‘V. I’m sorry if I gave offence.
‘N. You didn’t give offence but you did give me an excuse. Goodbye.’
Violet did in fact pay a last visit to Nancy – ‘I can’t really keep things up, I mean hates’ – then told everybody how ugly she thought the house and everything in it. ‘However that’s that and I shan’t have to see her again.’
Nancy was robust, as people have to be when their lives are dependent upon friends and acquaintances: if one took offence at every remark, one would simply never go out. Nancy was not a sulker. She was delighted to heal the breach with Cyril Connolly, despite his mean-minded criticisms of her book: ‘Oh how I love clever people’, she wrote to Waugh, giving tidings of this reconciliation. ‘Great is my relief – I really minded about Cyril.’
Yet what Nancy really liked was her absorption into French life, which put her at a subtle remove from Trefusis-type behaviour. Living abroad meant liberation to be her best possible self: displacement made her personality more rooted. She could swim in the life that she knew from England, but at the shallow end, without being dragged into its depths. Meanwhile she could lose herself in something else entirely.
She spent holidays, for example, with her ‘one really Faubourg friend’, the Countess Costa de Beauregard, a half-sister to Violet Hammersley who owned a wonderful eighteenth-century house ‘plumb in the battlefield of the Marne’. Although the Valhubert country house in The Blessing is in Provence, Nancy was surely describing Fontaines-les-Nonnes, the home of Madame Costa, when she has Grace walk for the first time into ‘a huge room, dark and panelled, with a painted ceiling. Furniture was dotted about in it; like shrubs in a desert the pieces seemed to grow where they stood... and dotted about among them were human figures. There was an old man painting at an easel, an old lady at a piano playing the Chopin waltz, while another old lady, in the embrasure of a window, was deep in conversation with an ancient priest.’ It is a timeless configuration, sunlit and shadowy and infinitely spacious, and one can feel how it would have soothed nerves laid bare by the mad jibes of Violet Trefusis or the jittery affair with Palewski.
Nancy loved to be with old people, especially old ladies (replacement-mothers, as she later suggested); it made her feel secure and comforted to be called ‘Child’, as she was at Fontaines, where ‘nothing has changed for 100 years’16, where everybody was aged about eighty and where M. le Curé ‘has been M. le Curé there since he was 27’. The atmosphere was relaxed, oddly sensual despite Madame Costa’s extreme piety (when Nancy was writing her biography of ‘the devil’ Voltaire17 she did not dare tell her hostess: ‘I smuggle the volumes up to my bedroom like a schoolgirl with The Green Hat18’, she wrote to Harold Acton). The long days were all alike, with variation only in the company at dinner. In England it would probably have bored her to spend the whole of September in the world of ‘a Russian play – endless chat, endless leisure, a little plotting, secrets in the charmille’, as she described Fontaines in The Sunday Times. But this was France, where even boredom and sameness had the power to enliven. Unlike in Chekhov, ‘ennui does not exist’.
Of course this was Nancy seeing France en rose, as Diana Mosley says. She also stayed at Dolly Radziwill’s house at Montredon, near Marseilles: ‘Chez la Princesse Radziwill’, she headed a 1949 letter to Evelyn Waugh, with the absurdly touching snobbery of a schoolgirl. ‘I am here on holiday (holiday from what? as my Nanny used to say) in perfect happiness – boiling heat charming friends & exactly nothing to do except decide at what hour to go down to the rocks & swim.’ Yet Diana’s memory of Montredon is rather different. ‘A few years later I went down there and visited her, and she and the friends lived there in a terrible little cottage, full of mosquitoes, and the field of flowers she had told me about was just sort of dead grass, and when you got down to the bottom of the field you had to cross a terrible main road, with enormous lorries pounding along. When you got over that there was the sea, but there were huge rocks, where people had been to the lavatory on the rocks, and paper floating about, and one didn’t feel awfully inclined to go into the sea.
‘And it was just unbelievable, how she’d transformed it into a kind of paradise. But I think to her, when she wrote all that about it, it became true.’
