In the novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the scenes involving the Duke and Dauphin show them as visitors from the theatre of the absurd. After telling Jim and Huck all about their phony recent projects of the past including “selling an article to take tartar off the teeth” only to remove “the enamel along with it as well”, and “a-running a temperance revival thar ‘bout a week,” or doing “a little patent medicines with “theatre actor-tragedy,” taking “a turn to mesmerism and phrenology,” teaching “singing geography” and “sling a lecture” they claim, with a straight face to be European nobility. One is a Duke and the other a Dauphin.

Yet, for all that, are these two “rapscallions” who are obvious hicks from rural America as far removed from European royalty as the moon is from the earth, any less believable than “real” royalty, who are only noble because people are taught to believe it? The gullibility of people in America, like the gullibility of people in Europe or Canada is staggeringly profound.

The “Duke” allows that Jim and Huck can refer to them as “Your Grace,” or “My Lord” or “Your Lordship”. Yet he said he wouldn’t mind if they call him “Bridgewater” to show what a good guy he is, without any airs, but “at least one of them ought to wait on us at dinner and do any little thing for him he wanted done.” After all, do nobility deserve any less that? And are these fraudsters really any more fake than the real nobility in large castles? Huck keeps referring to him as “Bilgewater” instead. A fitting name for a bullshitter.

Yet Huck is assured, “Yes gentlemen, you see before you, in blue jeans and misery, the wanderin’, exiled trampled-on, and sufferin’ rightful King of France” And oddly, the King of France speaks with the perfect accident of a Missourian.

So Jim and Huck “set to majestying him.” After all it is the people who make majesties of hucksters. Huck had learned from his scoundrel of a father “the best way to get along with his kind of people is to let them have their own way.” At least until they turned the tables on them. That is what we should do with “real” kings too.  At least until it’s time to turn the tables on them.

Jim was not fooled by them either. He realized quickly that “dese kings o’ ourn is regular rapscallions.”

Huck concluded: “Sometimes I wish we could hear of a country that’s out of kings.” Wouldn’t we all like that? Including those monarchs we elect every few years.

You don’t have to look far to find a lot of wisdom in a classic novel like Huck Finn.