Simonetta de Vries Demeulenaere was a true cosmopolitan. Born in Holland, she traveled and was educated throughout Europe, culminating with a PhD in art history in Germany. She was fluent in at least seven languages: Dutch, Flemish, French, Italian, German, Spanish, and English. I first met her several years ago in San Miguel, and was totally enthralled by her tales of travel, people and family.

Her friendship with Claretta Petacci, the mistress of Mussolini, was particularly interesting. She left Europe in 1939, just ahead of Hitler.

Her life was long and eventful, and she will be truly missed.
– Don Wilson, MD

Reminiscences of a cosmopolitan
By Simonetta de Vries Demeulenaere, 1907–2005 (December 9, 2005)

The following is an excerpt from lectures given in San Miguel

One of the great differences between the United States and Europe has always been in the attitudes about youth. In the States, youth was—and more than ever, is—considered an asset. It’s a time when all the good things in life seem possible, and often are. In Europe, youth was a time of preparation for life, a time devoted to study, learning and work. A few girls went to university, but they mostly stayed home, played tennis and the piano, went to a few dances and dated men much older than they were. They were badly dressed—they didn’t count and they knew it.

Afterwards—after marriage—they would be somebody and do what they wanted. This was the normal way of looking at life. Socially, it was the women in their thirties and forties who were important, admired and elegant. My parents wanted me to look pretty, and I was well dressed, but that was exceptional. Wherever my mother and I went, my mother was the center of attention; and I, an uninteresting addition. Mature people were experienced, had judgment, were cultured, had traveled—in short, were interesting. Young people, by the nature of things, were not. Furthermore, the parents had the money and the young were completely dependent on them.

Already in the ’20s, young Americans could earn money as camp counselors and at swimming pools. My mother, after arriving in San Francisco from a voyage around the world in 1920, went on a cruise to Alaska and was enthusiastic that college boys were waiters and could earn money that way. This didn’t exist in Europe. Being a waiter was a full-time job: a boy started at 16, after school was finished. First he served as an assistant, cleaning the tables, and before becoming a waiter in a good restaurant, he had to know several languages. Like all trades in Europe, it was jealously guarded and no outsider could penetrate.

Middle-class families sent their sons to universities, which were preferably financed by the state. The fees were modest, but the entrance examinations were very difficult, and so special high schools prepared students for these tests. When my sister entered such a high school at the age of 12, there were fifty students in two classes, but when she finished at age 18, only five students remained, she among them. In Holland, schools were mixed—boys and girls together. There were no extracurricular activities, no dances and few sports. School was not supposed to be fun. You met your fellow students at school, and met your friends outside of school.

Young Americans in Europe in the ’20s were in a class all by themselves—never mixing with their European age group—except for the artists, whom I saw in Heidelberg when I was at the university. The men wore long fur coats with the fur on the outside, which was unusual at that time. Many were married and drank hard liquor in hotel bars where we students never went. Real John Held types.

My life was different from the routine of other young people. Uprooted from home at age 14, I lived and studied in Germany, Italy and Switzerland, where I took my university entrance examination in French. My father advised me to go to college in the United States, so I wrote to Wellesley, Bryn Mawr and other colleges for information. They all answered that I could enter right away as a junior, but that they were girls’ colleges. Having stayed for two years in a Swiss boarding school, I preferred to study independently in Heidelberg.

In boarding school, I had met some American girls. They were fun, had the newest records and knew the latest dance steps—but they were in a class all by themselves. Everywhere the American girl went, she was admired for her beauty, sophistication and self-assurance. Long-legged, slender and well-groomed, she was the opposite of her European counterpart. At that time, European girls were always either too thin or too fat, dressed so as not to be noticed—and their hair was never really clean. French writers who visited New York in the ’30s used to rave about how well groomed all the girls were. And when I arrived in New York in 1939, I was struck by how clean the girls were there—how glossy their hair was. When I returned to Europe in the ’50s, I noticed that the women and girls, on the whole, seemed grubby. This changed with everybody traveling everywhere, so most young people look alike.

How can anyone born after 1939 visualize and get a feel for a time when there was no tourism? When the well-to-do English families went to Margate or Brighton, and the Germans went with their children to the Belgian coast—and the French stayed home. Men in their early twenties never traveled unless they had an independent income, which was seldom the case. Old, retired couples went for the winter months to the French or Italian Rivieras. I had photos of my grandparents, around 1900, both dressed in white—she with a parasol, walking along the promenade of Mentone, France. To Northern Europeans, the Riviera was what Florida is to the Americans, though Florida is much warmer during the winter.

The people one met in elegant European resorts were mostly the very wealthy—their women showing off the latest style in fashions and gorgeous jewelry. Besides these few, there were many middle-class men and women who could live comfortably on the proceeds of their income, as did my father.

