by Lisa Hilton
Waiting for love: Nancy spent five hopeless years ‘engaged’ to Hamish St Clair Erskine.
Nancy’s wedding to Peter Rodd – handsome, feckless and famously boring.
Gaston Palewski, ‘the Colonel’, Nancy’s great love.
The Connaught Hotel – Nancy and Gaston were caught here together and it remained a codeword ever after.
Rue Bonaparte. Gaston’s beloved flat was sequestered as punishment for his having joined De Gaulle.
Immortal in France, General De Gaulle’s speech of 18 June 1940 was not thought worth recording by the BBC.
Piccadilly and Leicester Square: Nancy’s eyewitness accounts provide a devastating description of the Blitz.
Nancy spent some of her happiest times with Gaston at Rue Monsieur.
‘Good clothes are a matter of health’ – Nancy was an enthusiastic devotee of the New Look.
Gaston’s daily walk across the Pont Royal. Nancy and Gaston were both ‘greedy for beauty’.
Nancy spent many happy summers in Venice, for whose preservation she and Gaston campaigned.
The ‘Pal Exquis’, home to ‘l’Embrassadeur’.
Gaston and Nancy were devoted to the spirit of ‘l’Europe Française’.
Nancy was a Gaullist even before she met Gaston.
Gaston in action as a politician.
Gaston’s achievements commemorated at Rue Bonaparte.
Louise de Vilmorin was a fixture at the Embassy, a lover of Duff Cooper and – possibly – Gaston.
Did Gaston seduce Nancy’s American friend Susan Mary Alsop?
The Sun King’s great house was the source of several of Nancy’s most successful books.
Paris at his feet and a beautiful woman in his arms – Gaston’s scalophilia began with l’Escalier Daru.
Nancy spent the last years of her life at Versailles.
In America, public opinion had turned virulently against De Gaulle after his refusal to make the military liaison broadcast. Encouraged by the White House and the State Department, the press portrayed the general as a presumptuous imposter who had actively impeded the Allied advance and sacrificed American lives for the sake of his own status, a position Roosevelt had affirmed at press conferences. De Gaulle surprised his critics by addressing the United States in English, declaring himself happy to be meeting the president once more and paying tribute to ‘all those American men and women who at home are working relentlessly for the war and also those brave American boys, soldiers, sailors and airmen, who abroad are fighting our common enemies’. By the end of his trip the Chicago Daily News, the right-wing Nation and The New York Times, as well as the London Times, were much more positive.
De Gaulle’s manifest enthusiasm for the prosperity and modernity of America was obvious to all who met him. Fiorello La Guardia, the mayor of New York, had skilfully aligned De Gaulle’s success as a popular leader with Roosevelt, who was facing an election; thus his triumphal reception at City Hall served as a Democratic endorsement. Since in terms of metropolitan provincialism the self-satisfaction of Parisians is equalled only by that of New Yorkers, De Gaulle judged his audience perfectly. Taking the microphone from La Guardia, he once again spoke in English. ‘From the very first, your city, which is literally a world, perceived where France had its being … It is up to us Frenchmen to show that we can return help for help, faithfulness for faithfulness.’ If he was dumbstruck when the black singer Marion Anderson sang the ‘Marseillaise’ at a concert at Madison Square Garden, altogether his public reception in the States could not have been more promising. Gaston’s description was ‘heartwarming’.
Gaston arrived back in France with the general on 20 August. On 31 July, the Third Army under General Patton had moved westward from Avranches to Argentan, 167 kilometres from the French capital. The race for Paris was on. Gaston recalled that they had almost not made it to Normandy at all. Sleepless in their plane, while De Gaulle dozed beside him, he wept as the pilot enumerated the names of the towns over which they flew. At dawn, a lone German fighter was spotted. The plane had lost contact with its accompanying squadron and Gaston was forced to make a decision. He felt that for those few moments, as the enemy plane circled, the destiny of France was in his hands. The thought that they might be shot down was unbearable, but he knew the general well enough to be certain that he would not consider turning back. So De Gaulle slept on while Gaston watched breathlessly through ‘the longest half-hour of my life’. From Cherbourg they arrived via Rennes at Rambouillet, where a doctor was summoned to deal with the general’s croaking voice, exhausted by roadside speechifying.
