Them
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Tatiana’s letter, written in early October of 1938, a few weeks after Edouard Daladier, Neville Chamberlain, and Adolf Hitler had set the stage for World War II by signing the Munich accords, was like a flare, a signal for Alex. He decided to decamp immediately for Paris. He left Liuba and Lalo as abruptly as Hilda had left him, slinking out of the house early one morning with all his possessions, without saying a word or leaving a note. A few hours after arriving in Paris, he went to see Tatiana and bought most of her uncle Sasha’s books—many volumes of art history, a ten-volume edition of J. H. Fabre’s Souvenirs entomologiques, a fine morocco-bound set of Buffon’s Histoire naturelle—a small, handsome collection that stands on my shelves to this day. They started to see each other every evening. After a few tête-à-tête dinners, they returned to Alex’s studio at Villa Montmorency. He found her as fearful of sex, as anxious about it, as filled with pudeur—a barely translatable word that denotes a Puritanical chasteness of mind and body—as he had been all his life. “I was both afraid and triumphant,” Alex told one of his biographers. “I think she was wearing a black or green satin gown…and a Cossack hat on her blond hair…. It was…the most extraordinary experience of my life. After we slept together for the first time, I knew that my life had changed forever.”
It was a month or so later that I had my first glimpse of Alex. On an autumn Thursday of that year, when I was staying with my great-grandmother at her flat near the avenue Foch—a weekly visit, which occurred on my governess’s day off—I had fallen ill and started running a fever. On this particular afternoon, Mother had come to pick me up at Babushka’s. It must have been at least October, for she had swathed me in her fur coat before lifting me up in her arms. The occasion was notable because there were quite a few instances when I had fallen ill at Babushka’s, and this was the very first time that Mother had stepped into the nitty-gritty of child care.
Now that I recall it, I marvel at her wondrous sense of theater: This would be the first time that she was allowing the two opposite poles of her life to meet—the first time Alex, her new lover, was to see her child—and she was staging the performance with utmost care, putting on the “Look at how good a mother I can be!” show. This is how she choreographed it: Blond, fragrant Mother carried me toward an affectionately smiling man whose thin mustache, almost slick in its neatness and brevity, accentuated the prominence of his generously arched nose. His graceful, photogenic gestures bordered, like my mother’s, on the theatrical. This was one of the great photo ops of their lives, and he posed for it as expertly as she did, leaning on top of his white convertible, his right elbow supported by his left arm, right hand supporting his chin, right index finger thrusting up a bit on his right cheek. As I came closer to him, I noted his exceptionally well-groomed dark hair, the kindness of his smile. His most distinctive expression—the expression that most instantly struck me as he eased me gently into his car—is best described by the French word attendrissement, that blend of compassion, pity, and tenderness that tells a child that the adult has been truly moved and affected by her, that she has begun to make him malleable to her every desire; which is the way Alex was to remain with Tatiana and me for many decades to come.
Tatiana at Alex’s house in the south of France in 1938, at the beginning of their lifelong romance.
He drove us to the doorstep of our family flat on the rue de Longchamp, and as I said good-bye to him I remember thinking that he was the nicest man I’d ever met.
A few weeks before Alex and Tatiana began their courtship, Nazi forces had invaded Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland. The French government was terrified by recent reports of Germany’s air strength and was doubtful that its own army, weakened by years of pacifist policies, could strike effectively at Hitler’s troops without suffering dire consequences. It eagerly approved Neville Chamberlain’s suggestion to sign the Munich accords, which, by sacrificing a good portion of Czechoslovakia, France’s ally, seemed to postpone the grim prospect of another war with Germany. The French left and pessimists of various political stripes (my father among them) looked on Chamberlain’s accords as the most cowardly of capitulations: They feared that Hitler’s capture of Czechoslovakia’s great Skoda arms complex and the collapse of the Czech defense line would free the Wehrmacht to deploy its full weight against France. But the majority of the nation greeted the Munich accords with rejoicing, and the delusionary aura of the Années Folles was sustained.
