Viewing page 87 of 150

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

-85-

down to sleep and asked D.di D. to warn her should there be another one. Awakened. by the crashing of bombs she sought D. di D. and found him seated in the miniature studio calmly painting away at his 'genre décoration pour meubles,' while the radio was thundering out a Beethoven sonata. She persuaded him to take refuge with her in the cellar and it was while they were there that a palazzo nearby was struck. Now though the Countess had been terrified by her experience, she was no less eloquent when it came to describing her last pictorial achievement: flowers copied from nature for the first time said she.
May 29th We hear the Villa d'Este at Tivoli is destroyed......Are all the old palaces and monuments the world over to be destroyed by this war? Palaces and monuments created in those times when Aryan geniuses, like giants, led the way.
June 5th Rome evacuated by the Germans and so perhaps saved from bombing. Has Germany an ulterior design? - to draw the Allied armies to her frontiers and there to counter-attack with weapons of which she alone is master? Yet all points to a German defeat.
June 6th The invasion on the Western coast of France. We listen at all hours over the radio, but can form no precise idea as to how events are moving.
France who has always encouraged and mixed freely with all nations, is she now to be devastated no less than Italy?