In front of the château is an expanse of sandy gravel that Albert has the job of raking every morning. A huge man wearing a peaked cap for extra authority, he seems to be keeping an eye out for all comings and goings. The flight of steps up the terrace to the front door has columns framing the entrance and statues set into the wall. Sometimes I still dream of the test I used to impose on myself as a boy, to jump off those steps each time higher, to land sideways on to the patch of grass below. I never dared jump down from the balustrade at the very top.
As the front door opens you would at once be aware of scale and proportion and light. If such a thing is possible, here is intimate grandeur. The hall rises high to a barrel ceiling. At its centre stands a table attributed to the eighteenth-century master Thomire, with a pink granite top over gilded bronze resting on winged sphinxes. Furniture like that conveys a lot of information about the owners and their freedom to indulge their taste. To the right is the drawing room, imposingly circular, with huge windows and a door out to a side terrace. Here the pillars round the wall are purely decorative. Beyond is the fumoir, the room no longer used just for smoking, but also where we would gather informally before or after a meal. To the left is the dining room, a matching circle except that it has ornamental painted panels of flowers and birds. The huge round table seats twenty-four. At the far end of the hall the spiral staircase repeats the motif of a circle. The steps are so shallow that you feel like racing up, past the half-landing with Max’s bedroom and the schoolroom where we had lessons and played with the electrified set of toy Märklin trains belonging to my cousin Philip and which he had laid out in a mock-Swiss landscape.
Max, the second and last Baron Fould-Springer, is nominally the head of the family. Dark on account of its low ceiling, his room halfway up the stairs is an accumulation of family portraits, an Empire bed, cashmere shawls, piles of newspapers and letters, mementos, and a vast collection of his lucky charm, owls of every size in stones, materials, and styles of every sort. He throws nothing away, not even worn envelopes. He is absorbed in the pages of newspapers that print puzzles and spends lots of time writing notes to himself in a pocket-book in a handwriting of tiny hieroglyphics that nobody but him could make sense of. After David Copperfield, he has a long-standing joke with me that he is Murdstone, and he leers, “Boy, I’m going to cane you.”
From the moment he was born in 1906, Jessie took charge of him until she died in 1959. She used to subscribe to the Sunday Express, and would cut out Ripley’s “Believe it or Not,” its regular feature illustrating far-fetched facts, and paste these rectangles like wallpaper in the corridor leading to his bathroom.
Every morning, she ran his bath for him and carried a breakfast tray into his room. He had been sent away to a Jesuit boarding school in the north of France and eventually to Magdalen College, Oxford, remaining uncertain which of these establishments was the most unsatisfactory. He must have been the only undergraduate at Oxford accompanied by his nanny.
Handsome, he had cut quite a dash in the 1930s, entertaining at Royaumont and the host of shooting parties at Kapuvár, an estate inherited in Hungary. His game book records a red-letter day there in August 1935 when he and his guests, the Duc d’Ayen, Comte de Beaumont, Comte de Maillé, Comte de Montsaulnier, Prince Achille Murat, and Jean de Vaugelas, shot an astonishing 6,009 partridges. Once past middle age the thin off-colour face, and especially the questioning look in his eyes, conveyed that he no longer found life easy. His usual comment to the news on television was “On n’a encore rien vu,” we haven’t seen anything yet.
His father’s son, he wore a small Star of David on a gold chain around his neck. Also like Eugène, he had a repertoire of stories and jokes, some of them Jewish. Mocking his education, he’d stress the wrong syllables in names such as Aristophanes and Euripides. One of his favourite quotations was “Quod licet Jovi non licet bovi” (What is permitted to Jupiter is not permitted to the ox), and another, uttered in a stagey falsetto, was: “Ach aber ach, das Mädchen kam, und nicht in Acht das Veilchen nahm” (Oh dear, the maiden came and paid no attention to the violet). Yet another derived from an elderly aunt who had tried to attract rabbits in the park in Vienna by holding out her hand as though offering food and saying, “Komm, Kaninchen, komm” (Come here, little rabbit, come here).
Playing the invalid, he chewed every mouthful of his food twenty or thirty times, finishing the meal long after everyone else. Liliane quipped, “Il a une très mauvaise santé defer,” (He has really good ill health.) Actually he was athletic, diving off the high cliffs at Eden Roc in the south of France, flying gliders, riding his horse and most remarkably crossing the ornamental canal in front of the château forwards and backwards on a tightrope. His interests were architecture and art, about which he wrote occasional pieces for the magazine Paris Match under the pseudonym Max Viar, short for Viarmes. When the car fetched him for a day of office routine as chairman of Maisons-Alfort, the family-owned factory that carried us all, he looked resigned to the boredom of it. One woman in his life was Paulette Helleu, daughter of the artist, and another was Cécile de Rothschild, Elie’s sister. Asked what sort of a lover Max had been, she replied, “pas plus mal qu’un autre” (no worse than anyone else). Solitary after his nanny’s death, he married Georgette Aftalion. Already middle-aged, she passed the time of day in an armchair, her bony face and staring eyes evidence of psychic disturbances too deep to fathom. To Mitzi, Max was “my adored Sonny,” yet on page after page in her diaries she pulls him to pieces with no apparent understanding that her domination and his dependency might explain the beaten-dog look in his eyes. His homosexual adventures in Paris were an open secret. In his Paris house in the rue Saint-Didier, he holed himself up in the care of Louise Chavanel, more like another elderly nanny than a housekeeper. Every morning there, Dr Vacher, a well-known psychotherapist, came to take breakfast and give professional advice.
White-haired and imperturbable, Jessie and Marion Stainer, the other nanny, were referred to as the duchesses. Throwbacks to the England of Queen Victoria, they were never in a hurry and rarely raised their voices. An unspoken agreement divided responsibility for the children: Max and Poppy (and so ultimately me) going to Jessie, Bubbles and Lily to Nanny Stainer. Rivals as much as colleagues, these two tended to oppose one another, only to unite in the face of criticism or interference. Nanny Stainer came from a large family in Godalming. One of the seven children of a carpenter, Jessie was born in 1872 in Horspath, a village near Oxford. When she was still small, they all moved into Rose Lane, Oxford, a street whose cottages have long since been demolished to make way for university buildings. She and her brothers and sisters had three pairs of shoes to share between them, and only those whose feet happened to be the same size as the available shoes could go to school. A boy had been sent home because he was dirty, and Jessie put on an Oxfordshire accent to relate how the mother had come to rebuke the teacher, “My boy ain’t no rose, you larn him not smell him.” Poverty and lack of opportunity were part of the natural order of things. A lifetime of hard work had deformed Jessie’s feet and ankles so that she had to have specially made orthopædic shoes that she called “beetle-crushers.” In her private vocabulary, an umbrella was an umbershoot, manipulative behavior was inkle-weaving, and those she took against were arsehole-creepers. Playing with nicknames, she wrote to Poppy as Kate, and might sign her own letters as Martha. Her philosophy was summed up by an incident at a tennis tournament to which she liked to refer. Jean Borotra had been losing badly until someone in the crowd shouted, “Courage, Pépé!” and he went on to win.
Making their lives in France, she and Nanny Stainer spoke a phonetic anglicised French: rubdisham for dressing-gown, culleryfere for radiator, saldiban for bathroom. Nanny Stainer in fact read Les Liaisons dangereuses round and round. Jessie had memorized whole chunks of Shakespeare, as well as a variety of poems and songs, some serious and some comic. She had an excuse for the neuroses and tantrums in the house: you can’t expect thoroughbreds to be cart-horses.
You could race up the great stone staircase, three or four steps at a time, to finish at the top in an open space like