Pre-War Italy and Post-War England

By Prince Louis Richard II de la Pau

There are some things that you never forget. And the funny thing is that they’re not the major events – graduation, losing your virginity, or buying your first car. No. It’s the little things that stick in your mind and come to you in the middle of a sleepless night with all the clarity and purity of a first-class film in technicolor. They are the ones that rip you apart inside, scraping their fingernails across your very soul. And they can follow you to the ends of the earth, never losing the immediacy of remembrance.

For me, all it takes is a piano. Even the battered upright that’s never in tune at the social center in the village brings a lump to my throat. Not because I used to play. Not even because I was good enough to win international piano competitions and play with some of the finest orchestras in the world. No, it all goes back 16 years to an afternoon spent with a frail old woman.

My grandmother was born of another time, another place: a princess born to a life of privilege and fabulous wealth before the First World War, in a country that was still trying to find its feet 40 years after unification – the Risorgimento, as it’s known.

Her life was a constant round of parties and balls, receptions and operas. But it wasn’t that aspect of royal life that enthralled her. The jewels and the palaces were just part of the décor, the wings and gloriously-painted backdrops of a life spent in the public eye. Her passion was music.

She was lucky, really. Most people in those circles would probably have indulged her only to the extent of the obligatory piano lessons so that, as a beribboned girl of 7, she could charm the Tsar of Russia with her skills in playing simple Mozart sonatas. Even the very idea of a professional career would have been anathema.

Yet her parents realized how gifted she was and sent her to the Royal Academy of Music in Rome, where she learned to hone her abilities and dazzle some of the most jaded audiences in Italy – a country where music is a way of life, a national heritage, a part of the identity of a people humiliated by the contempt of the rest of Europe and a lingering reputation for cowardice in battle.

Even the rise of Fascism couldn’t stop her own ascent to public acclaim. The Duke she’d acquired as a result of a marriage contract signed when she was 5 years old supported her yearnings to flee the etiquette of Court and the stifling restraints of Society, and so he permitted her to put off having a baby and travel instead.

She played everywhere: London, Madrid, Stockholm, Belgrade – even before the Emperor of Japan in his reclusive palace hidden in the center of Tokyo. Her skills attracted the attention of composers and performers alike. It is said that Rachmaninoff heard her in Paris and fell in love with her. Whatever the truth, she adored the melancholy Russian émigré. And she made his poignant concertos the heart of her repertoire.

Duty finally called in 1933 when her husband, weary of her long absences and unable to travel due to his post in Mussolini’s government, summoned her home. She gave up her blossoming career and bore the Duke a daughter – a girl who, one day, would turn her back on her mother and refuse to acknowledge the golden years when life in Italy was still fairly normal, before the catastrophe of a global conflict that would cost her family its homes, position, fortune, and country. But that’s another story, one where there are no heroes or anti-heroes – only pain and sadness and misunderstandings spanning decades.

Yet in 1937, my grandmother was finally able to realize her dream. Invited by Rachmaninoff, she set sail from Cherbourg on the Normandie bound for Carnegie Hall, the Second Piano Concerto and a presidential reception for Franklin Roosevelt. And New York welcomed this curious Italian princess, showered her with accolades, and left her with a nostalgic fondness for the States that would last the rest of her life.

That journey to America turned out to be her Swan song. She’d been fighting illness for many years: a simple contraction of measles at the age of 6 left her with full-blown lupus by her 9th birthday. But she never gave into it. Even when the painful sores appeared on her left arm, she was resolute. Her piano playing was the most important thing to her, so she started that fashion of long evening dresses with one arm covered and the other bare. Her elegance was a byword, and I doubt anyone at the time knew that there was a disease creeping through her body, leaving her drained and wasted.

Her doctors warned her: if she tried to have any more children, she would die. Naturally, she ignored them and bore two more daughters, and would probably have continued to try to bear the long-awaited heir if her husband hadn’t died of cancer at their modest home in ignominious Egyptian exile.

