A Prince Among Stones Read Free

1926 planning to make his fortune. He became a psychological adviser to the managing directors of a management consultancy, acting as a consultant to the consultants – his first job in London had been for the American literary agency Curtis Brown. He always enjoyed chatting to doctors and psychologists, and when I got married at least half of the guests he invited were from one or the other profession.
    My mother, Countess Bianca Treuberg, was Bavarian, She met my father at a party in Rome in 1931, when she was eighteen and he was ten years older. Her parents had split up, as indeed had my father’s parents – very unusual for the time – and she had moved with her mother to Italy, where she was looked after by a Florentine governess and eventually studied sculpture. Her schooling had been erratic, to say the least.
    Many years later, I was worrying about one of the school reports my daughter had been given. I had just returned from a trip to New York, and had been staying on Long Island with that most elegant of hostesses C. Z. Guest. I told my mother I had been talking about Dora’s report with C. Z., who had said, ‘I don’t know why you are so concerned about your daughter. I didn’t go to school. I’m sure your mother didn’t go to school. What are you worrying about?’ When I relayed this to my mother she was furious. ‘Of course I went to school.’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but I must remind you that you have always told me that you only went for one term to the Sacré-Coeur in Rome. After which I am sure that you thought that you knew more than they did.’ Wherever or however she had learnt it, she knew the whole of the Divina Commedia by heart. It was a source of great pride for her. She could start off at any point and carry on.
    Whether or not quoting long chunks of Dante was part of her charm to my father, they married in 1932, the year after the party in Rome.
    The marriage foundered rather soon, because of my father’s behaviour – he was, to be frank, a serial Casanova. Like many people one knows, his entire life had been dedicated to the pursuit of pretty girls. He had married my mother because she was very attractive, and also, then, possessed some money, which was helpful, too, but neither of them knew how quickly that money would disappear.
    However, they stayed together long enough to produce me. They had taken a house in Palma, Majorca, for the summer of 1933, where I was born on 24 August. Years later I went back with my wife, Josephine, to visit the land of my birth. Beforehand, we had lunch with the doctor who had brought me into the world. His own house was a huge place out in the country, very gloomy, like something out of a Lorca play.
    The day was extremely hot, the dust outside was boiling. In a vast, dark room the doctor and his wife received us, tapas arrived and sangria was served. We had been asked for 1.30 for 2.00, so I thought this was the lunch. Not at all. At quarter past three another pair of huge doors opened and we went into lunch. I asked him where on the island I could find the house I had been born in. ‘I knew you’d ask me this,’ he said, ‘but unfortunately it has been pulled down.’ According to the doctor, in the early 1930s it had been a rambling country house a couple of miles outside Palma, with sixty hectares of land, and had been offered to my father for £1,000 to buy or £100 per annum rent, which is the option he chose. By the time of my return visit, the city of Palma had spread out and over the site.
    Because of their separation I was my parents’ only child – and remained so, since, although they both later remarried, there were no children from either second marriage.
    In my father’s self-analysis book, the very first question in the questionnaire was: 1) When looking back on your childhood, up to the age of about ten, which impression predominates: that it