The Horror of Love

by Lisa Hilton

  the best conversation I have ever known. The depth of erudition was never allowed to penetrate the surface, but without it could the talk have been so good … Very fast English conversation between the Coopers and their friends was different, not better, but different from French conversation. This could be wonderfully amusing, stimulating, brilliant … English women are wonderfully gifted, knowing just when to put in the aside or the question that brings out the best in men.6

  Not all Diana’s entertainments were a whiz, however. On one occasion she forced her French guests to sit through Coward’s film In Which We Serve, which bewildered them, though they forced out a few polite and manly snuffles. At the height of tension between Britain and France over Syria in the summer of 1945, when diplomatic relations were practically broken off, she invited Gaston to lunch alone with her to tell him her plans for her summer party. She thought of turning the garden into a huge dance floor, hanging lanterns in the trees and opening the courtyard gates to any Parisian who cared to come, in the spirit of the opera balls under Louis XV. Gaston gently dissuaded her – on Bastille Day the Parisians were just as likely to torch the place.

  17

  THE PURSUIT OF CHIC

  Before the war had even ended, the authorities in Paris were turning their attention to the vital matter of women’s clothes. This was not quite such a trivial preoccupation as it might first seem. Since the seventeenth century, Paris had been synonymous with elegance and glamour, while the ingenuity of the Parisiennes during the occupation had not only boosted morale but made quite an impression on the arriving Allied troops. Stumping along in their wooden-soled shoes or bicycling in short A-line skirts stitched together from scarves (silk in the fashionable arrondissements, cotton in the bohemian sixth), with their sculpted hairdos and elaborately decorated hats reminiscent of Marie-Antoinette, they had, unlike the British, refused to surrender to utility. Paris fashion was the nexus of an economy that employed many, from the silk weavers of Lyon to the hundreds of specialist couture artisans in the capital; it was therefore economic necessity as much as national pride which required its reinvigoration.

  In March 1944, the Chambre Syndicale staged an exhibition directed by Bébé Bérard featuring dolls costumed in the best the couture houses could produce. Jean Cocteau, Christian Dior and Jean Patou were among the team who produced the show, which was seen by over 100,000 people. The dolls – a traditional means of exhibiting French styles dating back to the days of Louis XIV, when they had enjoyed diplomatic status – wore satin and chiffon gowns accessorized with diamonds lent by Cartier and even tiny sets of silk lingerie. After the drabness of the war, they seemed like a cloud of exquisite butterflies to women who hadn’t had a new dress for six years. The popularity of the exhibition reflected the need for colour, sensuality and luxury in the same manner that The Pursuit of Love sated the post-war hunger for charm and romance.

  Like Linda Radlett’s, Nancy’s first priority when she established herself in Paris was to ‘arrange’ herself. She and her sisters loved clothes, which often feature in their letters, and Nancy was happy to declare that being well-dressed was a matter of health. She had deplored the dingy gowns and wooden suspender-belts of wartime austerity, and though she had always made efforts towards chic (her first biographer, Harold Acton, describes the elegance of her figure in a plain black skirt and velvet jacket when she worked at Heywood Hill) now, for the first time, she could indulge her passion.

  Clothes had never been seen as frivolous in France. Like quenelles de brochet or a Watteau boiseries, the intricacy of their production and display was seen as part of the essential business of civilization, an idea Nancy thoroughly endorsed. Pierre Balmain recalled showing his 1945 collection, with those two unlikely fashion plates Gertrude Stein and her moustachioed companion Alice B. Toklas in the audience, ‘sitting on the seats of honour watching the pretty striped numbers go by, noting them on their cards with the same intensity of interest as they had noted the Picassos and Matisses which had passed through their lives’. Nancy had no truck with the idea that clever women ought to be scruffy and relished the whole complex ritual of fittings and pinnings, the discussion of the toile, the selection of hats. In The Blessing she enumerates with evident pleasure the complex process of assembling a Parisian tenu: ‘the elegance, the manicurists, the vendeuses, the modistes, the bottiers and the lingères’

