The Horror of Love

by Lisa Hilton

  The Palewskis later liked to claim that one of their family had been active in the anti-Russian insurrection of 1863 which saw many liberally inclined Polish aristocrats looking to France in a diaspora known as the ‘Grande Emigration’. Michel Rabbinowicz belonged to a less grand category of emigrants, a group of doctors, lawyers, artists and intellectuals, many of them Jewish, seeking refuge from Russian persecution. Michel lived in the unfashionable Faubourg-Poissonière district, in what is now the tenth arrondissement of Paris. His nephews attended the College Rollin and subsequently the Springer Institute, where Moise passed his baccalauréat in 1887. Although Michel had so conscientiously provided them with a home, there was little money, and Moise’s experiences of Paris during the flowering of the Belle Epoque were far from gay. He remembered weary miles walked to save the price of an omnibus ticket, sandwiches carefully divided on chilly park benches, an upbringing which while not actually deprived was nevertheless shabby and pinched.

  There remained also a disturbing current of anti-Semitism in French society, which created an atmosphere of danger, a sense of a precarious existence lived permanently on the brink of poverty and persecution. France was still recovering from the bitter divisions provoked by the Dreyfus Affair, in which a young Jewish army captain, Alfred Dreyfus, had been falsely accused of passing military secrets to the German Embassy in Paris. The inflammable conflict between Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards had exposed anti-Jewish prejudice in the most exalted echelons of French society, creating an enduring legacy of hostility and suspicion. Moise was troubled by the visits of an elderly relative, a refugee of the pogroms, who was to die in penury in London, and he grew up with a sense of uncertainty which propelled him to seek a secure place in a threatening world.

  Moise was a talented and driven student who won a place at the competitive Ecole Centrale des Arts et Manufactures, achieving his engineer’s qualification in 1892. For the next few years he held a series of engineering jobs, none of them lucrative, but his ambition can be discerned in the metamorphosis that had taken place in the year of his marriage. By 1895, the Polish immigrant Moise had become the ingénieur diplomé Maurice. He did not, however, marry ‘out’. His twenty-six-year-old bride, Rose Diamant-Berger, came from a similar Eastern-European Jewish background, with roots in Russia, Moldavia and Bucharest. Rose’s father, Yvan-Joseph, had brought his family from Romania to Paris in 1882 and was granted French citizenship a decade later. He had some success in business, as evinced by the fact that in the declaration of means required for French civil marriages, his daughter was provided with a dowry of 25,000 francs, as compared with the groom’s meagre savings of 1,000.

  Rose might have been something of an heiress by the standards of the Faubourg-Poissonière, but the young couple were by no means well off. Their first home was an apartment at 51 Rue Rochechouart, a similarly unfashionable address, where their second boy, Gaston, was born on 20 March 1901. (The desire of the Palewskis to become thoroughly integrated is discernible in their choice of the Frenchest possible names for their sons.) Soon afterwards, the family moved to the nearby Square Petrelle in the ninth arrondissement, a quadrangle of severe post-Haussmann-style buildings around a small courtyard. The third-floor flat featured a salon with an orange velvet sofa and a dining room overlooking the court. Gaston later claimed (with perhaps something of the Mitford capacity to reinvent history along more charming lines) that he and his brother spent much of their time in a large cupboard opening off their shared bedroom.

  The Palewskis lived a tranquil life of modest routines, but Maurice clearly tried to give his boys a more joyful upbringing than he had known. Gaston recalled rollerskating in the square downstairs, violin lessons, trips to the Coliseum cinema in the Rue Rochechouart and weekly visits to museums to hear tour guides explaining the exhibits. Gaston and Jean-Paul would wriggle beneath gilded tables to reach the front of the audience. Both boys shared a greedy delight in beautiful things and the histories behind them. Gaston recalled vividly the feeling of holding his father’s hand as they walked through the immense salons of the Louvre and the Petit Palais, and at home the boys turned the drawing room into their own ‘museum’. Jean-Paul, too, retained a vivid physical memory of traversing the city on huge exploratory walks, from the peaks of Montmartre to the château of St Germain-en-Laye. From the first, Paris belonged to Gaston as profoundly as did the Cotswold uplands of her own childhood to Nancy Mitford. It was in his blood and in his bones, and its poetry called to him all his life.

