The Horror of Love
Read The Horror of Love Online
Authors: Lisa Hilton
THE HORROR OF LOVE
Lisa Hilton
PEGASUS BOOKS
NEW YORK LONDON
To Caroline Dalmeny
CONTENTS
21: Theory of the Leisure Class
22: A l’Ombre de l’Embrassadeur en Fleur
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book could not have been attempted without the generosity and kindness of Charlotte Mosley, who gave me a great deal of time, access to both Nancy Mitford’s unpublished letters to Gaston Palewski and her own then-unpublished research and a magical winter walk in Eaton Square.
I am most grateful to the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire for permitting me a telephone interview. Anthony Beevor was extremely helpful, particularly in giving me the benefit of his great expertise on the complexities of Free French politics, as were those who shared their memories of Gaston Palewski with me in interviews: Lord Thomas, Lord Weidenfeld, Paul Johnson and Viscount Norwich provided invaluable insights into their personal relationships with Nancy and Gaston.
The assistance of Marcella, Lady Dashwood and Sir Alistair Horne at West Wycombe is much appreciated, as is that of Professor John Rogister and Lady Antonia Fraser, Anne-Sophie Sabouret, the Comtesse Caumont de la Force and the Marquis de Segure. For an evening in the sixième such as Nancy might have known, I thank Alexandre Pradere, the Princesse de Beauvau-Craon and Anne de Lacretelle. Anka Muhlstein and Philip Ziegler both shared their own impressions of Gaston’s character.
David Valence, the director of the Fondation Charles de Gaulle in Paris, was most kind in giving me access to the archive. Charlotte Javelot was very helpful with correspondence. I particularly wish to thank Tom Staley, director of the Harry Ransom archive at the University of Austin, Texas, where I was lucky enough to speak to Lady Selina Hastings, whose own work has proved an essential resource. Sir Peter Westmacott, the British
ambassador to France, and Lady Westmacott were the most gracious and patient of hosts for a weekend at the Hotel Charost and its gardens. I would also like to acknowledge the efficiency and dedication of the staffs of the Archives Nationales de France, the French Embassy in Rome, the British Library and the London Library, and the generosity of Andrew Neil and Fraser Nelson in allowing me to work in the
Spectator
archive.
Michael Alcock helped me to develop the idea for this book, and my agent, Georgina Capel, made it happen. Many thanks, too, to Alan Samson and Susan Lamb at Weidenfeld. My editor, Caroline North, agreed to work with me once again, with invaluable brilliance and efficiency.
Much of the work on this book was done at Rosebery House, where thanks are due to Craig and Sheryl Wilkinson for their interest and assistance. I am immensely grateful to Lord and Lady Dalmeny, who gave me the gift of peace and space to write in their beautiful home, not to mention the key to their wine cellar.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Waiting for love (National Portrait Gallery, London)
Nancy and Peter Rodd (Getty Images)
Gaston, ‘the Colonel’ (Topfoto)
The Connaught Hotel (Getty Images)
Piccadilly and Leicester Square in the Blitz (Getty Images)
Rue Bonaparte (Private Collection / Archives Charmet / The Bridgeman Art Library)
General De Gaulle on the BBC (Getty Images)
Nancy at Rue Monsieur (Rex Features)
Dior’s atelier (Sueddeutsche Zeitung Photo / Lebrecht Music & Arts)
Churchill and De Gaulle (Photography by IWM, Camera Press, London)
Gaston in action (Press Association)
Gaston’s achievements (Wikimedia Commons / Mu (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0])
The Pont Royal (Getty Images)
The Zattere in Venice (Getty Images)
Palazzo Farnese (Fratelli Alinari Museum Collections – Malandrini Collection, Florence)
Boucher’s ‘Autumn Pastoral’ (By kind permission of the Trustees of the Wallace Collection)
Louise de Vilmorin (Getty Images)
Susan Mary Alsop (Topfoto)
The park at Versailles (Photograph by Dorothea Schmid / Laif, Camera Press, London)
L’Escalier Daru (Giraudon / The Bridgeman Art Library)
Nancy at Versailles (Getty Images)
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Of her correspondence with the scholar Theodore Bestermann when she was working on her biography
Voltaire in Love
, Nancy Mitford wrote: ‘If you want to bore your reader, tell them everything.’ This book is, or aims to be, the biography of a love affair. It is not a ‘Mitford’ book, nor a history of Général de Gaulle’s role in the Second World War, though inevitably it is coloured by aspects of both narratives. It attempts to reconfigure the role of Gaston Palewski in Nancy Mitford’s life, and to present Gaston to English-speaking readers, who might know him best as Fabrice de Sauveterre, as the significant politician he was. For a fuller account of Nancy’s life, readers might wish to consult the excellent biographies by Selina Hastings and Laura Thompson, while for the Mitford sisters, Mary S. Lovell’s account is the most comprehensive. For the progress of the Free French, Jean Lacouture and Jonathan Fenby give more thorough histories than are presented here.