  Englishwomen’s clothes had always been a source of derision to the French, rendering ‘the British female abroad an object of terror and avoidance to all beholders’1 and Nancy, who had so minded her serviceable frocks and shiny face on her first heavily chaperoned visit to Paris, was prepared to put in the hours it would take to transform herself into a Frenchwoman. Her 1951 essay ‘Chic – English, French and American’ compares ‘chubby little red-faced Queen Victoria’ with the effortless beauty of Empress Eugénie. In England, smartness has nothing to do with clothes. If one is a duchess, like the two she reports being turned away from Dior, one can afford to dress like a gardener. ‘Ladylike’ is the best the Englishwoman, with her stiff, porridge-coloured tweeds and her skirt dividing ‘rather horribly’ over her calves, can aspire to. Compare those few ‘rich, ruthless and savagely energetic’ Frenchwomen who, if they can’t afford to dress well, don’t bother at all. Admittedly, not all duchesses were dowdy. Nancy wrote to Gaston with glee to describe Deborah taking her daughter Emma to Notre-Dame: ‘You’ve seen the outside, darling, you can guess the inside. Now let’s go to Christian Dior.’

  Nancy’s first couture clothes came from Grés, from whom she ordered a black velvet ball dress with a chiffon waistband which showed off her adolescent slimness. (Cynthia Gladwyn was scandalized by both the price – £200 – and the fifty yards of fabric in the skirt.) The dress sailed through a dinner party, a rendezvous with Gaston, a gallery opening and cocktails at the Embassy, where the conversation next day was devoted to the miracle of Nancy’s waist. Nancy’s great love, though, was Dior. The impact of Dior’s first show on the Avenue Montaigne on 12 February 1947 was such that even the dukes of the Jockey Club spoke of nothing else. The New Look, as christened by Carmel Snow of Harper’s Bazaar, was Nancy’s idea of perfection. ‘You pad your hips and squeeze your waist and skirts are to the ankle, it is bliss.’

  Nancy’s tall, thin figure set off the New Look perfectly, though interestingly, she was always troubled by her slimness, which could turn into unattractive skinniness when she was anxious or overworked. Hard to imagine a modern woman writing with pleasure to her mother from the country: ‘I am getting quite fat, you won’t know me.’ Nancy loved (well-disciplined) femininity. Grace de Valhubert is asked why she has ruined a Dior frock by having it made up to the neck, covering her beautiful breasts, while in Christmas Pudding Philadelphia Bobbin is misguidedly troubled by her ‘beautiful, rounded body’ which she squeezes into over-laced stays. In her essay on chic, Nancy describes American women as looking pretty in both youth and old age, but characterizes their taste as adolescent: ‘Where are the grown up women in the prime of life dressed as adults?’ In Love in a Cold Climate, Polly Hampton’s beauty is dismissed by the callow debs’ delights of the London Season who find her too statuesque, too large, preferring the thin, bird-like women who were the ideal of the Twenties. The fact that Nancy herself perfectly conformed to this ideal does not stop her criticizing it. The worship of the juvenile, which she saw as particularly representative of an immature American culture, tapped into all her beliefs about the threat to European values from a society that prized youth above all else. She agreed with Stendhal that while Americans might have the gaiety of youth, they were devoid of sensibility, of the capacity for pleasurable passion. To Nancy, a beautiful woman was very much a woman, breasts and hips proudly on display, and the New Look confirmed her prejudice that only the French truly understood this.

  Not everyone agreed. The conspicuous consumption embodied in Dior’s extravagant use of yards of cloth at a time when many French people didn’t have enough
to eat provoked violence. A publicity shoot in Montmartre was disrupted by angry housewives who attacked the model, pulling her hair and trying to rip off her dress. Nancy playfully feared that her own fate would be that of ‘l’élégante de la Rue Lepique’ as ‘people shout ordures at you from vans because for some reason it creates class feelings in a way no sables could’. The French might worship clothes, but they did not forget that it was the Austrian Queen’s bill at Rose Bertin that contributed to her downfall.