  During the excursions with his father, Gaston was particularly struck by the nineteenth-century Escalier Daru, which houses the Victory of Samothrace in the department of antiquities at the Louvre. The staircase is disarmingly plain, monumental in both the grandeur of its scale and the austerity of its lines, drawing the eye upwards to the perfect classical female torso of the sculpture. ‘One day, ’ Gaston said, ‘I’ll live in a house with a staircase like that.’

  French literature of the nineteenth century abounds with adventurous young men on the social make: Julien Sorel, Lucien de Rubempre, Eugene de Rastignac. Gaston was often compared by contemporaries to Rastignac, the charming, unscrupulous society mountaineer of Balzac’s Comédie Humaine, whose talent, and particularly his attraction for women, propel him to the zenith of the Parisian world, the gratin of the old aristocracy who inhabit the Faubourg Saint-Germain. There could be no more apt correlative for the trajectory of Gaston’s ambition than the Escalier Daru. He always knew where he wanted to be, there at the top with Paris at his feet and a beautiful woman in his arms. His arriviste tendencies were not among his most endearing qualities and his snobbery was often figured as risible, but his desire to move amid les gens du monde – society people – formed part of his concept of the best way of life. As Fabrice explains to Linda early in their relationship:

  Les gens du monde are the only possible ones for friends. You see, they have made a fine art of personal relationships, and of all that pertains to them – manners, clothes, beautiful houses, good food, everything that makes life agreeable. It would be silly not to take advantage of that. Friendship is something to be built up carefully, by people with leisure, it is an art … You should never despise social life – de la haute société – I mean, it can be a very satisfying one, entirely artificial of course, but absorbing. Apart from the life of the intellect and the contemplative religious life, which few people are qualified to enjoy, what else is there to distinguish man from the animals except his social life? And who understands it so well and who can make it so smooth and so amusing as les gens du monde? (The Pursuit of Love)

  This was entirely Nancy’s view, and one that she spent much of her early years trying frustratedly to live out. Yet there was another aspect of Gaston’s personality which, according to his nephew Dominique Palewski, informed his relationship with France on a more profound level. At the end of the war, Gaston presented Dominique with an illustrated book on the Hôtel des Invalides, in which he inscribed: ‘To my nephew Dominique, that he also might be accorded the honour of bearing arms in the service of a great cause.’3 Dominique believed that, as an immigrant family, the Palewskis were intent on becoming enracinés in France (in French, as well as meaning ‘rooted’ it has implications of national identity) and that their love and respect for their new country, which had allowed them to flourish, was manifest in a deeply emotional loyalty. This was one of the sources of the absolute commitment to the service of France, which, above all else, dominated Gaston’s life.

  The Palewskis were also typical immigrants in that they wanted the best possible education for their children. Both Jean-Paul and Gaston were to prove superlative students, though Gaston experienced more struggles than his older brother. Until 1911, Gaston attended the College Rollin, as his father had done, after which he entered the Lycée Michelet. At first he seemed a promising pupil, even brilliant, but in adolescence something went wrong. Maurice and Rose grew concerned that their lively, intelligent son was growing lazy
and lumpen, complaining of headaches and seemingly incapable of applying himself to work. A doctor prescribed a change of air, and in 1915 the Palewskis decided to send Gaston for a year to England, where he would study the language at Brighton College. He mastered English perfectly and though he always spoke it with a comically thick accent, his fluency would prove to be one of his most defining accomplishments. When he returned to Paris, it was to the family’s new home on the Left Bank at 162 Rue de Grenelle. It was hardly the Faubourg Saint-Germain, but the Faubourg-Poissonière lay safely on the other side of the Seine. The Palewskis were definitely on the up.

