The Blessing

by Nancy Mitford

  ‘How many years since I have done this?’ she said, shuffling and dealing, her long, spidery fingers bright with diamonds.

  ‘You said I would be killed in the war, I remember,’ said Charles-Edouard.

  ‘I said I couldn’t quite see in what circumstances you would be coming back. Suppose I had told you it would be complete with an English wife and a son, that would indeed have been a coup for me. Unfortunately I didn’t foresee anything so improbable. Please cut the cards. However, I see her now, clear as daylight, surrounded by old maids, not another man in her orbit. She must be very faithful. Nice for you to have this faithful wife. Good. Cut the cards. Yes. Now here we have a surprise, not that it surprises me very much. Not English, and not your wife, but a sparkling beauty, a brilliant. There is an enormous amount of interesting incident round you and your relationship with this brilliant. Cut the cards. This is for you. Yes, here you are and with all your talents, your charm, your wit, your good nature, watching yourself as you live your life, and fascinated by the spectacle.’

  ‘Ah!’ said Charles-Edouard, ‘this is very nice. How I love being rubbed the right way.’

  ‘Cut three times. I am bound to tell you that there will be a few little tiresomenesses, to do with the brilliant. You won’t be careful enough, or you’ll be unlucky – there’ll be a torrent of tears, but they won’t be your tears, so never mind. Cut the cards. Nothing different – you again, between the brilliant and the wife. I can’t tell any more today.’

  She leant her head on her hand and looked at him with blue, lollipop eyes, which seemed out of place among her pointed Gothic features. Everything about her was long and thin, except for these round, blue eyes; she was an exceedingly odd-looking woman.

  ‘So! How do you find marriage?’

  ‘Rather dull,’ said Charles-Edouard, ‘but I rather like it, and I love my wife. She is original, she amuses me.’

  ‘And lovely?’ said Madame Marel.

  ‘She will be, when she is arranged. No doubt you will see her at the Fertés on the 10th.’

  ‘Yes indeed. We shall all be there, all agog. You haven’t changed much, Charles-Edouard, except that you are better looking than ever.’

  ‘Ah!’ said Charles-Edouard. He got up and locked the door.

  ‘No need to do that,’ she said, smiling. ‘Pierre would never let anybody else in when he knows you are here.’

  Presently Charles-Edouard, lying relaxed among the cushions of an enormous sofa, said, ‘So tell me, since all these years what have you become?’

  ‘Oh it’s a long story – or rather a long book of short stories.’

  ‘Yes, I expect it is. And now –?’

  ‘Nothing very much. I have an Englishman who is madly in love with me – I don’t believe I’ve ever been loved so violently with such really suicidal mania, as by this Englishman.’

  ‘Ah, these English, they are terrible.’

  ‘You may laugh, but it is no joke at all. The evidences of his love simply pour into the house – I don’t know what the concierge can think, it is full-time work carrying them across the courtyard. Flowers, telegrams, letters, parcels, all the day.’

  ‘Does he live here?’

  ‘Better than that, in London. But he flies over to see me at least once a week, and then the tears, the scenes, the jealousy, the temperament. It is wearing me out, and I ought really to get rid of him.’

  ‘Why don’t you?’

  ‘Because of the bourgeois thrift I learnt from my dear husband. Never throw anything away, it might come in useful. Besides, I do love to be loved.’

  ‘And what is his name?’

  ‘It’s not an interesting name – Palgrave, Hughie Palgrave.’

  ‘It is interesting to me, however,’ said Charles-Edouard, ‘since Hughie Palgrave was once engaged to my wife.’

  8

  As soon as she had some presentable clothes Charles-Edouard began taking Grace to see his relations. ‘Very dull,’ he said, ‘but what must be, must be.’ So at 6.30 every day they would put themselves into a little lift which shook and wavered up to the drawing-room of some old aunt or cousin of the family. These lifts, these drawing-rooms and these old ladies differed very little from each other. The rooms were huge, cold and magnificent, with splendid pieces of furniture arranged to their worst advantage and mixed up with a curious assortment of objects which had been collected during the course of long married lives. The old ladies were also arranged to their worst advantage, and covered with a curious assortment of jewellery. Prominent upon a black cardigan they generally wore the rosette of the Legion of Honour.

