Views in Talloires

Monday, May 4, 2015

Chance meeting in Geneva

By, Wenke Thoman Sterns, MacJannet Fellow 1968
Dear Friends,

I want to tell you about a wonderful and stirring event that occurred on Monday evening in Geneva after we left Talloires.
Tony Cook, his wife Ciji, my husband Bill Sterns and I wanted to have dinner in the old town, near the MacJannets’ apartment on rue de l’Hotel de Ville. Which we did with great gusto. After coffee, we decided to go to the Macs’ old residence at Number 12 (the big door remains). We went in and peeked through the window onto the large staircase. A gentleman came in, and I said, “Bon soir” and explained that we used to know someone who lived here. He answered, in perfectly French-accented English, “Of course, the MacJannets!”

He invited us upstairs into Mrs. Mac’s flat for a drink. Here he introduced himself as Georges Haour, a professor at the International Institute for Management (better known as IMD). He said he knew the Macs and took over their apartment after Charlotte MacJannet died in 1999. He lived there with his Canadian wife, who had recently passed away. He could not have been nicer. The apartment remains almost as it was, albeit not quite as elegant.

These meetings are not chance or coincidence; they are meant to be. I know that Charlotte had a hand in this “rendezvous.”

Wenke Thoman Sterns, New York. June 6, 2014

I so appreciate Wenke’s message. What a continuing presence of Mrs. Mac! It takes me back to 1998 when, in Geneva for the International AIDS Conference, I visited Mrs. Mac at Number 12. We had a lovely reunion. Although she was then 97, she even contemplated going to a lakeside candlelight ceremony one of the following evenings. (A very nice young Latin American woman was assisting her.) That didn’t come to pass, but her spirit was with it.

Augustus Nasmith, Jr. Rutland, Vermont

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