Meanwhile the parties went on. Like Grace du Valhubert attending her first big Paris dinner after the war, Nancy was entranced by the scene:
The door opened upon a kaleidoscope of glitter. The women, nearly all beauties, were in huge crinolines, from which rose naked shoulders and almost naked bosoms, sparkling with jewels. They moved on warm waves of scent, their faces were gaily painted with no attempt at simulating nature, their hair looked cleaner and glossier than any hair she had ever seen... That the atmosphere was of untrammelled sex did not surprise her, except in so far as that sex, outside a bedroom, could be so untrammelled.
This may have been viewed, in Diana Mosley’s phrase, en rose. Surely not everyone was so stunning, although they were probably better turned out than their London counterparts (goose-pimpled poitrines and Coty lipsticks). And in the French circles through which Nancy moved there was a surprising amount of confidence and money. The conversation, clothes, food and hospitality were of a standard both to admire and to keep one up to the mark. ‘There has been a wild spate of entertaining, parties costing between 6 & 12 million francs, dinners off gold plates, fountains of champagne, clothes such as you never saw – all great fun’, Nancy wrote to Violet Hammersley in July 1948. ‘How rich the French are. I never can get over it – living in their huge houses with huge gardens in the very centre of the town, with between 20 & 30 servants – now I’m getting to know more French people, not the cosmopolitan ones, I am staggered by the luxe in which they exist.’
If this reads like a eulogy to the richissime, it should be said that compared with other commentators Nancy retained a certain amused distance, however much she enjoyed her sallies into this gilded world. The society figure Chips Channon15, for example, described in his diaries a day spent in Paris with quasi-religious awe:
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 Duchesse de Fesanzac and Nancy Mitford... Then, in the evening, Alexis de Redé – the Eugène de Rastignac of modern Paris – offered me a banquet... Alexis lives in eighteenth century splendour in a huge apartment in the Hôtel Lambert in the Cité.
My dear! This really is as the world of the Duchesse de Guermantes, unchanged in any detail since Proust created it; in a way Nancy saw it as such but she could, at the same time, take a less spellbound view. ‘Yes the Barons Redé and Redesdale have but little in common’, she wrote to her mother in 1950. ‘He lives but for luxury, beauty & social life... Not bad, though I prefer his patron, a fat jolly Chilean called Lopez.’ (One can almost hear Channon’s gasp at such lèse majesté.)
In fact she found the real French aristocracy quite sticky. Later she referred to ‘one of those quince-like old Frenchwomen who seem determined not to see, let alone speak to ONE’.16 And she wrote this to her friend Eddy Sackville-West17: ‘I’ve just been to a luncheon party so pompous, so full of Bourbon Parmes & d’Arenbergs, that the placement took 3 weeks to work out & resulted in nearly all the men sitting together. Isn’t it typical!’ She preferred a less self-conscious world, although she undoubtedly liked to know that the gratin existed. And she would never, as Diana Cooper did when Ambassadress, have ignored the formalities of placement: at one dinner Princess Dolly Radziwill (Nancy’s friend, wife of the artist Mogens Tvede) lit a cigarette during the fish to show that she thought herself ill-placed. Diana thought this madness (‘as the French undo their napkins, they take a look round two tables of twenty in hopes of seeing something wrong’18); Nancy saw it differently. She had learned to do so from the French, but she herself enjoyed these questions of etiquette, and would not have wanted – or dared – to defy them. One can call this snobbishness, which in a way it was; but as much as anything it came from Nancy’s almost mystical delight in the frameworks that kept life in elegant check.
Much of the time, however, she mixed in less rigorous society: in June of ‘heavenly’ 1948, she breezed off to a ‘very brilliant & great fun’ party thrown by Daisy Fellowes19, also attended by the Coopers (not the Harveys), Princess Radziwill and the Aga Khan (‘It was the day of his third Derby so he must have been in a specially good mood’, she wrote to Diana Mosley). ‘The Colonel says the Aga does the most dreadful things to the Begum – I said “Oh & she looks so dignified”. He shrieked...’
