Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter

by Diana Souhami

  The Princess revered culture and was a formidable patron of the arts. Cosmopolitan in a way Violet admired, if she liked what she saw, heard or read, she bought it. Her vast Paris house at the corner of the avenue Henri-Martin and the rue Cortambert was a temple to art. Reconstructed in eighteenth-century French classical style, she fitted it with public galleries and concert rooms and filled it with priceless things. She had a Renaissance tapestry in her bedroom. She liked the paintings of Goya, Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Sisley, Renoir, Boudin, Degas, so she bought them. Her grand salon resembled the galerie des glaces at Versailles. In it, she held concerts and exhibitions of paintings including her own. She commissioned the Spanish artist José Maria Sert to paint the pilaster capitals with ‘sapphic scenes’ of naked ladies cavorting with bunches of grapes and each other. In the oak-panelled music room she installed a full-sized organ on which she played Bach. In the library, which led to a raised garden, she commissioned a ceramic tabernacle from the sculptor, Jean Carriés, to house a Wagner manuscript she valued. From the engraver, Paul Helleu, she commissioned an album of etchings of her lovers, then bought and destroyed the plates so no copies could be made.

  Music was her particular love. From her earliest years as a child at her mother’s house at 27 avenue Kléber near the Bois de Boulogne she

  constantly heard all the great works of Beethoven, Mozart or Schubert, including the last Quartets of Beethoven, Nos 10 to 17, which were then considered almost incomprehensible … I remember that on my fourteenth birthday although I was offered a little watch from Boucheron’s or a fan painted by Chaplin the famous portrait painter, I chose as a present, or ‘birthday surprise’ a performance of my favourite work by Beethoven – the Fourteenth Quartet.

  The quartet was played on her mother’s collection of Stradivarius stringed instruments.

  Denys’s friendship with the Princess evolved from their shared interest in avant-garde music:

  Together they would attend concerts and rehearsals, the score under their arm; together they would curtail elaborately prepared dinners so afraid were they of missing any part of the programme.

  Each year the Princess went to Bayreuth. She was a devotee of Richard Wagner. Ravel dedicated piano pieces to her. Stravinsky, Debussy, Nadia Boulanger, Erik Satie were commissioned by her. She knew Diaghilev, Nijinsky, Pavlova, Karsavina, Ida Rubenstein. Gabriel Fauré, when her guest at the Palazzo Polignac, composed Melodies de Venise on her portable yacht piano on her boat on her lagoon. Janet Flanner heard the first performance of Oedipus Rex by Stravinsky at the avenue Henri-Martin: ‘The Latin was sung, with Italian pronunciation, to the French audience by Russians.’

  At the Princess’s salons Violet socialized with ‘names to conjure with’: Jean Cocteau, Anna de Noailles, Colette, Jean Giradoux, Misia Sert, Paul Valèry, Francis Poulenc, Marcel Proust. Proust wove dialogue and impressions of her salons into A La Recherche du Temps Perdu. Winnaretta corresponded with him but said it was impossible to endure his company for long because he took offence all the time, assuming slights where none was intended. She said his life was governed by unrequited romantic attachments to men and that she found this wearisome.

  She lived as she pleased, arranged life carefully and, like Edward VII, was too grand for scandal to stick. When she took Violet as her lover in 1923 her ‘inner circle’ was comprised of gay or lesbian artists. Though she had no contact with the Left Bank – Gertrude Stein at the rue de Fleurus, Natalie Barney and her Temple of Love, Sylvia Beach and Shakespeare & Company – she too was a lesbian who lived for art in the city where modernism was born, where the climate was accepting and the spirit free.

  Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas had attended the Polignac salons. Prior to Violet the Princess’s lovers included her husband’s niece, Armande de Polignac (married to the Comte de Chabanne la Palice, she used her maiden name and never mentioned him), the painter, Romaine Brooks and Olga de Meyer. Bertie was rumoured to be Olga’s father. Her middle name was Alberta, after him. Her mother, the Duchess di Caracciolo, left her husband at the altar steps to live with her lover Prince Josef Poniatowski in a villa near Dieppe. Bertie was a frequent visitor. In 1901 Olga married his friend Baron Adolf de Meyer, the fashion and society photographer. Olga filled her bedroom with paintings of nude women and was Winnaretta’s lover from 1909 until the start of the First World War. She and her husband were opium addicts. Violet called them Péderaste et Medisante ‘because he looked so queer and she had such a vicious tongue’.

