"Vivat Gustavus Rex!"

Not so long ago the bitter-brilliant publicist Maximilian Harden went to a State Reception held at the Foreign Office of the German Republic. He skulked about. There were mountains of caviar sandwiches, sideboards snowy with ices, trays of brimming champagne goblets; and all the women had shaved and powdered under their armpits. These things put Publicist Harden into a towering, democratic rage.

Afterward he recorded his bitterest impression thus:

"Under the middle chandelier stands a stocky, pale gentleman in faultless evening attire. His bald head is a palish gray; his prominent eyeballs, framed in reddish half-closed lids, have a lustreless prismatic glint; a shapeless little poodle nose surmounts a self-indulgent mouth which prepares us for his ample waistline and the folds of flesh above his stiff collar. He stands alone because the cercle round him has formed at a respectful distance. Now ... [a sycophant] advances with a deep obeisance, shakes the great man's hand . . . and then withdraws backward, wriggling his rump with fawning rapture. . . . Vivat Gustavus Rex!"

Today lean, brittle Maximilian Harden is the tenant of a grave (TIME, Nov. 7). Doubtless his ghost was in a towering rage, last week; because the fat, poodle-nosed man whom he had called "King Gustav" was quietly celebrating his fifth anniversary as German Foreign Minister. The Poodle-Man is Dr. Gustav Stresemann.* He celebrated at Oberhof, a Thuringian spa, where he has been convalescing from an almost fatal kidney attack (TIME, May 28). Telegrams, cables and flowers poured in, for Dr. Stresemann is the outstanding and most potent German statesman. He has held the Foreign Ministry while nine Cabinets have fallen. Previously, as Chancellor of the German Reich (1923), he wangled the French out of the Ruhr (which they had seized), and laid the German side of the foundations for the Dawes Plan. He was one of the Locarno Peace Pact signatories (TIME, Dec. 14, 1925); and he got Germany into the League (TIME, Sept. 13, 1926); and so he won the Nobel Peace Prize (TIME, Dec. 20, 1926).

In short, everyone knows all about "King Gustav"; and it becomes preferable to write of a svelte and charming woman whom one does not hesitate to call, in homage, "Queen Kate." She, Frau Gustav Stresemann, was Fraeulein Kate Kleeseld. Her father was one of the great industrialists, including Hugo Stinnes, in whose service Gustav Stresemann began to grow great.

They married in 1903. He was the son of a Saxon beer merchant; and, being a smart son, won his Doctor's degree with a thesis entitled: Upon the Development of the Berlin Bottled Beer Trade.

He was 25 when they married. She may have been lovelier then, but it is hard telling from photographs (see Cut). She has always remained slim. Her Wolfgang was born in 1904, and her Hans in 1908. When strangers see Wolfgang and Hans with her, today, they sometimes wonder if she is not her sons' siren stepmother.

He became a Deputy in 1907. They lived in Dresden. The toothpaste tycoon, Lingner, the man who has plastered Europe with ODOL signs, was one of the first to discover Deputy Stresemann's talent for wangling things, and paid well.

Shrewdness and flair and certainly Kate, enabled the young Deputy to climb to the top of his party, National Liberal, now grown into the German Peoples' Party. She may have bought him the portrait of Napoleon or the one of Byron. Anyhow he still keeps both.

He bellowed and blustered militarism through the War; but she was quietly relieved when the draft board doctors said he really wasn't fit to fight.

They were loyal to Kaiser Wilhelm, to the last, and afterward. But today it is better to be a Republican, and to maintain at the Foreign Office the old standards of caviar, sturgeon, cold venison, pheasant and champagne.

As her women friends know, "Kate" loves it all so! She is exuberant, kinetic, lovely. Of a morning she canters, while her bull (not poodle) scampers behind.

Dinner--often with Dr. Stresemann. But he seldom goes on to the theatre and almost never to the night clubs. However, there is a young secretary of the British legation, or a clever attache of the Turkish; and there is really no reason why the wife of the great Foreign Minister who is too fat to dance should not go to night club parties squired by discreet, ambitious gallants, each under the thumb of his Ambassador or Minister. Midnight is early, 2 average, 8 late.

Merely because Frau Stresemann is almost the only wife of a German Cabinet Minister who is not plump or a frump, they disapprove. But no one ever seems to really mind, least of all the smart Poodle-Man.

*Doodles are smart dogs, perhaps smartest, quick to learn and play tricks, apt at turning somersaults. Stresemann has been called "Germany's Lloyd George" because he has turned go many tricks and smart political somersaults.