The Horror of Love

by Lisa Hilton

  ‘No Monsieur, just perquisites.’

  Gaston now found himself working alongside Schuman (at the Ministry for Justice) on plans for European economic union, to be proposed by France at the conference of Messina. He was also one of the signatories of the Franco–Israeli accord on atomic energy which was kept secret until 1958, when France officially declared she had ceased working with Israeli scientists. Although one of Nancy’s favourite Colonel jokes was his response to a lugubrious official, when asked his views on nuclear energy, ‘Comme amateur de porcelaine, ’ Gaston was fascinated by nuclear power and keen that France should follow Russia, the United States and Britain into exploring its potential for domestic energy. In the face of much scepticism in the assembly, he refined a plan initially drafted by Felix Gaillard for national investment in and development of nuclear power as well as an investigation of the potential of nuclear weapons. The ‘Plan Palewski’, which consisted of a nuclear power station at Marcoule, research into a nuclear submarine and a huge investment programme, was nonetheless adopted. He was concerned that Europe should agree a cohesive nuclear strategy, writing to his colleague Antoine Pinay in advance of a conference in Brussels with precise details of communal production aims for the isotopic separation of uranium, and its sourcing in Africa. To promote his views, Gaston published a book of research, ideas and strategies gloriously entitled The Atom, Our Destiny. In another echo of his past, Gaston had also been charged with overseeing the Sahara, and co-signed the law of 3 April 1955 that declared a state of emergency in Algeria.

  In November 1954, the National Liberation Front of Algeria (FLN) had begun a campaign against the country’s colonial rulers. The ensuing war, which led to a debate at the United Nations, provoked a general election in December 1955, in which the Gaullists took just 4.4 per cent of the vote. The diplomatic catastrophe of the Suez Crisis in 1956 exacerbated the Algerian situation, and the FLN attacks became ever more frequent and deadly. The continuing troubles made it impossible for any government to remain in power for a significant time and by 1957 posters all over France were demanding the return of De Gaulle. In what can only be summarized as a superlative combination of bravado and political genius, after the ‘crisis of May’, on 1 June 1958, the General found himself back in power as president of France. But De Gaulle’s emergence from the wilderness came too late for Gaston. In the elections of June 1956 he had obtained only 5.6 per cent of the vote in the sixth district of the Seine. Although he accepted his defeat calmly and humbly and claimed to be glad to have more time to devote to writing and the push for restoring De Gaulle, his situation was rather difficult. Without his ministerial post he found himself, at the age of fifty-two, with limited means and no real job. ‘I know how you hate inaction, ’ wrote Nancy, and her letters of the summer of that year are deliberately light, chatty and touristy, as though she is trying to spare him her consciousness of what, despite his brave face, was a real humiliation.

  20

  DESPAIR

  For Gaston Palewski, De Gaulle was prepared to do something he had denied Churchill, Roosevelt and a generation of French politicians: compromise a principle. De Gaulle had always adamantly refused to engage his personal influence with public office, but when Gaston heard of the possibility of a post of ambassador to the EU, the general contacted Louis Joxe, the secretary general to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, on his behalf. It was the only personal favour De Gaulle ever asked of the government in his entire career. The EU appointment was blocked by the socialist Christian Pineau, but in August 1957 Gaston received something far better: Rome. Nancy cabled from Venice: ‘O DESESPOIR. O RAGE. O FELICITATIONS.’

  ‘Gaston has got his post in Rome, ’ Evelyn Waugh wrote to Diana Cooper. ‘Is Nancy desolate? Does one congratulate or condole?’ In a letter to Violet Hammersley, Nancy did her best to appear lighthearted: ‘The Colonel is off to the Palais Farnese in the form of Ambassador to Rome. He is very much pleased and I think he’ll love it, really made for him. He goes in October after which I shall be as free as air.’ But her friend Victor Cunard reported from Venice that her gaiety was painfully forced.