  The surface quality of the lifestyle of Mrs Keppel and her daughter began to elide. The Princesse de Polignac was not quite King Edward VII, but she was rich, large, hugely influential, entertained lavishly, had royal connections, and lived in undoubted splendour. Such credentials were unimpeachable in Mrs Keppel’s eyes. She connived at this new relationship of Violet’s. It was pragmatic and rewarding and this she could admire. It had none of the domestic reference of the affair with Vita. Passion did not fly. The French were unperturbed and it was away from the Cubitt’s eyes and the hypocrisies of home. The Princess ruled, with status and authority, at 57 avenue Henri-Martin as Mrs Keppel ruled at Grosvenor Street. Each had the same hauteur and unwavering self-confidence.

  In 1923 Violet moved to a house in Auteuil, in the rue de Ranelagh. It was large, peaceful, had a woodland garden and the view of a huge chestnut tree from her bedroom window. She furnished the house in her eclectic style, helped by her new lover’s wealth. The materialism she deplored for controlling and restricting her life became her security. She alluded to a gift from her mother of symbolic significance. It was of a painting on glass:

  It represented a Chinese lady smiling at a small grey parrot perched on her arm. She attempts nothing to detain it. Its cage is in her eyes.

  In such glancing remarks Violet told the world of her own captivity. The glass picture, bought by Mrs Keppel on her trip to China, allied with the photograph Violet kept on her desk of herself as a child looking into her mother’s eyes.

  She entertained extravagantly. Mrs Keppel complained to George of the bills. Through her mother and the Princess, Violet ‘maintained an exceptional position in Parisian society’. The painter Jacques-Emile Blanche, who did a portrait of Violet, described the house at Auteuil as like ‘a miniature Ritz’. He asked her why, when she was so evidently privileged in her own country she preferred Paris. She replied, ‘because here one is freer to say and do what one pleases without conventional restrictions.’

  She was not now the rebellious gypsy of her fantasy. Few people knew of her broken-hearted past. She was not going to get hooked or hurt again. Though she scorned hypocrisy she stopped being open. She could not break her attachment to her mother and began to mimic parodically her mother’s style. She told trite lies but everyone knew they were lies. Like a child testing virtue she teased at the truth:

  I am always – being a liar – seeking passionately for truth, TRUTH in people, real people, not shams and sycophants and humbugs.

  At Christmas 1923 the Princesse de Polignac took her on a cruise up the Nile to Egypt. Denys was in the party too. So were Mrs Keppel and George. For evening soirées the Princess took along a new protegé, the pianist Jacques Février. Above board Violet flirted with him, below deck she answered to the Princess. This was the acceptable face of infidelity without family rifts or jealous scenes. Husbands, lovers, mothers, observed civilities in high Edwardian style. Winnaretta and Denys were the best of friends. There were concerts, excursions to archaeological sights, games of bridge:

  Sometimes Mrs Keppel would interrupt the game and spread out a map: ‘Look Georgie, that’s ours,’ she would say, pointing to the location of some lucrative investment Sir Ernest Cassel had advised her to make.

  Such travel featured in French Vogue for its style and expense. The next year they all went to Greece. Photographs of a Polignac cruise show the women in hats and gloves viewing the Parthenon and riding on donkeys on a Greek island.

  Rumours of unor
thodox sex were the confection of gossip. The diplomat Duff Cooper relayed to his wife Diana what his friend Mrs Blew-Jones saw when she delivered furs to the Princess:

  She went round to Polignac’s house at eleven in the morning. She was asked by the servant at the door whether she was the lady who was expected. She said she was and was immediately shown into a large room where she was greeted by the old Princess in a dressing gown and top boots. On a sofa in another part of the room she saw Violet Trefusis and another woman, both stark naked and locked in a peculiar embrace. She ran from the room in terror. It sounds incredible, may be exaggerated but can’t be quite invented.

  ‘In love’ said the Princesse de Polignac to Charlotte Wolff, author of Love Between Women and The Human Hand, ‘there is always one who suffers.’ ‘I suspected it was not she who did,’ Dr Wolff wrote in her autobiography.

  Violet perfected her French, learned Paris slang, went to lectures at the Sorbonne and tested her ambition to write fiction in French. She called her first novel, Sortie de Secours (Emergency Exit). In her memoirs she derided it as

  a mediocre little book, a patchwork affair, aphorisms, maxims, annotations, loosely woven into the shape of a novel. It served its purpose, it was a loophole, an outlet, above all a piece of blotting paper which absorbed my obsessions.

