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We left Istanbul on a passenger ship which took us to Brindisi in southern Italy. There we took a train for Rome where my mother had many friends from her days hunting with the “Caccia”, the Roman hunt. There we stayed at the Hotel de Russie where we had always stayed the weeks of the hunt season, probably as the guests of the hotel as there was no money left. Shortly after we left for Lausanne where my maternal grandmother and two of their sons had come. They had taken out of Russia the family nurse and two god bars and were feeling quite comfortable knowing that in two or three months the Russian revolution would be over and they would be back.
My
mother did not share their
views. She
put us in a boarding school and went to Paris
where she was sure that all her friends and family were.
It
took her a few months to
find an
apartment and a job and orient herself. Then she came to get us and
brought us
to Paris.
Life
became stable once again but very different to the one we had left.
One day the door-bell rang in our apartment. I went to open and met a man whom I seemed to have seen before but did not recognize. He looked at me with a kindly smile on his face and then I knew . . . it was my father whom I had not seen for three years.
He found a job in a tea-room
selling
biscuits and candy from behind a counter. This did not last long
because
through Grand Duke Dimitri he met Coco Chanel who offered him a job as
supervisor of her Paris
salon. Very soon he became manager of the Paris
shop and after that general manager of all her branches, a job he kept
for the
best part of twenty years. Then Schiaparelli lured him and he moved to
London. Just
before the
War II he went to New York where
he
worked for
Van Cleef and Arpels and went to Houston, Texas to open their branch
there.
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preface
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