‘A well born man knows in advance all the procedures he should follow and encounter in the various phases of gallant love; it often displays more refinement than true love since nothing about it calls for passion or spontaneity, and it is always very witty.’
Stendhal,
On Love
PROLOGUE
In the summer of 1941, two Englishmen, a Welsh Guards officer named Peter Rodd and his brother Francis, met a Frenchman in Addis Ababa to talk about a railway. Colonel Palewski, the commander of the Free French forces in East Africa, needed to ascertain the British position with regard to the French concession in the Addis–Djibouti railway line. A year later, Colonel Palewski arranged a meeting on a bright evening in the garden of the Allies Club on Park Lane with Rodd’s wife, who he thought would be glad to hear news of her husband. In her most famous novel,
The Pursuit of Love
, Nancy Mitford described the effect of this ‘short, stocky, very dark’ Frenchman: ‘Linda was feeling, what she had never so far felt for any man, an overwhelming physical attraction. It made her quite giddy, it terrified her. She could see that Fabrice was perfectly certain of the outcome, so was she perfectly certain, and that was what frightened her …’
Some days later, Nancy invited Gaston Palewski to dinner at her home in Blomfield Road. She waited for him in the dining room of her small, elegant house with its swagged pink moiré wallpaper, until she heard that sound, ‘a sound more intimately connected with the urban love affair than any except the telephone bell, that of a stopping taxicab. Sun, silence and happiness’ (
The Pursuit of Love)
.
Gaston Palewski was no one’s dream of an ideal French lover, yet in his alter ego Fabrice de Sauveterre Nancy established an ideal of the type which even the stuffy
Daily Telegraph
was obliged to concede dominated the English mind for twenty years. Gaston had acne-pitted skin, ‘a face like an unpeeled King Edward’,
1
receding hair and, according to some of his mystified
contemporaries, halitosis that could stop traffic. ‘Oh, Gaston, ’ recalled Anka Muhlstein, a family friend, ‘
how
ugly he was.’ But women adored him, perhaps because he so thoroughly adored them. Gaston’s ‘pretty ladies’ were the despair and the scandal of Général de Gaulle’s suite. Gaston operated on a principle of maximum returns, making passes at practically every woman he came across, enjoying an astonishing (and to his peers quite infuriating) degree of success.
At a meeting in the Café de Flore, Paris in 2009, a group of ladies of considerably more than a certain age agreed to be interviewed in strict anonymity about Gaston. All tiny dogs and Dior, it took no more than a
kir à la pêche
for these women to begin reminiscing, with much giggling, about the friends, sisters, cousins who had fallen for the Colonel.
‘But did she give in, then?’
‘No, that was the summer he dumped her at Cannes and went to Switzerland with her sister.’
