The Horror of Love (24 page)

Nancy herself was both irritated and amused by the insistence that everyone she knew saw themselves in her books, including her own in-laws and Deborah’s. When she wrote her biography of Mme de Pompadour, A.J.P. Taylor insisted that she had merely taken Fabrice and plonked a wig on him. Nancy delighted in this view, wondering if anyone would be convinced by Fabrice as Voltaire – ‘exactly like you, all his meals are TAKEN’, she wrote to Gaston – but
Pursuit
is a great deal more than a felicitous cobbling together of the anecdotes she recounted to Gaston in the course of their affair. In some measure, the book is wish fulfilment. The Radletts’ furious quarrels never end in prison or suicide, Aunt Sadie’s vagueness is charming rather than irritating and Uncle Matthew, storming through the story with his stock whip, is a far cry from the battered Lord Redesdale who emerged from the war.

What it is not is the fantasy of a disappointed mistress. When Nancy wrote
Pursuit
she
did
have her colonel, he
had
come back to her from the blue skies above Algeria, and she was preparing to embark on a life with him in the city she loved best in the world.

In July 1945, Lord Redesdale agreed to give Nancy £3,000 to buy a partnership in Heywood Hill, selling French books (which,
naturally, she would go to Paris to acquire), for a 30 per cent markup. Nancy raced through the bureaucracy, obtaining a licence from the Board of Trade and an exit permit from the Foreign Office. Her new hat caused a sensation at the passport office. ‘The typists and clerks got such terrible giggles, they were paralyzed and couldn’t attend to anything, it must have made their day.’ English to the core, she set off equipped with dozens of oatcakes as provision against nasty foreign breakfasts and arrived to find her beloved in her beloved city in glorious sun. She stayed first at the Hôtel Jacob et d’Angleterre, ‘the kind of hotel that Oscar Wilde died in’, before moving to the Hôtel Pont Royal whose rackety bar was a great feature of ex-pat life. After two weeks she wrote to her mother: ‘I am so completely happy here … I must come and live here as soon as I can, I feel a completely different person as though I had come out of a coalmine into daylight.’

At last Nancy was able to see Gaston’s beloved flat in the Rue Bonaparte, which had finally been released from sequestration. He lived on the first floor. The spiral staircase, that essential feature, was late eighteenth century. It led to three succeeding rooms overlooking the courtyard, high-ceilinged, filled with so many treasures of years in the sale rooms. One friend described it as a ‘submarine grotto, original, personal, wonderful’; another, less kindly, as ‘a souk’. There was a bust of Talleyrand’s mistress, several good
terre-cuite
pieces by Clodion, Second Empire furniture, pictures by Longhi and a suspicious Magdalen by Simon Vouet, a minor Corot, a marquetry table from the Rothschild collection, a Rodin, landscapes by Narcisse Diaz, a portrait of Pope Benedict XIV by Subeyras and a Louis XV sofa. Gaston had an office, a drawing room and the bedroom which doubled as a dining room, the bed conveniently placed near the table. He blamed the ‘cold respectability’ of his new position for the impossibility of Nancy staying at his apartment, but within a month, she had found a flat just along the street, at number 20. Once she is installed a few doors away from the tempting
salle à manger
, Nancy’s letters sing with happiness. Diana Cooper is angelic, the concierge is angelic, the maid is lovely, the rowing
French neighbours better than a film, the food is lovely, always champagne, even at luncheon. When she returned to London in November 1945 – ‘In floods of tears, I do so love it here’ – Nancy had decided to leave England for good.

When she came back in April 1946, she was a rich woman.
The Pursuit of Love
had earned £7,000 in its first six months. ‘
Vive la litterature!
’ cried the colonel when he arrived at her hotel to be greeted by a bottle of champagne. Nancy had resigned without regret from Heywood Hill and could afford to start househunting.

