes, I know everyone agrees with me that he is a brilliant writer. He is also widely traveled–perhaps more so than even Charlotte. I know Charlotte has been to the major cities in the world and most desirable holiday destinations, but Nicolas has traveled to other kinds of places, like the Deep South, and seen things and met people Charlotte probably cannot imagine. The Paris Match article alluded to Charlotte being on a path of exploration. She’s a seeker. She is always looking, doubting, questioning, wondering. I love that they mentioned her great-grandfather, Prince Pierre, friend of Marcel Proust and eponymous and posthumous inspiration behind the Prince Pierre Prizes in literature, music composition, and contemporary art. There must be something in Charlotte, as in Caroline, that knows we are not here to be settled and stable and safe. We exist to learn and grow, to change and evolve. I know the ego wants to judge her, to say she is wrong, and to bemoan the “sadness” for the children, even though they are not your children and you do not have any idea what is going on in their lives, unless you see them walking down a street (thank you, paparazzi) or waving from the palace balcony. I think it is a good time to remind ourselves of Charlotte’s words about In Defense of Secrets by Anne Dufourmantelle. The late Anne Dufourmantelle was Charlotte’s friend and a family favorite. Caroline was once spotted on a street in Paris carrying Anne’s book, In Praise of Risk, French edition of course. Charlotte wrote the preface to the 2019 French edition of In Defense of Secrets. She paid homage to Anne at a 2018 Philo Monaco event; Anne had died saving children from drowning in 2017. In a review of In Defense of Secrets, for Libération, Charlotte wrote approvingly of the way that Anne explored the “ways of secrecy,” the human drive to “know everything” and the balance between secrecy and transparency. We protect our secrets, which can be used against us. Secrets live in that “inviolable and sacred space,” Charlotte wrote, in other words, the “human interiority,” where the secret lives, according to Anne, in “fundamental ambivalence”–precious, mysterious, potentially dangerous, even toxic. I can’t read these words without thinking of the ways that the royal social medias seek to “know everything” about Charlotte and Caroline. When they don’t know, they fill in the blanks with their suppositions, conspiracy theories, and conjectures. It is an all-too-common instinct (a knee-jerk reaction, really) to do this. Case in point–the furore over the altered image of the Princess of Wales (and children) by the Prince of Wales, released early in March and almost immediately banned by the Royal Rota and press agencies due to suspicious alterations. For the British princess, an extended absence from public life as she recovers from surgery has turned into a hostage crisis: give the public information or they will assume the worst! At the very least, publish a real photo that passes the photoshop smell test. It is an extreme example, but I think it shows how manipulative the celebrity-media-public relationship can become. In my own writing about royals, I try to always remember that they are humans and they value privacy the same as I do. They don’t want to explain and share everything, anymore than you or I would. They want a space that is off limits. If Caroline doesn’t want to explain her marriage to us, we should respect that, and the same absolutely goes for Charlotte, who is not even a princess. Let’s think about those photos in Paris Match for a second. How do those paparazzi even know exactly where she lives? Were they standing outside, waiting for her to come out? Did they know Nicolas was there? The couple came out, separately it seems, each carrying a bag, but joined up to have breakfast at a restaurant, laugh and flirt, and catch a train. The story of Charlotte’s mysterious exit from marriage and new, exciting love life is barely two months old and already it has been in every French magazine as well as People magazine, !Hola!, and the Daily Mail. The royal fandom is following Nicolas Mathieu, en masse, on social medias. I’m sure his newest book, Le Ciel Ouvert, was already selling quite well, but now? The sky opens, indeed!