The problems of moving in, Duff wrote, were not being helped by ‘the recalcitrant military, who try to rule the country with a touch as delicate as a sledge-hammer’. He hoped, however, that a projected visit from Churchill would frighten them into action. Typically, Diana saw the same visit as reason for dismay rather than hope. ‘If Duckling [her nickname for Churchill] comes in a fortnight as he threatens,’ she wrote, ‘he’ll find us in the same whiney, impatient state as he saw us in Marrakesh about the Algiers house and will think me a muddler and Duff weak.’ He did come, and though he stayed in the Quai d’Orsay, the Embassy was burnished and swept clean and opened its doors for its first postwar dinner-party. For a time the tired old man was morose and pathetic; then the table was brought out for bezique ‘and he laughed, and brightened up and the whisky warmed and the old magical splendour and jokes shaken up and frothing poured over us all’.
Pauline Borghese’s bedroom in the Embassy outdid even the splendours of Admiralty House. The great lit de parade, supported by Egyptian caryatids, crowned by a golden eagle, was both a spectacular piece of décor and also a comfortable study. ‘Like Milton’s Vallombrosan leaves,’ wrote Peter Quennell, ‘innumerable letters and papers lay scattered thickly all around; and the Ambassadress continued to distribute her attention between some half-dozen subjects … At the same time, a maid was preparing the tented alcove that had replaced the much simpler bathroom where Pauline Borghese had once washed in milk; and, having tapped on a hidden door, a minute yellow-skinned personage would silently slip across the carpet and, introducing himself as “Pédicure Chang”, move reverentially towards the bottom of the bed.’ Diana derived enormous pleasure from these rooms. ‘As I get older I get more susceptible to beauty of surroundings,’ she told Conrad. ‘It’s strange how exaggeratedly it affects me. Hence the love of Algeria.’ Paris itself she did not love, nor London. She craved the exoticism of Singapore or Venice and found it in Pauline Borghese’s bedroom.
Uncertainty over how much money the Foreign Office would make available curbed her more ambitious projects. She called on the authorities and explained that Churchill wanted Duff to do a good job, for this purpose a generous allowance was necessary. When she was told that the Treasury would first want to see detailed accounts she was scandalized. In her memoirs she complained that, while everyone else in Paris exchanged their money on the black market, she alone was forced to buy shoes at £30 a pair and pay £70 for a lunch for eight. She did less than justice to her ingenuity. The Embassy subsisted on barter, exchanging soap, candles or whisky for wine, meat or clothes. Nor was the black market wholly debarred. When Evelyn Waugh wanted to change money he was led off by John Julius to find an émigré Pole who, Auberon Herbert said, gave 1,000 francs to the pound. Only 720 were offered and the money-changer asked whether Waugh was disappointed. He denied it. Then it came out that he was staying at the Embassy. ‘Oh, then you are disappointed,’ said the Pole. Diana’s translation to the highest reaches of the official establishment did nothing to curb her buccaneering instincts or her belief that the law was an ass, to be flouted or evaded. That winter she wanted to visit Katharine Asquith at Mells. ‘Do you know of any black market petrol?’ she asked. ‘I’ll gladly buy it. No shame.’ When Diana said the Lord’s Prayer she always omitted the phrase ‘Lead us not into temptation’. ‘It’s no business of His,’ she declared roundly.
‘The old girl still cries when we mention Algiers,’ wrote Duff in September. The first three months in Paris were not happy ones – the first three months anywhere were unhappy for Diana but Paris presented special problems. ‘I ought to be so pleased,’ she wrote to Juliet Duff on 11 January 1945. ‘In the fairest capital, with husband and non-combatant child, plenty to eat, hot baths, gilded rooms, a self-driven little car for independence – yet you can hear my groans from England to Algiers. It’s not sleeping ever, and no memory for faces or names or what I did yesterday.’ Her circle of courtiers had temporarily disintegrated and she felt lonely; alarmed too, lest she had embarked on the sad downhill trail to zestless senility. Worst of all, she felt she was doing her job badly and letting Duff down. They had had a cocktail party for the Andersons the night before and it seemed to Diana that it had been a macabre failure. ‘Anxious as I am to make a success of things, it looks to me as if it will be impossible. Everything is criticized, there is a lot of jealousy and backbiting. They are sure to be saying, “L’ambassade n’a été jamais si moche”.’
Duff’s problems and his own sense of failure added to her woes. ‘Anglo-French relations could hardly be worse,’ wrote Duff gloomily. Things had improved slightly after Churchill’s visit and the recognition of the French Government, but de Gaulle resented his exclusion from the Yalta summit and in the summer of 1945 an Anglo-French clash over Syria meant that for a time the Embassy was almost boycotted by French officialdom. Duff being away, Diana decided that she could take liberties which the Ambassador would never have permitted himself. ‘My idea was never to let a corridor get blocked, open at all costs even with loss of prestige.’ She invited her old friend Gaston Palewski, now in high importance at de Gaulle’s right hand in the Elysée, to lunch à deux at the Embassy. He grumbled about the tremendous concession that was being asked of him but came nonetheless. Then she expounded her plan. On 14 July the Embassy garden should be covered with a huge dancing floor, the trees bedecked with lanterns, a band installed, and the gates flung open to the Parisian crowd. Palewski smiled and nodded, but clearly thought the idea a disastrous one. Diana attributed his doubts to a fear lest the British should prove more popular in Paris than the French Government cared to admit. She could have been right, but 14 July was, after all, Bastille Day. More probably Palewski feared that the Parisians might follow the precedent established by their ancestors and burn the Embassy to the ground.
Though the man-in-the-street knew little of it, the British Embassy was viewed askance by the more ardent Gaullists for another reason. Fairly or unfairly, the Embassy, and in particular Diana’s inner redoubt, the salon vert, was held to be a haunt of traitors and collaborators. Some people were predisposed to expect this even before the Coopers arrived in France. ‘Duff and Diana went to Paris last week,’ wrote a senior official in the Foreign Office. ‘I fear the worst from her, that idle useless woman who scarcely speaks French; she will collect round her all the old fifth-columnists.’ The problem for diplomats who were even mildly venturesome in their social contacts was that, in Paris of 1944 and 1945, it was extraordinarily difficult to identify fifth columnists, old or new. Only the Gaullists who had spent the last few years abroad were automatically exempt from any taint of collaboration. Those who had stayed behind were intent on establishing their good behaviour, and one way to do that was to besmirch the reputations of their neighbours. Paris was a welter of accusation and counter-accusation, with anyone who had treated a German for ulcers, acted before him, sold him a fur coat or served him a meal, vociferously proclaiming that he could not possibly have done anything else and that, anyway, his colleague across the road had behaved much worse.
Diana put her faith in Gaston Palewski, arguing that if a man as close to the General as he was considered that somebody could properly be invited to the Embassy, then no one else had any business to complain. ‘Palewski is our pilot fish,’ she explained, when justifying her presence at a concert featuring the somewhat controversial Maurice Chevalier. ‘Where he goes we feel ourselves safe.’ Palewski, however, was more relaxed in his standards than some of his compatriots and prepared occasionally to let the charms of society or a pretty face modify the rigour of his judgements. He must have been in particularly benevolent mood if he authorized the presence at an Embassy dinner of the notorious M. Patenôtre, something that so outraged François Mauriac that he stormed from the house without waiting for his meal. He was not consulted at all when Marie Laure de Noailles was invited and seated next to an ardent Gaullist called Oberlé. Mme de Noailles had had an accident during the occupation while dri
ving with a German officer and was looked at askance by the stauncher patriots. M. Oberlé turned his back on his neighbour and addressed not a word to her from soup to nuts.
Diana herself sometimes put friendship before the dictates of discretion. When the daughter of Daisy Fellowes was released from the Parisian prison where she had been incarcerated for her relationship with a German officer, she was at once invited to the Embassy. Diana was fascinated to know how she had got on with the four prostitutes with whom she had shared a cell for the past five months and who were apt to stand by the window with bared breasts waving to passers-by. ‘I asked if she had got fond of any of them (I know I should have). She said no emphatically. She’s an unlovable woman and I hope I never go to prison with her.’ Behaviour like this provided fodder for the gossips; and in London Mme Massigli, wife of the French Ambassador, spread the word about the riff-raff to be met in the salons of the British Embassy.
She found plenty prepared to listen and such talk did Diana considerable harm. Venetia Montagu arrived from London to spend a few months and help in some unspecified way with the running of the Embassy – ‘the witch of Endor’, Diana described her appearance, ‘long blue locks, dreadful little hat awry, long blue face, multi-coloured shirts and coats, blue boots; she did look a fright’. She came with alarmist reports of what was being said in London and urged her hostess to be careful and to occupy herself more conspicuously with ambassadorial good works: ‘Well, I don’t know what to do,’ Diana complained to Conrad.
There are no British things now in Paris, no hospitals, no colony even. I’ve inspected the Wrens because they asked me to, I can’t now offer myself to the Ats or Waafs. There isn’t a day that I don’t have Ensa or ecclesiastics or commercial representatives to meals. If we get these grim entertainments over with laughter, it doesn’t mean that they are enjoyable. Anyway I can’t bear a ‘brief of criticism’. I’m sure Venetia did it for the best, but I suspect the chancery wives here said something to influence her unreliable judgement. They wonder what sort of people we have, and why and when, and condemn with looks and shrugs and ‘I could and woulds’. I shall have to appease these boring wives who are absolutely useless. They never try to be agreeable to the French, are dumb at table, and are trained not to get on intimate terms with those to whose country they are accredited.
In January 1945 she dined at the Spanish Embassy and found the place filled with notorious collaborators, including at least three who had been imprisoned for a time and let out only for want of evidence. All of them came from aristocratic or at least plutocratic families, and nobody seemed to see anything surprising about their presence. ‘It seems it’s only the writers and journalists who ever get sentenced,’ commented Diana, ‘for there is black and white as evidence, but vile denouncing traitors and traitoresses get off scotters.’ It was in part this feeling that the artists had been unfairly victimized, coupled with her pleasure in their company, that led her to fill the salon vert with the brightest – if not necessarily the longest burning – stars of the artistic firmament. She created a group which in some ways seemed meretricious and certainly won little favour in the eyes of the staid and the conventional, but was as lively as any that could have been found in Europe.
Christian Bérard was one of the most talented. He was France’s leading stage-designer, a scruffy, shambling creature of enormous enthusiasm, perpetually suffused with excitement, convincing whoever he was with, and indeed himself, that they were the most intelligent and stimulating of people. ‘Oh, but he was loveable,’ wrote Diana to John Julius when Bérard died. ‘I see him most vividly coming for the first time to the Embassy; hair streaking over his scurfy collar, shaking little face as clear as a shower in the middle of the old birds’ nests and beaten eggs and ash and scent that his beard was stuffed with; septic trousers, their flies undone.’ Diana was always berating him for drinking too much, neglecting his work, looking too slovenly. He was abashed, loved her for caring, but did nothing to mend his ways. ‘D’où as-tu ce noir pour tes ongles, mon chéri?’ asked Jean Cocteau, surveying his grimy hands. ‘De Londres,’ answered Bérard glibly.
Like Bérard, Cocteau was introduced to Diana by Cecil Beaton. A man of alarming versatility, a verbal juggler of transcendent skill, he lacked Bérard’s warmth and spontaneity. Diana relished his company but felt no love for him. His behaviour during the occupation had been equivocal but his sins had been more of omission than commission. The Gaullists felt for him contempt rather than hatred: ‘Ce n’est qu’une danseuse’ was the answer when someone contemplated prosecution. To be received at the British Embassy was important for him and all his British friends were called on to smooth his way. Harold Nicolson listened to his explanations of how he had owed it to his art not to join the Resistance, and how ill-treated he had been by the fascist milice. ‘Somehow it was not very dignified or encouraging,’ he commented.
Edouard Bourdet, director of the Comédie Française; Drian, the artist, Georges Auric, the composer; Jacques Février, the pianist: these were the other stars of la bande, as Diana’s group was christened. They came to the Embassy because they liked the warmth and the whisky; because they knew they would find their friends there; above all, because they appreciated and enjoyed Diana. ‘It was extremely moving to see Diana presiding over this gathering,’ wrote Violet Trefusis. ‘There was something mythological about her appearance, she could so easily have burst into flower or into leaf; her moth-like, myth-like pallor stamped her as a being apart. Only goddesses have the right to be so pale.’ No goddess would have been so ribald, so vivacious, would patently have been having so much fun. Her vast enjoyment of the band in its turn fed their pleasure in being together. She flattered them, amused them, bullied them. Once she decided they did not know enough about Britain at war and forced them to sit through Noel Coward’s In Which We Serve. Whether through real enthusiasm or nervousness about Diana’s reaction if they were seen to be unappreciative, the French hailed it as a masterpiece; ‘never were there so many boo-hoos and manly snuffles’.
But the heart of la bande, the member closest to Diana’s heart, the woman who made the salon vert ‘sing with laughter and song, wit and poetry’ was Louise de Vilmorin, poetess, minor novelist, but supreme in the social monologue, the dinner-table fantasy, the art of making the trivial seem profound and the profound exquisitely trivial. Diana’s first reaction was of caution. ‘A long evening with a certain siren past her earliest youth called Lulu Vilmorin,’ she reported to Conrad, but even at that first dinner at Verrières she was enchanted by Louise’s wit, her songs and her ‘winning, unaffected ways’. ‘Unaffected’ was not a word that even her admirers often applied to her; her enemies – and she had many – considered her a monster of artifice whose every spontaneity was carefully rehearsed and every indiscretion calculated. ‘An egocentric maniac with the eyes of a witch,’ Evelyn Waugh considered her. ‘She is the Spirit of France. How I hate the French.’ She was an accomplished entertainer and one who craved the limelight; within it, she could blossom into wild and captivating originality; excluded, she grew morose and bitter. Her admirers relished her fine flights of fancy, to her critics they seemed like the most maudlin whimsy. She was in her fashion beautiful, slightly lame, delicately built with sharp, distinguished features. Like her or not, she could not be ignored.
Unfortunately her war record was open to question. Duff at one point was given a list supposedly emanating from the Sûreté of ‘pederasts and collaborators’ who were alleged to haunt the Embassy. Louise de Vilmorin’s name was prominent as having lived during the occupation with a German called Stuazi. In fact she had spent most of the war in Hungary with her then husband Count Palfi, and ‘Stuazi’ was probably a confusion for Prince Esterhazy to whom she had once been engaged. The fact that she was of French birth but, being married to a Hungarian, had travelled freely across Germany during the war, was however enough to wake the darkest suspicions of the authorities. Duff dismissed the list as reading more like a
gossip column than a police report, but French efforts to eject her from the Embassy continued. The Préfet summoned Victor Rothschild and asked him to tell the Ambassador that his consorting with a notorious collaborator was causing great offence. Duff greeted the emissary with one of his celebrated ‘veiners’, a rage so violent that the veins stood out on his forehead. For several days Lord Rothschild was banished from the Embassy, until Sweeny telephoned to ask when the nightly games of backgammon were to be resumed. The Préfet then tried to enlist Gaston Palewski, who considered him to be so unbalanced on the subject as to be hardly worth attention. Palewski retorted that the authorities could prosecute Louise if they wished but that until they did so he would continue to be seen with her. Palewski, or so Louise told Duff, tried to enlist her as a spy to report on Duff’s activities, but if he really did so he sadly misjudged her powers; anyone less competent to elicit political or economic secrets could hardly be imagined.
Duff’s defence of Louise de Vilmorin was not disinterested. ‘Duff is deeply in love with the spell-binding Lulu,’ wrote Diana, ‘which is nice for him and good for his prestige, as she is acknowledged to be the most remarkable and attractive woman in Paris, the most eloquent and witty.’ But Duff’s love for Louise was far from being the whole story; soon there had developed a triangle of affections that to some seemed bizarre yet to the protagonists was entirely natural and proper. Duff recorded in his diary how, after he had spent an afternoon making love to Louise, he and Diana had discussed their new friend. They had agreed that she was the most attractive woman they had ever met; ‘Diana was overcome by her charm.’ Diana in fact adopted towards Louise an attitude of touching reverence; she was ‘more attractive than any woman I’ve ever seen anywhere’, but it was absurd to think that she might become an intimate friend. ‘I’m too old and shy to make a friend of a poetess … I’m not “de son hauteur”.’ She wrote to Conrad speculating about the homosexuality of one of her friends. ‘My ways are going a little unnatural too, I fear,’ she told him, ‘all for the sake of Lulu.’
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