Diplomatic Passport : More Undiplomatic Diaries, 1946-1962 (9781551996790)

by Ritchie, Charles

  24 August 1946.

  Fête of the Liberation of Paris.

  The Prime Minister’s forthcoming departure for Canada will be no loss to the Canadian Delegation and certainly not to the Conference or to the peace-making process. He has produced no ideas and no leadership. He just goes through the motions. He seems principally concerned with petty fiddle-faddle about his personal arrangements. However, if any member of the delegation leaves the hotel for a ten-minute stroll or to keep an official appointment, the Prime Minister senses his absence by some uncanny instinct and, on his return, subjects the absentee to a sad stream of reproach. “At one time it would have been thought a privilege to serve the Prime Minister of Canada. Now it seems that young people think only of their own pleasure.” He insists for the record on keeping his personal expenses recorded at a derisory figure. I sat next to him in the Crillon dining-room the other night when he was consuming with avidity a lobster thermidor which must have cost twice as much as his whole daily expense account. He does not grow in stature in one’s eyes. Brooke Claxton, the Minister of National Defence, will now take over as Head of the Delegation, which he has been in practice all the time. He has plenty of drive and ability, is most frank and friendly with me, and I like him very much.

  The other day, during an interval in the Conference session, I was standing at one of the windows looking out at the sparkling fountains and patterned parterres of the Luxembourg gardens when I became conscious of a person standing beside me. It was Molotov, the Soviet Foreign Minister. He had removed his pince-nez and was wiping them clean with a handkerchief while gazing unseeingly at the scene outside the window. His eyes were red-rimmed, his face naked with fatigue. He looked like a weather-beaten Easter Island monument – but for a moment I had mistaken the old monster for a human being.

  13 October 1946.

  Bevin’s1 dinner at the British Embassy for Dominion delegations. After dinner Alexander, the First Lord of the Admiralty, played music-hall numbers of 1914 vintage and sea shanties. The party gathered around the piano and sang in a ship’s-concert atmosphere of jollity. Mr. Bevin danced with Mrs. Beasley2 of Australia, and they cavorted about like two good-humoured elephants. Here we all were – “the British family of nations.” What a funny collection! The prevailing social tone of the evening was British lower middle class. Since Labour came in in England they are the rulers – the politicians. Their servants of the upper class – the professional diplomats and officials – joined benevolently in the fun, taking the attitude “they are really rather dears and it is nice to see them enjoy themselves in their simple fashion and we must not seem patronizing,” except for one who remarked to me, “This is where experience at Servants’ Balls and Sergeants’ Messes comes in so useful.”

  The Embassy staff of elegant young and not-so-young Etonians, and the sophisticatedly pretty young secretary of Lady Diana3 (who had retired to bed with a toothache), had obviously fortified themselves for the evening with every drop of alcohol they could lay their hands on. I could picture the shudders in the Chancery at the idea of an evening with the Dominions, but it was Alexander and Bevin who made the party a success. They and the Australians are birds of a feather – all old trade-unionists together – members of the New School Tie – same standards, same jokes. You felt at once how English the Australians and New Zealanders are and how un-English the rest of us are: the South African, General Théron; the Indian, a fish completely out of water with his constrained, uneasy smile, being “coped” with by the wives; the Canadians – the Vaniers and myself – so different again.

  15 October 1946.

  Elizabeth Bowen1 is here. She has got herself accredited to the Conference as a journalist. We meet every day in the fenced-off area of the gravelled terrace outside the Palais du Luxembourg, where the press are permitted to mingle with the diplomats. We sit talking and drinking coffee at one of the small tables set up there and sometimes afterwards have time for a stroll along the tree-lined walks on the shady side of the gardens, past the statues of dead poets. She is staying around the corner at the Hôtel Condé, still unchanged as I remember it in the twenties, with its narrow stone stairways leading up to the garret bedrooms. We often dine together in one of the small restaurants on the Left Bank. Her being here is the reality which shows up for me the unreality of this sad charade of a conference.

  1 The San Francisco Conference opened in April 1945 and proceeded to the creation of the United Nations. I was an adviser to the Canadian delegation.

  1 Ernest Bevin, British Labour politician, was at this time Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs.

  2 Wife of the Australian Ambassador.

  3 Lady Diana Cooper, wife of Duff Cooper, British politician and member of Churchill’s wartime government, who was at this time British Ambassador to Paris. Lady Diana was herself a famous beauty and social figure.

  1 Novelist. She was a close friend from the war years (see my book The Siren Years).

  PARIS

  1947–1949

  The Diary for 1947 opens on my return to Paris as Counsellor of Embassy.