  ‘We might be going in for a literary prize,’ said Charles-Edouard, as for the fifth time they tottered up in the fifth little lift.

  ‘Why might we?’

  ‘This is how you win a literary prize in France. First you write a book – that is of no importance, however. Then you go and see my aunts, treat them with enormous deference, and laugh loudly at the jokes my uncles make over the porto.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘No wonder. All the literary prizes here are given by my aunts.’

  ‘And won by other aunts?’

  ‘Not usually. Their works, of an unreadable erudition, are crowned by the Academy. That is different, though my aunts have great power there also, and have managed to insert my uncles under the cupola all right.’

  ‘Does Tante Régine give prizes?’

  ‘Heavens no! She is in quite a different world. You will find her (she’s coming back next week, by the way) at all the parties, the dress collections, the private views, the first nights. It’s another product altogether. The Novembre de la Fertés, my grandmother’s and Tante Régine’s family, have never gone in for intellect – nor have the Rocher des Innouïs. All these clever old girls are Valhubert relations – their cradles were rocked by Alphonse Daudet and the Abbé Liszt. Ah! Ma tante! Bonjour mon oncle. So, this is Grace.’

  ‘Grace! Sit here where we can see you, dear child, and tell us – so cut off from England for so long – all about Mr Charles Morgan.’

  The rest of the company consisted, as usual, of earnest, dowdy young women, following in the footsteps of their elders, of old men so courtly in manner that they seemed dedicated to eternal courtship, and one or two bright, overgrown boys. They put Grace on a high-backed needlework chair facing the window, sat round her in a semi-circle, and plied her with weak port wine, biscuits, and questions. They passed from Mr Charles Morgan, about whom she knew lamentably little, to Miss Mazo de la Roche, about whom she knew less. They gave her to understand that one of the most serious deprivations caused by the war had been that of Les Whiteoaks, Les Jalna. Then they fired questions at her from all sides, wanting to know about English novelists, dramatists, lesser country houses, boy scouts, gardens, music, essayists, and the government of Britain, until she felt like an ambulating Britain in Pictures. Their knowledge of England was quite astonishing, very much like the knowledge some astronomer might have of the moon after regarding it for many a long night through a telescope.

  Grace felt that they were trying to place her. Not, as Tante Régine was always trying, to place her in English society, to find out whom she knew and if her family was really, in spite of the freemason father, quite respectable, but in another way. Some of them had read Sir Conrad’s Life of Fouquet. They pronounced it honourable, and assumed, from the fact of its existence, that Grace must have been brought up in intellectual circles. They wanted to place her views and inclinations, her turn of mind. They wanted to know if she was Oxford or Cambridge, whether she preferred The Times or the Daily Telegraph, what she felt about Shakespeare and Bacon. Their questions were not at all hard to answer, but she felt that by her answers to these, possibly deceptively, simple questions, she was being forever judged.

  She found it a great strain, and had said so to Charles-Edouard after the last tea-party.

  ‘But that is what French people are like,’ he had replied, shrugging
his shoulders. ‘In France you are always in a witness box. You’ll get used to it. But you must sharpen your wits a little, my dearest, if you want a favourable verdict.’

  The old uncles did not play much part in all this. They were still, after a lifetime of marriage, lost in admiration at the brilliance of their wives, quite wrapped up in whatever these wonderful women were doing. So when they met each other out of doors, which happened continually, as they all lived in the same neighbourhood and all had Scotties to exercise, they would shout across the street, ‘Good morning, and how is Benjamin Constant going on’ (or whoever it was that the other’s wife was known to be studying just then). ‘Splendidly, splendidly. And the old stones of Provins?’

