The Horror of Love (2 page)

Nancy’s correspondence also touches repeatedly on these themes throughout her life. Gaston was her great love, and he dominated her beliefs about art, politics, about the way life should be approached and lived. Nancy might have been madly in love with the colonel, but she was quite aware of his imperfections. She was always conscious that in person he was far less than the ideal she would have him embody, but that ideal eventually became her ideology, in her relationships and her books. To be a civilized adult seems a spare ambition, but for Nancy it was the end of art and of life.

Many writers have argued that Nancy’s philosophy was achieved by default, that she was merely, in her own words, ‘putting on a good shop-front’, making a virtue of necessity. Several of her biographers have portrayed her as a victim of her hopeless passion for Gaston, her life with him as a wasted one of humiliation and denial. Her letters are often raw with the
pain Gaston caused her, yet they also reveal the potential of an intimacy based upon ideas which contemporary women would find frankly appalling. Fidelity is not the point of marriage, though it may well be the end; adultery, if properly managed, may be a highly civilized pursuit (despite the tiresomeness of always having to go to bed in the afternoon), the one essential for happiness is not self-exposure or mutual dependency but great good manners. None of these points is necessarily revolutionary, but a glance around a bookshop or any women’s magazine shows that we are still bewildered, enthralled and terrified by our failure to achieve what feminism has taught us we deserve. Nancy and Gaston were two middle-aged, not particularly attractive people. He was a selfish, career-obsessed philanderer; she was febrile, needy and given to ‘shrieking’, yet the discipline, tenderness and
gentillesse
of their relationship exposes the limitations of many modern sexual mores.

Nancy was constitutionally incapable of bathos. Sadness and loss she knew very well, and she handles them in her novels so dexterously that the lightness of her touch initially disguises her very real capacity to convey pain and hopeless longing. Yet her great funniness, remarked on by all who knew her, whether or not they cared for it, meant that she could never play the tragic heroine for long, even to herself, as this exchange with Gaston demonstrates: ‘“I’ve given up everything”, I said, “My friends, my family, my country,” and he simply roared with laughter and then of course so did I.’

PART ONE

1901–39

1

GASTON

A
ll his life, Gaston Palewski’s father, Moise, sought to recreate the elements of a family which, in his own words, had been ‘brutally dispersed’.
¹
The Palewskis were Polish Jews: on the paternal side they had their origins in Vilno, in Russian Poland, on the maternal they came from Galicie in southern Russia, near the Romanian border. The family were linked by trade and marital alliances to a large Jewish community in the Grodno area, with many relatives in the small cities of Antopol, Pinsk and Kobryn. Educated members of the lesser middle class, many of the men trained to be rabbis while accommodating the concessions demanded of a devout, insular community in its negotiations with the commercial world. In a memoir written after the First World War, Gaston’s brother, Jean-Paul, observed a certain quiet humility in his relatives, an ability to combine remarkable intellectual talent with ‘the legitimate contentment of duty done, a bottomless instinct of charity and an often mystical devotion to the nicest forms of ideas’. He also remarked on the laws of segregation which caused the ‘unhappy Jewish nation in Russia’
²
to live in a tightly closed circle, never aspiring to worldly success beyond the most unassuming of trades. Gaston Palewski had an uneasy relationship with these origins all his life. No one could have been more eager than he to shake off the heavy garments of the
shtetl
, to recreate himself as the sophisticated
mondain
he so brilliantly became, yet the qualities identified by his brother – duty, kindness and the capacity for a certain mystic
idealism – shaped his life as surely as his more explicit rejection of his family’s past.

Moise’s father, Peisach Abramovich, was born in 1840 in Kobryn. A cultivated, emotional man with a fondness for poetry, he was employed as a manager for a Polish landowner and well respected in the city. He married Rachel Notkowa, a devout, intelligent woman five years his junior who spoke four languages and raised her six children with scrupulous respect for Jewish tradition. Moise was born in 1867, and as a small boy showed a rebellious streak. He recalled being reprimanded by his father for sneaking off to the theatre or displays of military exercises when he ought to have been at his studies. The family lived a quietly comfortable life until Peisach developed cancer of the mouth at the age of thirty-three. According to Jean-Paul’s memoir, it was not the disease that killed him, but the poisonous concoctions of a local chemist. Whatever the case, Rachel found herself a widow at thirty. Without her husband’s wages, her prospects looked extremely bleak. Her brother-in-law, a doctor named Michel Israel Rabbinowicz, offered to take the Palewski children with him to Paris, where he would oversee their education, and Rachel agreed to make the sacrifice, though she was unable to part with her youngest boy, two-year-old Paul. The others, Moise, Albert, Leon, Frieda and Judith, aged between twelve and four, set off with their uncle for France.

The Palewskis later liked to claim that one of their family had been active in the anti-Russian insurrection of 1863 which saw many liberally inclined Polish aristocrats looking to France in a diaspora known as the ‘Grande Emigration’. Michel Rabbinowicz belonged to a less grand category of emigrants, a group of doctors, lawyers, artists and intellectuals, many of them Jewish, seeking refuge from Russian persecution. Michel lived in the unfashionable Faubourg-Poissonière district, in what is now the tenth arrondissement of Paris. His nephews attended the College Rollin and subsequently the Springer Institute, where Moise passed his
baccalauréat
in 1887. Although Michel had so conscientiously provided them with a home, there was
little money, and Moise’s experiences of Paris during the flowering of the Belle Epoque were far from gay. He remembered weary miles walked to save the price of an omnibus ticket, sandwiches carefully divided on chilly park benches, an upbringing which while not actually deprived was nevertheless shabby and pinched.