  Our Ambassador to France was General Georges P. Vanier, later Governor General of Canada. He occupied a unique position in the diplomatic community in Paris. He had been a steadfast supporter of de Gaulle and of the French Resistance Movement from the outset. He enjoyed the trust and affectionate respect of French political leaders of varying parties and persuasions. They came to him as to no other foreign ambassador for advice. They confided in his judgement, integrity, and discretion. The Ambassadress, Pauline Vanier, a woman of distinguished beauty and warm charity of heart, carried all before her by her spontaneity. They were fervent Catholics, who lived their faith. French by ancestry, they loved France and believed in her future in the worst of times. As a new arrival at the Embassy I was treated by the Vaniers, whom I had known during the war, as a friend, almost as a member of the family. I much enjoyed working with the Ambassador; despite his distinguished military career he never seemed to me a typical soldier. He was sagacious and subtle, and I appreciated his particular brand of irony and deprecatory understatement, which often concealed a sharp point.

  The work of the Embassy was interesting in itself but unrewarding in terms of results. We reported to Ottawa at length on the twists and turns of French politics and the recurrent ministerial crises of those uneasy years when France was still suffering the traumatic effects of defeat and humiliation. No one was better informed than the Ambassador about the French political scene, and he trusted me with drafting many of our dispatches home. Answer came there none. The Canadian government had at that time no discernible interest in France, or if they had, it was not revealed to us. I pictured the fruits of our labours mildewing in the files of some junior officer in the Department of External Affairs. Most of the staff of the Embassy were French Canadians. It was my first experience of working with them as a group, as in those days our department at home was almost entirely Anglo-Saxon in language and mentality. I was stimulated and attracted by my French-Canadian colleagues and made many friends among them, particularly the quick-witted and responsive Jean Chapdelaine and his delightful wife, Rita.

  The Embassy was housed in a mansion in the Avenue Foch, erected in the 1920s for one, or both, of those fabled enchantresses of the period, the Dolly Sisters, by a wealthy admirer. During the German occupation it had been in the hands of the Gestapo – a centre to which victims were taken for interrogation. The décor, in pseudo-rococo style with inset bands of pink marble, must have been a sinister setting for the dreadful scenes enacted there. As an Embassy the house was superbly impractical. Typists were packed into passages and boudoirs. The vast marble bath with its solid gold taps was piled high with files and documents, which even overflowed onto the bidet. My own office was in the bedroom in which once the Dolly sisters had romped. My desk, an enormous affair in an unrestrained version of the Louis xv style, was rich in gilt and ormolu, with drawers that stuck when you tried to open them. It w
as placed between tall French windows looking out on the Avenue Foch.

  My first task on arrival in Paris was to find myself somewhere to live which I could afford. Finally I installed myself in an apartment on the Boulevard St. Germain. The house was built round a paved courtyard. My own flat was up one flight of stairs. It belonged to the scion of a family who had owned a Paris department store. There he had lived with his mistress, a well-known actress. This happy state of affairs was brought to an end by the bankruptcy of the department store and by the intervention of his wife, who under some obscure provision of French law now claimed the flat belonged to her. He was determined that it should on no account fall into her hands, and to prevent this he must find a tenant, preferably a diplomat who could not easily be expelled. Our bargain was struck over a bottle of rye whisky, which he had never before tasted and to which he took an instant liking. Two conditions went with the lease: first, that his wife should never on any excuse penetrate into the apartment; second, that I should supply him each month with a case of rye whisky.

  My apartment was on the dark side, which suited me, as I dislike brightness in rooms – or people. In fact there was so little light in the dressing-room that I often emerged wearing socks of different colours, sometimes even trousers that belonged to other suits than the coats. As one entered there was a stone-flagged hall with, on the left, a tiny dining-room suitable for dwarves only; on the right, a large and largely unused salon in which spindly chairs and precarious little tables were grouped in uneasy circles. The parquet floor was islanded with dangerously slippery rugs. The salon led directly into the bedroom, the setting for a bed of generous proportions – evidently the scene of action of the whole apartment. Opening out of the bedroom was a small chamber containing a writing-table and an indispensable stove. The winters of 1947 and 1948 were cold ones and much of one’s time was spent huddled for heat in front of the stove. I loved this apartment with the passion that some interiors have the power to induce. It had, it seemed to me, been a scene of happiness and I was happy there.

  A further part of my bargain with the owner was the continued employment of a manservant who “went with” the place. Yves was of an unguessable age – probably not so old as I then thought. He had started life on an estate in Brittany and had been brought to Paris as a gardener by the old countess who had once owned the whole house in the days when it had been an hôtel particulier and who still lingered on in the apartment below us. Yves himself lodged in company with a so-called nephew, a sloe-eyed adolescent, in an attic hovel above. He attached himself to me with bossy devotion, like an old nanny. With his full share of wooden Breton obstinacy he combined great tact – was never in the way at the wrong moment. He had at times a sly smile, conspiratorial without ever becoming indiscreet. He was an excellent plain cook in the provincial style – very good with soup and with a passion for the artichoke which I came to share. In the kitchen he mercilessly bullied a musty old crone who was never permitted to approach me directly but who could be glimpsed bent double over the sink.

