The Horror of Love (30 page)

… a long career as a Don Juan of snobbery … they were never below a certain title. Countesses, marquises, duchesses, princesses, miladies, succeeded one after the other without him ever marrying them. Nothing would have seen him courting a baronne, even were she a Rothschild. His success was to the credit of his hidden virtues, because they were nothing to do with his appearance or sensibility. The craters on his face seemed to be the imprint of the coronets embroidered on the pillows where he had slept.
¹

Even when not, as in Daphne Weymouth’s case, her own friends, many of Gaston’s
innamorate
were well known to Nancy. Marguerite, called Margot, de Gramont was the twenty-five-year-old daughter of Count Louis-René de Gramont, a distinguished veteran of the First War and (practically the ultimate prize apart from a Rochefoucauld) Antoinette neé Rochechouart-Mortemart. Margot had had her portrait painted by Laszlo at the age of eight, was a Resistance heroine and had a huge crush
on Gaston. She was blonde and fat, ‘handsome and distinguished’ by virtue of her particule; irresistible. Nancy caught Gaston dining with her in the most unfortunate of circumstances. She had taken Peter and his two nephews to a restaurant and there at a nearby table were Margot and Nancy’s colonel. She then invited her guests to see the Louvre by night, surely one of the loveliest sights in the world. As if they were all players in a hideous farce, there were Gaston and Margot, hand in hand. Later, she explained to Diana that what she couldn’t bear was that he had looked happy, ‘so dreadful to prefer the loved one to be unhappy … Oh the
horror
of love.’

The scene makes its way into
The Blessing
, where Charles-Edouard de Valhubert plans to seduce a beautiful young woman by taking her to see the statues lit up at night. By then, Nancy had rationalized her feelings into comedy, but her immediate reaction was nothing like the cool, assured response she gave to Sophia Garfield when she catches Rudolph with her friend Olga at the Ritz. In view of the setting, she convinced herself that what she had seen was a proposal and, for the second time in her life, she thought of suicide, planning to take some ‘poison pills’ that Prod had left lying around. Luckily, she brought herself to telephone Gaston first. He was sweetness itself. ‘The rights of passion have been proclaimed by the Revolution, ’ he declared (a line she gave to Charles-Edouard de Valhubert), adding that, contrary to appearances, it was he who was unhappy, having seen her dining with her husband.

Violet Trefusis was a long term ‘frenemy’. Gaston had known her before the war, when, aged forty, she had tried to seduce Paul Reynaud’s thirty-year-old
chef de cabinet
. He had not been attracted to her, despite her stories of being the daughter of Edward VII (her mother, Mrs Keppel, had been the King’s last mistress). She was flabby and rather drunken, definitely not ‘arranged’. This didn’t stop Violet claiming that she and Gaston had had an affair. He was altogether inclined to be tolerant of the only woman in Paris he had never tried to seduce, and they were friends for many years. Nancy and Violet knew one another
well in London, where Violet was perhaps most famous for her lesbian affair with Harold Nicolson’s wife, Vita Sackville-West. Both women adored France. Rebecca West called them ‘Les Françaises Imaginaires’, though each claimed, quite untruthfully, that the other spoke the language badly. Nancy was quite fascinated by Violet, entertained and irritated in equal measure by what Gaston called her ‘mythomania’ and her literary pretensions. He couldn’t resist a Proust connection any more than he could a duchess, and loved to visit Violet at her home at Saint-Loup-en-Naud, a former abbey, to which Proust had taken Antoine Bibesco in his pursuit of Gothic perfection. When Violet died, she left him a piece of Augsburg enamel. But Nancy never really forgave her for putting about the rumour that Gaston had succumbed to her Turandot charms so long ago. When Violet wrote her autobiography,
Don’t Look Round
, in 1953, Nancy suggested that a more appropriate title would be
Here Lies Mrs Trefusis
.

Ethel de Croisset, another London acquaintance of Nancy’s, became her neighbour in Rue Monsieur. An American heiress, she had married Philippe de Croisset, a veteran of Dunkirk, whose father, the playwright François de Croisset was (yet another) friend of Proust, and her salon brought together American café society and the French intelligentsia. She was a great patron of Stuart Preston, known as the ‘Sergeant’ and the model for Lieutenant Padfield in Evelyn Waugh’s
Sword of Honour
trilogy. The famously good-looking Preston, who had had affairs with Nancy’s friend James Lees-Milne and her social crony Chips Channon, was often invited by Nancy to her flat, where he and Gaston enjoyed talking about pictures (Preston was particularly interested in Vuillard and for a long time was an art critic for
The New York Times)
.

