The Blessing

by Nancy Mitford

  ‘I never know quite what it means, to understand men.’

  ‘Don’t you, dear? It’s very simple, it can be said in a few words. Put them first. A woman who puts her husband first seldom loses him.’

  ‘Well I daresay,’ said Grace with some indignation, ‘that a woman who lets her husband do exactly as he likes, who shuts her eyes to every infidelity, and lets him walk over her, in fact, would never lose him.’

  ‘Just so,’ said Madame de Valhubert, placidly.

  ‘And do you really advise that?’

  ‘Oh I don’t advise, the old must never advise. All I do say is remember that Charles-Edouard is a Frenchman – not an Englishman with a French veneer, but a deeply French Frenchman. If you want this to become a real marriage, a lifelong union (I don’t speak of a sacrament), you must follow the rules of our civilization. A little life of your own, if you wish it, will never be held against you, so long as you always put your husband first.’

  Grace was thoroughly shocked. ‘I could have understood it if Tante Régine had spoken like that – would have expected it in fact, but your grandmother!’ she said to Charles-Edouard.

  ‘My grandmother is an extremely practical person,’ he said, ‘you can see it by the way she runs this house. You can always tell by that, with women.’

  The next day Charles-Edouard made one of his sudden moves and whirled Grace off to Paris. Nanny and the little boy were left behind to follow in a week or two, escorted by the faithful Ange-Victor.

  7

  The Valhuberts’ Paris house was of a later date than any part of Bellandargues, and had only been finished a month or two before the Revolution. It stood on the site of a Louis XIII house whose owner, planning to receive Marie Antoinette there, had pulled it down and built something more fashionable, to be worthy of her. The intended fête for the Queen never took place, and in the end it was Josephine, not Marie Antoinette, who was received as guest of honour in the round, white and gold music room. This was an episode in their family history very much glossed over by future Valhuberts, and most of all by Charles-Edouard’s grandmother. The truth was that the eldest son of Marie Antoinette’s admirer, a soldier born and bred, had not been able to resist the opportunity of serving under the most brilliant of all commanders. He had joined the revolutionary army, had risen to the rank of General before he was thirty, and was killed at the battle of Friedland shortly after receiving his Marshal’s bâton.

  ‘Most fortunately,’ Charles-Edouard said when recounting all this to Grace, ‘or he would certainly have ended up as a Duke with some outlandish title. I prefer to be what I am.’

  ‘Perhaps he would have refused.’

  ‘Perhaps. But I’ve yet to hear of anybody refusing a dukedom.’

  The family, after his death, had once more embraced a cautious Royalism, and a veil was drawn over this unfashionably patriotic outburst. Old Madame de Valhubert always pretended that she knew nothing of it, and, if anybody mentioned the Marshal, would say that he must have been some very distant relation of her husband’s. All his relics, his portrait in uniform by Gros, the eagle which it had cost him his life to recapture, his medals, his sword, and his bâton were hidden away at Bellandargues in a little outhouse, locally known as le pavillon de la gloire, and even Charles-Edouard would not have dared bring them back into the salon during the lifetime of his grandmother.

  ‘It will be the same with me,’ he said. ‘Sigi’s great-grand-daughter-in-law will hide away my Croix de Lorraine, my médaille de la résistance, and the badge of my squadron, and say that I was some distant relation of her husband’s. They are terrible, French families.’

  The house, long, three-storied, lay between courtyard and garden. Old Madame de Valhubert, when in Paris, occupied one of the lodges in the courtyard. ‘She moved in there during the war, after the Germans had looted the main block, and now she likes it so much that she has stayed on.’ The other lodge housed the servants. The ground floor of the house itself consisted of five enormous drawing-rooms leading out of each other, the middle one being the famous round music room, masterpiece of the brothers Rousseau. Over this, the same shape and almost as elaborately decorated, was Grace’s bedroom. These rooms were on the garden side, facing due south and with a wide view of trees.

  ‘What an enormous garden, for a town,’ said Grace.

