September 1932 Sir Horace’s waistline, always a matter of concern, led the senior Rumbolds to spend their last Weimar summer at the Bohemian spa of Marienbad, whose hundred or more natural springs were thought to cure digestive disorders and alleviate rheumatism. ‘Horace’s cure is going on very well,’ Lady Rumbold told her mother, ‘he has taken off 12 lbs already.’ The spa, dominated by grandiose hotels built in the latter part of the nineteenth century, had long since attracted the rich and famous – Goethe, King Edward VII, Chopin, Wagner and the Emperor Franz Joseph among them. Its
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