The Disinherited

by Robert Sackville-West

  Lionel’s siblings had every reason to distrust him. When Mary had the jewels, on which the security for the loan was based, assessed in England, their value was ‘miserably low’ – and far less than the valuation Lionel had had done in Paris. His siblings insisted that, as a condition of a new loan to him of £5,000 from the North British Insurance Company (to be repaid out of his salary), the jewels and the plate, which he had offered as security for previous loans from family members, must now be turned into hard cash. The silver that Lionel would need for his embassy in South America would have to be electroplate. Writing to William Edward in May, Mary quite understood Lionel’s ‘feelings of parting with the plate & jewels (those that belonged to Mama) but after all, she would have wished to leave them for such an emergency’. Mary went on to explain how her ‘great object in getting the plate disposed of out of your hands & his, is simply in plain words this – As long as there is anything to raise money upon, depend upon it, it will be raised. In these matters it has been so since the world began.’ The sisters and their husbands were not only much richer than Lionel, but also more worldly wise, alert to the way in which funds could be raised several times over on the same security.

  Lionel himself was obtuse about the arrangements that were being made on his behalf, feigning ignorance of what was being done, or blaming the family solicitors for any delays. He was enjoying life in Argentina, writing to William Edward from Buenos Aires on 5 September 1873: ‘There is everything to be had. Riding, Shooting, Boating, Clubs & Theatres, & a splendid Climate . . . I have two gunboats.’ But he was running into further financial difficulties, and there were repeated requests from his bankers, Maynard, Harris & Crice, for further funds to cover the bills he was forwarding them from Argentina. Lionel promised to live more cheaply next year, by giving up his house and his cook, and even suggested to William Edward that the plate and jewels should be sold to ‘square’ Maynard – conveniently forgetting that these already formed the security for previous loans from his brother. Mary hoped that ‘he might have found a nice person with some money whom he might have married out there, but this does not seem likely I fear’.

  Instead, she and her husband continued to bail Lionel out, sending the bank £300 in October 1874, when ‘the last grain of sand’ threatened to ‘break Messrs. Maynards’ back for Lionel’. She was endlessly forgiving of her feckless brother. ‘I really do not think he has recklessly run into difficulties again,’ she wrote to William Edward, ‘but it was absolutely impossible for him to live upon £1,000 at B. Ayres’ and to support the children. ‘Lionel’s letter to you confirms my belief that he never understands a word of business. And strengthens my wish and Lord Derby’s to exhort you to sell the plate and get your £1,000 back safely.’ Predictably, the plate had been revalued in London at two-thirds of the value on which the security had been raised. ‘How wonderful is Lionel’s inaccuracy & forgetfulness about money! I cannot the least see what is to come & what is to be the end, except that Bessie & I shall have to go on paying! Some people say it is better thus than that things should get into a muddle again. Perhaps it is, but anyhow it is inconvenient.’

  There was, of course, the house in Arcachon. The Earl of Derby had located the Villa Pepa on a trip to France in November 1873, but a year later it was still unlet and therefore providing no income towards the £1,000 annual cost of bringing up the five children. There was also some doubt as to who actually owned the house. It was hard to get a straight answer from Lionel, so in November 1874, the Derbys started making enquiries. Mary wrote to Béon asking whether the French property belonged to Lionel or the children, and also tried to find out what the situation was under French inheritance laws. ‘If Lionel is so muddle-headed about the plate and jewels,’ she wrote, ‘he is probably ten times more ignorant about French law & c. I hope a crash may be averted meanwhile, but I do not see very clearly how.’

  The reason for the confusion was that, by a deed of gift in 1868, Lionel had made the Villa Pepa over to Pepita. On her death, therefore, it belonged to her estate, rather than to Lionel, and thereby to her estranged husband, Juan Antonio de Oliva. In the sort of conundrum that would be played out in the courts decades later, Lionel could not have it both ways: if he had married Pepita some time in the mid-1860s, Henry was his eldest legitimate son; if he had not married Pepita, the villa belonged to Oliva.

