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

by Ritchie, Charles

  27 March 1947.

  Mathieu, the Corsican chauffeur at the Embassy, has become almost a friend. He is a man of thirty-five to forty, fat from good eating, and he likes to hear the sound of his own voice, loves a joke, and has immense confidence in his own opinion on all subjects. He can put on a tough, taxi-driver manner and a coarse, rough voice whenever the need arises in the traffic. He takes me out to Versailles to the Beaudoin trial. He misses no points in the trial – in fact, he catches several that I missed. But what first endeared him to me was our common passion for The Three Musketeers. He said he had read it at an age when he still believed in love and friendship. I like the way he said that, without bitterness, with a grown-up acceptance of life. Of “Milady” he said, “She is just the woman to excite a boy’s imagination – a woman of the world, seductive and so beautiful.” (Milady’s beauty is indeed one of the unquestionable facts of literature.)

  The feeling of liberation that I get in France is because anything can be discussed here and quite naturally too. I can talk about women with Mathieu (the chauffeur) or I can talk about doctrinal differences between the Church of Rome and Protestantism. When he talks about women he does not give me commercial travellers’ stories; he talks like an individual, and if he talks about religion it is not to air a few prejudices but to discuss. Marcel, the other chauffeur, tells me of how he was put in a German concentration camp and how the older men in the camp went to pieces and wept with despair. “Indeed, I admit that I wept – it was not that I was frightened, but to find myself in prison with armed sentinels, knowing oneself to be an honest man, was enough to make one despair. All the old men were like that but the young ones joked and did not give a damn.” What Englishman would tell anyone that he cried when he found himself in a prison camp? He would think no one else had ever done such a thing. The French are not ashamed because they have not set themselves an inhuman standard of behaviour. They are natural men – not public-school boys, or American tough guys, or Nazis, or communist supermen, but natural men.

  3 April 1947.

  Anne-Marie Callimachi1 is here on a visit from London. She talks of Romania, from which she was clever enough to escape in time, saying that a communist takeover is richly deserved by her own class, that they have been corrupt and rapacious. However, she still manages to get substantial slices of her fortune out of that country. She is bored with my interest in French politics and says that Paris is the worst place to find out what is happening in Europe, as the French are so self-engrossed. She claims to be in a state of suicidal depression but appears in high spirits, buying new hats and a Modigliani painting, and up to her ears in mysterious financial deals through her banker in Switzerland. We talked of the erotic effects of train travel, due, we think, partly to the motion of the train itself, and always seeming most insistent on the night train from Paris to the Côte d’Azur.

  5 May 1947.

  The green arches of the park of Chantilly in the April sunshine, the blowing of the paper tablecloths into the grounds of the Lion d’Or, the taste of pâté and red wine warm from the sun, and the sight of M. standing beside the car, her plaid rug over her arm. She scowled into the sun. She is like a statue carved in ivory, her beauty severe and classical. What a fool I am at forty – adolescent dreams that have been dreamed too long.

  6 May 1947.

  Lunched with Darcy Gillie of the Manchester Guardian. He lives with and for books, as a cat-lover might live surrounded by cats. You stumble over insecurely piled pyramids of books when you go to his room. He has a noble cast of countenance and a nature devoid of smallness. I admire and envy him. I wish I knew as much about anything as he knows about North Africa – and never to be boring about it. Yet today he was suffering from a hangover and was less intelligently articulate. I find people more attractive when they are not in “good form,” and I felt positive affection for him when, scrabbling among his papers, he cast over his shoulder at me “What year is this? I find it hard to keep up with the revolving years.” M. was here in the evening. It was not a success. We had dinner on a small card-table with uneven legs which Yves attempted unsuccessfully to level. I could see that she disconcerted him by bleak glances at the arrangements of the flat. She is beautiful and intelligent, but have we anything in common? I asked her if she felt with me as if she were talking to someone of another generation and had to get me going on a favourite subject, spot my hobbyhorse, and send me off on it. I used myself to do that with older people while cooking up in my mind the unscrupulous schemes of youth. Is she doing the same?

  7 May 1947.

  Elizabeth de Miribel is an extraordinary personality. I have known her since the war years in Ottawa, when she, an exile from France, with a handful of others upheld the Gaullist cause in Canada with missionary zeal and in the face of all odds. Back in Paris, she now occupies an influential position in the Quai d’Orsay. In everything Elizabeth is larger than life-size – in her range of interests and friends and, above all, in her fanatical enthusiasms. She is out of scale with compromise. The most loyal of friends, she is a despiser of the middle road. She has just come back from Moscow full of the spiritual qualities of the Russian people. “They are so much richer spiritually than the Americans. Their faces are more interesting. There is still a continuity with an old and great civilization which has not been entirely lost to communism.” I even fancied that a new way of doing her hair showed Russian influence – it suited the earnest, poetic young woman in a Russian novel and was less Princesse de la Fronde than her usual coiffure.

