Kunffy Lajos: Visszaemlékezéseim, 2006

all participants in the Hungarian Republican movement as well as to those in the Communist Terror. After the amnesty the Karolyis could enjoy in Paris the enormous income their immense estates yielded in Hungary. Count Mihály died in Paris. Countess Katinka returned to Budapest in the seventies and died there. Among the de Kunffys' friends was the great poet Endre Ady. They corresponded for years and this invaluable correspondence was donated to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Magyar Tudományos Akadémia) by their son, Zitan. They were close friends of Bela Ivanyi-Grünwald, who was painted by Lajos as Bela was painting a Gypsy boy in his park. Another great painting of Lajos's is that of a young couple facing the Atlantic. It depicts his friend Oszkár Mendlik, who lived in Paris when Lajos and Ella did, on the seashore in Brittany. Together they frequented the atelier of their mutual friend, the world-renown painter Mihály Munkácsy Mendlik lived in France and in the Netherlands for most of his life. Lajos and Ella made their home in the two hundred-year-old manor house in Somogytur, their great estate. He built an atelier in his park that looks like a temple for the arts. Simple, elegant, well-proportioned and, as art would require it, a more elegant home than that of the artist himself. His home remained the more modest-looking of the two buildings in his park. Lajos and Ella maintained a large flat in Budapest, at the corner of Bern Rakpart and Sorház Utca. He exhibited in the capital and they indulged in the cultural and intellectual pleasures offered by the then-glamorous city. Their son, Zitan, married the beautiful dancer Lili Laszlo, and they lived opposite the National Museum on Museum Korut. The building was owned by Count Forgach, who was the ambassador to the Court of St. James (London), the highest imaginable diplomatic post in the 1930s. In this building a red coconut runner was often placed from the sidewalk through the entrance to the elevator, indicating that the Regent Miklós Horthy and entourage was coming for a visit. Countess Forgach spoke in a deep baritone voice. During the bombardments of Budapest in 1944, when all inhabitants of the building were commanded to go to the air-raid shelter in the basement, she would say, her voice now deepening to bass, „Let us pray". During the last six months of World War II Lajos and Ella de Kunffy moved into a suite in the Art Nouveau style Hotel Gellert (built in 1913). After the son of the Regent Miklós Horthy, István, died in an airplane crash, his young widow, nee Ilona Edelszheim-Gyulay, remained a very close friend of the de Kunffys. When the Nazi occupation started and the rabid Arrow-Cross party ruled with a degree of terror, Ilona Horthy procured a „Letter of Asylum" (men-level) from the regent, to protect the de Kunffys from the excesses of the Arrow-Cross regime. Ilona Horthy's mother remarried and became the wife of József Kohanowsky And this eminent 266