The Horror of Love

by Lisa Hilton

  At last Nancy was able to see Gaston’s beloved flat in the Rue Bonaparte, which had finally been released from sequestration. He lived on the first floor. The spiral staircase, that essential feature, was late eighteenth century. It led to three succeeding rooms overlooking the courtyard, high-ceilinged, filled with so many treasures of years in the sale rooms. One friend described it as a ‘submarine grotto, original, personal, wonderful’; another, less kindly, as ‘a souk’. There was a bust of Talleyrand’s mistress, several good terre-cuite pieces by Clodion, Second Empire furniture, pictures by Longhi and a suspicious Magdalen by Simon Vouet, a minor Corot, a marquetry table from the Rothschild collection, a Rodin, landscapes by Narcisse Diaz, a portrait of Pope Benedict XIV by Subeyras and a Louis XV sofa. Gaston had an office, a drawing room and the bedroom which doubled as a dining room, the bed conveniently placed near the table. He blamed the ‘cold respectability’ of his new position for the impossibility of Nancy staying at his apartment, but within a month, she had found a flat just along the street, at number 20. Once she is installed a few doors away from the tempting salle à manger, Nancy’s letters sing with happiness. Diana Cooper is angelic, the concierge is angelic, the maid is lovely, the rowing French neighbours better than a film, the food is lovely, always champagne, even at luncheon. When she returned to London in November 1945 – ‘In floods of tears, I do so love it here’ – Nancy had decided to leave England for good.

  When she came back in April 1946, she was a rich woman. The Pursuit of Love had earned £7,000 in its first six months. ‘Vive la litterature!’ cried the colonel when he arrived at her hotel to be greeted by a bottle of champagne. Nancy had resigned without regret from Heywood Hill and could afford to start househunting.

  The only drawback to Nancy’s lovely new wealth was that it made it difficult to get rid of Prod. His relationship with Adelaide Lubbock continued until the 1950s, and they were as accepted in their own way as a couple as were Nancy and Gaston by their friends, but Peter refused to give Nancy a divorce. She was not terribly troubled about the morality of her situation, despite Waugh’s grumblings about the indecency of her happiness, but Peter was an encumbrance and an expense. He knew Gaston, of course, and appeared quite amiable towards him – in a letter from Blomfield Road in 1946, Nancy reported to Gaston that Peter wouldn’t mind if the Colonel came to stay while he was away on a projected trip to Spain. ‘I said to him, about my will, would it hurt your feelings if I left some money to the Colonel. Peter said, hasn’t he got any money? NR No PR Then I think it is a good idea, he ought to have some. But the trouble is I’m not dead.’

  Nancy was kind to Peter, cooking him breakfast and fussing over his plans, but there is a sense in which she has sailed beyond him, floating in a couture balloon. None of the racking sense of failure that haunted her earlier remarks about their marriage remains. She was in love, her life was blossoming, and perhaps she felt, if anything, sorry and a bit embarrassed for him. Cynthia Gladwyn noted that Nancy was devoted to Prod but she must have found him a crashing bore. By 1948, he was hanging around her Paris flat ‘making my life hell’, as she wrote to Diana. The prospect of maintaining him indefinitely was a worry – ‘even Linda can’t pay for that’ – but Nancy never seriously considered retreading the thorny path of duty. Though Peter had fought bravely and honourably in the war, peacetime saw a return to his old dissolute habits. He cut a pitiful figure, the bright, beautiful Balliol boy, purposeless, debauched, broke, doing all he could to prey on Nancy’s sense of guilt even as his overdraft gobbled up her hard-written funds.

  Nancy’s biographer Laura Thompson suggests that Prod’s refusal to grant her freedom in a sense did her a favour. Just as he had saved her face by pretending to have stolen her from Hamish, now he was her alibi in the ‘case of the Unwanted Englishwoman’. So long as she was married, she did not have to face the fact that Gaston wouldn’t have her even if she were free. And it was convenient for Gaston to bring up the threat to his political respectability when it suited him. It is impossible, however, to say whether or not he would have married Nancy had he been able to do so in the mid-1940s. Nor indeed whether she would have wished to exchange the freedoms of her own life – her work, her friends, her travels – for the role of a dutiful Yvonne De Gaulle. Prod may have cared enough for Nancy to want to spite her when she spurned him, but his reasons for hanging around were purely mercenary. Had she not been such a professional success, she might have had a chance at becoming Mme Palewski; as it was, Prod, perennially unemployed and full of improbable schemes, had no intention of releasing his meal ticket. He was quite shameless, continuing his habit of stealing any cash Nancy might have left lying about. When he made one of his odd marital visits to Paris, she was forced to have Marie, her housekeeper, sew money into the hems of the curtains to prevent him finding it. Nancy bore no grudge against him, even remained fond, in her way, of the man she had once thought ‘heavenly’, though he remained the fly in her Guerlain cold cream until any chance she may have had of marriage with Gaston had passed.

