A Life of Contrasts: The Autobiography of Diana Mosley

by Diana Mitford

  We spent one more summer on board Alianora, then we sold the boat. Venice is the place we love best for holidays, and a small yacht is far from the ideal lodging there. Alianora had given us freedom of movement; we were now to leave England with all our worldly goods. Only one sister remained there: Debo. Nancy lived in France, Pam in Ireland, Decca in America. Derek and Pam had left Rignell and gone to live at Tullamaine Castle in County Tipperary where Derek hunted with the ‘noble Tips’. He had fought with great gallantry in a war he was convinced Britain should never have been engaged in. Now he did not feel disposed to stay in England while it went downhill under an inefficient Labour government, and be slowly ruined himself in the process. Later on he worked for the French government, in a laboratory near Paris.

  Early in 1951 we left Crowood.

  21.

  LE TEMPLE DE LA GLOIRE

  In December 1950 we were in Paris, and one day, lunching with Gaston and Bettina Bergery and speaking vaguely about getting a Paris flat, Bettina said: ‘Would you like to live in a tiny Directoire temple? We know of one, it’s for sale.’ We motored down to Orsay and there on a cold, dark and foggy afternoon we first set eyes upon the Temple de la Gloire.25 It was as shabby as a house can be that has stood empty for many years; only the small but magnificent shell was unravaged by damp and neglect. It looked older than its one hundred and fifty years. For me, it was love at first sight, and the following March it was ours.

  Leaving Crowood was painful. Although less sad for me than leaving Wootton had been, I minded terribly for the boys, whose first real home it was. We had to leave all our kind village friends, among them Mr. Watson, a clever old Scotch hermit who had taught Alexander, and then both boys, in his tiny cottage on the hill. He had recently been ill and they now had a tutor, Mr. Leigh Williams, but Mr. Watson was a wonderful friend to Alexander. Packing up Crowood was a nightmare, partly because M. had used rooms there as an office and there were myriads of files and old papers as well as relics of all our former dwellings, Denham and Grosvenor Road and Wootton. We planned to get a house in Ireland and everything was sent to Cork; meanwhile the Temple was not yet habitable. We took a little flat in Paris from Jean de Baglion, who was to become one of our dearest friends, and from there we supervised the work at the Temple. In June we moved in. It was the third time in my life that I had had the luck to live in a beautiful house, and this time it lasted.

  Thus our move to Ireland and our move to France were simultaneous, but the circumstances were not the same. Our furniture arrived in Ireland battered, scratched and broken. Even the heavy marble tops of two large sideboards appear to have been thrown from the ship on to the quay and were shattered. It took months to get everything mended and polished. M. used to say that I wandered through County Galway in search of an ébéniste; it was only too true; I did.

  At the Temple on the other hand we had no furniture at all. For months we had to take our chairs with us from drawing-room to dining-room; and we had five forks, which severely limited the number of guests. I haunted the Hôtel Drouot, the Paris salerooms. It is very easy to become a saleroom addict, absorbed by the thrill of bargain-hunting. The old Hôtel Drouot was like Christie’s and Sotheby’s and Bonhams and salerooms in darkest Fulham and the Caledonian market all rolled into one. It had twelve rooms, in some of which lovely and precious things were sold while in others one found the lowest of the low, degraded rexine chairs with horsehair stuffing falling out of them on the dusty floor, filthy old carpets full of holes, broken and chipped gas stoves. Many, probably most of the crowds of people who came were not buyers at all, but liked the warmth and amusement of the place. I had to be very careful in my purchases because our francs were strictly limited, also the Temple is so small that there is nowhere to put anything inessential.

  One saw incredible bargains. A perfectly nice sham Louis XVI canapé in grey painted wood went for twenty francs: in modern money twenty centimes, that is to say less than the price of the stamp on a letter to England. The auctioneers got very impatient when nobody bid. A monstrous carved and highly coloured group of heavy panels, vaguely Burmese in style, were being propped up by several strong porters for the public to admire but nobody made a move. ‘Voyons, voyons,’ said the auctioneer; ‘combien pour le petit cosy-corner Chinois?’ As well as the hôtel des ventes I went to dozens of antique shops hunting for suitable objects for the lovely little Temple, and we also brought favourite possessions from England.

