The Bugatti Queen

by Miranda Seymour

The great car race from Paris to Madrid was to commence on the last Sunday in May 1903; the papers of the Beauce region had been building up to it for weeks. People at Aunay, excited by their proximity to the first lap of the route, moving westwards to Chartres and down to Bordeaux, talked of little else. Some planned to join the fifty thousand who were expected to arrive at Versailles on the Saturday night in order not to miss the excitement of the dawn start of over 300 machines. Others, eager to experience the thrill of watching the machines travel at full speed, studied maps and decided to spend the day on the roadside, familiar to them from the bicycle races which had been crossing this part of the country for over a decade.*

  The list of participants had already been announced in the press, their vehicles divided into four classes according to weight. The heaviest and fastest machines would be stripped down to bare essentials in order to qualify, with the drivers seated on a plank of wood lacking even the luxury of a feather-stuffed cushion to spare them from jolts and bruises. Cars would depart on the minute, at the firing of a pistol shot, pursuing each other along roads above which dust, however carefully watered-down in advance, would arise in impenetrable clouds. Roadside spectators were urged to keep their distance and to remember that they might not be visible to the drivers until it was too late for escape.

  Towns were another acknowledged source of concern. A few would be bypassed with wooden tracks, but this was too great an extravagance to be employed in more than a handful of cases. Elsewhere, it was predicted that the streets would be crammed with innocent spectators, unaware of the danger they presented to themselves and the drivers as they pressed close to the machines or ran in front of them. (Gloomily, and with a certain relish, the newspapers reminded their readers that pedestrians and dogs had, to date, been the major causes of fatal automobile accidents.)

  A banker, a count, a jeweller, a lady who had already shown her courage in the 1901 race from Paris to Berlin: the entry-list of drivers ranged from the celebrated to cranks who entered for fun, never expecting that their cars would take them further than a six-hour run to Tours or, at best, Poitiers. Among them were two young car-designers from Alsace, Emile Mathis and his Milanese associate, Ettore Bugatti. More serious candidates were the Americans Tod Sloan (it seems likely that he was the celebrated jockey in the United States and Great Britain during the 1890s) and William K. Vanderbilt Jr in his formidable mile-a-minute Mercedes; British car salesman Charles Rolls and his compatriots, Lorraine Barrow and Charles Jarrott; René De Knyff, always driving a Panhard; Marcel, Fernand and Louis Renault – and a mysterious ‘Dr Pascal’, the pseudonym masking the identity of the millionaire playwright and motoring enthusiast, Baron Henri de Rothschild.

  Camille du Gast was the only woman brave enough to volunteer for a race of 872 miles over largely unfamiliar roads; to the disappointment of the Versailles spectators familiar with poster-portraits of ladies who went driving in their finest Paris dresses, Madame du Gast arrived dressed for battle. Goggled, masked and wearing heavy gauntlets to protect her hands from the burning heat of a metal wheel and gearshift, she was a sexless lump. There were unchivalrous comments until her mechanic hit on the ingenious idea of feminizing the bonnet of their powerful De Dietrich car. (Camille du Gast’s expensive taste in machines was subsidized by a doting husband.) Ropes of pink roses and cornflowers restored the driver to iconic status in a moment; an enthusiastic crowd rallied to wish her well.

  Hélène’s chance to witness one of the greatest events in the early history of automobile races almost didn’t happen. The baby, Henri, was too sick for Alexandrine Delangle to leave him and the postmaster was also unwell. His friend Chopiteau, the schoolmaster, offered to take the children along, but Solange, perhaps from nervousness, had a bad stomach. The expedition eventually comprised only Chopiteau, Lucien and Hélène, barely visible under her lace sun-bonnet. Lucien, to whom the sturdy little girl still seemed like a charmingly animated toy, clasped his thin arms tightly round her stomach as they sat on the jolting cart bound for Bourdinière, some twenty miles to the west. Even through a layer of white lace, Lucien could smell the warm, sweet scent of her skin, like hay.