Small wonder, then, if some English people were worn down by Nancy’s rampant Francophilia. The House of Mitford says that Evelyn Waugh ‘was not the only person to find Nancy a little irritating on the perfections of France. Sydney and Debo used to tease her on the subject’; this rings true. Francophiles have to be careful. The relationship between England and France renders what they say welcome up to a point, because the English like to see themselves as civilised enough to appreciate French living; beyond that point they are on dangerous ground, because they are saying what many English people believe to be the truth and can’t bear to acknowledge: that France might be a better place to live. Then the English superiority-inferiority complex comes rushing forth. Then Nancy receives letters like the one about The Little Hut, which told her to go back to her Parisian brothels.
There is something schoolgirlish about Nancy’s obsession with France. She can become slightly – if sweetly – silly on the subject; she acknowledged as much in her portrayal of Grace de Valhubert, described in Don’t Tell Alfred as ‘Idiot, rolling her r’s and dressing up French’. Yet to her friends it may not have been Nancy’s love of France that annoyed so much as the blitheness with which it was expressed. Happiness in itself can drive other people mad. ‘You have made great friends with a Pole who has introduced you to a number of other Poles,’ wrote Waugh in 1952.
You have found some Jews for yourself, such as... the lady19 who gave me caviare & pretended to like painting, filling her drawing room with fine works of art and all the time secretly sipping Picasso in her bed-room. You are the kindest possible hospitaller to your distressed fellow countryman. And you spend long hours with the Harveys talking socialism. This is not the France of Louis XIV or Joan of Arc or Bossuet or the Curé d’Ars. All the great Frenchmen & women would repudiate it. Still less is it the real modern France that fills the world with its self pity.
Of course the French have numerous skills and once had the very purest taste. I am told their music-hall songs are very witty.
Anyway your ‘France’ is pure fantasy...
Which made no difference to Nancy, who would have screamed with laughter over this letter, have seen the truth in it and found it wholly irrelevant. Her France, as Waugh surely understood, was a writer’s construct. It was something she dreamed into life with her yearning sophisticate’s soul. It was not fairyland, it demanded daily compromise, but it was the place where Nancy could live according to her philosophy. She did not believe that the pursuit of happiness was immoral; if anything, she saw it as the means to morality. ‘ONE... thinks everybody should have everything & all forms of bliss – the difference between HERE & THERE, really.’ Nancy knew, few better, the stoicism required by her epicurean faith; to which she adhered as surely as her friend did to the Catholic Church.
In 1954 she published the finest expression of her love for France, a life of Madame de Pompadour. The idea came from Pamela Berry, who clearly understood the Mitford idiom – ‘When will you realise you must write a book about Pompadour?... I so ache for it’ – and it was brilliant. ‘Hamish Ham wants me to do it as a novel & that I won’t (can’t really)’, wrote Nancy to Evelyn Waugh in February 1953, using the solidity of his advice as a sounding board. ‘On no account a novel,’ he replied. ‘Write for the sort of reader who knows Louis XV furniture when she sees it but thinks Louis XV was son of Louis XIV and had his head cut off.’
Waugh had learned to advise according to Nancy’s instincts; what he said is what she did; and it worked wonderfully. From the first paragraph, assured and clear to the point of funniness – ‘the Duc de Bouillon, wearing a black feather, went out on to the balcony and announced to a waiting crowd, curious but not sad, “Le Roi est mort”. He retired into the pa
lace, put on a white feather, came back and announced “Vive le Roi”’ – Nancy’s readers had the comfortable sense that she knew what she was doing. It has been said, and not just by A.J.P. Taylor, that what she was really doing was taking the world of her two best novels and erecting it in the palace of Versailles, casting Fabrice as Louis XV and assorted Radlett girls as Pomp. The similarity between Nancy’s novels and her historical biographies (of which she eventually wrote four) is considerable; yet this comes back to the voice, the approach, the divine simplicity with which she ordered her thoughts and opinions. Madame de Pompadour does indeed read as easily and astutely as Love in a Cold Climate. But this is not because she recast her favourite characters as eighteenth-century French nobility; it is because she continued to use her technique of ‘racontez, racontez’, understanding very well that history is still a story to be told.