The news from Paris was confusing. On 15 August the city’s police had gone on strike in response to a German move to disarm them. Two days later the Communist-dominated COMAC (Comité Militaire d’Action) met to discuss their options for an uprising. De Gaulle had emphasized that no popular insurrection should begin without his authority, but even as his prefect of police, Charles Luizet, arrived to take up his post the same day, the city appeared to be out of control. The general desperately needed to reach Paris, as a citizens’ revolt could mean his authority would be compromised by another popular (that is, Communist) leader, with the implication that Communist government would lead to the imposition of AMGOT. However, his strategy also required that the city should be freed by the Deuxième Division Blindée, under the command of Général Leclerc. He therefore had to convince Eisenhower and Patton to divert a planned thrust northwards towards the Rhine in favour of moving on Paris with the armoured division in the vanguard – and he had to do it before the Parisians established an alternative government.
The Nazis were already fleeing. ‘Along the Rue Lafayette, coming from the luxury hotels around the Etoile, sparkling torpedoes pass by containing purple-faced generals accompanied by elegant blonde women, looking as if they are off to some fashionable resort, ’ described Gaston’s great friend, Jean Galtier-Boissière.3 Despite a chronic lack of Resistance ammunition – the actors of the Comédie Française gallantly planned to revolt with the aid of four shotguns and two dummy pistols from the prop room – fighting had broken out all over the centre of the city, encouraged by the call to arms of the Communist paper L’Humanité. An unlikely hero in the preservation of Paris was General von Choltitz, the German commander of the region. Like De Gaulle, Choltitz needed the Allies to arrive swiftly. His orders from Hitler were to defend Paris to the last, and if forced to retreat, to leave the city in ruins. Choltitz procrastinated in the hope of being able to surrender, but he knew that if the Führer learned of this, it would mean the Luftwaffe.
Fretting at Rambouillet, De Gaulle learned at last that Eisenhower had authorized the advance. Covering 240 kilometres in under forty hours, Leclerc arrived in the southern suburbs. Eight kilometres from the Porte d’Orléans, Leclerc learned that General Omar Bradley had given the order for the US 4th Division to advance: There was now a strong possibility that Paris would be freed by Inter-Allied troops rather than French ones. Leclerc ordered Raymond Dronne, the captain of a tank detachment, to push forward into the city by any means possible and accept no command to stop. At around 9.30 on the morning of 24 August Dronne found himself, spent and bewildered, outside the Hôtel de Ville in the fourth arrondissement. A triumphant crowd carried him into the building to the waiting arms of Georges Bidault, the president of the National Council of Resistance. As the news spread, by radio, cycle messenger and frantic telephonists, the bells of first Notre-Dame and then more and more churches began to ring. For many Parisians, this was the unforgettable moment; the moment when the skies above their city swelled with church bells after four years of silence. The historians Artemis Cooper and Antony Beevor note that ‘with the occasional boom of a heavy gun and the constant refrain of the Marsellaise … the Liberation of Paris started to sound like the 1812 Overture’.4
At his headquarters at the Hôtel Meurice, General von Choltitz heard the bells and knew that it was over. Paris was saved. On the afternoon of 25 A
ugust he was driven through an aggressive crowd to sign the surrender at the Prefecture on the Ile de la Cité. Few of those who jeered and spat at Choltitz were aware of what they owed him. In 1940, Paris had been spared by an American, William Bullitt; now, in 1944, it had been rescued by the last commander of the hated occupiers.
General de Gaulle, accompanied by Gaston, arrived at the Gare Montparnasse shortly afterwards. After saluting Leclerc, they were driven to the old headquarters in the Rue St Dominique, then to the Prefecture and, finally, at eight o’clock, to the Hôtel de Ville. De Gaulle’s speech was short and choked with emotion. ‘Paris! Paris outraged, Paris broken, Paris martyred, but Paris liberated! Liberated by herself, liberated by her people, with the help of the whole of France, that is to say the France which fights, the true France, the eternal France.’