  Nancy was rich, she had her pretty flat and her pretty clothes and for the moment Gaston was not governing France. Although they remained discreet, they could now enjoy some sort of a life together, and within their circle they were perceived as a couple. Nancy was flattered when Violet Trefusis referred to her as ‘La Palewska (it was never a sad little nickname she invented for herself), and her letters from England, where she still returned frequently, tease ‘Colonel Mitford’ with the confidence of a woman who was, at least for the present, secure in her relationship. Gaston introduced her to many of the friends he had known before the war, while her luncheon parties at Rue Monsieur became a regular event for both the English community in Paris and visitors passing through. There were never more than five guests, Marie would produce simple, delicious food – snails, roast chicken, salad and cheese, with a special English-style pudding if Gaston was asked – the Colonel adored nursery puddings, though Marie never thought much of them. Nancy never drank very much, but there was always plenty of champagne, wine and brandy for her friends, so much so that the less experienced ones occasionally over-indulged: ‘Hugh, if you drink as much brandy as that you’ll be dead before you’re thirty!’ Arthur Ross told Lord Thomas.

  Lord Thomas met Nancy at the Cambridge Union and subsequently went often to the flat. He recalls that the conversation would be mainly in English, though it would switch to French for particular descriptions and phrases. It often touched on politics, though Nancy was discreet about her hotline to De Gaulle. ‘How did you know that?’ asked Momo Marriott once. ‘Oh, I listened to the news on the wireless before you came.’ Nancy seemed ‘very attractive, very happy, full of beans’ and often spoke of the Colonel, though always as a dear friend. Paul Johnson, whom Lord Thomas introduced to Nancy, speaks of her as ‘very correct, even for the 1950s’. The colonel was certainly a fixture, and always lunched at Rue Monsieur on Sundays when he was in Paris, but Nancy was careful about who saw them together. Guests had to be mindful of their manners, says Johnson, but ‘laughter was the very essence of life to her’ and her flat appeared to the young man as the acme of elegant living. Gaston himself was ‘always popping in’. Another friend describes him arriving very late for a luncheon party and launching into a long anecdote about trying to book a burial plot at the Père Lachaise cemetery. It was outrageous, he laughed, that a man in his position should not even have been offered a view.

  Beyond the Rue Monsieur and the Embassy (whence the Coopers departed in 1947 – ‘a richly lachrymose occasion, Diana was in tears, Duff was in tears, Gaston Palewski was in tears’2) a taste of post-war Parisian social life is given in the diaries of Jacques Dumaine. Within the span of a few months, he lists a concert by Francis Poulenc, a Vuillard exhibition, a recital of Prokofiev’s violin concerto at the Beaumonts’, with Picassos hung on the eighteenth-century woodwork. Or events like Marivaux’s Fourberies de Scapin, featuring Bébé Bérard’s last stage set, the final exquisite testament of this ‘tender tramp’. Nancy saw her colonel at dinner at Maxim’s, at the theatre, at innumerable parties and at receptions such as that described by the MP and socialite Chips Channon: ‘Today was a day of fantastic elegance. Arturo Lopez gave a luncheon party for me at … his small Versailles, with every object in it beyond price; it is, I suppose, the most elegant “set-up” in the world … I was between the Duchess de Fesanzac and Nancy Mitford.’

  Nancy herself didn’t really get worked up about duchesses: she found gratin life too pompous and dull. She did sulk when Gaston went to Carlos de Bestegui’s ball at the Palazzo Labia in Venice in 1951, described in her Sunday Times column as a frantic free-for-all as the beau monde scrambled for invitations. ‘A certain lady … intending to go as a Spanish Infanta, advertised for a dwarf to accompany her. She arrived home next day to find her hall filled with rich dwarves of her acquaintance who had not been invited.’ She teased Gaston sourly about his careful preservation of his own precious carton. She often lamented Gaston’s unavailability, and the comedy that ensued when she tried to steal a few moments with him, stuffed into the escalier de service and discovered by the concierge. In a letter of 1947 she scripted one such attempt, employing nonsensical timings for comic effect.

  28h La Marquise de Bairn arrives Rue Bonaparte. Leaving, she declares ‘M. Palewski is a man who knows what’s best for him.’

  28h36 The Duchesse de la Rochefoucauld is introduced to the Director’s office. ‘This visit produced nothing, ’ she observes.

  28h42 Mme Rodd leaves by the escalier de service. ‘It’s cold, ’ she remarks.

  28h43 The Princess of Lichtenstein has an interview with the Director, she leaves after an hour and declares ‘I have the impression than M. Palewski was in a hurry.’

  29h43 Renewed visit of Mrs Rodd, who leaves five minutes later without making a declaration.

  29h48 The Duchesse de Montesquiou comes to pay a visit to the Director. On leaving, she declares ‘It’s a good beginning.’

  30h48 Lady Liz von Hoft left the office one hour later. ‘I have just had the most encouraging conversation with M. Palewski.’

  Conversations will begin again at 17h this evening.

  Nancy never concealed her longing to be with Gaston, and she was unashamed to make herself available, waiting in the flat for a call or a snatched quarter of an hour’s conversation, cancelling other plans at the last minute if he happened to be free. Does this make her pathetic, or the realistic lover of an extremely busy man? Marcel Schneider, who knew Nancy well, described her and Gaston rushing into one another’s arms at every opportunity, and as the tempo of Gaston’s political career increased along with his commitments to the RPF, those opportunities were scarcer. It is not necessarily true, as one of Nancy’s biographers would have it, that the thrill of their meetings ‘concealed a great emptiness’.3 Her letters to Gaston are full of her need to be with him and her frustration when they are separated, but these are, after all, love letters. Lovers do not generally write to inform the beloved he or she is not much missed. Nancy also describes her many visits to friends, the fun she has in London or on the Riviera, jokes, ‘shrieks’, books, outings and, very often, work.

  In an interview recorded in Versailles in 1970, Nancy explained that after the success of The Pursuit of Love she had simply ‘meekly carried on’ with her writing. Yet she took it extremely seriously and worked immensely hard. Between 1946 and 1960 she produced three novels, two scholarly biographies, a great many newspaper and magazine articles and reviews and translated both Mme de Lafayette’s novel La Princesse de Clèves and André Roussin’s play The Little Hut, with which she toured in England. Of her books of this period, the best known is perhaps her second bestseller, Love in a Cold Climate, in some senses a ‘prequel’ to The Pursuit of Love, featuring Fabrice de Sauveterre in a cameo which gives even sensible Fanny the chance to fall in love with him. In a much-quoted passage, Fabrice advises Fanny on the French method of keeping one’s lover – that is, to give way to him in everything: ‘Now you see, these English femmes du monde … They are proud and distant, out when the telephone bell rings, not free to dine unless you ask them a week before – in short, elles cherchent à se faire valoir, and it never never succeeds.’

  This is not quite the dismal advice it might first appear to be. Nancy was able to laugh at her often comic attempts to snatch a few minutes with Gaston, and Fabrice’s lecture is as much an in-joke at the expense of colonial pomposity as a prototype of The Rules. If one considers the sheer scale of the output Nancy achieved durin
g her first decades in France, let alone its quality, it becomes clear that her work was neither a compensation for Gaston’s absences, nor a hobby that she could pick up and put down at the shrill of the telephone. Her letters to him constantly discuss her work, describing her progress, asking his opinion. The tone is not quite the same as that used in her correspondence with her cher maître Evelyn Waugh, but nonetheless she addresses herself to someone she expects to be interested, who takes her as seriously as a professional writer as she does herself. She did structure her life around Gaston, but when she decamped to write, at the country home at Fontaines-les-Nonnes of her friend Mme Costa, or the Coopers’ château at Chantilly, it was not pour se faire valoir, but because she had work to do.

  (Love in a Cold Climate contains another interesting little instance of a writing habit Nancy shared with Evelyn Waugh. Just as Waugh employs certain names for characters he dislikes (Cruttwell being the most frequent), in the novel she called ‘Cedric’ Nancy introduces the name Borley for a family of huntin’ and shootin’ Oxfordshire squires, notable for their physical hideousness and indifference to aesthetics. Caroline Dexter, in The Blessing, turns out to be a Borley. The name can only have its origins in the horrible landlord who turned Nancy’s friend Cecil Beaton out of his beloved country house at Ashcombe.)