Bad Faith

by Carmen Callil

  Louis was now a wheat broker, and he had a share in the company. His mandate included, fatally, permission “to sign, endorse and discharge cheques and money orders.”20 And he signed the accounts. He had a fiancée called Line, whose expensive ring he used in later years to raise money when down and out. Nearby, in Munich, Hitler's trial following his Beer Hall Putsch was making headlines. In July 1924 Louis visited his parents, to go to the Olympic Games at Colombes in the western suburbs of Paris. He used his excellent English during numerous trips to London, where he stayed in comfort at Brown's Hotel in Mayfair near Piccadilly, an elegant place beloved of the smaller kind of European royalty and “but a stroll away from Buckingham Palace.”

  The high point of Louis' life as a working man was 1924, the last year of peace for all members of the Darquier family, and the last year of any continuing relationship with his father. At the same time, the elections of that year were won by an alliance of parties on the left, and France's political fissures were deepened by terror of communism and hatred of fascism. Louis' handsome prospects began to ebb away in the following year, when the country was in the midst of economic depression.

  In Strasbourg Louis had already acquired the reputation of a rake, but now mention of debts began too. It is also said that he was arrested in London for being drunk and disorderly.21 It seems that he was often intoxicated, for one day at the Antwerp stock exchange—a magnificent Moorish Gothic building with an immense colonnaded and arcaded hall—he galloped in “on a horse, and tried to take it into the central enclosure.” But his real crime was his use of company money “for his own purposes.” Other reports suggest that he used the money to speculate against the franc, which seems likely. “At the same time he also began his swindles: he used the business information he found on the Stock Exchange for his own purposes if an interesting opportunity arose, and passed the bad deals on to the company. Management discovered this at the end of six months: these manoeuvres and his characteristic abuse of trust cost the company nearly 500,000 francs!”22 Louis traded in futures: good ones for himself, bad ones for his company. On 29 November 1925 his fellow director called an extraordinary general meeting and demanded Louis' dismissal. It took two months to get rid of him.

  Louis wrote to an old friend and political colleague of his father's in Cahors, telling him he was returning to the town for Carnival—he now had plenty of free time on his hands—and that he wanted to go into the political life which “Papa has unfortunately abandoned.”23 Louis' reconstitution of recent events included a claim to have made a fortune of about two million francs on the Antwerp Bourse; but only his family and their connections now saved him from his embarrassments. When Louis' fraud was discovered, René was in Antwerp too, as director of Vilgrain's CATC office there, and presumably he pacified Vilgrain.

  Henry Lévy had set up Grands Moulins de Strasbourg with Achille Baumann in 1899. By 1924 Baumann had resigned and by 1927, when René went to work for him, Henry Lévy had become “The Miller King,” in sole charge of the vast Baumann-Lévy empire. Vilgrain and his companies had encountered financial problems: whether these were due to the court cases, or investigations into the Australian wheat scandal, or were brought about solely by the depredations of Louis Darquier is unknown. Lévy bought out Vilgrain's company. All reports agree that René rescued Louis with the help of Lévy, but this would have been only one of a thousand of his generosities, for Lévy was known as a “man with great heart,” a benefactor to Jew and Gentile, whose greatest qualities were his boundless generosity and his “understanding and kindness to those in distress.”24

  The years 1925 and 1926 were the peak of de Monzie's ministerial power, and Louis was not sent to prison. Scandals much larger than his were chronic in France in the 1920s and 1930s anyway. His honour was restored to him, inasmuch as his reinstatement was announced on 31 December 1926, and his “resignation” accepted the following day. Louis' anti-Semitism was always to be linked to these Jewish wheat barons, and he chose King Two Louis, who added insult to injury by using Louis' good French Christian name twice, as representative of them all. So, whilst it was Henry Lévy who bought out Vilgrain, Louis hid his ignominious dismissal and its resolution by transforming these events into a principled resignation because Vilgrain's company had been “sold to the Jew Louis-Dreyfus.”25

