by Diana Cooper
Once I had the temerity to tell the Ambassador that my son, after leaving school, would have a year to fill in before our National Service claimed him. I said that the boy had taught himself a little Russian and was anxious to spend a year in the U.S.S.R. I asked how we could arrange for him to work there? On a communal farm? Perhaps in a factory? Better, could he not live with a Russian family? “Chez nous cela n’est pas la coutume” was all the encouragement I got, and advice to send him to the British Embassy in Moscow. “But there he would never hear or see a Russian,” it was my delight to answer.
Another time when I sat between Molotov and Vishinsky I laughingly said to the former “I must complain of your Ambassador, M. Bogomolov, who, when I offer him my son, a young Russian enthusiast, will have none of him.” The interpreter answered, “M. Molotov dit que chez nous cela n’est pas la coutume. Pourquoi ne pas envoyer M. votre fils à l’Ambassade d’Angleterre à Moscou?” I wound this conversation up with the same reply and the same delight. I was fond of Madame Bogo; she was pretty, had a hero-worship for Winston, and laughed when one of our Embassy ladies whom I had taken to tea with her said of somebody: “He was an absolutely awful man—a regular Bolshie.”
Duff had been separated from his books ever since we had sent them to Belvoir in makeshift cardboard boxes during the bombardment. Now the time had come to unpack them in peace. There was no library in the Embassy and Duff had the generous idea of establishing one by giving his collection when his mission as Ambassador ended. The Office of Works agreed in exchange to instal elegant shelves on which to range it. The lofty room in which he worked was ideal in size and position, and the decoration must naturally be worthy of the rest of the house. Charles de Beistegui, whom I had known for twenty-odd years, volunteered, with the help of Georges Geoffroy, to design a library which all agreed became, with its deep cornice, its slender pilasters, its busts and vases and green-fringed shelves, perhaps the most perfected room in the Embassy.
Duff and I and Mrs Walker (long may she live to see our Ambassadors come and go) and a little Polish refugee of ten who swarmed the pillars with books for the topmost shelves (he was the only one of a thousand Catholic children Auberon Herbert, in his quixotry, had determined to rescue from the Communists), spent many ecstatic hours arranging them,
Bébé Bérard chose the colour of carpet and curtains and arranged the placing of furniture. These suffered vicissitudes after our departure, so I have added gratitude to my great affection for Gladwyn and Cynthia Jebb for restoring the library to what it was, and beautifying it with commemorative words that run round the cornice:
AD FRANCOS FELICITER LEGATUS TACITÆ LIBRORUM AMICITIÆ HUNC LOCUM DEDICAVIT DUFF COOPER UT LECTORES INTER AMICOS SUOS NUMERARET. SALVE AMICE ET LEGE.
An Anglo-French alliance was what Duff—through all the maze wrought by two absolute, redoubtable, inflexible men—was determined to see a signed reality. I can see his tired face when he would quote “I often am much wearier than you think”—words I could not hear without feeling my heart grow cold within me, and I would think two millstones too good for Winston and de Gaulle. Duff’s memoirs tell of these convulsions; this hideous game with Duff the shuttlecock, that had to be played to its inevitably successful end. I should write of peace coming at last and yet curiously enough I cannot tell of that either. Duff says I broke down when he told me through his own tears, but I don’t remember that particular breakdown among so many. I remember the announcement was bungled, the day and hour unpointed. I remember the siren shrieking its last All Clear, the church-bells pealing, the Champs-Elysées in an open car, hood and mudguards crawling with pick-ups, and generally a sense of bewilderment. As in 1918, when war-fortitude is laid aside, when prayers are answered after five years of supplication, expecting to be elated and flushed by glory and victory and a sense of ineffable relief, one is overcome instead with the miseries, the senselessness, the dreadful loss. This is perhaps what the Duke of Wellington meant when he said that nothing was worse than victory except defeat.
