Edu's dentist bill happened to be owing. He and Sarah did not go to the same man. The lawyers told her that it would be fatal to meet any single liability. Sarah sent her protesting children to have their teeth seen to again. She was understood and the dentist sent her a comprehensive statement, which she paid.
At Voss Strasse as time passed and they realized that Edu was actually unable to put name to cheque or note, the sentiment was surprised relief. Of course when they remembered to think of it, they did not forgive Sarah. They also resented the gaps at the Sunday dinners, for the young Merzes had gone to live abroad. First they had tried a villa of theirs between Grasse and Nice, but the proximity to Monte Carlo made Edu too unhappy. A friendly yacht offered and bore him to less tempting shores. Sarah
went to Paris. She asked my father to get her a flat and he found her one in the Avenue Rapp. Sarah sent the Henri II sideboards into storage but said that the Louis XIII suite might do not at all badly with a picture she had an eye on; my father said that indeed he also did not like Renaissance but what could one expect in these furnished places, and if really she was about to buy something, she had better have a look at a thirteenth-century relief of the Annunciation he had found, well he would not tell her where yet, and which he was sure came from Cluny. Sarah engaged the cook on my father's advice and bought the picture on her own. And it was in this flat, at a dinner party, that my father met my mother.
1
Julius Maria von Felden was born about the middle of the last century in Baden, as second son of Augustus Matthias Joseph, Baron Felden, Freiherr zu Landeney, and after the continental custom inherited with his three brothers a version of the title and a portion of the estate. The family was old, landed, agreeably off without being in the least rich and of no particular distinction. At a period nearer to its origin it must have conformed no doubt to a tougher and a more acquisitive mould, and at least one Felden had been obliged to take part in a crusade, but for
the last four centuries Feldens had looked after their land, diminishing rather than otherwise, filled diplomatic posts of a more decorative than political character and discharged functions at provincial courts. Yet they were neither backwoodsmen nor courtiers, but country gentlemen of cultured, if not general, interests. They drank hock and claret, but they also drank and knew how to make their own wine. They dabbled in the natural sciences; they enjoyed and contributed to those branches of the arts that increase the amenities of living—domestic architecture, instrument-making, horticulture. They were bored by the abstract, bored by letters, and their acceptance of thought was confined to thought about things. They liked new theories of acoustics, but turned from ones of government with suspicion and distaste. They played music like craftsmen, and made objects like artists. One went to Cremona; learnt; and became known as an amateur lute-builder. Some contributed to works of ornithology, some botanized. In their time several had experimented with alchemy, and my father's grandfather had been fascinated by steam. Physics held no terrors then and the laws of the universe were something a man might deal with pleasantly in a work-shop set up behind the stables.
For an undilutedly Catholic family, few had entered the church, and of these most had remained country abbes. The French Revolution was still alive with them as a calamity, and of the Industrial one they were not aware. During the Napoleonic Wars they had favoured the Confederation of the Rhine, and though unenthusiastic about Buonaparte had fought a little on his side. No Felden, however, had borne arms as a profession since the Reformation, and not one was known to have borne them in a cause. They married their neighbours' daughters, they married women from Bavaria, from Piedmont, from the Tyrol, Lombardy, Alsace and France; looks were important in their choice, yet not once within the recorded memory of the Almanach de Gotha had they married outside the
Catholic aristocracy. At the time of my father's birth, the language spoken in his family was French, the temper and setting of their lives retarded Eighteenth Century; their seat had always been in a warm corner of Baden, that mild, bland, rural country of meadows and trout streams, small farms, low mountains and small towns; their home was Catholic Western Continental Europe, and the centre of their world was France. They ignored, despised, and later dreaded, Prussia; and they were strangers to the sea.