  My domestic life thus satisfactorily settled, and by no means overburdened with work, I set about determinedly to extract as much as Paris had on offer and to suppress my persistent traces of guilt at leaving behind me Ottawa civil-servanthood. I approached the Paris scene in the spirit of the Renaissance Pope who said, “God has given us the Papacy, now let us enjoy it.”

  Elizabeth Bowen came on frequent visits to Paris and her friendship which meant so much in my life continued, as indeed it did until her death in 1973.

  Socially I moved in different circles which seldom overlapped, a condition which has always appealed to me. Through the friendship of the Vaniers I encountered most of the leading French political figures, also intellectuals like Jacques Maritain and André Malraux. Then there were my colleagues in the Embassy and my fellow diplomats. I had friends among the journalists – the closest, Darcy Gillie of the Manchester Guardian. Another world was that of the English and American friends who flocked to Paris after the long deprivation of the war, eager for a renewal of the pre-war pleasures of which they had been so long deprived. There was a continuing cavalcade of such visitors with whom the more cosmopolitan French mingled. Some of the actors and actresses in this revived social performance were getting older, but there were spirited recruits from a younger generation. The Parisian arts and fashions – it was sometimes difficult to draw a line between the two (a “New Look” by Dior, a new stage design by Bébé Bérard) – enlivened the scene. Party succeeded party – fancy-dress parties, picnic parties, dinner parties, theatre parties, and house parties. Pre-war social rivalries revived, wits were sharpened, scandal took wings, and love affairs came and went as brief as summer lightning. At the British Embassy, Duff and Diana Cooper reigned – there politicians, writers, and artists mingled with the fashionables. Under Diana’s magic touch, platitude and pomposity shrivelled – all was warmth and sparkle.

  20 January 1947.

  Well, here I am back in Paris and installed as Counsellor of Embassy, but why the hell am I here? What possessed me to leave an interesting job, in which I could exercise some influence on events, to walk up and down the Champs-Elysées on a sunny day or to admire the beauties of Paris. Life is not a coloured picture-postcard. As for my work at the Embassy, what do they care in Ottawa for a painstaking analysis of the shifting play of French politics and politicians? Anyway, French politics, although absorbing on the spot, do not export well and are incomprehensible outside France. D. W. Brogan once spoke of “the provinciality of the Ile de France.” It is quite true. Then, returning to the Paris of my student days as a middle-aged official is like paying a social call on a former mistress. I think of the desolating scene in which Colette’s Chéri revisits Léa, when the nostalgic disturbance of his love for her and the shock of his war experience are met with her sensible health recommendations. Yes, Paris has only a bitter little smile for the past. Sufferings and scarcities have contracted her spirit. She has become a femme de ménage.

  1 February 1947.

  Elizabeth Bowen is here. The weather is so penetratingly cold that we spend most of the time sitting close by the stove in my flat, often in company with a bottle of whisky. It is like life on board ship. We sally out on to the windswept decks of the boulevards for a blow and are glad to be back again in the warmth and shelter. I want to see no one else and wish that this good time could last, yet feel that it is transitory. She re-awakens my sympathy for people, my curiosity about situations and ideas; she rehumanizes me.

  7 February 1947.

  The smell of dusty ivy on a misty winter’s afternoon as I go past the enclosed gardens of the big, shuttered houses in the Avenue Foch.

  There is nothing in the least mysterious about the French. It is just that they are plainly different from us and for that very reason attractive and somehow formidable. They are gay, but not funny; they make one smile but not laugh; they are so conventional in the grooves of custom, however revolutionary their ideas may be. They have no use for eccentricity – you must be effective in the life here or you are mercilessly brushed to one side. They never tell a story against themselves. After all, why reduce your bargaining power by giving the world a handle against you?

  4 March 1947.

  During the war we had a simple poster-picture of what was going on on the European continent. It seemed to us an armed camp of enemies – German bullies and satellite zanies – lording it over a vast concentration camp of subject peoples and defied by numerous and heroic resistants. We had to believe that things were black and white; in a war it is a dangerous waste of energy and sapping to the will to admit that one’s enemies have mixed motives and sympathies, but it is interesting to take off the wartime blinkers and to indulge in what still seems an unpatriotic luxury of seeing people not just as friends or foes but as people. It leads one to all sorts of reluctant and awkward admissions.

  Today, for instance, I spent at Versailles at Beaudoin’s trial. He was the Vichy
Foreign Minister. It is gospel that the men of Vichy were odious, but there simply did not appear to be any evidence against him at all. I said to myself that I disliked the man, that he had played both sides, that he was anti-Semitic, anti-British, anti-Resistance, a careerist and probably a crook, one of those who had stifled the soul of France. But I could not say, on the evidence produced in court, that he was guilty of any of the precise things with which he was charged.

  Evidence came from so many sides, from honest men who had worked with him and whose own reputations were clear, from British Intelligence, from a Free French Jewish fighter pilot. All coincide with remarkable accuracy – he was a patriotic Frenchman who had done his duty as he saw it and, given his own aims, quite effectively. Obviously if he is condemned on that evidence it will be a miscarriage of justice.