"My father was chosen to be young King Thânh-Thâi´s, teacher and later became a royal minister. These honours were the cause of dreadful trials for my father when the Governor General in central Vietnam, Mr. Levêque decided to dethrone Thân-Thâi under the pretext of insanity. This was an infringement of the authorization contained in the French-Vietnamese treaty.
Governor Leveque had the court mandarins called together illegally and ordered them to unanimously vote for the sovereign's deposition. With exception of my father, these mandarins obeyed slavishly. Sentenced to the stripping of all his mandarin titles, my father was put into prison and the king banished to Madagascar. In light of this abuse of power and the cowardice of the court, the Vietnamese people announced that Ngô-dinh-Khâ was the only one who opposed the deposition of the king. My father's banishment was rescinded only at Emperor Duy-tân’s majority. He was one of Thân-Thâi’s sons and he restored my father's titles and his old-age pension.
Here I believe I must report how the Governor from France chose the new king. He let Thân-Thâi’s numerous male offspring get into a line, ordered them run, and promised the winner a reward. The one, who finished last, was selected by the Governor to be king because he thought that he was the least intelligent. Here however, he was greatly mistaken, because this boy was the future Duy-tân, a confirmed enemy of France, who almost drove the French out with help of the "volunteers" who were destined to fight in France. Though, thanks to my brother Ngô-dinh-Khôi, this plot failed.
My father, released from the prison after a long illness, had to think about finding the daily rice for his large family: six boys and two girls. He was a mandarin of strict honesty, and the illness devoured his meagre savings. He therefore decided to cultivate some slopes that he owned in the village of Ancûn, which is not far from Hué. I can still see my father, accompanied by one of his sons or daughters, walking the six kilometres to his rice paddies in a pair of self-made clogs. There he would supervise the transplanting of the rice and irrigate with help of a pedal-driven machine, and then the reaping. If he was tired, our father stopped in the shadow of a bamboo thicket along the way and told us interesting stories taken from the Bible or a treasured books, while smoking a self rolled cigarette passed out by the Brothers of the Christian Schools."
Topic: Autobiography of Archbishop Thuc (Read 5061 times)