When I was born, Julius von Felden was already a man in his late fifties and his own parents, and their age, had long been dead. I never knew my grandparents and I never knew Landen, the house in which my father had grown up. Yet something of the atmosphere of his youth came through in his own person, and some of the facts I learnt from talk. Not all of them. What my father chose to remember was governed by his own sense of relevancy, and his aim was to converse. He would have preferred solitude, or rather a privacy of animals and objets-d'art, yet thought it was incumbent on him to spend a reasonable amount of his time—at dinner, perhaps—with his kind. His language was limited, he was certainly not aware of words, but I believe that when he spoke he saw what he had lived. From these set fragments, then, I knew the sheltered valley of Landen where the apricots had ripened on the south wall every year; I learnt the names of dogs and ducks and horses, and the smells of seasons— of the scent that drifted across the snow from where the sides of boar were smoked, of sweet clouded wine drunk foaming off the press and stands at sunrise immobile by a pond, of the tree that bore three-hundred weight in plums and the swinging fall of rye before the scythe. I learnt terms of bee-keeping and terms of stag-driving; I learnt of clean straw, oats and clover, of winter honey, walnuts and March wool, of the pig killed at Michaelmas and Easter, and the hams baked whole inside a loaf of bread; I learnt
of demonstrations held by travelling Mesmerists in the library, of quirks of squires, discomfitures of tutors, and of the ruses employed by peacocks. Rural life, under Julius's touch, emerged as composed as his own exquisitely turned out person and well-ordered day. I did not learn the name of my father's mother, nor what the tutors had been supposed to teach; I learnt that at Landen they had dined at exactly one hour after sunset and that my grandfather (or was it his father?) explained this to his guests as a custom of the Romans; I learnt that Julius and his brothers rode any old how but were kept to be most particular about their dress when driving, that the boys were always given brandy and hot water when they came in from skating in the winter dusk, and that Johannes the third son had danced with a bear at a fair.
I learnt of the missal dropped by them from the choir of Karlsruhe Cathedral during high mass in order to prove Newton, and how in consequence they were all packed off for a term to the Jesuit Seminary where the Fathers had dined off hock, trout and hare, and the pupils had dined off soup. I learnt of holidays in summer with cousins in the Cote-d'Or, en Bourgogne my father called it, where he had been allowed to wax the furniture and had been given black currant syrup mixed in his white wine; I learnt that Cag-liostro had once spent a night at Landen and was supposed to have left a secret; that Gustavus, the eldest (Julius never liked him), had a fine hand at water-colouring but disgusted the old Baron by not helping with the birds, persisting instead to paint in coats of arms; I learnt that the cure" was asked to dinner once a year, on Saint Martin's Day, when they were served, in a length of courses, with two roast geese: one for the company, one for the cure, and how my grandfather refusing to speak German in his house except to tenants and domestics, and the cure unable to speak French, they had all had to get along in Latin; and I could taste the cakes that had no taste at all given to my father as a baby by the old Grand Duchess of
Baden, and it comes to me only now that she cannot well have been the same old lady, the Grand Duchess Louisa, I was taken to in turn to have my head patted at the age of four.
Julius's mother died when he was a small boy. His father did not remarry, no female relative was called in and the house went on being run by an elderly majordomo. They were all taught early, Julius said, to order their own dinner. The boys, in fact, took their place at table at twelve, not as children but as sons of the house, drinking their wine and doing their share as hosts. They entertained their neighbours as little as possible. Baden, the old Baron said, had turned dowdy in the Sixties—the men dressed badly and the women were interested in nothing. Yet the house was always full; with scientists and travellers and collectors from all over Europe, with gentlemen of decided hobbies, with old beaux, with cousins and gourmets and the sons of the relics of the French Revolution, and there was always a warm welcome at Landen for quacks. In this household my father remained until he was seventeen years old.
Then he was asked to accompany a Prince of Baden of the same age on an educational tour. The rest of the suite consisted of the Prince's tutor Herr von L., one equerry, a courier and a valet, and they stayed away some years. They went to France, where they were inscribed at the Beaux-Arts and Julius took lessons in furniture designing and began his lifelong siege of the Hotel des Ventes, and met the women who pleased him among the grandes cocottes of the Second Empire. They went to Spain, to Portugal, and thence by sea to Italy. On Julius's insistence they went to Spanish Morocco, and on Herr von L.'s to Greece. They returned by way of Vienna, stayed at the Hofburg and the young men had their glimpse of the Empress Elizabeth. They did the usual things and saw the expected people. They sketched; looked at sights; went to dances. They hunted in the Guadarrama, were at Seville for Holy Week one year and at Venice for the Carnival the next; they
called at the proper courts, had their fortunes told by a gypsy under the walls of the Alhambra and paid their respects at Rome; yet Julius's pursuits and will must have dominated the party, for they spent the best of their time looking at houses and browsing in antique shops. Julius always loved France, but he was swept off his feet by Spain. In Italy he knew already what he was looking for and found less of it; in Greece their travelling became more strenuous—he was enchanted by the ritual of Mediterranean living he found among goatherds and fishermen, and hardly touched by anything else. He returned to Landen as a young man, with a lemur, some crates full of bric-a-brac, and a clear idea of how he wished to spend his life.
It was after 1870; the Franco-Prussian War had been fought while Julius was in Spain, Baden was now a part of Germany, and he found everything quite changed.
