by Diana Cooper
Winter and Journey’s End
I COME now to my last chapter. I recoil from it not because it is the end—I am thankful to have done with the labour, though it was of love—but because I know even less than I knew when I wrote the first one, how to tackle it. A little time ago, crippled with despondency, I dreamed of a way out of my slough. “I’ll write no more,” I told John Julius. “You were there, you remember the Embassy in Paris, the Liberation, the war’s end. You shall write this chapter. After twenty years, when these sensitive players have left the stage, your pen can flow with less impediment than mine. You can blow your parents’ trumpets to the skies, and tell the stories of their deaths.” John Julius would have none of it. He called me a coward and a malingerer, so, driven by shame, with tired hand, tired memory and an avalanche of tired repetitive letters all clamouring for life through print, I will begin my end.
Paris—in diplomats’ eyes “the crown”—loomed in mine as the coup de grâce. It was the crown for Duff, whose favourite season was autumn. He saw through the mists and golden rays of autumn rest after work, with books to read and write, nature to love, the harvest home. I, disliking age and holding it at bay, yearned always for the promising, adventurous spring, and this particular October, after my Indian summer in Africa, chilled me with its evening damps and cold heraldings of winter and journey’s end. Falteringly I will lead the reader into the golden house of the Faubourg St Honoré that was to be our Embassy during our short mission to Paris as the King’s representatives.
*
On 13 September 1944 we watched Beachy Head fade away in the morning light, and soaring over France we stared with pent-up interest and curiosity at the earth of this long-occupied country. The traveller’s bird’s-eye that makes molehills of mountains saw nothing extraordinary except for nests of bomb-craters concentrated in fields; the land looked normal, orderly, its villages intact. We seemed to hang motionless in the high air, between the Eiffel Tower and the Sacré Cœur, while our impressive escort of forty-eight Spitfires weaved and dipped like swallows round our arrival. I don’t remember who was with us, and, but for the recognisable lump in my throat, I did not feel it could be me, dressed like other people in sober conventionality, arriving with all this circumstance in Paris.
A little knot of diplomats and staff—Victor Rothschild included, thank heavens—stood in a welcoming group on the airfield. At a snail’s pace we drove the twelve miles to the capital, a dozen policemen on their ear-splitting machines protecting us—from what? The streets were empty of traffic. The people by the roadside, hearing the clatter, mostly stopped and waved, many lifting their hats, while workmen in groups, recognising our loudly conspicuous Union Jacks, sometimes raised a cheer.
As we came to the centre of this unfamiliar, unjostling city, I remember being diverted by gay merry-go-rounds of bicycles pedalled by Parisians, coats flying in the speed, panniers on their back-wheels, as likely as not carrying a poodle, trimmed to kill, on their rack. These undauntable women, if not sporting the highest and most shapeless hats ever devised, hats to out-caricature the incroyables, dressed their hair like their dogs’, and stuck it with roses, bows, feathers or fruit. The Champs-Elysées boasted a few old horse-drawn fiacres which warmed my cold heart. The Allied flags on the lamp-standards and floating from windows warmed it too, but there was little gladness or gaiety in the atmosphere. There were no restaurants or cinemas, no cafés with pavement-tables: lack of electricity, scarcity of food and coffee had dealt with them.
The official gerbe that had met us automatically at Le Bourget was placed without detour or hesitation on the Unknown Soldier’s grave, where, considering the luncheon hour, a fair-sized crowd had collected. Thence we moved on, not to the Embassy but, to my surprised delight, to the little doss-down hotel that had sheltered Duff and me so prettily and cheaply for fifteen years or more. This home-from-home, by chance only, had been requisitioned to house the Ambassador and his staff until the Embassy could be habitable. So we found ourselves in our own suite, whose faults and taps we knew, our Marie Antoinette still priding herself on the chimney-piece. This gave my sagging face and spirits a needed lift, as did the flowers that made it difficult to move or open the door. Baskets of orchids, long-stemmed roses, satin bows on golden wicker from the few old friends, officials, from shops soliciting custom and from collaborationists working a passage home. I remember thinking the first day that Embassy life is a life apart, a fool’s paradise, for here already was all the light, the steaming water, the steaks and butter we were warned not to expect in Paris.