  Louis Darquier now led an existence that was the despair of his father, never ceasing to complain that his parents would not help him as they helped Jean and René. His fiancée Line had committed suicide. He had already seen his older brother become a doctor, which he had failed to do, and now he had to bear the further indignity of watching his younger brother prosper where he had come to grief. René's good fortune and Henry Lévy's generosity were to support him for the next ten years: “crippled with debts, with creditors at his throat, his back against the wall…each time he knocked at the door of his brother and Henry Lévy, each time they got him out of his fix, though obviously not for very long.”26

  Before the 1960s all Australians had British citizenship, but now, as the wife of the Northern Irish Roy Workman, Myrtle had a British passport, of which she was immensely proud and which she treasured until the end of her days. This devotion to the “Mother Country” nevertheless seems to have caused interminable problems, because Myrtle's grizzles about passports flicker through the following decades. Perhaps she obtained her passport as Sandra Lindsay or Sandra Workman, but whatever the original problem she compounded it, for although Roy Workman was a singer who only appeared in musicals and Gilbert and Sullivan, they presented themselves to Europe in late 1926 or early 1927 as Lord and Lady Workman-Macnaghten, of Belfast.

  There are many explanations as to how Louis Darquier met Myrtle. Some say she met him in France where her husband was singing, others that it was in a military convalescent hospital where Roy was performing, while Louis once claimed that they met at the casino in Monte Carlo. Gambling is a distinct possibility, but the favourite of the medley on offer is that they met in Germany, where Roy's company was entertaining the troops.

  After the Great War, as a protective buffer between France and Germany, the Rhineland was occupied for eleven years by the armies of the Entente. The British left in 1929. Until 1926 their headquarters were in Cologne, thereafter in Wiesbaden. The occupying troops were provided with every British comfort: cricket, marmalade, Scouts and Guides, theatre and cinema. In the Walhalla Theatre in Wiesbaden, the Rhine Army Dramatic Company put on productions of plays by John Galsworthy and, of course, the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan. In Strasbourg from 1922 to 1923 and in Antwerp from 1924 to 1926, Louis Darquier was a whisper away from Cologne and Wiesbaden, and, with the Rhineland virtually a French protectorate, the latter had become almost a border town.

  Around these troops hovered a number of prostitutes so excessive— an estimated thirty thousand in Cologne alone—that it was proposed that a team of British policewomen should patrol the streets. Louis was known to be partial to this kind of sexual opportunity, and his good English enabled him to move around where he liked. Finally there was a casino, the Casino Wiesbaden, an old and famous place of entertainment, dripping with chandeliers and fantastical neoclassical grandeur. Today it has blackjack and roulette and stud poker, but it was closed for gambling from 1873 to 1949; then, as now, it had a concert hall, and here the troops were entertained. This gingerbread palace would have been a perfect setting for the meeting of Louis Darquier and Myrtle Jones.

  By 1927, however much René and Henry Lévy had helped him, Louis could no longer actually earn money. He now looked to other quarters for financial rewards, and he wrote happily to René in 1927—“not without some cynicism”—about his new arrangements. He was living “as man and wife” with Sandra in her guise as Lady Workman-Macnaghten, with Roy in tow, at the Hôtel Bristol on the Canebière in Marseille. This port city of strangers and travellers was another perfect setting for the three adventurers to arrange reincarnation. Myrtle, Louis told René, was “an Australi
an woman, married to an Englishman, nephew and heir of Lord Macnaghten but who has not a sou. She is the daughter of a grain and wool producer of Tasmania [Louis writes the latter words in English]. Family with Yankee style—9 children—unquestionably lots of money…In any case the directory indicates several of her father's firms. But she is fed up with her husband.”27 Roy Workman drank so much he was completely helpless, wrote Louis; all three of them drank. Louis would become violent, but he was not an alcoholic. Myrtle was.