What a lovely life it sounds. As Fabrice says in The Pursuit of Love, ‘social life – de la haute société – I mean, it can be a very satisfying one, entirely artificial of course, but absorbing’. Nancy also believed this, had done so even when making the best of it among the ‘oh I say!’ hunting chat of debutante dances. Now she was living out her dreams of being ‘in the world’, and it brought her the kind of sustained joie de vivre that most people have grown too tired for by the age of thirty-five.
Both Nancy and Paris knew the importance of frivolity; both were prepared to work at it. It was not always an easy task. In The Blessing, Grace du Valhubert is described as all at sea in the exhausting world of Paris society but loving, nonetheless, the demands that it made upon her. Nancy was never all at sea – she was far cleverer and funnier than Grace – although she understood that Paris was ‘quite frankly, a terrible effort’. But this she loved; ça valait bien la peine. She loved the standards set by her social life, and the collective faith in these standards that lay beneath the ‘hours of smiling politeness’. Here was her philosophy of life writ large: the will to happiness brought to a peak of emphasis by the bright silks of the Dior dresses, the sparkle of the jewels, the gleam of the Boulle and the colours of the Sèvres, the finest examples of civilised living that man could produce.
It was all so different from England; thinking this became a near mania with Nancy, but she had a point. Grace compares the French with the English, who ‘don’t expect that the last ounce of energy will be expended upon them in the natural order of things, and are, indeed, pleased and flattered at the slightest attempt to entertain them’; again, one knows what she means. Nancy and Grace were making a serious point about France. Even today, it understands that life is easier to bear when it is underpinned by civilised ritual.
And who wouldn’t rather have been at Daisy Fellowes’ soirée than out with Peter Rodd? ‘The night of Daisy’s party Prod & Ed [Stanley] went out & returned at 1 pm the following day’, Nancy wrote to Diana Mosley. ‘Of course I thought they must be in prison – it is always my nightmare that we shall have our identity cards taken away – but it was just that they were on such a bat that they thought it was only breakfast time. Really at their age!!!’ So public schoolboyish; so horribly reminiscent of Blomfield Road. But in 1948 Nancy was, in a sense, back at Blomfield Road. Peter was living at Rue Monsieur and there was little she could do to get rid of him. The pull of England and the past was threatening to drag the bright whirl of her life into a muddy vortex.
In May of heavenly 1948 Nancy wrote to Diana in something like concealed despair: ‘Peter is back for good I gather, it is a tiny bit of a worry because he has nothing to do from morning to night & is already hankering for London. So I say then what about a divorce so that we could each live where we like & he says the treasury would never let me live here... for some reason he is absolutely determined not to have a divorce.’ (The reason, almost certainly, was that Nancy was far more likely to give him money if he was always liable to turn up.) So much for the complaisant husband. He did not exactly object (could hardly do so) to Nancy’s relationship with Gaston Palewski, but it annoyed him all the same, and he must have known that his presence hampered it considerably. ‘I never never see the Colonel which is too depressing’, she wrote to Diana in June. Meanwhile Palewski was using the situation for his own careful ends, fluttering about the scandal of having a married mistress. When Nancy did manage to visit him ‘it is like some dreadful spy film & I end by being shut up in a cupboard or hiding on the escalier de service & being found by the concierge – so undi
gnified I nearly die of it.’ So unsuitable to Nancy, with her proud ideals of love.