There remained also a disturbing current of anti-Semitism in French society, which created an atmosphere of danger, a sense of a precarious existence lived permanently on the brink of poverty and persecution. France was still recovering from the bitter divisions provoked by the Dreyfus Affair, in which a young Jewish army captain, Alfred Dreyfus, had been falsely accused of passing military secrets to the German Embassy in Paris. The inflammable conflict between Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards had exposed anti-Jewish prejudice in the most exalted echelons of French society, creating an enduring legacy of hostility and suspicion. Moise was troubled by the visits of an elderly relative, a refugee of the pogroms, who was to die in penury in London, and he grew up with a sense of uncertainty which propelled him to seek a secure place in a threatening world.

Moise was a talented and driven student who won a place at the competitive Ecole Centrale des Arts et Manufactures, achieving his engineer’s qualification in 1892. For the next few years he held a series of engineering jobs, none of them lucrative, but his ambition can be discerned in the metamorphosis that had taken place in the year of his marriage. By 1895, the Polish immigrant Moise had become the
ingénieur diplomé
Maurice. He did not, however, marry ‘out’. His twenty-six-year-old bride, Rose Diamant-Berger, came from a similar Eastern-European Jewish background, with roots in Russia, Moldavia and Bucharest. Rose’s father, Yvan-Joseph, had brought his family from Romania to Paris in 1882 and was granted French citizenship a decade later. He had some success in business, as evinced by the fact that in the declaration of means required for French civil marriages, his daughter was provided with a dowry of 25,000 francs, as compared with the groom’s meagre savings of 1,000.

Rose might have been something of an heiress by the standards of the Faubourg-Poissonière, but the young couple were by no means well off. Their first home was an apartment at 51 Rue Rochechouart, a similarly unfashionable address, where their second boy, Gaston, was born on 20 March 1901. (The desire of the Palewskis to become thoroughly integrated is discernible in their choice of the Frenchest possible names for their sons.) Soon afterwards, the family moved to the nearby Square Petrelle in the ninth arrondissement, a quadrangle of severe post-Haussmann-style buildings around a small courtyard. The third-floor flat featured a salon with an orange velvet sofa and a dining room overlooking the court. Gaston later claimed (with perhaps something of the Mitford capacity to reinvent history along more charming lines) that he and his brother spent much of their time in a large cupboard opening off their shared bedroom.

The Palewskis lived a tranquil life of modest routines, but Maurice clearly tried to give his boys a more joyful upbringing than he had known. Gaston recalled rollerskating in the square downstairs, violin lessons, trips to the Coliseum cinema in the Rue Rochechouart and weekly visits to museums to hear tour guides explaining the exhibits. Gaston and Jean-Paul would wriggle beneath gilded tables to reach the front of the audience. Both boys shared a greedy delight in beautiful things and the histories behind them. Gaston recalled vividly the feeling of holding his father’s hand as they walked through the immense salons of the Louvre and the Petit Palais, and at home the boys turned the drawing room into their own ‘museum’. Jean-Paul, too, retained a vivid physical memory of traversing the city on huge exploratory walks, from the peaks of Montmartre to the château of St Germain-en-Laye. From the first, Paris belonged to Gaston as profoundly as did the Cotswold uplands of her own childhood to Nancy Mitford. It was in his blood and in his bones, and its poetry called to him all his life.

During the excursions with his father, Gaston was particularly struck by the nineteenth-century Escalier Daru, which houses the
Victory of Samothrace
in the department of antiquities at the
Louvre. The staircase is disarmingly plain, monumental in both the grandeur of its scale and the austerity of its lines, drawing the eye upwards to the perfect classical female torso of the sculpture. ‘One day, ’ Gaston said, ‘I’ll live in a house with a staircase like that.’

French literature of the nineteenth century abounds with adventurous young men on the social make: Julien Sorel, Lucien de Rubempre, Eugene de Rastignac. Gaston was often compared by contemporaries to Rastignac, the charming, unscrupulous society mountaineer of Balzac’s
Comédie Humaine
, whose talent, and particularly his attraction for women, propel him to the zenith of the Parisian world, the
gratin
of the old aristocracy who inhabit the Faubourg Saint-Germain. There could be no more apt correlative for the trajectory of Gaston’s ambition than the Escalier Daru. He always knew where he wanted to be, there at the top with Paris at his feet and a beautiful woman in his arms. His arriviste tendencies were not among his most endearing qualities and his snobbery was often figured as risible, but his desire to move amid
les gens du monde –
society people – formed part of his concept of the best way of life. As Fabrice explains to Linda early in their relationship:

Les gens du monde
are the only possible ones for friends. You see, they have made a fine art of personal relationships, and of all that pertains to them – manners, clothes, beautiful houses, good food, everything that makes life agreeable. It would be silly not to take advantage of that. Friendship is something to be built up carefully, by people with leisure, it is an art … You should never despise social life –
de la haute société –
I mean, it can be a very satisfying one, entirely artificial of course, but absorbing. Apart from the life of the intellect and the contemplative religious life, which few people are qualified to enjoy, what else is there to distinguish man from the animals except his social life? And who understands it so well and who can make it so smooth and so amusing as
les gens du monde?
(
The Pursuit of Love
)