and otherworldly to get the measure of the Nazism overpowering her, she reminisces about aristocrats and rabbis in her life. Aunty Lily told me that Hélène wore silk underclothes and changed them three times a day. Both of them elderly, she and Eric were deported in Convoy 63 to Auschwitz on 17 December 1943. Locked without food or water in a sealed cattle wagon, in all likelihood they would have died during the journey. Of the 850 on that convoy, 22 survived in 1945, four of them women. Thousands of Jews had come to Cologne to demonstrate outside the court and march through the city in memory of those who had been murdered. As we were assembling, I happened to notice a wall with a tablet set into it, recording that the Fould-Oppenheim bank used to be on that spot.
Achille Fould (1800–1869), Ber Léon’s son, was a banker and economist. At different times during the Second Empire, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte appointed him finance minister. Cartoons of the period draw him rapaciously shoveling all available taxes into the Treasury in order to finance the disastrous wars in which Louis Napoleon tried to emulate the first Napoleon Bonaparte, his uncle. Karl Marx, no less, polemicised against the man he dismissed as the Jew Fould, “a stock-exchange Jew,” and one of the most notorious members of what he imagined was the conspiracy of high finance. At a moment when Achille Fould was minister, his mistress, an English demi-mondaine known as Skittles, dropped him into a very public scandal by going to live with the much younger Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, then an attaché at the British embassy at the start of a conspicuous career as a ladykiller. A number of Jews converted to Protestantism as a first step on the roundabout way to assimilation, and Achille Fould was one of them.
A cousin of his was Léon Fould (1839–1924), my greatgrandfather, known in the family as “Bon Papa” and not to be confused with his uncle Ber Léon. He had lived through the Commune in the revolutionary Paris of 1870. His wife was Thérèse Praskovia Ephrussi from Odessa, the half-sister of Charles and Maurice Ephrussi, cosmopolitan figures to whose financial and intellectual distinction Edmund de Waal, another of their descendants, pays tribute in his book The Hare with Amber Eyes. In 1864 when Thérèse was sixteen she sat for a portrait that brings out her prominent brown eyes, a round face as intelligent as it is innocent, a high straight forehead, dark hair that falls with natural tidiness – Poppy took her real name from her and looked so similar that they might have been twins. Bon Papa and Thérèse had three children: Eugène my grandfather born in 1873, Robert who died young, and Elizabeth, otherwise Tante Lizzie, another of the little old ladies on the terrace at Poppy’s wedding. She had married Oncle Jo, Vicomte de Nantois, also long dead but for whose sake she had become a Catholic. German race laws held that Jews converted to Christianity still counted as Jews, and in occupied Paris she had to wear the yellow star that singled them out. Her devoted maid, Clothilde Kannengiesser, a born Catholic and a native of Alsace, sewed the yellow star on her own clothes, and never hesitated to accompany Tante Lizzie in the streets and shops. Alsatians had been obliged to have German citizenship, and Clothilde’s courage might well have gotten her shot for treason.
Eugène attended the Lycée Janson, reputedly one of the best schools in Paris. In March 1888, when he was a teenager, his report gave a sketch of his character that others, among them Mitzi and his children, were to substantiate in the future. “He will be an excellent pupil the day when he is able to check his frivolity and the arrogance that prevents him achieving the results to be expected of him.” The tone of letters to his parents is light, though what is remembered of his humour still offers clues to a remote and idiosyncratic personality. Speaking of a couple, he described the husband as Sunday afternoon in London and the wife as Monday morning in Paris. “Sich vorstellen und wieder weg,” he joked at the sight of any ill-favoured couple whose sexual relations might seem improbable – just to imagine them at it is enough to turn you away, in an unidiomatic translation. A Jew who has become a Catholic priest is “a deserter in uniform.” Asked by Mitzi how to spell some word he would keep a serious face and spout a row of impossible consonants. To have daughters, he lamented, was like putting sugar on strawberries that someone else would eat. A dog called Toby, he said, was an “or not,” a pun from Hamlet that might well escape a French owner. Long after his death, his daughter Bubbles summed up: “Word play constituted his sole defense against those who made claims on him. The laughter of others kept his melancholy at bay.”
