The success of The Sun King was well earned and well deserved: edition followed edition while Nancy concentrated on the little house she had bought at Versailles, 4 rue d’Artois.
Nancy was more of a novelist in life than in literature. She superimposed her own image on what she was seeing, yet she wished to be seen in the role she had assumed, a Muse of Comedy—and to appear more worldly than she was. For all her pseudo-Parisian sophistication and the growth of her fame she retained her pristine naïvety. A virginally romantic sensibility coloured her outlook. Great wealth and historic genealogies cast a glamour on their possessors even when these were dowdy and plain. Her next abode was much prettier in her mind’s eye than in reality. Its façade on the street was unassuming but its interior was adaptable, and she proceeded to arrange the rooms with discriminating taste. The street itself was quiet and suburban, with a solid grey parish church round the corner. For Nancy the garden behind the house was its cynosure. With her cult of fresh air she could read and write in it when the weather was fine. The garden was her ‘necessary luxury’.
Her Parisian apartment was more elegant and she had improved it over the years, but having decided to leave it she did so without apparent regret, though most of her friends were sorry, not for selfish reasons but because ‘Mr Street’ and its environment fitted her like a glove. Whenever I pass it I stop at number seven and it does not strain my imagination to picture her smiling hatless in the courtyard. Her halcyon years were spent there. Alas, the same could not be said of rue d’Artois—a name associated with a monarch she detested.
Already in October she made frequent if not daily excursions to the new house to supervise its transformation: ‘such fun and I’m in love with all the workmen. It looks as if my move will be at about Christmas,’ she told Alvilde Lees-Milne. ‘All goes swimmingly so far—my neighbours are perfect, sensible and kind, the sort of neighbours one dreams of and the femme de ménage lives opposite and acts as a concierge and is one of those fixers. I only pray she and Marie will get on.’ And to her sister Debo she wrote enthusiastically: ‘Everything to do with the house is made easy and delightful on account of the great sweetness of all concerned. Immediately after buying it I had nightmares about what I supposed would be a straggle [sic] but you see all goes on wheels.’ She wanted ‘a lot of weed seeds’ for the garden—‘poppies, valerian, irises, orchids, butter cups, marsh mallow’s, daisies and hare bells. Can one buy them? You’ll have to tell me how to sow grass. Isn’t it exciting…’
‘Oh dear, last night I sat next to an American at dinner and I said, talking of Paris, “there was a book, not very good, about Paris in the Terror.” “I wrote it”. Sleepless night and I doubt if I shall ever sleep again. What’s more he said gloomily that it had taken seven years of research. It has aged me by 90 years, oi am now auld [sic].’
The new house was half-way (about seven minutes walk) between the two stations to St. Lazare and les Invalides. As Nancy did not own a motor she would go up and down in the train ‘which is now much quicker and far more peaceful.’
On 18th December: ‘I went yesterday and made a huge bonfire in the garden (oh how enjoyable) and, in spite of being Saturday afternoon the sweet deaf and dumb painter was there and of course joined in. Nobody ever can resist, can they? Marvellous sunset and rooks flying home and a moon coming up—goodness, I long to move. The old servant of the next door chemist was shutting the shutters. I never saw such a dear old face, like olden times… The first thing any Versailles person says to you is you’ll see how much you’ll love being here. It’s really most striking—last week the telephone man and the removals man both said it, quite unsolicited.’
On 4th January, 1967, still from rue Monsieur: ‘Men are in the drawing room taking away my curtains and carpet—I feel like a criminal who hears the guillotine being put in the prison yard. In fact I feel exactly as if I were going to die next week: a plunge into the unknown. How odd… Keep writing to make me feel I’m still alive’. And to Mark she wrote at the same time: ‘I move next week, a week today. Feel as if I were dying’.
In spite of Nancy’s habitual tendency to verbal exaggeration I suspect that a genuine premonition dictated these words. All her friends received a postcard-size photograph of her lifting the lid of her drawing-room stove with a demure smile slender and neat in a tartan skirt, she seemed a young woman of thirty. ‘Farewell rue Monsieur’ was inscribed above and ‘Hail 4 rue d’Artois, Versailles, on 12 January, 1967’ below. At the back she wrote to me: ‘I’m engulfed in my move and greatly enjoying it though I suppose the actual day will be like the death of Damien’. The fatal note recurred.
On 29th January she wrote to her sister Pam [the Hon. Mrs. Derek Jackson]: ‘We are still in a tremendous muddle here and nothing seems to make much progress but I suppose it does, invisibly! But I like the house very much in fact I love it—so warm and sunny and cheerful. The move was quite harmless—absolutely nothing either lost or even chipped and the weather was both warm and dry, so rare at this time of year! The local charwoman is a marvel; don’t know what we should have done without her, she is one of those get a move oners and so nice.
Then I’ve got a dear little boy who works in the garden one day a week. 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. We’ve got a grand new gas cooker—very complicated so that now I can’t even boil an egg if left alone because I can’t light it—an oil heater which does the house and the baths—boiling water in floods—I’m getting a plate washer and a new frigidaire and washing machine, so we ought to be comfortable I hope. People are so rich that not only nobody wants the old machines as a present which work perfectly well, but you have to pay to get them removed!’
‘I’m recovering from the move but it was tiring,’ she told Mark. ‘At the height I had a feeling of total exhaustion, which reminded me of the war—working in bookshop and fire watching twice a week… 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?’
‘Sun King is still top of the pops am I pleased! Generally Xmas kills a book like that. It was the top of the whole of 1966.’
As usual she was deluged with fan mail. A communication from a descendant of François Francine, who designed the fountains at Versailles, was among the more interesting. As Nancy informed M. Jacques Brousse, her French translator: ‘I’ve got a letter from an American Mr Jacques-Louis Francine, complaining that on page 43 of my book I have killed off the whole of his large family at one blow. It seems his ancestor was not guillotined at all: he emigrated. I answered most politely saying I’m too sorry but pointing out that in my view the New World and the Next World count the same.’
‘However I’d be glad if you would change the passage… Francine is evidently an educated man and sent a good deal of chapter and verse for his claim although the French genealogist of the family says it perished in the revolution. Probably both versions are true as there were most likely several Françines by then.’
‘The French movers are extraordinary,’ she told Sir Hugh Jackson. ‘They even kept the little heap of pennies under my big clock, to balance it, and put them back in the same place and started it again. The system is, everything is wrapped up, however small, and every book separately, and all the furniture from top to toe. Then they lead the things at street level on to a platform which rises to the level of the rooms, and the things float in through the windows—none of that wrestling on the stairs. It took three whole days and I haven’t got so very much furniture. They even make your beds and would probably cook your dinner if you asked them. They were so adorable—we parted in silence and tears and enormous tips. The high spot was when old Marie said must I give my valise to the men? Well, Marie, I’m giving mine. Frantic whispers: “There
’s a thousand pounds in it.” So we took a taxi. Isn’t that France all over! I said I suppose it’s in a stocking? and she said yes it is. I wish you could see this vast heiress!… I’m wanted here every minute by the workmen or by the arrival of hundreds of roses to plant…’
‘I wonder if you ever read the letters of the Stanley of Alderley family which I edited before the war. Hamish Hamilton is going to republish them so I’ve been reading them—goodness they are amusing, I’d quite forgotten. Such a picture of a naughty Victorian husband and his neglected huge family (12 children, 8 survivors). As so often seems to happen, I believe, there is now only one male heir. My grandfather Redesdale had 5 sons and there is no heir at all.’
Since her removal to Versailles, Nancy chose to become a semi-recluse, abstemious but never austere. Her garden—a cultivated wilderness—drew her gently back into the world of children’s fairy tales. A young gardener called Dominique helped her to cultivate it in the style, or lack of style, she favoured, rustic and informal, like a canvas by Monet in which cottage flowers predominated. ‘I’ve sent for more climbing roses,’ she told Mark Ogilvie-Grant. ‘Dominique has torn down all the horrid vigne vierge so I’ve got a mass of South wall waiting—and also wistaria and jasmine. Princess Sixte de Bourbon popped in and telling about her sister Duchess (Geranium) Mouchy, she said elle est assommante avec son jardin ma chère, selon elle les poirots s’appellent pommes de terre et les épinards sont vraiment des laitues. C’est à ne rien comprendre. How I agree—my ducal sister is just the same.’
