The Horror of Love

by Lisa Hilton

  The Talleyrand-Périgord-Palewskis were at the top of the guest list, Palewski presided opposite Florence … Mme Palewski spoke of the Lido. ‘What a sumptuous spectacle’, she said, ‘What an orgy of colours … We have nothing to envy the Americans’. ‘You could make M. Palewski Prince de Chalais’, ‘What? Is it possible? But did a misadventure not occur when Guillemette de Bauffremont published in the Figaro that she would make her husband, Mr I-don’t-know-who Due d’Atrisco?’ ‘With M. Palewski’s friends in high places you could obtain him the right to remain covered before the King of Spain! He would only remove his hat for General de Gaulle!’ Laughter.

  Gaston ought to have choked on his langoustes.

  Nancy knew Violette, and described her as a ‘sort of non-person’. Like her famous ancestor and her mother’s witty first husband, she was very distantly descended from the Rochechouart-Mortemarts, the family of Athenais de Montespan, Louis XIV’s greatest mistress and a particular favourite of Nancy’s. She and her siblings were famous for the ‘esprit Mortemart’, the funniest people of their century, everyone said, but obviously the gene had died out. Nancy was not the only one who thought Violette had no apparent reason to exist: even her greatest flatterers concede that she was no intellectual. Cynthia Gladwyn said that she was ‘nice, but very simple, not amusing or interesting or pretty’. Nancy’s description of Lady Prague in her first novel sums up a particular type of aristocratic woman to whom those who did not know Violette well might believe she corresponded, ‘a creature so overbred that there is no sex or brain left, only nerves and the herd instinct’. She was perfectly kind, and had kept her relationship with Gaston as discreet as possible, hating the gossip that her mother had attracted. ‘She has a horror of people talking about her, ’ Gaston told a friend. The wedding, on 20 March 1969, was so discreet that Gaston did not even tell his brother Jean-Paul, who was offended to hear of it from Général De Gaulle. Nor was Violette’s son Charles-Maurice informed until after the event.

  As a wedding gift, Gaston received a little bit of Poland. His wife’s Sagan title derived from Zagan, formerly in Lower Silesia on the German–Polish border, and had come into the family in 1843. Originally Prussian, it was authorized by imperial decree in France in 1862, so the men in the family were dukes of Talleyrand-Périgord and princes of Sagan. In 1945, Zagan had been repopulated by Poles, who enterprisingly rebuilt the picturesque red-roofed château, with its hundred rooms, which had been burned down in the war. The iron curtain prevented any honeymoon plans for a return to the Palewski roots, but quand même, it was a pretty irony. It was Le Marais that was truly made for Gaston. Receiving a guest from Rome just after his marriage, Gaston greeted her shrugging his shoulders and looking bashful. ‘What do you want?’ he said. ‘I’ve always loved high ceilings.’

  Nancy didn’t stand a chance against Le Marais, and she knew it. A friend of Gaston’s claims that ‘yes, he did love Nancy Mitford. But he loved châteaux and duchesses more.’ Another suggested that ‘the darling old Colonel’ was only in love with organizing the decoration of a wonderful château. Nancy had her shop-front firmly in place. In a letter to Gaston in 1962, Nancy had described a lunch where one of the women present announced that her lover was shortly to marry another woman. ‘She said, “Why should I be jealous? She is ugly and stupid and frightfully rich. I don’t mind a bit.”’ This was to be Nancy’s line and she stuck to it. She must have been extremely convincing, as Diana wrote to Deborah:

  Just spoken to Naunce and Col has told her he’s going to marry Violette and she (Naunce) really doesn’t seem to mind in the least. As I knew this was looming (or thought I knew), it was one of the things I most dreaded, but it has come so late in the day (Col is almost seventy) that she has got over the annoyance years ago, evidently, and now just thinks it a bore for him and also (which is true) rather silly to give up one’s freedom.

  A letter from Nancy to Deborah dated the day after the wedding begins: ‘I’m felled by disappointment.’ She goes on to explain that she has been deceived by a tricky farthing, mistaking it for an enormously valuable 1933 penny, then discusses the activities of her tortoises. To both Deborah and Alvilde Lees-Milne she explained that she expected things to go on as usual, with Gaston spending most of his time in the Rue Bonaparte. Deborah wrote to Pamela: ‘That wretched Colonel has chosen that week to get married to that person he has been more or less with for ages. One simply does not know how much she minds as she is a very private person and so desperately reserved one perhaps never will know.’