In photographs he appears either as a good-looking and well-groomed man about town or as a satisfied and conventional paterfamilias with his wife and children grouped around him. The first time Mitzi was pregnant, however, he told his mother that this was “unberufen,” uncalled for. Social life evidently preoccupied him. Writing from St Moritz to his mother, he gives a typical list of the international set he was pleased to be with, café society in today’s vocabulary: “the Lamberts, Bijou Heine, the Casati, little Madame Deschamps with the Ritters, Madame d’Hautpoul, Pierre de Segonzac, Constantinovitch, Marino Vagliano, the Zoghebs, Mrs. Tiffany, Napoléon Murat,” and more besides. Max remembered that in St. Moritz in about 1912 his father had overheard four Frenchmen at the next table in the hotel accusing Jews of vulgar manners and nouveau-riche furnishings in their houses. As someone who considered that connoisseurship and good taste were essential aspects of his personality, he moved to their table and tackled them then and there.
In France the names of the company he kept are Löwenthal, Helbronner, Weisweiller, Stern, David-Weill, members of families whose social success led them to hope they were assimilated though they could not be sure of it. In one letter to his mother he calls an angry cousin “Meschuggah” (as he spells the Yiddish word for idiotic, adding a self-conscious exclamation mark), while in another written from a boat on the Nile he explains arrangements for their journey in “Mitzraîm,” a complex pun based on Mitzi’s name and the Hebrew word for Egypt. In his twenties at the time of the Dreyfus affair, he found himself cut by the upper classes among whom he so badly wanted a place. Exceptionally, the Marquis de Jaucourt crossed the Place Vendôme to shake Eugène’s hand in full view of other people. Right up to the present the members of the family have kept alive the memory of this public gesture – his daughter Lorette was yet another guest on the terrace at Royaumont when Poppy married. “Je ne nous aime pas” – I don’t like us – Eugène used to say of his French compatriots.
Once when I must have been in my twenties, Mitzi took me to lunch in Paris at Maxim’s. They made a fuss of her there. She’d invited someone who had known Marcel Proust, and they could exchange memories. In a sort of glory by association, for instance, the family had their teeth seen to by Docteur Darcissac, Proust’s dentist whose technique by then was half a century out of date. (His even older colleague once drilled my tongue by accident, and then said, “Mais mon petit, tu renifles comme un petit cochon de Yorkshire” – you are sniveling like a Yorkshire piglet.) Connection to Proust came through Mitzi’s mother-in-law Thérèse who had a salon where he was a regular and watchful visitor. In the library at Royaumont was a copy of his first published work, the translation in 1904 of Ruskin’s The Bible of Amiens. The flyleaf carries a dedication in his slightly disjointed hand to “Madame Leon Fould. Respectueux hommage d’un ami,” followed by his signature.
Mitzi was in touch with Professor Philip Kolb of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the outstanding Proust scholar of the day. His edition in twenty volumes of Proust’s letters has a good many references to one or another Fould. In the fifth volume of this series Kolb publishes a remarkable letter to Eugène that he dates, no doubt correctly, to 19 March 1905. Eugène was then twenty-nine and Proust had come to a dinner celebrating his engagement to Mitzi. He praises “the ravishing beauty of Mademoiselle Springer” and her air of intelligence although he had not had the chance to speak to her. Insisting that he is writing as Eugène’s friend, he appears ostensibly to be congratulating him. It is a solemn moment for Eugène, his life and his friends are about to change, and Proust concludes with resonance: “The task of your wife will be very delicate and very lofty and all your friends place the greatest hope in her that she will be able to fulfill it.” Unexpectedly he lets drop that Eugène is a “humouriste,” that is someone caught up in his own comic view of things. Under the circumlocution and the tact is the unmistakable warning that a homosexual could not expect to have a successful marriage. Had Eugène read it that way and