  ‘It used to be three times as long, but some of it was taken, alas, in the time of Haussman to make the horrible rue de Babel, well named. However we can’t complain, many houses in this neighbourhood suffered more – many wonderful houses either lost their gardens altogether, or were even pulled down. Paris was only saved from complete ruination by the fall of Napoleon III. Bismarck really saved us, funnily enough!’

  As Charles-Edouard had quite openly joined the Free French under his own name, everything he possessed was confiscated during the war and would have been taken off to Germany had it not been for the initiative of Louis, his old butler, who had piled pictures and furniture in the cellar, built a wall to hide them, and, to make this wall convincing, put a wash basin with brass taps against it.

  ‘We had so little time,’ he said, when explaining all this to Grace and Charles-Edouard, ‘that we had to connect the taps with an ordinary bucket of water hung up on the other side of the wall. Oh how we prayed the Germans wouldn’t run them very long. All was well, however. They came, they tested the taps for a minute, just as we hoped they would, and went away again. Oh what a relief!’

  ‘And they never requisitioned the house?’

  ‘They didn’t like this side of the river – too many dark, old, twisting streets; they felt more comfortable up by the Étoile in big, modern buildings. They just carted off everything they could see, and never came back again. Fortunately, as I’ve been here so long I knew which were the best pieces (we didn’t dare hide everything). Later on we installed ventilation in the cellar, and the things were miraculously well preserved through those long, terrible winters. In all this we were helped by M. Saqué the builder – M. le Marquis will perhaps go and thank him.’

  ‘Very probably I will,’ said Charles-Edouard, more touched than he cared to admit by this recital. He loved his furniture and objects, and specially loved his pictures. He showed them to Grace before he even allowed her to go upstairs. It was a charming collection of minor masters with one or two high spots, an important Fragonard, a pair of Hubert Roberts, and so on. He was always adding to it, and had bought more than half the pictures himself.

  The weeks which followed, spent by Grace alone with her husband in the empty town during unfashionable September, were the happiest she had ever known. Charles-Edouard, rediscovering, after seven long years, the stones of Paris, for which he had an almost unhealthy love, walked with her all day in the streets, and sometimes, when there was a moon, after dinner as well. Grace was a good walker, even for an Englishwoman, but he was indefatigable, and sometimes, as when they went to Versailles for the day, she had to cry for mercy. He was wonderful company. He knew the long, intricate histories of all the palaces of the Faubourg St Germain and exactly where to find each one, hidden behind huge walls and carriage doorways.

  ‘You could ring the bell there and have a peep,’ he would say, ‘nobody knows you as yet – but I shall remain here, out of sight.’

  So Grace would ring, put her head round the wicket, apologize to the concierge, and be rewarded by a transparency of stone and glass and ironwork, placed, like her own house, between courtyard and trees. When the ground floor was the width of one room these trees would be visible through the two sets of windows.

  ‘Well, did you like it?’

  ‘Oh wonderful – I can’t get over it, Charles-Edouard!’

  ‘Please do not demonstrate in front of these policemen. Please remember that I am a well-known figure in this neighbourhood. Did you notice the sphinxes in the courtyard?’

  Grace never noticed any details of that sort; her eye was quite untrained, and she was content to take in a genera
l impression of beauty, to which she was very receptive. Unlike her husband, however, she really preferred natural beauty to things made by man.

  ‘I am loving it, oh I am loving it. I didn’t know Paris was like this. When I was at school here it was different – rue de la Pompe and Avenue Victor Hugo (the hours we spent in the Grand Magazin Jones!) in those days. And even so I was always happy here, but now –! I suppose it’s got something to do with you as well, my happiness.’

  ‘Something!’ said Charles-Edouard. ‘Everything.’

  ‘How lucky I am! I could never have loved anybody else half as much.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Still, I wish you wouldn’t say “I know” like that. You might say that you’re lucky too.’

  ‘I’m awfully nice,’ he answered, ‘never could you have found anybody as nice as I am. Admit that you amuse yourself when you are with me. Now look – the Fountain of Bouchardon, so beautiful. But how foolish to put those horrible modern flats just there.’

  ‘You ought to have a Georgian Society,’ said Grace. ‘Do you think you’re really the whole reason for my happiness?’

  ‘Almost certainly.’