  She goes on saying that everything is going swimmingly with the Colonel, but one goes on hearing rumours that the whole thing is breaking up, which, from loyalty, one always denies. But my theory is it really is all over bar the shouting, that all her good spirits (or at least most of them), are a bluff and that her almost savage teasing of friends is a sort of safety valve operation. If I am right it is rather pathetic, because if she would only tell one she is unhappy then one would do what one could to comfort her.1

  Nancy’s teases grew so acerbic that she and Victor had a tremendous row, which left them both deeply disturbed and distressed. From Venice Nancy took refuge at Fontaines-les-Nonnes. Her letters from there show that the shop-front was firmly back in place. She describes a conversation about stigmata – ‘After dinner, M. l’Abbe!’ and Mme Costa’s suspicion that her kitchen had been infiltrated by Soviet spies. Nancy had returned to Paris briefly to say goodbye before Gaston left for Rome in the middle of October. By early November she wrote to him from London that the thought of going home and finding Paris without him was too much to bear. Still, she added, she longed to hear all about Rome, and had heard from Diana that the Colonel’s new house was huge. (‘Well, we knew that.’)

  The Palazzo Farnese had been commissioned in 1517 by Alessandro Farnese, the ‘petticoat cardinal’, whose appointment was owed to his sister Giulia being the mistress of the Borgia Pope, Alexander VI, a detail that cannot but have charmed Gaston. Work on the house was interrupted by the sack of Rome, but when Farnese himself eventually became pontiff as Paul III he commissioned Michelangelo to finish the third storey of the 150-foot facade of this ‘most monumental of Roman palaces’. How could the boy from the Faubourg-Poissonièré fail to be enchanted? In the grandeur of its austere simplicity, it was everything that Gaston loved, including a frescoed staircase, courtesy of Salviati and Zuccaro, a great spiralling swoop of white marble all of his very own. Gaston’s scalophilia was clearly known to the Mitfords: the Duchess of Devonshire suggested mischievously in an interview that ‘one must note the staircase’. The new ambassador wrote to De Gaulle that his heart rejoiced at the appointment to what he and Nancy soon referred to as the ‘palais-exquis’.

  It was, nevertheless, controversial. The Italian authorities were suspicious of the name Palewski, which they associated with the annexation to France at the end of the war of Tende and La Brigue as well as Aosta. Rome had signed the Common Market treaty in March that year, and Gaston’s brief, when it was eventually passed by the Quirinale, was to celebrate the historic links between Italy and France, to sustain co-operation between the two countries and to refine their relations in terms of their participation in Europe. Gaston spoke little Italian and had scant knowledge of contemporary Italian politics, so it was reassuring, when he arrived at the station, to be greeted by his counterpart at the Holy See, Roland de Margérie, who had been chef de cabinet diplomatique in the Reynaud administration of 1940. Another old Paris connection was Gaston’s friend Alary, who had married a daughter of Aman Jan, and was in Rome as a correspondent to the Havas agency. Gaston had visited him there before the war, in the office which would later become his own. Indeed, Rome was full of ghosts. ‘At the Farnese palace there was one room which I never crossed without an impression of unease: the little white salon which gave onto the terrace, decorated earlier by Mme Henri de Jouvenal, with armchairs and a deep sofa, perfect for summer parties.’ This was the sofa on which Pierre Laval had discussed with Mussolini the dictator’s plans for Ethiopia.

  The French community in Rome was surprised to find such an unconventional, indeed entirely inexperienced ambassador in their midst, but according to André Malraux Gaston was ‘an ambassador born’. A critic claimed that he had no idea of the niceties of Embassy etiquette, which could hardly have been the case, given the time he had spent at the British Embassy in Paris and his r
ole as unofficial chief of protocol there. Most of the objections stemmed from the alacrity with which Gaston flung himself on a fresh crop of pretty ladies, quickly earning himself the title ‘l’Embrassadeur’.

  Gaston’s first duties involved the protocol visits decried by Fanny in Don’t Tell Alfred.

  ‘You have to polish off the colleagues, visit them you know, and there are eighty embassies here so it takes a bit of doing.’

  ‘Are there so many countries in the world?’

  ‘Of course not – the whole thing is a great nonsense – but we have to keep up the fiction to please the Americans. There’s nothing millionaires like so much as being ambassadors.’

  Got up in a marvellous costume of gold-embroidered blue coat, bicorn hat with white feathers and a cape, Gaston first proceeded in a motorcade to present his letters of appointment to the Italian president, Giovanni Gronchi. Gronchi may have looked like ‘a cross between a fig and a raisin’, but he was sharp, greeting Gaston: ‘Monsieur l’Ambassadeur, you are most welcome in Italy, everywhere in Italy. Even the Val d’Aosta.’ They never became friends. He got on better at the Palazzo Chigi, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where he reassured the Italians of his personal commitment to the European Community. After the solemn honour of meeting the Pope, Pius XIII, was concluded, the new ambassador felt himself established.