It was now, exploring at Chantilly, that I walked through open iron gates (an ingrained and irresistible habit) to an eighteenth-century house clearly built for the retirement of a scholarly English lover of life and his doting wife. The garden window yielded to my hand, the place was furnished and seemingly uninhabited. I found an American Lieutenant, who told me it belonged to Bill Bullitt, and was temporarily requisitioned by the American forces, that no one was home and I could look into every nook and cranny. It was the house of my dreams set perfectly on a slope à l’anglais within the park of the Château de Chantilly. Tall trees were reflected in a little lake fed by the much bigger pièce d’eau into which gushed a snow-white vigorous cascade. A willow wept away over some leisured swans, and beyond in the forest were as many glades and avenues, statues, vases and obelisks as I required. Duff was as enthusiastic as I was, and so began the light but long struggle, the candles lit in churches, the medallions of saints planted surreptitiously with a prayer at the threshold, the pleadings and the threats that made it ours, first as tenants and ultimately as leaseholders from the Institut de France. This retreat would be a mitigation of our sorrow if before our time we were to be fired; and fired we were, not unnaturally and not unkindly.
The D (for dreadful) day of the General Election dawned, and by evening we heard that Winston Churchill, saviour of the free world, was no longer Prime Minister. There was something magnificently English and something cold-hearted and ungrateful about this result. I failed to see the magnificence, but many far wiser than I admired the unsentimental independence of the voters. “A blessing in disguise,” some said. “It’s very well disguised,” said Winston. To us it meant in full probability dismissal. Duff had been appointed by a Conservative Government, and why should the new Labour Foreign Minister not replace him by a career-diplomat or assign this Embassy—this plum of plums—to his own political nominee?
Nothing to be done. Yet the sack did not come for two and a half years. Instead came Ernie Bevin to see and conquer us all. Massive, rude and strong as a Stonehenge cromlech, he was as tilled, as fertile and generous as his English fields. Proud of his lowliness and of his achievements, he loved his fellow-men with as much fervour as he admired himself. It was said that General de Gaulle had asked our Foreign Office to leave Duff in Paris as England’s representative. My letters say confidently that he did, but in Old Men Forget this compliment is referred to only obliquely. Duff must automatically have offered his resignation and I think the offer was never referred to by Ernie, who came to us frequently as the most friendly and loved guest.
*
The work and speed and crowds did not decrease with the new régime. They became even more hectic. The salon vert seemed more crowded with the new Ministers and new M.P.’s, with the Massif Central of La Bande to give me confidence. At 6 p.m. they would arrive, at 7.30 I would slip noiselessly into the Borghese bedroom, take my bath in the Marshal’s tent to the murmur of their voices next door, and return to sweep the dear remnants down the back stairs that they might not collide with the dinner-guests. What a lark it was! Louise de Vilmorin was the most faithful, the most loved.
The last two years in Paris have become telescoped in my mind—a palimpsest of events. I could recover dates and details by reading my last letters to Conrad, but my memoirs are already ridiculously swollen and I must gallop to my end.
I remember, as who doesn’t, the comic incidents most vividly. Two flit through my mind as I scribble. The first a flamboyant review in the Place de la Concorde, General de Gaulle, myself and others on the tribune, dense crowds, crowds too on the laps and shoulders of the allegorical statues—Strasbourg and the rest. Crowds had also filled to the brim the dry basins of the fountains, three tiers of them. We never knew who turned on the taps, was it a mauvaise plaisanterie or an order forgotten and too late remembered? Anyway, the jets beneath the cheering people’s feet, so long in disuse, spurted out their gush with pent-up pressure and gusto. The
consequences can be imagined.