  No sooner had we got some chairs and spoons and forks than we began asking friends down to the Temple. Both of us had old friends in Paris from before the war whom we were pleased to find again. The Foreign Office forbade English diplomats to see us; just occasionally when a friend or a relation happened to be en poste in Paris I was sorry about this, but as a rule it mattered not at all, though possibly it resulted in us seeing more French and less English people than, for example, Nancy. She used to complain loudly about the number of our compatriots who, as she put it, ambled into the courtyard of the rue Monsieur wanting to be fed and generally hoping to borrow a few francs for their shopping. She was at their mercy, because she often sat sunning herself among her potted geraniums and one only had to push open the heavy porte cochère in order to discover what Debo called ‘the French lady writer’. To escape from importunate countrymen she was obliged to leave rue Monsieur when she was writing a book. She took a room in a pension at Versailles and hid the address from everyone except her great friend Gaston Palewski and me. Between books she earned her living by journalism, writing a column in The Sunday Times which often made people apoplectic with rage. Her teases were usually directed towards England, but from time to time even her beloved French were at the receiving end.

  For the bicentenary of the birth of Marie Antoinette an exhibition was arranged at Versailles. Beginning with her childhood at Schönbrunn one saw the whole life of the tragic Queen in room after room, through her years of luxury, grandeur, fun and riches to the poverty and suffering in the prisons of the Temple and the Conciergerie and ending with David’s cruel drawing of her with her prematurely grey hair cut short as she sat in the tumbril on her way to the guillotine. It brought tears to the eyes.

  Nancy chose this moment to publish her deep thoughts about Marie Antoinette. I think what set her off was a letter from Maria Theresa to her daughter when she was Dauphine, in which the Empress enjoins her never for one moment to forget ‘que vous êtes Allemande’. That word, allemande, was too much for Nancy. She wrote that Marie Antoinette was a traitress to France who tried to persuade her brother and the other German monarchs to invade France on her behalf. There was just enough truth in it to annoy, for the French who idolize Marie Antoinette, the martyred queen, in much the same way but multiplied a thousand-fold as the English idolize Mary Queen of Scots.

  During the ensuing storm we were lunching one day with Princess Natty de Lucinge. When we arrived she took me aside and whispered: ‘I’m afraid I’ve made a terrible gaffe. Van der Kemp is here!’ M. Van der Kemp, curator at Versailles, had arranged the exhibition.

  ‘Does it matter?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh yes. Your sister’s article,’ said Princess Natty.

  However, he rose above it, and a few years later Van der Kemp became one of Nancy’s great friends; during her illness he used to arrive at her house with armfuls of flowers for her.

  A friend we were fond of at that time was the Marquis de Lasteyrie, an old gentleman who was descended from Lafayette and who lived at Lafayette’s country house, La Grange. He invited us to tea and raspberries in summer. Although he was very poor he never dreamed of selling any of the priceless documents at La Grange; priceless, because Americans would pay anything for the slightest scratch from the pen of Lafayette. He allowed his guests to look at everything but he himself was unimpressed, and he avoided his famous ancestor as far as possible. When M. de Lasteyrie died and his cousin René de Chambrun inherited La Grange he was astonished at the chaotic way in which these Franco-Amer
ican treasures were stored and disposed about the house. ‘C’est que Monsieur le Marquis n’aimait pas le Marquis,’ explained his butler, Delphin.

  This dislike was the result of his deep love and veneration for Marie Antoinette. When Lafayette was supposed to be in charge of the safety of the King and Queen at Versailles the mob burst in and killed the Swiss guards. The Queen only escaped by using a secret passage which connected her room with the King’s. ‘Monsieur de Lafayette dort bien!’ she was heard to say.

