The Horror of Love (37 page)

By 3 May, following a fractious reinauguration of the traditional May Day parade, it seemed that Paris was once more at war. The Sorbonne was closed and policemen were attacked by missiles from St Michel up to the Luxembourg Gardens. Rioting continued for another five days. On 11 May, the police were finally deployed against the barricades on the Boulevard St Michel, with significant numbers of arrests and casualties, though since officers had been instructed not to use guns there were, mercifully, no deaths. By 20 May the workers had joined the students and over six million people were said to be striking; within four days this had risen to ten million. France was in panic, housewives stockpiled food and the country was paralysed. The general election that year returned a vote that was more indicative of the panic of the bourgeoisie than faith in the Gaullist project. De Gaulle survived, and a new government headed by Maurice Couve de Murville took power on 11 July. Life gradually regained its regular rhythm. But
les Evénements
had fractured more than shop windows, they had exposed the gaping generational crevasse that yawned beneath the confident surface of consensus which had obtained in France for ten years.

At Versailles, Nancy had been less exposed than her Parisian friends to the immediate threat of this latterday terror. Cristiana
Brandolini telephoned her to share her fear at the ‘furious animals’ who surrounded her flat. Writing to Deborah, Nancy reported: ‘Ann [Fleming] said they looked so beautiful and good. The ones I saw on
télé
looked beautiful and bad.’ She was quick to nickname the student leaders: Geisemar, Sauvageot and Cohn-Bendit became ‘Fat Boy’, ‘Savage’ and ‘Cohn-Bandit’. She wrote two columns for the
Spectator
detailing the events of May 1968 but, as had been the case with Fascism in the early Thirties, she was unable to accept that the students’ grievances were anything more than regrettable ‘showing off’, based on the kind of modern quasi-philosophizing she had satirized in the character of David Wincham in
The Blessing
. To some extent, she could sympathize with their views. ‘One can’t help seeing the point of the poor little things – the dullness and ugliness of daily life. One of their cries is down with concrete, ’ she wrote to Deborah, but their essential lack of civilization recalled everything she had despised and poked fun at in
Wigs
. The screams of the students were ‘simply lovely’, but their strutting and speechifying was merely silly.

The
Spectator
columns give an insight into Nancy’s life at Versailles quite contrary to her image as an aloof, upper-class tease, aiming her darts from the heights of her exquisite Parisian drawing room. Her direct knowledge of the strikes is drawn from ‘a great friend’, a workman with the Renault family, who has dined at Nancy’s home with his wife. Other callers are the Saclays, whose daughter is training to be a chemist, and the Lebruns, modest, middle-class people who clearly like Nancy and are liked back. These Versailles friends, Catholic, Gaullist, agree with Nancy that much of the tension in French society is caused by the geographical separation of social classes, which breeds fear and mistrust, very much the point Nancy had made in
The Stanleys
and in an essay on life at Fontaines-les-Nonnes. Nancy’s politics are old-fashioned, conservative, paternalistic, but her belief in the psychological trauma created by ugly, inhuman modern environments, that gutting and rebuilding of the countryside ‘in the American manner’, no longer seems quite
so retrogressive. If Nancy was conservative, it was because she thought she perceived something worth conserving in French society, something that had already been lost in England, and which buyers of
A Year in Provence
or expats in the Dordogne have been seeking in their millions for the last twenty years.

As president of the Constitutional Council, Gaston had no choice but to get involved in
les Evénements
. On 27 May, when the council sat to decide on a referendum on social and economic reform with regard to the universities, he telephoned Pompidou to point out the implications for the government of engaging in the process. De Gaulle said to him mournfully, ‘You will take me for Pétain.’ The
Evénements
also made it painfully clear to Gaston that, in the words of the political commentator Pierre Viansson-Ponté, he was ‘prehistoric’. The times they were a changin’, but not in the Palais Royal. Gaston had hoped once again for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the post-May reshuffle, but the idea was not even considered. Nancy was better able to cope with the brave new world than he. When asked about the fashion for miniskirts (which Yvonne de Gaulle hoped her husband would ban), she cheerfully declared she would rather be dowdy than ridiculous, but otherwise she was content in the eighteenth-century world of her research, her garden and her friendships. Gaston, conversely, had to accept that in political terms, ‘Monsieur Atom’ was now as decorative and dated as one of his beloved antiques.