At the age of 39, he retired from business and then pursued an entirely different kind of life—a life of civilized enjoyment. He studied the history of art and went to live in Paris, where he took up painting and attended classes in a studio. He hardly ever sold a painting, but that didn’t bother him. In wintertime, he often went to Tunis and Morocco for some months, or went to visit the family in Holland.

In the late ’20s, we spent a summer at Juan les Pins, which he liked so much that he went to live at nearby Cap d’Antibes, where he remained until the end of the war. Then he came to visit the United States. He stayed some time with me in New York, then traveled by bus through the country, first going south, then to Arizona and California. It took him several months, as he stopped over to paint and walk wherever and whenever he pleased. This was in his late sixties. He lived until his ninetieth year, always full of vitality, interested in everything—particularly in literature and art—and I never saw him bored.

One summer, my mother was ill, so I had to find a place to stay near her clinic. I found a pension run by nuns who kindly accepted me, but I had to wear long sleeves. No wonder! The only guests were priests from all over Europe and the Middle East. They had a common language: Latin. I always disliked Latin because it seemed to me so very dead, but there, at the long dining table we all shared, people talked, joked, laughed—asked me to pass the butter—in Latin! It was a most fascinating experience, as I seemed to be transported back to the Middle Ages.

In Florence, I met the English prototype: These were mostly retired army men, usually living with their mothers or a sister in a small house on the outskirts of town. Life in Italy was very inexpensive in the 19th and early 20th century. Florence was replete with English spinsters who received a small monthly remittance from their families, which were glad to be rid of them, and they, in return, were thankful for their independence. The English spinsters clustered together in tea rooms and shared apartments.

To live in Florence at that time! To walk every day past the Palazzo Strozzi, that bastion of stone and power. To remember the elegant David of Cellini at the Loggia dei Lanzi, in front of the Palazzo Vecchio. What a privilege! I knew several well-known Dutch writers who lived permanently in Florence. Arthur van Schendel, the most famous one, was memorialized with a bust in a park in Amsterdam, but he lived in near poverty.

The foreigners at places like the Lido, near Venice, were quite different. The Lido was a summer resort, the season only lasted from June until September, and people usually stayed only a month. Venice, at that time, was a far-off place. Even from Florence, one had to take a sleeping car train and once, coming from Geneva where I studied, it took me more than twenty hours.

The Lido is an elongated island that protects Venice from the storms of the Adriatic Sea. It has a large, white beach. Anyone who has seen the movie Death in Venice will remember the hotel where most of the action takes place. It is the Grand Hotel des Mains, where my mother and I stayed in 1923—only twenty years later than the story in the book, but how different! Every epoch has an atmosphere quite its own, an interplay of a mode of living and certain attitudes. It is something intangible, which only those who lived it can define, and then only year later. What strikes me most, remembering, is how quiet it was—everywhere. In the movie, the hotel is always filled with people: in the lounge and in the dining room, where they practically touch elbows. In reality, the tables were placed at a distance from each other, and one spoke in a whisper. Once, when my mother and I laughed loudly at table, the proprietor of the hotel came over, telling us how happy he was to hear some cheerfulness. You saw few people at any time. Gregariousness didn’t exist. Every family, every couple was on its own, and it took at least a week of observation before one decided to talk to someone. There was a Dutch couple in a boarding house in Florence where we stayed all winter. We didn’t want to talk to them, so each time they passed our table at lunch or dinner, we spoke French.

The Grand Hotel at the Lido was a family hotel, the really chic hotel was the Excelsior, where Barbara Hutton stayed that summer—she was one or two years older than I. There, the great attraction was the bar, strictly forbidden for European girls by their mothers, but a center for the American crowd. 

The unique feature of the Lido, however, was Venice itself, at twenty minutes distance on the vaporetto, the small steamboat. There, you went for the five o’clock aperitif on the Piazza San Marco, or rather for an ice cream—a baked Alaska. Do they still serve it there, I wonder?

The unhurried life of great comfort. Yet, very few hotels had rooms with a bath. My father took us to London, and the only English I had to know was “Will you draw the bath, please?” Every floor had some bathrooms, and the maid told you when they were free. But the bedrooms were five times larger than they are now.

And the comfort of traveling by train! The Blue Train for the French Riviera left Paris in the evening. You arrived half an hour before departure time and were escorted to a car, which was later converted to a sleeper. How exciting was the depot at night! The bustle; the musty smell of locomotives. At night, the train would pass small towns, shrilly whistling. Or it would stop and you would see a stationmaster signaling and you saw a sign—Orange or Avignon. Then in the morning, there was the blue Mediterranean. You were in the South—full of sun, flowers and red earth.

Then came September 1939: the War. I was visiting my father at the French Riviera, the Cap d’Antibes, where he lived. He advised me to go the the States. I applied to the American consulate and received immigration papers within a week. In early November, I arrived in New York—to begin another adventure.