The Horror of Love (27 page)

The large, beautiful honey-coloured house, in its quiet courtyard, seemed a haven of delight. It has more the atmosphere of a country than a town house … no town noises can be heard, only the rustle of leaves, the twittering of birds, an occasional mowing machine, an owl. The French windows in the garden side fill the rooms with sunshine and air in amazing quantities. They open to a vista of trees; the only solid edifice in sight is the dome of the Invalides, a purple shadow on the horizon, hardly visible through summer leaves. Except for that and the Eiffel Tower, there is nothing to show that the house is situated in the centre of the most prosperous and busy capital on the continent of Europe.

While the cobbled streets Nancy knew are gone, and although the Faubourg St Honoré is now thick with traffic fumes, little has altered within the Hôtel Charost since she wrote this description. The Embassy remains one of the city’s loveliest buildings, its garden still a surprising green lake of calm in the centre of a hectic metropolis. Nancy knew the house from her visits to her friend Middy O’Neill in 1927. Middy’s grandfather, the Marquess of Crewe, was ambassador to Paris from 1922 to 1928 and Nancy had spent a thrillingly sophisticated evening there with a dinner
at the Embassy followed by a trip to the Florida nightclub. From the moment she arrived in Paris after the war, Nancy’s friendship with the Coopers placed her at the heart of the city’s diplomatic life. Their son, Lord Norwich, recalls that she was ‘always popping in and out’. The Embassy was vital to Nancy in providing the basis for her social network in Paris in the otherwise disorienting atmosphere after the liberation. It was also the source of more practical comforts. Unlike nearly everyone else in the city, the lucky inhabitants of the Embassy had large supplies of food and fuel. Diana Cooper was initially criticized for apparently dispensing with protocol and receiving all comers, but in the terrible winter of 1945 this was a kind gesture, and one that fostered an essential atmosphere of security and camaraderie, a respite from the harsh and often threateningly anarchic conditions of the streets.

Diana had known she would eventually become ambassadress since Duff had accepted the post of British representative to the French Committee of Liberation in 1943. Her first reaction was ‘flustered, hysterical, funky and giggly’. Her French was limited and Frenchwomen were terrifying – ‘they make me feel at any time a smelly, untended, untaught, uncouth, dense bumpkin’.
¹
The Coopers had an exciting, happy year in Algiers to accustom themselves to the idea of diplomatic grandeur, but it was still with feelings of deep apprehension that Diana had left for Paris in September 1944. She need not have worried. Her unconventional brilliance, her great beauty, her conversation and her own peculiar brand of chic made the Coopers a lighthouse of glamour for the short duration of their tenure. She was delighted all the same to encounter her ‘Laughing Cavalier’, Gaston Palewski – whom the Duffs hid of course known in London and during the weighty hilarity of negotiations in Algiers – at a dinner party given by Jean and Marie-Blanche de Polignac in October. Duff, whose liking for Gaston ebbed and flowed according to how impossible De Gaulle was being at that moment, never entirely took to him, but for Diana he swiftly became her ‘pilot fish’, a sort of unofficial chief of protocol, helping her navigate the
potentially disastrous social waters of collaboration.

Gaston found himself enjoying the greatest social success of his life. Just as exiled aristocrats returning in 1799 paid court to Josephine Bonaparte in order to ingratiate themselves with her husband, so those members of the
gratin
whose war record was less than patriotic cultivated Gaston for those coveted invitations from the Embassy which would relaunch them in post-liberation society. ‘On pense que vous êtes 1’entourage, ’ Jean Cocteau explained. Gaston was not so naïve as to have thought anything else, but he was aware that his social connections had a significant function in the legitimization of the provisional government. His colleague Pierre de Brissac emphasized the importance of his supple ease in Parisian society to the Gaullist project: ‘He had the
pied Parisien
… he could explain the complexity of the capital, this nervous and insurrectionary city, so sensitive, sceptical and versatile.’
²
At times, De Gaulle did not appear so much to consult Gaston as to leaf through him like a guide book.

Gaston’s own attitude towards
collabos
was balanced between principle and pragmatism. At times he could be severe. In Algeria, Duff Cooper had noted that his attitude to Pierre Pucheu, former Vichy minister of the interior, transcended diplomatic exigence. Duff’s view was that Pucheu’s execution would be a disaster for French relations with Britain and America, but Gaston remained cynical and ‘obviously would like to have him shot’.

