The Horror of Love (29 page)

Beyond the Rue Monsieur and the Embassy (whence the Coopers departed in 1947 – ‘a richly lachrymose occasion, Diana was in tears, Duff was in tears, Gaston Palewski was in tears’
²
) a taste of post-war Parisian social life is given in the diaries of Jacques Dumaine. Within the span of a few months, he lists a concert by Francis Poulenc, a Vuillard exhibition, a recital of Prokofiev’s violin concerto at the Beaumonts’, with Picassos hung on the eighteenth-century woodwork. Or events like Marivaux’s
Fourberies de Scapin
, featuring Bébé Bérard’s last stage set, the final exquisite testament of this ‘tender tramp’. Nancy saw her colonel at dinner at Maxim’s, at the theatre, at innumerable parties and at receptions such as that described by the MP and socialite Chips Channon: ‘Today was a day of fantastic elegance. Arturo Lopez gave a luncheon party for me at … his small Versailles, with every object in it beyond price; it is, I suppose, the most elegant “set-up” in the world … I was between the Duchess de Fesanzac and Nancy Mitford.’

Nancy herself didn’t really get worked up about duchesses: she found
gratin
life too pompous and dull. She did sulk when Gaston went to Carlos de Bestegui’s ball at the Palazzo Labia in Venice in 1951, described in her
Sunday Times
column as a frantic free-for-all as the
beau monde
scrambled for invitations. ‘A certain lady … intending to go as a Spanish Infanta, advertised for a dwarf to accompany her. She arrived home next day to find her hall filled with rich dwarves of her acquaintance who had not been invited.’ She teased Gaston sourly about his careful preservation of his own precious
carton
. She often lamented Gaston’s unavailability, and the comedy that ensued when she tried to steal a few moments with him, stuffed into the
escalier de service
and discovered by the concierge. In a letter of 1947 she scripted one such attempt, employing nonsensical timings for comic effect.

28h La Marquise de Bairn arrives Rue Bonaparte. Leaving,
she declares ‘M. Palewski is a man who knows what’s best for him.’

28h36 The Duchesse de la Rochefoucauld is introduced to the Director’s office. ‘This visit produced nothing, ’ she observes.

28h42 Mme Rodd leaves by the
escalier de service
. ‘It’s cold, ’ she remarks.

28h43 The Princess of Lichtenstein has an interview with the Director, she leaves after an hour and declares ‘I have the impression than M. Palewski was in a hurry.’

29h43 Renewed visit of Mrs Rodd, who leaves five minutes later without making a declaration.

29h48 The Duchesse de Montesquiou comes to pay a visit to the Director. On leaving, she declares ‘It’s a good beginning.’

30h48 Lady Liz von Hoft left the office one hour later. ‘I have just had the most encouraging conversation with M. Palewski.’

Conversations will begin again at 17h this evening.

Nancy never concealed her longing to be with Gaston, and she was unashamed to make herself available, waiting in the flat for a call or a snatched quarter of an hour’s conversation, cancelling other plans at the last minute if he happened to be free. Does this make her pathetic, or the realistic lover of an extremely busy man? Marcel Schneider, who knew Nancy well, described her and Gaston rushing into one another’s arms at every opportunity, and as the tempo of Gaston’s political career increased along with his commitments to the RPF, those opportunities were scarcer. It is not necessarily true, as one of Nancy’s biographers would have it, that the thrill of their meetings ‘concealed a great emptiness’.
³
Her letters to Gaston are full of her need to be with him and her frustration when they are separated, but these are, after all, love letters. Lovers do not generally write to inform the beloved he or she is not much missed. Nancy also describes her many visits to friends, the fun she has in London
or on the Riviera, jokes, ‘shrieks’, books, outings and, very often, work.