  The following spring though, the crisis the Gaullists had been expecting for so long finally broke over France.

  ‘I long for your voice so passionately I can’t imagine today without you being there … Yesterday, I stayed shut in the house all day, expecting you to telephone. Oh, Colonel, you see I’m in one of my states … Don’t abandon me. Perhaps you’ve changed too. Are you too rich or too happy? Bourgeois perhaps, however that isn’t a word one associates with you.’ Nancy felt she was living the past all over again, the longing, the excitement, De Gaulle and Gaston in Algiers. Then she received word to go and meet him at Orly. ‘After so long it seems unbelievable … we cried with happiness.’ If Nancy chose to believe that Gaston’s tears were for her, rather than the general, she could, for a few moments on a dusty airfield, believe herself Linda in the arms of her Fabrice.

  Nancy accepted that she could hardly expect to see much of Gaston during the crisis, but his refusal of a role at the heart of the new government was an incomprehensible blow. Gaston later explained: ‘My mission in Rome had too particular a character for me to abandon it … It seemed that my duty was, for a time at least, to remain in Italy.’ But Nancy knew him too well. She couldn’t reproach him – after the years of effort, endless work and the exhausting grind of a hostile political culture, Gaston deserved all the beauties Rome had to offer, and which he was so perfectly equipped to appreciate, but she had to confront the reality of her place in his life. She had clearly forgotten Elizabeth Bowen’s dictum that as soon as one is sad, one is ordinary. The dynamic of their relationship, that it was she who loved and Gaston qui se laissait aimer, had been something she could handle, and often joked about.

  ‘Oh, Colonel, I love you.’

  ‘That’s awfully kind of you.’

  Yet she now had to accept that Rome was worth a discarded mistress. Gaston had never lied to her. He had promised her nothing and that was what she had got. ‘Why would you want to deprive me of all that I love for one thing?’ he asked her. For years, Nancy had convinced herself that she was the most significant woman in his life, the Pompadour to the pretty ladies in the Pare aux Cerfs, and Gaston had exposed the illusion. She felt foolish and angry.

  A letter in June was clear-sighted and reproachful. ‘I’m no longer any use to you. When things go badly, you need me. When they go well you turn to other, prettier women. So, I no longer have a role, le portefeuille est vide.’ (The metaphor is a glance at Gaston’s new ‘portfolio’, but also a sharp reminder that Nancy may not have always felt as serene as she appeared to about their different financial status – ‘portefeuille’ also means wallet. It’s a horrid image, Nancy figuring herself as used up, turned inside out and cast aside.)

  But there was still love there. Gaston could easily have used his position to keep his distance from Nancy. The guards of the Palazzo Farnese would have proved more effective Cerberuses than the bewildered aides-de-camp at the Rue St Dominique in 1945. Nancy could have nourished her bitterness into a final quarrel, as Victor Cunard had anticipated. Their relationship could have dwindled into correspondence, with dignity maintained on both sides, but it did not. The next summer she was Gaston’s guest at the palazzo and returned there every year of his mission.

  Her first visit took place in August 1958, ‘in dead secret’. Gaston was sensitive about his unusual status as an unmarried ambassador (he had taken Pauline with him from the Rue Bonaparte, a move which made him unpopular with the staff. ‘Pauline is a traitor’ was scrawled on the walls of the palazzo). Her visit was timed to coincide with the flight of the beau monde to the coast. As hardly ever, Nancy had her lover to herself, and sightseeing with the Colonel was an altogether delightful matter, quite different from trailing round dusty ruins with Prod. Gaston showed Nancy his favourite walk, to the church of San Agostino to see the Caravaggio Virgin, they visited the galleries and the antique shops. Nancy adored the heat and after a morning in the city happily sunbathed away the afternoons. ‘What the Colonel calls exposing my limbs to the Spanish Embassy, ’ she giggled. Paris seemed gloomy without him. ‘I sigh for the land of cypress and myrtle, I loathe the oak and ash. After 101 degrees in Rome I find it freezing here and pitch dark.’

