For once, this post is family-themed and unrelated to my work. Its origins go back to August 1983, when my grandfather Georges Véron died while I was 11 years old. At the burial ceremony in Thury (Burgundy, France), where he had been the village doctor for decades, his eulogy mentioned that he had been "born in Nitra (Hungary) on 4 January 1915 from a French father and a Swiss mother." I knew that my great-grandmother had been Swiss: she was referred to in family discussions as "Mémé Bâle", having spent her later years in Basel. But I was puzzled by the Nitra/Hungary bit. My father told me that Georges's father, also named Georges with an end 's' as is customary in French, had been a cook for some grand Central European aristocrat "à la Esterhazy" - the reference to Haydn's benefactors was natural, since classical music was big in the family tradition. (To avoid confusion, in the rest of this piece I refer to my great-grandfather as Georges, and to my grandfather as Georges Louis, even though the latter also always went by Georges.)
Eulogy of Georges Louis Véron, my paternal grandfather, pronounced by André Grossier on behalf of Thury's municipal council, 13 August 1983
I was reminded of Nitra in 1993 while working in a glass factory of the French building materials concern Saint-Gobain in Potsdam, Germany. One day visitors came from Nitrasklo (literally, Nitra glass), a partner company in what had just become Slovakia. As I realized their hometown was the same place where my granddad was born, I thought I should investigate more about the place and the story, but failed to follow up. Then in October 2009 at a conference in Bodrum, Turkey, I met Katarína Neveďalová, then the Member of the European Parliament for Nitra, who kindly invited me to come and visit after I told her of my fuzzily-understood Nitra connection. Eventually, the trigger to search for more came in July 2017, when my father unearthed a beautifully calligraphed letter from a box of old family archive.
Certificate of recommendation about Georges Véron by Countess Margaret Apponyi, 8 March 1918
The letter is written in quaint and florid, nearly faultless French. It is signed "Comtesse Louis Apponyi née Marguerite Comtesse de Seherr Thoss", by then the widow of Count Louis (Lajos) Apponyi who had been the Marshal of the Court for Hungary (Hofmarschall in Ungarn) of the Austro-Hungarian Empire from 1895 to his death in late 1909. In her letter titled "Certificate", the Countess attests that "Le sieur George [sic] Véron" worked in her service as chef de cuisine from 1 January 1904 to 1 March 1909. She praises his personality - "faultless conduct, good manners, sweet character" - and cooking ability - "his cuisine is excellent, delicate and elaborate" (excellente, délicate et recherchée). The latter skill, she continues, shone in the "grand official dinners, ball buffets and evenings" that Count Apponyi "gave to the Court, to the Diplomatic Corps and to society." She then notes that "his health called for a relocation" in 1909 and that she was "very sorry to let him go (son état de santé exigeant un changement d'air, j'ai dû à mon grand regret me séparer de lui.)" She ends by recommending him "very warmly".
Birth Certificate of Georges Véron, issued 22 July 1941
Georges Véron was born 1875 in Le Mans (Sarthe, Western France), from what family lore remembers as a family of poor peasants in a nearby village. In 1901 he had married one Marguerite Charlotte Coupechon in Paris, but she died giving birth to their daughter Hélène. Hélène ended up at the Daughters of Charity of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, going by Sister Véronique and/or Sister Jean-Gabrielle depending on sources - in the 1950s at the Daughters' convent in Blacy near Vitry-le-François, where my father visited her, and in the 1960s in the mining country in the North of France, where she died in a car accident. It is probable that Georges left Hélène to the care of the Daughters of Charity before taking the chef job in Hungary, but there is nothing about that transition in either family memory or surviving documents.
"Der Kaiser hält Cercle", court scene at Buda Castle shortly after Count Louis Apponyi's appointment as Hofmarschall in Ungarn, and less than a decade before my great-grandfather's time there. Count Apponyi is the standing figure holding a ceremonial staff right behind Emperor Franz Joseph. Next to him, on the picture's far right, is Prime Minister Sándor Wekerle, and behind them is Cardinal Vaszary. Rotogravure based on a painting by Arthur Lajos Halmi, 1898, now at the Austrian National Library
The Countess's letter makes it possible to imagine Georges's whereabouts between 1904 and 1909. As Marshal for Hungary, Count Apponyi's functions were held primarily in Buda Castle and in Gödöllő Palace, with some more possibly in Vienna and Oponice - then known as Appony, the family's ancestral lands in what is now Slovakia. In Budapest and Gödöllő, the Apponyis presumably lived in the palaces ex officio. In Vienna they had a comfortable town house which they had commissioned in 1880, and in Oponice they had the family castle, built in successive phases between the 16th and the 19th centuries. The latter was restored in the late 2000s after considerable damage under Communism, and is now a hotel branded Chateau Appony. I stayed there for a night in November 2019, and visited the lovingly rebuilt Apponyi Library. Since the Countess's letter does not indicate a specific location for Georges's service, it is plausible that he would have travelled with his masters and worked in all these properties.