  At eight in the morning, the fields below the long slant of Bourdinière hill were already crowded; Aunay was not the only village to have calculated where the race could best be viewed. Nobody was sure when the first cars would be coming through, but every sound, every gust of wind, was greeted by a flurry of expectant shouts, a surge of bodies towards the road. There was the sense of a fair about the occasion; dogs ran in and out of the wheels of farm-wagons and carts on a hunt for dropped crumbs; babies with surprised eyes lay on quilts which scattered colour across the patches of shadow under the plane trees. Heavy-bellied horses of the Percheron region cropped at the grass verges of the dusty track, while a couple of pedlars in the bright clothes of circus-people hawked trays of ribbons and strips of lace through the crowds, calling attention to the elegance of their wares.

  Did a three-year-old girl absorb all this and store it away for future recollection? Probably not. But photographs of her suggest that she was already pretty enough, with her big blue eyes, for several of the mothers to have stooped to stroke her round cheeks and tickle her, wheedling for a smile. Years later, friends would tell Hélène Delangle that whatever she gave away, she must never lose that glorious, unforgettable smile of hers. You could see a hint of it already in the baby face shaded by the bonnet, a grin of beaming confidence that spread and stayed, cheerful as the sun. The ladies smiled back; the schoolmaster, enjoying his paternal role more than he had anticipated, knelt to retie the satin ribbons of his charge’s white bonnet.

  Ten o’clock. A gust of wind brushed the planes, spattering the white road with the shadows of their broad five-fingered leaves. The men were smoking furiously, scribbling calculations on folded sheets of newspaper; the women, faintly excited by the thought of the proximity of the approaching drivers, hitched up their skirts, enjoying the coolness of the grass under their thighs as they lay prone, black shawls spread over their faces. The schoolmaster felt in his pocket for a pipe. He was on the point of lighting up when one of the men gave a shout.

  The women threw off their shawls and rose, staring intently up the hill to where a silhouette against the sky had signalled an approach with a raised flag. Far away, soft as a whisper, the sound wavered towards them. It rose to a hum, a whine and then, with sudden fury, to the rattle of nails being hurled around a tin barrel as the machine burst on them from above, burying the flag-holder on the hilltop in a dense cloud of white dust before it plunged forward.

  The sound of the car was, briefly, drowned by screams. For many in the crowded fields, this was their introduction to the automobile in motion. A few stood still, hypnotized, unconscious of others behind them who were running away, shrieking as they fled to safety from the demon motor.

  Schoolmaster Chopiteau’s pipe dropped from nerveless fingers. He was close enough to the road to glimpse the eyes of a hawk behind the white mask before a dust-cloud rose and forced him to cover his face. ‘Take me!’ he heard little Lucien Delangle screaming. ‘Take me!’

  And then the car, with young Louis Renault grasping the vibrating wheel in flayed hands, was past them, rattling into the distance on a long ribbon of track that carried him from their sight. A low sound went up from the crowd, a sigh empty of emotion, an extension of the engine’s roar. There was pride in it, somewhere. This was the future, and they had been a part of it. The feeling of weightless absorption might have encompassed even a small girl in a lace bonnet, to whom the rite of speed had been experienced only as a rush of noise and dust, the flinty glitter of falling stones, the sudden whiteness of the grass, the smell of sweat on the frightened horses, a sharp tang in the air, the smell of sand and oil. So this, thought the schoolmaster, as they slowly began to brush the dust from their clothes and faces, this was what the Greeks had meant by the words: sacred terror. And it had taken him fifty years to discover it. Looking down, he s
aw Lucien, still standing by the road, his arms stretched out. The car, Chopiteau realized, must have missed him by centimetres.

  Even the grim reports which began to filter in by the end of the day failed to extinguish the wonder of the country folk who witnessed Louis Renault’s record run of 140 kilometres an hour down the hill of La Bourdinière. They had shared in his triumph too closely to relinquish it at once for grief. On Sunday night, back at Aunay, Lucien tried to explain what he had seen. Finding that no words could make his parents understand the wonder of the great rushing machine, the noise, the dust, the smell, he wept.