  ‘Oh dear, I hope not, so dangerous when it all depends on one person. Perhaps the Blessing has a bit to do with it too.’ But she knew that if so it was a very minor bit, much as she loved the pretty little boy.

  ‘Look, the gateway of the Hôtel de Bérulle, is it not a masterpiece of restraint and clever contrivance? See how a coach would be able to turn out of this narrow street, and drive in.’

  ‘Oh yes, how fascinating!’

  ‘Please do not demonstrate –’

  But he was really delighted at the way she was taking to everything French. He saw that, in spite of her bad education, she showed signs of a natural taste which could easily be developed. As for Charles-Edouard, art was a religion to him. If he had a few moments to spare he would run into the Louvre as his grandmother would run into church for a short prayer. The museums were awakening one after another from their war-time trance, and Charles-Edouard, intimate with all the curators, spent hours with them discussing and praising the many improvements.

  Grace said, ‘How strange it is that you, who really take in everything through the eyes, should hate the country so much.’

  ‘Nature I hate. It is so dull in the country, that must be why. But Art I love.’

  ‘And pretty ladies you love?’ she said, as he turned to peer at a vision in black and white flashing by in a little Rolls Royce. September was nearing its close and the pretty ladies had begun to trickle back into town, filling Grace with apprehension.

  ‘Women I love,’ he said with his guilty, interior laugh. ‘But also I am a great family man, and that will be your hold over me.’

  But how to have a hold, she thought, unless one’s own feet are firmly planted on the ground? And how can they be so planted in a strange country, surrounded by strangers at the very beginning of a strange new life?

  In due course Nanny and Sigi arrived on the night train from Marseilles, and that afternoon Grace took them across the river to the Tuileries Gardens. Nanny was in a wonderfully mellow mood, delighted to have got away from the heat of Provence, from Canari, and, temporarily, at any rate, from M. l’Abbé. (He was coming to Paris after Christmas, when the lessons would be resumed.) Delighted, too, to be in a town again, where a child is so much easier to control than in the country. She entirely approved of the fact that the door to the street could only be opened by the concierge, and that the garden was surrounded by walls high as the ramparts of a city. No means of escape here for little boys. She was not even entirely displeased with the nursery accommodation; arranged for Charles-Edouard by his English mother it was like an old-fashioned nursery in some big London house, and had none of the strange bleakness of the rooms at Bellandargues.

  Her smiles, however, always on the wintry side, soon vanished when she was confronted with the goat carts, the donkeys, the Guignol, and the happy crowd of scooting, skating children in the Tuileries gardens. Sigi had, of course, no sooner seen the goat carts than he was in one.

  ‘We shall never get the little monkey away from these animals – is there nowhere else for us to go, dear, more like Hyde Park? I’m not going to stand the whole winter in this draughty-looking square waiting for him to ride round hour after hour.’

  ‘Oh no, darling, you mustn’t. We must ration him. But don’t you think this is a charming place for children, more fun really than Hyde Park?’

  Grace had been so much looking forward to bringing Sigi here and watching him enjoy all the treats that she had overlooked the certain disapproval of Nanny.

  ‘Grace! I’m surprised to hear you say such a thing! Think of the Peter Pan monument, and the Dell! Goodness knows what he’ll pick up from all these children. Anyway there’s to be no question of him going inside that filthy-looking theatre, or whatever it is. I hope that’s quite understood, dear.’

  ‘Of course, Nan, just as you say.’

  Nanny took Grace’s arm and said in a low voice, ‘Isn’t that Mrs Dexter over there?’

  ‘Grace!’

  ‘Carolyn!’

  ‘I was just going to ring up your house and see if you were back. We’ve come to live here, isn’t it lovely! I spoke to your papa on the telephone on our way through London and he gave me your number, but we’ve been so busy flat-hunting. Yes, now we’ve found a lovely one – only miles from you I’m afraid – up by the Parc Monceau. Is this Sigi? Seven, I suppose – he looks more. Poor little Foss will be rather young for him, but Nanny will be pleased to see you, Nanny, it will make all the difference. Which day can you come to tea? Then we must get together, Grace, and meet each other’s husbands! Isn’t it exciting?’