  These obsessions were jealousy and faithless love. Most of her fiction was an attempt to make sense of her past. The emergency exit she described as ‘self-love in all its various forms’. The exit was there for when obsessive love threatens to destroy the person it consumes. It allows them ‘when some obsession becomes too violent to vanish away with a mocking laugh’.

  In French she wrote with a mocking laugh, a comic irony to shield past pain. In French she joked about games of the heart. This was her adopted language which her mother’s society could not claim. The tone she found, caustic and defended, contrasted with the rawness of her letters to Vita.

  In Sortie de Secours Laure loves Drino, a charmer. Because she loves him so much he withdraws. Because she waits for letters they do not arrive. Because she fears betrayal she finds it. She falls ill, leaves Paris for Provence and starts a seemingly safe relationship with a painter, Oradour. Because she has someone else Drino is jealous. She visits him in Paris and he tries to ‘claim’ her as his. The gamesmanship of it all frees her and she travels back to Oradour. On the train she overhears two middle-aged women talking of love. One speaks of jealousy, the other of her attachment to … Oradour.

  Love, Violet suggested, is a merry-go-round of betrayal. There is no freedom in it. Its manipulations, declarations and reversals form repetitive patterns.

  * * *

  Mrs Keppel moved from 16 Grosvenor Street in 1924. She bought the Ombrellino, a huge villa overlooking Florence at the top of a hill called Bellosguardo (beautiful view). She had tired of London, her social dazzle tarnished by the war, the first Labour administration, Violet’s scandal, middle age, the English climate which she loathed. Sonia was ensconced in Hampshire. Henry, a brother for Rosalind, was born in March 1924. George had no occupation to keep him in England.

  She kept a furnished suite at the Ritz for when she was in town. The Ritz, created at the turn of the century with Bertie’s tastes in mind, was her spiritual home. The Palm Court with its panelled mirrors, gold trellises, glass roof, little gilded replica Louis XVI armchairs made by Waring and Gillow, was an Edwardian haven in a changing world. Its marble fountain was known as ‘La Source’. Her suite with marble basins and gold candelabra looked out over Green Park and had servants’ rooms attached.

  The Ombrellino was her palace in the sun, financed by the King’s bequest. Here she could spend, indulge and enjoy her wealth. Every room and terrace gave a stunning view – over the Duomo, Baptistery, Palazzo Pitti, Ponte Vecchio, over olive groves, the river Arno and ‘the greenest of pastoral landscapes’. Harold Acton wrote of it and her:

  In London she had been on parade, as it were, but in Florence she could lead, comparatively, the simple life. The food at L’Ombrellino was conspicuously more lavish when a Rothschild was being entertained on the principle of ‘unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance’.

  She never learned the language but this proved no impediment to her Italianate life. Bellosguardo, studded with monolithic villas behind stone walls and surrounded by olive groves, was an ex-patriate colony. English was spoken. Mrs Keppel’s neighbours composed, painted, collected works of art, travelled and entertained. There was the art historian Bernard Berenson in the Villa I Tatti (for many years he worked for Joseph Duveen), Mabel Dodge ‘presiding over Bohemia’ at the Villa Curonia, Sir George Sitwell at the Villa Montegufoni, Harold Acton at La Pietra.

  Rich English and Americans bought these huge Tuscan villas at low prices from the late nineteenth century on. The Villa Ombrellino was on a heroic scale. It served Mrs Keppel’s status fantasies. From the terraces Violet said, it was like being on the deck of ‘some great ship about to sail’. The villa, she said, had

  quality, beauty, spaciousness, but not intimacy … large, handsome rooms leading out of each other … a mere cupboard assumed the proportions of a cathedral organ, an armchair cannot forget that it is distantly related to a throne.

  Galileo had lived there and his bust was on the loggia. Monumental rooms and a great staircase led to the piano nobile. There were three drawing rooms to every bedroom. The servants’ rooms filled the third floor. There were walled gardens with purple bougainvillea, an iris garden, baroque statues, cypress trees.

  Into the Ombrellino Mrs Keppel imported all the Grosvenor Street furniture and more. The Chinese pagodas given her by Bertie, Chinese porcelain, eighteenth-century portraits, tapestries, Chippendale chairs and Regency settees. No one, Harold Acton, said, could compete with her glamour as a hostess:

  A fine figure of a woman as they used to say, more handsome than beautiful, she possessed enormous charm, which was not only due to her cleverness and vivacity but to her generous heart … Altogether she was on a bigger scale than most of her sex.

