Chapter 2

I was born in 1910, in Paris. My father was a gentle, easy-going person, a pasta salad of racial genes: a Swiss citizen, of mixed French and Austrian descent, with a dash of the Danube river in his veins. He owned a luxurious hotel on the Riviera. His father and two grandfathers had sold wine, jewels, and silk. At thirty he married an English girl, daughter of Jerome Dunn, the alpinist, and granddaughter of two Dorset parsons, experts in obscure subjects--paleopedology and Aeolian harps, respectively. My very photogenic mother died in a freak lightning accident when I was three, and I don’t remember much of her, except for in a warm pocket in my heart.

My mother's elder sister, Sybil, whom a cousin of my father's had married and then neglected, served in my immediate family as a kind of unpaid governess and housekeeper. Somebody told me later that she had been in love with my father, and that he had disgracefully taken advantage of it one rainy day and forgotten it by the time the weather cleared. So you see, I have my father to thank for my own womanizing tendencies, both his example and his genes. I was extremely fond of Sybil, despite the rigidity--the fatal rigidity--of some of her rules. Perhaps she wanted to make of me, in the fullness of time, a better widower than my father. Aunt Sybil had pink-rimmed azure eyes and a waxen complexion. She wrote poetry. She was poetically superstitious. She said she knew she would die soon after my sixteenth birthday, and did. We mourned her vigorously. Her husband, a great traveler in perfumes, spent most of his time in America, where eventually he founded a firm and acquired a bit of real estate.

I grew, a happy, healthy child in a bright world of illustrated books, clean sand, orange trees, friendly dogs, sea vistas and smiling faces. Around me the splendid Hotel Mirana revolved as a kind of private universe within the blue greater one that blazed outside. From the aproned pot-scrubber to the flanneled potentate, everybody liked me. Elderly American ladies leaning on their canes listed towards me like towers of Pisa. Ruined Russian princesses who could not pay my father, bought me expensive bonbons. He took me out boating and biking, taught me to swim and dive and water-ski, read to me Don Quixote and Les Miserables, and I adored and respected him and felt glad for him whenever I overheard the servants discuss his various lady-friends, beautiful and kind beings who made much of me and cooed and shed precious tears over my cheerful motherlessness.

I attended an English day school a few miles from home, and there I played rackets and fives, and got excellent marks, and was on perfect terms with schoolmates and teachers alike.