She moved into the upmarket Hôtel de Bourgogne (Waugh: ‘a nest of Gaullists’) opposite the Assemblée Nationale, and immediately threw a smart lunch party – ‘lovely snails, chicken & port salut (don’t cry)’5 – for Palewski and five others. It cost £9 which then was nothing to her. She had made £1,400 from The Pursuit of Love by February, £3,500 for the book’s film rights (the film was never made), £1,200 for serial rights, an upfront sum of £100 in April for the French edition and royalties from 20,000 copies sold in America; but this was just the start, the sales figures continued to blaze merrily and then there was, of course, the spin-off effect that ensured best-seller status to almost everything thereafter. ‘By the author of The Pursuit of Love’ would become a guarantee of success. In 1963, when The Water Beetle was about to be published by Penguin, a spiky little internal memo said that the book had no ‘obvious intrinsic value’, but publication could be justified because of ‘the loyalty of the Mitford fans’; they never let Nancy down. ‘But will the general public be amused by this?’ Palewski would say to her, slightly cattily, jealous perhaps of her bright talent, after she had read him some new piece of her work. ‘The funny thing is,’ she wrote with good-humoured humility to Mrs Hammersley, ‘they always are.’
Not that she ever stopped worrying about money. It is an odd human tic that rich people tend to panic more about losing everything than do the poor – especially when these rich people have been poor – and in May she was already writing to Diana: ‘Darling I shall have to come back – I’m simply eating up money here’ (although this was probably more to do with worries about currency restrictions). She didn’t go back, but in late 1946 she wrote to Evelyn Waugh that ‘the thousands on which I foresee I shall have, in the end, to pay 19/6 in the pound (because this thing about being abroad is most tricky unless you lived there before the war) are flying out of the window in a truly hateful way. And oh oh I missed the big prize in the lottery (8,000,000 fr:6) by one figure last week, you must say almost unbearable.’ Waugh was not remotely sympathetic. Instead he made this droll reference to the payment for Nancy’s film rights: ‘If you were not a socialist I should advise you to have it paid in two instalments on Apr. 6th 1947 and 1948 so that it does not all go to the State, but of course, that is what you like.’
Although Nancy indulged in terrors about providing for her old age (‘I shall want a little fire & perhaps a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles & a molar or 2 do admit’), she lived well in Paris. When Palewski arrived at her Hôtel de Bourgogne lunch party and saw a bottle of champagne waiting to be opened, he said: ‘Vive la littérature!’ The couture houses of Madame Grès, Piguet and, later, Christian Dior might have said the same thing. Not least of the pleasures of living in Paris was the proximity to good clothes. Nancy was never insanely extravagant – her personality was too disciplined – but her financial fears went for nothing in the face of the latest collections. She was not a vain woman, but clothes she could not resist, and they hung to perfection on her fleshless but feminine figure (very post-war, very Barbara Goalen: Vogues of the late forties are full of women who look just like Nancy in their tiny-waisted, full-skirted suits, their audacious little hats, their long, wrinkled gloves). The secret of happiness lay for her, in no small part, in treating the trivial as something vitally important. She loved the whole ritual of fittings, the snipping and pinning and frowning, the exigent standards. ‘They left the luncheon together, they must have been in bed all afternoon’, says a character in The Blessing, to which the reply is: ‘I don’t think so. She had a fitting at Dior.’ Nancy loved this kind of chat, which held for her the essence of Paris; as did a piece of gossip that she heard about the vendeuse from Balmain, who turned up at a flat with dresses for her client to try, only to realise, after a few tweaks, ‘that the pretty little bosoms (were) not quite real’, and that it was the client’s husband who was gratifying a passion for haute couture (‘The end of it is he has ordered several dresses including a shell pink ball-dress... Do admit –!’7).
