And she could be so touching in the determination to be happy; and in the pleasure that she began to find in flowers and birds, hedgehogs and tortoises. ‘Her garden’, wrote Acton, ‘drew her gently back into the world of children’s fairy tales.’ It is like at the end of The Pursuit of Love, when Linda lies in the Hons’ Cupboard waiting for Fabrice, wrapped in a mink coat with her dog beside her, ‘reading fairy stories’. Although Nancy’s life was now punctuated by seemly, mature activities like listening to the BBC, or writing letters to newspapers, or gardening of a sort, she was also returning to the recessed world of childhood. She longed for a dog, or a rabbit; she wrote that ‘My grass is rather tufty so I pretend to be a cow & pluck it with a grazing motion.’ It is strange to read of her concern for her tortoise in winter, or her curiosity as to what kind of bird it is who ‘honours me all the time and is so pretty’ while, in the great grown world outside, The Sun King was blazing away at the top of the best-seller list, being praised in cabinet by none other than General de Gaulle and selling 350,000 copies in the five years after publication (‘CAN you tell me why?’10).
She had not completely turned her back on public life. A 1968 interview with the Sunday Express suggested that she had: ‘I won’t go out to dinner parties any more. Boredom is one thing I cannot put up with. Oh, how I’ve suffered from the boredom of dinner parties! And from all the fuss of getting one’s hair done and getting into a long dress and hiring a car... I find myself getting more and more like my father and mother. My father never in his life went out to dinner.’ In truth, however, she had one elegant foot still planted in the Faubourg. She visited Paris regularly and received her friends for parties; she dined at the British Embassy with the new ambassador Christopher Soames (‘I predict TOTAL SUCCESS’11); she saw Palewski from time to time (‘I remain your Excellency’s humble & obedient servant’12); she was in close contact, as ever, with Diana at Orsay; and she was busy with work, fan mail, interviews, the lot.
She was an absolute success by now: unassailable, totemic, ‘La Reine Soleil’ as she was called in the Sunday Telegraph. Her name was constantly in the newspapers. ‘Nancy Mitford is moving into a three-bedroom house at Versailles’; ‘Mr Justice Stamp heard allegations that considerable parts of a book called Madame de Pompadour by Nancy Mitford had been plagiarised’13; ‘Imagine Nancy Mitford on the shilling counter! Yet that is where I found yesterday a quite presentable hard-backed copy of The Pursuit of Love.’ Her books were broadcast on the radio.14 Nancy wrote to the adapter of Love in a Cold Climate, aired on Woman’s Hour in 1969, to say ‘I only hope the person who reads it won’t “put in too much expression”’: a telling concern.
She was interviewed by the Observer, a fascinating article in which she was allowed simply to deliver her thoughts about love: ‘To fall in love you have to be in the state of mind for it to take, like a disease. You have to be very much wanting it, expecting it. Then if you see anyone and he is at all attractive you are ready to start all the strange imaginings, ready to run around indulging all his most selfish whims. You imagine he has such extraordinary qualities and at the same time you do know partly that he can’t quite be like that in reality. There are always those two feelings together.’ Such good sense is reassuring even now to read; and according to Nancy was positively gobbled up by her questioner, Mrs Green (‘Well it seems all the young people in England are in despair about Love & Mrs Green described this despair so vividly with such a wealth of realism & detail that I soon saw she too was in despair’, she wrote to Deborah in 1968. ‘She says they all talk non stop about WHAT WENT WRONG? For hours & hours about WWW? I said but how do they have time – I thought they all had jobs?...’). How enchantingly robust it all sounds; and how one envies Mrs Green her audience with Nancy.
By the time of this article, in April 1968, Nancy’s words were hung upon by many more than just Mrs Green. Her following was immense: the publication of The Sun King in 1966 had pushed her into a wider sphere. The book was the perfect vehicle for her mature style. There was no better subject than Louis XIV and Versailles for Nancy to pull off her trick of filtering France through Englishness; she did it stunningly, juggling the myriad glittering balls of the Bourbon family with a conjuror’s ease, imparting to the whole enterprise an air of contented relaxation (‘Each time [Louis XIV]’s eye slid down this river on the map he was annoyed to be reminded of little Holland’; ‘Colbert had one unexpectedly romantic side to his nature: he was a snob’). The result was another example of the theory, or truth, that the best books work on two levels.
