Death Comes to the Ballets Russes

Начало книги

New Year is the season of hope or despair. For the young, the first day of January brings another chance of true love, the prospect of a new job with new horizons. For the middle-aged, it is the time when people start to look back as well as forward, the time when the first faint lines start to appear on what had been perfect skin, the time funerals start to replace weddings and christenings as the rite of passage. For the old, they know that the aches and pains that have grown into permanent fixtures are never going to go away now; they know that time is not going to run backwards to make them fit and healthy again; they know that each New Year might be the last and, more surely than ever, that death comes at the end.

For the gilded aristocracy of Europe, New Year always begins with a ball. In the perfectly sprung ballrooms of the Habsburgs and the Romanovs, from the Hofburg in Vienna to the Winter Palace in St Petersburg, aristocrats dress up and dance. Like the Roman god Janus, who gave his name to the month of January, the dukes and duchesses, the princes and princesses, the counts and countesses face both ways at once. They look back, secure in the knowledge that their family has left its mark on history across the centuries. They look forward, secure in the knowledge that their family will leave its mark on the centuries to come.

Читать дальше →