It was not the last that anyone would hear of Oliva. Lionel himself noticed his name on a playbill in Madrid in 1867, and went to watch him dance. By then Oliva was a little stouter, as photographs of him in his dancing clothes show, looking like a portly bullfighter. Catalina too was spotted many years later, by one of her former neighbours from Albolote, in a secondhand shop in Málaga. ‘There was a great difference in her appearance and apparel from what I remembered her,’ he noted. ‘She seemed crestfallen and in straitened circumstances – she seemed decayed. I just bowed to her.’ And Pepita, the inspiration for Vita’s book and the starting point of this one, settled in south-west France, where she was to assume a new role as a mother and home-maker.
Such was the fate of some of the key characters described in the witness statements which Vita discovered in the trunk in her mother’s house. Those documents offer a window into another world – the teeming backstreets of Málaga in the mid-nineteenth century, with its cast of actors, barbers, chambermaids, door-to-door saleswomen – that is such a contrast to the broad ancestral acres of Knole, with its leisured elegance. It is a parallel world in another sense, too. For whereas Vita, in Pepita, focused on a single line of mother-daughter relationships, I wanted to find out more about the parallel, but very different, lives of the characters who were gradually erased from the record in Vita’s account: Max, Flora, Amalia and Henry. ‘Of no interest to me’ Vita scrawled in red crayon across one of the documents in the trunk, dismissing it as ‘The case from Henry’s point of view’. Like generations of illegitimate children before them (including the son of La Baccelli and the 3rd Duke), these children were thus consigned to the roll of the disinherited at Knole.
See Notes on Introduction
1
The Villa Pepa
As you wander along the Boulevard de la Plage in Arcachon, in south-west France, today, there are few traces of the town’s former elegance. The summer smell of sunblock and frites hangs in the air; shops selling beach mats, balls and fishing equipment alternate, on one side of the boulevard, with cafés providing pizzas à emporter. There, on the other side, between the blocks of holiday apartments, is a row of ornate railings shielding one of these modern residences from the street, with an entrance gate in the middle, surmounted by the scrolling letters ‘SW’ and a baronial coronet.
This is all that now remains of one of Arcachon’s exclusive nineteenth-century villas, the Villa Pepa. The initials, which stood for the name Sackville West, had been commissioned by the mistress of the house, a woman styling herself the ‘Countess West’. Her real name, however, was Josefa Duran, and she was most certainly not a countess. Indeed, the question as to whether Pepita, as she was known to friends and family, had ever been married to Lionel Sackville-West would come to dominate the lives of the characters in this book.
In the summer of 1866, Lionel, who was then a secretary at the British embassy in Madrid, brought Pepita, the mistress with whom he had been enjoying an on-off relationship for the previous fourteen years, to Arcachon. Their relationship had been interrupted by Pepita’s performances as a dancer, by Lionel’s postings, and by Pepita’s other affairs. But it was now time, they felt, for her to move from temporary accommodation in a honey-coloured, neoclassical sandstone house, overlooking the Jardin Public in Bordeaux, into something more permanent.
Lionel bought a house at 167 Boulevard de la Plage from a Captain Cutler for 100,000 francs, and there he installed Pepita and her two children, Max and Victoria. Arcachon was exactly the sort of discreet, slightly out-of-the-way resort where you might install a mistress, as the Duke of Saxe-Coburg had done in the nearby Villa Fougas. The town was within a day or so’s travelling distance of Lionel’s postings, at first in Madrid and then in Paris, with the intention that he could visit for holidays. The price included 8,000 francs for the furniture and contents: the pepper-grinders and the poissonière in the kitchen, the armchairs in the vestibule, the eleven beds and six commodes, the coffee cups, crockery, chandeliers and so on. Here, Pepita, with the help of six servants, including a gardener and a cook, would be able to bring up her growing family, screened from prying eyes by the villa’s fretted balconies and shuttered windows.
