It is easy to see how the confusion arose: a muddle entirely of his own making. Lionel accepted the fact that Pepita was always known in Arcachon as Countess West, even calling her ‘Madame West’ himself, and addressing her in letters as ‘my little wife’. And yet, on the other hand, he strenuously denied that ‘he ever got married or went through a form of marriage with Pepita during the residence at Arcachon . . . the idea of a marriage between us was never for a moment discussed. We both of us knew that she was legally married with a husband living and that therefore we should be committing bigamy if we went through a form of marriage.’
A similar contradiction extended to the registration of his children’s births during the Arcachon years. Flora was born on 11 November 1866 at the Villa Pepa, and registered the following day as ‘of father and mother not named’. The following year, however, Pepita put pressure on Lionel to recognise Flora as their legitimate child. ‘I was very strongly opposed to this and for a long time absolutely refused to be party to such a proceeding,’ Lionel later claimed, ‘but was ultimately prevailed upon to do so chiefly with the object of shielding Pepita’s reputation. She said she was very anxious that the children should bear my name and that was the only way of accomplishing this object.’ Amalia was born in Paris on 16 February 1868, and was the first of the children to be described at once in the register as the legitimate daughter of Lionel and ‘his wife’. Yet again Lionel later had ‘no recollection of signing the register of the birth although the official copy obtained states that I did so sign’.
The fifth surviving child, Henry, was born at Arcachon on 24 June 1869 and, given the fact that both his birth and baptismal certificates describe him as the legitimate child of the Hon. Lionel Sackville-West and of Dona Josefa Duran, his wife, it is no wonder that he was to have some expectations of his legitimacy. Despite physical evidence to the contrary, Lionel was later to deny any memory of signing the register. The Mayor of Arcachon was present at the registration, however, and, though nursing his own private doubts, assumed that the ‘Count and Countess West’ must have been lawfully married ‘because I could not believe that Count West being a gentleman of honour would deceive the State and I did not believe that he would come and make a false registration’. The ‘gentleman of honour’ in question was the future British Minister (the equivalent of ambassador) to the United States.
The question of whether Lionel and Pepita were ever married was the subject, decades later, of a celebrated court case, in which the domestic arrangements of the Villa Pepa were to help decide the inheritance of Knole, the largest stately home in England. In the process, evidence was taken from people very different from those who stalked the galleries of Knole: station masters and cemetery keepers, washerwomen and wine merchants, coachmen and concierges, house painters and shoemakers – indeed, a cast of characters straight out of a novel by Balzac. From their accounts emerges an intimate picture of life in a seaside resort in south-west France in the 1860s, a study in small-town snobbery, and a household rather more rackety than that described by Pepita’s daughter Victoria and, later, her granddaughter Vita. Victoria presented a curiously sentimental version of a happy and relatively well-ordered childhood, while Vita played up the romantic aspects of the story: the love affair between her glamorous grandmother, Pepita, and her grandfather, Lionel, the distinguished diplomat. The tale of the crotchety courtesan and the perjurious peer would have reflected the more prosaic reality.
Among those who were asked for their views on whether the ‘Count and Countess’ were ever seen together ‘in Society’ – because that would have been a sure sign they were married – were several of the people who played a prominent part in the development of Arcachon: Dr Gustave Hameau, the Reverend Samuel Radcliff and Harry Scott Johnston, a director of Pereire’s Société Immobilière and the father of Minna and Bella. Johnston, for example, claimed that although he knew Pepita by sight, he never had any closer acquaintance – ‘on the contrary that was to be avoided’, as it was generally believed she was Mr West’s mistress. Johnston and his wife ‘mixed in the best society in Arcachon’, and it was inconceivable that they should meet ‘the Countess’ there. ‘It was notorious she had been a dancer,’ he continued. ‘The Countess had not a very good reputation in Arcachon. I have seen people dining at her house but I never saw any ladies there – small dinner parties consisting only of men [in particular, a Comte Auguste de Clouet, a dentist from Bordeaux]. Her mixing with these fast young men and living alone . . . gave me the impression she led a fast life.’
