by Lisa Hilton
A cultural confederation of European states had been a key Gaullist goal since Gaston had presented their proposals to the assembly in 1951. He was convinced that France had a primary role in guiding such an institution because, as he saw it, she had always given primacy, in the modern world, to humanism. The continuing parlous position of European federation was dangerous not just economically, he feared, but at a profoundly spiritual level, that of the only recourse against ‘the great misery of the individual delivered to the torrent of mass technology’. One could barely imagine even a French politician today making such an unashamedly elitist case for l’exception Française. However unacceptable such a view might have become, it is one of the keys to understanding Nancy and Gaston’s relationship. Nancy’s ardent Gaullism might well, as in the case of her sisters Unity and Diana, have had as much to do with the cause as the man, but it had been her cause since she wrote to Tom about Clive Bell’s book in 1928. It is the message of her two last novels and the ideology which underpins her historical writing. This shared conviction appears again and again in her letters. It was something deeply felt between them and it connected them powerfully even at the lowest points in their affair.
Nancy did not, however, accompany Gaston when he visited La Serenissima with De Gaulle in May 1967. Since his return from Rome, their relationship had become calmer. Once she had recovered from the shock news of Gaston’s son, Nancy was reassured by his insistence that he had no intention of marrying the mother, and she soon recovered herself sufficiently to make jokes about it. ‘I might call my memoirs The Real Sauveterre. Bound in full morocco it would be a nice wedding present (Who for?).’ She had been aware for some years of Gaston’s relationship with the mother of his child and seemed capable of absorbing the fact into their relationship, as she had done with so many others. In 1966 she wrote from Venice that Anna-Maria had told her she had seen ‘Gaston’s offspring’. The boy was at this time about fourteen. Nancy panicked rather, but it turned out that Anna-Maria meant Marc de Beauvau-Craon, reviving the old tease about him being Gaston and Nancy’s son and not, as Nancy referred to him in a private code, ‘the Profile’.
The absence of the colonel in Venice that season was made up for by the presence of Marlon Brando, a guest at Peggy Guggenheim’s, with whom Nancy went to the beach, and the continuing pleasure of Yank-teasing. Babe Paley, ‘toothy, little upstairs’ failed to live up to her reputation as the best-dressed woman in the world – she looked just like everyone else. At a dinner, the subject of Vietnam came up. With a sober face, Nancy said that she believed the only solution was to drop the bomb. ‘But if the Chinese retaliate?’ asked a horrified Mrs Paley. Nancy replied that since there were so many Americans, a few million or so fewer couldn’t really make much difference, ‘at which she began to scream’. Brando was a hit, but Nancy wrote to Deborah that her enjoyment of Venice in 1966 was patchy, as the Lido was becoming popular with film stars like Brigitte Bardot and Audrey Hepburn, who was deemed an idiot, albeit a pretty one. ‘They are all quite without grey matter. Actors, and when you’ve said that you’ve said everything.’
So there were jokes, always jokes, and there was Venice and, as the Sixties drew on, there was also sadness shared between Nancy and Gaston. Comtesse Costa de Beauregard died that year, as, in April, did Evelyn Waugh. Nancy heard the news on the radio, and was very deeply upset. She wrote to Laura, Evelyn’s widow:
Oh Laura, I am so miserable. I loved Evelyn really the best of all my friends, and then such an old friend, such a part of my life. As for you, what can one say? If I feel like that about him what must his loss mean to you? … For him, one can only say he did hate the modern world, which does not become more liveable every day. (It is always my consolation for the death of my brother Tom, how much he would have hated it.)
Gaston wrote a tribute to Evelyn, praising his extraordinary penetration and declaring Brideshead, ‘un tableau douloureux de décadence et de désespoir’, one of the great novels of the era. Like Nancy, he grasped that the essence of Evelyn was humour, that devouring and often brutal satire which permeated his writing, and which so many took for malice. ‘What nobody ever remembers about Evelyn is everything with him was jokes. That’s what none of the people who wrote about him seem to have taken into account at all, ’ commented Nancy in a television interview. But even Gaston could not fully grasp what Evelyn had meant to Nancy, how irreplaceable he was.
