While Dictator Francisco Franco palavered along the Mediterranean with Dictator Mussolini and Marshal Pétain (see p. 27) his onetime sovereign added another egg to the Spanish omelet. Dandified, talkative King Alfonso XIII, deathly ill with angina pectoris in Rome, announced that a month ago he had abdicated his vacant throne in favor of his son, 27-year-old Don Juan, Prince of the Asturias.
Don Juan is the third son of a family famed for its Bourbon nose and its unhappiness. Alfonso's Queen, Victoria Eugenia, niece of Britain's Edward VII, carried hemophilia to two...
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