Apponyi Castle in Oponice, Slovakia, now Hotel Chateau Appony
After leaving the Apponyis' service in March 1909 Georges reappears in 1910 in Davos (Eastern Switzerland). Davos was not yet the watering hole of the global elite that Klaus Schwab made it into, but its climate was already recognized as ideal to cure lung diseases, as would soon be made famous by Thomas Mann in The Magic Mountain (1924). This suggests that the illness alluded to by the Countess may have been tuberculosis. In 1909-1910 Davos also featured a stationery shop and/or bookstore in a building known as Villa Erica. In there worked a young woman from Biel/Bienne named Claire (Clara) Mutschler. (Biel/Bienne, as its name hints at, is often dubbed the most bilingual place in Switzerland; the Mutschler family would switch effortlessly between German and French, as did Georges Louis in his youth.) The family archive has a love letter of Georges to Claire dated 14 June 1910, which suggests that their relationship was already intimate. They would marry in Davos in early April 1911.
Georges Véron and Claire Mutschler. The picture of Georges, undated, was made in Topoľčany, a town north of Appony and Kovarce; the picture of Claire was made in her hometown of Biel/Bienne, probably in 1910 as it was kept inserted in a love letter of that date.
However, Georges was not done with Upper Hungary, as the territory of today's Slovakia was known at the time. By the summer of 1910 he was in Kovarce (then known as Kovárcz), a village to the immediate north of Oponice/Appony. A letter he sent to Claire from Kovarce, dated 6 September, gives directions for her to join him there: take a night train from Davos to Vienna; then take the Vienna-Budapest line and stop at Érsekújvár, now Nové Zámky; then take the local train from there to Szomorlovászi, now Koniarovce, where Georges would pick her up with a car. The letter mentions that he had traveled that itinerary in June.
The same letter refers in passing to a Madame Cardéza as Georges's new boss. Mary Cardeza was the French-born wife of American Thomas Cardeza, heir to a financier family from Philadelphia - his grandfather had founded Fidelity Trust Company, now part of Wells Fargo. The couple had been renting the village castle of Kovarce from the Apponyi family since 1906. Ostensibly Georges became their chef de cuisine in June 1910. We know that Georges was still in the kitchen because he is referred to as a cook on Georges Louis's early-1915 birth certificate.
The Kovarce castle where Georges worked in the 1910s while in the service of the Cardeza family, now a mental health institution. I was not allowed to venture inside on my visit in November 2019.
Why serve the Cardezas in Kovarce rather than Georges's old employers the Apponyis in Oponice next door? Count Louis Apponyi had died in December 1909. The surviving Apponyis were no longer duty-bound to entertain the Imperial court with lavish French cuisine. They also faced chronic financial tightness: back in 1892, Count Louis already had to sell some of the family library's choicest items. By contrast, the Cardezas were wealthy and had a suitably flashy lifestyle. Thomas Cardeza and his mother were on board the Titanic in April 1912, in one of the ship's two most luxurious cabins; they survived, and their lost valuables were insured. With all this in mind, it is not too surprising that in her March 1918 certificate, Countess Apponyi does not allude to Georges's return to Upper Hungary after leaving the family's service in 1909, even though she may well have known about it. By that time, moreover, the Cardezas had returned to the United States and were now, from the Countess's perspective, on the enemy's side.