In an interview recorded in Versailles in 1970, Nancy explained that after the success of
The Pursuit of Love
she had simply ‘meekly carried on’ with her writing. Yet she took it extremely seriously and worked immensely hard. Between 1946 and 1960 she produced three novels, two scholarly biographies, a great many newspaper and magazine articles and reviews and translated both Mme de Lafayette’s novel
La Princesse de Clèves
and André Roussin’s play
The Little Hut
, with which she toured in England. Of her books of this period, the best known is perhaps her second bestseller,
Love in a Cold Climate
, in some senses a ‘prequel’ to
The Pursuit of Love
, featuring Fabrice de Sauveterre in a cameo which gives even sensible Fanny the chance to fall in love with him. In a much-quoted passage, Fabrice advises Fanny on the French method of keeping one’s lover – that is, to give way to him in everything: ‘Now you see, these English
femmes du monde …
They are proud and distant, out when the telephone bell rings, not free to dine unless you ask them a week before – in short,
elles cherchent à se faire valoir
, and it never never succeeds.’

This is not quite the dismal advice it might first appear to be. Nancy was able to laugh at her often comic attempts to snatch a few minutes with Gaston, and Fabrice’s lecture is as much an in-joke at the expense of colonial pomposity as a prototype of
The Rules
. If one considers the sheer scale of the output Nancy achieved during her first decades in France, let alone its quality, it becomes clear that her work was neither a compensation for Gaston’s absences, nor a hobby that she could pick up and put down at the shrill of the telephone. Her letters to him constantly discuss her work, describing her progress, asking his opinion. The tone is not quite the same as that used in her correspondence with her
cher maître
Evelyn Waugh, but nonetheless she addresses herself to someone she expects to be interested, who takes her as seriously as a professional writer as she does herself. She did structure her life around Gaston, but when she decamped to write, at the country home at Fontaines-les-Nonnes of her friend
Mme Costa, or the Coopers’ château at Chantilly, it was not
pour se faire valoir
, but because she had work to do.

(
Love in a Cold Climate
contains another interesting little instance of a writing habit Nancy shared with Evelyn Waugh. Just as Waugh employs certain names for characters he dislikes (Cruttwell being the most frequent), in the novel she called ‘Cedric’ Nancy introduces the name Borley for a family of huntin’ and shootin’ Oxfordshire squires, notable for their physical hideousness and indifference to aesthetics. Caroline Dexter, in
The Blessing
, turns out to be a Borley. The name can only have its origins in the horrible landlord who turned Nancy’s friend Cecil Beaton out of his beloved country house at Ashcombe.)

Waugh was always Nancy’s lodestar as far as her writing was concerned and though she often disagreed with his recommendations they were united in their views six years after publication of
Love in a Cold Climate
on what they both referred to as ‘the book of shame’. Nancy’s essay on U and non-U, which began as a response to a serious philological inquiry, became a joke between friends and then a national
cause célèbre
that dogged her reputation for the rest of her life, has produced so much nonsense that it scarcely seems worth discussing yet again. Perhaps the best comment is Evelyn’s, in his open letter in
Encounter
to Mrs Rodd on a ‘VERY SERIOUS SUBJECT’: ‘Of the ramifications of the social order which have obsessed some of the acutest minds of the last 150 years, they know less than of the castes of India. Was it kind, dear Nancy, to pull their legs?’

Of Nancy’s less-known works, her translation of
The Little Hut
might be read as a tantalizing hint as to the author’s own situation. Explorers and adventurers had always fascinated her – she had a positive obsession with Scott of the Antarctic and remembered being disappointed as a child when her parents failed to take up their reserved cabins on the
Titanic
. The play maroons a triangle of lover, husband and wife on an island in nothing but their evening clothes (Susan is in Balmain), where
they come across a shipwrecked cook. The three men take turns to spend the night with the wife in her hut. Husband and lover discuss adultery with cool detachment: bachelors are polygamists really, it’s natural, but equally so for women. Philip, Susan’s husband, proves very happy with the three-way open arrangement, less so her lover Henry, who insists that they go back to deceiving him when they are eventually rescued.