The Embassy itself had been for five years the British Empire’s furniture-dump; it was stuffed to its closed doors with all the paraphernalia, the treasure, the chattels and junk of Commonwealth diplomats’ families and exiled Parisian residents: pianos, hatstands, bureaux, bath-mats, sponges, bottles, good and bad pictures, boxing-gloves and skates, clouds of moth, powder of woodworm. Nothing of the house’s beautiful proportions or decoration could be seen and nothing could be done until the owners, the dividers, scrappers and cleaners took over.
The comfort I found in the little Berkeley Hotel was within a week or so snatched from me. Our friendly staff in the restaurant, the friends who dribbled in and out of England on missions, were making my difficult transition easier to bear. “Vous êtes trop mal logés, celà n’est pas digne,” said the busy-bodies, so we were translated to the Hotel Bristol, G.H.Q. Corps Diplomatique, all for the sake of a private dining-room and private staircase, two bathrooms, four basins, one for each hand and a third, at chest-level, that could, I thought, only be for vomiting. Indeed these weeks were my nadir; the gloom and cold and officialdom throttled me, then suddenly the new brooms swept the Embassy clean of its flea-market, and things looked up. Pauline Borghese, who had owned the house, and had left her silken walls, her sphinxes and laurels, her eagles of Empire, her complete furnishings, and above all her ox-blood bedroom giving on to the salons, inspired me out of my sullen misery. Hers was the most extraordinary bedroom I had ever thought to lie in; it had rarely been used by our succession of unusual ambassadresses. Walls, curtains, sofas and chairs were upholstered in the richest Lyons silk which bore a design of caducei and laurel-leaves. The tables and the tall psyche (or full-length looking-glass) were signed by master-makers. The bed, supported by Egyptian caryatides, rose to a high curtain-hung testa, crowned by a heroic golden eagle, so perched as only to be seen by one in bed through the soaring looking-glass on the opposite wall. Sir George Clark was the one Ambassador I knew of who had made this room his own; though doubtless there were others who had slept in its magnificence since Napoleon’s extravagant sister.
The autumn sun slanted through the ten high windows which looked out on to a garden, not of flowers, but of fine trees, sward and boscage, gilding the yellow silk walls of the first salon, the white-and-gold pièce de cérémonie, and flattering the green, undecorated room, to become familiar to many as the salon vert.
The airy country-house bedrooms above were quickly refurbished to hold a succession of V.I.P.’s and friends, who could find no room in the requisitioned hotels of Paris. On the ground floor, connected by a Victorian glass marquise, were the vast reception-rooms, darkened by the verandah, and without the charm and brilliance of our living apartments; they struck cold fear into my heart and manner. Fortunately they did not come into use until later, when I was hardened to the life.
Our D-Day was November 11, when Winston was to make his first appearance in Paris since the Liberation. We had prepared to house the party, but at the last moment the Churchills and the Edens were invited to the Quai d’Orsay. It was warmer than the Embassy, which was cruelly cold, though it gave a lambent glow. I went to inspect the suites. They had been blazed up in 1938 to receive our King and Queen. I liked the two bathrooms, one of silver and one of gold—mosaic, crystal and fiddle-de-dees rampant, and the dressing-room Goering had left, with its cupboards for a hundred uniforms, walls raying out infra-red and ultra-violet
beams, everything in it from bath to boot-jack too solid, too massive for any bulk to break.
For the great victory review I sat with Mesdames Churchill, Eden, de Gaulle, Catroux and Massigli in the Ladies’ Tribune. We trembled with anxiety as we watched our two heroes drive to the Arc de Triomphe in an open car—the one so cherubically pink and benign, the other so sinister and elongated. After the inevitable wreath was laid, we held our breath as together, and in great danger, they walked half a mile down the Champs-Elysées, to join us in the Tribune. Paris went mad. The bands played, the Garde Républicaine champed and clattered and the pompiers who had played a big part in the Liberation played it still.
On the last evening of the visit, our Embassy opened its doors for its first dinner-party. The Sergeant-Major and Sweeney, still in khaki, were in their appointed places, and André Bonnot, the elegant huissier, who had announced the guests for twenty-five years, called out le Général et Madame de Gaulle, Mr and Mrs Churchill, Monsieur et Madame Bogomolov, Mr Caffery (from Washington), the Canadian General and Madame Vanier and Monsieur et Madame Georges Bidault (Foreign Secretary). The house looked as I hoped it would and better, for Madame Annie Beaumel, the genius of Hermès, with whom I had become most friendly, took over the flowers and festal ornamentation, surpassing herself in taste. (She helped me in all my efforts of this kind, once for Field-Marshal Lord Montgomery wreathing the pillars and pilasters with laurel, and giving the house panache with faded silken flags that had survived battles. Another time she brought me models of frigates from the naval museum to dress the table overall for Admiral Cunningham.)