The Villa Cutler, as it was originally known, was a fine building wrapped all the way round by a veranda. Pepita had it extended by a local builder, Auguste Desombre, who put up the front wall, the railings and the gate in 1866, added another floor, and crowned the building with a belvedere. He gave an exotic lilt to the villa so that the roofs curved up at the eaves to make it look a little like a Chinese pagoda. In the grounds, he built stables and a gardener’s house, two jaunty bathing pavilions in the Chinese style at the waterfront, and a couple of years later a small chapel. The gardens ran around the house from the Boulevard to the sea, catching the west winds which blow gently across the Bassin, an immense salt-water lake separating Arcachon from the Atlantic Ocean. It is these water-laden breezes that moderate the climate here, and make it more temperate, without losing the warmth of the Midi.
By the time the Villa Pepa was put up for sale in 1876, it had been transformed into a substantial nine-bedroomed property. This time, it was sold with 27,300 francs’ worth of Lionel and Pepita’s furniture: in the anteroom, for example, two chairs of old carved oak covered in green leather, with blue cretonne covers, a large armchair covered in garnet velvet, a brass suspension lamp, a card table in old oak, a Medallion mirror with a frame of old carved oak. The dark woods and heavy fabrics of the interiors, so typical of the seaside villas of the Second Empire, flattened the light flooding in from the Bassin.
The town that Lionel and Pepita chose for their young family was relatively new. Before the railway from Bordeaux reached the neighbouring village of La Teste in the 1840s, hardly anyone visited what is now Arcachon. The journey from Bordeaux would have taken three days in an ox-cart across some of France’s most desolate and depressing moors: Les Landes, which stretched flat and featureless as far as the eye could see, a wasteland scorched in summer and waterlogged in winter. In 1857, however, the railway line – that great moving force in France’s colonisation of its own country – was extended to Arcachon, and the town could now be reached in just over an hour from Bordeaux. Through the carriage window you might still glimpse the outlandish sight of a few shepherds, cloaked in sheep’s fleeces and perched on stilts so that they could better survey their flocks, poised, floating, between the earth and the vast sky.
Gradually, a seasonal, transient population of holiday-makers joined the hamlet’s original inhabitants of oyster farmers and fishermen. A guide to The Health Resorts of the South of France by Dr Edwin Lee, published in 1865, a year before Lionel’s purchase of the Villa Pepa, included a chapter on Arcachon, ‘with remarks on the chief causes of pulmonary consumption and on the influence of climate on that disease’. It described a town of very recent creation: Arcachon had only become a separate municipality in 1857; its mairie was built in 1858, and the following year, the Emperor Napoleon III and his wife visited the town for the first time. In 1860 this freshly minted town acquired a coat of arms and a motto that reflected its rate of growth and its aspirations – ‘Heri solitudo, hodie vicus, cras civitas’ (Yesterday solitude, today a town, tomorrow a city).
Arcachon was a town ‘fondée sur la maladie’, and in particular on the hope that its climate would cure, or at least relieve the symptoms of, that great nineteenth-century killer, tuberculosis. In 1835, Dr Jean Hameau had been an early pioneer of the benefits of sea-bathing and Arcachon had at first developed as a station balnéaire. The bathing resort was concentrated around the Ville d’Eté, strung out along the Boulevard de la Plage, with the little fishing port at one end, and the church of Notre Dame and the gateway leading to the grounds of Monsieur Pereire, one of the principal founders and proprietors of Arcachon, at the other. In between were a striking series of villas, including the Chateau Deganne at No. 163, which was ‘said to be a good imitation of Chambord’; Mr Johnston’s vil
la at No. 165; the beachfront Grand Hotel which opened in 1866, the year the Sackville Wests came to Arcachon, with 150 rooms and cabinets de toilette, and offering ‘bains et services de balnothérapie’; and, of course, the Villa Pepa at No. 167.
As its appeal as a health resort broadened, Arcachon became a town of two halves. In the Ville d’Eté, the doctors promoted the therapeutic benefits of sea-bathing in summer, while in the other half, the Ville d’Hiver, they extolled the soothing effects of a soft ‘balsamic’ climate in winter. Dr Gustave Hameau, Dr Jean’s son and for many years the Médécin Inspecteur at Arcachon as well as family doctor to the Sackville Wests, noted the Ville d’Hiver’s excellent location. It was close to the sea, but screened from it by dunes covered with pine forest. These pines had been planted from the late eighteenth century onwards by the French government in order to bind the shifting sands of the shore and stop them turning the land into a desert. The trees broke the force of the Atlantic winds and imparted to them, once they had passed, moisture-laden over the great expanse of the Bassin, the ‘resinous emanations’, which were considered so ‘sedative to the nervous system’.