Nancy’s theatrical tour brought plenty of journalistic opportunities for her newly acquired hobby of Brit-baiting, as did her visit to Russia in 1954. She did not attempt to write to Gaston from the USSR, but they would have had the chance to compare notes as he had spent time in Moscow in early 1945 to negotiate, among other things, the personally touchy subject of Poland. Gaston was appalled by the coarseness of Stalin’s language and humour and had a disquieting taste of the realities of Soviet life, which he compared to the court of an Asiatic satrap. Irritated by the stringency of De Gaulle’s position, Stalin turned to Gaston and remarked: ‘I am as Polish as you are, but I want a democratic Poland.’ Gaston countered: ‘You are certainly Polish, but are you a democrat?’ The interpreter translated only the first half of his response, and when Gaston asked why, the interpreter whispered that had he spoken it all, he would have spent the night in Siberia. Nancy herself rejoices in provocative approval for Uncle Joe in her article about her visit – ‘the dear old soul did save our bacon’ – and makes plenty of teasing comparisons between Russia and America. She also spends some time discussing her love of silver, a passion of Gaston’s in which she herself acquired considerable knowledge. On her return he was, of course, the guest of honour at the caviare feast she threw for her friends.

Nancy was proud of her relationship with one of France’s most influential men, though she was always sure to be offhand about it. Gaston, in turn, was proud of his connection with ‘the French lady writer’. Anatole Muhlstein a Polish diplomat Gaston had met in the Thirties when he was en poste at the Polish Embassy, renewed his acquaintance with the Frenchman when he returned from the US after the war. Gaston would often
come to lunch, formally dressed ‘
en Saint Denis
’. Muhlsteins daughters, who adored
The Pursuit of Love
, were astonished when their father’s friend was revealed as the real Fabrice de Sauveterre, and begged Gaston to introduce them to Nancy. Anka Muhlstein recalls her coming to lunch, very elegant, though rather quiet, allowing the men to talk rather than putting herself forward. Perhaps if lunch at the Muhlsteins’ found Nancy in a reflective mode, it was because one of the favourite jokes in the family was that Gaston always declared he would marry a
gratin
name. Did Nancy still hope, in the early Fifties, that it might be hers?

18

LES FEMMES DU MONDE

F
or there was, of course, the perennial question of the ‘pretty ladies’. Gaston’s proclivities were never a secret between them, nor did Nancy make one of them to others. In 1946, she wrote to Diana: ‘Daphne was here – oh what a bitch she is. She made a terrific pass at the Col and her tactics were absolutely all in, for getting me out of the way. However, the Col roared with laughter and (I believe) resisted.’ This does not seem very likely, as Lord Norwich recalls him sitting next to Daphne on a sofa at the British Embassy, bouncing up and down with excitement and murmuring ‘j’ai envie de toi, j’ai envie de toi’. Was the rhythm of these words an aural inspiration to the lady who claimed that being made love to by Gaston was like ‘being run over by an express train’? Not necessarily unpleasant. Despite his physical appearance – Louise de Vilmorin described ‘wisps of smoke’ puffing from the spots on his face, but then she would – he was considered far from unattractive. He could talk away that face in a demonstration of what Kingsley Amis called ‘hypergamy’, whereby unfortunate-looking but clever men are able to seduce their physical and social superiors. And, according to the memories of the ladies of the Flore, Gaston had hidden talents. He was also remarkably and, it must be said, more than creepily, persistent.

Virginia Forbes-Adam met Gaston at the Embassy, where she was dining without her husband. He invited her to lunch the next day, and the Coopers assembled in the courtyard to wave off the lamb to the slaughter. The lunch, including the time it
took to drive to and from the Rue Bonaparte across the river, lasted from 12.45 to 1.15. Gaston had opened his own front door, stark naked and ‘in a state of considerable excitement’. The doughty Mrs Forbes-Adam roared with laughter and ran back to her car.

Unlike Prod, Nancy’s cousin Ed Stanley and even, on occasion, Duff Cooper, Gaston was not the type to go off on a ‘bat’ round the brothels. (Even Général de Gaulle had been known to indulge before his marriage, introduced to the pleasures of the
maisons closes
by none other than Maréchal Pétain.) Gaston’s preference was for married society women,
les femmes du monde
. This may have been partly due to a fear of scandal: married women knew the rules, were in the main uninterested in jeopardizing their marriages and partings were civil and friendly. Oswald Mosley, in his early political career, boasted that he stuck to the maxim ‘Vote Labour, sleep Tory’. By one contemporary, Gaston’s seductions were attributed to Rastignac-like social climbing: