Yesterday Was Mine
Memoires of a Romanian Princess. Memoires of Europe*
In 1937, the British writer and eccentric Sacheverell Sitwell visited Romania at the invitation of Princess Ana Maria Callimachi. This trip resulted in the publication of Romanian Journey in London, a book later translated into Romanian by Maria Berza and published by Humanitas in 2011 as Călătorie în România. I read it with great interest but was surprised to find few references to his host.
In 1940, Princess Ana Maria Callimachi left Romania and, encouraged by Sacheverell and Georgia Sitwell, published her memoirs—Yesterday Was Mine— in England in 1949. I still wonder what the British thought about Romania when they read it! What did they think of this country (left at that time behind an “iron curtain”) which “is no country of moderation and balance”? Of course, this wasn’t the first account of Romania, which, until a few decades ago, was considered something of an exotic realm, whose charm began to captivate the imagination, especially after the Crimean War. Plus, the British had already given us a queen, the granddaughter of Queen Victoria. I also wonder what they thought about the accounts of Queen Marie! What is certain is that the Romanian people, very much loved their queen, forgiving any of her escapades in their deep affection. All the behind-the-scenes accounts from the palace, with a touch of salon gossip, retain a hint of mystery, avoid a syrupy sentimental tone, and have all the ingredients of a story that keeps you turning the pages. Ana Maria Callimachi’s writing is fresh, and dynamic, with bits of melancholy, sometimes painfully honest.
"Morality has never been a strong point with my compatriots, but they can boast of charm and beauty, wit, fun, and intelligence. Life was too free in a rich and easy-going country to breed rigid principles. The extraordinary facility of divorce in the past, as well as in the present, somewhat shattered the sanctity of matrimony and the strength of family ties. [...]
The disapproval of the Church, which might have made divorce less popular, is lacking. One can get married up to three times in church, the service being slightly shorter each time. A fourth religious blessing can occasionally be obtained [...].
Nobody reads the Bible, although some may know the Gospels; but religious superstition, nearly akin to magic, rules the peasantry without preventing sin. [...]
Outpost of the Orient, we carry its dangerous attractions; bastion of the West, the burdens of civilization weigh heavily on a still newly developed population. The slack moral standards are equally true of the middle classes and peasantry. Here is no case of “rotten upper classes” but of general outlook on life, which may vary in form, not in degree, for the cities, the villages, and the slums. Provincial towns copy the capital, and there is little contrast to Bucharest’s alleged corruption. Provincial puritanism, often met elsewhere, is nonexistent in Roumania. [...]
It takes centuries to alter the deep characteristics of a race, and to mine I am linked by heredity, language, and childhood surroundings. Whatever my subsequent revolts and disapprovals, my roots are there." (pages 49-54)
The Romanian edition, Lumea era toată a mea. Amintirile unei prințese was finally published—in 2015—in the Istorie cu blazon collection, coordinated by historian Filip-Lucian Iorga Bărbulescu, at Corint Publishing House, and translated by Lidia Grădinaru.
At my mother's insistence, and still under the influence of readings describing the before and between the World Wars periods, I set aside Wilson's biography and allowed myself to be immersed in the world of this princess. And I'm glad I did so, as the book captures you from the very first lines. Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday is entirely the world of Ana Maria Callimachi, both being the memories of Europeans who, in many ways, were far more European than we are now. However, despite all the losses and even at the twilight of her world, Ana Maria Callimachi’s tone is much more optimistic compared to the profound sense of sadness and despair that pervades Zweig’s work. This ability of many noble scions to adapt transcends time and, in a way, overcomes revolutions, having the capacity to sieve joy from sadness, always finding enough resources to live another day with the curiosity of a child.
"May all the yesterdays that were mine, more numerous than I have mentioned, not blunt my few tomorrows." (page 267)
This concludes the memoirs of a princess, married into the Callimachi family and born Văcărescu, with origins that trace back through the centuries of Romanian history. Ana Maria is a descendant of Ianache Văcărescu, who, alongside Constantin Brâncoveanu, lost his head in Constantinople, and Ienăchiță Văcărescu, an erudite polyglot, poet, philologist, and historian, a precursor of the cultured Romanian language and the second Romanian after Dimitrie Cantemir to write a history of the Ottoman Empire. Moreover, the great Văcărescu family of boyars produced several literary and diplomatic figures. Her cousin, Elena Văcărescu, after an impossible romance with the future King Ferdinand of Romania, found fulfillment in Paris, advocating for the Great Union and using her diplomatic skills for the Kingdom of Romania in her role as the General Secretary of the Romanian Association at the League of Nations.
