Except to me, because even this silent courtyard door speaks loudly of Nancy Mitford. Behind this door is an eighteenth-century pavilion. Nancy Mitford lived from 1947 to 1967 in the ground floor apartment leading onto the courtyard. I know from photographs and descriptions that the apartment was neither large nor grand, but furnished with a few fine screens, antiques and fresh flowers. Here Nancy Mitford wrote her books and letters, wearing her Dior dresses and a small string of pearls, slender and upright, holding a long pen and inscribing with a clear, square hand. She was a single working woman and, though she eschewed such a pretentious term, she was an artist. Sometimes the local children played loudly in the courtyard, breaking her concentration. Sometimes her eyes hurt and she had to put down her pen. And often her friends rang her up to gossip – they too were a distraction. As if to bring the past to life, the courtyard doors momentarily draw open, and a group of pretty French children spill onto the street, laughing and shouting. I glimpse the cobblestones and the white windows before the doors are drawn closed and the street falls silent again.
These courtyard gates opened to welcome an astonishing array of guests. Evelyn Waugh was a regular visitor. Anthony Eden, Clive Bell, Cecil Beaton, Noel Coward, sister Diana Mosley and numerous French aristocrats and intellectuals all came by. Nancy entertained with small dinner parties and lunches. But though she had a hectic social life, her letters make it clear that she also spent much of her time alone. If her maid, Marie, wasn’t there to cook for her, she didn’t eat a thing – she boasted that she couldn’t even boil an egg for herself.
I am staring blindly at the courtyard gates when a dapper old gentleman in cap and slip-on shoes strolls past me and stops.
‘Are you looking for something?’
‘Well, um, yes,’ I fumble. ‘Or rather, someone. I believe Nancy Mitford lived here?’ Monsieur tilts his cap cautiously. ‘She was an English writer,’ I add.
‘Well,’ he says, in a practiced way, ‘I know the film star who lives up there. See the second floor? And one of our greatest historians lived just down there. Just at the end of the street, can you see? That’s where Lamartine lived.’ For a moment he looks cross. ‘What did this English lady write about?’
‘She wrote about love,’ I reply.
‘Ah.’ He smiles, pleased. ‘Here is a story about love. You saw the beautiful Pagode on the corner. (Yes, Nancy refers to it in her letters, it was her local cinema.) ‘It was built by Monsieur Boucicaut, the proprietor of Au Bon Marché [the department store]. He was very much in love with his wife, a beautiful and fashionable woman. She craved a Chinese pagoda. Why? It didn’t matter. Unable to resist her whims, he had it built for her. It took months. But as soon as it was built she ran away with another man, breaking his heart.’
He pauses for effect. ‘It was a love story, but so sad, so sad …’ Then he tilts his cap again and ambles away down the quiet street.
Love was Nancy Mitford’s business. She wrote three books with that word in the title: Love in a Cold Climate, The Pursuit of Love and Voltaire in Love.
Love in Nancy Mitford’s world breaks all kinds of taboos. There’s Linda’s love affair with Fabrice: he won’t marry her and sets her up as his mistress. Or Grace’s love affair with Charles-Edouard: he sleeps around and visits one of his mistresses for ‘tea’ every day. Then there’s Cedric, the gay Canadian, who emerges as the true heroine of Love in a Cold Climate. By the end of the novel Cedric has established a ménage à trois with Lady Montdore and Boy Dougdale.
Nancy Mitford’s non-fiction lovers had even stranger love lives. Louis XV’s official mistress, Madame de Pompadour, didn’t particularly like sex, so Louis established a personal brothel to service him sexually. And Voltaire’s love affair with Emilie de Châtelet ended with her dying in childbirth to another man while Voltaire was sending love letters to his own niece. (You call this Love? Why not! responds Nancy Mitford.)
