Faberg's Egg

Switzerland, 1920 Dear Friend, “Called away” from my country, I square the egg and put it in a letter that all may read, gilding each word a little so that touched, it yields to a secret stirring, a small gold bird on a spring suddenly appearing to sing a small song of regret, elation, that overspills all private bounds, although you ask, as I do, what now do we sing to, sing for? Before the Great War, I made a diamond-studded coach three inches high with rock crystal windows and platinum wheels to ceremoniously convey a speechless egg to Court. All for a bored Czarina! My version of history fantastic and revolutionary as I reduced the scale to the hand-held dimensions of a fairy tale, hiding tiny Imperial portraits and cameos in eggs of pearl and bone. Little bonbons, caskets! The old riddle of the chicken and the egg is answered thus: in the Belle Epoque of the imagination, the egg came first, containing, as it does, both history and uncertainty, my excesses inducing unrest among those too hungry to see the bitter joke of an egg one cannot eat. Oblique oddity, an egg is the most beautiful of all beautiful forms, a box without corners in which anything can be contained, anything except Time, that old jeweler who laughed when he set me ticking. Here, among the clocks and watches of a country precisely ordered and dying, I am not sorry, I do not apologize. Three times I kiss you in memory of that first Easter, that first white rising, and send this message as if it could save you: Even the present is dead. We must live now in the future. Yours, Fabergé.