Orphaned from her mother at a young age, Ana Maria was deeply influenced by her grandmother's maternal figure, whom she recalls with great warmth. I was delighted to discover in the pages of the book accounts of her grandmother's education at a private girls' school in France, a testament to the connections that developed over time between Romania and France. These connections were both by blood, through numerous alliances between Romanian and Western nobility, and by friendship, which allowed Romanian nobles access to the most exclusive French, Austrian, German, Spanish, Italian, Belgian, and English circles. It was a solid education that opened the doors of diplomacy to many.
"From the first moment the atmosphere was one of austerity tempered by kindliness, and my grandmother adored her school years. The new pupils were received in a large, book-lined study by the imposing, portly figure of Madame Hachet de Macy, descendant of an old, now impoverished, family who, efficiently helped by a spinster daughter, ran the establishment in traditional French way like the original Institution of Saint-Cyr, or in the manner of Madame Campan. The latter had been Marie Antoinette’s former lectrice, who opened a school in which she was lucky enough to educate young Hortense de Beauharnais, thus attracting the attention of the girl’s stepfather, General Bonaparte. As Emperor Napoleon I, he entrusted Madame Campan with the creation of the Girls’ College of Écouen to teach the sisters and daughters of his parvenu marshals and fellow officers the manners and refined behavior of the ancien régime.
Madame de Macy belonged to another period, more sedate than the garish Empire fashions of Napoleon III. She had, indeed, belonged in some capacity to the household of Marie Amelie, the bourgeois King Louis Philippe’s unobtrusive wife; and this created enough of a link with past royalty to have all the young girls of the new regime sent to her school where they were bound to associate with the daughters of the legitimate aristocracy and to acquire the best traditional manners." (pages 15-16)
To a large extent, it is precisely the grandmother's education that explains Ana Maria's unconventional upbringing. It was less militaristic but not without strictness, more closely tied to family and home—namely, the estate at Mănești or the villa in Bucharest—with governesses or private tutors, and yet so open to the world, and especially to Europe. With a grandfather who was a diplomat, among other things, a former ambassador of the Kingdom of Romania to the court in Vienna during the last years of Franz Joseph's reign, and a father who frequented the same diplomatic circles and, in his free time, was a true dandy, instruction in the art of conversation and dialogue came naturally to Ana Maria.
The descriptions of meals, particularly dinners, heated by discussions and polemics, are full of flavor. The parties in Bucharest have a Balkan air, grandiose to the point of exhaustion and ruin! And Europe is free to be traversed by the Orient Express. The privileged can enjoy the ball season in Vienna, Paris, or Rome. Museums are explored leisurely, artworks are analyzed, and participation in the most important scientific conferences is a given. The most significant topics are debated in the most important “institution” of high society—the French salon! All these experiences are part of her education. And it is not about the childhood and youth of a spoiled princess, but rather the upbringing of a young woman full of personality and capable of making choices!
The marriage market and the institution of courtship are treated with pragmatism and also with much humor. The offer from King Nikita of Montenegro is declined, as is that of His Royal Highness Don Jaime of Bourbon, Duke of Madrid, a claimant to the Spanish throne, who was ready to fight for the crown as soon as he had the necessary funds, which he hoped to acquire through marriage. Within just three days, Jean Callimachi's proposal is accepted, and the engagement is announced, with the wedding taking place two months later at the estate in Mănești, at Ana Maria’s request. This is followed by a two-year honeymoon across Europe and a marriage to be envied despite the considerable age difference. However, the author does not shy away from highlighting the sins of the privileged class to which she belonged, seemingly blinded by brilliant prosperity in increasingly turbulent times.
"For several years we led the banal, sheltered existence of a well-to-do young couple without ambitions. We were no exception in a bygone world, so carefree and steady that the young people of nowadays can hardly conceive it. Perhaps, amid the fluid facility of passing days, we occasionally wished for some new excitement, called for the unexpected, accused of tame indifference the period in which we did not know our luck. When the unexpected occurred, it came as a rude awakening to a slumbering society, pregnant with turmoils and changes it had ignored. The term “war” held no meaning for us or, at most, only a symbolical one. Even to clever people horizons appeared clear.
My one regret is not to have taken at the time a more serious view of life and considered productive work as one of its major aims. But from the start busy leisure and travel had been our sole concerns. My only excuse is that we shared this rather superficial outlook with a great majority of our contemporaries in our own walk of life. None around us seemed to make or earn their money, one just had it as a matter of course, using it gaily and freely." (page 224)
However, since the book primarily focuses on childhood and youth, the carefree parties and travels throughout Europe cast a shadow over the accounts of the special relationship she developed with the peasants due to her childhood at the Mănești estate and any accounts of maturation, initiative, and adaptation to new realities. Yet, these aspects do exist for anyone who wishes to move beyond the atmosphere of ballrooms, Parisian salons where she mingled with Anatole France or Edmond Rostand’s house in Biarritz. Ana Maria is equally at ease whether she is in the company of Princess Pauline von Metternich, or before the former Empress Eugenie of France, who would casually remark that "it’s a pity the French always seem frightened by glory; they feel safer with mediocrity," or among the peasants on her and her husband's estates.