The great love of Nancy Mitford’s own life was a Frenchman, Gaston Palewski. She was forty-two years old and unhappily married when they met in war-time London. After the war she threw over her life and moved to Paris to be near him. He was the prototype for her characters Fabrice and Charles-Edouard – a clever, vain, elusive man. When Palewski refused to marry Nancy Mitford, she told herself at first that it was because she was married, but after her divorce it became clear that Palewski simply wasn’t in love with her. So she became one of his several mistresses, and their affair followed the usual pattern: she relegated all other friendships to second place; she refrained from overt gestures of affection in public; and she arranged her timetable to his convenience. This went on for years, surviving Palewski’s marriage in 1969 to a French aristocrat and continuing right up until her death in 1973.
If I had a friend who was proposing to live her life the way Nancy Mitford lived hers, I would feel obliged to give her a strong sister-to-sister talking to about wasting her life on a no-good, two-timing, low-down, absolute and utter bastard who didn’t deserve her.
But, if my friend were like Nancy Mitford, nothing I could say would make a gram of difference. Nancy Mitford was well aware what people thought, and she couldn’t have cared less. She wrote to Evelyn Waugh: I suppose you think I’m a whore & my immortal soul is in danger. About once a week, for a few minutes it worries me that you should think so.
Nancy accepted her status as the second-string mistress of a philandering Frenchman. But most of her friends couldn’t. They assumed that she had a sad romantic flatness in her life, concealed under the champagne fizz of her writing. I suspect they were wrong.
In life, it seems to me, there are few things more mysterious to us than other people’s romantic relationships, except possibly our own. Nancy’s relationship with Palewski astounded people to the end, and after. Her sister Diana said: She had a very happy full life, but the only thing that went wrong in her life really, was the men in it. They were hopeless.
Nancy Mitford was clearly not a woman of her times, but nor was she ahead of her times. She was a classicist. The traditions she looked to were pre-Romantic. That’s why she wrote biographies of eighteenth-century figures like Voltaire and Madame de Pompadour. She rejected the notion of modern romantic love, with its anti-social tendencies, individualistic narcissism, bourgeois emphasis on marriage and children, climactic highs and inevitable lows. She wanted to celebrate classical love – love which, at its best, was sober, understated, unsentimental and deep, and absolutely unrelated to marriage or children.
Here is an excerpt from The Blessing. The very English Grace has just been introduced to her French in-laws, including Charles-Edouard’s grandmother.
‘Who is the old man?’
‘M. de la Bourlie? He’s my grandmother’s lover.’
‘Her lover?’ Grace was very much startled. ‘Isn’t she rather old to have a lover?’
‘Has age to do with love?’ Charles-Edouard looked so much surprised that Grace said, ‘Oh well – I only thought. Anyway, perhaps there’s nothing in it.’
He roared with laughter, saying, ‘How English you are. But M. de la Bourlie has visited my grandmother every single day for forty-six years, and in such a case you may be sure that there is always love.’
Nancy Mitford snatched this lovely scene straight from history.
In 1662, the ageing duc de La Rochefoucauld fell in love with the youthful Madame de Lafayette. Until his death in 1680, every day he climbed the great hill on the Left Bank from rue Bonaparte to rue Vaugirard to visit his mistress. In Madame de Lafayette’s cozy salon they pored over his maxims, and refined her novella of passion, La Princesse de Clèves, which Nancy Mitford would translate into English three hundred years later. The couple never displayed affection in public or gave the least sign of their attachment to each other. But they spent every day together. One of their friends, Madame de Sévigné’s cousin, Bussy-Rabutin, remarked of their relationship: In such cases there is always love, and even when old age has intervened there is still something l
eft which, in the eyes of the Church, is as inadmissible as love itself.
This story was very important to Nancy Mitford; she told it many times as fact and fiction. To her it signalled the perfection of the classical love story. There must have been a deep resonance for her in La Rochefoucauld’s opinion that Good marriages do exist, but not delectable ones.
Nancy Mitford was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease shortly after relocating to Versailles in 1967. The disease meant years of excruciating pain and multiple operations. As her illness advanced, she stopped receiving most visitors, preferring to conduct her friendships by letter. Gaston Palewski was one of the few whom she saw.
