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Nikki acting like anything but his age! This was taken during one of those wonderful summers before the war at Tous-le-monde. Those fortunate enough to have visited the estate during those times will not marvel at the robust behavior pictured here. So acrobatic! Yet I can say without hesitation that being at Tous-le-monde was like one’s first taste of champagne; a rush of energy to the head , a joyous cry from the heart wild and free, and the devil take the consequences. Many a love affair was born at Tous-le-monde. Many a great adventure conceived and planned in its intoxicating atmosphere. Paintings, poems, plays, piano concertos, philosophical paradigms, and passionate pas-de-deux were all part of the daily creative product of the place. Even the mundane affairs of business and practical politics were best done at Tous-le-monde, as dozens of treaties and the fortunes of many a tycoon can attest. I am almost certain that Nikki’s amour of the moment was named Laura. This is due to a curious fact of Nikki’s love life; his lovers run in schools. Before the war they were almost all Lauras, so following the Law of Averages, this one probably was a Laura. There were so many, of course, as there still are, that I cannot be expected to remember them all, especially one from so long ago. I’m sure she was charming; all the Lauras were. So were the Trudys in the twenties. But all that is neither here nor there, except as a reminder that in cases like Nikki’s, breeding will always tell.

What is worth mentioning is the heart-wrenching sadness that one feels when contemplating the wretched fate of that beautiful estate. Just to know that Tous-le-monde is gone forever is burden enough, but for it to have been destroyed in a scene of such terror and violent slaughter as to make the battle of the Centaurs and Lapiths seem tame by comparison is almost more than I can bear. In fact, when I think of it, I realize that this journal is being written mostly to exorcise these dark and painful feelings of loss that I carry within. Hopefully, I will also write of events past that have such sweetness as to ease the bitterness, or at least cleanse the palette. What I know of a certainty is that I have seen such things and felt such swings between joy and sorrow as would make the full compass of a life, if one could but find the center. Therefore, let the muse guide my pen into the heart of this labyrinth of remembrance that I may find the peace that liveth there

The Queen boating on the lagoon at Tous-le-monde with her dear friends Berthe and Isolde. You can see some of the famous monkeys on the dock in the background, and beyond that, the Chateau and the incomparable Arch of the Avatars. Never again will the King arise from his bed and cross the Arch to The Center of the World and contemplate his navel, or see the universe in a grain of sand, or whatever it was that He did there in the morning.

But I will not mourn what is forever lost. Rather I will change my mood and write of those things that I did not like about Tous-le-monde. I will start with those monkeys, those cute little monkeys. So darling when they played in the trees and scurried about in the meadow. If only that was all they did; usually they were playing with one’s hair and scurrying about on the picnic blanket, overturning the wine and snatching food from one’s hand. The monkeys were a conceit of His Majesty’s; He said they reminded him of the great days in old Bihar. Maybe so, but Mahavira never had to play croquet in the midst of a multitude of monkeys. Of course it was impossible to get in a decent game, but many of us who harbored secret feelings about the awful apes rather enjoyed the opportunity of an occasional pot-shot, whacking away enthusiastically in the direction of some particular monkey or other who might seem to be momentarily off guard. Not that we ever hit one. And if anyone ever did, Merlin was there to work his magic and make all well again.

I believe that is Isobel de Coucey standing on the dock talking to Grandville. A horrid, horrid young woman who came to a frightful end, although I dare say she deserved it for what she did to the Prince. Quelle affaire! Certainly the war turned his mind to more serious matters, because such foolishness from His Royal Highness is unthinkable now. The Queen flew into one of her famous rages when she found out, and turned the unfortunate Isobel first into a flowering quince, and when that failed to satisfy the queen’s fury, into a tiny mushroom growing on a hill of dung. Which she still would be if the place had not been blown into fragments and buried under a mountain of corpses. So Isobel’s is at least one soul which can rejoice at the utter destruction of Tous-le-monde, freed thereby from feeding on turds forever and released into the Well of Souls for another chance at life.

Now that I think of it, I didn’t much care for Her Majesty’s fits of temper either. One didn’t know when the beautiful calm of Tous-le-monde would be shattered by the Tempest. The King never really tried to use his influence to calm her, preferring instead to retire in contemplation to The Center of the World, leaving the rest of us to get by as best we could. No wonder the Prince and Nikki were always off chasing after adventure in foreign parts. In retrospect, I suppose one can see in this some sign of impending disaster, but for us at the time it was just life as it was.

Nikki and the Prince in Mexico on their great quest for the lost city of Tula. This was taken in 1913, which Nikki says was the best year of his life. He and the Prince had an adventurous nine months seeking the birthplace of Ce Acatl’s last incarnation. They were weeks at a time in the desert, several days journey from any source of water. Hours and hours were devoted to making scientific measurements while the soldiers maintained a minute by minute watch against the perils that could strike at any second. There was much unrest in Mexico at the time, and such precautions were necessary.

They took with them a multitude of instruments, beautifully made of glass and brass and teak, and a small army of scientists to do the experiments. Nikki was convinced that the power of science could be utilized to make the earth itself reveal the city’s location, and apparently he was right, for they were able to ascertain that legendary Tula was actually the same as Teotihuacan, the great ruins near Mexico City. I have seen the calculations, notebook after notebook of them, but they meant nothing to me. What was far more convincing was when I actually saw Teotihuacan myself, years later; the grandeur of the place made it obvious that it was Ce Acatl’s city.

