High life | 17 January 2013

Gstaad

The sub-primate level of conversation, as prevalent as the snow up here in the Alps, took a turn for the better last week while a select few celebrated Prince Nicolas Romanoff’s 90th birthday. Yes, most people who live up here are illiterate, but they sure know how to count, some even up to ten billion. None of the counters was present at the birthday, however, given at the yacht club by Dino Goulandris for the head of the tragic Romanoff house, just many old friends who included some of Europe’s oldest and most royal families. No camel drivers, thank you very much, no Russian oligarchs, just Former People

, as Douglas Smith named his heartbreaking book on the final days of the Russian aristocracy. Buy that book (it was published last year in New York by Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and weep through it.