  Why would Gaston have bothered to dedicate time to Nancy had he not genuinely wished to see her when he might have been at Portofino with the Agnellis? Guilt, possibly, but every year? And in 1961, propriety was clearly no longer of consequence to the ‘seul ambassadeur celibataire’, as Nancy and Deborah visited in March, at the height of the Roman Season. The Duchess of Devonshire remembers it as a ‘real outing’, a week of non-stop parties at which she knew no one. Luckily, most conversation was in English. Italian ice cream was a joy, the smart Italian woman both a pleasure and a challenge. The duchess conjectured that by then there was little physical relationship between Nancy and Gaston, but recalls vividly after a week in their company their intense pleasure in one another, talking about art, food, dissecting the social life, chatting and laughing endlessly. Nancy’s visits were not a duty to Gaston, they were a joy, and if she had had the strength to lock up the pain and resentment of early 1958 and allow herself to be happy again, does that make her a fool or suggest that finally she had become one of the women she had always written about, those who know how to handle their lovers?

  Or, one might add, their husbands. At the end of 1957, Peter finally consented to a divorce. Prod had spite in his character, and while he had never cut up rough about Gaston it does seem rather pointed that he should have agreed to give Nancy her freedom at precisely the moment when her lover appeared to have slipped from her clutches. Since the early Fifties, Prod had been living on a boat at Golfe Juan, not far from Cannes on the French Riviera. ‘He looks exactly like some ancient pirate, ’ Nancy wrote to Evelyn, ‘bone thin, pitch black, white hair and beard and dressed in literal rags.’ Peter claimed that he had found someone he wanted to marry, though the identity of the lucky lady is uncertain and, as with most of his projects, it never came off. Nancy was obliged to appear in court to give evidence that her marriage had broken down, with predictable ‘peer’s daughter’ publicity from the papers. Given the Rodds’ lengthy and well-known estrangement, it was difficult to find a judge who was prepared to hear the case and four in fact refused. ‘Old dancers, I suppose, ’ Nancy remarked. ‘I had no idea I knew four judges!’

  Lord Redesdale’s death in 1958 also came just as Nancy was learning to live with Gaston’s absence. Even a decade before, Nancy had described her father, then almost seventy, as ‘looking like ninety’, and James Lees-Milne, encountering him in Heywood Hill during the war, had been unable to recognize the terr
or of his youth and the handsomest man of his generation in the wizened, patient creature Nancy presented to him. Lord Redesdale’s life had ended with the war, and though she grieved, Nancy acknowledged this. ‘It is sad, ’ she wrote to Evelyn Waugh, ‘but the odd, violent attractive man he used to be had already gone except for an occasional flash. He was so very weak and so very deaf.’ Uncle Matthew was to have a last hurrah in the novel Nancy began writing in August 1959, Don’t Tell Alfred. Evelyn told Nancy he thought this her best novel, though it is generally considered the worst.

  21

  THEORY OF THE LEISURE CLASS

  In an Encounter essay of 1955, Edward Shilson identifies a crucial shift in the attitudes of British intellectuals towards their own nation in the post-war period. In the 1920s and 1930s, he argues, the ‘whole notion’ of Britain or England was considered ‘repellent’. This was the view of‘nearly everyone [who] was considered worthy of mention’. In contrast, after the war, a new spirit of patriotism was nurtured by anti-Americanism.

  From a harmless, amiable, good natured, powerful, ridiculous, loyal ally – a sort of loutish and helpful nephew, America suddenly seemed to develop into a huge challenging empire, wilful, disregarding Britain, criticizing Britain, lording it over Britain and claiming to lord it over everyone everywhere. Loyal British backs were arched at this peril and the terrible economic crises of the second half of the 1940s accentuated impatience with America.

  In 1942, George Orwell had written a piece rehabilitating Kipling, with T.S. Eliot joining him to praise the poet formerly dismissed as a vulgar apologist for imperialism. Shilson correlates this shift with his suggestion that intellectuals were reconsidering their attitude to the culture of British gentry, returning to the security of reverence for establishment institutions: ‘a process of submission to the moral and cultural – but not the political or economic – ascendancy of the aristocracy and gentry’. In such a climate of endorsement of values which Nancy’s own generation had professed to despise, before the war robbed them of their sense of confidence and autonomy, Don’t Tell Alfred, in other respects a slight little book, is bang on message.