In September 2004, Pauline Terreehorst, then director of the Amsterdam Fashion Institute, spotted a vintage Gucci suitcase coming up for auction as part of a job lot. Having long coveted such an elegant piece of luggage, she put in what turned out to be the winning bid. The suitcase came with, in her words, ‘a whole cabinet of curiosities’: dresses, buttons, lace, a fur stole and riding jackets. Best of all, the lot included a number of albums containing photographs and postcards exchanged between a mother and her daughter across various parts of Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. Terreehorst sold the riding jackets to the losing bidder and put the rest of her haul to one side. Many years passed before she decided to scrutinise the albums more closely. What she discovered set her off on a quest across central Europe.

Her tale starts in the fashionable seaside resort of Abbazia in what is now Croatia, which was loved by the nobility of fin-de-siècle Europe. It was here that 29-year-old Countess Margarethe (‘Margit’) Henckel von Donnersmarck – described as a large woman ‘with bright-blue eyes and a metallic, masculine voice’ – met Count Sándor Szapáry. He was forty-two and half a head shorter than her. In July 1900 they married and moved into a vast mock-medieval castle called Burg Finstergrün on a high bluff in the Salzburg region of Austria, far from Vienna, the social life of which neither enjoyed. Margit had money from her family’s Silesian mines. Szapáry, like much of the Habsburg aristocracy, was a passionate hunter of partridge, deer, hare and bear, which only the nobility were permitted to shoot.

Left a widow four years later with two small children, one of them a daughter called Jolanta, Margit set about completing the task of restoring the 126-room castle, filling it with hefty Gothic pieces of furniture, stuffed hunting trophies and suits of armour. It was magnificent but also spartan. There