  With Grace they were charming, making her feel that she was a pretty woman and that therefore nothing she said would ever be held against her. However, she was shrewd enough to see that it was the aunts who counted. These aunts were a great surprise to Grace. She had hitherto supposed that, with the exception of a few very religious people like Madame de Valhubert, all Frenchwomen, of all ages, were entirely frivolous and given over to the art of pleasing. From which it will be deduced that the works of Mauriac and Balzac, like those of Brogan and Bodley, lay mouldering, their pages uncut, in the great heap behind the kitchen stairs at Bunbury.

  ‘Are you happy?’ Charles-Edouard said, as they walked home. It was some days, he had noticed, since Grace had said how happy she was, of her own accord.

  ‘I am perfectly happy,’ she said, ‘but I can’t feel at home yet.’

  ‘You felt at home at Bellandargues, why not here?’

  ‘Bellandargues was the country.’ She found it hard to explain to Charles-Edouard how different was life in Paris from anything she had ever known, so complicated and artificial that her only refuge of reality was the nursery. The other rooms in her house, with their admirable decoration and gold-encrusted furniture, so rich that to enter one of them was like opening a jewellery box, belonged to the Valhuberts past, present, and future, but she could not feel as yet that they belonged to her. The smiling servants maintained the life of the house undirected by her; the comings and goings in the courtyard, the cheerful bustle of a large establishment, would all go on exactly the same if she were not there. In short she played not the smallest part in this place, which was, nevertheless, her home.

  Charles-Edouard had quite fallen back into his pre-war existence. He spent the morning telephoning to friends whose very names she did not know; in the afternoon he ran from one antiquary to another; he was out a great deal, and always out at tea-time.

  Every fortnight or so he went for the inside of a day to Bellandargues to perform his mayoral duties, and very occasionally he stayed there the night. ‘I do hate to sleep out of Paris,’ he used to say, and did so as seldom as he possibly could.

  Grace herself was quite busy, an unaccustomed busyness, since it was all concerned with clothes. Madame Rocher’s vendeuse had taken charge of her, and kept her nose to the grindstone, making her get more and more dresses for more and more occasions; big occasions, a ball, Friday night at Maxims, the opera, the important dinner party; little occasions, the theatre, dinner at home alone, or with one or two friends, luncheon at home, luncheon in a restaurant; and odd occasions, luncheon or dinner in the country (nothing so lugubrious as a week-end party was envisaged), and the voyage.

  ‘Could I not travel in my morning suit?’

  ‘It is always better to travel with brown accessories.’

  ‘I am perfectly happy,’ she repeated, ‘only not quite at my ease yet. Perhaps a little homesick.’

  But more than ever passionately in love with Charles-Edouard.

  The first big occasion to which Grace went in Paris was a dinner given for her by the Duchesse de la Ferté. At this dinner Grace’s preconceived ideas about the French, already shaken by the porto parties, were blown sky high. She knew, or thought she knew, that Frenchwomen were hideously ugly, but with an ugliness redeemed by great vivacity and perfect taste in dress. Perfect taste she took to mean quiet, unassuming taste – ‘better be under – than overdressed’ her English mentors such as Carolyn’s mother used to say. Then she imagined that all Frenchmen were small and black, at best resembling Charles Boyer, her own husband’s graceful elegance being easily accounted for, in her view, by his English blood.

  So all in all she was unprepared for the scene that met her eyes on entering the Fertés’ big salon. The door opened upon a kaleidoscope of glitter. The women, nearly all beauties, were in huge crinolines, from which rose naked shoulders and almost naked bosoms, sparkling with jewels. They moved on warm waves of scent, their faces were gaily painted with no attempt at simulating nature, their hair looked cleaner and glossier than any hair she had ever seen. Almost more of a surprise to Grace were the men, tall, handsome, and beautifully dressed. The majority of both men and women were fair with blue eyes, in fact they had the kind of looks which are considered in England to be English looks at their best. Grace saw that these looks in the women were greatly enhanced by over-dressing, always so much more becoming, whatever Carolyn’s mother might say, than the reverse. That the atmosphere was of untrammelled sex did not surprise her, except in so far as that sex, outside a bedroom, could be so untrammelled.

