An American Princess: The Many Lives of Allene Tew(31)
My nearest relatives—the only people aside from you who know of my engagement—have welcomed my fiancée with open arms, this after a long correspondence. As I already wrote, they met in Dresden and there they grew closer harmoniously. My oldest brother is coming here tomorrow. My sister had to return to Berlin today. She, too, was very taken by my fiancée and the great inner distinction of this unique woman.
He hoped the governess would also agree to put aside her “prononcierte Aversion gegen Ausl?nder”—her “pronounced dislike of foreigners”—for the sake of the children, Henry wrote. He once again assured her, perhaps unnecessarily, that his fiancée would raise the children completely in the spirit and with the love their own mother had given them and that they were in complete agreement about this. The wedding would probably take place in very closed circles the following April in Paris, where his fiancée owned a house. In the meantime, the engagement should be kept secret until the widow’s second year of mourning had passed. The news would not be made public until February or March for this reason.
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 hers: a house with the number 33 on the front door had to bring her the luck she so desperately needed.
In early October 1927, almost to the day when Teddy would have turned thirty, she signed the purchase agreement. A few days later, she unveiled a memorial on the spot of her son’s crash in Masnières, offered to her by the townspeople as thanks for her contribution to their village’s reconstruction. The boys’ school named after Teddy opened that same day. On the plaque announcing that the school had been built in memory of “their son,” Allene and Anson were once again united in marble.
Sure enough, just a few months after Allene began a radical modernization of the house at 33 Rue Barbet-de-Jouy, she made the acquaintance of a handsome diplomat working at the German embassy in the nearby Rue de Lille. And he—how transparent fate can be!—also had a double three in his name, since Henry bore the aristocratic title of Prince Heinrich Reuss the Thirty-Third.
Henry had the Reuss family’s remarkable habit of naming all their sons Heinrich to thank for the XXXIII in his name. The numbering began anew at the start of each century to distinguish them from one another. Aside from this, they were each given a nickname that was a variant of their given name. In this way, Henry’s older brother went through life as Heino, his younger as Henrico, and his son—whose official title was Heinrich Prince Reuss II, because he was the second Reuss prince to be born that century—was called Heiner.
Henry didn’t need the lucky number in his name to charm the rich but solitary American widow. He was known as a handsome and charming man. Once, when his German family could still lay serious claim to the Dutch throne—this because their relative Queen Wilhelmina threatened to remain childless—the Dutch had openly expressed their preference of him over his older, not particularly intelligent brother. During their eight-day visit to the Netherlands in 1908, Henry was enthusiastically welcomed as “intelligent, good-looking and artistically minded”—in all respects the ideal candidate for the throne.