  For a year Nancy lived like a proper Paris bohèmienne, moving between hotels and borrowed flats, before settling in December 1947 at 7 Rue Monsieur. The perfect introduction to the flat is provided by Evelyn Waugh:

  You cross the Seine and penetrate the very heart of the fashionable quarter of Paris, the Faubourg Saint Germain. You go into a quiet side street, so exclusively aristocratic that few taxi-drivers know its name and ring at a great, white shabby door, which in due time opens, revealing a courtyard surrounded on three sides by low buildings of the period of the restored Bourbon monarchy. Straight in front, on the ground floor, with its glass doors opening into a garden behind, lie the apartments of Miss Mitford.1

  Unlike Gaston, Nancy had no taste for clutter. Her rooms – hall, dining room, drawing room, bedroom, bathroom – (Marie slept several flights up, as was conventional, in the chambre de bonne) were furnished with her favourite London pieces, set off by softly draped pink taffeta curtains and new finds from the antiquaries of the sixth arrondissement: a damask-covered chaise-longue, a Dresden clock. Her bedroom was white, with an enormous bed and a rather alarming portrait of Gaston, the drawing room was French grey, with the lamps crinolined in ribboned muslin petticoats, which one visitor recalled gave an enchanting light. One of the loveliest pictures of Nancy shows her with Jessica, having tea in a room so sunny it seems like a garden, with white wicker furniture and the walls dappled by the shadows of ivy leaves.

  Once she had a flat of her own, Nancy and Gaston could spend more time together, though he never stayed the night, continuing his London habit of going back to bed in the Rue Bonaparte and telephoning her at breakfast time. For a while, at least, it can only have seemed to Nancy that everything she had dreamed of – financial independence, a beautiful home, an admirable, desirable man who loved her, with whose voice she began her days – had been attained. Too many of her biographers, determined to spy out the shadows beneath the sunlight, have been unwilling to grant her this period of unalloyed bliss, but that is what it was.

  Pursuit had bought Nancy her new life in Paris and, of course, had made Gaston famous beyond the world of French politics. Her dedication of the book ‘To Gaston Palewski’ did, however, cause difficulties, though as she observed, it was Gaston’s love of publicity that created them. Nancy had anticipated that her politically controversial family might create problems, writing to Evelyn that Gaston was pleased with the dedication, though fearful that the Communists would fall upon it. Negotiations about the dedication went back and forth. ‘I said shall I put To the Colonel, to G.P. and so on and he absolutely insisted on having his full name.’ Nancy offered to remove it entirely from the French edition. Gaston was clearly unable to resist being portrayed as the greatest French seducer since the Vicomte de Valmont (indeed, in a letter to Princesse Bibesco, he declares himself very pleased with the dedication), but when the connection was made he became very anxious.

  In February 1947 Nanc
y wrote to Diana that a left-wing paper was planning a splash with the headline ‘Hitler’s mistress’s sister dedicates daring book to M. Palewski’. The general was apparently appalled, and Nancy could not resist adding chummily: ‘You know how the one thing that can’t be forgiven is getting in their way politically.’ She mentions two more articles, though in fact nothing appeared, owing to a printers’ strike which delayed publication. Nancy claimed that Gaston had not permitted her to see the pieces, which Diana Mosley found extremely odd: ‘It is bizarre, Colonel invented it.’2 At Gaston’s request, Nancy returned to England for several months. This episode has been used as an example of how he manipulated her, with more than one writer suggesting he shunted her off for his own purposes, on the basis that, as he was by then out of office, such a scandal could not have hurt him. In fact, negative publicity would have been very damaging at what was a delicate time politically, since he was involved, as will be discussed, in the founding of a new Gaullist party, the RPF. And Nancy’s letters to Gaston during her absence are packed with lively social news and confident jokes, in no way suggesting that she was in disgrace.

