The Disinherited

by Robert Sackville-West

  See Notes on Chapter 10

  11

  ‘Sackville Tragedy in Paris Flat’

  In the small hours of the morning of 3 June 1914, a woman and her husband were found dead in their sparsely furnished lodgings at 75 Boulevard Suchet in Paris’s 16th arrondissement. Their names meant nothing to the concierge of the apartment building, or to the police. All the concierge could supply, by way of meagre details, was that the deceased had been a quiet, rather melancholy man, but seemed very kind and good-hearted nonetheless.

  It was only when the husband’s former brother-in-law, Gabriel Salanson, learned of the tragedy a few days later, and sent news of it to England, that the sorry story emerged, despite attempts to cloak it in secrecy. Reports surfaced in the English press a fortnight after the deaths, and the identity of the couple was made public.

  ‘Sackville Tragedy in Paris Flat: Grief-Stricken Claimant’s Suicide after Wife’s Death’ is how the Daily Mirror described the story on 16 June. The wife, Emélie, had died after a long illness at 3.15 a.m. on 3 June, and her husband, Ernest Henri Jean Baptiste Sackville West (Henry, for short) had stood for a moment by the bedside looking at her body. He asked one of the nurses whether all was over, and when she confirmed that his wife was dead, he is reported to have remarked: ‘It is fate. It is finished now for both of us.’ Reverently, he covered his wife’s face with a sheet, and ‘distracted with grief’, walked into the next room and shot himself in the head at 3.30 a.m. Max Maisonneuve, a Parisian lawyer and close friend, who had advised Henry throughout the legal proceedings in Spain, was with him when his wife died. ‘As I followed him from the room,’ reported Maisonneuve, ‘I was horrified to see him raise a pistol to his head. I sprang towards him to seize the weapon, but was too late. He fired, and fell back into my arms.’

  On 15 June, the New York Times reported an interview with Henry’s sister Amalia, who summarised her brother’s troubles since 1910, in particular his distress at the illness of a wife whom he adored. ‘I have a letter from a very close friend of my brother,’ Amalia claimed, ‘in which it is stated that immediately he was sure his wife was dead he went into another room and shot himself before any one could interfere – that is just what Sackville [a pointed reference to what she believed was his proper title] would do.’ Under the heading, ‘A Love Tragedy: Peerage Claimant’s Despair at Wife’s Death’, The Star, too, stressed the depth of a husband’s love for his ‘young’ wife (Emélie was, in fact, forty-five years old), and published photographs – dating from the time of the court case – of a proud-looking man with a bristling moustache, and the wife to whom he had been passionately devoted.

  Other newspapers emphasised different reasons for Henry’s despair. The ‘Tragedy of Great Peerage Romance’ (the Weekly Dispatch) recalled the loss of a major lawsuit four years before. In the New York Times, Maisonneuve was quoted as saying that Henry ‘never accepted the finding of the English court as to the legitimacy of his birth. A few weeks before his death he had decided, as soon as he could find sufficient funds, to make an attempt to bring the matter before the courts again. He was much embittered at the loss of his suit, and could hardly think of anything else. His wife’s illness came as a final blow.’

  Whereas the Sackvilles had returned to Knole in style after their victory, to take possession once again of the house that had been their family home for more than 300 years, Henry was greatly diminished. Stripped of the swagger that had distinguished earlier portraits, he had returned to France with his documents and his proofs, and a photograph album of his father’s castle in his suitcase.

  It seems that, for a few years, he and his wife ran a lodging-house in Monte Carlo. And it was here, in February 1911, that Victoria had a terrible fright on her annual trip to the Casino, when she spotted Henry and his wife in town. Her sister-in-law, Maud, ran after them to make quite sure that Victoria had not been mistaken. ‘What a bore!’ Victoria wrote in her diary. She had netted some £500 the previous month, and continued to be delighted by the day’s winnings, ‘But H has spoilt everything now.’ This was Victoria’s last reference to her brother in her diaries until his death over three years later.

  Emélie, however, had been diagnosed with cancer, and after a major operation her condition worsened to such an extent that she and Henry decided to move to Paris in search of better medical care. In April 1914, they rented a flat in the Boulevard Suchet, overlooking the Bois de Boulogne. No. 75 is now a modern apartment block; if its surviving neighbours at this end of the Boulevard Suchet are anything to go by, it was probably then a relatively modest three-storey villa.