Whether Peter was being deliberately vengeful, by plonking himself down upon Nancy’s white muslin bed, it is hard to say. Of course there was no reason why he should make it easy for her to pursue a love affair, although he certainly did not want her himself. But he was at a pitifully loose end once more, and above all desperate for money. The return to peacetime finished Peter off; war had given him a sense of purpose and dignity, he had acquitted himself with honour at Dunkirk, in Ethiopia and Italy; but now he was Prod again, déraciné and dissolute, a man whose wasted life lay bare to the elements like one of the bombed-out houses in Blomfield Road. In his middle forties he presented a terrible contrast to his self-respecting wife, who with her upright carriage, nimble step and chic slenderness still had the aspect of a girl. Peter’s health was poor, he had a duodenal ulcer (not surprisingly), ‘he’s awfully unwell & awfully blind & halt & so on’, and the patina of handsomeness had been wiped clean from his face. ‘He has locomotor ataxia and a waistcoat made of an old rug. How you have brought him down. He was such a bright pretty boy’, wrote Evelyn Waugh, having seen him at White’s. And this happened almost overnight, or so it seemed; it was as if Nancy’s sudden success had felled him, and left nothing but the urge to debauch (brothels with Duff Cooper, dear God) and the desire to cling on to his wife.
Illogically, but perhaps understandably, Nancy had a sense of guilt about him and a strange residual fondness. This had been clear in 1946, when she called him ‘the late Colonel’, and a couple of years later it was implicit. Her letters veer between accepting his presence as rightful (‘there must be many many worse husbands in the world’) and longing for him to go (‘he is off to Timbuctoo. I hope it really exists & is not a mere figure of speech’). He practised a form of blackmail on her: ‘He sits all day editing his poems & waiting for the end & making me cry with the récit of my sins towards him’, she wrote to Waugh in December 1949. Then, a couple of months later, to Diana, when Peter was back in London:
Prod is making my life hell. Our money can be transferred only through his bank, & we get it in Nov: so I had carefully budgeted till then – darling he hasn’t sent me any though I’ve given him £600. What I suppose is that it’s gone down the drain of his overdraft... it is dreadful being in the power of such an enfant terrible & I am in his power financially in spite of the money having been earned by me... What a wail...
It was, but with good reason. She dealt with Peter as kindly as anyone could; one does feel pity for him, the beautiful Balliol boy unable to cope with his own potential, but there is a cunning in the way that he played upon Nancy – her dislike of scandal, her fear of poverty, her sadness about the failure of her marriage, her terror that Palewski would run a mile from the whole situation – that makes him, ultimately, despicable.
So heavenly 1948 was tainted with his hovering, droning, pathetic presence, and Nancy’s love affair had to step tactfully aside to accommodate him. This panicked her, beneath the smiling veneer. She was unsure of Palewski – to say the least – and spending evenings with her husband, straining to hear his mumbled tirades (‘my hankies are wet all day’20) when she yearned to be racontez-ing to her lover, must have been close to unendurable.
There had been a rift with Palewski in 1947 when The Pursuit of Love was published in France, and the dedication picked up on by the French press: ‘Hitler’s mistress’s sister dedicates daring book to M. Palewski’, ran a newspaper headline. This had turned the ever-cautious Colonel’s blood to ice; had he been in love with Nancy he would have laughed it off (he had, after all, wanted the dedication), but in his state of always trying to dance slightly away from her he reacted coldly: ‘he is in a great do about it & really I think I shall have to go away from here for a bit’, Nancy wrote to Diana. ‘He says the General will be furious.’ So what? would be a reasonable reaction; but as part of her desire to love all that was most French in France, and to ingratiate herself with Palewski, Nancy had conceived a girlish admiration for the charmless de Gaulle.21 Accordingly, she went along with Palewski’s fear of his disapproval rather than treating it with contempt. Palewski had wanted it both ways. He liked the kudos of having a ragingly successful book dedicated to him, but disliked the adverse publicity that went with it; and, knowing Nancy as he did, he realised that he could make her feel guilty rather than admitting that he himself had been naïve. (‘Bad women never take the blame for anything’, as a character says in Anita Brookner’s Hôtel du Lac; and, with the Colonel, Nancy was always as good as gold.)
