The Horror of Love (32 page)

De Gaulle was also pushing for the RPF to present proposals for a European confederation. Such proposals had already been voiced in May 1950, when the foreign minister Robert Schuman outlined his ideas for a supranational European community. Gaston had initially spoken out against these, as although a European community with clearly defined aims was advocated by the Gaullists (and indeed Winston Churchill in 1946), the
RPF felt that Schuman’s plan gave too much power to Germany, especially German industry, at the expense of France. A European community, the RPF believed, could never succeed without a European army. Nevertheless, Schuman’s first initiative, the ECSC (European Coal and Steel Community) was passed in April 1951 with the signing of the Treaty of Paris. Six member countries signed, marking, in Schuman’s words, ‘the true foundation of Europe’. Sour grapes from the Gaullists who, in their August propositions, reiterated the generalities of Schuman’s scheme: ‘A European confederation … of the cultural order, the development of intellectual, artistic and technical values … and notably the sharing in common of scientific research and peaceful applications of atomic energy.’ Much of Gaston’s time over the following years would be devoted to these issues.

De Gaulle’s complete incapacity to accept the realities of the system of the Fourth Republic was now creating fissures in the RPF. In January 1952, Jacques Soustelle arrived at headquarters in the Rue Solferino with the news that he had been asked to form a government. De Gaulle raged: ‘You are all the same! All it takes is a red carpet rolled out under your feet for you to walk on it, whatever its direction!’ Forty-five RPF deputies broke with De Gaulle that summer. The remainder capitulated the following year, supporting René Mayer’s government. De Gaulle’s response was to closet himself ever more closely at Colombey. Gaston’s own career, however, was progressing well. From November 1952 to February 1955 he served as vice-president of the assembly, where his ‘
acuité allègre’
in conducting the debates was once again in evidence. He was also a member of the Commission for Foreign Affairs, with a special interest in the Soviet satellite states and East and West Germany, campaigning against German rearmament without French control. This post was followed by a place on the Commission for Work and Social Security, then, a year later, the Commission of Law.

The collapse of the RPF permitted him to present himself as a social republican in the 1955 elections for the presidency of the council, where he obtained only seventy votes, but a month later
the Mendès-France government fell and Edgar Faure called on Gaston for the post of minister to the presidency of the council in February. He was attached to the Ministry of Defence, covering the Secretariat of National Defence and the Institute of Higher Studies for National Defence in addition to atomic energy. No one was happier than Pauline, his housekeeper at Rue Bonaparte, whose conception of a minister’s position owed more to the seventeenth century than the twentieth. She congratulated him: ‘Ah, Monsieur, finally the good times have arrived! No more money worries!’

‘Are you suggesting I take bribes?’ replied Gaston.

‘No Monsieur, just perquisites.’

Gaston now found himself working alongside Schuman (at the Ministry for Justice) on plans for European economic union, to be proposed by France at the conference of Messina. He was also one of the signatories of the Franco–Israeli accord on atomic energy which was kept secret until 1958, when France officially declared she had ceased working with Israeli scientists. Although one of Nancy’s favourite Colonel jokes was his response to a lugubrious official, when asked his views on nuclear energy, ‘Comme amateur de porcelaine, ’ Gaston was fascinated by nuclear power and keen that France should follow Russia, the United States and Britain into exploring its potential for domestic energy. In the face of much scepticism in the assembly, he refined a plan initially drafted by Felix Gaillard for national investment in and development of nuclear power as well as an investigation of the potential of nuclear weapons. The ‘Plan Palewski’, which consisted of a nuclear power station at Marcoule, research into a nuclear submarine and a huge investment programme, was nonetheless adopted. He was concerned that Europe should agree a cohesive nuclear strategy, writing to his colleague Antoine Pinay in advance of a conference in Brussels with precise details of communal production aims for the isotopic separation of uranium, and its sourcing in Africa. To promote his views, Gaston published a book of research, ideas and strategies gloriously entitled
The Atom, Our Destiny
.
In another echo of his past, Gaston had also been charged with overseeing the Sahara, and co-signed the law of 3 April 1955 that declared a state of emergency in Algeria.