In Paris Winston’s was a name to waken the dead. Where-ever he walked—and he liked to walk if time allowed—his way was dense with cheering enthusiasts. It made him happy to give them his V sign and to bask in their love and gratitude. After two days we waved him off with le grand Charles for the front at Besançon.
*
We knew no one in Paris, and that was one of the rubs; we had never lived there and only passed through occasionally on our travels to mix with English pleasure-seekers, to junket in Montmartre and cry in Russian night-clubs, to wander through the museums and then push off for the delights of the open road with Michelin as guide. The Parisians were warm and welcoming; Duff had the Travellers’ Club, where all men are alike and good, but I had no real friends, save those who had tagged along from Algiers.
One night Princesse Jean de Polignac, the daughter of Madame Lanvin, who sang like a syren, asked us to dine. In those early days, without fuel or much food, meals were huddled round the only fire, which might be in the bedroom. She invited to meet us two or three people whose names I knew, including Drian, the artist who had influenced my taste since childhood and whose friendship I had never quite lost. There was also a lady who hardly spoke a word and seemed to me, though beautiful, a little colourless. The Polignac champagne warmed us all into a less pompous mood. The unknown lady laughed a little, but contributed, as far as I can remember, nothing else. Next day I learnt that she was Louise de Vilmorin, a serious poetess of high worth, who lived with her three brothers in a suburb of Paris called Verrières-le-Buisson. A week later she asked us to dinner. Christian (Bébé) Bérard, Jean Cocteau, Marie-Louise Bousquet, Cecil Beaton, Edouard and Denise Bourdet, Georges and Nora Auric, and many others were there. Louise opened all her petals as suddenly and gloriously as a night-flowering cereus, and driving home that night Duff and I both felt that our life in Paris would now be completely different.
It was. “La Bande,” as we called this Comus-crew of artists, drew and grew closer round us, building our confidence, easing our work and filling our relaxation with gladness. Our dear stand-by from Algiers, Elizabeth de Breteuil, belonged to this delightful company, so did Minou de Montgomerie. Louise was the hub and heart of it. It was Louise who let in the light to an Embassy that might have been as drab as Embassies often are. From the day of her entrance the place sang with laughter and song, wit and poetry. The winter was icing our bones; there was no heating anywhere. Louise was very delicate, and the alien occupiers of the beautiful Verrières house had left it in a sad plight, so she often stayed with us. I had never seen her like before, no longer silent or colourless; one wondered if it was her beauty or the poetic and roaringly funny conversation that seduced one most; the songs, the Hungarian clothes or the extravagant schemes. To us she was an acquisition of the first water, for new diffident French Ministers and hardened old English ones came to the Embassy more often than they needed to, in quest of Louise.
Now I began to work with a will; now there was light and shade, and not unadulterated officialdom. Duff was having a very difficult time and I rarely saw him, except across a ceremonial dinner-table. De Gaulle and Winston were playing battledore with Duff as the shuttlecock. The daily programme was densely packed with cold and depressing engagements. My bad French handicapped me, but I was intent on the growth of Anglo-French amity, and would have stopped at nothing to further it. The Germans had left dreadful traces behind them. Hospitals and hostels must be visited; rooms where prisoners had been tortured, their walls scrawled with last messages from those who had been shot, had to be shown us, people’s relations must be traced and, if possible, warmed and fed.
The cold was appalling. One of the joys of the salon vert was its crowds, for crowds and shouting generate heat. La Bande were coming daily and so were the S.H.A.E.F. contingents (the organisation known to the cynical as V3). The war was not getting on very fast or very well; in fact by Christmas there was a minor panic. Personally I had no time to worry much about it and was horrified one evening among a group of Anglo-American journalists to hear Knickerbocker say that Antwerp would be gone in a week. “Good God,” I said, “that means goodbye to the Channel ports and D-Day to do again.” “Oh, we’ll never do it again,” he said. There was even talk of a second exodus and advice given not to bring John Julius to France for Christmas, but I do not remember its affecting me at all. Our great favourite in S.H.A.E.F., Charles Peake, brought the awful news that Strasbourg, the beloved town, liberated after seventy years of occupation, was to be abandoned. Duff put his life’s blood into saving the French this humiliation and persuaded Winston to fly over to Versailles, where the Council of War agreed to leave the French divisions to fight for their city and win their battle.
