Count Mippipopolous
Brett's champagne-buying Greek count — seven wars, four revolutions, and the settled secret of getting to know the values.
Quiet, and the oldest brandy on the list. Told not to be ostentatious when he orders an 1811, he says he gets more value for his money in old brandy than in any other antiquities. When Brett Ashley wants to move on somewhere noisier, he asks her to have it here, where it is quiet.
The book
At a glance
- A Greek count of elastic provenance, at large in Paris with money and calm
- The Paris chapters only
- Seven wars and four revolutions — soldiering, sometimes
- Two arrow wounds clean through the body, taken in Abyssinia at twenty-one, on a business trip
- A great bunch of flowers, a chauffeur named Henry, and champagne in a basket
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeThe count appears in the Paris chapters attached to Brett, buying champagne by the basket and enjoying everything with a calm the rest of the cast can't purchase at any price. He has been in seven wars and four revolutions and carries arrow wounds to prove it; having lived that much, he explains, he can now enjoy everything so well — the secret is to get to know the values. Brett pronounces him quite one of us, and for once the club's admission standard seems to mean something: he is damaged like the others, and unlike the others he has made peace with it.
He is also the cast's rarity — a character with no confidently documented original. In a novel of borrowed faces, the count appears to be the invention: a thought experiment in what Jake might become if the wound ever stopped aching — or a warning about the price of the anesthesia. He vanishes from the book when the party leaves for Spain, values intact.
How the book draws them
- The woundsArrow scars shown off in a nightclub — combat credentials so far beyond the Western Front's that the war generation goes quiet.
- The cellarChampagne is not for toasting, in his doctrine — a wine this good is for drinking, and mixing it with sentiment spoils both.
- The stillnessEveryone else in the book is running from something; the count has stopped, sat down, and ordered.
- The rule about jokingHe never jokes people, he says, because joking people makes enemies. Brett, who jokes everyone, agrees at once that this is why she has no friends.
- The offerTen thousand dollars for Brett to come to Biarritz with him. She refused, saying she knew too many people there, and by her account he was awfully nice about it.
- The valuesHis whole philosophy in one sentence: because he has lived very much, he can now enjoy everything so well. The secret, he tells Jake, is to get to know the values.