Like an excluded schoolgirl she accepted her exile, and went to stay with the Mosleys in London. From there she wrote placatory letters to Palewski: ‘One thing about having come over here, I’ve got the most lovely birthday present for you so do be excited.’ She also stayed with her mother, then with her old friend Mark Ogilvie-Grant in his house on Kew Green, where she worked on the script of the Ealing comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets. (None of her dialogue survived: ‘So I was invited to Ealing the other day to write a monologue for a film’, wrote Evelyn Waugh in October 1947. ‘It is the film you wrote. They have scrapped everything written up till now & wouldn’t show me your contribution.’)
The dedication crisis had blown over by the time Nancy returned to Paris, but it made Palewski wary (what else might she do?) and she knew this. So the last thing she needed in 1948 was to have a husband come between the two of them: the least welcome gooseberry of all time. And one evening in July the situation reached a painful non-resolution, when Nancy was dining with Peter and his Elwes nephews (whom she did not like). There in the restaurant, seated at another table, was ‘the Col with a girl called Margot de Gramont, a nice fat sad girl who was a Resistance heroine & who has been for ages in love with the Colonel. Well I could hardly bear that...’22
Something about this grim configuration – Nancy stuck with her uneasy little party, trapped by duty in a situation that brought pleasure to no one; Palewski leaning into his adoring dinner companion, just as on another night he might have done to Nancy herself – brought her feelings about the Colonel to a screaming pitch. She knew what he was like. She must have steeled herself continually for this sort of thing. But the frustration she had been forced to endure; the sense that her husband’s stubborn presence had given Palewski carte blanche to do as he liked with another woman (‘you are married after all’); the panic that nothing would ever be made right again; all of this caused Nancy to react with unusual despair. This time, the façade came down. She was like Grace du Valhubert in The Blessing, who is sitting innocently in a nightclub with her ex-fiancé when she sees her husband with another woman. ‘Grace was particularly struck, stricken to the heart indeed, by Charles-Edouard’s look, a happy, tender, and amused expression...’ This is the evening of 1948 brought back to life – painfully? cathartically? – but with one essential difference: Grace was married to her errant man, and Nancy knew that she would never marry hers.
After dinner, she went with her companions to look at the statues lit up at the Louvre and there, within that exquisite scene, were the plump, prosaic figures of the Colonel and Mademoiselle de Gramont. Following that remorseless thought process which passes, in these situations, for logic, Nancy decided that Palewski had just proposed marriage. She further decided that she would go home and take ‘Prod’s so called poison pills’. Then – no doubt after a desperate struggle for dignity – she telephoned Palewski who ‘though woken up, was absolutely angelic’. Naturally: the power of benevolence was entirely his. ‘I kept saying but you looked so happy “no no I’m not happy I’m very unhappy”. So dreadful to prefer the loved one to be unhappy.’
The next morning, after what surely was a night of torment – at what had happened, at the way she had handled it – she telephoned him again. ‘Oh Colonel, I’m so ashamed of myself,’ she said, to which he replied: ‘The rights of passion have been proclaimed by the French Revolution’, a phrase that made its w
ay into The Blessing. It was a kindly – if patronising – thing to say, typical of the man, but it was also distancing: the words of someone who knows that they are profoundly loved, who respects the person in return, who feels a fondness and even a pity for their emotions, but who gently refuses to return them.
‘The fact is I couldn’t live through it if he married’, Nancy wrote to Diana. ‘I know he really longs to be.’ Actually there is no evidence that Gaston ever stopped himself from doing anything that he wanted: self-restraint was not a notable characteristic of his. Nor was it likely, as Nancy told herself, that she had the power to prevent him from marrying. The probability is that in 1948 he liked his life as it was: pursuing his twin careers of homme politique and homme aux femmes. ‘He says I take a novelist’s view of marriage, that if he marries it will only be to have children & will make no difference at all.’ That in itself can’t have been easy to hear; it was a fairly blunt way of telling her that she was not in the running. Yet she seems to have taken comfort from it, as a sign that marriage would not, for him, mean overwhelming love for one person. His feelings for her would still be the same, even if he sidestepped them to rear a crop of spotty little garçons aux fillettes by some fecund Frenchwoman.
Life in a Cold Climate Page 32