On the one hand, Nancy dealt acutely with the king’s reign and the role played within it by Versailles. She, like Louis, was obsessively in love with the place, and her love informed and lubricated her book; but she did not describe it as fairyland; she saw, as Bossuet15 had said, that ‘it carried within it the seeds of its own destruction’. She could understand Colbert: ‘He hated Versailles, but he alone was capable of producing the enormous sums of money which it swallowed and as soon as he saw that the King was determined to live there he bowed to the inevitable and began to think of ways in which the house could be made to further French commerce’. Her book had grit and perceptiveness, and most reviews treated it accordingly. In The Sunday Times, the fond but exigent Raymond Mortimer (whose letters had become substitutes for Waugh’s), asked himself if Nancy could ‘cope with Louis XIV, so formal, so formidable, and in the second half of his life so earnest in his piety?’ She had, thought Mortimer, fudged the fraught subject of Jansenism. Yet in reply to his own question he wrote: ‘A decided “yes” is the answer...’
On the other hand, The Sun King was the kind of book that could be bought for other, less elevated reasons. It was what Nancy called ‘one of those picture books which Americans like’: a coffee-table book in fact, produced with Hamish Hamilton by a publisher named George Rainbird, who had invented the concept. Nancy hated the idea at first. ‘I shall make more money but of course nobody will read it’, she had written to Evelyn Waugh in 1964. Like the reviewer in The Times, for whom the large colour plates were ‘rather crudely done’, her instinct was to back off. She came round when Rainbird told her ‘he got orders for 100,000 copies at Frankfurt book fair wh, at 3 gns, seems more than promising.’
And so Nancy acquired a yet greater public: not just General de Gaulle but the entire, desperate, please-God-give-me-an-idea Christmas-stocking brigade. Back in 1945, at the end of a hard day in the bookshop Heywood Hill, she had written to Evelyn Waugh that ‘two quite separate people came in & asked me to think of a book for the Duke of Beaufort “he never reads you know”. If somebody could write a book for people who never read they would make a fortune.’ Et voilà: Nancy had pulled off one more trick.
She continued to work, although she was far too rich to need to. ‘I am driven to write’, she told the Sunday Telegraph, ‘by two things: impecuniousness [sic] and boredom’. The problem with her eyes had eased – would come and go for the rest of her life – so she seized upon the respite and busied herself. She rewrote a script for a musical of The Pursuit of Love (‘dialogue terrible’), which opened at the Bristol Old Vic and got no further (‘A journalist said to me who is G. Palewski & why did you dedicate your book to him? I said a Frenchman I knew in the war who gave me a hand with street names & so on’...16). She reviewed the republished Mapp and Lucia books by E.F. Benson: ‘No writer nowadays would allow Georgie to do his embroidery and dye his hair and wear his little cape and sit four hours chatting with Lucia and playing celestial Mozartino, without hinting at Boys in the background.’ She wrote a marvellous essay (‘I’ve been pegging away for three weeks & seem to be no further forward’) on Carlyle’s biography of Frederick the Great: ‘Unfortunately he [Carlyle] found much that was not grandly true of Frederick; much that he would have liked, but was too honest, to ignore, and much that he failed to understand.’
Her interest in Frederick had derived, in the first instance, from ‘his sparring matches with Voltaire’.
Then she wanted to write about the man himself: a massive undertaking, which she began in 1968. Possibly she was impelled by what she saw as the magnificent wrongness of Carlyle, who for Nancy was ‘at odds with the epoch... the arts of the eighteenth century were vacant oblivion [to Carlyle], and its enlightenment eternal night.’ Nancy may have a ‘wrongness’ of her own about Frederick, however. There is a slight sense, in her biography, that she is striving for a point of identification: that she has fallen for Frederick chiefly because of his love of France, because he ‘wrote and thought and dreamed in French’: like ONE. ‘It seems to me his reign, after Frederick William’s [his brutal father], is into a Watteau out of a Rembrandt’, she wrote to Raymond Mortimer, thus revealing her bias. Nonetheless her book is a remarkable achievement; the finest of all in a sense, for in it she took on the enemy, the man who brought about the possibility of a united Germany, for heaven’s sake. Pace the friendship with Voltaire, her knowledge of the Seven Years War, this was unknown territory. Rainbird, she wrote, ‘groans at the prospect & longs for Catherine the Great... I’m dreadfully afraid the English only like books about Mary Q of S & Marie Antoinette & that new ground won’t go down – specially German ground.’