Mark was an amateur botanist, and several years previously Nancy had sent him a Christmas card illuminated with the motto:
The kiss of the wind for lumbago,
The stab of a thorn for mirth,
One is nearer to Death in a garden
Than anywhere else on earth
Beside which she commented: ‘This is the French idea of a Christmas card, also their view, correct I think, of gardens. Oh do come and be Lady Di’s gardeness—one reply said “why I turned an Indian jungle into a perfect English garden”.’ Of course she was joking.
Later again she wrote to Mark: ‘My garden looks as if 1000 Edwardian hats (roses) had fallen into it. It’s really waste for me to have a garden where things do so well. A hollyhock I sowed last year is taller than me and huge like a tree and all is on those lines—but all I really want is a weedy meadow. But I love the roses…’ A typical instance of her gratuitous kindness: ‘Fancy I got Dominique into the gardens at Versailles. I feel it’s a good deed of a lifetime—he was utterly dreading the factory—in despair, poor little boy. Now he works at the Orangery and proudly tells the great age of the trees, and he goes twice a week to Paris to learn botany. He’s so happy you can’t think—I only hope it’ll last. Things one arranges so seldom succeed do they?’
‘What must I do to keep my tortoise alive all the winter? Do you know? She’s a frightful fool and I don’t trust her to make her own arrangements and then our winter is so long…’
‘A man I met in Bayreuth had been to Chatsworth and chummed up with a gardener who said, “if you hide in that bush you will soon see the Duchess go by”. Don’t you love the idea of all the bushes being full of Duchess-watchers? Quite creepy.’
Nancy would lie in a deck chair among her flowers and birds and tortoises, basking in the sheer joy of existence. ‘I can’t tell you how much I like living here,’ she told Alvilde Lees-Milne (1st April, 1967), ‘it suits me perfectly in every way. I did have doubts soon after buying it, but in fact I like it 100 times more than I would ever have expected to. It’s a dear little house and I long to show it to you. Christopher Sykes opened, or launched, the spare room and found it quite comfortable, or so he kindly said. I suppose I can’t lure you?’
‘The garden amuses me and is just the right size, nothing but roses and lilies is my idea and I’ve managed to find my favourite Dorothy Perkins to drape everywhere. Can you tell me what a bird is, a bit bigger than a sparrow, with slate-blue head and body and an orange tail? I’ve never seen another—it honours me all the time and is so pretty. I wonder if it may have escaped from an aviary… There’s a new rule in Paris, you pay a huge extra amount of rent for a garden now. I think I was very wise to skip off and buy something of my very own… Wherever I look I see nothing but pear blossom—oh the Spring, isn’t it heavenly?’
‘… I say, the English are loving that oil aren’t they, dashing about washing birds and so on, as good as the good old Blitz… Lesley [Blanch] and Auntie Vi [Trefusis] are still as thick as thieves—Lesley believes every single word she says, including that she is the 90th in the succession for the throne. The té1é gave out the death, at 93, of Mme Marie-Louise Bousquet—we were all very sad. But it was another Marie-Louise Bousquet and our old duck is alive and kicking, rather put out by people telephoning in dozens to ask about the funeral.’ And on 5th May: ‘The cold here beats all but my weed seeds are whizzing up and the feral grass is full of buttercups. The bird is called, here, rossignol de murail. I find a garden leads to the most appalling waste of time but no doubt you know that… Marie complains of the dawn chorus here, it certainly wakes one up (she loves it really). But no cuckoo or nightingale until one gets to the park, just sweet suburban birds of all varieties.’
In September she wrote in the same strain to Sir Hugh Jackson: ‘Yes I’m totally happy here—I’ve found a heap of sand and have buried my head in it. The Versailles people are so gentle and polite—utterly unlike the Parisians, whom I love but who are tiring no doubt. Then the town is so pretty and the traffic not at all too bad until you come to the Château.’