Most of the men who went with the Prince and Nikki on that expedition were killed in the first few months of the war. That gallant band of heroes had been so influenced by constant exposure to the Prince’s buoyant optimism that they thought themselves immortal. Sadly, this was not true, and the Prince’s protective aura proved unequal to the laws of physics that allow lead to fly. Before the war, none of us thought that our tendency to consort with humans could have anything but a beneficial result. In fact, there was much mention among us of our burden of responsibility and so forth, not that anyone will admit to such talk nowadays. Now, the whole approach is different, much more like being a secret agent and being inconspicuous; hiding what you are up to and covering your tracks. It can be exciting, sometimes.

The Pooka in the picture is Harvey LaPin, who later moved to America and became something of a celebrity, acting on the Broadway stage and in Hollywood. He is one of the best examples of that rarest of pookas, who did not choose radical separation but chose instead to stay with us. Bless them all who help to keep the hope alive that it can be again as it was before.

A Zeppelin went down behind our lines and Nikki was there with his camera. The crewman on the right is just transcending the physical plane. How tragic and unique to be able to capture such a moment on film! How often I have stared at this photo and thought of his mother and the sweetheart he must have had. How many other young men also died flying in those awful airships? How strange the expression on his face. I believe I can trace out the ghost of a smile on the dying man’s lips; had he just glimpsed the Great White Light, or am I seeing the tight lipped control of a boy afraid to show his fear? And that thing in the background! Usually the Zeppelins were destroyed in a great fireball high up in the sky. Since they flew mostly at night, you knew when one of them went because it would light up the sky so brightly that it could wake you from a deep sleep. Nikki called them exploding cigars.

Nikki was always making jokes about the Zeppelins, but I knew that inside he was deeply torn. Before the war he had been a real airship enthusiast; he had visited the Zeppelin factory several times and had even dined with the Count. There was more to it than a boyish fascination with mechanical marvels. The Orphic visionary in him had made a symbolic connection between airships and the lingam of Shiva. He thought it marvelous, and a sign of the wondrous nature of our times, that a huge emblem of the God’s creative power, wrought by the hand of man and guided by his cunning, should sail above our cities. He reminded those who accused him of Theosophistry that winged phalluses were scratched on the walls of Pompeii, thereby proving the universal nature of the image. They would laugh good naturedly at his earnestness, or snicker behind their hands at the thought of phalluses, but they were not convinced by him that this was a sign of the impending ascent of mankind to godhood. And how right they were!

This photo of our little Shirley and dear Alice Lapin at the Louvre opens so many doors. Of course I think of Alice, childhood companion to mother, daughter, and grand-daughter. How wonderful it was growing up in the company of Pookas. Always there was laughter. Always there was the certain warmth of their affection. I was well into my twenties before I understood how it was with the others, who did not have such childhood friends. And now, sadly, no-one does.

But here also is the winged Victory of Samothrace, an ode in stone to the soaring elation of victory, that gift of the Gods prized above all others by humans. At some forgotten moment she had her head knocked off, which ought to have diminished her appeal, but not according to Nikki, who became her greatest devotee during the time just after Versailles. He would haunt the Louvre day after day, standing before her, or sitting on a little folding chair that he brought along for when the pain in his leg got the better of him. Nikki’s devotion to Nike was quite the topic of conversation then, but he would say nothing to any of us, preferring to pursue his vigil in silence. Eventually life provided us with other things to provoke our wonder and fuel our gossip, so we did not notice when Nikki ended his obsession with the ancient Goddess, nor did anyone think to ask him what it had been about. I think I know, but only because I chanced to hear him remark, years later, that the Nike of Samothrace would be the perfect memorial to the Great War because it had no head.

I carried this photo with me for a long while because it shows two who are so dear to me. And so, I had it with me when I visited Oaxaca, in Mexico, in the thirties. I met an artist there who was painting a great cycle of frescoes in the City Hall by the Zoccalo. He was a handsome and gracious gentleman who painted in a white linen suit and kept an alter to the Virgin on his taboret. Everyone in Oaxaca called him El Maestro, and so will I. The subject of El Maestro’s fresco cycle was the Quetzalcoatl myth, which was amusing to me, because Ce Acatl was at that moment studying at the Academy. Of course I didn’t tell El Maestro that.

In fact, I couldn’t tell El Maestro much at all; He had no French and I had no Spanish. He had studied for a few years in Italy, but His Italian was atrocious, and poorly remembered in any case. So we struggled to communicate in the romantic ruins of Lingua Latina, gathering meaning mostly by hearing the mangled echoes of Caesar’s speech in each other’s nouns. It was an exhausting and doomed effort, and distressing to us both, for there was a definite attraction between us.

The Oaxacans maintain a charming colonial style, and the Zocallo retains its role in the city’s life as a meeting place. My last encounter with El Maestro took place at the cafe on the Zocallo where he took his afternoon coffee. We had our usual painful effort at conversation during which I showed him my photo of Shirley, Alice, and the Nike in response to what I thought must certainly have been a question about my family. He looked at it for a long moment, not seeing Alice, of course, and finally he said, “El Nike de Samothrace.” He looked at me then, with such a withered emptiness in his eyes that my breath caught in my throat, and said, “Ah ... el guerro.”