  Carolyn Broadman was a lifelong friend of Grace. Their fathers had been friends and they had been at the same school. Carolyn was a little older and much cleverer, she was the head girl at school, revered by the others, many of whom had been passionately in love with her. She was tall, with curly, auburn hair and particularly piercing bright blue eyes. This colouring constituted her claim to beauty; her features were not very good, though her figure was excellent. She moved with more than the hint of a swagger, and Sir Conrad always called her Don Juan. She had certainly been one at school, coldly gathering up the poor little hearts laid at her feet and throwing them over her shoulder. Grace had not seen her since the war, but knew that she had married an enormously rich, important American whom she had met in Italy. As was to be expected she had become a female General in the war – were there such things as female Marshals she would, no doubt, have been one.

  ‘Come back to tea now,’ said Grace, ‘and meet Charles-Edouard.’

  ‘Darling I can’t. I’m just off to our Embassy where they’ve got a cocktail party for some Senators – I must pick up Hector at his office and then go home and change for it. I promised I’d go early and help.’

  So they chatted for a few minutes more and then parted with many plans for meeting again soon.

  ‘Nice to see a clean English skin,’ said Nanny, as they wandered back across the Pont de Solferino.

  Charles-Edouard was in the hall, evidently on his way out.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘what are the news?’

  ‘I took Sigi and Nan – run along up darling, it’s tea-time – to the Tuileries Gardens and who d’you think we met? An old friend of mine called Carolyn Dexter. Wasn’t it funny?’

  ‘Beautiful?’

  ‘I don’t know if you’d think so. Beautiful colouring.’

  ‘That means red hair I suppose. Not my type.’

  ‘And a wonderful figure, and she’s terribly clever. She’s married to a very important American called Hector Dexter.’

  ‘So, go on. What did she tell you?’

  ‘Well, they live up by the Parc Monceau. We must all meet some day soon.’

  ‘Go on. What else?’

  ‘Nothing else.’

  ‘Ha! So you stood
together in the Tuileries gazing into each other’s eyes without a word?’

  ‘You do tease me. We chattered like magpies.’

  ‘But what about?’

  ‘She was just off to a cocktail party at the American Embassy.’

  ‘This is all very dull.’

  ‘Don’t be such a bully, Charles-Edouard.’

  ‘You must tell me stories about what happens during your day, to amuse me. Do go on.’

  ‘They have a little boy, but younger than Sigi, and Nanny is longing to go and meet their English nanny –’

  Charles-Edouard’s attention was wandering. ‘Quand un Vicomte rencontre un autre Vicomte,’ he sang, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’ils se racontent? Des histoires de Vicomtes.’ He picked up his hat.

  ‘Are you going out?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Back to tea?’

  ‘No.’

  Grace had her tea in the nursery, that day and subsequently. Charles-Edouard was never in at tea-time because he now resumed an afternoon habit of many years’ standing, he visited Albertine Marel-Desboulles. She was one of the little friends, all brought up together, about whom Madame de Valhubert had wanted to warn Grace, and quite the most dangerous of them. She and Charles-Edouard had had the same nurse as children (passed on to Charles-Edouard’s mother by Albertine’s, since Albertine was older). When he was eighteen and she a young married woman they had had a short but enthusiastic love affair; this had simmered down to a sentimental friendship in which love, physical love at any rate, still played a part. Charles-Edouard found her more entertaining than anybody; she was certainly quite the reverse of dull, always having something to recount. Not plain slices of life served up on a thick white plate, but wonderful confections embellished with the aromatic and exotic fruits of her own sugary imagination, presented in just such a way as to tempt the appetite of such sophisticated admirers as he. She had endless tales to spin around their mutual friends, could discuss art and objects of art with his own collector’s enthusiasm as well as with imaginative knowledge, and, what specially appealed to Charles-Edouard, would talk by the hour, also with imaginative knowledge and with collector’s enthusiasm, about himself. She was an accomplished fortune-teller. Like a child who knows where the sweets are kept, Charles-Edouard always went straight to the japanese lacquer commode, in the right-hand corner of whose top drawer lay packs of cards.