From the moment that Paris enters her novels – two-thirds of the way through The Pursuit of Love – the books become full of hommages to the uplifting power of clothes. Linda is given a wad of francs by Fabrice with which to kit herself out properly (not something Palewski would ever have done for Nancy); before entering a maison de couture she slopes off to the Galeries Lafayette and – a memorable, feminine touch – buys a dress off the peg, so ‘appallingly dowdy’ do her own things seem to her. Indeed Nancy makes great play with the contrast between English and French clothes; this was an even more fertile furrow to plough than the contrast in male lovemaking technique. Fanny is irretrievably unsmart, with her ‘nutria coat’ and her unspeakable ‘green velvet and silver’ evening dress, worn to the grand dinner at Hampton which opens Love in a Cold Climate. Later she wears a Schiaparelli jacket, sent by her mother, around the house ‘instead of a cardigan’, and is utterly horrified to discover it would have cost £25 (‘There’s only a yard of stuff in it, worth a pound, if that’). Nancy enjoys this sensible attitude, but it is far from being her own. She was much more like the mondaines Frenchwomen in The Blessing, clever Albertine and silly Juliette, who, despite the difference in the capacity of their brains, are united by their love of clothes. ‘For days I had been seeing myself at that ball wearing my new dress, and when I found it couldn’t be ready in time... I didn’t want to spoil the mental picture by going in another dress. Don’t you understand?’ says Albertine to Juliette, who replies: ‘I can’t think of any occasion – a tea party, even – without seeing an exact picture of how I shall look at it, down to shoes and stockings.’ This has the detailed air of sincerity; one assumes that Nancy felt the same way, at least by the time she had become assimilated into Parisian life.
She may have encouraged this trait in herself, because she exaggerated any part of her nature that she thought of as typically French. But it became her own. In a 1951 essay (‘Chic – English, French and American’), she joyfully reiterated the hopelessness of the English with regard to clothes. ‘Ladylike is the most that can be said’, she writes, telling a story (apocryphal?) of how ‘two English duchesses were turned away from Christian Dior. They were considered too dowdy to be admitted. In England, if you are a duchess you don’t need to be well dressed – it would be thought eccentric. I cannot imagine why they ever had the idea of going to Dior, where they would certainly not have ordered anything.’ (Interesting how Nancy manages to eulogise the French while giving her highest undercover praise to the grandeur of the English aristocracy; she was equally fascinated by elegance, and by the confidence that could afford to disdain it.)
But Nancy, who despite her own undeniable chic always looked completely English (‘there’s a skeleton in the Musée de l’Homme in Paris called “Englishwoman”. I always look at it and think, that’s me’), ordered from couture houses with the businesslike fervour of a true Parisienne. In the summer of 1946 she acquired a thrilling new wardrobe from Grès, where she was told she had a figure ‘in one hundred’ (no wonder she loved the French; whoever says such a thing in an English shop?). The centrepiece garment was a wonderful balldress, black velvet with a black transparent chiffon waistband. ‘My dress a sensation that’s all’, Nancy wrote to her sister Diana, after an evening that included dinner, a surprise meeting with Palewski, an hour at the British Embassy and ‘a “gala” at a picture gallery’. All very nice; and especially enjoyable when one is wearing ‘much much the prettiest’ dress of any woman present. ‘Daphne [Weymouth] who is here says at Diana [Cooper]’s levee this morning D. said “now we will talk about Nancy’s waist”. Daphne says did my waist burn?’ Nancy would soon triumph again in the New Look of Christian Dior, that gorgeous snub to the utility suits of the war years. ‘You pad your hips & squeeze your waist & skirts are to the ankle it is bliss. So then you feel romantic like Mme Greffulhe & people shout ordures at you from vans because for some reason it creates class feeling in a way no sables could.’ It was no doubt an image of Nancy thu
s dressed that Evelyn Waugh had in mind when he wrote, in 1951, a portrait of her for the ‘Book of the Month Club News’ (to coincide with the publication of The Blessing): ‘She greets you in a Dior dress, her waist so small that one fears it might snap at any moment. This is the only waspish thing about her; all else is sweetness, happiness and inexpressible levity.’
Waugh also described Nancy’s mise en scène, which her appearance fitted as neatly as one of her twenty-two-inch ceintures.
You cross the Seine and penetrate the very heart of the fashionable quarter of Paris, the Faubourg St Germain. You go into a quiet side street, so exclusively aristocratic that few taxi-drivers know its name, and ring at a great, white, shabby door which in due time opens, revealing a courtyard surrounded on three sides by low buildings of the period of the restored Bourbon monarchy. Straight in front, on the ground floor, with its glass doors opening into a garden behind, lie the apartments of Miss Mitford.
These were not behind the black and grey façade of the Rue Bonaparte, or the tatty oversized grandeur of the Quai Malaquais; after more than two years of travelling back and forth around the Left Bank, Nancy had found a flat of her own to rent, at 7 Rue Monsieur in the 7ème. She moved there in December 1947. Although she would not sign her own lease on the flat for more than five years, she was – as perhaps she realised – home at last.
As Evelyn Waugh wrote, Rue Monsieur is indeed quiet. It slots unobtrusively into the dignified, subdued part of the Left Bank where people are too assured to need to proclaim themselves. The street is withdrawn, self-possessed. It was completed in 1778, named for the homosexual brother of Louis XIV (always known as ‘Monsieur’) of whom Nancy would later write, and it contained several hôtels particuliers, including one for Princesse Louise-Adelaide de Bourbon Condé, who lived there for the eleven years before everything changed for ever. Nancy would have loved these details, and dreamed them back into life with all the force of her imagination. She would also have loved what she called ‘Mr Street’ for its irreproachable facelessness: living there, she was doing what she knew to be the correct thing, and she was also, more obscurely, finding a kind of anonymity, a retreat in which to lead her silent writer’s life: the street’s remote quality is somehow her own.
The flat itself, as Waugh described, faces outwards on to a courtyard with the slightly shabby aspect, that look of dusty geraniums and ancient poubelles, peeling cream walls and shuffling concierges, which gives even the smartest Parisian addresses an oddly homespun air: as if one might be in any small town in France. Number 7 Rue Monsieur is probably little changed from the days when Nancy lived there.
Her flat must have been full of light with its tall windows and big rooms: hall, drawing-room, dining-room in which guests would sleep, bedroom, bathroom, maid’s room above. She did not move her own furniture in properly until 1951, from which time photographs show her large, square, grey drawing-room to have been impeccable – the Sheraton desk, the Chinese screens, a Dresden china clock – and brought to life by the billowing diaphanous curtains and the slightly wild space beyond. There was also the wood stove that turned the room into what Waugh called ‘your furnace-salon’: Nancy always needed heat in her homes.8 ‘By no means austere, it revealed someone with consummate taste and a dislike of clutter’, Lady Cynthia Gladwyn said of Rue Monsieur, in the little memoir written after Nancy’s death. She compared the way in which Nancy ‘pared down her writing... so as to get that light touch’ with the clean, clear way she furnished her flat, ‘retaining only objects of intrinsic merit’. A painting by another friend, Mogens Tvede9, shows her seated at her desk in front of what she would have called her chimneypiece10; she is dressed in the New Look, wrists elegantly crossed, leaning slightly forward, ‘frail but tense, alert like a bird folding her wings carefully about her’.11 It is a wonderful little work. ‘It looked exactly like her,’ says Diana Mosley. ‘Very clever, the way she sat, very characteristic.’ The apartment gives an impression of harmony, maturity, confidence; its inhabitant gives, very slightly, the impression of assuming these qualities. It is a nuance only, perhaps deriving from the fact that Nancy never looks wholly relaxed in representations. Perhaps she never was relaxed: that ticking, fizzing brain, that writer’s outlook.
Harold Acton, however, conjures a memory of someone absolutely at ease in her surroundings: ‘Her individual taste was most evident in the arrangement of this luminous residence. One cannot imagine it without her, so intensely did it reflect her personality. I remember it as a serene emanation of the entente cordiale, French in its sophisticated simplicity yet English in a certain cosiness and feeling for privacy.’ (How lucky that this most polite of men did not read the Audience Research Report after Nancy’s television interview in 1957, filmed at Rue Monsieur, which viewers criticised as ‘so poky, and the décor and furniture so drab, that the establishment was hardly worth looking at (one or two compared it unfavourably with the stately homes of England)’).
Nancy loved Rue Monsieur dearly. It is, her nephew Jonathan Guinness wrote, ‘the place where we remember her best’. To her mother she wrote: ‘I’ve never liked any house I’ve lived in as much as this one.’ Its calm setting – enlivened by the Mitfordian presence of a white hen, ‘such a comic we couldn’t bring ourselves to kill her’ – enabled her to be the person she wanted to be. She even had the blessing of a ‘saintly’ maid, Marie Renard, who ‘literally never thinks of herself at all’ and whose loyalty was as complete as her good sense (when Nancy asked Marie if she wanted to watch the television programme filmed in their home, she replied, ‘But as I see Madame every day –?’).
For almost ten years after moving into her beautiful flat, Nancy was as happy as she could possibly be. One imagines a merry whirl of full skirts, pealing telephones, embossed invitations flopping through the door, jokes and shrieks and smiles. And it is lovely to think of; inspirational, in its way, as an example of how life can whip itself into a confection of happiness, if one only has the will to let it.
So to Evelyn Waugh she described her first full year in Rue Monsieur as ‘Heavenly 1948’. Was it? ‘What an odd idea of heaven’, he replied. ‘Of course in my country we cannot enjoy the elegant clothes & meals & masquerades which fill your days.’ True, Nancy’s social life was intensely glamorous. There was a stream of soirées to fill the gap – a large one – created when the Coopers left the British Embassy, around the time of her arrival at Rue Monsieur. This meant no more of Diana’s eccentric parties, which teetered at the edge of unacceptability (terrible riff-raff at the Hôtel de Charost these days, the French Ambassadress in London reported) but which were never, ever boring. Nancy was a frequent guest, singing for her supper with all the sparkle of which she was capable, enlivened by the equally omnipresent Gaston Palewski. Diana used him as her ‘pilot fish’, a guide to whom she might invite to her dinners (collaborators were rife, and questions like whether one should attend concerts by Maurice Chevalier12 burned continually; Palewski’s judgment was sound, although the odd undesirable did slip through).
The world created by Diana was extremely eclectic for an embassy. Jean Cocteau (‘world renowned for I don’t know what’, as Diana put it) made it through, and attended a successful dinner with Noël Coward and Clement Attlee; so too did the poet Paul Eluard, the comedienne Beatrice Lillie, Laurence Olivier (a failure at acting games) and Ernest Bevin, who had a crush on Diana that some said had kept Duff Cooper his job (‘go the ’ole ’og Luff’, Bevin counselled Mme. l’Ambassadrice, when she asked his opinion of what she should wear at dinner). Bevin was fun, so Diana liked him. Ernest Hemingway, on the other hand, she thought ‘the greatest bore to end bores we’ve ever struck’, while the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were dismissed as ‘two little poor old things... common of course’ (This slightly unwanted pair also aroused Nancy’s scorn: ‘he a balloon, she like the skeleton of some tiny bird, hopping in her hobble skirt... both look ravaged with misery’13).
So the three years of the Coopers’ tenure
was magnificently congenial to Nancy. It was also a source of gossip, not least about the love triangle being played out between the Coopers themselves and poetess Louise de Vilmorin, who was sleeping with Duff and an object of fascination to Diana. Louise was one of those people who mythologise themselves within their own social circle; not uncommon. Nor is it rare for other people to go along with the myth. ‘All the ladies fell at her feet to be hobbled over’, wrote Waugh, having observed this ‘egocentric maniac’ at a London party. Despite enjoying her company Nancy also saw through her: she cast her in the role of Albertine, the witch-like mistress in The Blessing, who has Louise’s sensual power mixed with Nancy’s sense of humour.
Unlike Diana Cooper, she was not taken in; Nancy was more intelligent than Diana. She was fond of her, she admired her verve and her statuesque beauty, but she thought her slightly silly, particularly in her antipathy towards the French. Nancy was also exasperated by Diana’s sudden withdrawals into sadness (‘Le désespoir de Diana’), this being exactly the kind of thing that she herself tried to resist. ‘I have long regarded your euphoria as a pathological condition as morbid as Honks’s14 melancholy’, wrote Evelyn Waugh in 1952. ‘You each choose minor exterior conditions to explain your states – oddly enough the same one – France.’
But Nancy did not want Diana to leave the Embassy. The Coopers’ departure (to a beautiful house at Chantilly) was generally viewed as a social catastrophe, and their farewell at the Gare du Nord was thus described by Philip Ziegler in his Diana Cooper: ‘Diana was in tears, Duff was in tears, Gaston Palewski was in tears; it was a richly lachrymose occasion.’ Their replacements, the far more correct Harveys, were described by Nancy as ‘utter ghastly drear’; she wrote to Diana Mosley that they ‘cut me on the double grounds of being mixed up with Gaullists & an habituée of Diana’s embassy’. With time, however, her opinion changed into affection: ‘I’ve greatly taken to the Harveys,’ she wrote in 1950; ‘he understands the French backwards, sees the whole thing crystal clear & loves what he sees. Just like me!’ And they provided her with the plot for her last novel, Don’t Tell Alfred. Fanny’s husband is appointed British Ambassador to Paris, and Fanny’s early days as Ambassadress are haunted by the beautiful Lady Leone, ‘her brilliant predecessor’, who sets up an alternative court in the Embassy entresol. Diana did not do this to Lady Maud Harvey, but it was unusual for the Coopers to continue to live nearby. Her dazzling presence did hover Rebecca-like for some months after her last leave.
Life in a Cold Climate Page 31