I was born in 1910, in Paris. My father was a gentle, easy-going person, a salad of racial genes: a Swiss citizen, of mixed French and
Austrian descent, with a dash of the Danube in his veins. I am going to pass
around in a minute some lovely, glossy-blue picture-postcards. He owned a
luxurious hotel on the Riviera. His father and two grandfathers had sold
wine, jewels and silk, respectively. 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 accident (picnic,
lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest
past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over
which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the
sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of
day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly
entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer
dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges.
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 lightheartedly taken advantage of it
one rainy day and forgotten it by the time the weather cleared. I was
extremely fond of her, 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. 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 would 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,
a whitewashed cosmos within the blue greater one that blazed outside. From
the aproned pot-scrubber to the flanneled potentate, everybody liked me,
everybody petted 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, mon cher petit papa, 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. The only definite sexual events that I can remember as having occurred before my thirteenth birthday (that is,
before I first saw my little Annabel) were: a solemn, decorous and purely
theoretical talk about pubertal surprises in the rose garden of the school
with an American kid, the son of a then celebrated motion-picture actress
whom he seldom saw in the three-dimensional world; and some interesting
reactions on the part of my organism to certain photographs, pearl and
umbra, with infinitely soft partings, in Pichon's sumptuous La Beautè
Humaine that that I had filched from under a mountain of marble-bound
Graphics in the hotel library. Later, in his delightful debonair
manner, my father gave me all the information he thought I needed about sex;
this was just before sending me, in the autumn of 1923, to a lycèe in
Lyon (where we were to spend three winters); but alas, in the summer of that
year, he was touring Italy with Mme de R. and her daughter, and I had nobody
to complain to, nobody to consult.
