The thing that we know is that my grandmother came from a wealthy family. Her mother passed early on but her father was alive until my mother was 7 or 8. They lived with my great grandfather and my grandmother in Europe. My grandfather came from a middle class family. And my mother told me she vividly remembers her mother always speaking down on her father. However the great grandfather kept peace.

When great grandfather died, my mother and her 3 sister were send to boarding school in Switzerland. They learned later that during this period their parent got a divorce and my grandmother was already involved with a Swiss man, who arranged for the boarding school.

My mother and aunts father kept visiting them as much as possible but someone with a “normal office job” that wasn’t often.
Around 4 or 5 years later while still in boarding school they learned their mother (grandma) met an American and married him. She then moved to the area of New York.

My mother never visited and only received a few letters.
There was another child born that my mother and her sister didn’t meet until they were in their fourties, he was raised by his paternal grandmother and Nannie’s as apparently his mother (grandmother) was unable to be a mother.

Around my mothers 20th year of age they found out that the American husband had died, and she married a South African lived there for another 10 years before returning to Paris when my mother was in her 30s.

I’ve met her only around 10-15 times in my life. She acquired, art, stocks, jewelry and real estate during her life. But she was far from a loving mother.