  Oliva was discouraged initially from taking his claim further by the strength of the forces ranged against him: the Derbys and the Bedfords, two of the wealthiest families in England. In August 1876, however, the state-appointed trustees of Pepita’s estate sold the Villa Pepa to a Monsieur Lesca for 100,050 francs and, three months later, Oliva, backed speculatively by a firm of Bordeaux wine merchants, claimed the whole of his late wife’s estate, including the Villa Pepa, for himself and his son Max. A tribunal in Bordeaux decided, in 1879, that Oliva, as Pepita’s lawful husband, was entitled to an account of her estate from the state-appointed trustees, subject to any liabilities. As it happened, these liabilities, including court costs, were to absorb the assets, and Oliva was never to receive anything from the proceedings. But the judgement did have the significant effect of establishing in a French court that Pepita and Oliva had stayed married.

  There was a grisly postscript to the story of the Arcachon years. In September 1896, a quarter of a century after Pepita’s death, her youngest son Henry visited the town with his brother-in-law, Gabriel Salanson. They were there to collect evidence in support of Henry’s claim to legitimacy, and needed to establish that Pepita had been a woman of ‘good repute’, whom people believed at the time had been married to Lionel. First, however, they needed to confirm that the woman buried in the cemetery that freezing March day had indeed been Pepita, and to this end they arranged to have her body exhumed. It took some time for the cemetery keeper, accompanying the Chief of Police and Dr Hameau (who had been the Sackville Wests’ doctor while they were in Arcachon and whose wife Marie had been a pall-bearer at Pepita’s funeral) to find the grave because there was no headstone. But eventually they found the site, and three or four workmen, plus a carpenter, Monsieur Comdom, opened the grave and took the coffin out. According to the cemetery keeper, ‘the body was quite life-like and as if she would speak’ (it had been embalmed) and Pepita was identified; ‘Mr. Henry West appeared to be very much upset and grieved, and he cried on the occasion of the opening of the coffin’. The coffin was then closed up and placed in the depository, awaiting further instructions from Henry and Gabriel who intended to have the body re-interred and a monument erected. Months passed without instruction, and there the body remained.

  For the rest of her life, the middle child, Amalia, cherished the memory of her mother. In 1900, she applied from England for a six-metre square plot in the cemetery at Arcachon, and Pepita’s body was taken out of the depository and laid to rest again, joining in the heathland above Arcachon the servants with whom she had squabbled, the neighbours who had spied on her, and some of the founding fathers of what was now a very prosperous town. It was Amalia who renewed the concession for the plot when it expired in 1915, and again in 1927, a full fifty-six years after her mother’s death. Finally, in 1971 – by coincidence, a century after Pepita’s death – when there was no one left to renew the concession, Pepita’s body was taken out of the ground for a second time and her bones consigned to a communal ossuary on the outskirts of the town.

  See Notes on Chapter 1

  2

  Lost in Translation

  After Pepita’s death in 1871, the children remained in the care of their mother’s friends, the Béons. Max was sent to school in Bordeaux, while the others stayed on initially at the Villa Pepa in Arcachon. Here they continued their secluded existence, shuttered from the world. Their father, on the other hand, as his granddaughter Vita later observed, was not the sort of ‘man ever to enjoy dealing with a difficult situation’, and having escaped to Buenos Aires as British Minister to the Argentine Republic in 1873 (or more
properly, Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary), he stayed in the post until 1878, when he was transferred to Madrid.

  There is an account of what it was like to arrive in the Argentinian capital at the time. Marion Mulhall, who was later to play a significant role in the lives of the Sackville West children, had accompanied her husband to Argentina, where he edited the first English-language newspaper in South America. In Between the Amazon and the Andes, or Ten Years of a Lady’s Travels, Mrs Mulhall described her first impressions of the place as ‘unfavourable, owing to the difficulties that attended our landing’. As she made her way ashore, ‘along the slippery planks, through a drizzling rain, we had to be very careful of the numerous holes that occurred at intervals, for [these] had already put so many people hors-de-combat that the municipality had set apart a special ward in the hospital for the victims of this “bridge of sighs”’. The rains lasted three days, leaving more than a dozen dead horses floating in the flooded streets, and in one place a shattered brougham, whose driver had been drowned. ‘Storms of this kind occur generally in March and September,’ she reported, ‘very often preceded by extraordinary signs, such as a shower of beetles, dead mice, or fish. The beetles fall almost as thick as snowflakes; the fish rise in waterspouts in front of the city, and are then blown inland over the houses; and as for the mice, it is supposed they come from Patagonia.’ She went on to describe an outbreak in early 1871 of a plague, with symptoms similar to yellow fever, in which 26,000 people died. These included 270 members, or about a sixth, of the British community.