  15

  POLITICS 1944–6

  ‘When we arrived in Paris, ’ Gaston recalled ‘the great problem which posed itself, with the reordering of the country and the inauguration of an administration which contained a certain number of new elements … and the preparation of a new Constitution, was relations with the interior Resistance. Immense difficulties awaited us, on a material as well as a political level … we had to draw up political choices which were highly delicate to make.’ De Gaulle had immediately confirmed Gaston in his position as Cabinet director, but though the general was now effectively the head of a real, rather than a nominal state, Gaston’s initial tasks were domestic.

  De Gaulle felt it was premature to install himself in the Elysée Palace, vacated by Albert Lebrun in 1940. Gaston suggested he take the Hôtel de Ville as his headquarters, but the general felt this was too revolutionary. He preferred to return to the Rue St Dominique, another gesture, like his refusal to proclaim the Republic, which emphasized the continuity of the legitimate French government. He took the traditional office of the war minister, with Gaston’s bureau nearby. Since his flat in the Rue Bonaparte was at that time still under sequestration, Gaston had little choice other than to camp out in the ministry, sleeping in a bed which, it was claimed, had belonged to Napoleon’s mother Laetitia. Nancy later admitted she had been fond of this arrangement, as she had always known where Gaston was, and they were both amused by the fact that the war ministry was housed in a former convent which had once hosted Mme du Deffand’s famous salon. A favourite story was a conversation between the hostess and her lover, Pont-de-Veyle, with whom she had enjoyed fifty years of ‘cloudless happiness’.1 Discussing their relationship, which had never been troubled by the least disagreement, Mme du Deffand suggested: ‘But perhaps it is really because we have been rather indifferent to each other?’

  ‘Very possibly.’

  A proper residence had also to be found for the De Gaulle family. Gaston located a suitable house on the Rue Champ d’Entraînement on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne, but De Gaulle was equally stubborn on the question of furniture, refusing to make use of the national collection. Gaston prevailed upon his friendships with the palace dealers to create a home of such prettiness that Mme de Gaulle, with her usual charm, confessed it was rather grander than she should have liked. As a stopgap country residence, Gaston appropriated a building in the grounds of Louis XIV’s old pleasure house at Marly, which Tante Yvonne declared to be gloomy and insufficiently simple, so he was also obliged to find workmen to restore the De Gaulles’ old home at Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises in the Haute Marne, which had been sacked by the Germans.

  Despairing at Mme de Gaulle’s insistence on provinciality avant tous, Gaston harried builders to complete the job as fast as possible which, given an almost complete lack of transport, raw materials and manpower, was a depressing task and one for which Mme de Gaulle never showed herself in the least bit grateful. Gaston himself was never less than charming about Yvonne, describing her ‘perfect simplicity and modesty’ and the ‘great service she had rendered to her country’ in discharging the general from all mundane concerns, permitting him complete freedom to concentrate on the ‘immense duties’ for which he was responsible. But the fact was that Mme de Gaulle never liked him. She was too plain for Gaston to bother to charm her, and she sensed and resented this lack of acknowledgement, though Gaston, who was well aware of her rancour, was not above making use of it when it suited him to keep Nancy at arm’s length.

  Rather more pressing than interior décor was the issue of maintaining order, with which the provisional government struggled in the face of the reprisals against collaborators known as the épuration sauvage. A legal framework for the purging of collaborators, the épuration legale, had been established by an ordinance passed in Algiers in 1943 and in March the following year five principal collaborationist offences were identified: participation in collaborationist organizations, co-operating in propaganda, denunciation or black-market activities and, rather vaguely, any form of ‘zeal’ towards the Germans. In August 1944, the offence of indignité nationale, ‘national unworthiness’, was added, covering any action considered harmful to the unity of France or to constitute neglect of national duty. Anyone found guilty of the latter could be sentenced to dégradation nationale in which civic, professional and particularly political rights were stripped away. Four categories of court, three civilian and one military, were set up to deal with the accused.