The pine-scented air was supposed to work wonders for those suffering from asthma, bronchitis and consumption. ‘The whole air is perceptibly impregnated with the balsamic odour of turpentine,’ wrote Hameau, ‘and we know that the balsams and turpentines in vapour are remedial agents of much power in bronchial affections. This impregnation arises not merely from the presence of pine forests on a great scale, but from the gathering of turpentine or resin from the live trees.’ This gathering was done by the indigenous population of résiniers who scraped away areas of bark from the trees, and tapped the resin which oozed from the trunk into wooden vessels. The obvious good health of the résinier himself – and an apparent absence of any pulmonary complaints, particularly consumption – seemed evidence in itself of the healing powers of the atmosphere.
Hameau was a member of an unofficial alliance of doctors, property developers and railway entrepreneurs, who helped create an artificial town in the middle of a wilderness. He was one of those who encouraged the Société Immobilière d’Arcachon, headed by Emile Pereire, to buy up land in what became the Ville d’Hiver. There, they carved a great park from the forest, on an incline facing south, and laid it out with promenades and allées, linking scores of isolated Swiss-style villas, which preserve to this day traces of the town’s former elegance. All of these villas were built to a different design but had a common feature: a veranda running all the way around the ground floor. Planted with magnolia, bougainvillea, oleander and orange trees, and palm trees as well as the pine, the entire Ville d’Hiver was a lush, large-scale, open sanatorium, with a climate ‘very favourable for invalids of a nervous and excitable constitution, for consumptive patients liable to haemorrhage, or exhausted by copious muco-purulent expectoration’. One of these invalids was Charles-N. Faduilhe who, in the preface to his doctoral thesis in medicine in 1866 (the year Lionel and Pepita acquired the Villa Pepa), described his own return to health in Arcachon from consumption: ‘It was there, abandoned, and condemned to death by all the doctors who had seen me that I found some relief to my sufferings, and the hope of a cure. In Arcachon I found the courage to undergo all the trials and tribulations I had to endure over three long and deadly years.’
Life in Arcachon could be a trifle dull, but as Dr Lee noted, this was no bad thing: ‘Too often invalids complain of the absence of the diversions (distractions) of a town, and of having always before their eyes a monotonous verdure. This, however, is an essential condition of their amelioration. The calmness of the atmosphere, the silence of the forest, a certain isolation of the inhabitants, a great mass of verdure, and the resinous emanations from the fir trees, constitute a combination of sedative conditions of which not one is superfluous.’ This plea for a peaceful life was echoed by Dr Roth in another guide, published in 1879: ‘In other places pleasures have, it may be, their utility; but here, for natures which must be tranquillised at any price – which must be guarded against every drain on the nervous system – the quiet amusements, which will spring up naturally among acquaintances, as the colony of strangers augments, will always be sufficient.’
People could walk and ride in the sand dunes and forest; dine at the four-storey Railway Buffet, which was built and decorated in the Chinese style and struck new arrivals to Arcachon with its architectural audacity the moment they stepped off the train; read The Times in the reading room of the Grand Hotel the day after publication; or meet in the Casino, ‘an extensive building in the mauresque style, situated on an eminence with a terrace in front, commanding a pleasing prospect, and comprising a tastefully decorated hall and concert room’. ‘Bathed in the perfume of exotic flowers,’ in the words of one guidebook, and ‘hanging like the [Babylonian] gardens of Semiramis,’ the Casino opened in 1863 and evoked ‘the dreamy fantasy of the Orient’. Its architect, who also designed the Grand Hotel, the Railway Buffet, and several of the first villas in the Ville d’Hiver, was Paul Régnauld, ‘a great magician’, according to Le Journal d’Arcachon, ‘who has managed to transport the Alhambra into our desert’.
So this was the strange, almost fantastic, world into which Lionel and Pepita introduced their new family: a resort in which invalids drifted between life and death in their forest villas; a small town that was growing fast, from around 400 resident inhabitants in 1857 to 3,000 in 1871, with as many as 300,000 visitors a year; a place where social boundaries were shifting like the shoreline, but never fast enough to disguise the exclusion of Pepita and her family.