Many merry new songs became popular that fall and winter. At fashionable nightclubs such as Le Boeuf sur le Toit and Grand Écart, Alex and Tatiana held hands as the waiflike twenty-one-year-old Edith Piaf sang “Mon Légionnaire”(“Il était blond il était beau / il sentait bon le sable chaud”) and Jean Sablon crooned “Vous qui passez sans me voir / Sans même me dire bonsoir.” They attended the popular six-day bicycle races at the Vel’ d’Hiver, the huge stadium where, four years later, some 13,000 French Jews would be incarcerated in subhuman conditions by the collaborationist French police. They went to see Jean Gabin in that fall’s hit movie, Marcel Carné’s Quai des brumes. They wept over Jean Renoir’s La grande illusion, which contradicted all cinematic precedent by presenting a wealthy young Jew as an exemplary French soldier. They also went to poetry readings, concerts, and many plays. Such cultural pursuits were more suited to my mother’s tastes. But just as he would always adapt to any compromise beneficial to the advancement of his career, until the end of his days Alex would instantly adopt the proclivities of whatever woman he was in love with. With Hilda, he had whizzed down ski slopes; with Irène Lidova he had attended exhibitions of typography at the Musée des Arts Decoratifs; with Marie-Claude, he had attended left-of-center political discussions; with Liuba, he had Charlestoned in nightclubs; with Tatiana, he went to hear Robert Casadesus play Mozart. The first year of their love was sweet, so sweet in that last year of Europe’s peace.
It was also during those weeks that the first phase of Alex and Tatiana’s correspondence began.
Her letters are loving but breezy, chatty. On December 26, 1938, she’s getting ready to go skiing in St. Moritz with her suitor of the past few years, a tall, courtly millionaire, twenty years older than she, named André Wormser. After dismissing Wormser, whom she’s attempting, as gently as possible, to ease out of her life, she plans to meet on the ski slopes with Alex, who is currently in the south of France.
“My love,” she writes from Paris as she’s packing up for her trip. “I can’t go away without telling you that I love you so much and I’m so happy to be with you. I’m leaving with a hope of returning quickly to your gentle arms.”
“Don’t forget…Bach and Mozart records [and] your ski things,” she writes the following day from the resort.
“I’m being very careful,” she reports on December 29 about skiing conditions, “because the streets are full of the one-legged and one-armed. It’s considered an elegant notion, but I’ll do my best to avoid it. I have a dire need to get to you in one piece. W. [Wormser] caught a strep throat and stays in bed the whole day till 6 pm, when I come down to play Lexicon with him. It suits me well and I feel pity for him. How we’re going to ski!! How I adore you! How happy our life will be. This is only the beginning.”
“I’ve just woken up and I love you and miss you frightfully,” she writes him the following day. “The [ski] lesson lasts until 12:30, then we go downhill to St. Moritz for lunch, and resume the lesson at two until 4:30. At 5 I have some pastries with fellow sufferers, at 6 I meet some friends at the bar, or I play cards with W. Dinner is at eight followed by a long hot bath and bed, at which time I fall asleep immediately…. While falling asleep I keep thinking about you and your gentle hands and about everything that is so dear to us. I love you.”
For the year 1938–1939, only one letter from Alex to Tatiana has survived—he was more fastidious about preserving their correspondence than she was. But that one surviving letter is the real thing.
“How spoiled we have been by this rare love which only
offers its gifts to those who know how to truly love,” he wrote her in November 1938. “You know how to love me as no woman has ever loved me, and thanks to you a man was born…. To love you has become a prayer, a benediction sent by heaven…. I only know life through our glances, our bodies, our thoughts, I have loved you I love you and shall continue to love you until the day when death will part us.”
After skiing together in St. Moritz in January 1939, the lovers went to spend time together at Alex’s new house at Sainte Maxime. The week they spent together there was, in Alex’s words, “the greatest moment of my life.” “The feeling was indescribably strong. I knew, and I’m sure Tatiana knew, that this was for life.”
Decades later, one of Alex’s closest friends, the editing wizard Tina Brown, had this to say about Alex and Tatiana’s relationship: “She seemed to have had the same impact on him as Wallis Simpson had on the Prince of Wales…. [W]atch that phrase which always recurs in his conversation: ‘Tatiana made a man out of me.’”
