Life in a Cold Climate
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In 1967 Nancy left Rue Monsieur and moved to a little house at Versailles. And one wonders if she did so because, having written Versailles into life in Madame de Pompadour and The Sun King, she had fallen in love again.
As a girl she had begun to create her image of Paris, and it had sustained her as surely as meat and drink, had made her happier than anything in the world had ever done. But now, writing as she was about Versailles, lost as she was in what she called the atmosphere of ‘an enormous and rather terrifying house party’1, at which she no doubt thought she would have acquitted herself rather well, she wanted to live anew the reality of what she imagined. Versailles began to take over from Paris; in it she found the purest distillation of all that she loved about France, and life. It was, to her, an absolutely real fantasy. ‘I do love Versailles I would like to live here & will when old I mean older’, she wrote to her friend Billa Harrod in 1953 during the writing of Pompadour.
Thereafter, according to mood, she occasionally returned to the idea of buying herself a house there. ‘Went to see the little house at Versailles that I’ve been hatching for years’, she told Violet Hammersley in January 1958 (perhaps Nancy had some intoxicating idea of Palewski coming back to Paris, beating at the door of Rue Monsieur and being told with quiet finality, ‘Madame est partie, Monsieur le Colonel’). ‘I think it’s now definitely for sale & I shall soon have to decide. Oh goodness!’ Two years later she wrote to Jessica that the house had ‘fallen through – I am very sorry’. But the thought that she might one day move there lay inside her head, glittering as the château, green and shadowy as le petit Trianon, comforting, as thoughts of a new life always are.
The choice to go to Versailles was easy enough to understand: she was in love with what she had written about it. But her reasons for deciding at last to turn her vague dream into reality, which she did towards the end of 1966, were rather more complex. There was a practical consideration, the uncertain (and expensive) lease on her flat. ‘In the Rue Monsieur’, says Diana, ‘there was a count and countess owned it, and they had five children. Well, in France you can’t really get a tenant out, but if it’s for your own child then you more or less can. And with Nancy – I mean she was so good in those ways, they’d only have to hint that they wanted it for one of their children and she’d have given it up. That was one reason.
‘The other was the garden. You see the garden at Rue Monsieur was completely dark, nothing would grow. She had her geraniums in the yard... But she was longing for this champ-fleuri that she had in her mind.’ Nancy had been brought up a countrywoman. The occasional refrain of ‘I long & long & long to live quietly in Provence’ should not perhaps be taken too seriously, but she did crave air and flowers and birdsong (‘an occasional nightingale’ was what she hoped to hear in heaven). What she had loved when growing up, as she wrote to Evelyn Waugh in 1964, was ‘the suburbs – I always thought they would be the place to live in (any of them in those days) with their pretty little houses buried in lilac & often a paddock or stables like the real country. I hated the real country (boredom) but always longed for fresh air & trees.’ The suburbs, to Waugh, were there to be snobbish about (viz. Scoop, and Lord Copper’s country mansion in East Finchley), and it is possible that Nancy was teasing him a little. Yet it is not hard to see the attraction to someone of her temperament, which liked things controlled and calm and pleasant; nor to see that Versailles (hardly Ealing) would have presented itself as one of the more glamorous examples of suburbia.
There were other, vaguer reasons for leaving Paris. As she approached and passed the age of sixty, Nancy felt that the flame of her life was dimming. The natural instinct towards smiling affirmation was turning, towards sombreness: ‘où sont les neiges d’antan?’ ‘I think the world is getting horrider more & more quickly. I intend to buy a house in Versailles when I can find one... I can’t always live in a town, not even Paris.’2 What had once filled her with ecstatic energy could now dance demonically upon her nerves. The sound of children playing outside her window caused her to say: ‘When I see [in the paper] fillette dans le coma depuis 4 jours I do so wish it could be all the children in this courtyard.’ She had always loved to ‘spend the long, hot evenings in my courtyard’, reading as the air became ‘full of swifts chasing in and out of the houses’.3 So infantile screams would indeed be an irritant. But hoping – as she wrote in a Sunday Times column – for the children to be struck with ‘eight mild attacks of laryngitis’ was a long way from thinking of comas.