Conciliation was more of a priority in 1944. Gaston was aware that some
collabos
were useful, whether for their connections, like the disgraced former minister and newspaper publisher Patenôtre, whose presence at dinner at the Embassy so infuriated François Mauriac that he left immediately, or Maurice Chevalier whose charm and popularity appeared to outweigh his dubious activities in the war. Vicomtesse Marie-Laure de Noailles was a difficult proposition. Gaston had known her for many years, she was a friend of Cocteau, who was very much persona grata, and her salon was one of the most important in Paris. But the De
Noailles’ family home ‘smelled of the black market, of corruption, of the greatcoats of the German Wehrmacht, who, we later learned, had been honoured guests during the occupation of France’. Marie-Laure herself had been severely compromised after an accident during the war in which she had been caught in a car with a German officer (since her husband preferred boys she was perhaps particularly vulnerable to Aryan charms), and Gaston made the error of allowing her to be seated next to a staunch Gaullist, M. Oberle, who showed his disapproval by refusing to speak a word to her during the entire dinner.

Even when it came to
collabos
, Gaston could never resist a duchess. In September 1944, during the first phase of the
épuration
, the apartment of the writer Alfred Fabre-Luce was raided early one morning. Fabre-Luce had supported Pétain, but had already been thrown into prison once for a book he had written criticizing the Nazis. He had managed to slip away, but in his place his butler and an overnight guest were arrested. His wife, Charlotte, telephoned her brother, Jean-Louis de Faucigny-Lucinge, who went immediately to the Fabre-Luce flat in the Rue Bassano. There he found the Duchesse de Brissac, wearing a fur coat over her underclothes (what
can
she have been doing there?), being interrogated about her friendship with Fabre-Luce as well as her acquaintance with certain German officers. When the duchess was escorted to the Conciergerie, ‘like MarieAntoinette’, Faucigny-Lucinge telephoned her husband. Since the duchess had been foolish enough to get caught, the duke was disinclined to do anything about it, so Faucigny-Lucinge reported the incident to Gaston, a friend from before the war. Gaston affected to think the matter was unimportant, but the duchess spent only four weeks at Drancy. Several months later, she invited Faucigny-Lucinge to stay in the country. He was unsure how he could get there as there was so little available petrol. ‘Oh, don’t worry, ’ replied the grateful duchess. ‘Gaston Palewski can give you a lift.’

Evelyn Waugh was sceptical of Gaston’s anti-
collabo
views, seeing them more as a matter of convenience than principle. In
1946, Nancy accompanied Gaston to a ball given by the Princesse de Bourbon-Parme, ‘duly binged up as one is before balls with champagne, black coffee and so on. We hadn’t been there 2 minutes before the Col said we couldn’t stay on account of the great cohorts of
collabos
by whom we were surrounded and firmly dumped me home.’ Nancy was very embarrassed, fearful that she would offend both her hostess and her friend the Princess Radziwill, who had taken her to the party, and her feelings were not appeased when Evelyn scathingly pointed out: ‘Collaborationists my foot. Does it not occur to you, poor innocent that the continental colonel went back to the aristocratic ball and that while you lay sleepless with your fountain pen he was in the arms of some well-born Gestapo moll?’ Since Gaston was an extremely prominent politician at the time, he had to tread very delicately, and where the presence of
collabos
might be necessary (or, admittedly, desirable) in the discreet context of the Embassy, more public events required greater caution. In
The Blessing
, Nancy gives Charles-Edouard de Valhubert a wry take on this social nicety, the problem with
collabos
being that one had to endure two hours of maudlin self-justification before getting down to business.

Nancy and Gaston were frequently guests together at the Embassy, but there was no question of them being invited as a couple. The fiction would be politely maintained that they were friends who had perhaps given one another a lift, though everyone knew of the relationship. Gaston’s extensive personal knowledge of the complexities of Paris’s extramarital affairs was also useful to Diana Cooper in judging her guest list. Lord Norwich explains that while it was an accepted fact that men had mistresses, it was the wife, not the mistress, who was invited out. In the case of the ambassador himself, this dictum was naturally dispensed with.

Louise de Vilmorin was the divorced fifth wife of Count Paul Palffy ab Edod. She was among the guests at the Polignacs’ first dinner for the Coopers and a month later they and Gaston dined with her at her family home at Verrières, outside Paris. Both the
Coopers were enchanted by her fragile, etiolated beauty, her talent for music and poetry and her whimsical, dashing, often outrageous conversation, in many ways similar to Diana’s own style. She was soon a fixture at the Embassy, often staying there for weeks at a time in the first stages of what was to become a longstanding affair with Duff. Diana was fully in the know, commenting that ‘Duff is deeply in love with the spell-binding Lulu, which is nice for him and good for his prestige, as she is acknowledged to be the most remarkable and attractive woman in Paris’.

