Katya & The Prince of Siam

‘I had a great sorrow in my life when Chakrabongse preferred Chavalit to me … I tried many months explaining to him that he will lose me. If instead of speaking like a lawyer discussing the points, he put his arms round me and asked me to stand by him to fight that infatuation, I would never leave him and maybe today, he would be alive. But he thought that I can stand everything, even the biggest wound in my heart …

‘No-one can say they saw me crying or miserable. I left Siam with a smile on my lips when my heart was perfectly broken: it cost me a lot to keep myself in hand. But the suffering made my will very strong and Chakrabongse was, for me dead, the day I left Paruskavan.

‘It was awful to leave then. I did not care about position, money, love of Chakrabongse; the most painful thing was leaving you … I knew I can’t give you all your Father could …’

 

These fierce yet touching words, matured in her heart for so long, speak for themselves. Clearly she was not an easy-tempered woman, but one perhaps with more than her fair share of the faults that make marriage, particularly romantic marriage, so traumatic. For when the rapture of passionate love inevitably subsides and the personality with its many failings emerges from the rosy clouds of euphoria, it is hard for both the lover and the beloved to submit so sublime an experience to the routines of daily life, blessed no longer by the magic ardour that brought them first together.

Katya, however, proved herself a realist, more so than the King and Queen Saowabha, who tried to intervene, and her brother who came from Peking to entreat her not to leave. For to Katya, it was clear that, had she accepted Chavalit in a triangular relationship as perhaps a Siamese woman might have done, her position would have been untenable. She was after all a foreigner, while Chavalit was not only Siamese but a Royal Princess. Moreover, she knew that in a society where rank counted so enormously, their difference in status would be entirely to her disadvantage and an open wound to her pride. For she was extremely proud: it was pride that made her refuse a handsome settlement and accept only twelve hundred pounds a year - and it was pride again that impelled her to fling in the face of the King’s emissary the gift of jewellery that he brought from the monarch.

As to Chakrabongse’s attitude, there is one long passage in his largely factual diary in which he gives a frank version of his feelings, with an eye to posterity.