YESTERDAY WAS MINE

It was a ""yesterday"" before World War I, and the story recreates a way of life that will never come again in reminiscences of the Roumanian scene viewed by Princess Anne-Marie and providing lovers of intimate scenes of life among the nobility with highly entertaining and refreshing tidbits. In a deeper sense, perhaps, it has some significance as a key to Roumanian psychology, politics, mores, at one social level. Her story centers largely on Bucharest and the country seat of the Bacaresco family. Anne-Marie inherited her wealth from her grandparents; her childhood recollections give detailed and intimate glimpses of life at Maneshti,- food, clothing, home management, the social round, in swift flowing story. Her allowance was spent by her spendthrift father and bailiffs hung around like vultures. At eighteen, Anne-Marie was swept into the social round, and the parade of kings, queens, princes, counts, wives and mistresses, parties, elaborate functions, all are described, and eventually the Princess in royal fashion proposes to Prince Jean Callimachi, catch of the season. Their honeymoon, their travels, and the arrival of their babies -- and the formidable English Nurse Wilkinson -- gradually build up to the first World War, to neutrality, mobilization, and finally the Peace Conference. Delightful if not important reading.