  Airily, Nancy remarked to a friend that Le Marais was well worth seeing. Her true feelings can only be a matter of conjecture. Intimate conversations, she wrote, had never been in her line. In the Forties and Fifties, Peter’s refusal to give her a divorce had kept marriage as a fantasy; after that, as a divorcée and a Protestant, she was out of the question because of Gaston’s career. Madame de Gaulle might once have been said to faint at the sight of a divorced woman, but now that career was settling comfortably into a belaurelled and rather pompous twilight, Gaston had married a Protestant divorcée. If she raged, called him a liar and a whore, vented her humiliation and frustration, she gave absolutely no sign of it. By the end of the year, she was writing a placid, affectionate note to remind him to send a Christmas card to her old housekeeper Marie. One tiny, poignant twist of the knife: ‘Remember all the chickens she has cooked for you.’

  Or perhaps Diana was right, and she truly wasn’t angry at all. In her meditation on her marriage to Peter Rodd in 1941, she had written that ‘love should never be allowed to interfere with the continuity of marriage’. Why should not the reverse be true? Twenty years before, when she had caught Gaston admiring the Louvre by night with Margot de Gramont, Nancy had told Diana in a letter that she couldn’t live through Gaston marrying. He said then that she had a ‘novelist’s view of marriage’, that he would only take a wife to have children and that it would make no difference at all to his feelings for her. Everything she had written about love since then had endorsed this calm, rational view, that love and marriage were quite different things, and only barbarians tangled themselves up into emotional and legal messes by conflating the two. But did she believe it?

  Many people who have written about Nancy take the view that Gaston’s engagement coincided with the cancer that was to kill her. ‘Her family always felt that [it] was the result of years of repressed longings and jealousy, followed by the deathblow of Col’s marriage.’1 Diana Mosley contradicted this, pointing out that it was unfair, that Nancy was already ill before she knew of the engagement; indeed, her greeting to Gaston when he arrived to tell her the news was ‘Hello, Colonel, I’ve got cancer’. Yet still the view persists that she died of a broken heart. True, Diana did write that Nancy had ‘poisoned’ herself with ‘spitefulness’, though it was not her fault, but this was years later, after she learned in 1983 of Nancy’s wartime denunciation.

  Tests showed a large tumour on Nancy’s liver (‘I wonder if it’s my twin brother … little old Lord Redesdale shrieking away’). She was operated on, apparently successfully, though her illness (Hodgkins’ disease) was never properly diagnosed by the thirty-seven doctors she eventually saw. As pain took over her life, Nancy’s sisters drew closer to her. Diana visited every day, Deborah and Pamela came frequently, Jessica twice made the journey from America. For a time, her last book before Frederick the Great acted as an analgesic. Her sisters, fearing she might die before it was completed, discreetly arranged for the publishers to pretend they needed it early. Nancy was very proud of this work. She said she loved it best and summoned all her strength to undertake the research, travelling to Potsdam, Berlin and Dresden with Pamela in 1970. She wrote to Gaston from a London clinic with a list of questions in French to be typed up and sent out to museums and libraries. Dedicated to Diana, the book is a celebration of the ‘Europe Française’ so beloved of Gaston and Nancy – ‘When the princes began to desire a better way of life than that of robber baron it was
to Paris they turned.’ While Nancy’s evocation of Frederick’s military strategies impressed even those critics who still thought of her as a frivolous historian, the book is very much a celebration of the eighteenth century in all its superlative Frenchness.

  Nancy managed one last trip to Venice in 1970. She was now very ill, her letters to Gaston increasingly dominated by suffering, but still took time to describe the restoration projects he had done so much to initiate. She saw the Wrightsmans and several other friends, though she was often unable to get up, staying in her room overlooking the Zattere, watching the rush of the boats. Gaston sent incense for her to ‘inhale voluptuously’, and arranged to have scans sent from the Hôpital Rothschild to her Italian doctor, but Nancy’s gratitude – ‘Colonel how powerful you are’ – came with a twist. ‘I am reading a life of Helen Ligne Potecki of whom you say you have got a picture. She was a very horrid person but lovely and RICH.’ Her last letter from Venice ends: ‘I can’t go on, I’ve got such a dreadful pain.’