  By now it was clear that Emélie’s end was fast approaching. Henry’s funds were severely depleted by the expenses of his wife’s illness – in particular, the two nurses he had engaged, and his desire, according to the reports, to gratify his wife’s ‘every whim in the matter of delicacies’. By the time of their deaths, they had just 10 francs in their possession, a simple bed, a few chairs and a table for furniture.

  Over the past decades, the progress around Paris of the illegitimate Sackvilles had traced, topographically, the gradual decline in their fortunes: from the Rue de Monceau, where the convent was located in a street of ‘hôtels particuliers’ backing onto that most elegant of Parisian parks, and the smart apartments near the Champs Elysées, where Flora and Gabriel lived soon after their marriage, to less fashionable areas, where in the late 1890s Flora and Henry dodged their creditors and lodged either together or within a few minutes’ walk of each other, encouraging each other in hopes of inherited wealth and hatred of Victoria. Henry’s final address in a shabby apartment completed that downward trajectory.

  A few days after their deaths, Henry and Emélie were buried side by side – as Henry had requested in a note he left behind – in the vast suburban cemetery of Bagneux, a couple of miles from Vanves, where Henry had attended the lycée and from where he had written Victoria those charming schoolboy letters in the 1870s. Their simple funeral was attended only by a sister and a nephew of the dead woman. Not a single relative of the dead man was there to mourn Henry. I have visited their modest grave – in the 26th Division of the cemetery, Ligne 9, Tombe 34 – the plain stone slab, paid for by a member of the Alexandre family, a contrast to the more ornate baroque memorials all around. Scraping the lichen off the stone to expose the names engraved in the granite, I was struck by the irony of the misspelt ‘Sakville’: Henry had spent half his life trying to establish a claim to the name and title ‘Sackville’, and yet even in death he was denied it.

  There were no reports of the deaths in the Parisian press. Here, the newspapers were dominated by international events – just over a month before the outbreak of the First World War – by outrage at the latest excesses of the suffragettes, or ‘femmes sauvages’ as they were known, and by reports of the terrible storms in the city. Buildings had been struck by lightning, the Place de la Concorde flooded, and the streets themselves destroyed by landslides and subsidence, with holes up to twenty feet deep opening in the pavements of Paris.

  There was, however, one reference in the French newspapers to Henry’s sister, Victoria. Lady Sackville happened to be in Paris, staying at the Hôtel Edward VII, on 16 June, the day the story about her brother’s suicide in penury broke in the English press. ‘Une personne des plus estimables et de beaucoup de goût’, she had just sold the art collection she had inherited from Sir John Murray Scott to the French dealer Jacques Seligmann for £270,000. The reporter from Le Gaulois catalogued the Gobelins tapestries, the paintings by Boucher and Le Prince, and the magnificent furniture, ‘ébloui de tant de merveilles’.

  Sir John had himself inherited this collection from Sir Richard Wallace and his wife, who had employed him for many years as their private secretary. On her death in 1897, Lady Wallace left the English half of the collection to the nation, forming what is now the Wallace Collection. But the French half she left to Sir John. This collection was housed at No. 2 Rue Laffitte, on the corne
r of the Boulevard des Italiens, not far from the hotel where Vita’s grandfather Lionel had first made Pepita’s acquaintance. It was here that the Sackvilles often stayed on their trips to Paris. Vita described this treasure house, which drew visitors ‘from every part of Europe’, in Pepita:

  Room after room opened one into the other, so that, standing in the middle, one could look down a vista of shining brown parquet floors and ivory-coloured boiseries on either side. Here, indeed, one had the eighteenth-century illusion at its height. The traffic might rumble down the boulevard outside and the cries of Paris echo muffled beyond the slatted shutters, but inside the rooms there was no hint, even in the smallest detail, of the modern world. No telephone, no electric light; nothing but wax candles in the heavy ormolu candelabra on the tables and in the sconces on the walls; no bells, save those that one could jangle by pulling a thick silken rope ending in an immense tassel. Even on the writing-tables the little sifters were always kept full of sand, and the pens were long quills, with a knife laid ready to sharpen them. All around, silent and sumptuous, stood the priceless furniture of the Wallace Collection. Chairs and sofas of brocade and petit point; tables and consoles with the voluptuous curves of Louis Quinze or the straight lines of Louis Seize; the bronze sphinxes of the early Regency; the tortoiseshell and buhl of Louis Quatorze; the marqueterie of rose-wood and lemon-wood; the ormolu mouldings of Caffieri, sporting into shells and cupids, into the horned heads of rams and cloven hoofs of satyrs; endless clocks, all ticking, and all exactly right, chiming the quarters together; the library full of rich bindings, all stamped with the Hertford crest; the faded gilt of the panellings; the tapestries where hirsute gods and rosy goddesses reclined on clouds; the heavy curtains, – all was untouched perfection of its kind, even to the exquisitely chased fastenings to the windows and differently modelled keys to every door.

  On his death in 1912, Seery left Victoria £150,000 and the contents of Rue Laffitte with the intention that these precious objects should be housed at Knole. The bulk of his fortune of £1,180,000 was to be divided between his two brothers and two sisters but, despite this, the Scott family contested Seery’s will, claiming that Lady Sackville had exercised ‘undue influence’ over Seery in his dotage. Before the case – dubbed ‘The Million-Pound Lawsuit’ in the press – was settled, the house on Rue Laffitte was placed under legal seal, and none of the objects within could be viewed. Nevertheless, Jacques Seligmann agreed a price for its contents sight unseen, on the basis of the sketchiest of inventories and his knowledge of the Wallace Collection, and committed to purchasing them in the event that Victoria won the case, which she did. Seligmann’s gamble had paid off. His son Germain described with relief the moment they were allowed at last to inspect the collection at 2 Rue Laffitte. It was ‘like entering Ali Baba’s cave . . . All over the floors, piled up in corners, some carefully covered with slips, others wrapped in papers or, more often, with only a heavy coating of dust to protect them from sight, were some of the greatest sculptures of the eighteenth century and luxurious pieces of furniture made for the royal family. There, rolled in a corner, was the famous set of tapestries after cartoons by Boucher, now in the Philadelphia Museum . . . Yonder was the superb Houdon bust of Sophie Arnould, now in the Louvre.’

  As Victoria, then, was finalising her deal with Seligmann for what was one of the finest collections of eighteenth-century French sculpture and furniture in private hands, and planning how to spend the proceeds, her brother lay dead on the other side of Paris in possession of a simple bed, a few chairs and a table.

  Victoria herself barely commented on her brother’s suicide in her diary. ‘Henry wrote for money which we sent him to help with his wife’s illness and he committed suicide on the 3rd after her death, poor fellow. The papers are full of it today . . .’ was the extent of her summary of recent events. She was equally taken up with the storms in Paris, the sale of her Scott inheritance and the arrival from Constantinople en route for London of the pregnant Vita and her husband Harold Nicolson. They had married the previous year and appeared so wrapped up in each other that Victoria felt barely wanted. ‘Great storm in Paris yesterday,’ she wrote in her diary on 16 June, ‘great chasms on account of rush of water; I was very near the very place yesterday, trying to sell Napoleon’s service de campagne . . . for £10,000.’

  The next day, Victoria went to the studio of Auguste Rodin, with whom she was conducting a mildly flirtatious relationship. Here she found the great sculptor ‘miserably unhappy’ with his companion of fifty years, Rose Beuret. Victoria had become friends with Rodin when he visited London in May 1913, and Rodin came to Knole the following month. By November she was sitting for him in his studios in Paris and the South of France. Rodin adored the flattery – and money – of the Society beauties who sat for him, and Victoria, who always craved adulation, was equally flattered by the attentions of the seventy-four-year-old sculptor, although she had no real appreciation of his art (she frequently criticised his work, much preferring the style of the French eighteenth century – the style of the works of art in the Rue Laffitte – to the rougher, more realistic style of Rodin). Rodin compared his relationship with Victoria to that of Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna, the Roman noblewoman to whom the great Renaissance artist had addressed some of his finest sonnets. He kept telling her how beautiful she was – ‘Quelles belles épaules’, he muttered repeatedly – ‘and yet the bust is perfectly hideous up to now’, thought Victoria, ‘I look like a fat negress with pouting lips.’

