Nancy was on holiday in Venice when she heard the news of Gaston’s appointment. ‘O DESESPOIR O RAGE O FELICITATIONS’ was the wording of the telegram she sent him. The blow was a heavy one; Paris without the Colonel was almost unthinkable. But to the world of course she revealed nothing of what she felt. She wrote casually to Mrs Hammersley, ‘The Colonel is off to the Palais Farnèse in the form of Ambassador to Rome. I thought I’d told you. He is very much pleased & I think he’ll love it, really made for him. He goes in October after which I shall be as free as air.’ These were brave words for Nancy minded desperately. Those who knew her well noticed that her gaiety now had an hysterical edge to it, her relentless raillery was more cruel than funny. Mrs Hammersley complained of it, and so did several of Nancy’s Venetian acquaintances, in particular Victor Cunard5 who, as one of her closest friends there, was goaded past endurance, finally retaliating with a furious outburst which left both of them severely shaken. In a letter to Billa Harrod describing the quarrel, Victor put forward with greater accuracy than he knew his own theory of Nancy’s behaviour. It must, he thought, be due to the break-up of her affair with Gaston. ‘All her good spirits (or at least most of them) are a bluff and that her almost savage teasing of friends is a sort of safety valve operation. If I am right it is rather pathetic, because if she would only tell one she is unhappy one would do what one could to comfort her.’ But that was something Nancy would never do.
Colonel left for Rome in October 1957 and there he remained for five years until recalled by the General in 1962. Nancy missed him painfully and in secret. Although she was not allowed to see much of him in Paris, at least she knew he was there, only a few streets away, with always the possibility of a whirlwind visit between appointments and daily chats on the telephone. In Rome he was out of reach, and his letters, due to a ‘neurasthénie épistolaire’, were distressingly infrequent. Nancy now saw him only on the one brief visit he permitted her every year, and on the rare instances when he was summoned to Paris for a day or two for a conference. The first of these occasions was during the Algerian crisis in the summer of 1958. The papers were full of the army’s coup in taking over the government in Algeria, and of the vociferous demands for the return to power of the General. To Nancy it was a tormenting exercise in nostalgia as all the memories of the war, and the General, and Colonel in Algiers overwhelmed her. ‘Oh Colonel I seem to be living all those old years over again today … I long for your voice so passionately. I can’t imagine today without you being there – I stayed in all yesterday expecting you to telephone. Ah Colonel, you see I am in one of my states. Write a little (lisible) line if you don’t come soon.’ Then suddenly he was there, in Paris, for the first time for nearly a year. ‘Colonel arrived on Friday,’ Nancy happily informed Mrs Hammersley. ‘They telephoned just in time for me to go to Orly & meet him since when I’ve hardly seen him as you may imagine. He is very happy – we cried with happiness – after so long it seems unbelievable.’
Nancy’s visits to Rome had to be undertaken in clandestine conditions during the height of summer when most of the gens du monde were away. The Colonel was sensitive about his reputation as France’s ‘seul ambassadeur célibataire’, as Paris-Match made a point of referring to him. He need not have been: within a short time of his arrival he was known to the Romans as ‘l’Embrassadeur’, and a favourite topic at Roman dinner parties was the French Ambassador’s chasing of pretty women through the vast salons of the Palazzo Farnese. Nancy’s first visit was in August 1958. She left Paris ‘in dead secret’, telling almost no one. She found Gaston in excellent spirits, loving the grandeur and prestige, busily involved not only in his diplomatic duties but also in the social and artistic life of the city. He had brought with him his own collection of paintings to hang on the walls of the Farnese, which he proudly told Nancy was now known as ‘the pal-exquis’. She was ecstatically happy to be with him, and they rushed about in the boiling heat doing the sights like a couple of tourists and seeing nobody. But all too soon she was back in (now) dismal Paris. ‘I sigh for the land of the cypress & myrtle – I loathe the oak & ash. After 101 degrees in Rome I find it freezing here & pitch dark.’