  The Monday papers brought nothing but horror stories. The Race to Death! screamed the headlines, over violent illustrations of burning bodies, scattered limbs. Hundreds killed! Hundreds had not died, but the truth was bad enough. Marcel Renault was dead (a camera snapped his brother Louis in the moment of pushing back his ear-flaps to learn the news).* An amateur English driver had burnt to death when his car overturned on a corner and caught fire. Lesna, the great champion cyclist, had been injured so badly that he would never be able to race again; Lorraine Barrow, swerving to avoid a dog, hit a tree and killed his mechanic while he himself lingered for a painful few hours. Another driver managed to avoid a child on the road before he lost control and rumbled into the crowd, killing three and scattering injured bodies, too many for the local hospital to cope with. Camille du Gast, gallantly renouncing her own chance of victory, briefly withdrew to nurse another De Dietrich driver before racing on to take 45th place.

  From Châtellerault to Bordeaux, the journalists reported, the road was littered with wrecked machines. Six of the 224 cyclists and drivers who set out from Versailles had been killed outright; ten more had been injured beyond hope of recovery. News that the winner, France’s champion Fernand Gabriel, had maintained a remarkable average speed of 105 kph, was diminished by the sense of a national tragedy. The level of catastrophe was too great for there to be any question of continuing with the race beyond Bordeaux; in Madrid, the garlanded pillars which should have welcomed the victor down a triumphal avenue of flowers were silently dismantled. There would be no more town to town races. The cost had proved too high.

  Two months later, the first Tour de France took place and was greeted as an unprecedented success. Nothing now would halt the advance of the car, but the spectacle of roads that hummed with spinning wheels and pumping thighs was welcomed by spectators as a less dangerous celebration of speed.

  3

  LOSS AND LEARNING

  Quand tu reverras ton village

  Quand tu reverras ton cloche

  Ta maison, tes parents, tes amis de ton age . . .

  CHARLES TRENET

  ‘Ton village’ was noted down by the old lady in Nice as one of her favourite songs, but she seems never to have returned to the house at Aunay, or to the church where, as a small girl, she knelt beneath a pink vaulted roof and joined in prayers for the restoration of her father’s health.

  Léon Delangle died in the autumn of 1904. The funeral took place in his father’s village, Lèvesville-le-Chenard, out in the heart of the Beauce. We can imagine how, kneeling on stone slabs from which a damp chill brought a smell of the underworld, they prayed for his soul. Tasting her first glass of cider at the lunch which followed the burial, the child looked up and noticed an old man glowering down the table. This was her grandfather, angry today because the occasion had forced him to come into the house of his son-in-law, the ploughman; they hadn’t spoken to each other for quarter of a century. Saying his goodbyes to the widow and her children outside the house – he had kept his honour by saying nothing at the table – Frédéric Delangle glanced at Hélène and remarked that Léon had produced at least one child who didn’t look half-witted; just as well Alexandrine had a government pension to help her bring them up. It was his way of making it clear that his daughter-in-law could expect no generous gesture from him.1

  The Delangle children have a desolate air in the only photograph to have been preserved from this early period of their lives. Lucien stands tall, large hands hanging loose at his sides. He is not a handsome boy. Studying his build and square stance, you might suppose that he had learnt to defend himself with his fists. Henri, a small curly-headed child in crumpled shorts, peers anxiously at the camera, seeming on the verge of tears. Solange and Hélène are dressed like twins, neat clips pinning back their heavy brown curls. Solange is perched on a stool, ankles crossed, feet swinging clear of the floor. Hélène is holding on to her. There’s no sign in this formal pose of the radiant smile which made Hélène the centre of attention in later photographs; even so, you can appreciate the strength of character in her face.

  This is the only family photograph which the old lady kept from her early years. It may have commemorated some special event, such as the annual visit to nearby Auneau, for the three-day fair held there every summer in honour of Saint Jean. Did it bring back memories of the few sous she was given by her mother to spend on riding a flared-nostrilled wooden horse on the carousel, or on a miniature box filled with sweet jam which a child’s careful tongue could lick out, clean as a cat’s? Perhaps she carried home a trophy from one of the stallholders, a gift for a pretty child, a butterfly flapping bright paper wings on the crest of a stick. Jolting home to Aunay on the cart past a moon-bleached expanse of cornfields, a determined little girl might hold her prize fast, clasped so tightly that not even in sleep could her fingers be prised apart.

  Or it might have been a school picture. The Aunay records of school attendance during this period have not survived, but this was where Hélène began her education in a school system which was, after thirty years of bitter dispute, under the direction of the state rather than the church. The school at Aunay was proudly modern; here, if she chose, an enterprising girl had the chance to move beyond the limited aspirations of a barely literate family. Her father had done it before her, pushing to raise himself from the Delangle ranks of shepherds and journaliers, day-labourers who competed annually against an invasion of Bretons for employment on the farms of the Beauce. She had an example to follow.

  The Delangle children in 1906 – left to right, Lucien, Henri, Solange, Hélène.

  As an old lady, Hélène Delangle took pleasure in emphasizing the fact that she had excelled in everything she did, easily surpassing the modest achievements of her sister. This, if true, could explain the sense of bitter rivalry which became an unbreachable rift between the two women in later life. Certainly, the evidence – Solange never rose beyond holding down a job as a telegraph clerk – would seem to bear out Hélène’s claims. She spelt and wrote well all her life, in a strong and slanting hand. A glance at one of the carefully prepared route-maps she made before embarking on a race shows an impressive attention to detail and an ability to compress information. A passion for stamp collecting which must have derived from her father’s occupation led her to take an interest in geography and history.* In later years, she found it easy to learn both English and Italian. She sang well and loved reading. Drawing up a list of her favourite authors in 1936, she included Stendhal, Maupassant, Cocteau, Anatole France, the journals of Marie Bashkirtseff and the novels and stories of Colette. She enjoyed poetry; her gift for drawing was above the ordinary. One of her lovers, a professional artist whose subjects included Colette,† teased her by saying that she had entered the wrong profession.

  Exercise played a large role in the new secular school system. Hélène had begun her schooling by frisking around the yard in the afternoon movement class; at ten, she was expected to concentrate on strengthening her muscles and learning how to conserve her energy. The extraordinary, androgynous bodies of the 1920s girls were the product both of the undernourished war years and the devotion to physical culture which began at their schools. Look forward to the legendary achievements of Suzanne Lenglen in women’s tennis during the 1920s, long limbs moving at full stretch to seize each point of every game from her opponents; to the formidable boxer, weight-lift
er and javelin thrower Violette Morris who, after finding that heavy breasts impeded her control of the steering wheel of her Donnet racing car, chose to have them lopped off in February 1929. Think, even, of Colette, fighting the soft flesh of encroaching years with a home gym: the passion with which these women strove to transcend their bodies was formed during their schooldays.

  The role models for girls of the pre-war generation were achievers, breakers of moulds. In 1904, La Vie Heureuse, a well-behaved magazine for ladies, of a kind which could easily have been read by Hélène’s teachers, celebrated the triumphs of a mountaineer, Madame Vallot, and a painter, Mademoiselle Dufau. The daily press, recording a disastrous speedboat race in 1905, paid enthusiastic tribute to the courage of intrepid Madame du Gast, dragged by the crew of a warship from the wreck of her own Camille.* From abroad, came accounts of a transcontinental allfemale car race in America in 1909, and of Alice Ramsay driving coast to coast alone, on roads which were little better than cart-tracks. In England, Dorothy Levitt had won a coveted trophy in 1905 when she took a formidably large and heavy Napier car up to almost 80 mph (128 kph) in a speed trial held on Brighton’s seafront. Condescension continued among the reporters: readers of the sports pages heard about Alice Ramsay’s interest in her appearance and Levitt’s skills as a hostess. Fearless, independent and shrewdly aware of the value of all publicity, these were the kind of women who were admired by schoolgirls of Hélène’s generation.

  Another side could be shown to life at Aunay in the years before the war. Marie-Josèphe Guers, in a book based largely on oral records of the village, describes picnics in the hayfields, the pleasure of threading a wreath of cornflowers and poppies around the rim of straw hats, the weekly task of helping mothers to carry baskets of linen down to be scrubbed at the washing stands on the river. Hélène might have been among the little girls who stared with fascination as the local butcher rammed a pump up the backside of a dead calf, swelling the body until its pelt could be stripped off as easily as a peach-skin and sent to the tanners. She, too, would have been taught to sing the Angelus, looked forward to fête days when she could put on a fancy dress and parade in the street, joined her friends to gather chestnuts among the fallen leaves in the long avenue leading up to the Château Grand-Mont.