Then in mid-September Nancy found a flat, closer than ever to her prey, in the Rue Bonaparte itself. She was at Number 20, while Palewski lived at the top of the road at Number 1: ‘Ici vecut Gaston Palewski’ reads the plaque outside the stone building, inside which a spiral staircase takes one along a marble landing, past a Greek statue in a shadowy alcove, to his door. In that dark, cool, entirely French interior one can feel Nancy’s nervous excitement as she tapped her way up the ‘grand escalier’, feel the Colonel’s bounding energy as he raced down for an evening with his ‘pretty ladies’.
What he thought, when Nancy turned up on this doorstep, one can only guess. No doubt he welcomed her with a lot of ‘ma chère amie’ and a night of Parisian passion, but he must have been wary. He had become a prominent figure in French political life. In de Gaulle’s provisional, post-liberation government he was again chef du cabinet, no mean task as France was in disarray. The country was not even recognised as a sovereign power; the Communist threat was real and potent; there were areas still ruled, Wars-of-the-Roses style, by bands of armed men who sensed the tremulous nature of central authority. In Paris, many government positions were filled by officials who had supported the puppet regime of Pétain against de Gaulle’s Free French: the foreign ministry at the Quai d’Orsay was said to be ‘peuplé de Vichy’.
So there were few that de Gaulle could truly trust, but Palewski was first among them. He was the buffer between the General and the rest of the world, a tricky job that inevitably brought him enemies. People went to him for favours and blamed him when these were not granted. And he was seen as more horribly regal than de Gaulle himself: the letters GPRF (Gouvernement Provisoire de la République Francaise) were said to stand for ‘Gaston Palewski Régent de France’. Jealous colleagues called him ‘l’empereur’ or ‘la lavande’ (such was the strength of his lavender eau de cologne). Palewski played the role of whipping boy, and absorbed the attacks that would otherwise have undermined de Gaulle. He was as able to do this as any man can reasonably be, with his urbanity and his tolerance of human frailty. His own little weaknesses, which he always feared would offend the absurdly puritanical de Gaulle, were part of what made him so useful; they gave him a worldly, forgiving understanding of how to deal with people (not something the General ever got the hang of: Diana Cooper, then the British Ambassadress, said that conversation with de Gaulle ‘flowed like glue’12).
But Palewski could always tell Nancy that their affair must be kept ultra-discreet because – in sitcom parlance – the boss wouldn’t like it. ‘Vous connaissez notre froide respectabilité’, he wrote to her, meaning: don’t think you can come swanning in and out of the Rue Bonaparte as my maîtresse en titre. Nancy was, of course, a married woman. This may have become an irrelevance, as far as she was concerned; but it made a difference in the wider world, where social codes were adhered to very rigidly. ‘A cette époque on se demandait comment recevoir les gens qui n’étaient pas mariés, c’était toute une affaire’, wrote a correspondent in Le Figaro13 whose parents had known Nancy and Palewski after the war. John Julius Norwich confirms that
there was never any question of inviting Nancy and Gaston together to the Embassy. It was very rare, you see, in those days in Paris. You didn’t invite people together if they weren’t married. There was the wife and there was the mistress, but the wife got invited out. Of course my mother would have been enchanted to have them both at the same table, there was nobody less prudish than my mum, but I think that at dinner, although they would have probably come together and left together, they would have come as two dear friends, and, you know, one had given the other a lift.
Therefore Palewski could legitimately say that Nancy’s marital status was relevant to him; or at least to de Gaulle. There was enough truth in it to convince (‘gone are those cheerful days when Fr politicians expected to die in the arms of their mistresses’, Nancy said in 1947), but the real truth was that it helped Palewski to keep Nancy at arm’s length.
‘I think’, says Diana, ‘he was always sort of half-hoping she’d go back. Well, you know, saying things like it would spoil his career if she got divorced – I don’t know. I don’t think it was easy for her, at all.’ Meanwhile John Julius Norwich puts himself in the Colonel’s position and shudders: ‘I mean I can’t imagine anything more terrible, trying to have a mild fling with someone and then they up sticks and come and move as close as possible to me. You know, terrifying.’