24

MARRIAGE

G
aston still called frequently at the Rue d’Artois, often coming for lunch. In spring 1969, he made two such visits, as he had something serious to tell Nancy, something that the great orator of the RPF, the seasoned speaker of the assembly, found almost impossible to articulate. Yet he had to tell Nancy, before the news broke in
Le Figaro
, that he was to be married.

Violette de Pourtales, born Talleyrand-Périgord, was among the ‘
femmes du monde’
with whom Gaston had been having relationships for years. She was technically a duchess, though she never used the title, which derived from Polish estates commandeered by the Soviets. Although she and Gaston had been involved with one another for at least eighteen years, Violette’s husband, James-Robert de Pourtales, had only recently agreed to divorce her. Eleven years younger than Nancy, she had three children, Helié, born in 1938, Anna in 1944 and Charles-Maurice, the youngest. Educated in America, she was elegant, perfectly dressed by Courrèges, from one of the most distinguished
gratin
families and possessed of Le Marais, one of the most wonderful chateaux in France, often compared with Vaux-le-Vicomte.

Gaston was to write several essays on the history of his new in-laws. One of the oldest families in France, they boasted one ancestor, Boson, who had elected Hugh Capet as king. When the king asked him, ‘Who made you count?’ he was said to have replied, ‘Those same who made you king.’ This established the Talleyrands’ shared belief as to their place in the social hierarchy. Another ancestor was murdered by Richelieu and there were
several cardinals, but the most famous Talleyrand was the greatest political chameleon of all time, minister to every French ruler from Louis XVI to Louis-Philippe. Duff Cooper had written his biography, though Nancy didn’t think it very good. Once Gaston was definitively installed at Le Marais, he and Violette set up a Talleyrand museum, an echo of the long-ago games in the Palewski salon with Jean-Paul.

Gaston had known Violette’s parents from his own personal Guermantes way. Her mother was Anna Gould, who first married Paris’s greatest playboy, Boni de Castellane. Anna was short, ugly, with a spine covered in black hair, but she was possessed of fifteen million railway dollars, and Boni knew how to spend them. ‘After all, ’ he said, ‘
elle est surtout belle vue du dot’
. (Since the French word for dowry,
dot
, is pronounced in the same way as
dos
, back, this could be interpreted as either ‘She’s especially beautiful for her money’ or ‘from behind’.) Boni’s extravagance was legendary. He purchased Le Marais, an important eighteenth-century château, from the Noailles family, as well as constructing the Palais Rose in Paris, but when Anna Gould had had enough of this extravagance, she divorced him, married his cousin, Hélie de Talleyrand-Périgord, Prince de Sagan, and took her houses with her. Her second husband was not much more gallant than the first; the Prince de Sagan remarked that one might as well dispense with the ‘u’ in his new wife’s maiden name. Boni was so outraged at the loss of the lovely millions that he attacked Hélie with his cane at a funeral. Undeterred, Hélie fathered two children with Anna, Howard, who killed himself, and Hélène-Violette, who thus became her mother’s heiress.

Violette sold the Palais Rose in 1968, not, according to some, without a little help from the president of the Conseil Constitutionnel, as the council of Paris had initially opposed the sale. Throughout the Sixties, Gaston had been spending more and more time at Le Marais, just 36 kilometres from Paris, an enclosed world in its own 8,000 acres. He got to know Violette’s friends, the Due d’Harcourt, his wife Thyra and his sister Lydie de
Pommereu, and lunched with Violette’s aunt, Florence Gould, who lived at the Meurice. During the war, Florence had been a collaborationist hostess, entertaining the German author Ernst Jünger and propaganda officer Gerhard Heller. Claude Mauriac described how the atmosphere of ’champagne and sympathy’ led him to shake hands with officers whose company he would have shunned in the streets. A scathing piece appeared in Cyril Connolly’s
Horizon
, depicting Florence’s ‘salon’ as the dregs of literary Paris who had found only acclaim in the wake of Nazi tanks, though Cocteau was not above accepting her hospitality. Nor, many years later, was Gaston. A writhingly sycophantic passage in a novel of the period describes one of Florence’s gatherings at the Meurice.