His promise of 18 June 1940 had been kept. Those who deride De Gaulle, who claim that he was deluding himself as to the actual role the French had played in the liberation, who criticize his blindness, his arrogance, his absurd insistence on his role as the leader of an illegitimate government of a shattered state, are in great measure correct, but they miss an essential psychological point about the general. True, he was fanatical, even ridiculous. His self-consciously mystical identification with Joan of Arc was absurd. True, he had consistently placed the honour of France above the strategies of his allies. But only a fanatic could have done what he had done. Only a fanatic could have defied the state he had sworn to serve, convinced a government at war that he, and only he, alone and almost entirely unsupported, embodied the true spirit of a nation that had capitulated. Only a fanatic could have been possessed of such immovable conviction of the justice of his cause. The quality which had first captivated Gaston, that spiritual separation from other men, was the source of his triumph. De Gaulle was in some senses a saint, not because he was good, but because of the extraordinary and unswerving faith in himself as the rightful leader of France that had brought him to this point. And even now, with France at last in his hands, he refused to betray his conviction. Bidault requested him to proclaim the Republic from the balcony of the Hôtel de Ville, and De Gaulle, dumbly, offensively, refused. To proclaim the Republic would be to lend legitimacy to the Pétain regime, to suggest that Vichy had been something more than an illegal aberration. ‘Why should we proclaim the Republic?’ he asked. ‘She has never ceased to exist.’
One wonders where Gaston slept that magical night. The Catholic press may have distributed hurriedly printed leaflets reminding young women of the importance of preserving their virtue even amid the intoxicating joy of the liberation, but no one appeared to take much notice. True to their national reputation, the French celebrated by making love. In what Simone de Beauvoir described as a ‘debauche de fraternité’, they rejoiced in the shrubs along the Champs Elysées, in the Tuileries, in the gardens of the Invalides and along the quays of the Seine. One historian suggests that Gaston might have taken the time to go to Louveciennes and hold his mother in his arms, but it does seem rather unlikely there was a vacancy there.
By the afternoon of 26 August, over a million people had gathered along the route from the Arc de Triomphe to Notre-Dame. At three o’clock, De Gaulle arrived to take the salute and relight the flame of the Unknown Soldier, cold and dead since 1940. Then, with Gaston a few steps behind him, the general set off along the Champs Elysées, arms raised in victory, to walk the mile to the Place de la Concorde. In one image, Gaston appears just behind De Gaulle’s left shoulder, radiant. When they reached the top of the Rue de Rivoli, De Gaulle got into an open car to travel the last couple of kilometres to Notre-Dame. As he did so, gunfire broke out, and the crowd threw themselves to the ground. It has never been ascertained whether this was a last-minute assassination attempt or a trigger-happy Resistant unused to his weapon, but De Gaulle was imperturbable. The cavalcade moved off, down to the Hôtel de Ville and across to the Ile de la Cité and the cathedral.
What took place at Notre-Dame was a moment of apotheosis, an improbable piece of symbolic theatre that burned into the hearts of all who witnessed it. As the general entered the church, shots were heard once more. His guard returned fire, aiming up at the towers and bringing down lumps of masonry. Again, the crowd hit the floor, those inside the cathedral crawling to shelter under pews or behind pillars. Quite calm, De Gaulle continued his progress, walking alone towards the high altar with the mystical solemnity of a crusader presenting the Oriflamme. Malcolm Muggeridge, serving in British intelligence, was an eyewitness and his account perfectly captures the essence of the man: ‘The effect was fantastic. The huge congregation who had all been standing suddenly fell flat on their faces. There was a single exception; one solitary figure, like a lonely giant. It was, of course, De Gaulle. Thenceforth, that was how I always saw him – towering and alone, the rest, prostrate.’5
14
THE ADVANCE ON PARIS
Like the rest of the world, Nancy followed the liberation on the BBC, where she also heard of Gaston’s appointment as chef de cabinet. He wrote to her that Paris was admirably beautiful, that the smoke of the factories was gone, leaving a ‘ravishing’ sky. Not quite an invitation, but it was enough for Nancy. Just over a year later a ‘Mrs Rodd’ appeared without warning at De Gaulle’s headquarters at Rue St Dominique and asked to see M. Palewski. The doorman was quite used to such requests. André Malraux spitefully described the secretaries on the ground floor whispering respectfully ‘Mme la Duchesse pour M. le Directeur’. ‘Send up the Duchess!’ was the enthusiastic response from upstairs. If Gaston’s present arrangements were discommoded by this eccentric arrival, he was far too kind to show it. ‘So, what’s the news?’ he greeted her, and Nancy, having had a year to rehearse, launched into a stream of shriek-making anecdote. Gaston was moved, charmed, delighted to see his ‘chère amie’, and if he was obliged to point out to Nancy that he really did have a lot of serious obligations, he also found the time to take her to Versailles to look at the Bouchers.