  Lionel’s account of Argentina on arrival was more favourable. He wrote to Victoria, in French, about all the ‘pretty flowers and birds’, and about his journeys on horseback to the mountains of the interior, where he had seen lions and tigers, and he promised to teach his oldest daughter to ride on his return. During the five years he was in South America, Lionel wrote to Victoria occasionally, but never to his other children – encouraging the belief that she was to hold for the rest of her life that ‘she was always his favourite, as I had been my mother’s’. He was, as he told Béon from Buenos Aires, ‘so busy and bothered that it is impossible for me to gather my thoughts’, or to answer letters from Flora or Max. There was also the distraction of the ‘fearful’, suffocating heat, and so, half-heartedly, he simply asked Béon to pass on a ‘thousand kisses’ to his children.

  Before leaving for Argentina, Lionel had made an agreement with Béon, which was to be the source of much future argument. Béon was to accept charge of the children and an apartment in Paris, where he and his mother were to live with the children and for which Lionel was to pay the rent. The signed agreement contained a schedule of the articles of furniture in the apartment, and between 1873 and the summer of 1876, when Lionel returned on a visit to Europe, Béon was reduced to selling many of these, as he later claimed, to defray expenses.

  In 1874, Lionel authorised Béon to act as his agent in the sale of the Villa Pepa and the house at 200 Avenue d’Eylau in Paris. He was in debt again, but reassured Béon that he would do everything he could to keep him out of trouble: ‘You do not know how I suffer. It seems as if I was destined to be always in a sad position and what affects me the most is that I place you in the same . . . It is a consolation to have a friend such as you, and one who has done for me what no one else would have done.’ As Béon’s goodwill towards the family began to leave him out of pocket, he became increasingly keen for Lionel to return to France to settle his account and pay for the expense of bringing up the children.

  While her younger siblings moved in with the Béons, Victoria was sent to board at a convent run by the Sisters of St Joseph de Belley, at 17 Rue de Monceau in the newly fashionable 8th arrondissement (on the site of a school, the Cours Saint Louis, later attended by former President Nicolas Sarkozy). The area had been developed during the Second Empire by the same Pereire brothers who had transformed Arcachon, and had largely escaped the devastation suffered in other parts of Paris just a couple of years previously. The banks of the Seine still bore the scars of the uprising in 1871, when symbols of imperial power from the Palais de Justice to the Tuileries had been turned to rubble and ash by insurgents. Further damage – and the loss of tens of thousands of lives – had been caused two months later, when government troops retook the capital from the Communards.

  The Rue de Monceau itself consisted largely of grand ‘hôtels particuliers’ built for the big Jewish financial families. The Camondos lived at No. 61, the Rothschilds at No. 43–7, and the Ephrussis at No. 81. It was here that the young collector Charles Ephrussi displayed Impressionist paintings by Berthe Morisot, Manet, Monet, Pissarro and Renoir, and assembled his collection of Japanese netsuke. And it was down the Rue de Monceau that Charles would stroll in his top hat and black frock coat, on his way to the offices of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts for which he contributed articles.

  Madeleine Lemaire was another familiar sight in the Rue de Monceau, as she took her afternoon walk surrounded by a flock of dogs. Mme Lemaire lived at No. 31, and painted flowers in a large glass pavilion in her garden; from April onwards, the scent of her lilac trees wafted into the street, causing passers-by to stop. Her speciality was roses (of which one lover claimed she had created more than anyone except God), but she was equally celebrated as a Society hostess, a ‘strangely powerful person’, whom Marcel Proust used as one of several models for Mme Verdurin in A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Crowds of artists, musicians, poets, playwrights and clubmen thronged to her salon, spilling on summer evenings out of the studio into the garden itself, while their carriages waited outside and clogged the street.