‘It can’t be, because that was the year
I
was with him at Biarritz …’
Perhaps, given their relative youth, these ladies were rather inclined to exaggerate their personal involvement with the legendary Beast of the Rue Bonaparte, but they agreed on two things. Gaston (giggles) was
‘doné pour faire plaisir aux femmes’
(the best translation of this would be ‘built for love’) and the Englishmen of their youth were absolutely hopeless. By the third year of marriage, they claimed, Englishmen barely look at their wives at all. The stereotype of the Englishman as a diffident and incompetent lover is firmly entrenched in the psyches of both nations. Edith Cresson, the French prime minister, was attacked for her airy assertion that ‘the Anglo-Saxons are not interested in women as women … It is a problem of upbringing and I consider it a sort of disease, ’
2
but no one really disagreed with her. Nancy Mitford was firmly in Mme Cresson’s camp. In her 1951 novel
The Blessing
, the worldly Mme Rocher wonders at the mystery of English marriage: ‘English husbands? They go to their clubs, their
Boat Race, their Royal Academy – they don’t care for making love a bit.’
Nancy’s portrait of Fabrice, Duc de Sauveterre in
The Pursuit of Love
seduced a generation of Englishwomen with its blissful depiction of
l’amour à la Française
. The real Fabrice, Gaston Palewski, was for thirty years one of France’s most distinguished politicians and diplomats, a connoisseur and patron of the arts and a significant influence in the post-war project for European federalism, yet none of his contemporaries is in any doubt that it was Nancy who really made him famous. The reality of Nancy’s twenty-nine-year relationship with her pompous, pockmarked colonel was far from the bliss she imagined for Linda Radlett and Fabrice, but the
coup de foudre
of that third summer of the war provided them both with the most significant personal and emotional attachment of their lives. Gaston’s story has, in English at least, been told very much as an accessory to Nancy’s life, which has been extensively documented as part of the myth of her beautiful, fanatical, compelling family. Yet that story, which encompasses one of the most passionately exciting periods of French history, illuminates not only the life of an extraordinary man, but the work of one of the most popular and influential writers of the twentieth century.
Nancy Mitford’s popular reputation diminishes her in something of the same manner as does Jane Austen’s. Bonnets and bosoms in Jane’s case, diamonds and darlings in Nancy’s. Film and television representations of their work have tended to focus on what Austen herself termed the ‘light, bright and sparkling’. Nancy’s name is also inevitably associated with the ‘U and non-U’ essay which she wrote simply as a joke to tease her friend Evelyn Waugh but which nevertheless has seen her branded ever after as a horrendous snob. Yet there is a toughness, a darkness even, to Nancy’s writing which can be traced through her early novels to the late and celebrated biographies, a vision of love which could not be further removed from the chick-lit happy endings of Bridget Jones and Mr Darcy. Nancy poked fun at the romantic fantasies of dizzy debutantes, but, through both her
own experiences and those of her family, no one could have been more bitterly exposed to the disastrous consequences of blindly romantic love than she.
Nancy’s first two post-war bestsellers deal respectively with a serial adulteress who dies in childbirth and a sexually molested child who marries her abuser and destroys her family in the process. They might be read as the last of the attenuated tradition of the English Gothic novel. Her later novels,
The Blessing
and
Don’t Tell Alfred
, take a more ‘Enlightenment’ approach, essays in Gallic didacticism whose pragmatism contrasts with the wilder, romantically violent loves which lurk beneath the glittering surface of
The Pursuit of Love
and
Love in a Cold Climate
. As her relationship with Gaston continued, Nancy’s perspective on love became progressively more ‘French’, or perhaps rather more eighteenth century. The keystones of her romantic philosophy become civilization and adulthood.
The Blessing
provides an unsentimental education for its English heroine, Grace, who is gradually brought to accept, even to endorse, her French husband’s infidelity;
Don’t Tell Alfred
is an exploration of and a warning against the imported American worship of youth.