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 o
utside. 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 Misérables, 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 Le Beauté 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 lycée 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.