‘I can’t get English television here, I wish I could. But when I’m writing I have to keep off it as it’s an extra strain on the eyes… Such lovely boiling weather, even at night. I sit out of doors all day and feel so well.’
The devoted Marie had piloted Nancy through the exhausting process of removal and for the time being she postponed the retirement which Nancy dreaded. Nancy could turn again with relief to the eighteenth century. An essay on Carlyle and Frederick the Great led her gradually towards a revaluation of the latter, shorn of his Carlylean trappings, and she decided to write his biography. She had been toying with the idea since 1963. Her study of Voltaire encouraged her to scrutinize his Francophile patron, to whom the French language was more familiar than his own, and she became increasingly fascinated by the complexity of his strange character. She always had a partiality for military leaders, dead or alive, and she followed their campaigns nostalgically, wishing she had been on the spot.
‘I’m frantically busy,’ she informed Alvilde Lees-Milne in September 1967, ‘having taken on a long essay on Carlyle and Frederick the Great which of course amuses me to death—one screams out loud as with P. G. Wodehouse—but now Rainbird is to re-issue Pompadour as a companion volume to Sun King. Painless childbirth, yes, but I want to do a lot of revision and have only got until end of November. So I feel that drowning in work which always upsets me. I’m too stupid to do two things at once and Frederick goes slowly because the eight volumes are like a huge plum cake; one can’t digest much at a time.’
‘My garden has been taken over by a fragile white morning glory very different from the ghastly Eton and Harrow sort. Through it smile the roses—the whole effect is ravishing.’
Apropos of her revision of ‘Pomp’ Nancy had told Sir Hugh Jackson that for eighteenth-century information the costly new edition of Voltaire’s letters proved invaluable. ‘I find for instance that it was entirely Louis XV who, informed of course by Voltaire, got the Calas judgement quashed. Then Voltaire, though a great friend of Choiseul’s, was on the King’s side over his dismissal when everybody else was making such a song and dance. Nobody ever mentions these things owing to stupid prejudice… but the letters speak for themselves. Choiseul’s dismissal of course is after Pomp’s death but I have done a bit about Calas over which she was most helpful… Yes, nobody has heard of Tam. but I am taking the line that T
om was always pronounced Tam in Scotland because I can’t resist calling my essay Tam and Fritz! There is one small piece of evidence in the text. Carlyle mentions Thomson’s Seasons and then in his mad way he adds, “Jamie Tamson, Jamie Tamson, oh!”’
‘Can’t remember if I told you,’ she confided to Sir Hugh in March 1968, ‘but I have definitely embarked on Frederick the Great. It is difficult because of the length of his life—I’m greatly enjoying it however. All new to me I know very little German history… In August I go to Germany to see the places relevant to the new book.’
With macabre humour—somewhat sinister in retrospect—Nancy wrote to her sister Debo about her tomb and burial (1st March, 1968): ‘Colonel and I were in the local marble shop—they’ve got a spiffing urn there. I said I think I’ll buy that for my tomb. He said you can’t have satyrs all over your tomb. I said, but as I’m sure to be killed by the satyr? (There is somebody called Le Satyr de la Banlieue who does young ladies and strangles old ones.) And so the world wags on…’
‘As for plantage—just wherever I drop, with unforgettable tomb and a great deal of Pompes Funèbres which Marie will enjoy. There seems to be an English church here where a few hurried prayers and Holy Holy Holy (to make Honks cry) can be muttered. Rope in the Colonel or the Duchess-loving van der Kemp or Mogens—people like to be asked.’
‘My neighbours are so nice. I went to tea yesterday (two English sisters very young with thousands of children). They had seen Woman [her sister Pam, the Hon. Mrs. Derek Jackson] and asked if she was my only sister which I found most refreshing. The elder neighbour bought this (my) house about 14 years ago for £2000—sold it for £18,000 and I paid £40,000. Makes you think. And now I would get, I am told, £60,000. It was clever of the eldest neighbour because the French regard this district as frightfully dowdy and the house, then, was a laundry.’
Nancy Mitford Page 23
