by Lisa Hilton
Nancy was acknowledged as a pretty, even beautiful woman, but her particular allure didn’t captivate Englishmen. She was not what she herself called a ‘romper’. What Harold Nicolson described as her ‘hoydenish Roedean quality’ was in her manner, which was extremely sharp, vicious even. Tom Mosley once remarked ‘poor brute’ when Nancy teased Gaston after a hard day’s work. Presumably he cared for women who were better at being gazed on (Diana was not, and she minded). Men, at least the heterosexual Englishmen Nancy knew, weren’t wild about clever girls. Throughout Nancy’s writing on France, she praises the way in which French conversation keeps one up to the mark, one is always obliged to produce an aperçu about Gide or Proust, to sparkle rather than simper. Frenchmen admire prettiness, but they also expect cleverness. And Nancy’s particular sort of prettiness, her attention to elegance, even as she kept strictly to four inches of tepid bathwater and bemoaned the lack of wearable clothes, was ideal to Gaston’s eye. He always said that he could never love a woman who wasn’t elegant. Seduce them, perhaps, but a companion who had no gift for ‘arranging herself’ would be too damaging to his self-image.
Later, Cyril Connolly told her, ‘The trouble with you, Nancy, is one can’t imagine you sitting on one’s lap. Have you ever sat on anyone’s lap?’ ‘No, and nor have I ever allowed anybody to kiss me.’ This is turned into a joke entirely at ‘Smartyboots’s’ expense in The Blessing, when Connolly’s alter ego the Captain is thwarted by his inability to grasp Grace at the waist. The remark has been read as indicative of Nancy’s virginal primness. In truth she would have been horrified at the idea of sitting on Connolly’s lap. She deplored the grubby, bohemian women he found sexy, and if her starched Dior skirts kept his like at bay, so much the better. That doesn’t mean she wasn’t quite happy to sit on Gaston’s. And, like many people in the first throes of love, she liked to flaunt it. In June 1944 she wrote to Gaston: ‘Osbert Lancaster said at luncheon on Friday that Aly Forbes told him you were so frightened in that raid on Thursday that you kept ringing him up – I said furiously that is a total lie, I was with Palewski all night. Sibyl Colefax said, “All night?”, N.R. “Well you know what I mean.”’ As this slightly embarrassing boasting shows, Nancy had no intention of keeping her relationship with Gaston secret, even though she was still a married woman. ‘The Col’ was now part of her life and her friends seem to have accepted this without question or any particular surprise. In a letter of 1944, Gaston writes formally to Georgia Sitwell (the wife of Nancy’s friend Sacheverell, ‘Sachie’, and a former mistress of Mosley’s) to thank her for a weekend visit he and Nancy had enjoyed. In the manner of Nancy’s class and the urgent, carpe diem mood of the times, they were acknowledged as a couple.
In her own way Nancy was as much of a bon viveur as Gaston. She never drank much alcohol, except for brandy when she was ill, at the end of her life, but she adored food. Her later, much-exaggerated, letters from France are simply swimming in cream and butter. Maybe gourmandes can be bad at sex, but women who don’t like food are never good at it. Nancy was only cold in as much as she was sensitive to it; very slim with poor circulation, she liked to heat her houses to tropical levels when she could. In Paris, she imitated her sister Diana in sweetening her home with expensive scent carried burning through the rooms on a spoon. Gaston would arrive in the perfumed heat and promptly ‘do the death of Chatterton’. During his time in Morocco, he would have been familiar with the quaint thermometers used in colonial buildings there. At 75 degrees, the temperature gauge is marked ‘vers de soie’, and accordingly he would call Nancy ‘his silkworm’. Rather a sexy nickname.