The only drawback to Nancy’s lovely new wealth was that it made it difficult to get rid of Prod. His relationship with Adelaide Lubbock continued until the 1950s, and they were as accepted in their own way as a couple as were Nancy and Gaston by their friends, but Peter refused to give Nancy a divorce. She was not terribly troubled about the morality of her situation, despite Waugh’s grumblings about the indecency of her happiness, but Peter was an encumbrance and an expense. He knew Gaston, of course, and appeared quite amiable towards him – in a letter from Blomfield Road in 1946, Nancy reported to Gaston that Peter wouldn’t mind if the Colonel came to stay while he was away on a projected trip to Spain. ‘I said to him, about my will, would it hurt your feelings if I left some money to the Colonel. Peter said, hasn’t he got any money? NR No PR Then I think it is a good idea, he ought to have some. But the trouble is I’m not dead.’

Nancy was kind to Peter, cooking him breakfast and fussing over his plans, but there is a sense in which she has sailed beyond him, floating in a couture balloon. None of the racking sense of failure that haunted her earlier remarks about their marriage remains. She was in love, her life was blossoming, and perhaps she felt, if anything, sorry and a bit embarrassed for him. Cynthia Gladwyn noted that Nancy was devoted to Prod but she must have found him a crashing bore. By 1948, he was hanging around her Paris flat ‘making my life hell’, as she wrote to Diana. The prospect of maintaining him indefinitely was a worry – ‘even Linda can’t pay for that’ – but Nancy never seriously considered
retreading the thorny path of duty. Though Peter had fought bravely and honourably in the war, peacetime saw a return to his old dissolute habits. He cut a pitiful figure, the bright, beautiful Balliol boy, purposeless, debauched, broke, doing all he could to prey on Nancy’s sense of guilt even as his overdraft gobbled up her hard-written funds.

Nancy’s biographer Laura Thompson suggests that Prod’s refusal to grant her freedom in a sense did her a favour. Just as he had saved her face by pretending to have stolen her from Hamish, now he was her alibi in the ‘case of the Unwanted Englishwoman’. So long as she was married, she did not have to face the fact that Gaston wouldn’t have her even if she were free. And it was convenient for Gaston to bring up the threat to his political respectability when it suited him. It is impossible, however, to say whether or not he would have married Nancy had he been able to do so in the mid-1940s. Nor indeed whether she would have wished to exchange the freedoms of her own life – her work, her friends, her travels – for the role of a dutiful Yvonne De Gaulle. Prod may have cared enough for Nancy to want to spite her when she spurned him, but his reasons for hanging around were purely mercenary. Had she not been such a professional success, she might have had a chance at becoming Mme Palewski; as it was, Prod, perennially unemployed and full of improbable schemes, had no intention of releasing his meal ticket. He was quite shameless, continuing his habit of stealing any cash Nancy might have left lying about. When he made one of his odd marital visits to Paris, she was forced to have Marie, her housekeeper, sew money into the hems of the curtains to prevent him finding it. Nancy bore no grudge against him, even remained fond, in her way, of the man she had once thought ‘heavenly’, though he remained the fly in her Guerlain cold cream until any chance she may have had of marriage with Gaston had passed.

For a year Nancy lived like a proper Paris bohèmienne, moving between hotels and borrowed flats, before settling in December 1947 at 7 Rue Monsieur. The perfect introduction to the flat is provided by Evelyn Waugh:

You cross the Seine and penetrate the very heart of the fashionable quarter of Paris, the Faubourg Saint Germain. You go into a quiet side street, so exclusively aristocratic that few taxi-drivers know its name and ring at a great, white shabby door, which in due time opens, revealing a courtyard surrounded on three sides by low buildings of the period of the restored Bourbon monarchy. Straight in front, on the ground floor, with its glass doors opening into a garden behind, lie the apartments of Miss Mitford.
¹

Unlike Gaston, Nancy had no taste for clutter. Her rooms – hall, dining room, drawing room, bedroom, bathroom – (Marie slept several flights up, as was conventional, in the
chambre de bonne)
were furnished with her favourite London pieces, set off by softly draped pink taffeta curtains and new finds from the
antiquaries
of the sixth arrondissement: a damask-covered chaise-longue, a Dresden clock. Her bedroom was white, with an enormous bed and a rather alarming portrait of Gaston, the drawing room was French grey, with the lamps crinolined in ribboned muslin petticoats, which one visitor recalled gave an enchanting light. One of the loveliest pictures of Nancy shows her with Jessica, having tea in a room so sunny it seems like a garden, with white wicker furniture and the walls dappled by the shadows of ivy leaves.

