One Man In His Time: The Memoirs Of Serge Obolensky by Prince Serge Oblensky

Author:Prince Serge Oblensky [Oblensky, Prince Serge]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lucknow Books
Published: 2015-11-06T05:00:00+00:00

2

I HAVE NEVER LIKED to gamble. It is not that I have any prejudice against it, or that I disapprove, or have lost heavily. It is just that I never held the cards, or never had a run of luck, and it is tiring. However, in Nice at some time or other everyone gambles, and one night I stopped at the Casino and placed the money I had on the table. I had around two hundred francs, perhaps the equivalent of thirty-five dollars as the franc was then valued.

It was amazing. I couldn’t lose. I played the red and the black, and my two hundred francs became four hundred and then eight hundred and then sixteen hundred. Then I began to play more seriously. I made quite a lot of money on those two hundred francs. A crowd gathered. The regulars began collecting around me and following my bets. Anything I put them on came out. I went off with quite a lot of money, about twenty thousand francs. The next morning I bought a car, a Peugeot, a pretty good car for those days, which cost me the equivalent of several thousand dollars. With it Catherine and I spent a lovely month driving around the south of France and loafing in the winter sunshine.

It was a very strange time, that period immediately after the war. We heard all sorts of stories about what had happened, but we really knew very little about where anyone was, and who was safe, or dead.

I had rented my old flat in the Albany in London to Paul of Serbia, and I heard that he still occupied it. The fates of my Oxford friends were entirely unknown to me. The last Englishman I had seen was Bertie Stopford who had managed to get out of Russia with his brief case loaded with jewels. Being completely separated from everyone I had known made me uncomfortable; I wanted to find work of some sort that would bring me back into the main stream of life.

Catherine’s own plans for the future were simple. She wanted to follow the ambition she had always held, to become a concert singer. Artistically her voice was lovely, a contralto; she had beautiful high notes and a marvelous mezzo voice. She tried it, but eventually the strain on her heart of singing professionally was too much for her. She had a first mild heart attack. She had no choice but to stop. But the poignancy of her singing was remarkable, perhaps for that very reason, and when she gave her first concert in London in December of 1919 the London Times said, I think quite accurately, “The Princess, who possesses a mezzo voice of considerable charm and quality, was heard to advantage in Russian ballads.”

Mme Litvin, the most famous Russian singer of the time, was in Nice. She befriended Catherine, helped her and assisted with her training. They became great friends. Early in the morning the villa resounded with the incessant trills and runs and high notes repeated over and over in the music room.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.