A Lion Roars in East Africa

Abstract

While Theodore stalked British East Africa with Kermit, Edith took three of the children, Ethel, Archie, and Quentin, on an expedition of their own to Europe. They sailed on the S. S. Crete and she brought along $10,000 to finance a five months “endless sightseeing tour,” for the children’s education.¹ The voyagers arrived on July 12, 1909 at Genoa where Edith’s maiden sister, Emily Carow, awaited them. By nightfall they were all ensconced seventy miles away at Emily’s tiny house, Villa Magna Quies (Villa of Great Quiet), outside Porto Maurizio. Though small, the villa in the Ligurian Hills featured breathtaking views of olive groves and the Mediterranean. For a few restful weeks the children rode bicycles and took daily French, Italian, and Latin l essons at the nearby Franciscan monastery. Edith ignored the journalists who snapped their pictures while they strolled on the pebbly beach or the donkey trails, protected by a Secret Service Agent. At the end of July, Ethel and Archie embarked for a tour of Provence with the U.S. ambassador to Italy, Lloyd Griscom, and his wife. On Edith’s forty-eighth birthday, August 6, she and Quentin explored the Palais Des Papes and saw a play at the amphitheatre at Orange before traveling to Lyons to be reunited with Ethel and Archie. Edith confided to her aunt Lizzie that she was beginning to feel “a little more confident in my powers of looking out for myself.”²