Q. What was so wrong about the Norman king, Henri the Bad?

A. Plenty. I don’t want to talk about it. Let me just say that it started out with his not going to school. He was called all sorts of names, mostly by his mother. When he grew up, he married Anne of Aragon--or was it Aragon of Anne?--the one who pouted a lot and claimed her feet were always cold in the castles they lived in. “Why can’t we go to the Riviera?” she asked. But her inconsiderate and loutish husband would say, “There isn’t any Riviera--well, actually there is, but there aren’t any hotels yet--so you can’t go.” He never built anything himself, he just louted around. Their son, naturally enough, was Philip the Worse, but that’s another story.

The Genealogical Conversation

“The thing is,” said the crocodile, “I look old—wouldn’t you say? Absolutely dinosauric: the lizardy corruscaded hide, the mindless devouring slithering predatory machine, slit-eyed, cold blooded, everybody’s idea of basic prehistoric ancient primary essence.”

            

“I am the model for all that,” said the shark, “millions of years before the likes of you, before even flowering began on earth. I’m not even bone but primeval cartilage, the reigning monster of the deeps.”

            

“You protoplasmic peasant,” said the Emperor crab, “you’re completely un-regal and inconsequent, next to me. Did you catch my name, you late-coming hulk? Learn what antique royal lineage really is.”

           

“What is all this hydrostatic priority?” asked the ant. “We are the teeming lords of the realm, for eons and eons and in continual hordes.”

            

“My,” said the bacterium, “such interspecial virulence! I’m counting on it to bring down your resistance. All of you together make me laugh. Fact is, we—” he was sub-dividing as he spoke—“in time have laid low everyone. We were here first, numerously, and we will be the last.”

            

Moral: Geneology—it’s not history, it’s bragging rights.