EIGHT
Tatiana and Bertrand
To all appearances, Tatiana’s marriage to Bertrand du Plessix, which was celebrated in Paris on December 23, 1929, had gotten off to a marvelous start. The couple went to Naples for their honeymoon—a first trip to Italy for both of them—and Tatiana’s letters to her mother glow with the serenity unique to young brides. “Bertrand is enormously caring, a tender husband and a marvelous companion,” she wrote from Pompeii. I seem to have been conceived within a fortnight of my parents’ marriage—my birth date is September 25, 1930, and my mother used to joke that I had “saved her honor by two days.” Directly after her honeymoon, she settled in Warsaw, where my father, a linguistic whiz who spoke flawless Polish, had been serving as commercial attaché at the French embassy; initially Tatiana seemed happy with her new home. The first surviving letter she wrote her mother from the Polish capital is dated March 30, and she seems to have already informed her of her pregnancy: “They do an analysis every three weeks, so far so good. There’s no nausea, I take a lot of strengthening medications. I spend a lot of time in the fresh air, drive to the tennis court to see Bertrand play, and almost every day go to the races, where we have a box, to cheer the French horses.” They plan to take their summer vacation, she reports, on the seashore at the Gulf of Finland. She also tells her mother about a recent Prokofiev concert at which the composer himself conducted the orchestra and played the piano; it was such a “colossal success” that the march from The Love for Three Oranges had to be performed twice as an encore. Their social schedule was hectic, she adds, because the many French and Italian businessmen passing through Warsaw have to be feted, and she constantly entertains guests at lunch. The postscript to that missive, written in Bertrand’s hand, reads “Je vous embrasse, chère mère.”
Tatiana and Bertrand du Plessix at an “all white” ball at the French Embassy in Warsaw in 1930.
This euphoria of young wedlock was broken, of course, by the news of Mayakovsky’s suicide, which Tatiana received less than three weeks after that March letter. Bertrand seems to have handled her emotions with enormous understanding and tenderness. “He’s a real friend, and it seems most unlikely that we could ever live without each other,” Tatiana wrote her mother in the first days of May. Less than two weeks after the tragedy, Bertrand arranged a trip to a spring fair in the western city of Poznan to cheer her up. On the road, “everything was flowering and green,” and Tatiana’s spirits temporarily brightened. She continued to love their apartment, which was also surrounded by greenery—“there’s a sea of green outside the widows and no sense of being in a city, Warsaw is a big village, not at all like Paris.” The night before they had heard Feodor Chaliapin as Mefistofele, who was still marvelous “despite his age,” and he too had had a “colossal success.” As for her pregnancy, it was going as well as ever; her only complaint was that she was eating for three and growing fat.
Two months later, she exults in the news that Bertrand has arranged for her to go with him to Paris, where she could see her grandmother, her sister, and all her relatives and friends. She would travel four days ahead of him by steamer, and he would fly. It was 35 degrees Centigrade in the shade in Warsaw, and she greatly looked forward to the sea voyage. Yet under this veneer of cheer, one senses that Tatiana was still obsessed by the Mayakovsky tragedy. She asked her mother to send her any other newspaper clippings she came across concerning the poet and reassured her once more that she was not blaming herself exclusively for the catastrophe. “There was…a combination of many reasons, plus his psychic illness.”
What about Bertrand du Plessix, who was trying to bring happiness to a young woman still tormented by the century’s bloodiest revolution and the suicide of her great first love? One of the several traits my parents shared is that they were both seeking refuge from their pasts. Tatiana had been fleeing from the desolation of postrevolutionary Russia. Bertrand had been fleeing a family wrecked by generations of poverty and pride. When I think of what my father fled from, I recall the genteel crumbling château in a flat plain of the Vendée, a few miles from Nantes, where five earlier generations of du Plessix were born and where his oldest brother, Joseph, lived until his death in the 1950s. I see it in a mist of small, raw rain, for it is a dank, bleak place, ransacked by indigence and prejudice and piety. I see crucifixes on the peeling walls of every room; windows closed in highest heat against the dreaded courants d’air; and aunts with sad eyes and deep body odor burdened by the ignorant penny-pinching hygiene of French provincial life, by many pregnancies, and by infant deaths. I hear the language of church festivals cited to denote every event of the year: we cut our first hay at Pentecost; at Assumption we went to see Aunt Marie in Brest. I smell the dust of sadistic Confirmation cards preserved in the pages of ancient missals, depicting young humans who writhe in the fires of hell. I recall images of ancestors in military costume being honored like Confucian shrines: your great-grand-uncle de Laromicière, who completed France’s conquest of Algeria! Your uncle de Montmorencie, a hero of the battle of the Marne! I think of the pamphlets scattered about the house proselytizing for ultraright-wing groups—Action Française, Croix de Feu—that preached cults of Joan of Arc and Nostradamus and a return to a heroic medieval France purged of Semitic and foreign blood. I think of a cousin who until recently composed, in Alexandrine couplets, attacks on legalized abortion for the Catholic press. I think of other cousins who still go into mourning clothes and celebrate a funerary Mass every January 21, to observe the anniversary of the beheading of Louis XVI. I think of narrowness and resignation and a desperate refuge in the swamp honor of a past.
