Why did my father always buy houses in such places, hoping for some connection to a society that would never otherwise have welcomed him? I was fond of recalling that château on Lake Geneva in which he died, a somewhat abashed variation on the Rothschilds’ Château de Pregny. I could picture the faded Baroque of the Van Dyck in the entrance hall, which in the time between two of my visits had been removed from the paneling, likely cut out, rolled up, and sent off to Sotheby’s. There was always a direct link between art and money—never the slightest doubt that they were as one. In my mind’s eye I saw the sofas upholstered with golden silk in the grand salon and, perched on the edge of one of them, my father, Christian, in his pale gray English flannel suit and narrow shoes. I saw his wily, icy-bright eyes. His gaze traveled out over the park, past Lake Geneva to Évian and on to the French Alps, orange red and yielding in the dusk. I saw his dressing room, lined floor to ceiling in fawn and orange leathers by Hermès, with hundreds of shallow teak drawers, one for each bespoke dress shirt from Harvie & Hudson. The collection of hundreds of diaphanous Chinese teacups he’d amassed over decades, like Chatwin’s Kaspar Utz, who suffered from that incurable porcelain sickness. My father’s fear of provinciality, of his own humble origins, emanated from him even after his death, a decade ago now. His own father had been a taxi driver in Hamburg, with everything that entails: the nightly barhopping the small boy had to tag along for, his father’s dull, inebriated blows. That was a place he never wanted to go back to, whatever the cost.