Midnight in Europe Read Online Free PDF

might be, according to the Almanach de Gotha , but there was a sprinkling of Spanish dukes who continued to use the title, and to them she wrote letters.
    Not that they were ever answered, but they were meticulously composed—Ferrar’s saintly sister helped—so that, perhaps, some day … Señora Ferrar’s hopes were based on a yellowed packet of letters, tied with a faded ribbon, left to her by a great-aunt. The letters concerned a certain Spanish duchess, descended from Mariana Victoria, Infanta of Portugal, who sometime in the eighteenthcentury had been wed, in an arranged marriage, to an Italian count. He was three, she was forty-six, and from this marriage there was no issue. But , said the great-aunt’s letters, the duchess had, in her intemperate youth, been secretly married, and produced a daughter; an ancestor of Señora Ferrar.
    Meanwhile, someone had to run this amiably mad family and that someone was Señora Ferrar’s mother, Ferrar’s grandmother, his beloved Abuela—the Spanish version of Nana —who made sure that practical matters were attended to, and kept the family from disaster. She had always lived with them and, now seventy-seven, continued to do so, ruling the house in Louveciennes, just up the Seine from Paris, where Ferrar’s parents, sister, and a stray cousin all resided. And it was Abuela who made the great decision of Ferrar’s life: “We must go away,” she said to the family at the dinner table. “If we stay in Spain, there will be tragedy.” And so they went: night train to Paris, lives as émigrés.
    In Barcelona, the last week of July is remembered as the Semana Trágica, the Tragic Week, and commemorates riots, set off by the army’s failed adventure in Morocco in 1909, and the subsequent conscription into the army of Catalonian workers. Mobs ruled the city, fifty churches were burned down, and over two hundred people were shot in the repression that followed. Ferrar’s father, then a young man, having graduated from Spain’s majestic university at Salamanca, had been encouraged by friends to take up a junior position at the Ministry of Justice. When the rioting broke out in 1909, the head of the ministry had fled for his life—the anarchist rioters disliked his politics and meant to kill him. Deprived of this pleasure, they went after his subordinates. On the night of 10 July, with gunfire echoing through the streets, blood was smeared on the door of the Ferrar house. Abuela made her pronouncement over dinner and nobody disagreed. It had become dangerous to live in the city and, Abuela decreed, in Spain: they would leave, or they would die.
    Two days later they left for Paris. Ferrar, twelve at the time,would never forget that journey: this rupture in the family life had frozen them into silence. Nobody said a word, their minds occupied by the refugees’ litany: Where will we live? How shall we survive? What will become of us? In time, these questions were answered as the family adapted as best they could. After an intensive three-week study of French, Cristián Ferrar was enrolled at the Lycée Charlemagne, near the Saint-Paul Métro station.
    Three weeks? This change of existence, brought on by catastrophe, was the first step in Ferrar’s future success. The eldest son of the family had always been considered smart: he was a good student—the Jesuit teaching brothers thought well of him, he could answer all sorts of dinner-table questions, he was an avid reader; a smart young man. Meanwhile, Abuela used the word brilliant , but she was a grandmother and what grandmother wasn’t proud of her grandson? In fact, Ferrar had been born gifted, was exceptionally intelligent, and his teachers at the Lycée Charlemagne took special interest in him.
    Ten years later, by the time he received his degree from the Faculté de Droit, the law school of the Sorbonne, he could read and speak French, Italian, Portuguese—wildly difficult!—English, and German, and could manage in