Orangery always fascinated me, I told Gambetti. It was the word I loved best of all. The Orangery was built on the escarpment above the village in such a way that the mild sunlight that fell on it benefited all the plants that grew in it. The old builders were clever, I said, cleverer than those of today. And the amazing thing is that they spent only a short time working on a building, unlike modern builders, who can spend years over a single structure. A stately home that was built to last for centuries would be completed in a few months, with all its fine, even highly sophisticated features. Today they waste years putting up some vulgar, unsightly, and ludicrously unpractical monstrosity, and one wonders why, I said. In those days every single builder had taste and worked for pleasure. This is obvious when you look at old buildings, which are entirely suited to their purpose, unlike any that are built today. Every detail was lovingly fashioned, I said, with the greatest sensitivity and artistry; even minor features were executed with the utmost taste. The Orangery is not only ideally situated, I told Gambetti, but it’s built with exquisite taste; it’s a work of art that can easily stand comparison with the finest creations of its kind in northern Italy and Tuscany. Each master builder was a minor Palladio, I told Gambetti. Modern building is degenerate, not only tasteless but for the most part unpractical and quite inhumane, whereas earlier building styles were artistic and humane. Built onto the left side of the Orangery is a big arch, made of conglomerate, tall enough for all the farm vehicles to pass under. Behind it is the spacious yard of the Home Farm, which consists chiefly of three cowsheds and a generously proportioned stable. Above them are the quarters occupied by the farmhands, who have always earned a good living. The Farm is built in the shape of a horseshoe. The living quarters above the stable and cowsheds could accommodate about a hundred people. They all have big rooms, no smaller than those in the main house, which is a very elegant structure built on an eminence directly opposite the Farm, at a distance of two hundred yards. One has the finest view of it from the Farm, through the arch that I’ve just mentioned.Ithas two upper floors and is exactly a hundred feet high, I told Gambetti. I love the view of the house. The front is more austere than any other I know in Austria, and more elegant. In the middle is the main entrance, twenty-five feet high, painted in such a dark shade of green that it appears black, with no ornamentation except for the brass knob, which is screwed on and never polished, and an iron bell pull to the left. The first-floor windows are set at a height that prevents anyone from looking in. Stepping into the entrance hall is always a shock to me when I come from Rome; its coldness, as well as its fine proportions, its height and its length, always make me catch my breath. It’s about a hundred feet long, up to the courtyard wall, and the only natural light falls from above onto the hundred-fifty-year-old larch-wood floorboards, each of which is about twenty inches wide and now quite gray from generations of use. I don’t know a more beautiful hall, I told Gambetti. It’s imposing by its size and its absolute severity. There’s not the slightest decoration on the walls, no pictures, nothing. The walls are whitewashed and give an impression of uncompromising austerity. It was like this for centuries. Recently, I said, my mother has taken to placing baskets of flowers in the hall; these don’t improve the effect, but they don’t destroy it — they disturb it a little, I told Gambetti, but it’s too grandiose to be destroyed. On first entering the hall, which has always struck me as cold and awesome, one might find it somewhat eerie, and more than one visitor has feared he would freeze to death. Most of them start shivering, because they are quite unused to entering such a large, splendid, and extraordinarily grand hall. No other entrance hall I know is so large or so splendid or so extraordinarily grand, and therefore so forbidding. It’s always seemed forbidding to everyone but me, for I still find its very grandeur and coldness attractive. On entering it, I told Gambetti, you think for a moment that you’re going to die, and you look around for something to hold on to. Your eyes are blinded when you step out of the daylight into the relative gloom of the hall, and for a moment you feel completely exposed. Immediately to the left of the entrance is the servants’ hall. Next to this is the door to the stockroom, followed by the door to the chapel. The chapel is as big as the average village church. It has three altars — a Gothic altar in the middle and two side altars. Even today mass is said there every Sunday morning at six. Either the priest or the chaplain comes up from the village on foot, which is a great effort for the old priest. In the sacristy we still have large cupboards full of vestments, some of which go back three centuries. Wolfsegg has been spared by most of the wars waged in Europe, and the fires that broke out in the last century were all quickly extinguished, as the village boasts one of the most famous and efficient fire brigades in Austria. Not a day goes by without my mother kneeling in the chapel between seven and eight in the evening. We were brought up to visit the chapel every evening. Naturally it was always a great occasion when the archbishop of Salzburg appeared in his ceremonial robes for special events such as christenings, confirmations, weddings, and so forth. The spectacle put on by the Church was at one time supremely important to me, as it was to all my family. That quickly changed. But I still remember how immensely impressive the ceremonies were, Gambetti, with the light streaming through the big window of the chapel