Gaston was having an affair with Ethel, along with Nancy and at least one other married woman, in 1955, when Ethel’s brother, William Woodward, was killed in a scandalous society murder. He had married (possibly bigamously) a former showgirl, Ann Crowell, to the horror of his rich Wasp family. After a dinner
party for the Duchess of Windsor, Ann and William had returned home to the news that a prowler had been spotted on their property. They both went to bed with loaded shotguns, heard a noise in the night and met in the dark on the landing, where Ann shot William, apparently by accident, at point-blank range. The story was retold in Truman Capote’s
Answered Prayers
and Dominick Dunne’s book
The Two Mrs Grenvilles
. Until the late 1950s, Paris gossips believed that Gaston might be planning to marry Ethel. Nancy took a low view of Ethel, though her real ire was reserved for another American mistress, whom Gaston possibly shared with Duff Cooper. In all likelihood, she was not the only one.

Susan Mary Patten, later Alsop, arrived in Paris in 1945 to join her first husband, Bill Patten, an economic analyst in the American Foreign Service. Nancy always called him ‘the World Banker’. Her family, the Jays, had an honourable connection with the city: her great-great-great-grandfather, the first chief justice of the American Supreme Court, had travelled to Paris with Benjamin Franklin and John Adams in 1782 to draw up the Treaty of Paris, the settlement of the American Revolutionary War. The Jays were as aristocratic as Americans could be, generations of marriages to Dutch heiresses had made them rich and service in the diplomatic and legal professions had made them grand and superlatively well connected. They had links with the Parisian
gratin
, Susan Mary’s grandparents having lived in Paris in the nineteenth century while her grandfather, Augustus, served at the American Embassy. Boni de Castellane and the De Noailles were friends.

Her father, Peter, was a diplomat, serving in Rome, where Susan Mary was born in 1918, then San Salvador, Romania and Argentina. From 1927 they lived at a family property in Bar Harbour, Maine, where Susan Mary passed through the conventional boarding school and country club adolescence of the American upper class. Having developed an early interest in politics, she disliked Bar Harbour for its parochial smugness. If Wasp codes meant that she could never have much of a career
in her own right, she would have the next best thing: proximity to powerful men. She was very pretty, well-dressed, extremely slender and an excellent conversationalist. In her portrait of Susan Mary as Mrs Jungfleisch in
Don’t Tell Alfred
, which is not unaffectionate, Nancy conceded that ‘one saw why she was such an asset in society; she could produce the right line of talk in its correct jargon for any occasion’.

Susan Mary’s affair with Duff Cooper began in autumn 1945 when, according to Diana’s Cooper’s biographer, the English ambassadress chose her as a suitable mistress, ‘a refuge between the emotional storms of Louise and the Whore of Babylon [Daisy Fellowes]’.
²
At the time, Duff was having an affair with Gloria Rubio y Alatorre, universally considered to be the ‘it girl’ of Paris that year. Diana, with her usual disregard for precedence, seated Susan Mary next to Duff at an Embassy dinner. They became close, but did not begin sleeping together until 1947, after the glamorous Gloria had married Prince Ahmed Fakhri. In February 1948, Susan Mary told Duff that she was expecting a child.

Her son, William Patten, did not discover his true paternity until long after it was well known in Paris. He discusses it candidly in his book
My Three Fathers
, but does not mention the rumour that, for some time,
les gens du monde
believed Susan Mary’s child was Gaston’s. In her collection of letters and memoirs
To Marietta from Paris
, his mother alludes discreetly to the Frenchman Nancy was in love with, and Gaston is mentioned as a guest of the Pattens, or dining out with them with the Rothschilds and Momo Marriott. Two hints are dropped as to the nature of her relationship with Gaston – the gift of a ticket to a De Gaulle press conference and the rather odd statement: ‘Frenchmen may be wonderful lovers. I wouldn’t know. Certainly they are very good thwarted lovers, bearing no rancour.’
³
Is it possible that there was no affair with Gaston? That he made a pass and genuinely received a rejection? Or, given that Susan Mary carefully conceals her relationship with Duff, is her protestation of ignorance a red herring?