What she also did – and this was where she revitalised the genre of historical biography, as no writer had since Lytton Strachey20 – was use her great gift of bringing characters to recognisable life. ‘When she gossiped to her friends about Pompadour or Voltaire or Richelieu,’ says her nephew Alexander Mosley, ‘she wasn’t talking about Versailles two hundred years ago. When she gossiped about these things they came alive.’ And they were alive to her: her ability to perceive motivation, the jealousies or lusts or idiocies that could influence events to an alarmingly disproportionate extent, was just as strong when she considered ‘historical personages’ as when writing about Linda Radlett, or her own friends. Nancy loved and revered learning, but she had no false awe for the concept of ‘history’. She simply saw things as they were, whether in the 1950s or the 1750s. It was inconceivable that there should be a difference. She would make this clear in a 1966 ABC television interview about her Louis XIV biography, The Sun King. Her questioner suggests that life at Versailles would have constituted a particularly ‘complicated network’ of love affairs and intrigues; at which Nancy shrieks (no other word for it) with laughter and says, ‘I’m afraid that’s life, nothing to do with Versailles, come now – it’s only that they had different sorts of names!’
So what brings Pomp and its characters to absolute life is the fact that Nancy absolutely saw the life in them all. She also saw herself – ‘They were all exactly like ONE, that’s the truth!’ – but this was wishful thinking as much as anything: she wanted to resemble Madame de Pompadour. One can quarrel with some of her interpretations. Raymond Mortimer, who said that the book read ‘as if an enchantingly clever woman was pouring out the story to me on the telephone’, nonetheless suggested ‘that she might not say Louis XV was perfect heaven 3 times on one page’. Nancy does, indeed, exonerate Louis of the charge laid upon him in Cyril Connolly’s faintly patronising review, that ‘a more lethargic, ungrateful or frivolous monarch has seldom reigned, nor one who took over so prosperous and devoted a nation when he came of age to leave it so impoverished and discontented.’ She also acquits Madame de Pompadour on various counts, among them that ‘she made permanent use of the secret police’ and had what Connolly calls ‘an element of cold rancour’. (Connolly is wrong to say that Nancy ‘does not mention the rumour that [the Duc de] Choiseul was her lover’; she did, if only to dismiss it.)
What Nancy mainly does, however, is what she always does: by tracing events as they happen, in context, from an intensely personal point of view, she infuses them with an understanding so clear that it bursts forth into benevolence. For example what Connolly calls Pompadour’s ‘political ambition’ becomes, under Nancy’s close and convincing inspection, not sinister but rather absurd. She writes of her going off to negotiate the 1756 Treaty of Versailles in ‘a bustle of self-importance... But how many women in her place would have had the strength of mind to refuse?’ Of course a ‘serious’ historian might find this sort of interpretation irrelevant, and Harold Nicolson wrote that it was ‘not history’, whatever that means; but the fact is that just because an event – such as the Seven Years War – acquired massive significance, this does not mean that those involved were not also, at the time, subject to less elevated concerns. A perfect example of her understanding is this, on a consequence of the Seven Years War: ‘In the nineteenth century the French could not forgive Louis XV for the loss of their colonies, but while it was happening they hardly noticed it.’
And for all her lightness of touch – far harder to achieve than seriousness, just as a soufflé requires more work than a bread pudding – Nancy was an assiduous researcher, fascinated by what she was doing. This was appreciated by one historian at least, Dr Alfred Cobban of London University, who wrote to her: ‘he’ll bet my reviewers have never read an original 18th century document, or any secondary stuff since Carlyle. Wouldn’t they be furious at this news!’ The work that she put into Pompadour was difficult, and not made easier by her method (‘what my old nanny used to call “rockabye”’21): ‘My system is pathetic, I don’t know how to take notes, no French book has an index’, she wrote to her friend Billa Harrod in May 1953. ‘I have no memory, so I have to read all of every source before writing each sentence. However the result seems rather good, to me(!)’
It was an extraordinarily fresh and clever approach to non-fiction: what Evelyn Waugh said of Nancy’s journalism, that it would make her ‘what is known as a “pioneer”’, was really far truer of her historical biographies. Pompadour especially has a sense of glorious liberation about it. It seems to have been written empirically, with Nancy thinking at the start that she had no notion of how to do it, and discovering at the end that she had known all along. The deployment of telling little phrases – as when she says that Louis XV felt at ease with the Duc de Choiseul because he ‘did not go droning on about things’; or that ‘Madame de Pompadour was one of those rare women who know exactly when, and how, to make a scene’ – had always been her way of bringing her narratives to life, and this was no different.