Memorial slab commissioned by Countess Margaret Apponyi in 1910 in honor of her recently deceased husband Count Lajos Apponyi, on the side of the Apponyi family burial chapel in Oponice's village church
From the surviving archive one infers that Claire's stay in Kovarce in autumn 1910, if it happened at all, did not last long, since there are several letters sent by Georges to her in Switzerland in November and December. One of the letters, written on Kovárcz letterhead and dated 24 November 2010, appears to hint at a project of Georges to work with Claire on the Davos shop: "Tant mieux que le commerce marche bien et j'espère que avec toi qui fais si bien et si aimable dans le commerce notre petite affaire pourra nous donner assez d'argent pour nous permettre de vivre bien gentiment et nous travaillerons bien pour aussi économiser un peu plus d'argent" - from this text it seems that notre petite affaire is the same as the commerce where she already works. This hypothesis is supported by an undated card advertising the shop at Villa Erica under Georges's name, whose vaguely Secession style is consistent with a date in the early 1910s:
There are no letters from 1911 in the family archive, but a number of postcards sent by Georges (from Kovarce) to Claire (at Villa Erica in Davos) in 1912 and 1913. There's also a postcard sent in July 1914 by Georges to his mother in Le Mans, with a picture of him and Claire in Kovarce; and a poignant letter from Georges to his brother, dated 3 August 1914 at the very beginning of World War I (see below). By that time, Claire was already pregnant with Georges Louis, who was born in January 1915 in Nitra, the closest sizeable town to Kovarce - most probably they just went to the hospital there for the delivery but did not stay in town very long. Then there are a number of postcards sent in 1915 by Georges from Kovarce to Claire and baby Georges Louis at various addresses in Switzerland - first Biel/Bienne, then at Aarwangen castle from mid-year, then Davos in December. (How the Mutschlers had gained access to Aarwangen Castle, a facility of the Berne cantonal authorities, is unknown.) Georges's last postcard from Kovarce in the archive, sent to Claire at Villa Berma in Davos-Dorf, is dated 9 December 1915; a postcard of Claire from Davos, dated and stamped 23 December, appears to have been returned with a stamp of the Appony Post Office in January 1916.
Georges and Claire with their dog Krotass in Kovarce, July 1914
From all this, one may hypothesize that after having spent the second half of 1910 in Kovarce, Georges moved back to Davos around early 1911 to marry and to work full-time on the shop business. But - either because it did not work out, or because the Cardezas made him an offer he couldn't refuse - he returned to Kovarce around early 1912 and stayed there until finally leaving Upper Hungary for Switzerland around new year 1916. Claire stayed in Switzerland most of the time, but was with Georges in Kovarce for a bit more than a year, from late 1913/early 1914 to shortly after little Georges's birth in January 1915.
Why did Georges eventually leave Upper Hungary? Quite possibly because the Cardezas themselves had left, or at least they no longer needed a chef on site. We know that in 1916 Mary was doing humanitarian work on the Russian side of the Eastern front, i.e. against Austria-Hungary, because she was decorated for that by the Red Cross. In any event, the Cardezas were done with Kovarce by April 1917, when the United States entered the war against (among others) Austria-Hungary. They returned to Central Europe in the early 1930s, this time in Austria where they rented the hunting manor of Radmer in the mountains of Styria until the next deterioration of the political climate led them to return to the U.S. in 1933. Mary Cardeza died in 1943, and Thomas in 1952.
During his sojourn in Hungary, Georges must have been witness to the rapidly increasing frictions between the cosmopolitan, aristocratic world of his patrons and the rising dominance of ethnic and linguistic nationalism. The imperial court had always been multilingual. Emperor Franz Joseph continued the tradition, being as proficient in French as in German, and moreover educated in Czech, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, plus Greek and Latin. The Apponyis were similarly fluent in French, as demonstrated by the Countess's letter of 1918, in addition to (at least) German and Hungarian, and didn't mind that their first name would change according to language context, e.g. Louis / Lajos / Ludwig (also Ludovicus). Latin had remained the Kingdom's official language until the 1830s, when it was replaced by Hungarian, and in Georges's time it still competed with Hungarian in religious contexts.
Baptismal certificate of Georges Louis Véron, January 1915. The form is bilingual in Latin and Hungarian, and filled in Latin.
But at the same time, in the Kingdom of Hungary, the nationalist "Magyarization" project aimed at suppressing minority languages such as Slovak in Kovarce's region, as well as Romanian in the kingdom's eastern lands and Serbian in its south. As it happens, Count Albert Apponyi, a distant cousin of Louis and arguably the family's most senior statesman (leaving aside Louis's granddaughter Queen Geraldine of Albania), gave the Apponyi name to the notorious 1907 legislation that imposed Hungarian as the main language of education - ironic since, as he recalled in his memoirs, his own first achievement in public service was thanks to his command of Italian.
Postcard addressed by Georges to baby Georges Louis, nicknamed Lajos (Louis in Hungarian), June 1915. Georges makes fun of elaborate Hungarian titulatures: if I get it right, Nagy költö sagos Véron Lajos uruak translates roughly as "the great blessed poet Lajos Véron, Esquire". The Swiss post office forwarded the card from Biel/Bienne to Aarwangen, where Claire had apparently relocated by then.
