Uncle Ferdinand reports on his Middle Kingdom even at lunch-time, when we eat a light repast of four courses and three wines, still in the bright breakfast room. But the age-palsied footman playing the maître d’hôtel here is already wearing his tails. (Is this the same man about whom my mother used to say, when talking about faraway Bessarabia to the amusement of the entire Côte d’Azur, that it was easier to squeeze him into his tails than to teach him not to appear in them barefoot?)

And afterward, while we sip black coffee in the library, Uncle Ferdinand will open out the perspectives on what he told me during the morning. He will show me the albums, the photos of houses, yachts, hunts—the scenes where it all took place. We will contemplate various snapshots of the people involved and study their genealogy, their relatives in the Almanach de Gotha, in Burke’s, in the Libro d’Oro, their business connections in Who’s Who . . .

I soon know the personnel of the Middle Kingdom by heart. After all, I’m well prepared: I recall many of the names from my childhood; I know the personalities, characteristics, spleens, likes and dislikes, vices and virtues, thanks to the social chitchat that I snapped up as a child and that was recently brought à la page again in conversations between John and Stella. Why, I even know some of these people; I can quite vividly recollect them; I used to call them by their first names, address them as “Uncle Bully” or “Uncle Agop.” Even if they only barely recognized me, they might still remember delightful Maud (my mother’s stage name, her real name being Ilse; but I am convinced that she plied her loose trade with sufficient artistry to have a certain right to a nom de plumeau).

in short: I am predestined for the legacy that Uncle Ferdinand wishes to leave me. Not his name, his fortune, his position in the world, of course, but that which can remain of those things when all their earthliness has crumbled into dust that the wind carries away: the myth of his bon-vivant world.

For simplicity’s sake, we also have tea in the library. The table is set with the same silver as it was in the days of my childhood. My mother loved the intricate and practical odds and ends: the toast racks and beehive-shaped honey pots, the hot-water-heated plates and bowls for pastries and canapés, the little silver muffin baskets. She was responsible for the English look of the tea table, while Russia and the Near East prevail in the huge samovar and the Sèvres porcelain fabricated pour l’Orient.

Aside from the chintz sofas and Queen Anne furniture (which I presume replaced the rug-covered divans and Boulle consoles that, before her time, adorned a country estate in the realm of the Sublime Porte), I wonder whether her taste has left its mark on other things in and around Uncle Ferdinand, starting with his tweed jackets, going on to his not really Eastern European passion for ocean sailing, and ending with his liberal choice of friends.