She knew that she had taken a risk with its style, but she knew no other successful way in which to write. At first, or so she said, she saw the book as ‘Miss Mitford’s sober and scholarly work’. Raymond Mortimer shattered this idea by telling her ‘I feel that the whole enterprise is questionable’ – how pompous – because the style was ‘so remote from what had ever been used for biography’. Nancy was rattled by this, as who would not be, and in a letter to Evelyn Waugh she wrote that she had ‘nearly died on the way’ to meet Hamish Hamilton for dinner after sending him the manuscript. ‘However, radiant smiles & (verbal) caresses, so the dear girl will see the light of day, Oh the comfort ’tis to me.’ Hamilton knew that his prize author22 had headed in another winner. Despite the thumbing of certain scholarly noses it was received more open-mindedly than might have been expected: it is not accurate to say, as The House of Mitford does, that ‘reviewers were cold’. The Telegraph wrote: ‘This is history – authentic history – without tears’, a near-perfect summation. And Evelyn Waugh – cher maître – understood precisely Nancy’s cleverness and originality. As he made clear in a letter from 1959, written about Voltaire in Love but equally applicable to Pompadour: ‘I enjoyed it hugely at the first reading but I didn’t appreciate it. You write so deceptively frivolously that one races on chuckling from page to page without noticing the solid structure... I can now realise what an achievement of research, selection & arrangement you apparently effortlessly performed. It is a masterly book.’
There are things in Pompadour that seem – to a contemporary reader at least – deliberately written to antagonise. ‘Madame de Pompadour’s excursion into politics will not give much satisfaction to the feminist’, she writes; one feels with some pleasure. ‘Although she was prettier, better educated, and had a more natural motive for her activities, she was no more successful than those ladies who adorn to-day the Chambre des Députés... To her, as to most women, politics were a question of personalities.’ It is a powerful contradiction – or apparent contradiction – in Nancy that she loved to ‘ride my anti feminist hobby horse’, while li
ving according to feminist principles. She was the bread-winner in her marriage; she worked almost until the day she died; she made a truly independent existence. Faute de mieux, one might say, and some do say. Who knows? What one does know is that, despite – or perhaps because of – the fact that she was a successful woman in her own right, she was always at pains to extol old-style femininity. She eulogises Northey, in Don’t Tell Alfred, as ‘the last of the charmers’; and a male character shudders at the ‘new ones’ who ‘make me despair of the female sex’. Alexander Mosley says that Nancy ‘held the view that women can exert a great deal of influence behind the scenes, as mistresses, wives, mothers, hostesses’. It is in this capacity – as someone who knew how to handle the King of France for twenty years – that she most admires Madame de Pompadour. It is almost as though Nancy feared that her own cleverness – frankly superior to that of most people, including men – would lead her to be considered ‘unfeminine’. Her love life would have given her no cause for confidence on this score. So it is not, perhaps, surprising that she should lay such stress upon the traditional feminine ideal, and should glorify Pompadour for her cleverness in submitting to the King’s will while exerting her own, and for being ‘the acme of prettiness’.
Prettiness, indeed, is what one remembers most from Madame de Pompadour. The book gleams in the mind like a room in the Wallace Collection. One is left with an impression of a ball at the Hôtel de Ville in Paris, whose ‘walls were of pink marble and trellis work filled with vine leaves, bunches of grapes and flowers’; of the staircase leading to La Pompadour’s rooms at Versailles, ‘lacquered by Martin in the bright delicate colours she loved’; of the tiny theatre in the palace ‘decorated by Perot and Boucher’; above all of the Marquise herself, an exquisite doll come to life, shell-pink lace at her neck and breast, her cheeks tinged sweetly darker. She suffered ill-health all her life and died with ‘her lungs full of water, or pus’ at the age of forty-three. Yet to look at her portrait one would never have known that her ruffles and rouge concealed anything but happiness, ease, an ordered contentment with life at its most pleasurable and civilised.
Life in a Cold Climate Page 38