Old Russian princess

One could not help feeling sorry for him, but the most pathetic of all are the women. One day an Old Russian princess was ushered into my office. Her name was familiar to me as having been the hostess in the years gone by in her stupendous estate in Crimea of an uncle of mine on a special mission of the Sultan to the Tsar who was then summering at Yalta. My uncle had told us the lavish manner in which this princess had entertained the Turkish mission. Her residence was a palace filled with precious antique furniture and works of art.

Her meals were served on solid gold plates incrusted with diamonds, rubies and other precious stones. She had thousands of peasants on her estate. Now she was coming to ask my assistance to sell her rights to some oil fields she had in Caucasia. She was willing to sell them for a song the rights to these oil fields whose annual income had been in the past equal to a king’s ransom. I had to explain to her that as the Bolsheviks did not recognize the rights of private property, especially property belonging to the former ski resorts Bulgaria Russian nobility, I was afraid that it would be impossible to find a buyer for her.

The poor lady was disappointed, but she confided to me that she had received similar answers from other business men. She therefore wanted to make me another proposition. When she had fled from Crimea she had hidden her most precious jewels in a place where she knew the Bolsheviks would never think to search for them. She was now ready to tell exactly where these jewels were and to divide them with anyone who would recover them for her.

Proposition impracticable

When I told her that the insurmountable difficulties of getting her jewels out of the country while the Bolsheviks were still there made her proposition impracticable, the poor old lady, making a superhuman effort not to break down at this, possibly the hundredth, refusal of her “business” proposition, asked me if I knew anyone who would care to take French lessons. Happily my wife wanted to take up French and I was able to help her.

Russians are not the only ones who scramble for business. Hundreds of transactions are proposed by and handled through people of a hundred different nationalities, and the characteristics of each individual nation govern the negotiations in each transaction. With so many diversified propositions and with the different style of negotiations they each require, it really is a fortunate thing that the religions of the different races of the Near East crowd the calendar with many diversified holidays. Otherwise few business men would be able to stand the strain.