  Victoria’s life at No. 17 was very different. Conditions at the boarding school, which had been founded by the Sisters of St Joseph in 1851, were spartan but, as the prospectus insisted, salubrious. For fees of 1,000 francs per annum, parents could park their daughters there for most of the year. The girls were only allowed out one day a month, and, in addition to the summer vacation, for two brief holidays at the New Year and at Easter, and even those could be spent with the nuns, for a supplement of 150 francs.

  Photographs and illustrations of the time show a large institution, arranged around two courtyards. The classrooms, dormitories and an infirmary overlook a large walled garden, where girls ranging in age from five to eighteen play or simply sit under the trees. The school’s regime, the prospectus continued, was ‘maternel’, with the nuns participating in all aspects of the lives of the girls in their care, eating with them and sleeping in the same dormitories. It was hoped that, this way, the Réligieuses would instil in their pupils ‘une piété solide’, good judgement and feelings of respect, gratitude and love for their parents – the last a rather tall order in the case of the Sackville West girls.

  Victoria would probably have started in the deuxième classe, with a curriculum that included religious instruction, arithmetic, geography, ancient history, French history and English. But she would have had some catching up to do because she was, at eleven on entry, barely able to read and write, never having had lessons before. Victoria was miserable at what she described as her ‘inhuman Convent’, although she did manage to recall it later with some humorous detachment. ‘Just think!’ she wrote to Vita. ‘Fifty years ago, a little girl of 12, all dressed in white and wearing a long tulle veil, was kneeling trembling at the altar in the Convent Chapel, for her “First Communion” and hoped she would become the Bride of Christ, who filled all her dreams of Love in those days. And that little girl is your broad-minded old Mama who, fortunately for her, did not become the Bride of Christ and does not sing any more ridiculous cantiques [hymns] such as this one she sang softly that memorable day . . .’

  The little girl disliked the cold (the rooms, the prospectus claimed, were all ‘parfaitement aérés’), the discomfort and the discipline, and resented the fact that she was no longer Mademoiselle Pepita, as she had been known by her family in Arcachon, but ‘Mademoiselle quarante-deux’. This was the nu
mber marked on all the clothes that comprised her regulation trousseau: the eighteen handkerchiefs, eight nightcaps, six petticoats, eight pairs of stockings, three dresses – all black, for ‘L’uniforme est noir; il est de rigueur dans la maison.’

  Victoria’s father was uneasy about her status, too, but for other reasons. When the mothers of schoolfriends asked Victoria to stay with them, Lionel was unsure how he and the Béons should respond, for he wanted to protect her from the possibility, through such encounters, of learning the painful truth about her past. The sense of social exclusion that had started across the garden wall separating the Villa Pepa from the Johnstons’ villa in Arcachon continued, as the secrets and lies surrounding her status compromised her capacity to have friends.

  Victoria rarely visited the Béons, and when she did she was instructed, like the other children, to keep away from the drawing room or any other room where there might be visitors to the house. At first they were told by Béon that this was because a man called Oliva was out to kidnap Henry and his sisters (it was around 1876 that Pepita’s husband Oliva had reappeared to institute legal proceedings in Bordeaux, and Lionel had asked Béon to do whatever was ‘needful’ to conduct proceedings on his behalf). But the reasons for keeping the children out of the reception rooms also included the fact that the Count felt it inappropriate to introduce illegitimate children to his friends.

  With Max away at boarding school in Bordeaux, the roles within the family were soon established. Encouraged by her father at a distance, Victoria assumed the role of responsible older sister and dutiful daughter. Lionel counted on Victoria to be ‘sage et obéissante’, particularly to Madame de Béon, and to take good care of the family, and he promised to make it up to her on his return. He was particularly keen that Victoria should look after Flora when she joined her older sister at the convent. Victoria, in turn, relished the power her role conferred, and found the memory of it too delicious ever to relinquish in later life.