Chapter 68. Ten Days at the Zieglers in Paris

In Paris we went straight to the luxurious apartment of our cousin Jacques Ziegler and his family, where we were warmly received. Jacques, one of Grandfather’s nephews, was a prominent financier and the French Rothschild’s personal assistant. He was a handsome, brilliant, and warm person. Jacques’s family included his wife Trude, their beauti¬ful and bright 17-year old daughter Dorli, whom I remembered from Vienna, and a son, Peter, who had been sent to England.
Lisa planned to devote all of her time and energy in Paris to the diffi¬cult and hazardous task of going to the German authorities and obtaining our laisser passer to Vichy [#7 ON THE MAP]. Jacques said that I could stay with them for the short time that Lisa would be busy, but that his family might be endangered if Lisa stayed there too. So she stayed in the apartment that Lucy Feingold had vacated when she fled to Vichy.
I enjoyed staying with the Zieglers. Here was a warm, happy, loving, German-speaking household, with good food, hot and cold running water, and comfortable furniture—quite a change after two months of roughing it in La Bernerie. But the greatest attraction for me was Dorli, with whom I hit it off immediate¬ly. I had long been in awe of Dorli, ever since hearing, back in Vienna, that her hair had once caught fire. That bit of background know¬ledge made her beautiful long hair particularly fascinating to me. Dorli was sweet-looking, charming, and very intelligent. We became insepa¬rable. Mostly, we played the paper and pencil game “battleship.” Every time she would say “How about a game?” my heart would jump.
Jacques, too, was very kind to me. He took me to buy much-needed shoes and also a model battleship kit that consisted of pre cut pieces of wood that could be glued together to make a battle¬ship about 14 inches long, and gray paint with which to paint it.
It took Lisa ten days to get our laissers passer. She told some exciting stories about how she did it—stories of intrigue, cleverness, and luck.
Lisa tried to convince Jacques to pack up his family and flee south with us while it was still possible. But Jacques was confident that he and his family were safe from persecution by the Nazis because Rothschild would protect him. So we said warm and heartfelt good byes to the Zieglers and took the train to Vichy [#7 ON THE MAP].

Chapter 69. The Refugee Hotel in Vichy

In Vichy we were met at the train station by Lucy, who took us to our hotel. Many of the guests at the hotel were German and Austrian Jewish refugees who, like us, were seeking haven in the unoccupied zone.
Though the Germans did not have a visible presence in Vichy, they still directed things through their puppet regime headed by Maréchal Pétain. Plastered all over town there were propaganda posters that said, “Pétain a sauvé la France; De Gaulle l’a trahie” (Pétain saved France; De Gaulle betrayed it).
At the Germans’ direction, most of the available food and heating oil was being shipped to Germany. People were quite hungry and the hotel rooms were unheated. The only heated area of the hotel was the spacious lobby, which had a large wood burning fireplace. Because it was too cold to stay in their rooms, hotel guests congregated in that lobby for a perpetual kaffeeklatch. The favorite topic of conversation, besides gossip, was specula¬tion about the likely impact of current events on our fates, a topic whose importance I well appreciated.
There were six or seven children in the hotel, and we spent much of our time in the lobby playing the card game “Old Maid.” My main companion was an eleven-year old girl named Feli Jellinek whose parents had become good friends with Lisa. On one occasion they took Feli and me to a movie theater, where they left us while they went to do something else. The movie was a silly French musical comedy with catchy music, the first music I had heard since Hélene’s gramophone records in La Bernerie.
I found Feli physically attractive, but that attraction was more than offset when I observed how mean and nasty she was to the other kids. Still, I tolerated her as a playmate. After all, there was no one else.
One evening, to Lisa’s great surprise, Fillip Baer unexpectedly appeared in the hotel lobby. He had come to visit not Lisa but another former girlfriend of his who happened to be staying in the same hotel, and whom Lisa had gotten to know. I later heard Lisa tell Mrs. Jellinek, with a giggle, something that this other girlfriend had confided to Lisa.
“This girlfriend said that she opened the door to Baer’s room without his hearing her,” Lisa said. “She stood in the doorway quietly and he still wasn’t aware of her presence. He was standing in front of the mirror, stark naked, and said to his reflection, “Fillip, Du bist schön” (Fillip, you are handsome).”
I was somewhat pleased that Lisa finally seemed to share some of my hostile feelings toward Baer, but I was disturbed to hear her recount such a compromising story about another adult, and betray what sounded to me like a confidential communication. Lisa, after all, was, at least for me, a paragon of moral virtue. But I said nothing.