during these colorful celebrations. Opposite the chapel is the kitchen, as big as a dressage hall and still not heated, even in winter, with its great ovens, some used no longer for cooking but simply as surfaces for standing things on, and the hundreds, indeed thousands, of dishes, cups, and bowls in the cupboards and on the walls. Eight women and girls used to work here, even when I was thirty, as I can remember my thirtieth-birthday party, and especially the activity in the kitchen. I was almost as fond of the kitchen as of the Orangery, but here I was in a female ambience, which interested me no less than the male ambience of the Orangery. There I was attracted by the fragrance of the flowers, here by the smell of the wonderful puddings and desserts. And the cheerfulness of the cooks, who were all well disposed to me, as I sensed at once, ensured that I too was cheerful. I was never bored in the kitchen. Indeed, during the first half of my childhood the kitchen and the Orangery were my dual points of reference. All in all, I can say that between the flowers in the Orangery and the desserts in the kitchen I had a happy childhood. In the kitchen no one asked me tiresome questions, and I could behave freely, just as I could in the Orangery, or anywhere away from my parents. My constant preoccupation was how to get down to the kitchen or across to the Orangery. Even now I often have dreams in which I see myself as a child running down to the kitchen or across to the Orangery, whatever the season. The child runs down to the kitchen to see people who seem happy and well disposed to him, or across to the Orangery to see others who appear equally happy, escaping those who are strict and seem to him malign, who are impatient with him and constantly demand the impossible. In my dreams I’m always running away from my impatient, demanding parents, out through the hall, past the Orangery and the Farm and into the surrounding woods, I told Gambetti. I lie for hours on the bank of a stream, watching the fish in the water and the insects on the reeds. The days are long and the evenings far too short. Having entered the hall, I told Gambetti, you walk about twenty paces and up a wide wooden staircase leading to the second floor. You turn right into what is called the upper hall. At the east end of this you see the large dining room, the door of which is always open. The dining room is immediately above the lower hall and has a big balcony. As children we were allowed in the dining room only on special occasions, when we were ordered there and had to sit at table, properly dressed, and keep quiet. The cupboards and sideboards in the dining room are full of costly china and cutlery, priceless treasures collected by our family over the centuries. On the walls hang portraits of those who built Wolfsegg and those who preserved and administered it, all of them long since laid to rest in our vault in the churchyard. If this dining room could talk, I told Gambetti, we’d have a full and unfalsified history of humanity, fantastic yet real, splendid yet terrible. This dining table undoubtedly saw history in the making, and not just local history. But dining tables don’t talk, I said. Which is all to the good, for if they did they’d very soon be smashed to pieces by those who have to sit at them. I remember sitting at this table with altogether eight different archbishops and cardinals and at least a dozen archdukes, I told Gambetti, and this naturally made a big impression on me as a child. And with many grand society ladies (I don’t recall their names), who came to visit us from Vienna, Paris, and London. And who all spent the night at Wolfsegg, in rooms that were normally kept locked but were opened up specially for guests, big, stuffy rooms with dark wallpaper and heavy drapes, so heavy that you have to be very strong to be able to draw them in the evening or draw them back in the morning. In these guest rooms, which are all on the north side, I always felt scared. Anyone who stayed in them even briefly was sure to become ill. But guests were always accommodated on the north side, in rooms that were deliberately furnished in this uninviting manner and kept at such a low temperature because guests were not meant to stay longer than was absolutely necessary. Nobody was invited to stay unless there was a particular reason, unless the family wanted something from them, some benefit that couldn’t be obtained in any other way. Guests who had spent the night in these rooms invariably showed signs of having caught a chill, turning up for breakfast with scarves around their necks and, what was most striking, usually coughing. Yet in spite of this they kept coming back, because they found Wolfsegg so fascinating. They couldn’t wait to be invited back. My grandparents used to invite lots of guests, my parents far fewer, as they didn’t have such a craving for company. My father didn’t care for company at all, and my mother at first had too many inhibitions and hang-ups about all these people, who in her opinion came to Wolfsegg only to spy out her social errors and report them wherever such intelligence could harm her. And for the first ten years she didn’t invite my father’s friends; she invited only hers, from whom she had much less to fear, with the result that all these frightful people from the so-called educated middle class descended on us, people who unfailingly make you cringe, Gambetti, especially if they come from Wels and Vocklabruck, from Linz and Salzburg, and fancy they are a cut above the rest of humanity. I always found such guests repugnant. On the other hand, Wolfsegg was very new and strange to my mother, not her scene at all, in fact, and she would very soon have been utterly isolated beside my not exactly exciting father. She’d have been bored to death. Wolfsegg would very soon have crushed her, the