In November 1954, the National Liberation Front of Algeria (FLN) had begun a campaign against the country’s colonial rulers. The ensuing war, which led to a debate at the United Nations, provoked a general election in December 1955, in which the Gaullists took just 4.4 per cent of the vote. The diplomatic catastrophe of the Suez Crisis in 1956 exacerbated the Algerian situation, and the FLN attacks became ever more frequent and deadly. The continuing troubles made it impossible for any government to remain in power for a significant time and by 1957 posters all over France were demanding the return of De Gaulle. In what can only be summarized as a superlative combination of bravado and political genius, after the ‘crisis of May’, on 1 June 1958, the General found himself back in power as president of France. But De Gaulle’s emergence from the wilderness came too late for Gaston. In the elections of June 1956 he had obtained only 5.6 per cent of the vote in the sixth district of the Seine. Although he accepted his defeat calmly and humbly and claimed to be glad to have more time to devote to writing and the push for restoring De Gaulle, his situation was rather difficult. Without his ministerial post he found himself, at the age of fifty-two, with limited means and no real job. ‘I know how you hate inaction, ’ wrote Nancy, and her letters of the summer of that year are deliberately light, chatty and touristy, as though she is trying to spare him her consciousness of what, despite his brave face, was a real humiliation.

20

DESPAIR

F
or Gaston Palewski, De Gaulle was prepared to do something he had denied Churchill, Roosevelt and a generation of French politicians: compromise a principle. De Gaulle had always adamantly refused to engage his personal influence with public office, but when Gaston heard of the possibility of a post of ambassador to the EU, the general contacted Louis Joxe, the secretary general to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, on his behalf. It was the only personal favour De Gaulle ever asked of the government in his entire career. The EU appointment was blocked by the socialist Christian Pineau, but in August 1957 Gaston received something far better: Rome. Nancy cabled from Venice: ‘O DESESPOIR. O RAGE. O FELICITATIONS.’

‘Gaston has got his post in Rome, ’ Evelyn Waugh wrote to Diana Cooper. ‘Is Nancy desolate? Does one congratulate or condole?’ In a letter to Violet Hammersley, Nancy did her best to appear lighthearted: ‘The Colonel is off to the Palais Farnese in the form of Ambassador to Rome. He is very much pleased and I think he’ll love it, really made for him. He goes in October after which I shall be as free as air.’ But her friend Victor Cunard reported from Venice that her gaiety was painfully forced.

She goes on saying that everything is going swimmingly with the Colonel, but one goes on hearing rumours that the whole thing is breaking up, which, from loyalty, one always denies. But my theory is it really is all over bar the shouting, that all her good spirits (or at least most of them), are a bluff
and that her almost savage teasing of friends is a sort of safety valve operation. If I am right it is rather pathetic, because if she would only tell one she is unhappy then one would do what one could to comfort her.
¹

Nancy’s teases grew so acerbic that she and Victor had a tremendous row, which left them both deeply disturbed and distressed. From Venice Nancy took refuge at Fontaines-les-Nonnes. Her letters from there show that the shop-front was firmly back in place. She describes a conversation about stigmata – ‘
After
dinner, M. l’Abbe!’ and Mme Costa’s suspicion that her kitchen had been infiltrated by Soviet spies. Nancy had returned to Paris briefly to say goodbye before Gaston left for Rome in the middle of October. By early November she wrote to him from London that the thought of going home and finding Paris without him was too much to bear. Still, she added, she longed to hear all about Rome, and had heard from Diana that the Colonel’s new house was huge. (‘Well, we knew
that
.’)