Chapter 70. Cold and Hunger in Vichy

Lisa and I took long walks around Vichy, sometimes by ourselves and sometimes with friends or Lucy. We visited many interesting places, including the hot sulfur springs that were the source of the famous and popular Vichy water. I liked the odor of the sulfur and the taste of that water.
But we were continually hungry. It was not the type of hunger one feels when one hasn’t eaten in a long time. Rather, it was a gnawing and exasperating craving for certain unavailable foods, especially meat, eggs, and fruit. I found it very unpleasant, especially because I did not feel free to complain. Lucy made great efforts to procure some special foods for us from time to time, but it wasn’t very much.
When Lisa and I went on our walks, I kept looking at the window displays of the charcuteries, which contained some of the foods I craved, such as sausages. For some reason that I don’t recall, we couldn’t buy them. Perhaps they were there only as window displays.
Equally unpleasant was the cold. It was a particularly cold winter, and one night even a bottle of benzene froze solid inside our room. Lisa explained to her friends in the hotel lobby how remarkable that was in view of the fact that the freezing point of benzene is significantly lower than that of water. Her friends seemed impressed that she knew this about benzene.
The malnutrition and cold soon took their toll. In January of 1941 I came down with a bad case of measles. I was sick for three weeks and Lisa said that I came close to dying. My fever ran 41.5° C. (105° F.) for five days in a row. I remembered having been told in Vienna that if your tempera¬ture reaches 42° C. (106° F.) you die, and I feared that my fever would soon reach that level. But I was too sick to care. I was much more preoccupied with my hallucinations of my paternal grand¬mother Berta riding around the room on a broom¬stick.
One of Lisa’s big problems was keeping me warm enough. She was constantly wrapping me in clothing and blankets, and often warmed me with her body by holding me for long periods of time. She sat at my bedside for hours on end and in the process got a bad case of frostbite on her ankles.
A woman doctor came to see me and told Lisa that she must put me into a hospital, both for my sake and because public health law required it. Lisa adamantly refused, insisting that if I were put into a hospital I would surely die. I was terrified that Lisa might nevertheless follow the doctor’s advice. The doctor eventually relented, saying that she was washing her hands of any responsibility for my recovery.
Lucy tried to help by bringing me milk that she had obtained in the countryside at great cost. But I refused to touch it, as I hated milk, and it ended up in Lisa’s coffee.
At around that time, Lucy received a letter from Paul Rosegg, Lisa’s boyfriend from two years earlier in Paris. He wrote that he had just arrived in Nice and was trying to locate Lisa. Lisa was thrilled.
So, shortly after my recovery from the measles, in January, 1941, Lisa and I took the train to Nice [#8 ON THE MAP]. We had been in Vichy for three months.

Chapter 71. Beautiful, Fragrant, Nice

After cold, gray Vichy, Nice was intoxicating. As we emerged from the train station, there was a scent of flowers in the air, and the weather was balmy. We took a taxi straight to the bungalow that Paul shared with his Viennese friend Fantl.
From the taxi, Lisa pointed out orange and lemon orchards, the first ones I had ever seen. Even more exciting was the sight of real live palm trees lining the avenues. Being perpetually hungry, I perceived most things in terms of their nutritional significance. The fragrance of the orchards stimulated fantasies of eating oranges, and, knowing that dates grow on palm trees, seeing those trees made my mouth water for dates. The last time I had tasted a date was in Vienna, but I remembered it vividly. Unfortunately, none of the fruit was even close to being ripe in January, and food was even scarcer in Nice than it had been in Vichy.
Paul’s bungalow was two blocks away from the beach, near the Pont Magnan. The day after our arrival, Lisa, Paul, and I moved to the second floor of a small two-story apartment building on the other side of the bungalow’s vegetable garden, at 5, rue Gloria. Fantl remained in the bungalow. Our jovial, middle aged landlady, Mme. d’Andrea, owned the bungalow, the building, and the vegetable garden in between. She lived in the main-floor apartment below us with her corpulent and mustachioed younger boyfriend.
Lisa, Paul and I went to the beach almost daily. I loved that beach. It had no sand, only rounded pebbles about three to five centimeters in diameter. The water was azure blue and so transparent that the pebbles on the bottom were still visible at a depth of three meters. The waves were often large, but rounded rather than choppy. I resumed my old pattern of swimming as far out as I could, until the people on the beach were mere specks, and challenging myself to make it back to shore.
Paul was proud of his fine physique and maintained it with various calisthenic exercises designed especially for his stomach and leg muscles. He did those exercises at the beach and got me to do some of them with him. Lisa sometimes laughed at Paul for being so preoccupied with his body, calling him a hypochondriac. Although he had a slight tendency to whine and complain, he was generally good-humored and fun-loving. He was attentive to me and I loved him. The three of us were a happy, close-knit family [PLATE 7].
We took frequent walks down the Boule¬vard des Anglais, past the Casino de la Jettée, which had recently been destroyed by a fire. We would walk all the way to the quaint little harbor on the other side of town and the beautiful park overlook¬ing it. Nice was indeed a beautiful city.