The Talleyrand-Périgord-Palewskis were at the top of the guest list, Palewski presided opposite Florence … Mme Palewski spoke of the Lido. ‘What a sumptuous spectacle’, she said, ‘What an orgy of colours … We have nothing to envy the Americans’. ‘You could make M. Palewski Prince de Chalais’, ‘What? Is it possible? But did a misadventure not occur when Guillemette de Bauffremont published in the
Figaro
that she would make her husband, Mr I-don’t-know-who Due d’Atrisco?’ ‘With M. Palewski’s friends in high places you could obtain him the right to remain covered before the King of Spain! He would only remove his hat for General de Gaulle!’ Laughter.

Gaston ought to have choked on his
langoustes
.

Nancy knew Violette, and described her as a ‘sort of non-person’. Like her famous ancestor and her mother’s witty first husband, she was very distantly descended from the Rochechouart-Mortemarts, the family of Athenais de Montespan, Louis XIV’s greatest mistress and a particular favourite of Nancy’s. She and her siblings were famous for the ‘
esprit Mortemart
’, the funniest people of their century, everyone said, but obviously the gene had died out. Nancy was not the only
one who thought Violette had no apparent reason to exist: even her greatest flatterers concede that she was no intellectual. Cynthia Gladwyn said that she was ‘nice, but very simple, not amusing or interesting or pretty’. Nancy’s description of Lady Prague in her first novel sums up a particular type of aristocratic woman to whom those who did not know Violette well might believe she corresponded, ‘a creature so overbred that there is no sex or brain left, only nerves and the herd instinct’. She was perfectly kind, and had kept her relationship with Gaston as discreet as possible, hating the gossip that her mother had attracted. ‘She has a horror of people talking about her, ’ Gaston told a friend. The wedding, on 20 March 1969, was so discreet that Gaston did not even tell his brother Jean-Paul, who was offended to hear of it from Général De Gaulle. Nor was Violette’s son Charles-Maurice informed until after the event.

As a wedding gift, Gaston received a little bit of Poland. His wife’s Sagan title derived from Zagan, formerly in Lower Silesia on the German–Polish border, and had come into the family in 1843. Originally Prussian, it was authorized by imperial decree in France in 1862, so the men in the family were dukes of Talleyrand-Périgord and princes of Sagan. In 1945, Zagan had been repopulated by Poles, who enterprisingly rebuilt the picturesque red-roofed château, with its hundred rooms, which had been burned down in the war. The iron curtain prevented any honeymoon plans for a return to the Palewski roots, but
quand même
, it was a pretty irony. It was Le Marais that was truly made for Gaston. Receiving a guest from Rome just after his marriage, Gaston greeted her shrugging his shoulders and looking bashful. ‘What do you want?’ he said. ‘I’ve always loved high ceilings.’

Nancy didn’t stand a chance against Le Marais, and she knew it. A friend of Gaston’s claims that ‘yes, he did love Nancy Mitford. But he loved châteaux and duchesses more.’ Another suggested that ‘the darling old Colonel’ was only in love with organizing the decoration of a wonderful château. Nancy had her shop-front firmly in place. In a letter to Gaston in 1962, Nancy had described a lunch where one of the women present
announced that her lover was shortly to marry another woman. ‘She said, “Why should I be jealous? She is ugly and stupid and frightfully rich. I don’t mind a bit.”’ This was to be Nancy’s line and she stuck to it. She must have been extremely convincing, as Diana wrote to Deborah:

Just spoken to Naunce and Col has told her he’s going to marry Violette and she (Naunce) really doesn’t seem to mind in the least. As I knew this was looming (or thought I knew), it was one of the things I most dreaded, but it has come so late in the day (Col is almost seventy) that she has got over the annoyance years ago, evidently, and now just thinks it a bore for him and also (which is true) rather silly to give up one’s freedom.