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How Ludovici's parents first met

Excerpt from a private letter to an English correspondent

26th January 1970







             [This precise period of the year — especially at this time — has particular & most solemn significance for me; because 100 years ago, almost to a day, the authors of my being found themselves shoulder to shoulder in a queue in Paris, & had they not been so standing, I should not now be writing this letter to you.
             — Yes! The victorious German Army, under Marshal Von Moltke, had for some weeks been encircling Paris & the Siege they had imposed, which had ultimately led to the City's surrender, had caused terrible hardship. My mother's family had had the utmost difficulty to fight starvation, as there was hardly any decent food that could be bought, & what little there was had to be paid for by exorbitant prices.
            But at last the siege had been lifted, & English ships bearing food were now mercifully sailing up the Seine to bring relief to the starving City.
             My father — a young art-student at the French School of Art, — had been in Paris all through the siege. His father (my grandfather) a successful London portrait-painter, had sent him to Paris to be trained as an artist, & that was how he happened to be standing in that queue, to buy the sort of foods which the English ships were bringing to relieve the starvation in the great city.
             Thus he & my mother, who had been sent by her father to buy whatever she could from the English ships then anchored at the quays, happened to get into conversation, & within that same year were married! And 12 years later I was born! 88 years ago!
             So I owe my existence to three agencies:— The German Army's siege, the English ships bringing food to the beleaguered city, & the fact that my father & mother met for the first time in that queue!
             Few people can owe their being to such a chapter of accidents.]

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