27th November 1937

27th November 1937

Sarvar to 27 Queen Square, Bath

Dear Madeleine!

Thank you awfully much for your letter and your kind invitation to Bath. I should love to come, only I’m sure there is not yet the slightest possibility. Am I not a good girl to answer your letter immediately? But I made up my mind to do so with every letter. Only I’m not sure whether I shall be able to do so. I am very sorry for poor Robert, I hope it is not badly broken and will mend soon of course, now he is a hero, but after a while he will get greatly bored to have his arm in plaster for so long. I do hope it won’t spoil his Christmas holidays. Only imagine Christmas to be so near! We are all very busy preparing things for it. We have a crib under our Christmas tree. We made it ourselves, it is awfully nice. The persons are about 25cms high, their heads, arms & legs of wax, which Mammy and Deidi made. And they are dressed with all sorts of cloth. I am just dressing one of the three kings. Mine is the black one, which Mammy did after pictures of Haile Selassie. Doesn’t he live in Bath? Have you ever seen him? Deidi and her husband are gone now, and we feel lonely. Poor dear, she was very sad to go. Mary D’Arcy left the same day. But next week we shall have a cousin staying for some days. The last film I saw was “The Plainsman” with Gary Cooper as Wild Bill Hickcock. It is one of the best and most exciting films I saw. And I liked Gary Cooper very well as a cowboy. Much better than in “The General Died at Dawn”. It is about Sioux Indians and Buffalo Bill and there are real Indians talking the Sioux language. I was very thrilled. Muck and I are mad about Indians and cowboys. Here is the weather clear but very cold. It is freezing so hard that I look out for skating. In our park we have a pond which freezes perfectly. It is not so big as that of Leutstetten and not so deep. But we have it all for ourselves. Now I shall write to you the promised

history of Sarvar. Well it was a Roman foundation, and then about the year 1100 they built a castle but only of wood. That burned of course and then towards the beginning of 1600, I don’t know was it 1604 or 1610 they built the castle as it is now. It belonged to the Counts Nadasdy. One of them married Erzsebet (means Elizabeth in Hungarian) Batory. She was beautiful but was cruel & mad. The story goes that she once hit one of her maids in waiting so hard that her nose started bleeding and one drop fell upon Erzsabet’s hand. When she wiped it off, she found that the skin was very white and soft. So she had the idea of bringing girls into the castle, killed them, and took a bath in their blood. That made her twice as beautiful. But after a while people found out what she did and shut her up in a thick wall and shut the wall again with stones and plaster. After twenty years they opened the hole and Erzsebet was still living. So they shut her up in another hole in another castle. There she died. And even now she can be seen haunting Sarvar as well as the other castle. She wears a purple dress, has raven black hair and a very white face. That is the story of the Blood Countess. In reality Erzsebet Nadasdy-Batory existed. She was beautiful and very cruel. She was epileptic, and had the maids thrashed and thrown out fainting into the frozen court-yard. Another thrilling story about a later Count Nadasdy. He was nearly betraying the Emperor to the Turks. His son-in-law found that out and told the Emperor. So the Count Nadasdy was beheaded and his son- in-law, Count Esterhazy inherited Sarvar. The crest of the Nadasdy was a wild goose. And here in the court-yard is a stone with the wild goose on it. But the wild goose is beheaded too. Later Sarvar was bought by the Dukes of Moderna. The last of them was Papi’s godfather, so Papi got it. There is a big hall all painted with pictures out of the war against the Turks in 1653. I hope you are not bored with that long letter, and all the history. You should come and see it one day. There are deep cellars and secret passages. But these have been filled up and one had the bath & running water put in. Isn’t it a shame!

Tons of love Loll