I didn’t stay long at the Patmian cocktail party. I was bored, but more so I didn’t like the house. It’s a beautiful home, rather old, decorated with great care, filled with precious objects and surrounded by an enchanting garden. Yet, I felt uneasy there. I returned home to find Maria in the kitchen. I told her…
My friend Jean once told me a story about a friend of his, an architect. The friend had been invited by an acquaintance to his castle in Poitou. Upon arriving, he found a very old fortress that had been restored with great care and without altering the architecture one bit. The architect learned from his…
The other day, I went to the American hospital for a check-up. I came across Dr Ribadeau-Dumas. I remembered his surname because it was the same as one of my schoolmates as a child. He remembered me because he examined my arteries ten years ago. “You gave me the book about your great-uncle that you…
Alexander was a lawyer at a Swiss bank in Geneva. He was immensely bored of it, as we well understand. One day, he dropped everything and took his family away to a new life. With his initiation, they purchased a large castle in the south of France, in Ariège, in the middle of a little-known…
Rose Hall is the most famous manor (in Europe, you would call it a castle) in Jamaica. It was built in 1770, cost thirty thousand pounds – an incredible amount at the time! – and was considered the most beautiful residence on the island. Rose Hall was damaged during the slave revolt in 1831, to…
In 1854, an epidemic erupted in Saxony that would quickly ravage the country as it had ravaged its neighbours’’. The royal family, led by Queen Maria, a princess of Bavaria, fled Dresden to seek refuge in the capital at the Castle of Pillnitz. The Queen only agreed to leave Dresden on the condition that her…
One July night in 1918, Emperor Nicholas II, Empress Alexandra, their five children and a few servants and loyal companions were murdered, as everyone knows, in the cellar of the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg. A few days later, the White Army liberated the city from the Bolsheviks. Then began the investigation into the imperial family’s…
“We are witches; we want to suffer punishment and be executed,” howled the chained women. There were about forty of them, excessively made-up and dressed in brightly coloured rags. Count Trautmansdorff, the illustrious lord in charge of life and death in Styria, watched them doubtfully. He knew these peasants, these farmers. He had vaguely heard…
One winter morning, it was freezing in the Grazzano library where the infamous séance took place. The seance that had, in a sense, resurrected Aloysa. The ghost took some time to show itself. Amazingly, there was nothing dwarf-like about it. On the contrary, the precisely contoured silhouette in the door was that of a tall…
“Spirit, are you there?” asked Count Giuseppe. They were six or seven seated at the round table in the library at Grazzano, the enormous castle next to Piacenza. The room where time seemed to have stopped had been left in darkness, and nothing disturbed the thick silence They were anxious, tense, and fixated on the…