In the next two years, 1959 and 1960, she stayed at the Farnese for a few days in July; in 1961 she went with Debo in March, and then again on her own for a couple of days four months later. She always felt so well in Rome, she told Debo, huge walks every morning, sun-bathing all afternoon (‘what the Colonel calls exposing my limbs to the Spanish embassy’), and the evenings alone with the Colonel in his ‘pal-exquis’. She returned to Paris sun-tanned and happy – to be met with news which made her turn cold with horror.
The Colonel had been in love for some years with a married woman, rich and socially prominent, whose husband had always refused to divorce her. The liaison had been conducted in secret but now she had had a child by Palewski, a son, and the story was all round Paris. Appalled and terrified, Nancy wrote to Gaston certain that this would mean their relationship must end: Colonel had the son for whom he had always longed, and no doubt he and his mistress would now marry. Gaston was reassuring: no, there was no question of marriage; he was sorry that she should be so upset but he for his part saw no reason why ‘le petit et gentil élément nouveau’ should make any difference to their friendship. ‘La grand affection que je vous porte n’a en rien diminué et ne diminuerait en rien si des arrangements éventuels me permettaient de m’occuper de mon petit garçon. La chose est si naturelle et serait si évident que l’amour-propre lui-même n’en saurait être atteint.’
So Nancy calmed down – but she was not wholly reassured. She and the Colonel continued to correspond. She went out the following year to visit him as usual. But she remained uneasy. ‘I am in a triste état,’ she wrote to him. ‘I wake up in the night & think of your new situation & I mind.’ In July 1962 she was in Venice staying with friends when she read in an English-language newspaper that the French Ambassador to Italy was about to be married. Her worst fears were instantly confirmed. In a mood of resignation and despair she wrote once more to the Colonel. ‘Dear Colonel I don’t understand your policy. I saw your marriage in the Daily American & my whole life seemed to collapse – now I have reconciled myself to it, so reasonable, such a solution to all your problems. But you always said you would tell me – I quite understand not telling because almost too difficult … All the same I find it odd of you, after a month’s silence, to write comme si de rien n’était & ask how I am. I am very sad & also don’t know what to do with myself. I can’t live in Paris where I miss you more than anywhere, especially it would be too painful with you arranging an hôtel particulier just round the corner so that I would see you from time to time … So I feel perplexed I must say. Perhaps I could settle here but then I would miss the French, & what about old Marie? so – you see –’ Patiently the Colonel replied: the story in the paper was untrue; he was not about to be married, there was no reason for Nancy to be jealous – the lady in question was the mother of his son and therefore he had a responsibility towards her. Simple as that.
Nancy returned to Paris at the beginning of August 1962, and almost simultaneously the Colonel was recalled. Georges Pompidou, the new Prime Minister, had not forgotten Gaston’s early patronage: ‘C’est vous,’ he used to tell him, ‘qui m’avez placé sur le tobogan.’ Now he was in a position to return the favour, appointing Palewski Minister of State for Atomic Energy6. The Colonel was so excited when he received the telegram that he flew that night to Paris, then had to go straight back to Rome to make his official farewells. Much as he had enjoyed his occupancy of the Palais Farnese, he had long been pining to return to Paris and his political life. Showing friends round his gorgeous palace he would tell them, ‘Je remplacerai tout cela avec la buvette du Palais Bourbon.’ Now he was back, in tearing spirits, and Nancy was beside herself with happiness: the period of exile was over, the telephone calls and last-minute visits resumed. At the beginning of September she wrote to her sister Decca, �
�The marvellous weather goes on I dined last night with the Colonel in his ministry Place de la Concorde & we sat out on the colonade, a new moon over the obelisk, it was really too lovely.’
The Colonel was back in Paris and Nancy was happy, or so she said, but now there was the child, and the mother of the child; and with the Colonel so busy, as Nancy teased him, letting off his bombs, the great emptiness at the centre of her life was impossible completely to disguise. The figure she presented to the world was as elegant and self-possessed as ever: her concern with her appearance in her fifties was as careful as it had always been7. The question of the moment was, should she wear more make-up as ‘Cecil B [Beaton] Harold A [Acton] & Raymond [Mortimer] all say I don’t paint my face enough’. And should she, now that she was turning grey, dye her hair? ‘I LOATHE grey hairs worse than death,’ she told Debo, but the first attempts at colouring were not a success. ‘When I went to Antoines to have it cut Madame Denise said “mais qu’est que ce curieux reflet vert?” Do admit the sadness.’ Eventually she found in a chemist in Bakewell, discovered while staying at Chatsworth, a dye that suited her. ‘Have my hair dyed boot black,’ she triumphantly told Muv, ‘& look lovely.’ Every night while she slept she wore a little piece of shaped cardboard, known on the packet as a ‘Frownie’, which was intended to smooth away the frown lines corrugating her forehead.
Now what she needed was something to do. The obvious answer was to write another novel; but, always a difficulty for Nancy, how to come by a plot? ‘Shall Cedric be offered & accept some Ruritanian throne (falling fearfully in love with the Dictator), Fanny & husband at the English embassy, Hector Dexter as Russian ambassador? I fear it is all too hackneyed or it might be nice … I do think Catholic writers have that advantage,’ she told Evelyn, ‘the story is always there to hand, will he won’t he will he won’t he will he save his soul? Now don’t be cross.’ ‘I’m fed up & bored,’ she confessed to Hamish Hamilton. ‘I must do something to keep myself amused during the long winter evenings … What about a life of Mme de Pompadour? Shall I have a shot at it, or does the idea depress you?’ Hamilton urged her to start at once.
Creative imagination was never one of Nancy’s strong points. The best of her fiction is closely autobiographical; the nearer she kept to her own experience, the better the result. With historical biography the problem of plot was removed; but could an intensely personal writer such as Nancy achieve sufficient detachment to write history? to write about people long dead, who had no connection whatsoever with Alconleigh, the Radletts or Fabrice de Sauveterre? The short answer is, no, she could not: she did not try. Nancy approached her biography of Madame de Pompadour exactly as though it were one of her novels, with herself as the Pompadour and Colonel as Louis XV. ‘I do love it because of the shrieks. They were all exactly like ONE, that’s the truth! … Like me, the Marquise preferred objects sculpture & architecture to paintings, (& pretty things to ugly ones & rich people to poor people – she liked pink better than brown & ladies on swings better than women baking bread) C’est comme ça it takes all sorts to make a world.’ The parallels with herself and the Colonel were impossible to miss. ‘Pomp literally worshipped the King, he was god to her, & never from the age of 9 thought of anybody else. Very cold, physically, which makes it perhaps understandable, her great faithfulness, no physical temptations.’ Theirs was a ‘delightful relationship of sex mixed up with laughter … After a few years of physical passion on his side it gradually turned into that ideal friendship which can only exist between a man and a woman when there has been a long physical intimacy. There was always love. As in every satisfactory union it was the man who kept the upper hand.’ Versailles itself Nancy saw as a Utopia, a perpetual romping house-party offering ‘a life without worries and without remorse, of a perfectly serene laziness of the spirit, of perpetual youth, of happy days out of doors and happy evenings chatting and gambling in the great wonderful palace, its windows opening wide on the fountains, the forest and the Western sky’. Nancy’s Versailles was a fairyland with dear good Louis XV at its head and pretty kind Madame de Pompadour by his side commissioning wonderful works of art and caring about the poor. The blackness of Versailles, the real and terrible power of the King, the ruthless greed of his mistress, Nancy chose to ignore. She read extensively in contemporary memoirs – Voltaire, Saint-Simon, de Luynes – and in the historians of the nineteenth century – Michelet, de Tocqueville and Carlyle – but certain subjects she simply chose not to treat: the brutal religious persecutions of Louis’s reign were skated over because ‘Catholicism is a closed book to me’; and so was the touchy subject of Free-masonry: ‘Nobody whose father was one could take free masons seriously. Waffling off to Oxford with his apron, I can see it now.’ The result may not have been history, but it was gay and pretty, full of jokes and personalities, and it brought France and the French court alive for many people who previously had barely heard of Louis XV and Versailles.
Pompadour took Nancy a year to write, part of which she spent in a pension in the town of Versailles itself. As soon as it was finished the manuscript was sent to Raymond Mortimer who, with his wide knowledge of French history and literature, could be relied upon to spot the worst of the howlers. Although (as Evelyn had always been) shocked by her slovenly punctuation and taken aback by the extreme informality of Nancy’s style (the Duc de Richelieu was ‘perfectly odious’, the Dauphine found many French customs ‘too common for words’), Raymond was nonetheless captivated by the liveliness of the narrative: ‘Your narrative style is so peculiar, so breathless, so remote from what has ever been used for biography,’ he wrote to her. ‘I feel as if an enchantingly clever woman was pouring out the story to me on the telephone.’
Madame de Pompadour was published in March 1954, with a fanciful jacket by Cecil Beaton and a print-run of 50,000 copies. The consensus among the critics was that it was marvellous entertainment if hardly to be taken seriously as history, an opinion summed up by A. J. P. Taylor in the Manchester Guardian: ‘All who admired The Pursuit of Love will be delighted to hear that its characters have appeared again, this time in fancy dress. They now claim to be leading figures in French history, revolving round Louis XV and his famous mistress, Madame de Pompadour. In reality they still belong to that wonderful never-never land of Miss Mitford’s invention, which can be called Versailles as easily as it used to be called Alconleigh … This is a book that provides high entertainment – much of it deliberate – from the first page to the last. Certainly no historian could write a novel half as good as Miss Mitford’s work of history. Of course he might not try.’
Whether or not orthodox historians approved of the Mitford approach, there was no doubt at all that the Pompadour was a success, and one which Nancy was eager to repeat. Within two years she was at work on her next historical subject, the story of the love-affair between Voltaire and the Marquise du Châtelet. It looked promising, she told Colonel: ‘Voltaire is so like you. No heart, & all his meals are TAKEN. He collects PICTURES & when exiled asks to go to Sully where he has relations. But we hear no more of the relations – he moves in on the DUKE. So Sauveterre Rides Again.’ But in truth the similarities were not profound, as Nancy admitted to Evelyn when she wrote to ask him to suggest a title for the book. ‘Colonel Voltaire perhaps – really no they aren’t very much alike & even I can’t make them. As for Emily heaven preserve ONE from being like her. (It’s all right, heaven has.)’ Partly because of this inability to identify with her characters, Nancy found Voltaire and Emilie much more difficult to write about than Louis and the exquise Marquise. There was a great corpus of material to be digested, including volumes of published letters and volumes more being prepared for publication by the great Voltaire scholar Theodore Bestermann in Geneva. Nancy did what she could at home, visited Bestermann and the Musée Voltaire in Geneva, and then in order to escape from Paris and the ever-pealing telephone retired for six weeks to write on the island of Torcello in the Venetian lagoon.
It was her old frie
nd Victor Cunard who suggested she stay on Torcello: it was quiet, the hotel comfortable, and it was near enough to Venice for evenings off and dinner with friends. Nancy thought it perfection: ‘I suppose all islands are beautiful but there can’t be many better than this, anyway in June. The fields have hedges of pink scented roses, poppies in the pale green corn, honeysuckle & vines over everything & huge terracotta sails floating by as there are canals on every side.’ The only distraction came from the boatloads of tourists who arrived every day just before lunch, tramped once round the island, inspected the churches and chugged away again in the afternoon, leaving the tiny island once more in peace. ‘I mingle with them, hating,’ Nancy wrote to Evelyn. The French, of course, were serious and well-behaved; the English smelt of Women’s Institute and left an appalling mess – ‘Aching feet, come limping off the steamer & gape round & then ache back again, leaving a litter behind that makes me die of shame. (Player’s Navy Cut wherever you look & flapping Daily Mails)’; and the Americans, interested only in the restaurant, do not go near the churches and move everywhere en masse, ‘dangling deaf-aids & asking each other where they live in America what difference can it make? The word duodenal recurs.’ The rest of the day, however, was tranquil and Nancy worked well, worried only by her longing for the uncommunicative Colonel (‘Dear love do write’), and by a painful condition of her eyes: she was tormented by headaches and after a few hours reading or writing her eyes felt hot and swollen and she was barely able to see. Once a week she gave herself the evening off, went into Venice for dinner with Victor Cunard or Willie Maugham or with George and Elizabeth Chavchavadze.
Nancy Mitford Page 25