After eight months of perfect happiness for Nancy, her Colonel was swallowed up by the war. In May 1943, Gaston left with the General for Algiers. Nancy was not entirely abandoned, as a Paris friend of Gaston’s moved into Blomfield Road (perhaps as a chaperone?). Marc, Prince de Beauvau-Craon, had escaped via Spain to join the Free French. He was younger than Nancy, in fact the son of one of Gaston’s old flames, Mary-Grace Gregorino, and Nancy joked that people thought he was their son. Marc was an ideal companion, taking her to suppers and the theatre, though there was no question of romance between them, although Marc clearly found her very attractive: ‘Nancy darling, don’t you think of me a little bit?’, ran one rather plaintive letter. Marc remained a friend after his marriage in 1952 to AlbinaChristina Patino and became something of an adviser to Gaston in his later political career, but though Nancy may have enjoyed flirting with him, there was never the merest question of her so much as looking at another man. While Gaston was away, she deluged him with letters, using all the charm her pen could conjure to keep their relationship alive. If Gaston was not quite such an assiduous correspondent, he might be forgiven, for the future of post-war France was still very much in abeyance.
It had always been the General’s aim to establish Free French sovereignty on French soil; now, with the whole of metropolitan France occupied and Vichy’s credibility destroyed, it seemed to him that the moment had come. So far as the Americans were concerned, though, nothing had been decided. Roosevelt was pushing his preferred candidate, Henri Giraud, to lead a future administration, and his solution, as tastefully expressed to Churchill in advance of the meeting between the Allies at Anfa, near Casablanca in January 1943, was a ‘shotgun wedding’, with Giraud as the bridegroom and De Gaulle as the bride. The American perspective is summed up in the Anfa declaration, which stated that:
France no longer possesses a government. In the interests of the French people and in order to safeguard the past, present and future of the country, the President of the United States and the British Prime Minster recognize that the French Commander-in-Chief, whose headquarters are at Algiers, has the right and duty to act as the director of the French military, economic and financial interests that are or shall be associated with the liberation movement at present established in North Africa and French West Africa …
The commander-in-chief was of course Giraud. ‘Thus Roosevelt’, De Gaulle’s biographer concludes contemptuously, ‘that paragon of democracy … who so firmly maintained the theses of France as res nullius against De Gaulle solemnly handed over the authority to a man without the slightest evidence of popular support.3 De Gaulle confounded Roosevelt by appearing agreeable to an alliance with Giraud, describing the American president’s solution as that of a ‘great statesman’. He had no intention of allowing Giraud to take over, proposing the establishment of a national committee of French liberation (CFLN) which would operate harmoniously from Algiers. The ostensible aim of De Gaulle’s trip was the organization of the command of the North African territories; its purpose was the routing of Giraud. When Duff Cooper, who had been offered the position of British representative to the CFLN, arrived in 1943, the situation was chaotic.
There had been no question on De Gaulle’s arrival in Algeria as to which general the people preferred. After meeting Giraud on 30 May, De Gaulle attended a memorial for Algerian combatants where he and his entourage were carried by cheering crowds to the monument to the dead. The next day, De Gaulle held a press conference where he read a statement emphasizing the importance of French sovereignty and the impossibility of working with men appointed by Vichy, who the Americans and Giraud were prepared to retain. The CFLN was announced on 3 June, De Gaulle had now to establish it at the head of the military. Eventually, Giraud was given the North African command, derived from Vichy’s troops, and De Gaulle that of the Free French forces, though he was also to oversee the military committee which would have ultimate control. Technically, Giraud was co-president of the CFLN, but not even Roosevelt really believed it by July. In August, Moscow, London and Washington, with varying degrees of reservation, recognized the CFLN.
Duff and his wife Lady Diana had met Gaston in London, where he had dined with them at the Dorchester. Beautiful, unconventional, capricious Diana was a friend of Nancy and close to Evelyn Waugh. Gaston took time out from unravelling Gaullean knots to welcome Diana at the a
irfield and appointed himself her guide to the ‘hub of the free world’.4 She was soon calling him her ‘Laughing Cavalier’ (more flattering than her husband’s nickname for him, ‘Wormwood’, as in ‘gall and’), as he refused to be fazed by the deplorable conditions in which they found themselves. There was simply nothing to buy, no plates, candles, not a sheet of paper, a hammer or a nail, no soap, no matches, no lightbulbs. Gaston took Diana to the Inter-Allied Club, where ‘all the upper homeless’, who hadn’t seen butter for months, cheerfully drank sour wine from cut down beer bottles with jagged, lipstick-smeared edges. If Diana complained of the cold, he encouraged her to skip to get warm, still chatting away, he took her to the Kasbah and the old palaces of the city and did his best to cheer her, though he wasn’t much help with Mme de Gaulle, ‘rather a pathetic little woman … she is obviously forbidden to put on any make-up’, 5 whose hatred of public life was equalled by Diana’s relish for it. The relationship between Duff and Gaston was to veer between affection, admiration and outright contempt, inevitably compromised by both the vagaries of their political missions and the difficulty of the General’s personality, but he and Diana always remained close, and she was to be instrumental in Gaston’s relationship with Nancy in the immediate aftermath of the war.