In November Dolly Radziwill died. She had been, Nancy said, her best friend apart from her sisters. Nancy did not go to the funeral – she was too afraid she would break down and make a spectacle of herself – but Gaston attended and afterwards talked to the priest, Rzewuski, a former artist turned monk who had painted Dolly in the Twenties. It turned out they had a lot of acquaintances in common, and Gaston reported a melancholy conversation about so many lost friends.
Dolly’s death may have been one factor in Nancy’s decision in 1966 to leave Paris for Versailles. Although they were still very close, she was seeing less and less of Gaston, and Dolly’s absence made his unbearable. She also took a low view of the English in Paris. ‘There are so few agreeable English people here now … they are all true horrors and loathe the French as common English always have.’ Conversations about French plumbing were one irritant, the noise of the increasing traffic and children in the courtyard at Rue Monsieur another. ‘When I see fillette dans le coma depuis 4 jours I so wish it could be the children in this courtyard, ’ she grumbled. With her refuge at Fontaines-les-Nonnes gone, the longing for country life which had always run through her letters had now become a powerful call. She loved Versailles which, thanks to her biographical research, she now knew even better than Gaston, and she wanted a garden and a peaceful environment. There she could tramp about the park or even go riding in the fresh air. ‘I can’t always live in a town, not even Paris.’ Gaston helped her through the bureaucracy, writing personally to the prefect to obtain the essential carte de résidence, and Nancy was able to move in January 1967.
Her new home was 4 Rue d’Artois, a low, white-painted eighteenth-century house in a side street. Harold Acton described it as very pretty; others were surprised to see the famously chic Miss Mitford in this rather bland suburban setting. What made the house for Nancy was its half-acre of walled garden. As she did everywhere she lived, she invested the house with glamour and drama. The garden, where she planted rose trees, wistaria and her ‘champ fleuri’ of poppies, irises, orchids and buttercups became the backdrop for a creatures’ soap opera. Her letters to Deborah suddenly become full of the doings of hedgehogs, tortoises and birds. If there was something wilfully childish about Nancy’s insistence on her enchantment in her new home, Versailles was also a retreat from the crassness and ugliness of modernity. To Hugh Jackson, she wrote of the château: ‘they’ve done up all the rooms … and it’s like a very expensive hotel … Give me that great crumbling fairy palace I used to love so much. Anyway, they can’t spoil the outside.’
The writings of both Nancy and Gaston at that time show their distress and bewilderment at the assaults on their shared conception of civilization. The Sixties had been happening for a while, and the students of France only just caught on in time. Nancy generally had a low view of the latest generation of rebels – compared with the talent for debauchery of the Bright Young Things, they seemed positively babyish. Worse still, they were earnest. The fatuity of the students’ position is encapsulated in one of the most celebrated encounters of ‘les Evénements’ of 1968, between the student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit and the minister for youth and sport, François Missoffe. After listening to the minister open a new swimming pool at the university of Nanterre, Cohn-Bendit denounced the government for omitting any mention of the sexual problems of young people (still forbidden, in theory, to have sex outside marriage under the age of twenty-one) in a recent lengthy report. Swimming pools, he said, were a Fascist attempt to sublimate the students’ sexual energies into sport. Sociology proved that sexual equilibri
um was the only form of freestyle that mattered. Missoffe ill-advisedly attempted a joke, suggesting Cohn-Bendit should ‘cool off’ in the pool. ‘Fascist, ’ Cohn-Bendit replied.
De Gaulle was unable to take the students seriously, even when sit-ins, strikes and demonstrations broke out at Strasbourg, Nanterre and Bordeaux. He had, he believed, given his life to the cause of French freedom, and it was simply beyond him to understand what these rebellious children wanted to do with it. In April, 2,000 students marched in Paris, where twenty-four years before the Parisians had torn up the tarmac to build barricades against the Germans. Even when Cohn-Bendit was arrested for sitting on a committee that put out a leaflet featuring a recipe for Molotov cocktails, the government remained both uncomprehending and condescending. It would be absurd, claimed Prime Minister Pompidou, to lock up a boy for a prank.
By 3 May, following a fractious reinauguration of the traditional May Day parade, it seemed that Paris was once more at war. The Sorbonne was closed and policemen were attacked by missiles from St Michel up to the Luxembourg Gardens. Rioting continued for another five days. On 11 May, the police were finally deployed against the barricades on the Boulevard St Michel, with significant numbers of arrests and casualties, though since officers had been instructed not to use guns there were, mercifully, no deaths. By 20 May the workers had joined the students and over six million people were said to be striking; within four days this had risen to ten million. France was in panic, housewives stockpiled food and the country was paralysed. The general election that year returned a vote that was more indicative of the panic of the bourgeoisie than faith in the Gaullist project. De Gaulle survived, and a new government headed by Maurice Couve de Murville took power on 11 July. Life gradually regained its regular rhythm. But les Evénements had fractured more than shop windows, they had exposed the gaping generational crevasse that yawned beneath the confident surface of consensus which had obtained in France for ten years.
At Versailles, Nancy had been less exposed than her Parisian friends to the immediate threat of this latterday terror. Cristiana Brandolini telephoned her to share her fear at the ‘furious animals’ who surrounded her flat. Writing to Deborah, Nancy reported: ‘Ann [Fleming] said they looked so beautiful and good. The ones I saw on télé looked beautiful and bad.’ She was quick to nickname the student leaders: Geisemar, Sauvageot and Cohn-Bendit became ‘Fat Boy’, ‘Savage’ and ‘Cohn-Bandit’. She wrote two columns for the Spectator detailing the events of May 1968 but, as had been the case with Fascism in the early Thirties, she was unable to accept that the students’ grievances were anything more than regrettable ‘showing off’, based on the kind of modern quasi-philosophizing she had satirized in the character of David Wincham in The Blessing. To some extent, she could sympathize with their views. ‘One can’t help seeing the point of the poor little things – the dullness and ugliness of daily life. One of their cries is down with concrete, ’ she wrote to Deborah, but their essential lack of civilization recalled everything she had despised and poked fun at in Wigs. The screams of the students were ‘simply lovely’, but their strutting and speechifying was merely silly.
The Spectator columns give an insight into Nancy’s life at Versailles quite contrary to her image as an aloof, upper-class tease, aiming her darts from the heights of her exquisite Parisian drawing room. Her direct knowledge of the strikes is drawn from ‘a great friend’, a workman with the Renault family, who has dined at Nancy’s home with his wife. Other callers are the Saclays, whose daughter is training to be a chemist, and the Lebruns, modest, middle-class people who clearly like Nancy and are liked back. These Versailles friends, Catholic, Gaullist, agree with Nancy that much of the tension in French society is caused by the geographical separation of social classes, which breeds fear and mistrust, very much the point Nancy had made in The Stanleys and in an essay on life at Fontaines-les-Nonnes. Nancy’s politics are old-fashioned, conservative, paternalistic, but her belief in the psychological trauma created by ugly, inhuman modern environments, that gutting and rebuilding of the countryside ‘in the American manner’, no longer seems quite so retrogressive. If Nancy was conservative, it was because she thought she perceived something worth conserving in French society, something that had already been lost in England, and which buyers of A Year in Provence or expats in the Dordogne have been seeking in their millions for the last twenty years.
As president of the Constitutional Council, Gaston had no choice but to get involved in les Evénements. On 27 May, when the council sat to decide on a referendum on social and economic reform with regard to the universities, he telephoned Pompidou to point out the implications for the government of engaging in the process. De Gaulle said to him mournfully, ‘You will take me for Pétain.’ The Evénements also made it painfully clear to Gaston that, in the words of the political commentator Pierre Viansson-Ponté, he was ‘prehistoric’. The times they were a changin’, but not in the Palais Royal. Gaston had hoped once again for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the post-May reshuffle, but the idea was not even considered. Nancy was better able to cope with the brave new world than he. When asked about the fashion for miniskirts (which Yvonne de Gaulle hoped her husband would ban), she cheerfully declared she would rather be dowdy than ridiculous, but otherwise she was content in the eighteenth-century world of her research, her garden and her friendships. Gaston, conversely, had to accept that in political terms, ‘Monsieur Atom’ was now as decorative and dated as one of his beloved antiques.