  Once at the Folies Bergère they did a comic sketch in which Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were made fun of. M. de Lasteyrie heard about it; he bought a ticket and sat in the front row of the stalls. When the rude sketch got under way he stood up and waved his arms shouting in his quavery voice: ‘Ce n’est pas vrai! Notre reine Marie Antoinette était une sainte!’ There was a moment of shocked silence and then the whole audience began to laugh. There was a sort of riot of laughter. According to Josée de Chambrun, as dear, brave old M. de Lasteyrie left the theatre someone from the management rushed up to him and asked what he would charge to do the same turn every evening. At the end of the war when the American army arrived in France some

  American officers were billeted on M. de Lasteyrie at La Grange. One day they asked their host whether he would care to accompany them to Paris, and M. de Lasteyrie, who had been marooned with no petrol for long enough, jumped at the chance. They walked across the Tuileries gardens; he described the scene: ‘I told them, this is where the palace of our kings and queens stood.’

  ‘Aw!’ said the Americans, ‘so this is where the orgies took place.’

  ‘Orgies!’ said M. de Lasteyrie. ‘My dear Sir, I can assure you there were no orgies here. All my grandmothers were ladies in waiting to our queens. I can promise you there were no orgies.’

  Lunching with us one day M. de Lasteyrie was performing what M. called the ceremonial dance at the dining-room door. Charles de Noailles was there and neither would move, M. de Lasteyrie saying: ‘Ah non! Je ne peux pas passer devant M. de Noailles;’ whereupon an American boy marched out, showing them the way into the new world of the twentieth century.

  During our first months at the Temple Farve came to Paris for a last visit. We showed him the Temple; he loved it, and sent me £500 ‘to buy a pair of curtains’. Nancy invited M. de Lasteyrie to meet him. There was talk of a recent election and someone asked M. de Lasteyrie whether he was pleased with the result.

  ‘My dear lady,’ he replied, ‘when it is not the guillotine I am always pleased.’ Then, turning to Farve, he explained. ‘You see, my dear Sir, five of my grandmothers died on the guillotine during the revolution.’ After he had left, Farve said: ‘I liked that old relation of Joan of Arc.’

  22.

  CLONFERT

  The same year, 1951, as we went to live in France at the Orsay Temple we bought an old house, formerly a bishop’s palace, at Clonfert in Co. Galway. It was less than a mile west of the Shannon, a broad river which regularly overflowed its banks in winter causing widespread floods. The name Clonfert means ‘an island’ in Gaelic, and the house itself was never flooded. It stood in flat country on the edge of the bog. In the garden there were great beech trees and an avenue of age-old yews called the Nun’s Walk which had been used by our predecessor for exercising his hunters when there was frost. There was a carpet of needles under the yews that remained soft in even the hardest winter.

  It was George McVeagh who told us about Clonfert. He was our Dublin solicitor to whom we had been introduced by Derek and Pam, a delightful man, whose passion was snipe shooting. He often shot over the bog near Clonfert, so he knew it was for sale.

  We put in bathrooms and electric light and central heating, and while the work was going on at Clonfert the boys and Mr. Leigh Williams and I stayed with Pam at Tullamaine. The drive over, which I did every day, was never easy. Either there was frost and I slithered on black ice, or else there were deluges of rain; once for a week there was snow. It was lovely to get back after a dreary cold day standing about in rubble to Tullamaine and Pam’s delicious dinner. Clonfert Palace was in parts so ancient and its walls were so thick that piercing them for heating pipes was a far harder job than anyone had anticipated. It seemed to take forever. There was hardly a single window of which the sash cord was not broken. The French call sash windows fenêtres guillotines and these really were guillotines; one might very well have been beheaded by a Clonfert window. While Harry Conniffe and his son Paddy put the garden in order I measured the windows for curtains and tried to decide where the electric light points must go. Of all the many houses I have done up in my life the hardest work was Clonfert. Fortunately I could not peer into the future and see how vain our labours were to prove. Our furniture and books had been stored in Cork, and had arrived in very poor shape. We got curtains and covers made in Dublin and by degrees the house became comfortable and pretty. We did not install a telephone; it seemed to us wonderfully peaceful to be without, but we lived to regret it.