The second was on a night of Embassy revelry, particularly democratic revelry in the pompous galleries below. Ernie Bevin and A. V. Alexander were both present. At a reasonable time they went upstairs, to our private apartments, and left me to hold the fort and speed the revellers. While I was talking to a young man in uniform, I asked him to put out my cigarette. It was summer, the windows were wide open on to the garden, the room had marble consoles between the windows holding ash-trays galore, and yet this poor Yahoo trod this cigarette out on the crimson pile carpet. “You mustn’t do that,” I snapped at him. “Don’t you know this is the King’s carpet, not mine—or yours?” He all but cried with remorse: it was the army’s habit, he said. The last guests to go were lovers—I had to shoo them away and as I bade them goodnight I removed from his arm an unopened bottle of the King’s whisky. He apologised for that too: he thought it was the Government’s, he said. Upstairs I found a sing-song going on (Ernie’s parties always ended that way), A. V. Alexander and John Julius taking turns at the piano, the detective logged in an armchair. I thought he should be woken by force since our songs failed to wake him, but his detectees wanted him left lying. At long last he was slapped awake, made a dash for it, was sick in the ante-room and vanished. “Another time we won’t take him to parties,” was all they said. Ernie, A.V. and I were a splendid trio for Victorian songs: “Whatcher,” “After the Ball was Over” and “Two Lovely Black Eyes.” We knew all the words and could caterwaul away for hours.
We grew fonder and fonder of Ernie. I took him in an open car, with the faithful Bob Dixon and a new detective, to watch the open-air dancing in Montmartre on 14 July. He loved to see people enjoying themselves and, wanting to be amongst them, he suggested having a drink on the densely crowded pavement. Bob Dixon looked dubious, the detective looked sober, and out we got. Ernie was immediately recognised by his bulk and bonhomie and the current cartoons, a table was found for us, and the crowd gave him the cheer of his life. He thanked them in a well-expressed little speech which was simultaneously translated and relayed by amplifiers.
Ernie was fond of me, and used to ask me not to think of him as a big bad wolf, but our fate was in his hands and I knew that one day he would be forced to gobble us up. I told him this in extenuation. We bore him no grudge when the grim day came. To Duff he never once referred to the dismissal and we continued as friends till his lamented death. “He was a good man” was the highest praise Belloc could give as an “envoi” to eventual heaven. I can say it of Ernie.
In all this sweetness, light and devoted work there were clouds gathering in England, clouds that were to shower bitter tears upon me.
My letters from Conrad grew ever more depressed:
I took my temperature tonight after ten days of whisky, medicine and cream, the doctor’s orders. I wanted to see what the effect might be, result 94 degrees. What kind of a disease can it be? I go to bed at eleven feeling all right and wake aching in my legs as if I’d run six miles, utter exhaustion and deep depression. When I’m up I sit wondering if I should go back to bed; one must fight against going back to bed. The doctor has packed up; he isn’t interested. I’ve had the carter up to cut my hair. It’s nothing to a man who can cut eight acres of wheat before dinner-time, and much nicer than waiting one’s turn at the stinking local wig-fixer.
P.S. The Bath specialist, called a cardiologist, will see me Wednesday. I wonder if I’ve got a “nervous breakdown” or “neurasthenia”? It seems so unnatural. I notice nearly every day that Mr So-and-so has been ordered “a month’s complete rest.” Don’t make yourself unhappy about me; it’s only what happens to people all the time, over and over again. I don’t read much; it’s as though my mind was tired like my body. I think of you a great deal but that’s a permanent habit, ill or well.
At last he gave up the farm and went to hospital in London, but not for long. His heart was ill, broken. I went as often as I could to see him in England, where he divided his days between his two sisters in Surrey and at the Manor House, Mells. There he died, a convert at the last to the Catholic faith. Farming for the war, combined with the Home Guard fatigues, killed him as surely as an enemy’s bullet. Katharine Asquith was there to reverence his parting soul. No one better could he have desired. I was prepared for his end, but preparation makes calamity longer. I was prepared too for my sister Marjorie—who had meant so much to me in youth—to die too young. I was in part what she made me and I felt that part of me died with her. Her husband scarcely survived her. Their children are now my dearest support.
Even Emerald must die—her lightly pitched voice still echoes in my ear. She died gracefully without fear, or faith. I once heard her say “I think Jesus Christ has the most unpleasant face,” as she might speak of a picture of François I or Hitler. “And,” she mused on, “John the Baptist’s is very little better.” She had an instinct for good and she could animate sticks and stones into glistening gems. So many of her circle of luminaries faded out with her setting, but many remained strong and beaming and constant to her as fixed stars.