  In total, 300,000 cases were investigated, 100,000 of those in Paris alone, as collaboration in the capital had been the most widespread and discernible. Nearly 7,000 death sentences, almost half in absentia, were passed, though only 791 executions actually took place. Almost 50,000 people, by contrast, lost their rights under dégradation nationale. While their dossiers were processed, accused collabos were interned in the camps and prisons where Vichy had held Jews and Resistants. Though the system had been rigorously formulated, its efficient implementation was almost impossible, not least due to an initial lack of magistrates, as only a single judge could be produced who had refused to swear allegiance to Pétain’s regime. Bureaucratic inadequacy, which saw thousands of innocent people wait months for their cases to be called, was exacerbated by hideous overcrowding, disease and corruption in the prisons. Inexperienced administrators were often incapable of understanding the laws they were obliged to apply, while many local resistance committees, spurred on by the hysterical outpourings of hatred that immediately followed the liberation and subsequently the return of deportees, simply ignored government officials altogether.

  Still, the épuration legate produced a few Mitfordesque jokes. In 1946, Nancy wrote to Gaston of a party for the reopening of the Tower of London. ‘Violet [Trefusis] said, “When we got to the Traitor’s Gate I heard two well-known voices and it was Emerald and Daisy.”’ Nancy’s friend Daisy Fellowes, the daughter of an American heiress and a French duke, and married first to the Prince de Broglie, was distinguished in many ways, as a beauty, magazine editor, writer and mistress to Duff Cooper, among others (possibly including Gaston himself), but the war had not been her finest hour. Two of her daughters, Jacqueline and Emmeline, were punished for collaboration. Emmeline was incarcerated for five months at Fresnes prison, where she shared a cell with a group of prostitutes who spent their time shimmying their breasts at the men’s wing opposite by way of diversion. Jacqueline had her head shaved in reprisal for the denunciation of Resistants by her Austrian husband Alfred Kraus. Daisy failed to rise to her daughter’s defence in the manner of one mother of a seventeen-year-old girl who had been over-enthusiastic in consorting with the enemy. ‘Why cut her hair off for it? She’s just as willing to go to bed with Americans.’

  Other members of the Parisian beau monde tried to keep up to the mark of chic even in the unpromising confines of the Concierg
erie. Comte Jean de Castellane, the brother of the famous socialite Boni de Castellane, was informed that he had to surrender his shoelaces and braces to a guard. ‘If you remove my braces, ’ he announced, ‘I shall leave immediately.’2 Sacha Guitry departed for the camp at Drancy in flowered pyjamas accessorized with a panama hat. Inside, he met his ex-wife, prompting him to remark that ‘one’s mishaps never come singly’.3 The most famous collabo riposte, attributed to everyone from the film star Arletty to Coco Chanel, was the proud declaration of a woman accused of sleeping with Germans: ‘My ass is international, but my heart is French!’

  The épuration sauvage left no room for even gallows gaiety. It seemed as though the French were so appalled by their collective guilt that they turned on themselves in a grisly penance which produced outrages similar to those perpetrated by the Nazis. One commentator in 1947 suggested that ‘it was as though we were afraid of the very amplitude of the crime’.4 Neighbours denounced one another, none more zealously than those who had turned their coats at the last minute to escape retribution, and hastily convened courts of Resistants bayed for collabo blood. Across twenty-two départements, over a hundred summary executions were carried out, while the total figure (confirmed by a Gendarmerie survey in 1952 and then by the French Committee for the History of the Second World War) was approximately 10,000, of which 8,867 were discovered to have been the direct responsibility of the Resistance.

  Malcolm Muggeridge, who was serving with the British forces in Paris, described the ‘horrifying callousness, arrogance and brutality’ of the self-appointed ‘purge’ gangs. Women were often a particular focus for atrocities. Jean Cocteau recalled seeing a woman being paraded entirely naked down the Avenue de la Grande Armée, one of the wide boulevards leading off the Arc de Triomphe. ‘They tore at her, they pushed her, they spat in her face … She was covered in bruises and carried around her neck a placard “I had my husband shot”.’5 At the Drancy internment camp, many women were raped, while shaven heads proclaimed their owners’ shame long after the liberation. Allied Forces were reluctant to intervene, seeing the épuration as a peculiarly French issue. It therefore represented a direct challenge to the authority of the provisional government. As De Gaulle observed, ‘nothing is more wounding than weakness, ’ and the ‘purification’ demonstrated not only the lack of control the provisional government was able to exercise but precisely the kind of disunity that would impede the general’s aim of establishing France once more as a living and dignified nation.