One realises just how daring, how confident in her abilities, how eager to push herself Nancy had become by the end of her career (and one thinks again of Highland Fling; who would have believed it possible?) The idea that Catherine the Great was her ideal subject was to misunderstand her. Rather it was to misunderstand what she wanted to be, the ambition she had, at the age of almost sixty-three, to develop as a writer. ‘I think if I could bring off this book & if it had the same enormous public as The Sun King [which of course it did not] it might do a little good from a European point of view. English people regard F the G as a sort of Hitler I believe.’17
She did not see him that way. Nonetheless she was tackling a world that was not just new but in many ways alien (ironically she was helped by Diana’s knowledge of German; her sister translated some letters and the book was dedicated to her: ‘she never dedicated to any of the sisters except that,’ Diana says. ‘It’s a lovely book I think’). She fought her way past her easy understanding of Frederick’s Francophilia, his funniness, his friendship with Voltaire; she sought instead an overview; and she achieved it. It was difficult and that, for her, was the point. As has been said, Nancy was a brave woman.
In late 1968, as she was just getting to grips with her new house and book, Nancy felt a pain in her left leg. ‘From November she was saying oh, my leg hurts,’ says Diana. It seemed innocuous; like her poor eyesight a reminder, to be accepted with good grace, that she had taken ‘one more step towards THE END’. She would have seen it as such. But in fact the pain in her leg was a different sign. It said that the slow encroachment of shadows, the seemly movement into old age, the chance to find resignation and peace, was not to be Nancy’s fate: for her, as for the world of Versailles, it would be the sudden fall of a great dullness.
‘In ’69 she wasn’t well,’ says Diana. ‘And our own doctor, Dumas, felt her tummy and felt something.’ He did not tell Nancy much about his findings, simply said that she should rest in bed while awaiting tests. So in March 1969 she was lying there obediently, ‘stuffed with drugs’, waiting for this unaccustomed pain to pass – as it surely would – when she received a visit from Gaston Palewski. ‘Hallo Colonel, I’ve got cancer’, was her not-very-serious greeting. This put him off his stroke. He had come to tell her that he was about to get married.
Having funked it he was forced to return the next day, as there was to be an announcement in Le Figaro. This time Nancy was given the news. Palewski, le célibataire par excellence, who had once said of marriage that it was ‘une terre promise vers laquelle on se promène lentement’, had reached the promised land. At the age of sixty-eight he had become engaged to Violette de Talleyrand-Périgord: extremely rich, recently divorced, and his intended prey for some time now. The marriage was to take place almost immediately, on 20 March 1969.
Was it a shock to Nancy? She had expected it for so long that probably, paradoxically, it was; by 1969 it had come to seem as though it would never happen. What made it worse was that the Colonel’s surprises always had an element of refined cruelty to them. His argument had always been that he could not, for the sake of his career, marry a divorcée, and a Protestant one at that; this in itself was ludicrous, as the perceived ‘taint’ of divorce could hardly have been worse, in the eyes of de Gaulle, than the very real taint of Palewski’s obsessive womanising. But by 1969 his political career was over, and he was free to do as he liked. So what he did, with all speed, was become engaged: not to Nancy, but to another divorced Protestant (albeit one with an exceptionally beautiful château, Le Marais).
Of course Palewski was under no obligation to marry Nancy just because it would have been nice for her, because his constant company in her later years would have brought a quiet flame to light her life. As usual, he could not be blamed for the hurt he had caused to her, although there is something quite awful about the way in which he did it. How could Palewski have come sidling into Nancy’s bedroom and presented her – no doubt in a manner full of due honour and respect – with this sneaky fait accompli? And yet, why should he not have done? What did he owe her? It was not his fault that he was stoking the physical pain that had begun its remorseless creep through Nancy’s body.