  Meanwhile, Général de Gaulle retired definitively to Colombey in April 1969 after a referendum on reform of the senate, aimed at eradicating the memory of les Evénements, was rejected. Gaston was involved in one last political controversy, concerning the interim mandate before a new president of the Republic was chosen. Since De Gaulle was the first president to have been elected by direct vote, there was no protocol in place to cover his resignation. Gaston suggested that the Constitutional Council write a letter to the president of the senate, Alain Poher, transferring interim powers to him, but did not feel he could deliver the message in person as he had done to De Gaulle in 1965.The council’s letter was delivered to the Luxembourg on 29 April at 12.10pm, De Gaulle having officially resigned at 12.00pm, so for ten minutes France was without a president. Poher insisted on summoning Gaston to the Elysée as soon as he arrived there to make a point; he had nothing to say to him.

  Psychosomatic illness was clearly in the air: Emmanuel d’Astier de la Vigerie, a resistance hero, dropped dead of a heart attack at the news of De Gaulle’s departure. Gaston’s position was assured – his tenure as president of the council was fixed until 1974 – and he now became involved in the election campaign for a new president. Anti-Semitism was still an unpleasant shadow over French politics: when the candidature of Pierre Sidos was quite properly rejected by the council on the basis that his recommendations failed to meet the minimum constitutional requirement, Le Soleil argued that this was due to the ‘ascendance of foreign Jews’ such as Gaston Palewski and René Cassin over the presiding body. Gaston was satisfied by the election of his friend and colleague Georges Pompidou. In a touching coincidence, Pompidou now worked from Dolly Radziwill’s former apartment in the Boulevard de la Tour Maubourg and it was here, time regained, that Gaston went in his official capacity to convey the news.

  Gaston wrote that as one aged, life became an Appian Way, a journey bordered by tombs. Dolly and Evelyn, Duff Cooper and Mark Ogilvie-Grant were gone, and at the end of 1969 Louise de Vilmorin died. She had taken up late in life with André Malraux, much to everyone’s surprise, and remained irrepressible, though Violette disapproved of the raucous atmosphere the couple’s drinking created at Le Marais. Gaston went to her funeral at Verrières. Her chosen epitaph was ‘Help’. Charlie de Bestegui and Marie-Laure de Noailles died in early 1970, and in November Charles de Gaulle passed away at Colombey. Gaston grieved violently. It was as much as he could do to control himself as he stood in the guard of the Companions of the Liberation, silent beneath a soft autumn rain.

  25

  THE HORROR OF LOVE

  It is not a very reassuring reflection, ’ Nancy wrote in The Sun King in 1966, ‘that in another two hundred and fifty years present day doctors may seem to our descendants as barbarous as Fagon and his colleagues seem to us … In those days, terrifying in black robes and bonnets, they bled the patient; now, terrifying in white robes and masks they pump blood into him. The result is the same: the strong live; the weak, after much suffering and expense, both of spirit and money, die.’ Nancy had joked for a long time with Evelyn about the English response to death, always said to be much the best thing; now she too began to pray for it. By the end of 1970, she weighed less than six stone. She was terribly humiliated by being increasingly unable to care for herself and even Gaston’s longed-for visits became an agony of self-control. ‘I used to think I wish he’d come, ’ said Diana, ‘and then I’d almost wish he hadn’t … He tired her quite, because she’d always try to think of things to amuse him. It was quite a drama, really.’1

  Her husband could not have been more different from Gaston Palewski. Oswald Mosley’s last attempt to win a British Parliamentary seat had come to nothing in 1960, while by any standards Gaston had enjoyed a brilliant political career. Now that Mosley’s views had mellowed, Gaston, whose early belief in De Gaulle had been so triumphantly vindicated, could afford to be generous to a man whose intelligence and charisma were still remarked upon even by those who approached him with the most negative of preconceptions. ‘Oh yes, ’ agrees the Duchess of Devonshire, ‘he liked Mosley.’ Before Nancy became too ill, she and Gaston had often visited the Mosleys at their home, Le Temple de la Gloire, though Diana diplomatically declined invitations to Le Marais until after Nancy’s death. Gaston was extremely fond of Diana, whose great beauty was still in evidence, slender and sculpted in the simple monochrome clothes she preferred. He was interested by her restoration of Le Temple, and recalled her there, seated on a low stool before the fire, laughing with her sister at the Mitford jokes he had always loved. In another instance of the manner in which their generation delicately ignored the inconveniences of love and focused on its essential truths (you ruined my sister’s life!), Diana was able tactfully to comfort Gaston as Nancy declined.