Chapter 72. Food Rationing

Food was tightly rationed in Nice. Every person was issued a monthly booklet of ration coupons for one egg, a quarter of a kilo of meat, five kilos of potatoes, and some oil, chickpeas, and tapioca. We could get ample topinambours (a type of turnip that I soon got to hate), but no dairy products, bread, sugar, fat, fresh vegetables, or fruit.
As a result, everybody was constantly hungry and most people lost a lot of weight. I was told that some people were resorting to eating cats and dogs. One time, while looking down from our window, I saw a group of men capture a cat. I watched in horror as three of them held the screaming cat by the legs while the fourth hit it on the head with a hammer, killing it.
As in Vichy, my cravings were maddening and bothered me more than the hunger. For example, when we went to visit our friends the Hoffmanns, a cultured elderly Viennese couple who lived nearby, we passed through an orange orchard. Even though the oranges were far from ripe, I became obsessed with them. Every time we passed through that orchard, I checked their progress, as if I owned them, and I sometimes crushed some of the leaves from the orange trees just to smell the citrus fragrance. I also took every opportu¬nity to go up into the hills behind Nice, where lime trees grew. Even though the unripe limes were still small, hard, and sour at that time of year, I picked some and enjoyed chewing on them.
Not surprisingly, life in Nice revolved to a great extent around ration coupons. They were more precious than money, and a prominent topic of conver¬sa¬tion. Because tobacco could easily be traded for extra ration coupons, Paul and Fantl told me always to keep my eyes on the sidewalk for discarded cigarette butts from which we could extract the remaining tobacco. Collecting butts from the sidewalks and streets quickly became my habit and made me feel useful.

Chapter 73. My Brief Crime Career

Everyone paid for groceries with a combination of money and ration coupons. I came up with a plan to pay for each food purchase with fewer than the required number of coupons. Lisa and Paul agreed to let me try. We didn’t think that a nine year-old would be punished if caught, though an adult could go to prison.
I had already identified some grocery stores whose elderly proprietresses were not too alert. My plan was to short-change them.
The coupons came in various denomina¬tions ranging from five to fifty. I prepared myself for each shopping trip by tearing out and separating the low-denomination coupons and rehearsing the counting out sequences I would use. To gain a grocer’s confidence in my arithmetic, I would start by counting out the first three or four coupons slowly and accurately. Then I would gradually speed up the count so as to cause the grocer to stop following. My usual goal was to short change her by about a quarter of the coupon cost for each purchase.
As time went on, my technique became more sophisticated. I went shopping only when the stores were crowded so that the grocers would be too busy to check my arithmetic. I was careful to use several different stores, fearing that my modus operandi would be recognized if I hit the same store too often. Paul offered to help by disguising me with a beret and a change of clothing. I went along with that for the fun of it, but didn’t really want to rely on disguises. Luckily, I was never caught.
Lisa and Paul were proud of me for these exploits and enjoyed telling their closest friends about my cleverness and courage in pulling them off. I felt that I was finally earning my keep. One day, eager to put my new skills to broader use, I came up with an inspired idea.
“Lisa,” I said, “I think I’ll try to do the same thing with money.”
“Don’t you dare,” Lisa snapped back sternly. “That would be stealing! You mustn’t even think about such a thing!”
But I wasn’t ready to let the matter rest there.
“Why isn’t it stealing to do it with coupons?” I asked. I really couldn’t see a big difference.
“With ration coupons it’s like taking food back from the Germans,” she said in a raised and angry voice.
I wasn’t convinced, and wondered why Lisa was so angry. I heard her say to Paul that she was afraid I was turning into a criminal. One thing I couldn’t bear was Lisa’s anger, whatever the reason for it, so I let the matter drop.

