by Lisa Hilton
6
THE PURSUIT OF HONOUR
In 1919, Prince Antoine Bibesco brought his fiancée, Elizabeth Asquith, to the bedside of his dear friend Marcel Proust. Proust, somewhat embarrassed to receive Miss Asquith en déshabille, nonetheless pronounced himself enchanted by the encounter. Many of Proust’s circle, however, disapproved of the bourgeois Jewish doctor’s son whose only object in life seemed to have been to ingratiate himself in the Faubourg. Although Proust had already published two volumes of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, they felt that he would make much better use of his genius if he were not so fond of society. A decade later, Maurice and Rose Palewski, whose son was also a close friend of Bibesco, were having similar thoughts. In 1927, Maurice had bought a property at Louveciennes, west of Paris in the Seine-et-Oise. He and Rose devoted their retirement to improving the property, but though Gaston had a room there, he rarely used it. He preferred strolling round the Invalides in intense discussion with his friend Marcel Fouchet, or talking vaguely about a thesis he intended to write on English painting, which never got further than the title. His concerned parents felt that having made such a promising beginning under Lyautey, their talented son was settling into eternal studentdom.
Proust’s Pastiches et Mélanges notes the encounter with Antoine and Elizabeth, whom he compares to a beauty stepped down from an Italian fresco. He also added a late subplot concerning a parvenu First Empire family and the attempts of ‘Saint-Simon’, convinced that the most vital interests of the state are founded on the rights of dukes, to undermine them. The irony of the pastiche is not so much Saint-Simon’s absurdity, but that it is ‘Proust himself, “the little Proust”, who had travelled the Guermantes way and emerged far beyond’, who is speaking of the Faubourg Saint-Germain ‘from the standpoint of a social superior, with the bitter diction and violent syntax and in the haughty person of the great memorialist’.1 Gaston never aspired to despise, but he yearned desperately to belong.
Gaston’s connection with Proust was through Jacques-Emile Blanche, the painter whose Sunday afternoon salons formed an important centre for his early Parisian social life. The décor of Persian rugs and chintz gave Gaston an advance taste of the ‘artistic’ houses he would come to know later in Chelsea. Proust had contributed the preface to Blanche’s Propos de Peintre, but this friendship, ‘an amity armed to the teeth’, 2 collapsed when Proust’s star outshone that of his friend. Chez Blanche, Gaston came to know many of the living prototypes for Proust’s characters; while his parents fretted about his idleness, he was setting out on his course du côté de chez Guermantes.
It was through Blanche that Gaston met Antoine Bibesco, who lived on the enchanted Ile St Louis, at 45 Quai Bourbon. His mother, Princesse Marthe Bibesco, played duets with Fauré and knew Liszt, Wagner and Debussy. She became a friend and lifelong correspondent of Gaston’s. There were Vuillards on the gold-leafed walls which, with their antique mirrors, presented a mosaic appearance that Proust compared to San Marco; Odilon Redon and Bonnard were regular visitors. Antoine and Elizabeth lived above, amid eighteenth-century vases and panels by Boucher. Their parties were international and political. Antoine, who would have been in his forties when Gaston first knew him, was a successful diplomat. Gaston met Leon Blum, the poetess Anna de Noailles, Lord Lloyd, in an atmosphere which, he wrote, ‘was one of those privileged environments where one can capture the essence of a civilization: it was that of French Europe’. It was this ‘essence’, in which Nancy and Gaston shared such a fervent belief, that coloured both their lives with joy and melancholy. Gaston was fascinated by Antoine’s family in much the same manner as he was later fascinated by the Mitfords. They used a private language – secrets for example, were ‘tombs’ and anyone who violated them ‘hyenas’ – and, of course, he ‘tutoyed’ Proust.
The Bibescos knew everyone, including the originals of Proust’s impossibly grand Guermantes family, derived from the Castellanes and the Talleyrand-Périgords. Boni de Castellane, who contributed some aspects of the character of the Marquis de Saint-Loup, had been ‘the most brilliant young man in Parisian society’ until his American wife grew tired of his extravagance. Boni’s mother was a model for the Princesse de Guermantes, his aunt, the Princesse Marie de Radziwill (née Castellane, her mother was a Talleyrand-Périgord) once thanked him for taking her to luncheon at the Ritz by saying she was particularly grateful as she had never before dined at an inn. Gaston obviously remembered Boni’s anecdotes about Aimery de la Rochefoucauld, nicknamed ‘Placement’ for his addiction to etiquette, as this makes its way into The Blessing. Marriage for love is all very well, but why exchange a few nights of passion for a whole lifetime at the wrong end of the table?