One morning her lover of nearly thirty years had a sudden and overwhelming intuition. He hurriedly made the trip from Paris to Versailles, and arrived just as Nancy was falling into unconsciousness. He sat beside Nancy and took her hand. He thought he saw her smile. He was the last person to see her before her death.
It was a fitting end to her own entirely classical romance.
As I wander down rue Monsieur, the old man returns on the other side. We bow and smile to each other as we pass by.
‘We are going to a house,’ says Rachel emphatically, ‘a house. Why are these people dressed for a hiking trip to the wilderness?’
Rachel and I are on the train to Versailles, and frankly, this is not an inspiring start to the trip. The Americans look appalling. What is it with microfiber tracksuits and huge sports shoes?
‘Maybe they think they’ll need a helicopter rescue,’ I say, ‘and it’ll be easier to pick them out in those fluorocolors.’
‘And why,’ asks Rachel, ‘do they need great hulking backpacks with supplies for a month?’
I once read an article about Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in the early days of their famous and golden marriage. In a gesture of extreme romanticism, one that had a Hollywood Roi Soleil kind of grandeur about it, Tom Cruise acquired Versailles for a day. According to the reports, the beautiful couple wandered hand-in-hand through the gardens and the château. Alone, untroubled. No queues, no hawkers, no backpacks blocking their view. Just their radiant orthodontic perfection and the glories of Versailles. I remember feeling a bitter pang both at their privileged access to beauty and history, and, snobbishly, peevishly, at their ignorant unworthiness of it.
But now I wonder: what could those two possibly have thought of it all? The main château at Versailles is, I think, rather a disappointment at first. It’s far less grand than you expect. And there are certainly prettier places in Paris itself – the Hôtel de Soubise for example, in the Marais, gives you a far better sense of aristocratic seventeenth-century living. As you wander Versailles you feel rather disconcerted by the empty rooms, the cracked mirrors, the uneven layout. In the main château at least, there isn’t the parade of revolution-provoking excess that the visitor secretly craves.
The thing is, Versailles unpeopled makes no sense. The whole point of Versailles was the crowd. The soldiers, the courtesans, the nobles, the gawking foreigners, the aspirants, the supplicants. Like Tom and Nicole, the Roi Soleil needed an audience. I think about this as we pass the African hawkers at the gate, and the busloads of Germans, and the hiking Americans. All the world came to Versailles to pay homage to the aura of power around the Sun King. All the world still does.
This time, however, Rachel and I aren’t going to do the regular tour. Three days ago I rang and organized for us to attend a tour of Les Petits Appartements de Louis XV or, as we gleefully referred to them, the mistresses’ rooms. The voice I spoke to was very polite and very competent. I was careful to make sure I understood what she said and to make myself understood in return. I may have asked her one time too many to repeat dates and times to be sure that I had got it right. But on the whole I thought my French wasn’t too bad. Not too bad at all.
Evidently she didn’t agree.
‘Madame, I assure you that all conversation will be in French. There will be NO opportunity for discussion of any kind whatsoever at all in English.’
‘OK,’ I said.
‘You will follow the tour exactly as instructed.’
‘OK,’ I said.
‘There will be no opportunity for you to ask any questions.’
‘OK,’ I said. Gee.
At the entrance it’s not hard to spot our group. The men and women are on average five kilos lighter than the hikers. The women wear light trench-coats and scarves, with sensible court shoes and handbags. Their hair is shiny, short and neat. The men all wear tailored jackets. Rachel and I have found ourselves among the French bourgeoisie, practical, sober, nicely cut. Our tour guide is another refined and solemn French woman. We sidle up behind them as our tour begins: mortified by my telephonic rebuke, Rachel and I are determined to blend into the group just as neatly as two slices in a baguette basket.