  When “Lady Workman-Macnaghten” met Louis she presented herself to him as an Australian version of those American heiresses much dreamed of by indigent Europeans in the 1920s. In photographs she stands about five inches shorter than Louis; sometimes she looks ample, sometimes thin and distrait. But whatever she may have lacked in beauty Myrtle made up with glamour; she had a tireless sense of humour, was always anxious to please, and she decorated herself like a child at play. Myrtle had style. In 1927 she was still in regular receipt of funds from Tasmania—“£40 a week without taking into account gifts on every occasion,” wrote Louis, with the expectation of a substantial inheritance of “as much as £130,000 at the age of 28.”28 Myrtle was already thirty-four when she assured Louis of these handsome prospects, unaware of the special arrangements Harry had made for her in his will.

  Roy Workman's adoption of a Northern Irish peer as his uncle was the kind of fabrication Myrtle dreamed up for all the men in her life.29 Her habit of claiming aristocratic relations seems to have come from an anxious aspiration to belong to England and “Home,” as Australians of English descent liked to call the country which despatched their convict ancestors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Such aspirations were thoroughly removed from the facts of Myrtle's existence as noted in her birth and marriage certificates. These circumstances made divorce difficult. Nevertheless Myrtle offered to divorce Roy, to marry Louis and take him to Australia. Louis equivocated, then settled the matter by marrying Myrtle, divorced or not. Family tradition reports that Roy remained devoted to Myrtle to the end, but his loss did not prevent him from returning to Egypt and living with another woman older than himself.

  Myrtle was to learn the truth about her inheritance two years after she assured Louis of her millions, just at the moment when, in the personae of Baron and Baroness Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, they descended upon Brown's Hotel in Mayfair to begin four years of life in London (save for Louis' constant dashes to Paris in pursuit of funds). Louis never showed any sign of fury when Myrtle proved yet again to be parsimonious with the truth—he could not afford to. Their mutual inventions were one of the strongest cords that held them together.

  5

  Baby

  IT WOULD BE BEAUTIFUL to have little ones around me,” wrote Louise to a faithful minion in Cahors in 1924. “I feel I am getting old.”1 When Louis and Myrtle married in St. Giles Register Office in London on 19 April 1928, they were staying at the St. Kilda Hotel in Torrington Square, in the heart of Bloomsbury. This hotel, obliterated by German bombs in the Second World War, was advertised in the Daily Telegraph as “Overlooking Gardens. Excellent Cuisine. Billiards. Full or part board. Most convenient for business and pleasure. Comfortable. Terms moderate.”2 Such terms were necessary, for by 1928 Louis was no longer speaking to his father. The couple was living on Myrtle's money. As Louis compounded his early differences with his father with constant imbroglios and demands for money, matters between them never improved. Though sorely tried by Louis' marriage to Myrtle, Louise continued to defend her “lame duck” son.

  The help Louis insistently demanded was sometimes given to him by his mother (who in 1934 sold the Laytou family home in Cahors to pay Louis' debts), and always by his brother René, but in 1928 his parents had other expenses. All three of Louise's sons married in that year, Jean and René in Paris, René's marriage properly taking place at Louise's local church of Saint-Pierre de Neuilly. Louise dreamed of great marriages for her sons. In Jean's case she had succeeded in parting him from a girlfriend in Cahors, explaining that she was a Protestant and “too modest in origins and not sufficiently rich.”3 She had no opportunity to interfere in Louis' choice. His London nuptials were unattended by any of his family, but at least he married first, always an important position for the Darquier brothers.

  “As you can see, my two beloved boys are so alike,” said Louise of Jean and Louis, maternal wishful thinking of a high order.4 Jean was a medical man but also an artistic touche-à-tout, a jack-of-all-trades, while Louis was Poor-Johnny-One-Note:5 once he chose Jews as his trade, he rarely moved off the subject for a moment. René, the youngest, was the businessman, the one with his feet on the ground. Jean qualified as a neurologist at the Faculty of Medicine of Paris in 1927, worked as an intern at the famous Salpêtrière Hospital and lived with his parents in Neuilly until he married Jeanne Riu—“Janot”—in July 1928. Four months later René married Lucienne Losson, who lived in another of the flats in the Neuilly apartment block: “Lucienne was a girl whom the three brothers used to meet on the stairs, and pull her plaits… she fell in love with Jean but that did not work out so she married René.” Pierre is reported to have said that she chose “the best of the bunch.”6 Louis missed the marriages of both his brothers. René was now living in Strasbourg, where Henry Lévy had acquired a shareholding in Les Minoteries Alsaciennes—Flour Mills of Alsace. René was appointed its operations manager, one of about forty top managers within the empire of Lévy's Grands Moulins de Strasbourg.