This, again, was mood-related – it is dangerous to extrapolate a state of mind from a throwaway remark – and in 1965 Nancy was still capable of writing to Evelyn Waugh: ‘I’m so sorry you are low in spirits. Why don’t you come here to have a change? Of course I always think one can’t be very low in Paris...!’ In fact Nancy’s letters from the mid-1960s are as spikily good-natured as ever. She did not move to Versailles – only half an hour from Paris, after all – in the spirit of a poor old lady settling into Sunny Bank Retirement Home. What she probably thought was that the day-to-day happiness she craved would be rediscovered – assured – if she made this change, got her garden, sat in the sun and wrote and dreamed of the Bourbon family up the road.
For there were sadnesses in her life now. Some were quite desperate; and however much she fought to shake off their cold clutch it was impossible ever to be rid of it. ‘It’s the dropping off of perches’, says Aunt Sadie in Love in a Cold Climate. ‘I’ve always dreaded when that begins. Soon we shall all have gone – oh well, never mind.’ There had been deaths before, of course: ‘We must think of Robert [Byron] and Tom [Mitford] today’, Nancy wrote to Evelyn Waugh on All Saints’ Day 1962 – ‘those are the ones I miss the most. It will be nice to see them again, rather soon now.’ But the process that Aunt Sadie describes had really begun, for Nancy, with the death of her father in 1958. Once started, it continued with a quiet, remorseless rhythm before which she could only bow her head, giving in and not giving in. She described in 1966 her annual visit to Venice, at which her friends were ‘pleased, I think, to see one but the number is terribly diminished. I had a long talk with Vittorio the bagnino which consisted in him reciting the names of the dead and me saying Oh Vittorio every now and then and crying. It’s Victor one misses so much...’
Victor Cunard had died in 1960. Then Lady Redesdale in 1963; Violet Hammersley in 1964 (‘I’ve now seen the pathetic last post card saying please tell Nancy I am very ill indeed & can’t write’4); and Eddy Sackville-West in 1965 (‘O dear, I mind. Monsewer’5). Peter Rodd died of an embolism in 1968, while Nancy was in Venice. Diana saw her walking along the Zattere ‘dressed in black’: a strange and solitary image.
But it was 1966, the year she decided to go to Versailles, that brought loss upon loss. ‘All these blows makes one’s own end more supportable, there is that to be said.’6 The Countess Costa de Beauregard died, along with the lovely life at Fontaines that seemed not to have changed for one hundred years; so too did Dolly Radziwill, probably Nancy’s closest Parisian friend; and so, in April, did Evelyn Waugh, to whose wife she wrote: ‘Oh Laura I am so miserable. I loved Evelyn I really think the best of all my friends... As for you, what can one say?... 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)...’ Not long afterwards Nancy talked about Waugh in her television interview. ‘Probably my greatest friend I ever had, and I probably admired his work more than anybody else’s. What nobody ever remembers about Evelyn is everything with him was jokes. Everything. That’s what none of the people who wrote about him seem to have taken into account at all.’ Fewer people were getting the joke anymore; the world, as Nancy saw it, was becoming both more serious and more ridiculous. ‘C’est à ne rien comprendre. I shall bury my head like an ostrich at Versailles.’7
The loss of that perfect relationship with Waugh – a man who always g
ot the joke, except about Catholicism – was terrible to Nancy. It caught at her writer’s self, as well as the self that loved Waugh as a friend. There is a real case for saying that the letters between these two elicited from each their best writing: relaxed to the point of being absurdist, funny to the point of lawlessness. Waugh responded to something in Nancy that no one else seems quite to have seen. Despite his pose of treating her as an equal-cum-idiot, he grew to appreciate what she could do as a writer; he regarded her with an absolute respect and understanding perhaps unique among her literary friends and he, more than anyone, probed the deepest nerves of her fantastical humour. Every single one of Nancy’s letters is brilliant and readable, but those to Waugh have an extra energy, as if they are making constant little delighted leaps ahead of their own inventiveness: ‘The great excitement of the week’, she wrote to him in typical vein, back in heavenly 1948, ‘has been the death of Pierre Collé, aged 38, of overeating. He literally burst... then somebody – the restaurateurs probably, had the bright idea of putting it about that it wasn’t only eating, that he’d had a child at the age of 15 & furthermore that he’d been too much in aeroplanes lately.’