But this image (‘L’Attirance Fatale’) is perhaps exaggerated; Palewski knew that he could handle Nancy. He also knew that she was too dignified to do anything that would compromise him: ‘Nancy never behaved badly in her life,’ says Lord Norwich (meaning socially). And Palewski was very fond of his sparkling, smitten Mitford girl. As Nancy’s nephew, Alexander Mosley, says, ‘the amount of effort he put into that relationship shows how fond he was of her’: a man like Palewski would simply not have bothered to spend time with Nancy, had he not wanted to. Why should he? He owed her nothing. No: he took great pleasure in talking to her, pleasure no doubt also in her bed. Although she has been viewed as a slightly embarrassing figure in his life, a semi-desperate woman who had come tagging across the Channel, this is in fact unfair to both of them. Which is not to deny that he treated her in a cavalier manner. ‘I’ve got a heavy political day LET ME SEE – can you come at 2 minutes to 6?’ was how she teasingly characterised it.
It is true to say, as John Julius Norwich does, that ‘the Colonel could deal with the situation largely because Nancy was prepared to accept any terms. She was always available. If somebody else had plonked him at 8 o’clock, he could ring up Nancy and take her out to dinner. If she had another engagement, which she probably did, she would cancel it. She would sit for a week beside the telephone.’ So Palewski could live his life away from Nancy to the full, and have the enjoyment of her company when he had an hour to spare. She asked nothing from him, very unusual in a woman; a sign of her touching naïvety, and of her fear that, should she dare to make demands, the Colonel would walk away. ‘Frenchwomen generally keep their lovers if they want to because they know that there is one infallible method of doing so’, says Fabrice to Fanny in Love in a Cold Climate. ‘It’s very simple. You must give way to them in every respect... these English femmes du monde... 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.’ What heresy this sounds –! One wonders what a clever handler of men like Sophia Garfield, in Pigeon Pie, would have thought of it. There is some truth in what Nancy wrote, more than most women would like to believe; but what she was really doing was dutifully setting out the philosophy of love according to Gaston Palewski (‘no Frenchman would put up with it for a day’, says Fabrice, of the not-tonight-darling-I’m-washing-my-hair brigade). Giving in to her lover in every respect was what Nancy was prepared to do. No doubt it consoled her to take this personal acquiescence, and sell it as a piece of universal advice.
So things were not perfect when Nancy arrived in Paris, but in her heart she had probably not expected them to be. When Linda doubts the constancy of Fabrice, she turns up at his flat to confront him and then, as she sits waiting, decides upon a different course: ‘Better go, better ignore the whole affair. Her only hope was to keep things on the present footing, to keep the happiness which she was enjoying day by day, hour by hour.’ This was Nancy’s own conclusion; again, perhaps, it gave her solace to bring it out into the open in this way. And perhaps doing so made it easier for her to cope with. If Linda could live by this philosophy, so too could her creator.
But the misery and frustration that Palewski caused her were only part of the story. ‘I am so completely happy here’, she wrote to her mother from her flat in the Rue Bonaparte; and there is no reason to doubt her word. Paris had struck a match to light up her soul. One is reminded of another female writer upon whom Paris had this same emotional effect: Jean Rhys,
who moved to the city in the 1920s with her new husband and became a fringe member of the Hemingway-Gertrude Stein literary set. In her autobiography she wrote that, had she never left London and gone to live in Paris, ‘there would have been no aliveness. I can’t imagine what my life would have been: useless and boring.’ This is Nancy speaking, with the social guard dropped and the nerves exposed. So too is this, from Rhys’s novel Good Morning, Midnight: ‘It was a lovely autumn in Paris. I’ve never been so happy in my life. I’m alive, eating ravioli, drinking wine. I’ve escaped. A door has opened and let me out into the sun. What more do I want? Anything might happen.’
The man who took Jean Rhys to Paris was a feckless con-man; the man who made Nancy want to live in Paris was a hopeless philanderer; but in neither case did this change the fact of the real, solid happiness that they brought to these women. As Rhys put it in her novel Quartet, looking out on to Paris from the balcony of a hotel at night, ‘One realised all sorts of things. The value of an illusion, for instance, and that the shadow can be more important than the substance.’ Again, this is the hidden voice of Nancy Mitford; even though she would never have expressed such a thought, such a feeling, never have turned her sunlit happiness to reveal its dark indigo underside.
