Pomfret Stone bore no nickname in the Foreign Service until, in the blazing rocketry of his downfall, he became known as the Madman of the Mamounia. Christened James Pomfret, he pared down his identity when he entered the Service and signed his dispatches "J. Pomfret Stone." Over the years I observed that the flourishes became more and more rococo: three swoops to form J; an elaborately curlicued P; a flamboyant Spencerian S, with the sequel trailing off into a line of barely perceptible humps, as if to blur any traces of the commonplace.

Stone was born in 1902, the youngest son of a Philadelphia family hitherto undistinguished by any extremes of genius or folly. His father owned a department store known as the Grade-B Wanamaker's. The Pomfrets, his mother's family, were Quakers, graduates of Swarthmore, patrons of the young Stokowski, and devotees of bird-walks along the Wissahickon. Pomfret was included in these excursions, and later in the huge and heavy dinners—pink-shaded candles and no "spirits"—which his parents offered to the gentry in their half-timbered house in Germantown.

In reaction against Germantown, Pomfret elected Princeton, where he majored in English and went in for pranks, apolitical but disruptive, which led to brushes with the dean's office and once with the police. He developed an orotund locution, compounded of snips and snaps of Shakespeare, uttered in the tones of W.C. Fields.("Give every man thy ear," he once told me, when I burned to offer advice to the Sultan of Morocco, "but few thy voice.") Similar reflexes drew him to the Service. At 28, when most men have found their corner, he quit his father's business and, after three