Later, in 1961, she had written in all sincerity to quiz him – and tease him – on the subject of the afterlife:
You know death – (my brother Tom aged 3 said once Grandfather, you know adultery – ).
Well, one dies, is buried & rises again & is judged. What happens then between death & the end of the world? Are we what the French would call en liberté provisoire? Do we sleep? But I’m always hearing people say he’s in a better place now or he knows now this that or the other. Do elucidate...
Death again... If we go to heaven first, then have the resurrection of the body (like finding your motor after a party) & then have the court martial & then go to hell that seems awfully disappointing?
Oh DO TELL.
Which he did, soberly and exhaustively (‘No you haven’t quite got it right’); living without him must have been so dreary. They had never had a speck of romantic interest in each other, and when they met after Nancy’s move to France the occasion (‘I die for it’) was generally a disappointment, but the love between them was real and alive and utterly sui generis. ‘People say to me does he love anyone, I say yes He loves me.’
Waugh’s last letter to her was subdued. ‘It is a long time since I wrote to you; so long that I do not know [in fact it was just a month]. I keep getting the news that I am dying and drug-soaked. Not true.’ But the tone was also characteristic.
M. Bowra’s autobiography8 will be a great disappointment to people like Lady Pamela [Berry] who read only for malicious gossip. It is really very soft & dull. He said you and I had sexual connexions. I explained to him that it was not so & he expunged the offending passage.
Love E.
Five weeks later Waugh was dead of a heart attack, aged sixty-two. ‘Oh Evil’, said Nancy, ‘when has one been so sad?’ There was no possible comfort for the loss of Evelyn Waugh, because there was no substitute: he was wholly individual and thus wholly irreplaceable: there was only a blank space on the breakfast tray where his letters had once been, regularly now for twenty years. Compared with such a relationship, one of the great literary friendships of the twentieth century, ‘sexual connexions’ had a lot to live up to.
They did not, of course. Not for Nancy. And here was another reason why she left Paris for Versailles: the reason, according to some. Her relationship with Gaston Palewski had reached an impasse, indeed had been at one since he went to Rome. The days of running back and forth from Rue Monsieur to Rue Bonaparte, of the sudden telephone summons (‘je vous dérange?’; ‘pas du tout’), of the delicious confabs with Marie as to what they might concoct that night for dinner à deux, of the strung-out hours of anguish pierced by sudden ecstasy; they were over, they would never return. Rather than sitting there minding about it, why not move?
Nancy knew perfectly well the state of play with the Colonel and, as with Peter Rodd, she bore him no malice whatsoever. Really he deserved none; he had simply done what he wanted, pursued his own happiness, in a way that made it hard for Nancy to pursue hers. Had he been less fond of her, or handled her with less practised grace, then she might have found it in her to break the habit of love. But he did not want to lose her, and she did not want to want to lose him. In a novel she would have made no moral judgment upon him, nor indeed upon herself: it was just one of those things, beautifully sad, the way of the world, and she would have portrayed it as such.
Because they were polite and civilised people, with a real affection for each other, the love affair managed to ease itself into friendship. If she suffered about this then one would not have known it. ‘Tomorrow is Colonel’s party’, she wrote cheerfully to Debo in 1966; ‘Much agony and ex: about what to wear – I’m all right if it’s fine & done for if not. Must flee now...’ Perhaps there was a relief, in no longer striving to cope with feelings that she knew to be inappropriate. Yet it was an ending all the same, a relinquishing inimical to her nature, to give up on the image of love she had created for Fabrice and Linda, and for herself.