Victoria came to Arcachon at the age of four, and her earliest memories are of living at the Villa Pepa with her mother, a beautiful woman, by all accounts, with luxuriant hair and a love-curl licking each cheek – although photographs cannot disguise her double chin and the fact that, by this time, Pepita was becoming a little stout. She had tiny dancer’s feet that could be seen peeping out from beneath the dresses which she wore very short at the front but longer at the back – one with a train several yards long. Several times a year, ‘Papa’ would come to visit – ‘a great event’, celebrated with much fanfare – and stay for a fortnight or two.
Victoria spent most of her time in her mother’s company, sitting with her as she did her needlework, speaking in French (as her mother knew no English), and sleeping in her bed. As a treat, Pepita would take out her castanets and dance for the children’s entertainment in a dress covered with black lace, her thick hair let down in two long plaits below her knees. Of an afternoon Victoria might drive out with her mother in a horse-drawn carriage to visit the poor (a nice, sentimental touch, that) or to the magistrates’ court in the neighbouring village of La Teste to deal with ‘troubles about the servants’, for Pepita enjoyed relations with her servants as volatile as Victoria’s were later to be. Court records from the late 1860s describe a string of cases in which the ‘Countess West’, or sometimes ‘la Comtesse d’Houesse’, is sued by servants and tradespeople – chambermaids and coachmen, butchers, midwives, gardeners and nurses – for non-payment of laundry bills, wages or summary dismissal. According to a housemaid, who had served at the Villa Pepa for a few months, Pepita was a very ‘changeable’ person, with quite a temper, and her washerwoman confirmed that she used to send servants away ‘for the slightest thing – she was most particular’.
Victoria also remembered the slights and social exclusions of life in Arcachon. The Sackville Wests lived next door to the Johnstons, Bordeaux-based wine merchants who had been one of the first families to build a summerhouse on the shore of the Bassin. The Johnstons’ Villa Mogador was separated from the Villa Pepa by a low wall, but Victoria and her siblings saw the little Johnston girls, Minna and Bella, only ‘very rarely, and then always surreptitiously, because they were forbidden by their parents to associate with us’. Similarly, when the young Sackville Wests went to a children’s ball at the Casino, no one danced, or even spoke, with them. Being left out in
this way made such an impression on Victoria that she burst into tears, but it was only much later that it became clear to her that it was because of her ‘mother’s position that people objected to their children associating with us’.
When the Sackville Wests stayed in Paris for a couple of months each winter, at first in a house that Lionel had bought in the Avenue d’Eylau and then from 1869 in the Rue de la Faisanderie, their life was just as solitary. Victoria was told not to play with other children in the Champs Elysées, and always turned back at a particular point, ten minutes from the embassy, when she accompanied her father on his walk to work. Once there was a fête in the Tuileries, she recalled, to which her father went officially. ‘My mother cried bitterly because she could not go with him. I did not then know the reason of this but I conclude it was on account of her not being recognised in society.’ This impression was confirmed by Lionel’s Foreign Office colleagues. When asked many years later to recall his years, 1868–71, as an attaché at the embassy in Paris, Baron Saumarez described how, although he was ‘on quite intimate terms with Lord Sackville [as Lionel later became], he never mentioned to me the fact that he had children. I have heard the name of a lady who was known as “Pepita”, I was told she was a Spanish Danseuse. Lord Sackville never mentioned to me his relations with that lady – he never introduced her to me nor as far as I know to any of my colleagues – I never heard of Lord Sackville or saw him going out into Society with that lady.’
According to Victoria, her mother never visited Arcachon’s main church, the church of Notre Dame, but went occasionally instead to the chapel at Le Moulleau to pray – although never for confession or communion, ‘in consequence’, as Victoria later realised, ‘of her living in adultery’. What might, therefore, have been for Pepita the setting for an idyllic family life – an imposing beachfront property, a delightful climate – was spoiled by being excluded from society, cut off from the company of other families and children, from the consolations of the Church, and from her husband’s colleagues. Victoria suffered these hurts too, and would bear an impression of them for the rest of her life. The reasons for them would only become clear much later, casting a pall of shame that she never quite succeeded in shaking off.
The Disinherited Page 3