  In 1901, Maurice had entered a partnership to set up a machine-tool company. At first the rewards were ‘very mediocre’, but by 1913 he and his partner Morin had premises of their own in the Rue Vivienne and Maurice was developing his interest in the exciting new business of aeronautics, in which he became a pioneer. The company was now directed to manufacturing protective coverings for planes, and the First World War made Maurice a wealthy man. Gaston was just too young to fight, but Jean-Paul enrolled at the military academy of St Cyr and spent two years at the front. Rose and Maurice were doubly blessed. Unlike so many, many parents, both of their sons survived. One writer has attributed Gaston’s ‘powerful taste for all forms of existence … gardens, books, paintings, pretty girls’4 to this sense of having escaped, of having been spared conscription at the last moment. This does not mean that he was unaffected by what a recent French critic has called ‘the unprecedented moral crisis’5 of the war.

  Young people of Nancy’s and Gaston’s era, the ‘Bright Young Things’ who danced their way through les Années Folles, were beset by both a feeling that they had been betrayed by the older generation and a powerful guilt that they had avoided sacrifice. ‘It is a queer world which the old men have left them … they will not be a happy generation, ’ observed Evelyn Waugh in an essay for his school magazine. Rejection of everything the ‘old men’ stood for, contempt for the nineteenth-century faith in the infinite march of progress, produced a sense of futility that many attempted to subdue in frenetic hedonism. Every generation of teenagers believes itself to be unique, but the phenomenon of the Bright Young People contained a self-consciousness of their status as a ‘lost generation’, who, as Linda complains to Fanny in The Pursuit of Love, were doomed to be sandwiched together between two world wars, obliterated, forgotten.

  Jean-Paul Palewski, who had served at the front, criticized his brother for what he saw as his ‘girlish’6 need for physical affection and reassurance. One of Nancy’s complaints about her own mother was that she was physically undemonstrative; Rose Palewski, by contrast, was warm and gentle, holding her youngest son for hours on her knee, kissing and caressing him whenever he was unhappy. Jean-Paul saw Gaston as ‘soft’, unable, as a student, to choose a path and stick to it. One of the notable features of the Twenties generation was their infantilism, their urge to recreate a happy childhood with nursery parties and nursery pranks, as though the world beyond the schoolroom was too terrifying to cope with. Dressing up as babies, albeit with gin in their bottles, was obviously a way of rejecting the ‘adult’ values that had almost destroyed Europe, but in a culture which had sent teenage boys to die in their thousands in the trenches, why would any of them have wanted to grow up?

  Brighton at least appeared to have cured Gaston of his academic lassitude. In July 1921 he graduated from the prestigious Sorbonne university with a diploma in foreign languages and literature, specializing in English, then for the academic years 1921–3 attended the ‘grande école’ of political science (affectionately known as Sciences Po and effectively the French equivalent of Oxbridge). He studied in the ‘private finance’ department, founded by Emile Boutmy in 1872, which had a reputation for innovative courses with a strong international slant. Simultaneously, Gaston developed his early taste for paintings and objets d’art by attending classes at the Ecole du Louvre, acquiring a rigorous background in art history. He joked later that in many ways he had had a ‘young girl’s education’. Perhaps the most significant part of his intellectual formation, though, came from the months he spent at Worcester College, Oxford during the Trinity term of 1922.

  Gaston was accepted as a ‘research student’, which entitled him to wear the long scholar’s gown in which he is depicted, complete with mortarboard and co-ordinating spats and gloves, in a contemporary photograph. He ‘adored’ his time at Worcester, which he described in his memoirs as ‘one of the oldest colleges in the university, with its Gothic buildings surrounded by a famous garden, whose lawns stretched to a lake bordered by trees, a ravishing backdrop to the setting sun’. For Gaston, many of Nancy Mitford’s friends who emerged from the university largely unencumbered by academic laurels, scholarly life was not the point. He began a thesis on Thackeray, but cheerfully admitted not having taken it very seriously. Nor did he show an interest in sport or in the then-influential politicking of the Union Society. What he did acquire was style, the ineffable Oxford manner that even today has the capacity to dominate and infuriate in equal measure. Maurice Druon remarked of the differences between the French and the English methods of instruction:

