The tide of gray iron men, rising all around Europe, is of no concern to Uncle Ferdinand. He knows that they have massed just a few miles across the Dniester and are menacing him directly and personally, but he doesn’t care. Nor does it matter to him whether others are about to blow up the Maginot Line before pitching into one another. Nothing, incidentally, says that they won’t make a detour and invade France via Belgium (as a former member of the general staff, Uncle Ferdinand thinks of General Schlieffen with great respect). In other words: Jacqueline and Guy and Alain and Marie-Jeanne and with them the stag hunts in the Île-de-France and the pheasant shoots in the Ardennes and in Sologne are as much at the mercy of providence as, perhaps, Ian and Daisy, Hugh and Elizabeth-Anne, in their splendid country houses and play parks full of first-class horses, dogs, sailboats, on the other side of the Channel. But more than anything, Uncle Ferdinand is haunted by the observation that for some time now—that is to say, increasingly since the last decade, from the end of the delightful twenties till today—more and more friends of the innermost circles have been complaining of boredom or (usually this goes hand in hand) have become boring themselves. (“If you can still remember good old Nicki—he was absolutely mad about your mother, and she liked him because he was so entertaining—I’ll never forget what he said at Stefanie’s funeral: ‘C’est commode, un enterrement, tu sais: on peut avoir l’air moussade avec les gens, ils prennent cela pour de la tristesse. . .’ ”—Stella calls this kind of esprit provincial.—“And then he married that person, that former actress. There was nothing to say about it. After all, in our day, the king of England stepped down from the throne because of a love affair, but he didn’t become more boring because of it, on the contrary. But poor Nicki, he was a completely different man. And when that person died in the bargain, he never stopped talking about her. He was unbearable. No matter where you ran into him, he talked about her. Eventually, nobody wanted to have anything to do with him. Who wants to hear about such matters all the time? People have enough problems of their own. If everybody carried on like that, that would be the end of it. And so ultimately we quite abandoned poor Nicki. Sandro as much as said so in his eulogy when Nicki died. And he talked about what a valuable person Nicki had been. Oh, well? Éloge funèbre. La moitié de tout ça lui aurait suffi de son vivant. But poor Nicki had really become unendurably boring . . .” This reminiscence has unforeseeably arisen during the recitation of a long list of cocaine sniffers among his friends, and he terminates it with a necrologue: “I can understand old Silvio Francalanza. When he turned ninety-five, he simply shot himself. Things had gotten too boring for him. Basta, fini, goodnight, everybody. I can understand him perfectly.”)