Diana especially worshipped ‘Lulu’, but her name appeared on a list of ‘pederasts and collaborators’ issued by the Sûreté. Though Duff dismissed this as gossip, the prefect sent Victor Rothschild to warn him that Lulu was causing rumours and bad feeling. French by birth, she was a Hungarian by marriage and had travelled frequently across Germany during the war. There were also whispers that she had cohabited with a German officer during the occupation (Diana’s biographer observes that this may have been a matter of misspelling – she had once been engaged to Prince Esterhazy and the ‘officer’s’ name was given as Stuazi). Duff flew into a tremendous rage and turned Rothschild out. Peter Rodd later reported that when Lulu’s brother appeared at a shooting party at the Rothschilds’ he was treated as a servant and given his luncheon in the kitchen. Gaston, meanwhile, backed her up by saying that even if she was prosecuted he would still associate with her.

The extent of this association was to cause difficulties between Duff and Gaston. In May 1945, Duff recorded in his diary that Gaston had invited Lulu to his office and suggested he could provide her with an ‘easy life’ if she was prepared to pass on information about Duff. ‘She was very much upset, ’ Duff wrote in his diary, ‘and meant not to tell me about it. But what a frightful fool the man must be – and how unfit for any responsible position.’ Lulu, who adored any drama in which she was the star, told Duff in December that Gaston was very anti-English and ‘very pugnacious with regard to the future and says that he
and De Gaulle would be prepared to use force rather than give up their position’. This was not only entirely untrue, but disastrous for relations between the British and De Gaulle, which were at a contentious stage. Many contemporaries claimed Lulu was also having an affair with Gaston. Duff dismissed this, but his diary entries become distinctly spiteful. On 1 January 1946 he saw Gaston at the general’s reception for the diplomatic corps. ‘Gaston Palewski was looking more revolting than usual … It occurred to me that De Gaulle may have selected him as being one of the few men uglier than himself.’
³

Whether it was the affair, jealousy over Diana’s attention or anger at the trouble she was stirring up, Nancy refused to worship at what Diana called Lulu’s ‘fountain of rainbow waterdrops’. Evelyn Waugh loathed her – ‘an egocentric with the eyes of a witch’ – and Nancy was made nervous by her spite. They had great fun bitching about the ‘Filth Marine’ and the ‘seed merchant’ (her family money came from plant seeds). The Coopers were convinced that Lulu, who wrote novels as well as poems and songs, was a genius, a view shared by the distinguished composer Poulenc, who credited her ‘sensitive impertinence, libertinage’,
⁴
but the two friends thought her the most tremendous fraud. ‘Life was made hideous by the arrival of a Hungarian countess who pretended to be a French poet, ’ wrote Evelyn. Nancy gleefully recounted a story about her old rival Romie Hope-Vere, whom Hamish Erskine had taken to stay with the Palffys in Austria. After dinner, when the ladies went to do their hair in Louise’s bedroom, Count Palffy arrived and proposed a threesome. Romie fled to Hamish, insisting they left at once, but he told her not to be so middle-class. Olga, the pretentious Russian aristocrat who tries to seduce Sophia’s lover in
Pigeon Pie
, is a prescient prototype of Louise, with her heavy accent and claims to be a poet. Neither Nancy nor Evelyn could see the point of Lulu. Professional writers both, they were infuriated by her literary posturings and Nancy begged Evelyn to expose her, consoling herself for Diana’s neglect with the
remark of a French dinner companion who told her,
‘All
Vilmorins are dull.’

Although the contribution of the Embassy to Nancy’s work is most obvious in
Don’t Tell Alfred
, but her encounters with Louise provided a rich seam of material for
The Blessing
. Not only does Sir Conrad Allingham’s professional lady turn out to be an energetic Hungarian countess, but Louise supplied a model for Albertine, the mistress of Charles-Edouard, a portrait so accurate Nancy worried it might be libellous. Albertine is Lulu to the life, incongruously blue eyes goggling from Gothic features. Her portrayal, however, is far from negative. Albertine is entirely self-interested – she marries an American in the war for the central heating (Nancy had obviously heard the gossip about Officer Stuazi) – and
jolie-laide
rather than sexy, but she is extremely clever with men. She can transform herself into whatever her companion needs, her conversation is a gourmet foam of anecdote and flattery and she is never, ever, a bore. This was very much the source of Nancy’s fascination for Gaston. She teased him about marrying a clever American girl who, when he asked, ‘What are the news?’ would tell him the news rather than the mixture of stories, improbable scandal and sharp observation he loved. Albertine, though, is controlled in a way Nancy could never manage to be. Her Frenchness gives her a discipline and subtlety that thoroughly outfoxes plain-speaking, easily wounded Grace de Valhubert. Louise herself was kind to Nancy, finding her translation work which helped her to acquire that holy grail of expat life, the
carte de séjour
, and Lulu’s exploits continued to delight her for years. In the Sixties she wrote to the Colonel from Venice reporting a remark she had overheard about a film Louise had made. It was so pornographic, it had been said, that it would even shock Gaston Palewski.