Gaston’s attitude to his own family was ambivalent. He was proud of his father and had a close relationship with his Diamant-Berger cousin Marcel. He never concealed either his Polish or his Jewish roots, but nor did he ever emphasize them. Jean-Paul was much more interested in his family history and visited Poland several times, persuading Gaston to accompany him there in 1921, when they visited an aunt at Wilno on a trip which also included Poznan and Warsaw. Presumably both Palewski boys knew Polish, though their parents had not insisted that they follow the Jewish faith, and they both converted to Christianity. In 1923 in the chapel of Saint Joseph de Cluny in Paris’s fourteenth arrondissement, Gaston was received into the Catholic church by Abbé Mugnier, a fashionable priest who was much sought after as a confessor by smart Parisiennes. His godfather was Henri Bremond, a former Jesuit and distinguished literary critic. Gaston’s choice of spiritual counsellors does not appear uncalculated – this last step to assimilation contained an element of social ambition – but in his own writing he reveals himself on occasion as a sincere, if somewhat sentimental Christian.
Through the diaspora of the Polish intelligentsia in which his uncle Michel Rabbinowicz moved, Gaston came to know Jean Godebski. Jean’s father, the sculptor Cyprien Godebski, lived in a sixth-floor flat whose extreme modesty was the inverse of the glamour of his guests. Ravel was Jean’s godfather, Gide and Poulenc were intimates and the walls of the scruffy apartment were hung with portraits of Cyprien by his friends Manet and Renoir. Gaston was on his way to being a crashing snob, but he had too much respect for genuine talent and sensibility not to admire the Godebskis, who devoted their lives to their brilliant friends. He was as thrilled to share a glass of orangeade with Stravinsky or Satie as a dish of Belle Epoque champagne with the Princesse Bibesco.
Moving in such exalted circles, it was unsurprising that Gaston seemed disaffected by his own relatively modest life, so his family were astonished when he found a job at Boivin, a small, conservative publishing house near the Place Saint-Sulpice. He tried to interest the director in a series of his own devising, ‘What you need to know about …’ (if only he had known Prod then). It was not accepted; still, he stuck it out for two years. When Jean-Paul visited him in his gloomy office he remarked cheerfully: ‘See how low I’ve sunk!’ Eventually his boss offered him a partnership in the business, but Gaston admitted with relief that he hadn’t a penny to invest and resigned. Rose Palewski stepped in and wangled him a job at a prototype think-tank through her friend Mme Raymond Poincaré, with whom she took singing lessons. The Bulletin Quotidien, whose office was at 282 Boulevard Saint-Germain, produced daily reports on the political and economic situation with a right-wing bias. The atmosphere was young, energetic and provocative, and Gaston loved it, remaining there until 1928, when one of the editors who also headed the Journée Industrielle offered him the job of secretary of a centre-right parliamentary group, the Democratic Alliance, led by the gifted fifty-year-old Paris deputy Paul Reynaud. At first, Gaston scrabbled about to make ends meet, writing odd articles in the afternoons when the Chamber was sitting, then joining his boss in the late afternoon to work on finance briefs. In 1930, Reynaud became finance minister in the second Tardieu government, and Gaston accompanied him to the Rue de Rivoli, following his minister to the Colonial O
ffice in the government of Pierre Laval in 1931 as directeur de cabinet.
With a serious political job came Gaston’s first adult home: the apartment at 1 Rue Bonaparte that Nancy later gave to Fabrice de Sauveterre. Although his means were limited, Gaston immediately began to collect the pictures and objets with which the flat was soon filled. Collecting was a taste he shared with Nancy. When she gave this shared delight to Louis XV and Mme de Pompadour it was a realistic reflection of both relationships. Her letters are full of treasures discovered in the antiquaires to which Gaston introduced her, she understood that relationship with things that made Gaston call his paintings his companions and confidants. Later, when she was rich, she tried to buy things for him, though even the idea, she joked, would cause him to knock her flat on the floor. Like Nancy with her fittings for couture clothes, Gaston loved the process of acquisition, ‘the ardent duel with the dealers, who didn’t blame me because they saw that I loved their things, and that I bought them not as a speculation, but to cherish’. Gaston’s relationship with the dealers becomes Charles-Edouard de Valhubert’s in The Blessing. ‘Here are the vases, not bad … but the price is the funniest thing you ever heard. M. Dupont does love to make me laugh. Now what of this bronze? I am thinking of it seriously. I do love Louis XIV bronze, so delightfully solid, so proof against housemaids … As soon as M. Dupont has mentioned the real price I shall buy it.’ The Rue Bonaparte flat, a few doors along from where his first inspiration, Maréchal Lyautey, lived, was most convenient for other activities. ‘If this bed could talk …’ Gaston once boasted to a friend. Not the remark of a gentleman.