  The house faced south and just across the lawn was Clonfert Cathedral, a large and ancient church with a curiously-carved Norman west doorway. As is usual in Ireland, this old church was the place of worship of a small handful of Protestants. The vast majority of the people were Catholics and they filled their little modern church to the brim. To any outsider it seemed crazy that of the two sects of Christians it should be the few belonging to the reformed church who made up the tiny congregation in the old cathedral, built centuries before reform was ever dreamed of. Not only few in numbers, they were also lax in attendance compared with the Catholics. They could easily have fitted into a minuscule chapel.

  To a newcomer Clonfert did not at first sight give the impression of being a village at all, but in fact there were dozens of people living here and there in well-hidden little old cottages. One realized how numerous they were when they came out of church on a Sunday or a saint’s day, or when there was a hunt on the bog.

  The East Galway hounds hunted a big country and there were always a couple of meets a week within reach of Clonfert. Max adored hunting. We had brought our Crowood ponies to Ireland and it so happened that Max’s pony, Johnny, was a star. He enjoyed hunting every bit as much as did Max himself. When they were standing while a covert was drawn and the huntsman blew ‘gone away’ on his horn, Johnny in his excitement before galloping off to the first fence would give a great sigh. ‘He sounds just like a train when it leaves a station in the Paris metro,’ said Max. He could jump fences and walls bigger than himself.

  The hunt could never cross the bog, which was treacherous and dangerous for the horses, therefore sometimes on winter Sundays after church the village men and boys would hunt there on foot. Everyone brought his dog, one saw mongrel, puppy, whelp and hound and curs of low degree just as in Goldsmith’s day. One Sunday they were out and Max was feeding Johnny in his stable and just preparing to run off and join the hunt when a man was heard to holla quite near at hand. Max told me: ‘There was a great thumping noise; it was Johnny’s heart beating.’ The pony knew that a holla meant someone had seen the fox and he was dying to be off. As Max ran out of the stable without him he heard Johnny give a furious squeal. The holla at Clonfert also reminded one of how little Ireland had changed since the eighteenth century, for the bog echoed with wild cries of ‘Ya-hoo’. Jonathan Swift, ‘the great dane’ as the Irish call him, had stayed with the Bishop in our house, which was old even in his day. Max thought it must have been here that he conceived his idea of Houyhnhnms and Yahoos.

  When we went to Ireland Max was eleven and Alexander twelve. They took their tutor with them; there was no hateful boarding school to interfere with their lives, but Alexander bitterly regretted Crowood and Ramsbury and the old familiar faces. He suffered as we had when we left Asthall, and as Debo had when Farve sold Swinbrook. Like us, he gets deeply attached to places. He never cared for hunting; he buried himself in books. At gymkhanas in the summer he was to be seen kindly holding two horses for Ma
x, the reins hitched over his arms, reading, oblivious of his surroundings.

  There is no doubt that round Clonfert the people were exceptionally kind and welcoming. We quickly became very fond of the place. My room looked over the bog, and through the open windows delicious scents wafted in from the sweet-smelling wild flowers which covered it in spring, and sounds of curlews, snipe and water-fowl of all kinds. Sometimes one heard the curious dry sound of wild geese flying in formation to Norway or wherever it is they go. At Clonfert I regretted knowing so little about birds.

  It was at Clonfert I first realized Muv had got Parkinson’s disease. Jean de Baglion was staying with us and he pointed out that when she was reading the paper her hand continually trembled so that the newspaper gave a sort of rhythmic rustle. Jean’s father had died of it and therefore he knew the symptoms. At that stage it did not seem to inconvenience her, and it certainly never stopped her making journeys to visit all of us, even Decca in distant California. She often came to Ireland and to France, and I went every year to Inch Kenneth where she spent her summers.

  During these years my elder boys were at Oxford. While he was still an undergraduate Jonathan married Ingrid Wyndham. Desmond was at Christ Church and it was in Christ Church cathedral that he married Mariga von Urach. One Sunday a week or two before my forty-second birthday in early June, M. and I were lunching at Groussay with Charlie Beistegui and when we got back to the Temple there was a telegram from Jonathan; my first grand-child, Catherine, was born.