But the thought of the move to Versailles thrilled Nancy. All her girlish passion came flooding back into her sixty-two-year-old body as she dreamed of her garden, her own home, the château around the corner. She gave bubbling paeans to her removal men, whom she must have charmed into near-insensibility: ‘They were so adorable – we parted in silence & tears & ENORMOUS tips.’9 The smiling tone, first heard in her voice when she moved to Paris in 1945, was firmly back in place; she was ready to find joy once more in the daily consolations of normality. To Alvilde Lees-Milne she wrote: ‘All goes swimmingly so far – my neighbours are perfect, sensible and kind, the sort of neighbours one dreams of.’ To Deborah: ‘Everything to do with the house is made easy and delightful on account of the great sweetness of all concerned... You’ll have to tell me how to sow grass. Isn’t it exciting?’ Making a bonfire – ‘oh how enjoyable’, watching ‘rooks flying home’, seeing the servant next door ‘shutting the shutters. I never saw such a dear old face, like olden times’: all these small pleasures gathered themselves together inside Nancy’s susceptible soul and lifted her into a state of buoyancy: the state she craved. ‘Goodness I long to move.’
And yet. Three weeks later she wrote this, to Mark Ogilvie-Grant: ‘I move next week, a week today. Feel as if I were dying.’
For if ever Nancy’s imagination was working overtime, it was now. How she had become euphoric about her move to 4 Rue d’Artois at Versailles is one of the great mysteries of her life. Why she moved there is probably the greatest mystery of all. On first seeing the house, one cannot actually believe that this is right; only the plaque outside that bears her name can convince one that it is, that the magical Nancy Mitford, who as a girl had been sheltered within a vast baronial Gloucestershire manor the colour of old gold, who had stepped out to debutante dances from a Knightsbridge mansion the size of a hotel, who had conquered Paris from an elegant apartment in the impeccable 7ème, should have come to end her days in what looks like an elongated dirty white slum, an ugly peeling rectangular box, eighteenth century but without a single redeeming bit of prettiness, stuck between houses on an insignificant street that might be in a different country, a different world, from the château a bare mile away. What was she thinking of? Did she believe that she was participating in some timeless image of French life, making herself a part of these simple silent streets, with their little grey church around the corner, the workaday shops nearby, the motor repair shop opposite? Was this what she wanted, or thought she wanted, after twenty years of the city and its glittering demands? Was it reassuring to be surrounded by symbols of ‘olden times’, by a life that seemed not to have changed, as Paris in the 1960s was surely changing? Or did Nancy, in some resigned part of herself, recognise that the yellowing house with the garden full of birdsong was her resting place, that halfway up the Rue d’Artois was the end of the road?
‘When I showed the house to Harold, soon after she died,’ says Diana, ‘he couldn’t believe it, because he’d had her description. He said is this really the house? I said yes. Is that the garden? Yes. And he couldn’t get over it.’
It was more than that, however, more than the fact that Nancy – despite her considerable wealth – had chosen to live in this almost wilfully plain and provincial home. It was the sense – acknowledged only obliquely, as in the letter to Mark Ogilvie-Grant – of being in exile from her own life. She had come to Versailles on what was really a whim: impelled by a vision that had not in fact existed for two hundred years. She had left what she knew, the life she had made for herself with courage and hard work and good fortune; she had done so for reasons that were partly logical and partly obscure; they were not good enough to justify this sudden wrenching change.
But Nancy being Nancy, the brief black moment passed; and she turned her face resolutely to the sun. ‘I like the house very much in fact I love it’, she wrote to her sister Pamela. ‘Yesterday we planted about ten rose trees, two wistaria, two jasmine and other climbers. The walls are old and real, which is by no means always the case at Versailles, and covered with plants growing out of them. Marie is loving it here.’ And then she wrote to Mark, as if to cover up – apologise, even – for her sudden lapse into terror: ‘I shall never regret coming here I’m sure: at present I’m in a state of wild happiness and if one feels like that in January, what will April bring?’
‘It was not – very nice, honestly, the house,’ says Debo. ‘No – it wasn’t really. But she invested it with a sort of glamour. It was perfect, and the blackbirds were perfect, and the cat was a perfect pest, and the poppies were wonderful, and she didn’t notice when all the grass went dead. No, she could do that.’