  When they were together, Nancy desperately kept up her ‘shop-front’. She loved the story of the Windsors dining at Orsay, and Daisy Fellowes asking mischievously for Coca-Cola. Diana, of course, had no such thing in the house, so the Duke of Windsor rang up his butler to send some over, bellowing into the telephone ‘Ich bin der Herzog!’ Her letters grow increasingly more desperate, thankful for the little gifts Gaston sends, but repeatedly dwelling on her agony and her wish to die.

  Gaston had been asking for some years for Nancy to be awarded the Légion d’Honneur for the services her books had done to France. On 8 April 1972, he arrived at the Rue d’Artois with the cross and ribbon in a little box. Diana helped her down the stairs and he pinned the decoration to her breast. ‘A little rouge looks well among the laurels.’ Her last letter was written to him just over a year later. ‘I think and hope to die, but the doctor thinks not, or not yet. It is too much, this torture. You don’t know … the pain is so strong that I can hardly write.’

  On 30 June, Gaston was driving from Le Marais to Paris when he was struck by a premonition that he must see Nancy. He found Jessica and Diana at Versailles. He ran past them up the stairs to Nancy’s bedroom. She was unconscious and immobile, but when he spoke to her and held her hand, she smiled. An hour after his return to Rue Bonaparte, Nancy died.

  Gaston lived another eleven years. He was among the founders of the Institut Charles de Gaulle and received the highest order of the Légion d’Honneur. He was president of the Revue des Deux Mondes, for which he wrote many articles, of the Commission for Cultural Affairs to UNESCO, the Fondation Lyautey, the Society of Friends of Marcel Proust, and vice-president of the Council of National Museums, elected to the Académie des Beaux Arts. The archive devoted to Gaston Palewski at the Bibliothèque Nationale comprises seventy-two boxes stretching 24 metres. And yet, in his speech to the Académie, he talked of the peculiar sadness of satisfied ambition. ‘All her life, ’ Nancy wrote of Amabelle Fortescue in Christmas Pudding, ‘she had had before her one ambition, to be a success in the world of culture and fashion and to this end alone her considerable talents and energy had been directed … If the fulfilment of this ambition brought with it the s
mallest degree of disappointment, she managed very successfully to conceal the fact from all but herself.’

  As Gaston grew older, he confessed that memories of the war dominated his thoughts – of Ethiopia and Algiers, of De Gaulle of course – but also, why not? of Nancy. Had he, in the end, been true to his vows to honour? He had his château and his duchess, but his marriage was not ideal. His Palewski nephews, who came less and less often, remembered that he seemed ‘constrained’ by Violette’s presence. Old friends distanced themselves because, though they dared not say so at the time, they were tired of the coldness between Gaston and his wife. When he became ill and wheelchair-bound, Violette said airily, ‘Oh yes, I know, but there are doctors …’ Gaston was not comforted by a loving and supportive family as the end drew near. Some friends go so far as to claim Violette did not care for him in hospital, where he died on 3 September 1984. She was too ‘bereft’ to arrange his funeral, and the ceremony was planned by the members of the Institut Charles de Gaulle. After his death, Violette commemorated him in a little museum she established at Le Marais; after her own, the bulk of Gaston’s collections were auctioned at Sotheby’s by her children.

  Nancy had been cremated at Père Lachaise. Her grave is at Swinbrook, marked with the Mitford mole that she used latterly on her letterhead, the descendant of the ‘charmante avalanche grise’ with which she had scattered Gaston in Algeria. Gaston’s ashes are interred at Passy. Nancy loved the story of the Marquise de Sévigné complaining that the air of Paris was filled with clouds of the famous poisoner, Mme de Brinvilliers. So perhaps somewhere, in that Parisian sky, which Linda Radlett watches as it turns from bright blue to dark green to yellow to moleskin, that first summer of the war …

  Nancy always warned Gaston that marriage was not for him. She wrote a scenario of his future: