The Pursuit of Laughter

by Diana Mitford (Mosley)

  Harold Nicolson’s story, quoted here, of Clemenceau being ‘rather high-handed with the smaller powers: Any objections? No? Adopted! Like a machine gun’ is frightful in its implications, and reminds one of Stalin and Roosevelt at a Yalta banquet, when they moved pepper pots and forks representing millions of Europeans around on the table cloth, deciding who was to be merely bullied and who to be enslaved.

  The ‘smaller powers’ got everything they wanted, provided it injured Germany or Austria-Hungary. They emerged from the Treaties swollen with immense tracts of central Europe to which they had no possible claim, whether historical or ethnic. The author skates over all this with a strange indifference. There is no mention, for example, of Masaryk or Benès, and the Treaties of Trianon and St Germain are ignored. Yet, for the future, what timebombs they contained! Europe is still suffering from the cruelty and stupidity of Versailles, St Germain and Trianon, and no-one more so than the foolish ‘smaller powers’.

  Clemenceau went banging on, paying scant attention to his ignorant though well-meaning allies. He had a distinct weakness for Anglo-Saxons and particularly admired the United States, but his theoretical friendliness did not extend to their representatives at Versailles. He hated Lloyd George, House and Woodrow Wilson hardly less than he hated Poincaré, Foch, Briand, Painlevé, Millerand, Léon Blum—the list could be tediously prolonged. When, after the war, Clemenceau allowed Mandel to put his name forward as candidate for the Presidency, he was convinced that he was bound to be elected. He was genuinely amazed by the victory of Deschanel, and his bitterness increased. The fact that Deschanel went mad soon afterwards was a slight comfort. He was beaten by his many enemies, and by the Catholic vote; his old passionate hatred of the Church of Rome had not been modified by the years. At the end of his life he proclaimed that the bolshevist peril was an illusion, the real danger was the Church.

  He hated nearly everyone, but whom did he like? He liked his family, except for his American wife. He liked Monet, and admired his painting. He liked writers and painters and actors and especially actresses, and he liked a few cronies and toadies. He could not tolerate an equal, who might turn into a rival. One of his secretaries, Jean Martet, an unconditional worshipper, became his Eckermann or Boswell, producing several little books full of amusing details which find no place in the author’s more serious and specifically political biography. Martet describes his hero’s life in Paris after the war, and the speedy dashes by motor car to his house near the sea in his native Vendée. The simplicity of his flat and his cottage did not include plain fare. He sent his cook to have lessons from the chef at Claridges, and when Martet complimented his host upon the omelette soufflée, mouton à la tomate and crême au chocolat, the Tiger, gulping down a boiling pêche pochée which burnt his mouth, said: ‘That’s nothing. You should try my poulet Soubise.’

  He could never resist a tease, and when Martet asked him whether he did not consider that Mme Curie, for example, was more qualified to vote than some drunken sot, Clemenceau replied that he was all for taking the vote away from the drunkard, but that he didn’t feel too sure about giving it to Mme Curie, who kept very bizarre company.

  Always ready with a sarcasm or an irreverent joke, Clemenceau’s company was greatly enjoyed by young people. Hearing that an equestrian statue was being made of Marshal Foch (perhaps the one in Grosvenor Gardens) he remarked that Foch had never ridden a horse in his life. ‘It’s as if I had a statue made of myself riding a camel’, he said scornfully. His statue, in the Champs Elysées near the métro station bearing his name, has neither horse nor camel. He looks as he must have looked in life, striding along into the east wind, bursting with energy; bold, malevolent, rough, ugly and ferocious.

  Georges Clemenceau: A Political Biography, Watson, D.R. Books and Bookmen (1974)

  Paris and the Nineteenth Century

  Counting from 1789, Paris had four revolutions in less than a century. Small wonder if the bourgeois inhabitants were frightened by rivers of blood. Napoleon built the Rue de Rivoli to make it harder to reach the palaces; in theory a few soldiers could prevent a mob crossing from East to West. Yet in 1871 the Tuileries palace was burnt down, and the Louvre only just escaped burning.

  Christopher Prendergast is too much concerned with what happens to the mountains of filth and waste, the hundreds of dead bodies, which had to be disposed of in a city of millions. There is nothing special to Paris about the problem, and in fact it used the enormous underground space whence the stone that built it had been quarried. He also dwells on human waste, the rag and bone man, the vagabond, encountered by the typical middle class flâneur as he strolls through the streets.

  Haussmann during the second empire destroyed much that was beautiful in order to build wide, straight boulevards, and make it easier for police and military to contain trouble. He also made parks and green spaces to calm spirits. Yet the mob and the students threw up barricades in no time, when revolution was in the air.

  Prendergast lightens his rather turgid prose with excellent quotes from Balzac, Baudelaire, Hugo and Flaubert to make his points. Some important contributions to Paris as ‘capital of capitals’ are entirely missing from his book: the beauty of the architecture; elegance and fashion. The uniquely delicious food gets a passing mention, but the exquisite minor arts of couture and decoration, the brilliant intelligence of conversation, the gaiety and fun, all are ousted by squalor, dirt and evil smells. Proust is mentioned, but there is no hint of a Guermantes to be found.

  The Continual Pilgrimage opens with the liberation of Paris in 1944, American soldiers smothered in flowers and champagne. The honeymoon was short, the drunken boorishness of Hemingway and his like changed the scene, and on every empty space ‘US go home’ was the ungrateful message to the liberators. A few GIs made a bee-line for Gertrude Stein, who had spent the war in France and welcomed her compatriots in her grandmotherly way. Paris was a beacon for young writers, and over the Atlantic they came, both black and white. The blacks were entranced by the apparent absence of racialism in the French. They were accepted as they had never been by white people at home. They quarrelled among themselves, James Baldwin nourishing deep hatred for Richard Wright.

  None of the young writers made French friends, they herded together and got their work into print at English language publishers and bookshops which catered for them. Most were very poor, and lived in seedy, bug-ridden hotels, or damp basements with no running water. They liked Paris, apparently because of the cafés.

  When the Algerian war began they were disappointed to discover the French were racialists after all, and anti-Arab attitudes fashionable. They drifted away, and probably lived happily ever after in Greenwich Village. Even if some of Sawyer-Lauçanno’s swans are geese, it is nevertheless a touching story in its pretentious way.

  John Betjeman said that to read American books in an American accent is a great help. Presumably the pilgrimage continues; there is no end to the attraction Paris can exercise for artists, even now. Its tower blocks made the great ex-American writer, Julien Green, looking over the city from the heights of St Cloud, exclaim: ‘It could be Detroit!’ But, fortunately, it still could not.

  Paris and The Nineteenth Century, Prendergast, C.;

  The Continual Pilgrimage by American Writers in Paris 1944-1960, Sawyer-Lauçanno, C. (1992)

  Napoleon’s Children

  Besides his legitimate son, the King of Rome, Napoleon had three other children. His son by Countess Walewska became a diplomat, the other two were of scant interest, therefore the title of this book is rather misleading since far the biggest role is that of Napoleon’s nephew, the son of Napoleon’s brother Louis, King of Holland. Louis-Napoleon’s mother was Hortense de Beauharnais, daughter of Josephine. La Reine Hortense, as she was always called, had a younger son by her lover the Comte de Flahaut whose father was Talleyrand. This Auguste, afterwards Duc de Morny, engineered the coup d’état which brought his half brother to the throne as Napoleon III.

&nbs
p; The cast is enormous, Napoleon had many brothers and sisters as well as his step-children Eugène and Hortense. Even someone familiar with the period might get muddled not only by the sheer numbers but by the determination to leave nothing out, resulting in what Lytton Strachey once described as ‘an unwieldy accumulation of facts’.

  The Bonaparte clan, and above all the great man himself, are so much disliked and so keenly denigrated throughout that it’s a wonder the subject was chosen. Physically, mentally and morally they are attacked: fat, ugly, stupid, mean, cruel and dishonest. Even beautiful Pauline (disguised here in one of the many misprints as Paulette) is not given her deserved praise for refined elegance.

  After Napoleon’s defeat his son lived in Vienna where he bore the title Duke of Reichstadt until his early death from tuberculosis. He is the hero of a tear-jerker play by Edmond Rostand, L’Aiglon, which had Sarah Bernhardt in the name part.

  Napoleon III was certainly a disastrous ruler. Queen Victoria, who stayed at St Cloud with him and Eugénie after the Crimean War, was enchanted by Paris, and she found the Emperor strangely seductive. But over the years he became unpopular for many good reasons, and when he provoked war with Prussia his armies were beaten in a matter of weeks. Eugène fled to England, where Napoleon joined her. The bloody Commune and the white terror which followed in 1871 were his legacy, matching the bloody coup d’état which had brought him to power twenty years before.

  That was the end of the Bonapartes as rulers, though Napoleon’s cousin Princesse Mathilde lived in Paris and is familiar to us through her literary friends, the Goncourt brothers, Flaubert, George Sand, and as a character in Proust. She died in 1904.

  Napoleon’s Children, Susan Normington, Evening Standard (1993)

  The Upper Hand

  The Prince de Talleyrand was one of the wittiest, cleverest, most charming men who ever lived. He had inherited the celebrated esprit Mortemart from a grandmother, and there are Frenchmen today who give, as a reason for believing that the Duchesse de Dino’s daughter Pauline was fathered by Talleyrand, the fact that the esprit Mortemart cropped up once again in Pauline’s grandsons, Boniface de Castellane and his brothers.

  There is probably no such spur to ambition in a brilliantly clever child as being utterly neglected by his parents. Lady Randolph Churchill’s letter to her son refusing to go down to Harrow for some school festivity, as he had implored her to do, (she was going to the races), must have filled him with a feverish desire to succeed in life.

  In the nineteenth century the children of the rich were hidden in their nurseries, but at least the nursery was only at the end of a corridor which led to their parents’ part of the house. Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord was sent miles away from home to be brought up by a poor woman in a cottage. He never saw his parents. As a baby, he fell off a chest of drawers and injured his foot; nothing was done about it, and he was lame for life. His uncle, who had the curiosity to seek him out, found him limping and dressed in rags and carried him off to his mother. He was four years old. She sent him away to his great-grandmother, an old lady who taught him the graces and manners of an eighteenth-century aristocrat, until at the age of eight he was sent to a boarding school in Paris.

  Because of his infirmity, his parents (who never received him in their house) bestowed the family titles on his younger brother and forced Charles-Maurice to go into the Church, a career for which, to say the least of it, he had no vocation. In his memoirs he expresses deep bitterness about his upbringing.

  Born in 1754, and destined to live in times of violent change, he grew up with three passions: politics, money, and women. He became a deacon at the age of 21, and, staying with his uncle the Archbishop of Rheims, he was present at the coronation of Louis XVI. Here he met for the first time the beautiful and high-born young ladies who were to become his bosom friends for life. He had a genius for friendship, and he was seductive and charming with his blue eyes, turned up nose and witty jokes. Ordained priest in 1779, he never allowed his vows of chastity to interfere with his gallantries, nor yet with his pursuit of riches.

  He sensed that he was gifted for politics, and he was bent upon making enough money to be able to live not in comfort, but in luxury. ‘Il ne faut jamais être pauvre diable’ [never be a poor sod], he said. He loathed his priest’s soutane, and the measure of restraint it might put upon his vaulting ambition, for he realised that the days of the great political Cardinals, the Richelieus and Mazarins, were past. When Talleyrand was 34, he was made Bishop of Autun. Before taking up his duties he went into retreat at Issy, to prepare himself for the sacred order. The Abbé Ducloux, his spiritual director, complained that in the midst of his exhortations to the Bishop-elect the door would fly open and frivolous gens du monde would rush in for a gossip. The whole point of the bishopric, for Talleyrand, was the large income that went with it.

  He visited his See once and once only, and impressed the local clergy with his brilliance. When he had to celebrate Mass in the cathedral it was a slight disaster because he was so obviously unfamiliar with the service. Nevertheless he was elected by his clergy as deputy for the Etats Généraux at Versailles, for this was the fateful year 1789, and the King had been prevailed upon to call the Estates together.