With Emerald’s death I felt that “all my friends are lapped in lead,” but Paris fortunately allowed me no respite for grief, so I began with broken nerves to think that work and frustration would kill Duff. The Anglo-French alliance was making haste very slowly. Generally there was a crisis. De Gaulle had resigned and was to remain, as Winston had been, for ten years a voice crying in the wilderness. There was the Ruhr, and Syria (Duff’s most barbed thorn), and more changes of government and the Council of Foreign Ministers, followed by the Peace Conference. One event succeeded another. For me this meant redoubled entertainment on a sumptuous and lugubrious scale.
It was after one of our receptions that François Mauriac wrote in the Figaro a piece that I would blush to publish had not Duff forestalled me. All the more reason not to reprint it, one might think, yet I am so flattered by the sentiment and so admire the impeccable French that I cannot resist doing so:
À une fête de ces derniers jours, où les visages fermes des Slavs glissaient, tous feux éteints, à travers les groupes, j’observais l’ambassadrice d’une nation amie, cette figure de Pallas Athénée qui épandait sur ce troupeau sombre et méfiant l’inutile lumière de ses yeux; statue encore intacte, témoin des époques heureuses, sa beauté adorable se dressait en vain, comme un dernier appel à la joie de vivre au dessus d’une humanité sans regard.
Duff said he could write Nunc Dimittis (disturbing words for me) once a firm treaty with France was signed and delivered. And signed it was on the last day of February 1947, under rainy skies at Dunkirk. The historic seaport, so present in our war-memories, was chosen by our imaginative Ernie. He was splendidly to represent England, while little M. Bidault signed for France. I don’t remember much more about the ceremony; it was a laurelled victory for Duff after all his pains, and I should have been exultant; yet Nunc Dimittis, those words of ending, weighed like lead in my mind, treading down jubilation. Within six months came Duff’s dismissal. As I have said before, it was natural and not unkind. Just as Ernie had never answered Duff’s letter offering resignation when the Labour Government took over, so not once did he refer to this dismantling, although they had many an interview before the end of the mission. He never again came to the Embassy; perhaps he had no cause, or perhaps he did not want to show the furry ears and sabre-teeth of the big bad wolf.
I felt much older after the dismissal. I don’t think Duff did; although he had expected it, it came as a shock, but he had unusual balance and serenity for the big events of his life and could always look forward. Now he would write his memoirs and enjoy the seasons and his autumn at Chantilly. For my part, I felt unusually incapable and tired. We gave a last ball—my own Waterloo. Winston was there to lend lustre to the feast; I lent it a skeleton. We went to San Vigilio, our happy haunt on Lake Garda. As always it consoled, with its beauty, my troubled mind. I began to count God’s blessings. I had new friends to walk beside me on
the sad road of age—Louise de Vilmorin, Paul-Louis Weiller, who had come into my life two years before and would, I knew, stay to the end, and many other reliable wayfarers. I had Chantilly to cope with, and its proportions and peaceful atmosphere would offset the effort that must be expended. Another blessing—a very old friend, Benjamin Guinness, had made us a present for life of a little flat in the Rue de Lille. I had John Julius, always a Sunday’s child, who had gone from strength to strength at Eton, and after a year at the University of Strasbourg had just started his National Service as a naval rating. I liked that. Then, above all blessings, there was Duff—never sick, never tired, never cold, to me ever turning. Before we married I used to ask him if he felt equal to the heavy task of keeping me happy. He never doubted it for a moment. “As long as Duff is there,” I would think, “it is shameful to give these spectres of melancholy a triumph.” His thoughts as the sands ran out in Paris were of the future—work, sport (he was sometimes Roi de la Chasse at the Presidential shoot at Rambouillet), clubs and club-bores, lovely women, walking in the forests, reading to himself even while dressing, shaken to tears with laughter if the book was funny, reading aloud to me, walking up and down the lawn at Chantilly refashioning a phrase before he wrote it down in his clean, scarcely-corrected manuscript. Though not liking picnics he had vowed to enjoy them for my sake, and himself bought the basket. I still had Duff, and together we left the Embassy with what hauteur we could muster.