Her idiom was always social, as was her milieu, and her instinct was to play delightedly upon the surfaces of her new life, shot through as they were with shafts of joy. She kept herself busy, engaged with her beloved city through activity rather than reverie. That was her style. She pursued her job for Heywood Hill – ‘I’m doing business in rather a desultory way’, she wrote to her mother, although as usual she was actually quite assiduous, and complained: ‘Nobody in London takes the slightest interest in my activities, Dearest [Heywood] doesn’t answer my letters and Mollie [Friese-Greene] just says it makes more work for her – I see her point vividly but it is all rather discouraging I must say. What I’ve done in fact is to establish a branch of HH here which will take any amount of books from us at 30% more than we pay for them which must be quite a cop.’ Impressive stuff, although one doubts she would have worked so hard at selling Cobbett to the Norwegians.
She was also ‘writing articles for French papers like mad & getting £10 for 500 words (thank heaven for paper shortage) which you must say not bad’, she told Evelyn Waugh. Randolph Churchill, then writing a column about Paris for a group of American newspapers, had asked her to send him ‘gossip’ that he could use (under his own name) for £2 a time. ‘No shame, no effort’, said Waugh; so Nancy gossiped away. She told Churchill, for example, that Gaston Palewski was nicknamed ‘Régent de France’ and under ‘venomous’ attack in the lead-up to the French elections. If it gave her a small kick to do this, she would have regretted the impulse when Churchill went on to write ‘an absolutely hateful article about Fabrice in a French communist paper – how I wish none of my friends could hold a pen’. Palewski, with some dignity, asked Nancy to tell Randolph Churchill ‘qu’il n’est pas d’usage en France d’écrire sur les gens avec lesquels on est en relations d’amitié ou de camaraderie’. In England, unfortunately, traducing one’s friends was, and remains, a favourite hobby among journalists. Although Nancy felt she had escaped this kind of thing in France, it is a dismal fact of life that no one ever quite does.
Such nasty, schoolboyish behaviour only served to underline the superiority of France. ‘Oh my passion for the French’, she wrote to her mother, ‘I see all through rose-coloured spectacles...!’ In this letter, written in September 1945, she tells a little story of finding a ‘char’ for Rue Bonaparte, and is quite delirious about the whole event: ‘The angelic concierge (how helpful the French are) got into the Métro at rush hour for me, went all the way to Montmartre & returned with the prettiest femme de ménage you ever saw, all like magic. Imagine a London porter, all grumbles & groans & certainly no lovely girl at the end of it!’ Of course, not everybody finds the French so wonderfully obliging. But they and Nancy got along together. They shared an elegant bustling spirit, a love of brightly correct formality, a set of standards applied to daily life: food, clothes, social interchanges. And this sense that she had of belonging, of being so welcome a part of society, put her in a marvellous mood. ‘I like the human race, & I long to be liked back, & here I am liked back’, she wrote to Evelyn Waugh. Everything was suffused with light and fun; she was like someone who had had two strong martinis on an empty stomach at the bar of the Hôtel Crillon. But Nancy was drunk only on happiness.
‘She saw everything en rose, she really did,’ says Diana. ‘I think, at the end of the war, everybody wanted to go to Paris! England had become so terribly dreary, so dirty, so everything. But Paris was not all that one would wish either, there wasn’t really enough to eat, although Nancy would always pretend it was wonderful. She wasn’t at all truthful. And there’s a marvellous comparison, when she was staying with Alvilde Chaplin [later Lees-Milne] as she was then, and they both wrote to England on the same day for some reason, and Nancy said “so marvellous here, you can go to one farm and get a chicken, another and get a leg of mutton”, and Alvilde said we walked about ten kilometres and in the end managed to get a few turnips.