It has been suggested that her illness was connected to Palewski’s news: that his marriage brought it on, or made it worse, or removed her will to fight it. The BBC Omnibus took this line and, according to Rhoda Koenig in The Sunday Times, Nancy ‘died soon after reading that [Palewski] was married’.
This, of course, is the ultimate expression of the idea that all the buried sorrows and frustrations had somehow to be released: that over the years they had emerged in glinting little dribs and drabs, as flurries of spite, as lethal teases, as darting attacks; but that now, as Nancy realised that the pursuit of love had led only to failure, so the agony poured out of her in a poisonous stream that flooded her body with pain. How convincing and schematic that sounds; and how insulting, somehow. Nancy would not have thought much of it – she never went in for fitting theories on to life, like lids on to jars that are slightly the wrong size – and her relations did not either. ‘Well, no,’ says Diana, ‘she was ill already when Gaston got married. No that wasn’t fair’ (to either Nancy or Palewski). Alexander Mosley is even more robust: ‘Nonsense.’
That Palewski should have got married when Nancy fell ill was nothing more nor less than our old friend, coincidence. Nor was it the only sorrow that she suffered at this time: Mark Ogilvie-Grant died from cancer of the oesophagus in February of that terrible year (‘even you’, Waugh would have scolded, ‘cannot say blissful blissful 1969’). In her last letter to Mark she had written: ‘I had a dream. Robert [Byron] rang up from Paris & said he was alive & coming down by the next train...’ The deaths were starting to overwhelm her. ‘Oh the Reaper’, she wrote to Cecil Beaton. Yet what the Colonel had done stirred up a different kind of pain, compounded of betrayal and humiliation and impotence, spiced to burning point with a sense of having been the worst kind of fool for twenty-five years. Nancy could do nothing but lie there in her silent bedroom, on her own small wheel of fire, and submit to it all. In April 1969 she wrote a letter full of honesty and obfuscation to Deborah (by now her most cherished correspondent):
Colonel (married) has just been. He makes that face – ‘it’s all too silly’. He’s to go on living rue Bonaparte...
Well I did the tests, it was like a horror-comic. No meal, but much worse, a large jug full of liquid was injected taking 10 minutes... Then they kept on leaving me naked in pitch darkness which at first I thought was to reduce me to obedience but after a while I realised they were developing the photographs in a kitchen sink next door like children with a Brownie... The snaps have just arrived & lumpling is terrifying simply huge. I wonder if it’s my twin brother (it has happ
ened I believe) little old Lord Redesdale shrieking away... hope he can cook.
And for bravery of that kind one can forgive, very easily indeed, these feminine digs at poor harmless Madame Violette Palewski, which Nancy sewed firmly into a subsequent letter to Alvilde Lees-Milne:
She’s a sort of dead person, an anti-person, always very amiable but with no apparent reason for being on this earth. He’s to go on living in the Rue Bonaparte & the Marais at weekends.
My health drags on the same...
By this time the other Mitford girls were sensing the presence of danger and, like loyal animals, had begun to close around Nancy’s bed. ‘Woman [Pam] was wonderful’, she wrote to her friend Viscountess Mersey in April, from the Clinique Georges Bizet in Paris. ‘Somebody told me I ought to have a companion for my tortoise so she went out & got one... As for Elle [Deborah] one can’t help noticing that she only comes when there are wills in the wind – when I see that large black plastic bag & large, welling with croc tears, blue eyes I shall know I’ve had it. Saint [Diana] says she will be here throughout which is too good & holy. In short my sisters are perfect not that I doubted it.’
What they knew, and Nancy did not, was that the operation in Paris had found ‘an enormous tumour’, says Diana, ‘which was partly on the liver’ (the advanced nature of this cancer does raise the question of whether Nancy was feeling ill before November 1968, and had not wanted to admit it).
Debo stayed with me at the Temple [the Mosleys’ house at Orsay] for the operation. We were all day at the hospital and then two days running we could not get hold of the surgeon. And I said to the sister: we must be allowed, as the family, to see the surgeon and find out what the prognosis is. ‘Il est parti, Madame, non il est parti...’: so. So I think Kit said you must, you must ask the surgeon to ring up tonight, and we gave the number.
Life in a Cold Climate Page 45