  It would be hard to pinpoint which of her daughters-in-law disappointed Louise the most. Jean's wife Janot was the most formidable of the three—“she was a fascinating woman, not beautiful at all, which was astonishing because Jean was elegant, handsome and a sweet talker.”7 Janot was “a little brown thing, ugly, with prominent teeth,” but she had a brain—she too became a doctor, in 1943. Lucienne disliked Louise and vice versa, while Myrtle was simply beyond the pale. It is unlikely that Louis explained the bigamous nature of his marriage to his adored mother. In the 1920s divorce was a lengthy, costly and scandalous procedure, and it would have been impossible to complete it in the short period between the encounter of Lord and Lady Workman-Macnaghten and Louis Darquier in Marseille in 1927, and the marriage of Louis and Myrtle in London in April 1928. If Myrtle did divorce Roy Workman, there are no records of it in the registers of Australia, France or Britain.8 Perhaps they divorced in Egypt, although it seems unlikely. Possibly Myrtle convinced herself that she had not been married before, because she had not used her real name. The Tasmanian family seems to have known the truth of it: that Myrtle did not have a divorce when she and Louis married. Bigamy was transmuted into elopement, a romantic French love story, as the years went by.

  Whether or not Myrtle and Roy were later divorced, for a Catholic like Louise, Myrtle's previous marriage was unacceptable. What is more she was a Protestant, also unacceptable. Louis' marriage meant he now had problems with both his parents, and he dealt with them at this point by staying away from France. In a sense he became a French remittance man, because, as a wedding gift, René Darquier gave Louis and Myrtle a first-class ticket to Australia. On the passenger list of the elegant steamship the Principe di Udine, which sailed from Genoa in mid-June 1928, both of them stated that their “intended future permanent residence” was to be Australia. They listed themselves as plain Mr. and Mrs. Louis Darquier, he a grain merchant, she a housewife, heading for 3 Cypress Street, Launceston. It seems that the appurtenances of nobility descended upon them during the voyage, because on arrival the entire Tasmanian family appears to have sincerely believed that their daughter and sister had married a baron.

  Louis Darquier made grand claims for this wedding trip. The inventions are rich and various, swerving from accounts of a year spent raising sheep and cattle, to the running of a “sheep-farm,” to the management of a large agricultural concern. He obliterated the years 1926 to 1933 from his memory under a mountain of faradiddles in his curriculum vitae, ranging through: “Fro
m 1925 to 1928 having made a fortune of about 2.000.000 Darquier worked for himself and travelled particularly in Australia, the United States and in England,”9 to “Went to Australia in 1927 to manage a livestock and agricultural farm,”10 to “In 1927 he failed at sheep-farming in Australia having previously married an heiress.”11 He was nowhere near Australia in 1927, and he did no work of any kind there. Tasmania was unknown to 1930s Europe, so the story of Myrtle's fortune was a safe claim which could never be investigated.

  The couple reached Melbourne in July 1928, and by the end of the month they were in Launceston. As they were steaming towards Australia, Harry Jones ensured that Louis could not get his hands on any Jones money. On 6 July he added a codicil to the effect that no one could inherit until Lexie's death. As Louis and Myrtle approached Launceston, she ceased to be an heiress.

  If Louis and Myrtle had serious intentions of living in Australia, they were quickly dispelled. They did not stay at Cypress Street; indeed its suburban proportions probably gave Louis his first indication of disappointments to come. These were to be many. Launceston was a small antipodean rural town, and Louis and Myrtle were night birds, creatures of the city. Myrtle had told Louis that one of her brothers was a student at Heidelberg, another at Oxford, and a third a doctor. All this was untrue, though her brothers were accomplished and educated young men, and Louis now met the dentists, teachers and farmers they actually were.