Chapter 74. School in Nice

Shortly after our arrival in Nice, Lisa enrolled me in the École d’Arênes de Garçons. The spring semester had already started and I was nervous about going back to school after such a long layoff. I felt as if I had forgotten everything academic.
The teacher was a tall, white-haired, kind old lady. She placed great emphasis on drawing beautiful friezes across the notebook page to separate one day’s work from the next, and usually allowed us to choose the subject of the frieze. For my first frieze I drew mimosas, which grew abundantly around Nice. I loved their fragrance, which was always in the air. When the teacher saw how well I drew, I quickly became her pet.
But that didn’t help me during recess in the yard. In fact, it may have hurt. Being the new kid and a foreigner, too (mainly because of my Parisian accent), I was immediately challenged to combat. In one to one combat I was usually able to hold my own with the headlock technique I had learned in Le Touquet, but here the usual pattern was for several boys to gang up on me. I was terrified of recess.
That’s when Guercini entered my life. He liked me and appointed himself my protector. From that time on I felt safe. The kids respected Guercini, perhaps because he knew how to box, or perhaps because he was the son of a policeman. I admired his strength, self confidence, and handsome flat, round face. In school, we were rarely apart.
For the kids, the high point of the school day was milk time during recess. With their tin cups in hand, they would eagerly line up in the yard for a cup of skimmed milk, which was dispensed from a large, barrel-like container. I didn’t participate, but watched with disgust and contempt as they jostled each other for their place in line, and then gulped down their milk so eagerly that some ran down their cheeks and chins onto their clothes.
The kids and the teacher asked me why I didn’t want my share of that precious skimmed milk. I explained that the very thought of drinking milk nauseated me. I couldn’t remember the last time I had tasted it, and had no intention of ever doing so.

Chapter 75. A Sadistic Teacher

To my dismay, after only a few weeks we got a new teacher, a young man named Filippe Petit.
“Lisa,” I said when I came home from school. “We have a new teacher.”
“What happened to the old one?” Lisa asked with a chuckle. “Did she die?”
“How did you know?” I asked with amazement. She had indeed died. Lisa and Paul couldn’t stop laughing and I soon joined in half hearted¬ly. But I was actually quite sad, as I had liked that nice old lady.
M. Petit turned out to be a sadist. He strutted around the classroom brandishing a long rod made from the dried center stem of a large palm leaf. Several times a day he would choose a victim who then had to come up to the front of the classroom and hold out a hand with the finger tips pressed together and pointing up. M. Petit would then slam down his rod on the finger tips with all his might, producing screams, broken nails, and sometimes blood. I found this gruesome and upset¬ting. Some of the kids received this treatment so often that their finger tips never had time to heal.
I took it for granted that M. Petit would never touch me, and he never did. He always treated me with great respect, almost deference. On every report card, up until the summer recess, he ranked me either first or second in the class. The one time he ranked me second, first place went to a new kid in the class who was two years older than the rest of us. That kid was extremely smart, friendly, handsome with long brown locks, immacu¬late¬ly groomed, wearing a brown felt suit, and the son of the recently repatriated governor of one of France’s African colonies.
I suspected that part of M. Petit’s deference toward me was related to the reason I didn’t find much social accept¬ance among the kids—my Parisian accent. But even when I had acquired the local accent du Midi, which happened quickly, the kids still regarded me as a foreigner. It was obvious that I hadn’t been born anywhere near Nice and wore clothes that obviously hadn’t been made there. My manners and interests probably seemed strange to them.

Chapter 76. Stamp Collecting

Paul was a passionate stamp collector. I used to watch him for hours as he worked on his collection. He taught me how to remove stamps from envelopes by dissolving the glue, handle them without causing damage, dry them on blotters, press them, and arrange them in accordance with the classi¬fi¬ca¬tions of the stamp catalog. When he gave me some of his duplicates, I became completely hooked.
On my tenth birthday, May 1, 1941, Lisa and Paul gave me a stamp album they had made for me out of yellow card¬board and strips of translucent paper. From that time on, I spent every spare minute arranging and rearranging my stamps and studying Paul’s catalog. The greatest treat I could be offered was a visit with Paul to the Nice post office, which was on the other side of town. The great attraction there was a permanent display of French stamps.
When I studied the stamp catalog, I was interested not only in the text information about the stamps and their value, but also in the pictures on the stamps and their precise colors. After a few months, I had memorized large parts of the stamp catalog, and was surprised and touched when Paul said to Lisa one day that I already knew more about stamps than he did. I couldn’t believe that.
A big event in my stamp collecting career was a visit to the house of our cousins the Feingolds. Joseph Feingold was one of my grand¬mother’s brothers, who, like us and many other Viennese refugees, had fled to Nice after the Anschluss. I had been to their house in Vienna. Their brilliant and handsome seventeen-year old son, Erich, was a stamp collector, too. He had a huge collection, the first one other than Paul’s that I had ever seen. Even more impressive to me was his knowledge of stamps. He generously gave me several hundred of his duplicates, which just about tripled the size of my collection and kept me busy for weeks thereafter.
Another big stamp event was an announcement by the Principauté de Monaco that a new ten stamp Monaco series would soon go on sale at the Monaco post office. It was described as a beautiful series consisting of a combination of horizontal and vertical stamps. The morning of the designat¬ed day, Lisa, Paul, and I hiked the 19 kilometers to Monaco [#9 ON THE MAP] along the Mediterranean coast. The weather was gorgeous. By the time we arrived at the Monaco post office, there was already a long line of stamp collectors at the guichet, and purchases were limited to one set per person. We stood on line twice and bought a total of four sets, one of them for me.

Chapter 77. Marcel Kruh

One day another cousin of ours, who was living in a hotel in Cannes, came to visit us. His name was Marcel Kruh and he was extremely wealthy. When he saw our destitute circumstances he offered Lisa financial help. But she was too proud to accept money from him and steadfastly turned it down.
Upon hearing that I was a stamp collector, Marcel asked to see my collection. I didn’t have to be asked twice and took him into the other room where I could spread out the stamps on my bed. It quickly became evident to me that Marcel didn’t know a thing about stamps, but that didn’t stop me from explaining to him as much as he was willing to hear. When we came to the Portuguese stamps, Marcel picked up one of my duplicates.
“Franzi,” he said, “I have been looking for this stamp for years. I’ll give you 1,000 francs for it.”
Obviously he was joking.
“It’s a very ordinary stamp,” I said. “It isn’t worth even one franc.”
“To you, maybe. You are being very honest. But to me it’s definitely worth 1,000 francs.” As he spoke, he handed me 1,000 francs in cash and took the stamp.
Now I understood. He was cleverly getting around Lisa’s refusal of his financial help, which he knew we needed badly. So I took the money and went back into the kitchen where Lisa and Paul were still having coffee.
“Look, Lisa,” I said, putting the money on the table. “Marcel bought a worthless Portuguese stamp from me for 1,000 francs. Take the money.”
“Oh no!” said Lisa, unable to keep from smiling at Marcel’s deviousness. “We can’t accept that. Marcel, you must take it back.”
“That’s out of the question,” said Marcel forcefully. “I bought that stamp and a deal is a deal. There is nothing further to be discussed.”
So that was it. Lisa and Paul thanked Marcel profusely, and I was pleased to have contributed once more to our subsistence. I couldn’t get over the tact and skill with which Marcel had handled the whole incident.
Before he left, Marcel invited us to visit him for lunch in Cannes [#10 ON THE MAP].

Chapter 78. A Memorable Feast

Shortly thereafter, we took a bus to Cannes. The hotel at which Marcel was living looked more like a royal palace than a hotel to me. It was huge, situated high up on a hill overlooking its private beach across flowerbeds and manicured lawns.
We spent the morning on the beach as Marcel’s guests. I took out a pédalo (a foot-paddle boat) and played in the white sand. By noon I had worked up quite an appetite superim¬posed on my normal level of hunger.
As we walked up the path along the flowerbeds to the hotel, Lisa told me that I would be getting an unusually good lunch. But she did not prepare me for the experience that awaited me. We entered a palatial dining room with crystal chandeliers and tapestries, and sat down at a large, magnifi¬cent¬ly set table bedecked with flowers. These luxurious surroundings were quickly eclipsed when uniformed waiters brought in real bread. I had just begun to devour it when the first course appeared. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Seemingly unlimited quantities of écre¬visses (crayfish) and langoustines (small lobsters) with wonderful sauces were put in front of us. I was still stuffing myself frantically when the second course appeared, making the first one seem like the appetizer it was. One meat dish after another was brought to the table, each one with its own incredible sauce, and vegeta¬bles that I had forgotten existed. The wines, which impressed Lisa and Paul, were of no interest to me, but every¬thing else was amply intoxicat¬ing. Having stuffed ourselves to capacity, we barely had room for the heaven¬ly desserts that included grapes, pineapples, bananas, apples, oranges, and other wonderful fruits. Lisa opined that Maréchal Pétain and his German masters must have had their own good reasons for sparing and maintaining this hotel.
We sat at that table for three hours. I would have been pleased to remain there until I had digested enough to be able to continue eating.

Chapter 79. Field Labor for Food

A few days went by before I felt real hunger again. We never got another invitation from Marcel Kruh, but Paul disco¬vered another way to get us a decent meal. He had gotten to know a farmer who invited us to help out in the potato fields. So, on two occasions, we took a bus to the farm. It was in Cagnes, a small farming village up in the mountains, about one hour northwest of Nice.
Our reward for the day’s labor was a complete dinner, which we ate at a long kitchen table with the entire big farm family of about a dozen people. But I didn’t wait until dinner. On the farm grounds there were some peach trees. After I had spent a few hours digging up potatoes, no power on earth could keep me away from those trees. On one occasion, as I sank my teeth into a huge, fuzzy, succulent white peach with juice squirting out and dripping down my face, I thought that I would never in my life eat a more delicious peach.
At night, as we waited at the bus stop for the bus to take us home, I felt happy, well fed, and at peace with the world. The stars sparkled brightly in the black mountain sky, and the fragrance of flowers seemed particularly strong. I was bursting with energy and plied Paul with questions about the stars, constella¬tions, and the Milky Way. He found it amusing that I was able to think of so many questions to which he didn’t know the answers, but I found it somewhat frustrating.

Chapter 80. Summer Activities in Nice

One day, at the beginning of the summer, I once found Lisa lying on her bed, crying.
“Why are you crying?” I asked her. She didn’t answer.
“She’s upset because the Germans just invaded Russia,” Paul explained. “Lisa is worried that they are winning the war.”
“Are you worried about Grandmother and Grandfather?” I asked Lisa.
“Yes, and many other people, too,” she responded.
As the weather got warmer, we started going to the beach almost daily, usually with Lisa’s and Paul’s friends, the Matlakowski family—Mr. Matlakowski, a former Austrian count, his Jewish wife, and their son, also named François, who was a year older than me but twice my size. On the beach, François and I would mainly wrestle, and play with the battleship that Jacques Ziegler had bought me in Paris.
François sometimes came over to our house to play with me, and I tried to get him interested in stamps. I may have been a bit too successful because one time, after he left, I found three of my stamps missing. I told Lisa, Lisa told his father, and the stamps were soon returned. But I was still upset that François could betray me that way, and I had difficulty feeling good about him again. I was reminded of my similar experience with the kid in La Bernerie.
On weekends, Lisa, Paul, and I often went on long hikes. One time we walked to Monaco and then continued on until we got to the Italian border. Most of our hikes took us into the beautiful hills north of Nice, where we walked through fragrant, colorful carnation fields that extended as far as the eye could see, and visited ancient castles atop some of the hills.
Lisa and Paul did a lot of socializing. Nice’s émigrés, mostly Jewish refugees, had little else to do. Besides our friends the Hoffmanns, we often saw a Russian doctor and his family. Their Russian name was so long and hard to pronounce that when Lisa and Paul spoke about the doctor privately they referred to him as “Doctor Russo.” Only when I once addressed him as Doctor Russo did I discover, to Lisa and Paul’s great embarrassment and my mortifica¬tion, that this was not his name.
My own social life was more limited. I spent a lot of my time with Mme. d’Andrea in her vegetable garden. I especially enjoyed helping her take care of her rabbits in the rabbit coops. But much of the joy went out of that one day when I found one of my favorite rabbits missing. Mme. d’Andrea confessed to me that he had been made into rabbit stew.