He especially loves the era bestowed on him and his kind, the era of precarious armistice between two phases of a Hundred Years’ War (for Uncle Ferdinand, just like John, sees WWI and WWII not as two distinct conflicts having distinct causes and goals and carried out with murderous weapons among European nations but as two skirmishes of one and the same European civil war, fought with all means and methods and bestowing on him and his kind a wonderful hybrid blossom during twenty-one years while the armies, aggressions, and weapons were renewed).

No doubt, the thing that Uncle Ferdinand most loves—as do I—about that era, the thing that gave its style that incomparably piquant mestizo character of refinement and violence, making it quite unforgettably vivid, charming, promising, the time of our lives, was: the American touch.

You may not believe it, Mr. Brodny, but that’s what it was like. Uncle Agop’s Venezuelan tango orchestra and nigger band as well as Dada and the Constructivist vision, bobbed hair and Expressionism as well as the conveyor-belt production of superfluous consumer goods and political street scuffles, transvestite nightclubs and the “simple life” reform movement, Einstein’s theory of relativity and Fascism, Greta Garbo and Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Mistinguette and James Joyce, Mayakovski and various secret police (et quelle est la différence entre le Négus et Léon Blum? Aucune: tous les deux ont une barbe, sauf Léon Blum)—all the things that now make the years between WWI and WWII seem like a paradise lost we owe to the return of the prodigal daughter, America.

The delicious blend in that time of chaos and extreme stylization, of decadence and tempestuous promise; the suspenseful coexistence of gangster violence and pure, self-sacrificing faith in man and his right to light, beauty, happiness—the myriad contradictions, the perilous extremes, the explosiveness of all the legacies and tendencies of the zeitgeist made those years a time, a lifetime, more stimulating than could ever have been experienced before or after. It was most likely, as Stella maintained, Europe’s most European hour. And just as she, Stella, realizes it, so too does Uncle Ferdinand realize (both of them, presumably, from the proclamations dropped by John at the ends of his sentences) that this historic hour of Europe could not have come without the return of Europe’s prodigal child, America, without America’s intervention in, its regress into European history. Be proud, sir. It’s your century. It’s your world.

Certainly, Uncle Ferdinand is an aristocrat and a European, a European’s European, sated by the spirits not only of Roman civilization but also of Byzantium; were I to attempt to draw up his spiritual pedigree, I would have to show Irish apostles crossed with Moorish mathematicians, and Venetian seafarers with German philosophers. Nevertheless, or perhaps for that very reason, Uncle Ferdinand loves the American touch in the years of precarious armistice between WWI and WWII. He is delighted by the fedora’s smart bootlegger look: the crease in the hat brim, so to speak, the brim clapped down at a slant over the brow of a killer’s eyes. He enjoys the spirit of adventure that entered the remnants of a beau monde salvaged from WWI with the polo-playing tin-mine magnates and poker-playing oil tycoons and arms runners, a high society in which the coteries of the Guermantes had long since become intimately entangled with those of the Verdurins as well as those of the Astors and the Vanderbilts.