‘It was extraordinary. She just didn’t see the snags.’ Because it is, when one thinks about it, quite brave of Nancy to have upped sticks and taken herself off to Paris. She had no idea of where she would stay, or for how long. She certainly had no reason to believe that she would find a flat (‘she was lent it by two awfully nice lesbians’, says Diana), and it is indeed hard to imagine her inside this plain grey and black house at 20 Rue Bonaparte: ‘an ice box, never a ray of sun’. It looks like student digs, where all one wants is a bed, a gas ring and the boy one fancies up the road. It brings home the adolescent nature of this venture. Nancy was not a girl who could start a new life abroad with the knowledge that, if everything went wrong, there was plenty of time to start again. She was a grown woman, launching herself into a barely known world, with nothing but a few francs and hope to sustain her.
Of course there was nothing much to keep her in England; but that, too, might have seemed sad rather than enlivening. At forty most people expect to have a family, or at least things that they do not want to leave. But Nancy cut loose completely, backed by a kind of impulsive certainty, and loved the fact that she could do so. She stayed closely in touch with her family. And she had good connections in Paris – not just Palewski, but Duff and Diana Cooper, who had just taken over the British Embassy – which meant that she was, as always, protected by the mysterious safety nets of privilege. Yet it is remarkable that a person of her age and apparent conformity should have taken this step: should, at the end of the war, have found herself living alone in a dark appartement, as excited as the girl who had longed to dance down the Champs-Élysées in 1926. This was the adventure of her life.
So she did not mind that until she found a flat of her own, at the end of 1947, she had to move back and forth between England and France, in and out of hotels and apartments. She stayed at the Hôtel Pont Royal, the Hôtel de Bourgogne, the Hôtel Madison, and a flat on the Quai Malaquais; as well as the Rue Bonaparte. These all fell within the protection zone of the posh; they were in the 6ème or 7ème, the latter being, as John Julius Norwich says, ‘the grandest for the old French aristocracy. All the gratin, as they were called, would have always lived in the 7ème. À la rigueur you might just ooze over into the 6ème. There was the other sort of grand who lived in the 16ème, because the houses were larger, but it’s not where anyone with any pretensions to artistic sensibility would have dreamt of living.’ The artistic connection was apparent almost everywhere that Nancy lived. Her first hotel was in the Rue Jacob, where Jean Cocteau held soirées after the liberation; the Pont Royal was a ‘hôtel littéraire’, today hung about with photographs of Dylan Thomas and Françoise Sagan; the Hôtel Madison was on the Boulevard St Germain, opposite the cafés where Sartre and de Beauvoir conducted their highly public love affair, the Quai Malaquais flat had been the
home of George Sand. And the flat in the Rue Bonaparte was owned by Betty Chetwynd (one of Diana’s ‘lesbians’), who wrote on modern French literature in the TLS; in an obituary written by Nancy, Miss Chetwynd’s flat was described as ‘an Anglo-French centre which will be sadly missed’. So it was all of a piece, atmospherically. Nancy had probably received her education in where to go from Palewski and co.; as a girl she had stayed in the 16ème, a safe if more glamorous Mayfair, but mixing with the Free Frogs she would have picked up that she should gravitate across the river. (Accordingly she gives Fabrice an appartement in – surprise surprise – Rue Bonaparte, and Charles-Edouard de Valhubert an enormous hôtel particulier in the Faubourg St Germain). But for all the smartness of her milieu, the impression remains of a very young person, trawling around from hotel to flat to hotel, excited as a backpacker by the whole affair: considerations such as how do I move my possessions? how do I get my mail? were the bourgeois worries of a middle-aged person. Yet Nancy was a middle-aged person, living the peripatetic life of a gap-year student, with dinners at the Hôtel de Charost thrown in.
But for her – and this is one of her most defining, reassuring traits – middle age was the prime of life. ‘You are lucky to be middle-aged,’ her nephew Jonathan Guinness told her in 1947. ‘I agree.’ Nancy disdained any notion of being over the hill. She was aware of physical ageing, of course, and wore ‘frownies’ (a Heath Robinson version of Botox, put on the forehead at night to smooth out wrinkles), but the little vanity she had would have neither lessened nor increased as she grew older. She was too confident for that. She had no truck whatever with the idea that a young girl was any more desirable than an elegant grown woman. (‘I don’t happen to be attracted by children,’ says Charles-Edouard de Valhubert, whose eternal tendresse is for the clever, fortyish seductress Albertine, ‘one whom people never get out of their systems.’)
Life in a Cold Climate Page 28