For a year, Gaston’s boss remained in the ascendant. A trip to Saigon, Bangkok and Calcutta was followed by Reynaud’s promotion to minister of justice. In February 1932 Gaston formed part of the French delegation to the League of Nations Disarmament conference in Geneva. Here he claimed to have heard, faintly, the sound of boots marching over Europe. Germany was to leave the league the next year. Gaston found himself exasperated by the weaknesses of a parliamentary system that spent more time making resolutions to take resolutions than taking action and he was perturbed by the French government’s insistence that further disarmament would produce greater security. Even more disappointing was Reynaud’s fall in the elections that May. After only three months at the Chancellery, he returned to the back benches.
Perhaps it was not a coincidence that Gaston met Charles de Gaulle in 1934, the same year that Maréchal Lyautey died. He immediately saw the light. After their first encounter, ‘I decided from now on to use all the means and relationships I had at my disposal in the service of this man … Everything he said was of an incomparable force and originality. I entered totally into his crusade, because it was a crusader, a preacher, that he made me think of.’
Charles de Gaulle was either a fraud, a saint, or the greatest political gambler of the twentieth century. After six years of screaming rows, Churchill inclined towards the latter view; Roosevelt definitely took the former. Saint-like, De Gaulle was stubborn, singleminded to the point of bigotry, capable of extraordinary self-sacrifice, often terrifyingly mystical and extremely irritating. In many ways, this archetypal Frenchman possessed a certain sort of Englishness, in his respect for a ‘law of extreme reticence that was both a pride and a desire not to allow the pure order of the family to interact with the impure order of family life’.3 God was a fact, not a discussion; the Catholic bourgeoisie, like the English, simply did not speak of certain matters. Spotless honour and service to the nation were the only worthy masculine ideals. De Gaulle never got on with the English, though, neither liking nor understanding them, and without Gaston Palewski’s contribution to his self-imposed crusade at its most feeble pass, it might well have failed.
The deep traditionalism of De Gaulle’s family was evident in the fact that although they were Parisian, his mother returned to her home town of Lille to give birth to him. Henri and Jeanne de Gaulle were monarchists who did not acknowledge the rights of the French Revolution, Catholic, puritanical, worthy without ever being generous or cheerful. Henri de Gaulle taught philosophy and literature at the Jesuit college of the Immaculate Conception on the Rue Vaugirard. Like Maurice Palewski he educated his children in their history by walking them through the Paris streets, to the Arc de Triomphe and the tomb of Napoleon. De Gaulle knew his vocation early. At fifteen he sat the examination for the officers’ academy at St Cyr which he entered in 1910. Already conspicuous for his great height – fellow students called him ‘The Asparagus’ and an aloof, superior manner, he graduated thirteenth in his class of 210, progressing to the 33rd Infantry Regiment, where his colonel was one Philippe Pétain, the future hero of Verdun. After the First War, he trained Polish officers near Warsaw, returning in 1920 to take up a teaching post at St Cyr, the same year he married Yvonne Vendroux, known as ‘Tante Yvonne’ to the Free French.