Nancy had been planning her move for some time. ‘Oh, to live in Paris, I’d give anything, ’ she had written to Lady Redesdale in September 1944. ‘I am angling like mad for a job.’ Her initial scheme was to establish a Parisian branch of Heywood Hill. While the war dragged on, though, this could only remain an idea, and while she waited it out, Nancy wrote her masterpiece, The Pursuit of Love.
‘Etj’ai compris que tous ces matériaux de l’oeuvre littéraire, c’était ma vie passée, ’ wrote Proust. It would be absurd to suggest that Nancy Mitford might lay claim to the literary status of Proust, but the ‘key’ to her novels – who was really who – exerts a similar fascination. The originals of Proust’s characters, many of whom were known to Gaston, were kept alive by their literary fame long after the prototypes were dead; Hamish St Clair Erskine, Lord Redesdale, Louise de Vilmorin, Billa Harrod, Peter Rodd, too, are only really of interest now as models. Gaston’s fame as Fabrice was both a delight and a curse to him. Cyril Connolly never quite made it as a novelist, but is unforgettable as the Captain in The Blessing. Nancy’s central character in Pursuit, Linda, is a blend of her sisters and herself. Idina Gordon, the inspiration for Fanny’s mother, the deliciously unrepentant Bolter, has had a whole biography devoted to her. For Mitford fans, the novels provide an endlessly diverting game of who’s who.
Nancy herself was both irritated and amused by the insistence that everyone she knew saw themselves in her books, including her own in-laws and Deborah’s. When she wrote her biography of Mme de Pompadour, A.J.P. Taylor insisted that she had merely taken Fabrice and plonked a wig on him. Nancy delighted in this view, wondering if anyone would be convinced by Fabrice as Voltaire – ‘exactly like you, all his meals are TAKEN’, she wrote to Gaston – but Pursuit is a great deal more than a felicitous cobbling together of the anecdotes she recounted to Gaston in the course of their affair. In some measure, the book is wish fulfilment. The Radletts’ furious quarrels never end in prison or suicide, Aunt Sadie’s vaguene
ss is charming rather than irritating and Uncle Matthew, storming through the story with his stock whip, is a far cry from the battered Lord Redesdale who emerged from the war.
What it is not is the fantasy of a disappointed mistress. When Nancy wrote Pursuitshe did have her colonel, he had come back to her from the blue skies above Algeria, and she was preparing to embark on a life with him in the city she loved best in the world.
In July 1945, Lord Redesdale agreed to give Nancy £3,000 to buy a partnership in Heywood Hill, selling French books (which, naturally, she would go to Paris to acquire), for a 30 per cent markup. Nancy raced through the bureaucracy, obtaining a licence from the Board of Trade and an exit permit from the Foreign Office. Her new hat caused a sensation at the passport office. ‘The typists and clerks got such terrible giggles, they were paralyzed and couldn’t attend to anything, it must have made their day.’ English to the core, she set off equipped with dozens of oatcakes as provision against nasty foreign breakfasts and arrived to find her beloved in her beloved city in glorious sun. She stayed first at the Hôtel Jacob et d’Angleterre, ‘the kind of hotel that Oscar Wilde died in’, before moving to the Hôtel Pont Royal whose rackety bar was a great feature of ex-pat life. After two weeks she wrote to her mother: ‘I am so completely happy here … I must come and live here as soon as I can, I feel a completely different person as though I had come out of a coalmine into daylight.’
