An American Princess by Annejet van Der Zijl

Author:Annejet van Der Zijl [Zijl, Annejet van Der]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781503951839
Publisher: AmazonCrossing
Published: 2015-11-17T00:00:00+00:00

In his hope-filled letter, the German prince might not have been correct about his betrothed’s age or the high regard her family enjoyed in America. But in one aspect he had aptly characterized Allene: she was indeed downright lonely.

After her transatlantic journey in the spring of 1927, Allene had stayed with her old friend Olive Greville, who had been party to her marriage to Anson from the very start. But she couldn’t stay with the Grevilles in England endlessly and so traveled on to Paris over the summer with the idea of building a new life there, like so many Americans who had something to run away from. She needed a new house for this, one that wouldn’t constantly remind her of the person she’d rather have been in Paris with.

At the end of the summer, she walked around the elegant mansion that was to become hers, a grand house on the Rue Barbet-de-Jouy, for the first time. The house was in the seventh arrondissement, on the left bank of the Seine, where rich Americans with artistic tendencies had traditionally banded together. Around the corner, in the Rue de Varenne, lived the now elderly but still very successful writer Edith Wharton. Allene’s house had been built during the short reign of Emperor Napoleon III for the then Count of Montebello and now belonged to his granddaughter.

Albertine de Montebello had been known in her youth as “one of the loveliest, most charming, most intelligent women Paris could boast of” and had hosted a renowned and fashionable political salon at the Rue Barbet for years. But this aging comtesse was yet another who found herself forced to sell her family possessions, due to lack of money and high taxes, to the Americans rolling in dollars who had alighted upon Paris like a swarm of noisy locusts. Americans who then thoroughly modernized their new possessions, because the French may have had patents on good taste and culture, but—the expats felt—they didn’t have a clue about bathrooms and other modern American amenities.

And yet it seems it wasn’t the location, the evocative history, or even the charm of the house, decorated generously with little cherubs and flowers, that was the decisive factor for Allene. It was the house number: 33, Allene’s lucky number. This was a hangover from Jamestown, where an entrepreneurial tradesman had run a successful clothing business with the appropriate name of Proudfit at 33 Main Street. To advertise, he’d had trees and rocks painted with a double three for miles around and had even managed to claim the digits as a telephone number.

Allene hadn’t taken much with her when she ran away as a pregnant eighteen-year-old, but she’d always kept the double three as her lucky number. Although raised Presbyterian, in this she showed herself to be as superstitious as the majority of her otherwise-so-modern compatriots—there still weren’t any thirteenth floors in New York. And as believers fall back on their religions in difficult times, so the knocked-about Allene fell back on

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