The Palazzo Farnese had been commissioned in 1517 by Alessandro Farnese, the ‘petticoat cardinal’, whose appointment was owed to his sister Giulia being the mistress of the Borgia Pope, Alexander VI, a detail that cannot but have charmed Gaston. Work on the house was interrupted by the sack of Rome, but when Farnese himself eventually became pontiff as Paul III he commissioned Michelangelo to finish the third storey of the 150-foot facade of this ‘most monumental of Roman palaces’. How could the boy from the Faubourg-Poissonièré fail to be enchanted? In the grandeur of its austere simplicity, it was everything that Gaston loved, including a frescoed staircase, courtesy of Salviati and Zuccaro, a great spiralling swoop of white marble all of his very own. Gaston’s scalophilia was clearly known to the Mitfords: the Duchess of Devonshire suggested mischievously in an interview that ‘one must
note
the staircase’. The new ambassador wrote to De Gaulle that his heart rejoiced at the appointment to what he and Nancy soon referred to as the ‘
palais-exquis
’.

It was, nevertheless, controversial. The Italian authorities were suspicious of the name Palewski, which they associated with the annexation to France at the end of the war of Tende and La Brigue as well as Aosta. Rome had signed the Common Market treaty in March that year, and Gaston’s brief, when it was eventually passed by the Quirinale, was to celebrate the historic links between Italy and France, to sustain co-operation between the two countries and to refine their relations in terms of their participation in Europe. Gaston spoke little Italian and had scant knowledge of contemporary Italian politics, so it was reassuring, when he arrived at the station, to be greeted by his counterpart at the Holy See, Roland de Margérie, who had been
chef de cabinet diplomatique
in the Reynaud administration of 1940. Another old Paris connection was Gaston’s friend Alary, who had married a daughter of Aman Jan, and was in Rome as a correspondent to the Havas agency. Gaston had visited him there before the war, in the office which would later become his own. Indeed, Rome was full of ghosts. ‘At the Farnese palace there was one room which I never crossed without an impression of unease: the little white salon which gave onto the terrace, decorated earlier by Mme Henri de Jouvenal, with armchairs and a deep sofa, perfect for summer parties.’ This was the sofa on which Pierre Laval had discussed with Mussolini the dictator’s plans for Ethiopia.

The French community in Rome was surprised to find such an unconventional, indeed entirely inexperienced ambassador in their midst, but according to André Malraux Gaston was ‘an ambassador born’. A critic claimed that he had no idea of the niceties of Embassy etiquette, which could hardly have been the case, given the time he had spent at the British Embassy in Paris and his role as unofficial chief of protocol there. Most of the objections stemmed from the alacrity with which Gaston flung himself on a fresh crop of pretty ladies, quickly earning himself the title ‘l’Embrassadeur’.

Gaston’s first duties involved the protocol visits decried by Fanny in
Don’t Tell Alfred
.

‘You have to polish off the colleagues, visit them you know, and there are eighty embassies here so it takes a bit of doing.’

‘Are there so many countries in the world?’

‘Of course not – the whole thing is a great nonsense – but we have to keep up the fiction to please the Americans. There’s nothing millionaires like so much as being ambassadors.’

Got up in a marvellous costume of gold-embroidered blue coat, bicorn hat with white feathers and a cape, Gaston first proceeded in a motorcade to present his letters of appointment to the Italian president, Giovanni Gronchi. Gronchi may have looked like ‘a cross between a fig and a raisin’, but he was sharp, greeting Gaston: ‘Monsieur l’Ambassadeur, you are most welcome in Italy, everywhere in Italy. Even the Val d’Aosta.’ They never became friends. He got on better at the Palazzo Chigi, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where he reassured the Italians of his personal commitment to the European Community. After the solemn honour of meeting the Pope, Pius XIII, was concluded, the new ambassador felt himself established.

The following spring though, the crisis the Gaullists had been expecting for so long finally broke over France.

‘I long for your voice so passionately I can’t imagine today without you being there … Yesterday, I stayed shut in the house all day, expecting you to telephone. Oh, Colonel, you see I’m in one of my states … Don’t abandon me. Perhaps you’ve changed too. Are you too rich or too happy? Bourgeois perhaps, however that isn’t a word one associates with you.’ Nancy felt she was living the past all over again, the longing, the excitement, De Gaulle and Gaston in Algiers. Then she received word to go and meet him at Orly. ‘After so long it seems unbelievable … we cried with happiness.’ If Nancy chose to believe that Gaston’s tears were for her, rather than the general, she could, for a few moments on a dusty airfield, believe herself Linda in the arms of her Fabrice.