All that is what my father fled from; I am the child of two ambitious refugees. Like my mother dreaming of glory in her own dismal Russian province, he had longed for the brio and glamour of the siren Paris. His parents had died of diphtheria when he was fourteen, and as the youngest of five children he was left in the care of older brothers and sisters. He was extraordinarily handsome—tall for a Frenchman, with dark hair and hints of Valentino in his soft-cheeked, doe-eyed face—and he had his unruly side, but he was obsessively studious. He fled the dim province of his birth by passing the entrance exams to two of France’s most prestigious graduate schools, Hautes Études Commerciales and École des Langues Orientales. He had linguistic gifts equaled by few of his contemporaries, mastering fluent English, German, and Polish by the time he was twenty-five, earning an appointment at the French embassy in Warsaw at twenty-six. But there was an eccentric, Dionysiac side to Bertrand du Plessix’s character that may have come from the Celtic Brittany blood and has affinities with the Slavic temperament. While making a career in the social sciences, he had become an accomplished musician; a passionate lover of poetry; a licensed pilot; an expert in Chinese sculpture, Pompeian glass, and many other branches of the visual arts. There was also a melancholy, depressive streak in his character for which romance seemed to be the principal palliative—he was definitely a Don Juan and had a taste for
beautiful, elegant women. The same adventurous, reckless side that enticed him to all those proclivities led him to fall in love, in the late 1920s, with a dazzling Russian girl who was being ardently sought by a very famous poet—in retrospect, the thrill of the competition must have all the more fired “Vicomte” du Plessix’s ardor for Tatiana.
Bertrand du Plessix at right, greeting officials at Warsaw airport, 1930.
I set off that title because it has to do with another trait my parents shared: My father’s snobbism, albeit of a different sort, was quite equal to my mother’s. Our family tree traces our ancestry to a “Sieur” Jochaud du Plessix who lived in the region of Nantes in the sixteenth century. Although the family might be called “noble” in the very widest sense, none of my father’s brothers or uncles used the title “vicomte.” Notwithstanding the fact that it had not been used for generations, some elitist impulse prompted my father to engrave the title on his own calling cards when he took his first diplomatic post. (Neutral observers have told me that it was not uncommon for young diplomats of vaguely noble lineage to similarly embellish their credentials abroad—besides, Poles were notoriously receptive to titles.) However he came to it, the word “vicomte” could not have failed to impress my mother when they were introduced by mutual friends, in late 1928, in the lobby of the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, during one of his home leaves.
Here is the way I understand my parents’ courtship in the context of Tatiana’s Mayakovsky romance: Bertrand and Tatiana meet in the last weeks of 1928, after the poet’s return to Moscow. They make a strong impression on each other, see each other often, and when Bertrand returns to Warsaw they start a correspondence of growing ardor. When Mayakovsky arrives in mid-February 1929 for eight weeks, Tatiana keeps du Plessix on the back burner; but one particular sentence from a letter to her mother, written just before the poet’s return to Paris, indicates that the Frenchman is already pressing his suit: “Various admirers want to take me to various countries,” she writes, “none of them seem like anyone at all compared to M.” It’s clear that du Plessix paid court to her more fervently than ever when he returned in late spring, after Mayakovsky’s final departure. Tatiana must have spent an anxious summer, torn between the eminent poet who offered to fulfill one of her principal ambitions—fame as a great artist’s muse—and the elegant Frenchman who offered her, in however ersatz a form, the aristocratic credentials she’d craved much of her life. The rest of the denouement is clear: Bertrand returns in October, when Tatiana has realized that Mayakovsky is destined not to return, and she accepts his offer of marriage.