  Madame de la Ferté took Grace by the arm and led her round, introducing her to everybody. She was so much fascinated by what she saw that the terrible up and down examination accorded to a newcomer to the herd went on without her even being aware of it, and it was a long time before she realized how underdressed, under-painted, and under-scented she must seem. The jewels, however, which Charles-Edouard had forced her to put on against her own inclination, were second to nobody’s. Her face, too, though lacking the sparkle of the French faces, had no rival in that room for beauty of line and structure.

  The party waited some time for the arrival of a young Bourbon and of a certain not so young woman who, to underline the fact that she was now his mistress, liked to arrive late in queenly fashion. The affair was being discussed by the group round Grace, the rapid quality of whose talk, so precise, so funny, so accomplished, so frighteningly well-informed, positively paralysed her. Her own brain seemed to struggle along in the rear. Charles-Edouard, swimming in his native waters, was happy and animated as she had never seen him.

  A moment before the arrival of the Prince, his mistress came in on her husband’s arm. She curtsied lower than anybody, murmuring, ‘Monseigneur!’

  ‘They left the luncheon together, they must have been in bed the whole afternoon.’

  ‘I don’t think so. She had a fitting at Dior.’

  When the late arrivals had shaken hands with the company they all went in to dinner. Grace sat beside her host, the brother of Madame de Valhubert and Madame Rocher. He seemed a thousand years old, very frail, and wore a shawl over his shoulders. Opposite her was Charles-Edouard, between his hostess and a majestic old woman who had swept in to dinner holding in one hand the train of her dress and in the other a large ebony ear-trumpet. During the hush which fell while people were finding their places and settling down she said to Charles-Edouard, in the penetrating voice of a deaf person, but with a very confidential look as if she thought she was whispering:

  ‘Are you still in love with Albertine?’

  Charles-Edouard, not at all put out, took the trumpet and shouted into it, ‘No. I’m married now and I have a son of seven.’

  ‘So I heard. But what has that to do with it?’

  Grace tried to look as if she had heard nothing. She was wondering desperately what she could talk about to M. de la Ferté when, greatly to her relief, he turned to her and said that he had just read Les Hauts de Hurlevent by a talented young English writer.

  ‘I wondered if you knew her,’ he said. ‘Mademoiselle Émilie Brontë.’

  This was indeed a lifeline. ‘I really know her sister Charlotte better.’

  ‘Ah! She has a sister?’

  ‘Several. They all write book
s.’

  ‘But no brothers?’

  ‘One brother, but he’s a bad lot. Nobody ever mentions him.’

  ‘This Mademoiselle Brontë tells of country-house life in England. It must be very strange – well of course one knows it is. They do such curious things, I find. I should like to read other books by her talented family.’

  ‘I wonder whether they’ve been translated.’

  ‘No matter. My concierge’s son knows English, he can translate them for me.’

  M. de Tournon, on Grace’s other side, was handsome, blond, and young, and when the time came for them to talk he opened the conversation in English, saying, ‘You are new to Paris life, so I am going to explain some very important things to you, which you may not have understood, about society here.’

  ‘I wish you would,’ she said gratefully.

  ‘Footnotes, as it were, to the book you are reading.’

  ‘Just what I require.’

  ‘We will begin, I think, with precedence, since precedence precedes everything else. Now in England (and here I break off to explain that I know England extremely well; let me give you my credentials, Mary Marylebone and Molly Waterloo are two of my most intimate friends). Now what I am going to explain first is this. Please do not imagine that social life is easy here, as it is in England. It is a very very different matter. I will explain why. In England, as we know, everybody has a number, so when you give a dinner it is perfectly easy to place your guests – you look up the numbers, seat them accordingly, and they just dump down without any argument, Placement, such a terrible worry to us in France, never bothers you at all.’