Lionel may have been hoping to find in Arcachon a bucolic backwater where his growing family could lead a life free of censure. But he had failed, perhaps, to appreciate the size of the English colony there; a community large enough to support its own Anglican church, to give its name to the Promenade des Anglais, and to cherish the snobberies and social conventions that they had brought from home. There was no escape after all.
The Reverend Samuel Radcliff, the British chaplain, had come to Arcachon in 1866 for the sake of his health, and was to spend the rest of his life there. He found the resort very ‘rustic’ at first, but threw himself wholeheartedly into the life of the town, organising paper-chases on horseback in the woods, translating into English Gustave Hameau’s book on the climate of Arcachon, tending to his flock, playing golf. Between 1867 and 1871 he lived opposite the Villa Pepa on the Boulevard de la Plage. Pepita, he recalled, ‘was what would be called a fine woman’, in whom ‘one could see the remains of former beauty, but she was at that time stout and rather coarse-looking’. He confirmed Johnston’s impression of her social exclusion: ‘She was not regarded as a desirable acquaintance. She was not in any way received or recognised in Arcachon society. It was rumoured that she drank freely . . . The general reputation was, I believe, that they [Lionel and Pepita] were not married. Their connection was looked upon as a very shady affair.’ Such suspicions, or concerns, did not impress the patrician Lionel who was later, as Lord Sackville, to claim that there was in any case ‘no society in Arcachon which I in my position in life would have cared to mix with’.
These sentiments would certainly have extended to his French neighbours. Louisa Dignac lived at No. 220 Boulevard de la Plage and, as Pepita’s laundress, visited the Villa Pepa almost every day, seeing ‘the Countess every time . . . in the drawing-room, in her bedroom – everywhere’. Louisa noted how opinion in Arcachon was divided as to whether Pepita was Lionel’s wife or mistress, but she added a further twist to the complicated domestic arrangements by reporting the ‘general opinion that the Count de Béon was her [Pepita’s] sweetheart’. In this version, the eldest son, Max, was the son of the Prince of Bavaria (of whom there was said to be a portrait photograph in the drawing room), Victoria was Lionel’s daughter, and Béon was the father of the last two children, Amalia and Henry.
Henri de Béon, the assistant station master at Bordeaux’s main railway station, is a slightly elusive figure, and it is unclear where he first met Pepita and whether it was Lionel himself who had introduced them. In a witness statement taken in 1897, the builder Desombre described how Pepita had sent him to Bordeaux to invite Béon to dinner, in order to thank him for helping them all so graciously into a railway carriage. Béon accepted the invitation and, according to Desombre, ‘the following day I saw him at the Villa, so he must have stayed all night’.
In any case, by 1868, when he was in his late twenties – ten years younger than Pepita – Béon had left his job in Bordeaux, and Pepita, who was forever worried that people were cheating her, had appointed him her ‘superintendent’. He was living at the villa, sometimes accompanied by his mother, and sleeping in a bedroom that ‘communicated’ with the Countess’s room. It was Béon who would pay Louisa for the laundry, who managed all of Pepita’s affairs, and who generally seemed, Louisa said, ‘on very familiar terms with her’, to such an extent that ‘I used to say to myself “Yes, you are the superintendent and something more”.’ Sometimes she would s
pot them drinking together – Pepita ‘used to be always drinking champagne’. A shoemaker called André Fay lived just opposite the Villa Pepa and he, too, often caught sight of Béon coming and going. He could never understand why ‘Count West, a very good man, amiable and kind-hearted’, tolerated Béon, who was generally thought to be Pepita’s lover. ‘People used to say that they were surprised at Count West allowing Count de Béon to be in the house, and that he ought to have sent him into the Bay. He looked to be a lazy fellow. But the Countess seemed to be master, and it appeared that she could make Count West do anything she liked.’