Nancy got on with Susan Mary, though she cannot have failed
to hear the gossip. She often asked her to her flat, where Susan Mary recalled the theatrical and literary conversation, and they shared a love of Parisian history, exchanging discoveries that would help them to pin down the dates of buildings in the ancient palimpsests of Parisian architecture. The story in
The Blessing
, where Grace de Valhubert discovers her husband in flagrante while taking a tour of a
hôtel particulier
, is, according to Susan Mary, quite true. It was Nancy’s anti-Americanism, she suggests, that soured their relationship. Nancy had many American friends, including the journalist Art Buchwald, and liked Americans very much as individuals, though when this was pointed out she would remark archly, ‘Yes, but they live
here
, and they have
chosen freedom.’
Susan Mary was distressed and annoyed by what she saw as the ridiculous prejudice of someone who had never even visited her country – Nancy once went so far as to claim she had been a Communist before the war to avoid going there – yet her assessment of Nancy was humble and generous. ‘She caricatured me as the idiot American sentimentalist that I probably was and am … but I miss my clever, witty friend.’
⁴

It must be said that Nancy was not very nice to Susan Mary, though, if the rumours were true, it wasn’t very nice of Susan Mary to go to bed with Gaston. Nancy read her the manuscript of
Don’t Tell Alfred
, which is fairly merciless about Susan Mary/Mrs Jungfleisch’s passion for ‘top English policy makers’, and was quite open about the fact that Hector Dexter was an amalgamation of Americans she had met as Susan Mary’s guest. A more elaborate tease was plotted with Evelyn Waugh for the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953. Evelyn knew Susan Mary from the Embassy, and invited her to stay in Gloucestershire after her trip to London for the coronation celebrations. She was met in a large Rolls-Royce, evidently hired for the occasion, and driven to the Waughs’ home at Piers Court, which was decorated with a huge floral arch emblazoned ‘God Save the Queen’ (this was not actually for Susan Mary’s benefit – it was left over from Evelyn’s reception for the Dursley Amateur Dramatic Society, of
which Evelyn had contrived to remain president for fifteen years without ever meeting a member). Susan Mary changed into a simple dress for dinner, to be received by Evelyn in white tie and decorations and his wife Laura in ball gown and tiara, eccentrically accessorized with crutches.

Evelyn gave a long speech about Queen and country, then announced to his bewildered children, who had not been permitted to watch the coronation on the television, that Mrs Patten had been present in Westminster Abbey and would now describe the rituals. Poor Susan Mary, who had been nowhere near the abbey, did her best with what she had seen on TV, but she felt like an ‘underdressed fool’. The excursion concluded with Evelyn, got up now in full tweeded squire mode, driving her around the countryside in the embarrassing Rolls and treating her to a morning-long monologue on farming. ‘Your torturing of Susan Mary is all over Paris, ’ wrote Nancy delightedly. ‘Poor little thing looks more like a Nazi victim than ever.’ If Susan Mary really had succumbed in the Rue Bonaparte, then time whirled in its revenges. William Patten’s book, in which he solemnly and priggishly tries to persuade his mother that she is a dangerous alcoholic, might have been written by Hector Dexter.

Nancy’s 1951 novel
The Blessing
, as well as being an encomium on the superiority of all things French, is effectively a guide to how to deal with adulterous husbands. Adultery was not unknown in the Mitford family tree, and the word had brought forth many suppressed shrieks from the Mitford children when it appeared in the lessons at Swinbrook church. Nancy’s grandfather, ‘Tap’, was the illegitimate son of a Liberal MP and a servant, Susan Bowles; her ‘Aunt Natty’ (actually a great-aunt on her grandmother’s side, Lady Blanche Hozier) was known to have had at least nine lovers, including her own brother-in-law Bertie Mitford. Both the Churchill and Mitford families agreed that Bertie was the natural father of Clementine, who married Winston Churchill. Aunt Natty’s daughter Nellie was supposed to have carried on the family tradition by having an affair with
Winston, who, it was said, was the natural father of Jessica’s husband Esmond Romilly, a rumour Esmond alluded to on several occasions. Incestuous love affairs appear in Nancy’s books, most famously, of course, in
Love in a Cold Climate
, but there is also a set piece about uncles and nieces marrying in
Christmas Pudding
, just a hint of family lore. ‘Your family, ’ Evelyn remarked darkly in 1963, ‘were peculiarly tolerant of incest.’ Whatever the truth, Lady Redesdale never approved of Nellie Romilly.