As if he had lived solely and exclusively for this “reality within reality,” as if, like a character in a novel, he had been invented only for this particular one of the book’s themes, existed only for, found his reality only in the world of the “upper ten thousand,” as it was called in his day: the beau monde of the monstrously rich—whether they had always been rich, are rich still and now indeed are quite rich, or if they have only recently become rich and are newly settling into it—in any case, in the kingdom of the monstrously rich and their high life he finds himself realized, and among them especially the inner circle of dynamic enjoyers of life at Deauville, Biarritz, and the Côte d’Azur, with their many beautiful houses in all the most beautiful places on this wondrously beautiful earth; their parks and shooting grounds; their oceangoing yachts, polo ponies, Rolls-Royces, and Bugattis; their wondrously beautiful women, spoiled, sheathed in brocade and precious fur and hung with legendary jewelry; the expensive whims, jokes, flashes of inspiration; the captivating manners and the powerful carnivore teeth, in which (as Uncle Helmuth and Aunt Hertha alleged) the bones of the disinherited classes splintered so crunchingly (as I, in contrast, can assure you) that it was a delight to watch.

This is, probably, precisely one of the reasons Uncle Ferdinand hasn’t given up this world of his for lost, even though one can hardly conceal that it is threatened in its core: his unbroken confidence in his strong-toothed playmates from the greens of polo fields and chemin-de-fer tables; these are people who will not easily give up the succulent morsels for which they waged such bloody battles, even if the devastations of WWII were to prove even more catastrophic than those of WWI. There is something like a quantum law even in times of danger, a law that those who have a great deal to lose will ultimately lose even less than those others who from the very start had little to lose—and men like Bully Olivera and Sir Agop Garabetian weren’t exactly sleepy, even though dawn usually caught them in a swallowtail or a tuxedo. Indeed, one could expect that, like most of the people in the inner circle, these men, thanks to markets made accessible again by the huge and general devastation, would simply seize even larger morsels in their teeth (as experience taught in WWI, to be confirmed after WWII by the various Economic Miracles of defeated fatherlands in Western Civilization and newly created fatherlands in Africa and Asia). But still: these men would most likely not be able to chew their morsels as unabashedly as before.

Meanwhile, however, these marvelously unchallenged consciences, with which my diverse nominal uncles and godfathers (and fellow travelers of Uncle Ferdinand’s) managed to enjoy everything that their unscrupulous conception of the world permitted them, are probably the reason that Uncle Ferdinand appreciates them not only individually but all together, as a group, a troop, a swarm, a cheerfully baying, eagerly sniffing, keenly hunting pack, yes, presumably he even loves them, with the plainness of self-evident identification. Well, the sharp and shiny toothfulness of carnivore jaws is as old as mankind, as life itself, and will probably perish only when life itself does; yet in the unadorned fashion of the Bully Oliveras and Agop Garabetians, it belonged specifically to the most beautiful period in Uncle Ferdinand’s life (a period whose late flowering coincided with my first flowering); and with it Uncle Ferdinand was always in agreement, he loves it effortlessly, self-evidently, with the surety of a profound inner correspondence.