In 2017, our journalist Marc Messier painted a portrait of Prince Philip, who died Friday morning at the age of 99.
A man with a singular destiny who spent his life in the shadows of Queen Elisabeth II.
An extra, a prince of nothing ... A life spent in the shadow of a queen: his own for almost 70 years ... His "sausage" (sausage, in French), as he delicately nicknames her ... His " sausage ", love in Buckingham's charcutière version… Better than turkey, slut or blood sausage, let's face it, more original than chicken: sausage… A little affectionate, plump, colorful, English name.
A familiarity that he is the only one in the world who can afford with Her Majesty, Elizabeth II of England, the woman he married on November 22, 1947, in Westminster, "Lilibeth", as he calls her, more reverently in public, with which he will celebrate in a few months, their platinum wedding.
Philip, a Greek-German-Danish Orthodox prince who, upon his marriage, became British, Anglican, Duke of Edinburgh and Royal Highness, a few years later.
A crownless package for the one who is today one of the main pillars of the English monarchy and the oldest prince consort in the world.
A prince who is "taken out", everywhere, always, at all times.
A prince that the English would sometimes have preferred to hide.
A 1st category blunderer, a funny wacky with often borderline humor, one day asking a disabled person if he had run over many people with his wheelchair, breaking, another time, the dream of going in the space of a plump teenager: "you're too fat for that", judged the prince, the smile impeccably tied in his tie.
Philip still in Scotland joking about whiskey with a driving school instructor, asking him about his method of keeping the locals from being drunk on license day.
Philip again, in China, advising English students there, not to stay too long, so as not to have slanted eyes.
A feast for English columnists, a nightmare for royal protocol, a prince consort, insortable for the English Foreign Office, for a long time obliged to extinguish diplomatic fires, kindled everywhere by the Duke of Edinburgh.
Blunders, odd ones, which, without her ever letting anything appear, often made Elisabeth laugh a lot.
A type without filters and without complexes, able, in the old days, to chase her, in the royal train, disguised as Dracula.
The only man in the world, she once confided, to treat her like a normal human being.
Philip, the only man in her life, her first cousin who became her husband, her only confidant.
Her rock, as she always says.
A paradoxical man, at the same time rough, brittle, muzzle and domineering but also sentimental, gallant, literary and facetious.
Quite the opposite of a smooth and satin prince.
A nostalgic for the lost colonies, for the natives who were treated like horses, for the maids who were trolled in the stables.
A baroque aristocrat from another era, from the century of his maternal great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria, and of his paternal great-great-grandfather, Tsar Nicolas I.
Philip of Edinburgh, a 19th century man, born in the 20th century.
A fan of carriage races, science, military music, thrillers, and tales of Kipling, the cantor of the empire, its favorite author that he cites all the time.
“Be a man, my son,” his daddy used to say to him when he was a child.
A little Greek prince of German and Danish origin, an intricate family tree, the multiple and intersecting branches of European royal families.
A birth in Corfu, a family driven out of their country in 1922. Philip is 1 year old, he will leave Greece, hidden in a crate of oranges, in the hold of an English boat.
Exile, France, school and then the military academy in England.
His mother, schizophrenic, will briefly found a monastic order and will end up in the asylum, his father, player and alcoholic, will end up ruined in Monte Carlo.
His sisters will marry German princes, one of whom is well known for his Nazi connections.
A singular fate for this young lieutenant, taken in charge by his uncle Lord Mountbatten, whose name he will take, an unnamed prince who will meet his future wife, just before going to war in 1939. Philip is 18 years old, Elisabeth 13 years.
He will have 4 children for him.
She will forgive him everything, his dumplings, his pranks.
He will sacrifice his military career for her, he will follow her everywhere, always withdrawn, always two steps behind her, the requirement of protocol.
Never the right to take his hand in public.
A hand on the buttocks when no one is looking.
Philip of Edinburgh, a man worshiped by the English, a living god, in Vanuatu, a very old prince, who presented himself a few months ago as the world's greatest expert in inauguration plaques.