PART TWO
1944–73
13
LIBERATION
In May 1944, the telephone rang in Blomfield Road. The operator asked Nancy to hold the line. Then, for the first time since his departure for Algiers, she heard Gaston’s voice. She was overcome with emotion, barely able to speak coherently, and afterwards worried that she had been foolish and inarticulate. On 5 June, at 7.30 in the morning, she received another call. Gaston was there, in London, on his way from Northolt, where he had just landed with De Gaulle. Several hours later, after so very long, he was with her, for one brief, perfect night. In The Pursuit of Love, Linda hears Fabrice’s voice emerging from the maelstrom of war, and waits in calm ecstasy for him to arrive. He has come to tell her he loves her. Perhaps Gaston did the same, perhaps he did not, but surely it is a measure of his regard for Nancy that it was to her he came, at the climax of the Free French struggle, just as the Normandy landings promised to deliver all that the general had for so long fought to achieve.
De Gaulle had been told of the date of the invasion at lunch with Churchill in the prime minister’s private railway carriage near Portsmouth. Initially, the encounter went well, and De Gaulle described his admiration of ‘the policy of courage that [Churchill] had personified since the darkest hours’ as now ‘brilliantly justified’. ‘Esteem and friendship’ wafted round the carriage like the steam from Churchill’s perennial baths. Things went sour when the two leaders got down to brass tacks. Churchill endeavoured to encourage the general to meet Roosevelt, a proposal the latter loftily dismissed. ‘The French government exists. In that area, I have nothing to ask of the United States of America any more than of Great Britain.’ Churchill declared his unequivocal preference for Roosevelt, should he be obliged to divide his loyalties, but Ernest Bevin discreetly added that the prime minister was speaking personally, and not for his Cabinet. The row was smoothed over and Churchill politely proposed a toast to ‘De Gaulle, who never accepted defeat’, answered by his guest, who proposed ‘To England, to victory and to Europe’.
The party then proceeded to Eisenhower’s temporary headquarters, a hut in nearby woodland (there is a touch of bathos in the choice of meeting places for these men who were about to determine the future of the world). De Gaulle was shown a ‘draft’ (in fact it had already been printed up as leaflets) of a speech Eisenhower was to broadcast at the moment of attack. It was unfortunate that Gaston was presently in bed with Nancy Mitford, as never had his diplomatic skills been more urgently needed. De Gaulle exploded. Eisenhower was named as having entire responsibility for France and no mention was made of De Gaulle, the Free French or the Resistance. That evening, De Gaulle drew up a broadcast in which he called on the French to ‘comply with the orders of the qualified French authority’, which would allow them to choose their representatives and their government once the Germans had been expelled, but when he discovered, on the evening of 5 June, that Eisenhower had dissembled, De Gaulle refused to broadcast after the supreme commander, explaining that this would make him appear to be endorsing Eisenhower’s authority – effectively a direct denial of the principles on which the Free French had been operating since the broadcast of 18 June 1940.
Despairingly, Alexander Cadogan described the behaviour of Roosevelt, De Gaulle and Churchill at this juncture as like that of ‘girls approaching the age of puberty’.1 The quarrel between Churchill and De Gaulle, who continued to refuse to send the required military liasion mission to the invading force, was so severe that the two men almost came to blows. Pierre Vienot and Anthony Eden shuttled between the War Office and Carlton Gardens trying to find a resolution, but Churchill was now so enraged that he dictated a letter expelling the general from British soil. This was subsequently burned, but at Iam, with just three hours to go before Eisenhower launched the invasion, both leaders remained furious and intransigent. Churchill, who, according to Vienot, was even more drunk than usual, accused De Gaulle of treason, claiming that he saw the lives of British and American troops as worthless; De Gaulle denounced Churchill as a gangster.
