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posterity he was envisioning: “Suffice it you to know, scoffer and ribald, that the little child is old and blind now, and once more toothless, and the rest of us are shadows, these many, many years. Yes, and
your
time cometh!”
    Come it does, of course. But a half century beyond 1960, finding ourselves still avid for Clemens’s letters—in which the children are still cutting their teeth and the bloom remains on Livy’s cheek—we have the pleasure of seeing that the joke, for once, was on him.
    THE MOST IMPORTANT letter Jessica Mitford ever wrote was a forgery, addressed to herself (“Darling Decca”) at the age of nineteen, on February 3, 1937. Pretending to be a girlfriend traveling on the Continent, the future muckraker issued an effervescent pseudo-invitation to come across the Channel: “We have taken a house in Dieppe—that is, Auntie has taken it! We mean to make it the centre of a sort of motor tour to all the amusing places round. We are going there from Austria on Wednesday, and we should so
love
you to join us next weekend sometime …”
    The letter made it appear as if Mitford might soon be headed toward a world as stable and socially regulated as Madame de Sévigné’s. In fact, her destination was war-torn Spain, which she intended to reach after eloping with her second cousin EsmondRomilly, a nephew of Winston Churchill’s who’d achieved a precocious stardom through his flamboyant rebellion against British public-school culture and his later service with the International Brigade defending Madrid. The Dieppe ruse worked. Shown the letter of invitation, Mitford’s mother, Lady Redesdale, let her daughter slip out of England, and before long Decca and Romilly were in Loyalist Bilbao, transmitting news of the Spanish war for a press bureau that had taken them on.
    Looked at in class and period terms, all this might be regarded as normal youthful revolt. Lord Redesdale, known to his children as “Farve,” was a glowering martinet who used a stopwatch to time the sermons of whatever vicar he hired for the Cotswolds village that the Mitfords dominated. His wife (“Muv”) insisted that their six daughters, widely spaced in age but sharing a complicated matrix of games, nicknames and nonsense languages, receive much of their education at home—a confinement especially resented by Decca, who from the start possessed terrific gumption.
    She was the fifth of the sisters to make a London debut. All of them had looks, wit and aggression to burn; each was “a terrific hater,” Decca would remember. The escapades of the older ones had been harmless enough during the 1920s heyday of the Bright Young Things (Evelyn Waugh even worked twelve-year-old Decca’s pet lamb into
Vile Bodies)
, but they proved a good deal less amusing when conducted under the darker clouds of the decade that followed. It would be the grotesque doings of her sisters, more than the eccentricities and strictness of her parents, that prompted Decca’s flight in 1937.
    “Whenever I see the words ‘Peer’s Daughter’ in a headline,” sighed Muv, “I know it’s going to be something about one of you children.” In 1936, after the collapse of her marriage to Bryan Guinness, heir to the brewing fortune, Diana, the greatest beauty among the girls, wed Sir Oswald Mosley, head of the British Union of Fascists. This new connection fired up Nazi enthusiasm in the most physically imposing of the sisters, Unity (middle name Valkyrie), who soon became friendly with Goebbels, Goering and Hitler himself. Nancy Mitford, the eldest and most caustic of the girls, satirizedthe family’s political adventurings in a novel called
Wigs on the Green
, but even she had the Mitford gift for group-loathing; in her case, a weirdly virulent anti-Americanism. When Decca, the clan’s only leftist, made her escape, Nancy joined forces with the family in trying to retrieve her.
    After a period in Spain, the young Romillys did return, briefly, to England,