Once she had a flat of her own, Nancy and Gaston could spend more time together, though he never stayed the night, continuing his London habit of going back to bed in the Rue Bonaparte and telephoning her at breakfast time. For a while, at least, it can only have seemed to Nancy that everything she had dreamed of – financial independence, a beautiful home, an admirable, desirable man who loved her, with whose voice she began her days – had been attained. Too many of her biographers, determined to spy out the shadows beneath the sunlight, have been unwilling to grant her this period of unalloyed bliss, but that is what it was.

Pursuit
had bought Nancy her new life in Paris and, of course,
had made Gaston famous beyond the world of French politics. Her dedication of the book ‘To Gaston Palewski’ did, however, cause difficulties, though as she observed, it was Gaston’s love of publicity that created them. Nancy had anticipated that her politically controversial family might create problems, writing to Evelyn that Gaston was pleased with the dedication, though fearful that the Communists would fall upon it. Negotiations about the dedication went back and forth. ‘I said shall I put To the Colonel, to G.P. and so on and he absolutely insisted on having his full name.’ Nancy offered to remove it entirely from the French edition. Gaston was clearly unable to resist being portrayed as the greatest French seducer since the Vicomte de Valmont (indeed, in a letter to Princesse Bibesco, he declares himself very pleased with the dedication), but when the connection was made he became very anxious.

In February 1947 Nancy wrote to Diana that a left-wing paper was planning a splash with the headline ‘Hitler’s mistress’s sister dedicates daring book to M. Palewski’. The general was apparently appalled, and Nancy could not resist adding chummily: ‘You know how the one thing that can’t be forgiven is getting in their way politically.’ She mentions two more articles, though in fact nothing appeared, owing to a printers’ strike which delayed publication. Nancy claimed that Gaston had not permitted her to see the pieces, which Diana Mosley found extremely odd: ‘It is bizarre, Colonel
invented
it.’
²
At Gaston’s request, Nancy returned to England for several months. This episode has been used as an example of how he manipulated her, with more than one writer suggesting he shunted her off for his own purposes, on the basis that, as he was by then out of office, such a scandal could not have hurt him. In fact, negative publicity would have been very damaging at what was a delicate time politically, since he was involved, as will be discussed, in the founding of a new Gaullist party, the RPF. And Nancy’s letters to Gaston during her absence are packed with lively social news and confident jokes, in no way suggesting that she was in disgrace.

15

POLITICS 1944–6

‘W
hen we arrived in Paris, ’ Gaston recalled ‘the great problem which posed itself, with the reordering of the country and the inauguration of an administration which contained a certain number of new elements … and the preparation of a new Constitution, was relations with the interior Resistance. Immense difficulties awaited us, on a material as well as a political level … we had to draw up political choices which were highly delicate to make.’ De Gaulle had immediately confirmed Gaston in his position as Cabinet director, but though the general was now effectively the head of a real, rather than a nominal state, Gaston’s initial tasks were domestic.

De Gaulle felt it was premature to install himself in the Elysée Palace, vacated by Albert Lebrun in 1940. Gaston suggested he take the Hôtel de Ville as his headquarters, but the general felt this was too revolutionary. He preferred to return to the Rue St Dominique, another gesture, like his refusal to proclaim the Republic, which emphasized the continuity of the legitimate French government. He took the traditional office of the war minister, with Gaston’s
bureau
nearby. Since his flat in the Rue Bonaparte was at that time still under sequestration, Gaston had little choice other than to camp out in the ministry, sleeping in a bed which, it was claimed, had belonged to Napoleon’s mother Laetitia. Nancy later admitted she had been fond of this arrangement, as she had always known where Gaston was, and they were both amused by the fact that the war ministry was housed in a former convent which had once
hosted Mme du Deffand’s famous salon. A favourite story was a conversation between the hostess and her lover, Pont-de-Veyle, with whom she had enjoyed fifty years of ‘cloudless happiness’.
¹
Discussing their relationship, which had never been troubled by the least disagreement, Mme du Deffand suggested: ‘But perhaps it is really because we have been rather indifferent to each other?’