  Victoria’s letters to Rodin over the next few days, signed ‘votre modèle’, referred to the suicide of ‘un très proche parent’ and the debts he had left, but as an inconvenience among many other ‘ennuis considérables’ that prevented her from spending the day with the sculptor; and she berated him for not sending a single word of sympathy on her bereavement.

  The following week, Victoria was back in London, consulting the family solicitors about paying Henry’s debts and the expenses of his funeral, such as they were (in July she sent £100). She instructed Pemberton not to write to the papers to contradict suggestions that she had failed to help Henry. But by July she was more preoccupied with the Scott family, who continued to create difficulties over Victoria’s share of the Wallace Collection. ‘Ces Scotts!’ she wrote to Rodin, ‘Je les voudrais au fond de la Seine!!’

  Henry’s suicide had an effect on Victoria more profound than she was prepared to admit at the time. The last entry in her diary for the year 1914 was on 5 September, and she did not take it up again until the following July. In the intervening months, she obviously suffered a nervous breakdown. In January 1915, when she first sought treatment from Dr Woods, she was, she claimed, ‘depressed enough to take [her] own life’. She hated ‘that horrid war’ and Lionel’s departure for the Dardanelles; Vita’s preoccupation with her own husband and newborn baby; Harold’s rudeness; the installation of Lionel’s mistress, Olive Rubens, with her complaisant husband Walter, in a flat at Knole; and the ‘dreadful hurricane’ at Knole after Christmas, in which a tree fell on the car carrying one of their guests back to the house. But top of her list of worries had been the ‘shock’ and ‘worry’ of Henry’s suicide, including the money she had paid for his expenses.

  Victoria credited Dr Woods with having given her a ‘new lease of life’. By July 1915, she claimed that she now accepted ‘life more or less as it comes’ and was ‘very much more philosophical in every way’. ‘I want to be happy,’ she wrote, ‘& radiate happiness and have “Peace within”.’ Any ‘Peace within’, however, must have involved the suppression of all memories of her brother; of the childish letters he had written her, describing how much he had cried when she left for her convent in Paris; of the shopping trips on which she took him to outfit him for a new life in South Africa; of the shared gratitude he admitted to her once that he felt towards their father; and, finally, of the furious figure glaring at her across the courtroom. And any ‘Peace within’ must also have come at the
expense of her other siblings, of whom, after Henry’s death, there is barely a mention in her voluminous correspondence or diaries.

  See Notes on Chapter 11

  12

  Victims of Circumstance

  After the court case, relations between Victoria and her sisters were strained to breaking-point. In less than a month, Amalia was writing to Lionel to ask whether he and Victoria intended to continue the allowance of £200 a year they had given her since 1908. Lionel replied that, at the time of her father’s death, he had not been aware of the ‘active part’ she had played ‘in helping Henry to bring his action against me and involve me in all the unnecessary expense which this lawsuit has entailed’. Under the circumstances, he continued, he must decline to make her an allowance, ‘however much I regret the circumstances in which you find yourself’. Nor, as he told his friends, had he been aware at the time of the large sums of money Amalia had received from her friends for ‘the express object of helping H. to pay his legal expenses’. It was, he felt, up to ‘these friends to help her now that she finds herself, through her own ill-advised conduct, in such unfortunate circumstances’.

  Amalia turned for assistance to her very grand first cousins: Gilbert, 8th Earl De La Warr, and Herbrand, 11th Duke of Bedford. For whatever reason – genuine concern at Amalia’s near destitution, some sympathy with Henry’s claim, or a desire to avoid more scandal engulfing the extended Sackville family – the Duke of Bedford offered Amalia £200 a year, on condition she lived abroad. Amalia – unfoundedly – blamed Lionel for persuading Herbrand to make this condition, which she described as ‘absolutely downright wicked’. ‘It is no doubt your wife’s wish to get me out of her way,’ she wrote to Lionel; ‘She knows it is absolutely impossible for a girl to live abroad alone without running the risk of having the worst said of her. I am fully aware knowing the hatred she bears me that such a move would be a great feather in her cap but for my father’s sake I decline to afford her that pleasure.’ Her letter ended with a warning: ‘There will come a day when you will have to part with all your worldly possessions that you cannot prevent happening & all I pray for is when that day comes God may spare you both the punishment such cruelty deserves.’ In the end, Amalia turned down the Duke’s offer.