In the meantime, Uncle Ferdinand is doing what he would do if he were with them. By conjuring up his various friends and circles, he is weaving this world of his friends together, weaving away at its myth, re-creating it in a new dimension, perpetually resurrecting it. He takes it out of time, present as well as past, and places it in a sort of no-man’s-land of time: makes it eternal. He lives through it once more, and all the more systematically for that. He pursues an enormously ramified, no doubt mostly one-sided correspondence with addressees in all countries still in postal communication with Romania. He instructs these people in minute detail about himself and his present circumstances, his social calendar as it would be if the circumstances were different, if things were as they once were—hunting, travel, and vacation plans in countries lying well out of harm’s way. He reports on everything—no matter what—that he knows about his and their kind, and he requests equally detailed and precise answers. He has the caution, methodology, and pedantry of a general staff officer (which he was—in Russian uniform, intriguingly enough—during an after all halfway chivalrous WWI). And whatever information he picks up he tries to supplement out of his own (phenomenal) memory, photo albums, older correspondence, and newer memories and biographies, as well as items snipped out of society gazettes that manage to arrive every now and then. Moreover, he excerpts all pertinent notices from the most recent arrivals and departures in Lloyd’s Insurance Register of Private Yachts, in the membership lists of the Cresta Run Club, the Jockey Club, the Circolo della Caccia, the Royal English, Dutch, Spanish, Belgian, and Italian automobile clubs, the Almanach de Gotha of Princely Families, Burke’s, the Libro d’Oro, and Who’s Who. With the material thus gained (makeshift, to be sure, but as good as circumstances permit) he keeps his people up to date on the thing that bears the most infallible witness to the existence of a world of friends: the roster of their personnel.

Amusingly enough, the introverted quality of real aristocracy is thus more purely expressed in spiderlike Uncle Ferdinand than in the big extroverted rooster of his bon-vivant heyday. In high nobility, a more frequent type than this is the elderly gentleman absorbed in some kind of abstruse (even serious) research or collecting, and so neglectful of his obligation to present himself as a nobleman that only very sharp eyes can distinguish him from the next-best white-collar worker. And indeed, the intellectual disciplines in which aristocrats excel are the ordering, categorizing ones rather than the analytical, speculative ones. (Schwab tried to talk me into writing an essay on the difference between aristocratic and non-aristocratic intelligence.)

Uncle Ferdinand’s close relations include ornithologists, shell collectors, and lepidopterists of the highest scientific rank, an important genealogist (important because he specialized in the multinational aristocracy of the former Ottoman Empire), and (lovingly esteemed by one and all) a princely cousin who had raised the aristocratic mastery of timetable perusal to such an art that he could reel off both the summer and the winter schedules of the entire national railroad network (à propos, as a true scientist, he was not content with this abstract lore: he traveled throughout the land, stationed himself on various overpasses, and, watch in hand, checked whether the timetable data corresponded to the facts).