Word: countesses
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...Countess checked in at the Athene Palace the day Paris fell. She found the hotel swarming with "spies of every Intelligence Service in the world; the diplomats and military attaches of great and little powers; British and French oil men on their way out, and German and Italian oil men on their way in; Gestapo agents and Ovra agents and OGPU agents, or men who were at least said to be agents; amiable Gauleiters and hardheaded economic experts; distinguished Rumanian appeasers and mink-clad German and Austrian beauties who were paid to keep them happy. ... As the drama of bloodless...
Spats & Monocles. But, for the Countess, the deathbed atmosphere of Rumania was best typified by the "Old Excellencies." There were two of these strange creatures in the lobby of the Athene Palace, "a kind of token force of a large army of some 700 living Rumanian former cabinet ministers, and of innumerable diplomats and generals." Wearing white linen spats and monocles, they sat at their table in the lobby from noon until midnight, studying "women's points." One Old Excellency had "the face of a sick greyhound." The other, "grey-haired and heavy-eyed," had a pointed beard like...
Once the Excellencies introduced the Countess to a deferential man who had "the face of a seal and breathed very loudly through his short nose." The old men were very cordial while the seal kissed the Countess' hand with "very moist lips." But as soon as he moved on, Bratianu-beard said: "Voila le gigolo le phis dangereux de Bucharest." All his friends in high Rumanian society knew, said the Old Excellencies, that "he lived on women and blackmail" and "worked for Moruzov's Secret Police." Nearly everybody in the Athene Palace worked for Moruzov, they said, from...
...Countess wondered what indiscreet Bucharestians were like. But just then the Old Excellencies bowed to an "extraordinary dark beauty" who was slipping off her sables. "That," whispered the Greyhound, "is the friend of the German and the Hungarian and the Italian ministers. They all pay her for telling them what Udareanu [Carol's court chamberlain] does. And Udareanu pays her to tell him what the ministers are up to. The perfect arrangement...
There was Dr. Neubacher, German minister plenipotentiary for economic affairs in the Balkans. He had been mayor of Vienna when the Nazis made the Jews clean the streets, liked to call himself an old revolutionary. Of Nazi aims in Rumania, Dr. Neubacher told the Countess: "We have only one aim, and that is to keep quiet in the raw-material sphere...