  She presided aware of past times. Queen Alexandra’s signed photograph was displayed, feathers stuck to a card were captioned in Bertie’s writing ‘shot by me’, a sapphire the size of a duck’s egg was a gift from the King of Persia. Presents she gave had a history. A diamond owl hatpin for the Countess of Listowel was once a trinket for Little Mrs George from Bertie.

  Expatriate European princes and queens, Florentine, English and French aristocracy gathered on her terraces. Group photographs taken by George show Princess Irene of Greece, Queen Helen of Romania, Prince Paul of Yugoslavia, Count Raben of Denmark whom Violet resembled. Violet, her social status restored, posed in these photographs with the Princesse de Polignac, with Denys, Sonia, Mrs Keppel, the Princesse Bibesco, the Princesse de Chimay.

  The English aristocracy summered at Ombrellino or travelled there from the casinos of the Riviera, the spas of Montecatini and Arles. The talk was of ‘so and so’s liaison with a chauffeur or the rumour of some Casanova’s impotence – variations on the sempiternal themes’. The Earls and Countesses of Rosebery, Abingdon, Kimberley, Ilchester and Listowel, the Viscounts and Viscountesses Knollys, Ellbank and Chaplin, the Dukes and Duchesses of Wellington and Westminster, Lord Stavordale, Mrs Hwfa Williams, the Marchionesses of Curzon and Crewe, Ambassadors from the Netherlands and Chile, French Generals, Admirals of the Fleet and Masters of the Realm, signed the visitors’ book, admired the views, praised the food, played bridge and tipped the butler, who was, said Harold Acton, ‘insatiable of tips especially from the bridge players: he had an intuitive knowledge of their winnings’.

  ‘Winston was so happy staying with your Mother at l’Ombrellino’, his wife Clementine Churchill wrote to Violet some twenty years later from Montecatini Terme where she was taking a cure:

  & I think it was at the beginning of his painting career … I remember he tried to do a Panorama from the Terrace. He wanted to take everything in, but I thi
nk & hope he was persuaded that the human eye can’t take everything in at one focus. I am enjoying the mud baths but Alas to-day they are not functioning because of the Strike.

  Hedonism was obligatory. Luncheon in the huge dining room with its marble floor, frescoed walls, glass doors opening to the terrace, took three hours. George’s niece Lady Cecilia, daughter of the 9th Earl of Albemarle, and her husband, David McKenna, visited the Ombrellino when they married. There was a lavish dinner in their honour. David McKenna got sunstroke, felt ghastly and needed to be in bed. Mrs Keppel told him he was well enough to dine. It was his honeymoon, he would appear, the dinner was for him, the show must go on. Persuasion, as Violet said, was her mother’s hallmark.

  George got himself an early Lanchester, red and very sporty. He liked to drive it fast with the roof down and a ‘little darling’ from the Ombrellino at his side. He kept an apartment in Florence for his personal use. And he became an author. He privately published a series of Aids to Memory by Colonel Keppel. These dealt, in columns, lists, indices and addenda, with ‘Contemporary Dates between the 13th and 18th centuries of the Medici in Florence and the Renaissance’ and ‘French Painters (1400–1900) And Their Times’. The Colonel’s readers could ascertain that in the year Charles X died at Goritz, the first electric telegraph was erected and that Manet ‘was an attractive personality, and had an exquisite sense of paint, as well as great decorative charm’.

  Previously, Violet said, George had ‘scarcely glanced at a picture in his life’. Now he could tell his visitors that the ‘Tribuna’ was added to the Uffizi Picture Gallery during the reign of Ferdinand I, or that Ghiberti’s Baptistry Doors were finished in 1424.

  In Paris on 3 December 1924 after a gap of three years, Violet and Vita met briefly. Vita was there for the sale of remaining pieces from Seery’s flat in the rue Lafitte. She stayed at 53 rue de Varenne home of the American lawyer Walter Berry. He arranged a dinner party for her and invited, among others, Violet and Gerald Berners. ‘Oh my God. What am I to do?’ Vita wrote to Harold in panic. She said she was frightened out of her wits. He wired urging her to be careful. ‘You are always so opty about things and so weak.’ Next morning she said curiosity had replaced her agitation. ‘If V does not know I am here she will get a nice jump – and anyway it will be great fun for Berners.’ Violet, Harold replied, had the evil eye, was a fiend of destruction and all she wanted was to destroy their happiness, ‘do do be careful and not get mesmerized by that devil. I know she will try to do us harm.’ But Violet and she were no more than guests at the same table. The fiend of destruction did no damage that day.