  The fall of the Bastille was the prelude to riots and troubles, and what was known as la grande peur [great terror] swept through the upper classes and even the royal family. Talleyrand asked to see the King; he had a plan for reforms which might have saved the throne. Instead, he was granted an interview with the Comte d’Artois, who put the plan before Louis. When the King refused to budge, the Comte d’Artois and the Comte de Provence decided to flee. This precipitate emigration of his two brothers did great harm to Louis XVI, whose own disastrously bungled attempt to get away two years later was the beginning of the end.

  On the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille it was decided to celebrate with a Fête and a Mass in the Champ-de-Mars. The Bishop of Autun was called upon for this bizarre ceremony. Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, sporting the tricolour, and a huge crowd assembled. Talleyrand, as he climbed the steps to the altar, set up in view of all, was heard to say: ‘Pourvu qu’on ne me fasse pas rire!’ [hopefully they won’t make me laugh] Lafayette, who was rather a prig, was deeply shocked. All his life, Talleyrand was a man of the centre. He now resigned his bishopric and took the oath of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy; for this, the Pope excommunicated him. He worked with Mirabeau and other moderates, and had Mirabeau lived it is possible that the monarchy might have been saved and the worst excesses of the Revolution avoided. Possible, but not probable. Armies of the central powers were massing on the frontiers of France, the King’s brothers were with them, and they were in constant communication with Marie-Antoinette. War was imminent.

  In 1792 Talleyrand was sent to London to attempt to secure English neutrality in the war. He was not well received by the Tory government, which looked upon the ex-bishop as a dangerous revolutionary, nor by his émigré countrymen who called him traitor, renegade, unfrocked priest, nor by the King and Queen. On the other hand, he was made much of by the Whigs, and welcomed by Charles James Fox and Lord Lansdowne. From this time onward he and Lord Lansdowne were close friends; they would doubtless have been pleased, could they have known that their descendants were to marry, and that the daughter of Talleyrand’s natural son, the Comte de Flahaut, was destined to be a future Lady Lansdowne.

  After his return to Paris the horrible massacre of the Swiss Guards at the Tuileries was followed by the imprisonment of the royal family in the Temple, and in September there were mass killings of aristocrats, priests and nuns in an orgy of bloodshed. Moderates like Talleyrand were in grave danger, and he decided to go back to London, though he waited for a passport signed by Danton, for he did not wish to be classed with the émigrés.

  When Louis XVI was guillotined there was a great revulsion in England against anyone connected with the Revolution, and the ex-Bishop of Autun was ordered
to leave the country. He sailed for America, where he attempted to improve his depleted fortunes by dealing in real estate. It was not a success, and when he heard the great news of the fall of Robespierre and the end of the Terror he made his way home as soon as he could: ‘If I must spend another year here I shall die,’ he wrote to Madame de Staël. Die of boredom…

  The false step taken by Robespierre which led him to the guillotine was one of those outdoor fêtes so beloved of revolutionaries. He proclaimed that it was in honour of an ‘Etre Suprême’, and this was more than his colleagues, or the cynical Parisians, could stomach.

  Germaine de Staël worked diligently among her political friends to ensure that Talleyrand could return safely, which, via Germany, he did in 1796. Then he waited and watched, for a chance to get into politics. He joined a political group, the Constitutional Club, made up of like-minded moderates, and quickly gained an ascendancy over the other members. He read learned papers to the Academies. He made friends with all the influential women in Paris: Mme de Staël, Mme Tallien, Joséphine de Beauharnais. Mme de Staël arranged for him to meet Barras, the most powerful man of the moment. Barras was greatly impressed, and before long named him Minister of Foreign Affairs. He was 43.

  According to Benjamin Constant, who rode with him in the carriage when he went to take up his appointment, Talleyrand murmured: ‘Immense fortune! Une fortune immense!’ [Good fortune, a large one.] Mr Bernard dismisses the story as ‘spurious’. But whether he said it or not, he undoubtedly thought that he could make vast sums of money as Minister, and make them he did. In two years he acquired twelve to fifteen million francs, taking presents and bribes, ‘douceurs’ as he called them, from foreign powers. He made no secret of it, and perhaps the French felt they had suffered enough from a ‘sea-green incorruptible’.