24
MARRIAGE
Gaston still called frequently at the Rue d’Artois, often coming for lunch. In spring 1969, he made two such visits, as he had something serious to tell Nancy, something that the great orator of the RPF, the seasoned speaker of the assembly, found almost impossible to articulate. Yet he had to tell Nancy, before the news broke in Le Figaro, that he was to be married.
Violette de Pourtales, born Talleyrand-Périgord, was among the ‘femmes du monde’ with whom Gaston had been having relationships for years. She was technically a duchess, though she never used the title, which derived from Polish estates commandeered by the Soviets. Although she and Gaston had been involved with one another for at least eighteen years, Violette’s husband, James-Robert de Pourtales, had only recently agreed to divorce her. Eleven years younger than Nancy, she had three children, Helié, born in 1938, Anna in 1944 and Charles-Maurice, the youngest. Educated in America, she was elegant, perfectly dressed by Courrèges, from one of the most distinguished gratin families and possessed of Le Marais, one of the most wonderful chateaux in France, often compared with Vaux-le-Vicomte.
Gaston was to write several essays on the history of his new in-laws. One of the oldest families in France, they boasted one ancestor, Boson, who had elected Hugh Capet as king. When the king asked him, ‘Who made you count?’ he was said to have replied, ‘Those same who made you king.’ This established the Talleyrands’ shared belief as to their place in the social hierarchy. Another ancestor was murdered by Richelieu and there were several cardinals, but the most famous Talleyrand was the greatest political chameleon of all time, minister to every French ruler from Louis XVI to Louis-Philippe. Duff Cooper had written his biography, though Nancy didn’t think it very good. Once Gaston was definitively installed at Le Marais, he and Violette set up a Talleyrand museum, an echo of the long-ago games in the Palewski salon with Jean-Paul.
Gaston had known Violette’s parents from his own personal Guermantes way. Her mother was Anna Gould, who first married Paris’s greatest playboy, Boni de Castellane. Anna was short, ugly, with a spine covered in black hair, but she was possessed of fifteen million railway dollars, and Boni knew how to spend them. ‘After all, ’ he said, ‘elle est surtout belle vue du dot’. (Since the French word for dowry, dot, is pronounced in the same way as dos, back, this could be interpreted as either ‘She’s especially beautiful for her money’ or ‘from behind’.) Boni’s extravagance was legendary. He purchased Le Marais, an important eig
hteenth-century château, from the Noailles family, as well as constructing the Palais Rose in Paris, but when Anna Gould had had enough of this extravagance, she divorced him, married his cousin, Hélie de Talleyrand-Périgord, Prince de Sagan, and took her houses with her. Her second husband was not much more gallant than the first; the Prince de Sagan remarked that one might as well dispense with the ‘u’ in his new wife’s maiden name. Boni was so outraged at the loss of the lovely millions that he attacked Hélie with his cane at a funeral. Undeterred, Hélie fathered two children with Anna, Howard, who killed himself, and Hélène-Violette, who thus became her mother’s heiress.
Violette sold the Palais Rose in 1968, not, according to some, without a little help from the president of the Conseil Constitutionnel, as the council of Paris had initially opposed the sale. Throughout the Sixties, Gaston had been spending more and more time at Le Marais, just 36 kilometres from Paris, an enclosed world in its own 8,000 acres. He got to know Violette’s friends, the Due d’Harcourt, his wife Thyra and his sister Lydie de Pommereu, and lunched with Violette’s aunt, Florence Gould, who lived at the Meurice. During the war, Florence had been a collaborationist hostess, entertaining the German author Ernst Jünger and propaganda officer Gerhard Heller. Claude Mauriac described how the atmosphere of ’champagne and sympathy’ led him to shake hands with officers whose company he would have shunned in the streets. A scathing piece appeared in Cyril Connolly’s Horizon, depicting Florence’s ‘salon’ as the dregs of literary Paris who had found only acclaim in the wake of Nazi tanks, though Cocteau was not above accepting her hospitality. Nor, many years later, was Gaston. A writhingly sycophantic passage in a novel of the period describes one of Florence’s gatherings at the Meurice.