It was something of an arranged match, but the marriage was a devoted one and they had three children, Philippe, Elisabeth and Anne. Anne, the youngest, was mentally handicapped and her illness forged an important bond between the couple, who cared for her tenderly and bravely in a much less tolerant time. It would be a cliché to say that Anne brought out De Gaulle’s most gentle, human qualities were it not also true. Speaking to his military chaplain as he prepared to lead his tank division into battle in 1940, De Gaulle said: ‘For a father, believe me, it is a very great trial. But for me, this child is also a blessing, she is my joy, she has helped me to rise above all setbacks and all honours, and always to aim higher.’4
What De Gaulle was to do – that solitary escape to England after the fall of his country in 1940, that Shakespearean insistence that he, like a mediaeval king, contained France in his person – was ‘an action that has scarcely had any precedence since the appearance of sovereign states’.5 Its magnitude has been smoothed by history, one heroism in a period of great heroism, yet it is worth pausing to consider. One man alone defied the orders of the government he was sworn to serve and declared to another, on the basis of no authority whatsoever, that it was he, and only he, who represented his country. His conviction was such that this single act, which could so very very easily have been taken as no more than the delusion of a madman, won him the support of the world’s greatest empire, a support that was vindicated when he returned to govern his country four years later. His was an entirely spiritual rebellion, and only the strength of his imagination succeeded in turning it into fact. Like Châteaubriand, he led his people by dreams; like Napoleon he ‘made his plans out of the visions of his sleeping soldiers’.
Gaston first came to know De Gaulle through his writing. In the summer of 1934, in the journal Le Temps, he came upon an extract of a new book by a Colonel de Gaulle, Vers l’armée de mêtier. Following on from his previous publications La discorde chez l’ennemi and Le Fil de l’epée, De Gaulle argued powerfully for a new, more efficient army of armoured divisions which could work in close co-ordination with the air force. He emphasized that it was crucial for French industry to start producing tanks and planes at a time when, as Gaston had observed at Geneva, the policy of the French government was directed towards disarmament. Reynaud was sympathetic towards De Gaulle’s new approach to strategy and asked for a meeting.
This eventually took place in December, three months after Lyautey’s death. Palewski welcomed De Gaulle into Reynaud’s office at the Rue Bremontier, where the colonel’s head almost touched the ceiling. Gaston mentioned his cousin, Marcel Diamant-Berger, De Gaulle’s companion in the attempted escape of 1917, and De Gaulle visibly relaxed. They went on to discuss Morocco, Lyautey and Pétain, for whom De Gaulle’s initial liking and respect had dissipated: ‘a great man who died in 1925’ was his comment. Reynaud was then introduced and the three men spoke for an hour. Reynaud had another engagement, but instructed Gaston to work with De Gaulle on preparing a report which would pinpoint the weaknesses in current strategy at the Ecole de Guerre. Gaston and De Gaulle repaired to Poccardi�
�s restaurant on the Boulevard des Italiens. The food was mediocre, but their conversation lasted well into the afternoon. De Gaulle subsequently visited Rue Bonaparte on several occasions where, propped against the wall between the two windows of Gaston’s salon, he outlined his thoughts for the ‘effort’ to come. Further discussion took place at the De Gaulles’ flat on Boulevard Raspail, where Yvonne hosted a black-tie dinner once a month. Both men favoured an alliance between the British, the French and the Russians to counter the potential for German aggression. Two days after their first encounter, De Gaulle wrote the first of the sixty-two letters he addressed to Reynaud up to 1939. The three men would remain closely connected until the man Churchill called ‘l’homme du destin’ was summoned to his fate in 1940.
Reynaud’s commitment to armoured divisions and a pact with the Soviets would during the following years place him in opposition to his former allies on the right. Gaston prepared his speech for a foreign policy debate at the end of 1935, shortly after Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia in which. Reynaud spoke of the danger of German imperialism and the threat it posed to smaller nations allied with France. The speech received strong support from all spectra of the left, diminishing noticeably (Gaston counted those who were applauding) across the right and extreme right. Reynaud’s attempts to instigate production of an armoured division that would be ready to go into action by 1940 met with repeated failure throughout 1935, at the end of which Laval’s government was replaced by Albert Sarraut’s. Reynaud remained on the Finance Commission, where his speeches, researched by Gaston, formulated many of the ideas which later became known as Gaullist. The feebleness of the party system was a consistent theme: ‘We can no longer remain where government depends on the vote of one or another parliamentary factions … The dangers threatening democracy are too great for us to be able to remain subject to the exclusive regime of party.’6 Despite a theatrical showdown with Daladier in 1937 and the promised support of Leon Blum for an alternative alliance which would include moderate Communists who supported De Gaulle’s reforms, Reynaud’s efforts came to nothing. He returned to power as minister for justice in 1938, but Gaston estimated that it was already too late. After Munich and the annexing of Austria, Gaston believed that the British were keen for Reynaud to continue in office, but there was already the sense that the proto-Gaullist faction was a spent force in French politics.