Finally, on the afternoon of 6 June, De Gaulle spoke on the radio. He talked of the supreme battle that France was now facing and the ‘sacred duty of the sons of France to fight the enemy with all the means at their disposal’. His endorsement of Allied authority was vague but sufficient. ‘The orders of the French government and by the French leaders it has named for that purpose [must] be obeyed exactly. The actions we carry out in the enemy’s rear [must be] co-ordinated as closely as possible with those carried out at the same time by the Allied and French armies.’
Between 6 and 12 June, by which time the invading force had succeeded in establishing a bridgehead stretching 100 kilometres along the coast and 20 inland, Churchill departed to visit the troops at Bayeux. In a rare example of misjudging the press, he did not invite De Gaulle to accompany him. Both the newspapers and the Commons were indignant on De Gaulle’s behalf. With the exception of the Netherlands, the governments-in-exile in London now recognized De Gaulle, and there was also pressure from the intelligence services, who reported that the only name being heard in France was the general’s. Churchill’s attitude to De Gaulle at this point was shamingly truculent. He conceded that the general should be permitted to land and be treated courteously, but explained to Anthony Eden that no meetings ought to be held or crowds encouraged to gather. De Gaulle’s principal biographer notes: ‘Let it be remembered that the person in question was the head of a government of a country whose armed forces were fighting in the war, whose maquisards were everywhere giving their lives to help the Allies’ advance, and whose people, in many places, were being massacred by way of reprisals for the landing.’2
On 13 June, Gaston boarded the destroyer Combattante with Vienot, Koenig, Boislambert, d’Argenlieu and De Gaulle. They sailed the next morning, landing just after noon near Courseulles. De Gaulle seemed withdrawn and glum, though he explained later that he had been too choked with emotion to speak. One of his entourage tried to start a conversation by observing that it was four years since the Nazis had entered Paris. De Gaulle’s laconic response? ‘They made a mistake.’ Gaston’s reaction was more romantic: ‘I picked a rose at Bayeux. It stayed a long time on my night table as a message of sweetness and hope.’
Otherwise, the first footsteps on French soil were something of an anticlimax. A few old ladies dressed in black appeared and failed to recognize De Gaulle, two bicycling gendarmes dropped their vélos in surprise when they realized whom they were speaking to. For his own part, Gaston knew that the day was won when he spied the scuttling cassocks of the bishops of Lisieux and Bayeux fluttering down the beach. The party was received enthusiastically at Bayeux, where the crowd soo
n warmed up when they understood who was addressing them, but for De Gaulle it was Isigny that provided the most poignant and sobering sight of the day. The Americans had taken the town and De Gaulle’s jeeps were obliged to drive through the wreckage from which bodies were still being dug out. Despite the intense emotions of the day, it was no time for triumphalism.
Gaston departed for Algiers with De Gaulle on 16 June to prepare for the anticipated visit to Washington. Churchill was still smarting from the quarrel, but Eden and Vienot had continued their discussions and arrived at a consensus, reported in a letter from Vienot of 30 June, which seemed to promise a tripartite agreement of recognition of the provisional government, a categoric assertion of French sovereignty, the affirmation of the provisional government’s equality with that of their allies and the dismissal of the concept of ‘supervision’ by the commander-in-chief. Yet from the moment the plane touched down on US soil, it was clear that Roosevelt remained unconvinced. In a snubbing gesture worthy of Louis XIV, De Gaulle was met with a seventeen-gun salute, as accorded to a high-ranking military leader, as opposed to the twenty fired for a head of state. Although the military commanders Marshall, King, Arnold and Vandegrift were summoned to welcome him, Cordell Hull and Sumner Welles were conspicuously absent. Hull awaited him along with Roosevelt at the White House, whence he was conducted in what could only have been a display of outright malignance by Admiral Leahy, the former ambassador to Vichy. Roosevelt greeted his guest in French, and then, in case anyone had missed the point, offered tea to De Gaulle, suggesting that Leahy might prefer Vichy water. For a moment, it was unclear whether De Gaulle intended to leave the room or assault the President of the United States in his wheelchair. Gaston clenched his hand around the General’s arm. A frigid cordiality prevailed throughout the dinner, where Gaston remembered the only thing worse than the food was the orchestra, but discussions did begin the following day, 7 July.