Whether or not Pepita had behaved in a ‘respectable’ sort of way while in Arcachon would later become a matter of some significance, from which it could be inferred whether she was more likely to have been Lionel’s mistress or wife. The fact that she wandered around the garden en négligée, with her beautiful black hair hanging loose, was remarked upon, although the house painter Georges Tregan admitted that he never saw her do anything in the garden ‘to give rise to scandal or comment’. It was testimony such as this, taken a quarter of a century after Pepita’s death, gleaned through glimpses over a garden wall, or from a veranda, that give us this insight into the domestic life of Arcachon in the dying days of the Second Empire. Just as boundaries between land and sea were blurred, so were the social barriers, the shifting small-town snobberies, and the nuanced line between truths and half-truths. When Desombre boasted that he used to smoke a daily cigar with Count West, or that he generally declined the Wests’ frequent invitations to dinner, his neighbours pooh-poohed his statements on the basis that, as a member of a completely different social class, Desombre was very unlikely to have been invited to dinner in the first place.
Pepita died at home on 11 March 1871, aged forty, a few days after giving birth to a short-lived son, Frédéric. Béon was the only person living in the Villa Pepa at the time, besides the children and the servants. Lionel was in Paris, where he had been sent as chargé d’affaires, but applied for a week’s compassionate leave from his boss, Lord Lyons, the British ambassador to France. In Pepita, Vita described how her mother Victoria remembered the moment when Lionel arrived at the Villa Pepa:
She was in the room, a frightened and heartbroken child of nine [sic], praying beside the bed on which lay the still body of Pepita, a crucifix clasped between her stiffened fingers, the lighted candles burning steadily over the unearthly beauty of the pallor of death. Beside her lay the tiny figure of the dead baby who had cost her her life. As my grandfather reached the room, he stopped for a moment at the threshold, then ran forward and threw himself on his knees beside the bed, sobbing out that it was he who had killed her. It was in vain that they tried to comfort him by telling him that she had died with his name, ‘Lionel’, upon her lips.
Vita’s description captures the melodrama of the deathbed scene, and the romance of her grandparents’ love. Even though the children were very young when their mother died – Victoria was only eight years old, and Henry not yet two – they each of them treasured their very different, and possibly unreliable, memories of her for the rest of their lives, jealously guarding them from their siblings.
Lionel entrusted Béon with all the arrangements. Frédéric was registered as the legitimate son of Lionel and ‘his wife’, and on Pepita’s own death certificate, she was registered as Lionel’s ‘wife’. Béon organised the funeral, too, with Lionel conceding that the arrangements be ‘made as for a lady who enjoyed the position of my wife’. There were notices in the local paper and lithographed invitations to the funeral signed by Lionel, which described the deceased as his wife (indeed, in one handwritten letter, he informed a friend, Colonel Fritz Holst, of the death of ‘ma pauvre femme’). Opinion was, nevertheless, still divided over whether they had been married. ‘It is not an uncommon thing, especially in Arcachon for persons to speak of themselves as married when they are not so,’ observed the chemist who helped Dr Hameau embalm Pepita’s body so that ‘Count West’ might see it in all its ethereal beauty when he arrived from Paris.
It was snowing – an extraordinary event for that part of France – on the day that Pepita’s coffin was taken from the church of Notre Dame, from which she had been excluded in life, for burial in the windswept municipal cemetery above the town. Although no handsome monument was erected to her memory, there is no question that she was buried here as Lionel’s wife. The municipal authorities had previously refused permission for her to be buried, as she had wished, beneath the little chapel that she had had built in the garden of the Villa Pepa.
Lionel also asked Béon to take care of the children, which he did with the help of his mother, first at the Villa Pepa, then at Mme de Béon’s house in Bordeaux, and from 1873 in Paris. In the first few years after Pepita’s death, Lionel often wrote to Béon, expressing his great gratitude to his ‘dear friend’ for all that he had been doing on his behalf. It was only many years later, when Lionel believed that Béon had ‘behaved very dishonestly about money matters’ during this period, that they were to fall out.