Conrad wrote on Christmas Eve:
Quiet Guard. Weather mild, nights wholesome; the bird of dawning sings with leathern lungs all night long, yet the state of the world hardly bears thinking about.
I like penning the sheep on Christmas Day; there is a sort of continuity of tradition about the task. If Christ and his disciples came by they would just say “Oh, there is a shepherd doing his sheep,” but if they saw a man filling up the tank of his car with petrol they would be flummoxed and would not know what on earth he was up to. Last year you were at Ditchley. Ever since that it’s been separation. The light of my life is extinguished. The farm chores I do we used to do together, shall we ever again? Everything is the epitome of sadness now. I don’t know where to find a pleasant thought.
The German success is bad enough; I suppose we were caught napping. But it’s not like March 1918. A whole army was not disintegrated. We have not lost 100,000 men. I remember March 1918 as stunning and thinking “The Germans have won after all,” and sobbing. I could show you a little wood about two miles from Longpré les Corps Saints where I sobbed alone after seeing the English routed—a disorderly rabble in flight. I don’t think anything like that has happened. What you tell me about C. is a thumping lie; it’s untrue like Kitchener still being alive, and Percy being killed in a duel, and Alexander the First having become a monk, and Winston having broken his parole, and Queen Victoria having married John Brown, and Mr Druce being the Duke of Portland, and Uncle Bedford being Jack the Ripper, and the Duke of Wellington having said Up Guards and at ’em, and Dreyfus being a traitor, and Lord Dufferin being the son of Dizzy, and Brendan the son of Winston, and a lot of other queer nons
ensical rubbish which gets about.
I was learning for the first time in my life a little of the joy of power. It was amusing, when all the lights went out at a Palais Royal restaurant where Bébé Bérard and Jean Cocteau were entertaining us, to send the car round to the Embassy for twenty candelabra and priceless Price candles. It was good to dole out these candles to people without light, to beg blankets from the army for the shivering French civilians. Best of all I could have unprocurable penicillin traced to Rheims and send a scout on a motor bicycle to fetch it in time to save a girl dying of septicaemia.
Another time, when Louise was nursing a brother at Châteaubriand who was very near death, I motored through the night with penicillin, for which light labour of love the Vilmorin family gave me my treasure of treasures—a Colonne Vendôme in gold and silver. It was made by a madman called Poujade. A silver Napoleon stands on top with three changes of uniform and boots, hung in a royal-blue velvet closet in the pedestal. Its silver door bears the words “La Vestière de S.M. Napoléon.” In his Roman classical robe he carries a pistol and in his Marshal’s dress a kind of fishing-rod and line with a hooked Légion d’Honneur.
*
One day a letter came from a solicitor in Geneva informing me that the Count de Luzarraga, a man I had seen for three minutes in my life, had died and bequeathed me £28,000. This astonishing announcement left me cold. I knew it could not be. Twenty years before I used to receive letters from one who signed himself Manuel and wrote sometimes three times a day in violet ink on transparent stationery. He wrote of the anger he felt for his family who kept us apart, of our three children, and of the happy days at Newmarket. From Biarritz, Geneva and London these letters fluttered to me daily for five or six years, then less abundantly but without pause, until the war, when they ceased. Nineteen out of twenty I put unopened into the wastepaper-basket, scanning the twentieth to see if the plaint was still the same. It always was. Once, when the correspondence was at its height, I was politely accosted in Gower Street by a little gentleman, aged about seventy, wearing a black coat, a sombrero and a trim white beard, who, uncovering, said “I am Manuel.” Now was my moment to clear up a big misunderstanding. With distaste I faced up to the situation and told him that he had certainly confused me with another, that we had no past and no children, and please he must stop writing to the wrong woman. He stared into my face, a little stunned and incredulous, and then, bowing with courtly Spanish grace, said he was sorry that I had had to suffer from his importunities but that I should never hear from him again. This meeting, the only one, made no difference to the flow of letters signed Manuel. It was no misunderstanding but an illusion that he clung to passionately, one that he could not let go.