"It had taken almost a revolution to start me working personally on the land. It was only in 1920, after the Roumanian Government had decreed a drastic, if probably necessary, law almost totally expropriating the big landowners, that, believing us to be potentially ruined, I decided to try and farm myself the land left me. This was an estate —Cocargea by name, and a very large one—(...).
I then set to work on an almost hopeless job that was totally new to me. I had some experience of diking and enlisted the help of famous engineers, who did much to render the marshland available for crops. After that I planned, planted, hoped, plowed, and sowed, despaired and reaped, until I finally managed to make the estate not just an exciting hobby but a well-paying proposition. By the time political circumstances compelled me to sell the property by proxy in 1940, it was the best-run farm in the region and some of my experiments had actually created precedents. For instance, I was the first farmer in Roumania to succeed in growing two crops on the same land in one year. I felt this was quite an achievement for one lacking any special agricultural training!
I had gathered a fairly competent staff around me, but I owed much of my success to the cooperation, understanding, and good will of the peasant folk on my estate. They never undermined my work, nor shirked hard strenuous labor. I pride myself as having often been treated by them as one of their own— great compliment, for the Roumanian peasant is a lord in his way, my equal in many instances, and sometimes my better, despite poverty and great lack of education, for which he is but partly responsible." (pages 40-41)
Similarly, amidst the whirlwind of a recently concluded honeymoon, the choice of a highly qualified English nurse—the English nanny being another institution of that era—for the newborn, and the humorous tone with which the arrival of this new family member is presented, might render the account of her involvement in the Balkan War somewhat less interesting. Indeed, the author does not dwell on details about this subject; it was not about a title of glory but rather a moral duty to her country, which is mentioned as naturally as possible.
"Our return home was compulsory. Before leaving Switzerland, expecting the worst, I took measures to order all the necessary material and drugs to set up a field ambulance which I intended to present to the Roumanian Red Cross, reserving for myself the right of running it with imported doctors, at my own expense. A trusted friend and experienced surgeon. Dr. Lardy, who had previously campaigned in the Balkans, was to supervise the last details and accompany the bulky shipment." (page 239)
Behind an impressive gallery of historical figures from various fields and all corners of the world, presented with both their virtues and flaws, beyond the grandeur of life and concerns that might seem superficial, we discover a keen observer of society in an internally and externally political context, evoked with subtle humor—without notes of lamentation about what was and will no longer be—a trait often exhibited by cultured individuals who have lived through such times. Thus, more than once, I found myself smiling during reading, sometimes even laughing loudly, although perhaps it would have been more fitting to shed a few tears.
"Tidings from the Palace indicated that the aged sovereign could not recover from the blow dealt him by his kingdom’s neutrality. The news of a French victory on the Marne was more than Carol’s strained heart could stand. Acutely sensing the disaster that would overwhelm his beloved Germany, he died suddenly on the tenth of October. He was given a grand funeral, many speeches of official praise ... not one sincere regret." (page 262)
The volume concludes with the moment of King Carol I's death and Romania's entry into World War I, the first of which would lead to the disappearance of a world not only in Romania but throughout Europe and even beyond its borders. This world, with all its strengths and weaknesses, helped build the Europe we now know and to which we owe our cultural heritage and what we today call tourist attractions that we enjoy. It offers a colorful, fragrant, noisy, and charming portrait of a Bucharest that astonished everyone, a snapshot of a passionate society regardless of status. It includes many historical lessons drawn directly from the intimacy of boudoirs, the story of two old noble families about which we still know too little, and the tale of our old connections with Europe. In the over 300-pages memoire volume, the author proves herself a worthy heir to the literary gene of the Văcărești family.
*Quotes are from YESTERDAY WAS MINE, By PRINCESS ANNE-MARIE CALLIMACHl, PUBLISHED BY WHITTLESEY HOUSE, 1949, available online for free download here - Yesterday Was Mine : Princess Anne-Marie Callimachi : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
This is the English adapted-version of an article initially published in my native Romanian language on my blog, based on the 2015 Romanian edition published by Corint Publishing House. https://www.dinmansarda.com/lumea-era-toata-a-mea-amintirile-unei-printese-amintiri-despre-europa/
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