After Pepita’s death, Lionel – with five children to support – was in desperate financial straits. He turned to his younger brother, William Edward, appointing him as his man of affairs. William Edward, or ‘Gummer’ as he was known within the family, was persuaded to lend him £4,500: if not, he would be ‘up a tree’. Security consisted of a life insurance policy, some silver plate, and jewellery, which Lionel himself was going to have valued in Paris and included a fan set with emeralds and a diamond tiara. In return, Gummer was to receive interest at five per cent. Lionel was now in a position to issue letters of instruction to Gummer on where to make the payments – mostly into Béon’s account in a bank in Bordeaux. These letters were also interspersed with gossip – a dinner last night at Versailles with Adolphe Thiers, the French head of state; riding a vélocipède for the first time and grazing his face against a wall; and news of heavy fighting in Paris during the popular uprising of 1871. Lionel was at the same time angling for a posting to Rio de Janeiro (at £6,000 a year) or, failing that, to Buenos Aires (at just over ‘£3,000 a year and yellow fever’), which he eventually accepted in September.
Despite the loan, Lionel was further in debt. ‘You will be surprised at all this paper,’ he wrote to Gummer, ‘you are however the only person who can help me out of a hole into which I am put by a lawsuit here and which has rendered me liable immediately for this amount.’ He was being taken to court by his creditors and was unable to leave Paris to take up his new appointment to the Argentine Republic until they were paid. ‘Under these circumstances,’ he wrote once again to Gummer, ‘I hope you will assist me and prevent by so doing most disagreeable consequences.’
Lionel’s sisters were helping him out as well. Two of them had married very successfully into that small group of super-rich landed families with incomes of over £75,000 a year. Elizabeth’s husband was the Duke of Bedford, and Mary had married first the Marquis of Salisbury, and second the Earl of Derby. As a result, the repercussions from Arcachon spread to some of the greatest stately homes in England. In January 1873, Elizabeth, writing from Woburn, sent an order to her bank for £2,000 to be remitted to William Edward on behalf of Lionel, to enable him to leave Paris, although she feared that his debts were ‘more than we as yet know’. Her husband Hastings, the Duke of Bedford, was less sympathetic, forbidding her to do any more to help her brother and advising William Edward that it was his duty to his own wife and children not to help the feckless Lionel any further.
Elizabeth hoped that her sister Mary might get at the truth, for ‘it is too serious an affair to go on making mysteries . . . I can’t say how much I am distressed at all this, & I see nothing but misery to come.’ Just as Lionel had always been deliberately unclear in Arcachon about his status as a father and a husband, he was equally vague about the scale of his financial mess – with bills appearing here, there and everywhere. In March 1873, Mary joined the correspondence from Knowsley, ag
reeing to lend Lionel £1,000 and expressing to William Edward the hope that Lionel would now confide in him the state of his affairs. Her husband Edward, the 15th Earl of Derby, had recently become aware that ‘the beginning of the mischief was a connection of many years standing with a Spanish woman, I believe, originally a dancer, by whom he has a family left on his hands to maintain. She died last year. It is an awkward business altogether.’ Lionel had hinted to him that he was ‘likely to marry a young Jewish lady with a fortune believed to be £200,000’, which would pay off the loans made by his sisters. ‘But it does not seem clear,’ Edward noted in his diary, ‘that there is any certainty of the event coming off.’
By 17 March, Lionel was back in London, and Mary was worrying that he had not disclosed to his brother and sisters the full scale of his borrowings, that the money they were lending him was simply being used to service his other debts: ‘If this be so, the sums with which we have assisted him are only so much thrown into the fire just to enable him to get off now.’ Two days later, Lionel assured her that this was not the case; but, as Mary wrote to William Edward, ‘when people are in money difficulties I have but little confidence in statements. He said he was waiting for information about what sum was to come from what you term “the other way out of his difficulties”. He said he must be assured it would be £200,000. I doubt this being likely.’
The Disinherited Page 4