The post-war years and the proclamation of the Italian republic had left her and her family destitute, penniless, and stateless. It took a coup d’état in Egypt for England to finally take the decision to allow the widowed princess and her daughters to move to London with what was left of their belongings.

But while her public victory in New York in 1937 had been the talk of Europe at the time, no one knew of an earlier, private conquest she’d made on board the Normandie. His name was Frank, a ships officer who had captivated her on the first night of the voyage. And in 1954, it was Frank who came to her rescue in London when they met quite by accident in a department store where she had gone to look for a job. The flame lit before the War had never died away for either of them, although 17 years had passed with no contact, no letter. They waited the obligatory length of time for the reading of the banns and were married a month after that chance rendezvous.

She never played the piano again. The disease had spread so far that her left arm was virtually useless, burned by nitric acid applied by ignorant doctors in an effort to stop the sores from spreading. By the time I really got to know her in the 1980s, people had forgotten about her glittering career. She was merely known as ‘the duchess’ or ‘her highness,’ never as Mrs. Barton.

Frank, knowing that her royal status was all she had left, had refused to ask her to part with her family name. Despite her modest way of life, her neighbors sensed the regal hauteur, the quality and dignity shining from behind the dull patina of poverty, and she reigned supreme in that dreadful neighborhood south of London.

By 1990 my grandmother was so ill that she had to go into a nursing home. It broke her. The Alzheimer’s that had been creeping up on her slowly for years finally pounced and claimed her for itself. Three months after I drove her to the home, she didn’t know who I was, or she thought I was her father.

Maybe that was a blessing, heavily disguised as a disaster. She had no idea where she was, no idea about the humiliation of helplessness, no recollection that her daughters had stopped visiting her years earlier. She was living in the 1930s again – a royal princess, a star, and a happy young mother.

One day, Herr Alzheimer must have been concentrating his attentions on one of the other residents, because I found her downstairs in the common room watching two senile old women trying to play gin rummy and failing miserably. She laughed as soon as she saw me and spoke to me in French, explaining that the women were both trying to cheat each other out of five pence, but were both too far gone in their dementia to realize what the other was up to.

I don’t remember what we talked about, but we strolled slowly round the room, enjoying the sort of conversation that we hadn’t been able to have in years, until we reached the piano. She stopped suddenly and stared at it for a few moments before sitting down pensively on the plastic chair in front of the keyboard. She lifted the lid and then looked up at me and said, “Do you want to know why Sergey Rachmaninoff loved me?”

I nodded, thinking that the curtain had come down again and she was off in a vanished world of her own, safe from the horrors of her life.

But she put her poor arthritic hands on that dusty keyboard and started to play the slow movement from the Concerto in C minor. She took it gently, confidently, her fingers caressing the keys and coaxing a tone out of that piano that it had probably never achieved before and never would after. The whole room grew still as the other old people stared at us, the duty staff-members poking their heads round the door in amazement before coming in and sitting down in the vacant armchairs and sofas.

The whole time my grandmother played like an angel possessed, as though the lupus and arthritis and Alzheimer’s had never happened and Rachmaninoff himself was conducting an invisible orchestra just beyond the cusp of hearing.

A week later she was dead.

You don’t forget things like that. It was as though a compassionate god had decided that she had the right to one last moment of adulation. When I close my eyes, I can still see the glow on her face when she’d finished and the brilliance in her usually melancholy green eyes at the applause she received. I’ll never be able to look at a piano without hearing her play that slow, sad, exquisite music – music that described her so perfectly and which I cannot bear to listen to without crying for her all these years later … because, after all, it’s the little things that rip you apart.

HSH Prince Louis Richard II de la Pau, a member of the Italian House of Bourbon-Parma, was born in exile in Australia in 1969 but is now living in Bulgaria, where he is a translator and writer. He has just finished writing his first semi-autobiographical novel, A Prayer for a Prince, or Valse Triste, which is under consideration for publication in the United States.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Wednesday, November 29th, 2006 | Email This Post

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