The furniture she had inherited in May 1933 together with her great-aunt’s flat, the display cabinet with a masked Meissen china Pulcinello on the left and his beloved Columbine on the right, the glass-fronted bookcase with the fifty-five small volumes of the Comédie humaine bound in carmine red, the writing desk, the long ottoman, the camel-hair rug lying folded at one end of it, the blue-tinged aquatint of the Bohemian mountains—throughout my entire life, which was now unraveling headlong before me, all this had stayed in the same place because as Vera told me, said Austerlitz, once she had
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