The Feldens, like many people in those parts, would have preferred to stay on as they were. They had not liked the idea of even a Southern-German Federation, and had it not meant giving up the monarchy they would not have minded being joined to France. The accomplished fact of a wholly German Union with and—worse—headed by Prussia in the wake of a French defeat in a gratuitous war, gave them a most unpleasant shock. No good would come of it, the old Baron said, and his tenants said the same; politics were an activity of plotters, of whom Bismarck was a fair example. They decided to wash their hands of the new Empire—it could not make any difference to themselves. And then all at once the most unlikely people were in uniform. Land values were going down and everything else became expensive. Anyone wanting the quietest post was asked for qualifications. Baron Felden believed himself on the brink of ruin; neighbours came and badgered him about providing careers for his four sons. He was seventy himself and, without realizing it, had always done as he pleased; now they told him one must swim with the
times. There had never been any talk of this kind at Lan-den; before his tour Julius had wanted to be an amateur cabinetmaker and his brother Johannes an animal trainer. The old man got rattled and Johannes, at fifteen, was carted off to a cadet corps to be made into an officer; Julius, who was too old for this fate, was boarded with a crammer at Bonn to be got through the new examinations for the Diplomatic Service. The lemur died.
The old Baron's choice had not been wise. At any event it was made too late. Johannes, rather unbelievably, became a captain; my father never got beyond third secretary, and at his chance resigned. But Johannes also became simple and in due course the pivot of a cause celebre; Julius in most respects managed to fare better, but the changes sprung on him gave him a distrust of life and he adjusted himself with a twist that left him, too, at odd angles with reality. He saw forces everywhere he wished only to dodge, not understand, and existence governed by a sequence of fortuitous blows. He had a long run of successful elusion of what he feared, but he believed it to be always at his heels, and his own great talent for the grace of living was mined by that streak of pessimism, gloom and caution which must have made life seem to him such a precarious course, and life with him so peculiar. One could never tell, he used to say, what one might find upon returning from a journey. It was most catching. And by his side, up on the box, about to turn into our drive, my heart too contracted and my hand stole to my forehead for a protective sign as we sat, my father and I, joggled, silent, trying each for himself to lay the vision of the house burnt to the ground.
The rigours of the Prussian cadet institutions were notorious and intentional. They were places where boys— the sons usually of military gentlemen, and sometimes from as young as nine—were left to spend seven or eight
years in a formative atmosphere of organized hunger, brutality and spiritual deprivation. There they were drilled into rigidity on frosty mornings with smallarms, von Moltke, the Army Manual, Julius Caesar and the campaigns of Frederic the Great. Many died. Of dysentery or pneumonia in the infirmaries—no boy was sent, or after one experience would go, to these for less—of injuries, never reported, never mentioned, suffered in the dormitories after dark. The survivors were released at eighteen as career officers and defective human beings. Corps Benz-heim on the Rhine, a recent foundation, was only newly Prussian but a good self-conscious copy of the originals. Johannes went out of his mind.
He could not have been less prepared. He, who in his ample home had always had a sunny bedroom to himself and his three large dogs, who had eaten fresh food brought in from their own farms, who had always been spoken to and been taught to speak with gentle courtesy to everyone, who had spent his days in the fields and his evenings round a polished table, Johannes, who had not even been a schoolboy, but was shaped into an unconscious blend of fine animal, young gentleman and happy child, was locked to sleep in a dormitory with forty breathing humans, shouted at by corporals and prefects, marched along corridors and dished out slops in an enamel mug. On his first night, at supper, he cried. As the clatter of the refectory, the commands, the gaslight, the fumes of thin soup and undrained greens broke in on him, he burst into open tears. A Rousseau flavour still lingered about Landen, and the old gentlemen his father's guests wept freely. Johannes did not know the century had changed. He did not know, he could not know, what tears meant at Benzheim. For an instant he was looked upon with awe—this display of what no one ever might uncover could only be an enormous, an unimaginable act of daring. Then they loathed him. The captain with the game leg who was on surveillance limped by, eyes averted. The word later went almost audibly through
everybody's mind. The head boy of his table, a cadet of seventeen, leant forward and stared at Johannes cold and hard. The others followed. The faces of two or three of the smaller boys began to work, one yelped out a snicker. They subsided at once. Johannes, locked in his homesickness, lifted his childish streaming face, unseeing. Then there came a diversion: it was Thursday night, and on Thursday night they were given meatballs for their supper. There were other meat days—Irish stew on Wednesday at midday, beef-and-gravy for Sunday dinner, all wolfed— but the Thursday meatballs were the big treat, the one good thing in all the week.