Our first stop is an engraving of the famous Ball of the Clipped Yew Trees, where the King seduced Jeanne, Madame d’Etioles, later Madame de Pompadour. The ball took place, we are told, in February 1745, when Jeanne was just twenty-four years old. For this masked ball the King devised a unique romantic ploy. He and seven other men covered their heads in tall masks, shaped like clipped yew trees. Everyone knew the King was under one of these ridiculous masks, bobbing loftily around the ballroom, but it was impossible to tell which one. While one of his fellow conspirators kept a hopeful Duchesse conspicuously engaged, the King dashed into the corner with the pretty and accomplished Madame d’Etioles. It was the beginning of the love affair that lasted until she died twenty years later.
I smile, at the solemn rendition as much as at the absurd tale. Rachel chuckles as she examines the engraving. But the rest of the group merely nods gravely. A kingly romance, even conducted under a tree mask two feet high, is apparently no laughing matter.
Now we head up the stairs to Les petits appartements. We wander through a series of small and charming rooms, and rooms within rooms, which are clearly made for living, not posing. There’s lovely gold and white wood panelling and gilded fireplaces and a golden parquet floor. Here and there we see pieces of furniture, reminders of the exquisite artistry of the period. A table of black lacquer and gilt, inlaid with delicately colored birds on the tip of flight. An oyster silk chair covered with roses. A vase as fresh-minted as a bunch of flowers. With la Pompadour installed here, this became the new heart of Versailles, with a traffic jam of art dealers, philosophers, travellers, artists, architects and craftsmen, musicians and messengers crowding into la Pompadour’s cozy and intimate rooms. Every now and then the King would turn up and everyone would bow deeply and scurry off, only to return later. The duc de Cröy expected to disapprove of the bourgeois mistress, but came away enchanted: I found her charming, both in looks and character; she was at her toilette and couldn’t have been prettier. Voltaire, whom Pompadour was instrumental in appointing to the lucrative and influential positions of court historian and gentleman-in-ordinary to the King, concluded that: It was more profitable to say four words to a king’s mistress than to write a hundred volumes.
Our French guide tells about La Pompadour’s magical life at court with the tidy sobriety of a Sunday school mistress. The group nods and rests its chin thoughtfully on its hand.
From la Pompadour’s we move on to Madame du Barry’s rooms. Contemporaries sometimes called La Pompadour a whore, but Madame du Barry was the real thing. She was well known in Paris and counted several members of the court among her clients. Legend has it that the jaded Louis XV caught sight of Jeanne du Barry in 1768 in the Hall of Mirrors. When summoned to meet him she did the unthinkable – she gave a deep curtsy and then kissed the King on the lips, smiling roguishly out of her hooded aqua eyes.
As we stroll through her rooms our guide acknowledges Madame du Barry’s low beginnings, but assures us that Madame du Barry became a woman of considerable culture and refinement, adding her own luster to the glories of France. The group nods in grave agreement. But the evidence suggests otherwise.
Then we come across a long reclining statue. It’s a full-length nude of Madame du Barry in white marble. As she lies there in her glass case on a black gilded base, Louis XV’s mistress appears rather like a pornographic Snow White. Her jutting breasts, her turning bottom, her curving hip … even the marble fabric which winds around her body seems sinuous and erotic. True to form, our tour group murmurs solemnly as it walks past the case. Not a hint of a knowing smile, no risqué comments, not even an admiring glance at the superb physical confidence of the subject or the beauty of the marble form.
I want to say something to Rachel. Trying to ascribe to Madame du Barry the same level of culture as Madame du Pompadour would be foolish. She was a poor girl, a vulgar girl. She knew nothing about art, or architecture or culture. She didn’t read serious books or play music like La Pompadour. Why pretend she did? And yet, she was an uncommonly kind and decent person. All the records show that you could count on Madame du Barry’s tender heart and her gift for friendship.
And still our group retains its earnest demeanor.
It’s a cliché that Australians are irreverent about our history. But it’s true that we lack a certain awe. After all, our national story is brief, makeshift, often brutal and somewhat inconclusive. If we didn’t laugh about it, we’d probably cry. It must be very different to be French. There’s that long and complex history to sustain, the grand national narrative to be nourished and fortified. For the sake of la gloire, it seems that even naughty Madame du Barry must be made respectable.
True Pleasures Page 11