In the summer of 1935, Russian prince Alexis had a fatal accident with Maud, wife of Baron Von Thyssen. Salvador Dalí identified the victims
Cadaqués: where Dalí and Lorca almost took another step
It was a summer like this. On Thursday, August 1, 1935. A Rolls Royce Phanton Dorpheat Coupé, registration number ALF 222, gray with garnet leather seats, accelerated, tumbling down the narrow road from Flassá to Figueras, raising a cloud of dust. The children went out to the door of the houses to see it pass as an exhalation, and it was precisely the 13-year-old boy Mateo Buas who first heard about the accident, "I heard patapúm and I saw a car turned upside down" would tell the tens of journalists from around the world who moved to the small town of Albons, province of Girona, in "that August of blood and adventure", as La Esfera titled . The car had crashed into a tree and then turned around. The boy shouted that there was a person inside and a lady without panties lying in the middle of the road. The countrymen straightened the car, a young man, with golf pants, blue shirt and white shoes, appeared slaughtered by the windshield glass. The half-naked woman lying on the road was still breathing. They looked in the glove compartment for passports , Prince Alexis Mdivani. Baroness Maud von Thyssen. Someone deduced:
-They come from Mas Juny.
And another added:
- That they call the son of the notary of Figueras, who is always with them.
Thus, Salvador Dalí appeared in Albons, identified the victims, with whom he had dined the night before, and called Mas Juny to report the misfortune.
More Juny! Still today it awakens echoes of an era and an extinct society, but that is still remembered. Orgies, drugs, women sunbathing naked ... "My grandfather said that the ladies went with their breasts in the air through the house", "they were intoxicated with opium ...", "the owner was a millionaire ..." This is the only incontrovertible truth: José María Sert was the richest painter of his time. He had painted the murals of the Rockefeller Center in New York and on his last assignment the League of Nations of Geneva had paid him a fortune. Sert was a curious mix of talent and sense of the show, his wife, Misia, a very intelligent Russian, had introduced him to high society. When they had been married for ten years, Misia realized that her husband was bored and to fan the flame decided to share his marriage with another woman, another Russian, the fascinating Roussy Mdivani, who had been a lover of Coco Chanel. But Sert fell in love with Roussy, who was only 24 years old, and divorced Misia to marry her.
Roussy requested as a wedding gift a farm in the then wild Costa Brava to live in contact with nature, and Sert bought the Mas Juny, on the beach of Castell, next to Palamós, which he reformed with the latest advances! of bath!
Roussy Mdivani and his four brothers had fled from the Bolshevik revolution, had made false titles of princes and had dedicated themselves to the sport of marrying for money. The most attractive, Alexis, his sister's favorite, had married Louise Astor and Barbara Hutton, from whom he had won four million francs. "He has 150 pairs of shoes!" the Parisian press was ecstatic, and the unwrapped prince said that his first sexual experience had been at age fourteen with Mistinguette, which he shared with the king of Spain.
In the summer of 1935 Alexis was living an affair with an adventurer like him, the fortune hunter Maud Zarske, married to Baron von Thyssen, father of our Tita Cervera's husband, forty years older than her. Maud, according to some was a model of a Berlin fashion store, according to others worked in an art gallery. The baron lost his head and gave him a superb palace in Lausanne, Villa Favorita, while giving him a painting and a jewel every day.
But Maud was young and fiery and, when her husband went on a business trip to Germany, she decided to indulge a holiday with Alexis in Catalonia. He was traveling with a crocodile briefcase in which he kept his fabulous jewels. The first stop was in Barcelona, they stayed at the Ritz and attended a bullfight. Maud put on a sapphire necklace and the bohemian Roussy reproached him: "This is vulgar here." After they went to Mas Juny, Alexis owned a separate house, the Mas Ponki, where they made love and sang loudly. Maud was wearing shorts and Alexis bathed in a tight-fitting sealskin slip, boarded out and during the day disguised themselves as countrymen, with espadrilles. In the evening they put on tuxedos and long suits and dined with the other guests, Jean Cocteau, Gide, Marlene Dietrich, Coco Chanel ...
A phone call interrupted that heavenly placidity. The baron had anticipated his arrival in Paris! Maud began to tremble, but Alexis told him not to worry, that he would take her by car to Flassá, where the train to Port Bou departed, and there he would take the express from Paris. Maud, with his jewelry briefcase, left without saying goodbye, but when they reached Flassá, the train was already gone. Desolation, tears, Alexis decided to take her to the next station, Figueras. At 140 kilometers per hour, on those devilish roads, at the height of the town of Albons lost control and collided with one of the bananas that bordered the road.
TRAGIC ACCIDENT
Alexis Mdivani's body was placed on an old mattress and transported in a hay carriage to the Albons cemetery. Maud was admitted to the clinic of Dr. Coll de Figueras in a very serious condition, her face horribly mutilated, her cheekbone was crushed and the frontal bone, an eye came out and she had a skull fracture and concussion. He had lost teeth and had broken his tongue.
When Roussy arrived, he threw himself on the body of his brother trying to revive him, his screams could be heard from all over town. They could not lift the body until the judge arrived and performed the autopsy, outdoors, in a pouring rain. After two days he was buried in a gala uniform in the cemetery of Palamós, in niche 66 row 1 A, according to the detailed chronicles. Sert, newcomer from Venice, only allowed the service people to be there. Baron Thyssen, from Paris, who was staying at the Peninsular Hotel, went to the hospital every day with flowers and champagne, after dispatching the mail, cables from Hitler and Von Pappen. In the American press they scoffed, "while the prince made love with Maud, Von Thyssen made guns for Hitler." In the end, he decided to file a complaint because his wife's briefcase had appeared, but with the closures broken and empty. He detailed his content: four black pearls (200,000 francs), seven gold and brilliant bracelets, an emerald dressing that had been from the tsarina .... And an amulet: a dried sardine, which the Rasputin monk had given to the zarevitch .
When Maud recovered from his injuries, he began his pilgrimage through aesthetic clinics throughout Europe trying to regain his beauty. The baron got tired of paying the bills, divorced her claiming adultery and Maud, ruined and disfigured, tried in vain to sue Alexis' brothers, arguing that he had been the cause of his downfall. He became a lesbian.
Roussy, shattered and freaked out by the death of the beloved brother, plunged into morphine and died two years after being a victim of drugs and tuberculosis. But nobody cared, because some soldiers had revolted in Morocco and the Spaniards began killing each other. No newspaper echoed, its time had passed.
THE JEWELRY CASE
If you ask Albons about that briefcase today, they tell you in a low voice, "So and so, suddenly he started buying land, nobody knows where he got the money ..." Legend or reality, who knows? But the truth is that the curious jewels, unique pieces, have never been put up for auction. In 1942, Sert still confessed to Josep Pla when he accompanied him to sell Mas Juny for a million pesetas to the Puig Palau brothers, "my wife wanted me to bury her in Palamós with her brother ..." And he took the hands to the eyes, "I will not return, but I will miss this light ... this llum!"
The journalist who signs this chronicle has gone to look for that grave in the cemetery of Palamós, but has not found a niche or pantheon in the name of Prince Alexis Mdivani, and nobody has been able to explain what happened to him. The dazzling light of the Mediterranean has not been able to clarify those unfathomable mysteries and their long shadows extend to the present day.
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