One suspects that Georges had to manage some language sensitivities as well, even though he certainly could speak French with his Apponyi and Cardeza patrons. Mary Cardeza herself had a French family background - she apparently was a descendant of Jean Racine, the 17th-century playwright - and the Cardezas had other French servants in addition to Georges: these included a butler, who also went on the Titanic and survived, and a driver. Georges also presumably spoke functional German, at least after spending time in Davos. Slovak was by far the majority language in Oponice and Kovarce (which also had small Hungarian and German minorities), but no one in the elites would speak it in Georges's time. (Strikingly, the Apponyi Library in Oponice, now the pride of the Slovak National Library, had thousands of volumes in French, German and Latin, many in Hungarian and Italian too, but not a single one in Slovak.) One wonders if Georges had to speak it to communicate with his kitchen team in Kovarce. His letters suggest that he may have mastered at least some basic Hungarian, even though he occasionally struggles with the spelling of Hungarian place names. By contrast to the present, fluency in English was not needed or even very useful in those times and places.
Letter from Georges Véron to his brother Louis, 3 August 1914
In his August 1914 letter to his brother, Georges refers implicitly to the nationalistic fervor of the moment by insisting that he and Claire are safe, even though at that time he did not expect to be allowed to stay in Upper Hungary for much longer: "We will wait to be forced to depart, I mean if the war becomes generalized they will require us to leave the country (...) we will leave if we must, but until then we stay". His assessment is sober and, with hindsight, grimly accurate: "As serious as the situation is, I still have a modicum of hope, and I believe that each day that passes without it worsening is one more chance that the war may remain localized, but unfortunately any spark can trigger the most horrible of wars. We should still wish and hope that the men on whom so many responsibilities rest will still be able to stop such misery, but all these rascals in Vienna and Budapest who have led their country and Europe into such an impasse - oh then a curse on them."
Georges's brother Louis Véron in military attire, presumably during World War I
After leaving Kovarce, Georges probably spent the rest of the war period together with Claire and their little son in Switzerland, and possibly even stayed there a bit longer. The family archive has many photos of Claire, baby Georges Louis and assorted members of the sprawling Mutschler family, in Aarwangen in 1916, in Basel in 1918, and in Aarwangen again, with several also showing Georges, in 1919. At some point between 1919 and 1922 the family relocated to Strasbourg, not far down the river Rhine from Basel, where they opened a restaurant on 1, rue Stimmer. I imagine that Georges may have longed to live and work again in his native France, and was conceivably further enticed by French government incentives for French people to move to just-recovered Alsace.
The restaurant in Strasbourg, early 1920s
There is still a restaurant now at the same address, even though it was closed when I visited in December 2018.
1 rue Stimmer, Strasbourg
By that time, the Danubian world that had been Georges's for more than a decade had changed beyond recognition. Oponice and Kovarce were now in Czechoslovakia, where Hungarian aristocrats such as the Apponyis faced a stark choice between staying as a now-embattled minority, or leaving and be dispossessed. Georges's former boss Countess Marguerite Apponyi opted for the former and remained in the Oponice castle until her death in 1931; cousin Albert Apponyi chose the latter and lost his family estate in Éberhárd (now Malinovo) near Bratislava, which in 1923 became the State Agricultural School of Czechoslovakia. As for the Kovarce castle, Marguerite's son Henry sold it to the Czechoslovak government in 1926. When Henry died in 1935, the continuous presence of the Apponyi family in their ancestral lands of what is now Slovakia came to an end, even though members of the family lived on in Hungary or emigrated.
Georges died in Strasbourg on 9 February 1925, perhaps of another bout of tuberculosis. He was 49 years old. Claire sold the restaurant business and after a few years she returned to Basel, where she stayed until her death in 1956. Young Georges Louis remained in Strasbourg with support from his Paris-based uncle Louis (who died in 1946 and was buried in Le Mans). He went on to study at the faculty of medicine, where in the 1930s he would meet his future wife Paulette, my grandmother. In September 1939 they were expelled from Strasbourg during the Alsace-Moselle Border Zone Evacuation and settled during the war in Thury, where they married just after liberation in September 1944 and where my father was born in May 1947. But that is another story.
Announcement of Georges's death, February 1925
Is there any legacy of this journey through long-disappeared Mitteleuropa? I am tempted to think that immersion in the Apponyis' milieu had a transformative influence on Georges, who comes across as unusually worldly for a son of presumably illiterate farmers in Western France. His letters of the 1910s are well-written and often witty, he read newspapers regularly and had strongly-formed political opinions, and he also painted as a hobby. Cooking elaborate meals for the Apponyis, the Cardezas and their high-society guests may have facilitated the ascension of my Véron forebears to the middle class, and opened their horizons to the wider world. If so, I am grateful.
Painting by Georges Véron, undated
Note on sources: other than my family's archived documents, I particularly relied on a 2015 conference volume published by the Slovak National Library on The Apponyi Family in the History of Book Culture, which I found on sale at Hotel Chateau Appony, and on research on Kovarce and the Cardeza family by local historian Peter Gerši.