  The teaching in the French supérieurs produces an elite … inclined to bear constant witness to the profundity of their knowledge or the weight of their responsibilities, or at least to allow this to be guessed. The ancient English universities produce an elite of politicians, scholars and scientists who affect not to take what they do very seriously … one asks oneself when they work, they who bring to their labour the modesty in which others wrap their leisure.7

  It took a war, Druon adds, to show the French that the English were quite capable of earnestness. There is an excellent word in Italian for this overlaying of effort with seeming diffidence: sprezzatura, the art of doing that which is difficult while appearing to do nothing at all, and it suited Gaston’s temperament perfectly. Although this brilliant diffidence was to prove extremely effective in his understanding of English methods of conducting politics, it nevertheless provoked dislike and mistrust among his French (and later American) colleagues, who were bewildered by the ‘false lightness of his comportment’. No one could be more French than Gaston, as was illustrated by his rather mournful recollection of the lack of girls at Oxford (‘some misogynist dons arranged for them to read the most indecent authors of the Restoration, which caused them to flee’), but the ability to slip on the well-cut mantle of the English gentleman when required gave him great pleasure. Oxford also provided him with a network of acquaintances which formed another step on the staircase of ambition which climbed away from the Faubourg-Poissonière.

  The conversation of dons and the mysterious rites of High Table gave a richer polish to Gaston’s already impressive intellect, while the company of men like Ivor Spencer-Churchill, cousin to the future prime minister, who took him to visit the family house at Blenheim, introduced him as a guest to the world he was so determined to inhabit. No more paying for a ticket and wriggling under a table to get a good view: at Blenheim Gaston could stroll beneath the Thornhill ceilings or the oaks in Capability Brown’s park as an invited equal. Gaston’s memories of Blenheim make their way into The Blessing, where CharlesEdouard de Valhubert installs a bust of the Duke of Marlborough in Grace’s bedroom and goes about humming, ‘Marlbrou s’en va-t-en guerre.’ (One of Gaston’s most distinctive traits, remembered by everyone who knew him, was his habit of inserting snatches of song into his speech. The Duchess of Devonshire, Nancy’s sister Deborah, was astonished that he even knew English nursery rhymes, and one critic of Nancy’s novels found it a ridiculous exaggeration. It was, however, quite true.) In November 1944, when he organized a victory luncheon for Churchill in Paris, Gaston dug out a bust of the prime minister’s ancestor, the scourge of Louis XIV, to display at the table. ‘It’s too much, ’ remarked Churchill, but he was rather touched.

  A good deal has been made of Nancy Mitford’s enduring romance with France, but Gaston had a
similar tendresse for many aspects of Englishness. Picturing him wandering at Blenheim, it is irresistible not to see him as an (admittedly spottier) Charles Ryder, the artistic middle-class boy intoxicated by the splendours of the old aristocracy in Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Perceptions of Oxford have been coloured for good or ill for half a century by Waugh’s great elegy at the opening of the novel, and Gaston was not immune to the lure of the aquatint. ‘I lodged in one of the ancient monastic buildings of the sixteenth century, ’ he recalled. ‘How young we were, and how those times seem far away!’ His brother Jean-Paul describes Gaston’s experience in terms that echo his praise of their Polish ancestors: ‘He took no vanity [from Oxford] except in so much as to clarify his vision of society and the world, which directed him to the pursuit of what there is of the most refined and the most elegant, the most distinguished and without doubt the best of our humanity, blending from this culture the type of a truly superior man.’8

  At Oxford, Gaston discovered the cavalier poet Richard Lovelace, the adherent of Charles II who was wounded fighting under Grand Condé at Dunkirk and died in alluringly romantic poverty. He later wrote of his affection for a particular poem, ‘To Lucasta, Going to the Wars’, which perfectly summed up the relationships with Mars and Venus that coloured his life: