John Julius-Norwich

What a pleasure it was to be reminded in a ‘Life and Letters’ column by Allan Massie (28 July) of Desmond MacCarthy. He was an old friend of my parents’ and, in the immediate postwar years, a fairly frequent visitor to their house in Chantilly, outside Paris. One Friday afternoon — it must I think have been 1950 or 1951 — we were sitting opposite each other as the train rattled through Normandy. I was at that time reading Russian at Oxford and was struggling through War and Peace in the original. Not surprisingly, the book caught Desmond’s eye. ‘Did I ever tell you,’ he murmured in that wonderful velvety voice of his, ‘did I ever tell you that I knew the Tolstoys?

I should hesitate in any circumstances to compare myself with Marcel Proust; but on opening this marvellous book I knew exactly how he felt with that madeleine. My father was appointed Ambassador to France in 1944, moving in a few weeks after the Liberation of Paris; thus it was that from Christmas of that year — when I was 15 — and for the next three years I spent all my holidays at the Embassy. At that time, oddly enough, we had no other home; so it was there more than anywhere else that I felt I belonged.