  8 May 1947.

  The Poles invite us to the magnificent Hôtel de la Rochefoucauld, which is now their Embassy. Course after course of rather badly prepared food. The Ambassador – squat, voluble, formerly a schoolmaster in Cracow. Reception afterwards – hordes of swarthy Eastern Europeans – thug intelligentsia who look as if they could shoot as fast as they can argue – swarming like termites through the lofty rooms. These cocktail parties and official receptions where dull and tired officials are crowded with tiresome women into brilliant rooms made for leisure, for conversation, for the mannered comedy of intrigue! Clumsy attempts of the state robots to be gay!

  9 May 1947.

  I had John Grierson, formerly of the Canadian National Film Board, to lunch. He talked about his interest in economic freedom and his belief in a cultural aristocracy – how he was always being asked to lecture on aesthetics when he was really a political scientist. He twisted up his eyes hypnotically behind his spectacles to give me glances of piercing insight. He spoke of the Prime Minister as an “old darling.” Grierson is working in UNESCO. What a stew-pot of jealousies UNESCO sounds. God preserve me from having anything to do with it. One look at the people at the UNESCO building was enough. How I loathe international secretariats – they are always so provincial – talking shop all the time and having affairs with unattractive secretaries. They think they are “men of good will” and progressive. They make no allowance to themselves for their egotism and love of power. They have no humility. I am sure the League atmosphere at Geneva would have made a fascist of me.

  In the evening at Paul Beaulieu’s,1 a reception for French-Canadian intelligentsia – a world new to me of young French-Canadian students, artists, and actors who are finding Paris for the first time and who have a whole set of new gods unknown to me. Young students came up to me, greeting me with great charm as Monsieur le Conseiller, and getting away as quickly as they prudently could to continue passionate discussions among themselves. But they do have passionate discussions and they are infatuated with ideas and phrases. And everyone was enjoying just being there and talking. After the aridity of diplomatic entertainments and the suspicion which ideas, especially ideas about art or literature, arouse in a group of Anglo-Canadians, it seemed all to be a Good Thing.

  Reading Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet— one could get caught in Shakespeare and spend one’s whole life (and it would not be long enough) in that world of clues and whispers, glorious vistas, sw
eet songs and perfumes, breath-taking glooms – in that world so monstrously larger than life.

  Date Most Uncertain.

  Weekend in the country with the d’Harcourts – nice French people – in fact, impoverished gentry. A small, shabby château of no particular period (1820-1830?) with bowls of lilac everywhere – in the halls, in my bedroom – so that the whole house smelled of it. They had Germans in the house during the war but it must have been shabby long before that. No signs of a bath anywhere, primitive w.c., but of course a brand-new glistening bidet. They are a very nice family and I liked them all. Comte d’Harcourt takes rather a back seat. His wife is much concerned with local affairs – she sat on some local women’s council with a communist woman councillor. She said, “At first the woman was impossible, she must have this and must have that – but she is getting better – already one has got her to use the conditional mood when discussing business and I am lending her some good religious books.” This pleasant-looking couple have produced two buxom daughters – short, stocky, peasant types – very nice, simple, and natural (which did not prevent one of them from showing off like mad). Then my friend Emmanuel, their nephew, was there with a sister, a shade less buxom but giving off a slight odour of “good works in healthy country surroundings.” On Sunday morning they all went off to Mass and I made a tour of the park, which is encompassed by a high wall. It was a shut-in world of rough grass, trees, and rides in the woods, quite thick undergrowth with violets and other small violet-coloured flowers everywhere. I lay on a cut log in the sun and felt extremely happy.

  15 May 1947.

  Dined with Maurice Forget (our Military Attaché) to meet General Revers, a famous figure of the French Resistance – his idol. He gives the impression of being deformed due to his immensely broad shoulders and his jutting, underhung jaw. He has charm and quick wit – he is bold, magnetic, vain, and intelligent – in conversation, half-jokingly cynical and extremely outspoken. The company consisted of his wife, another general (retired), who had at one time been in charge of the French Deuxième Bureau and who, in appearance at least, was (to me) a most baffling type, a “simple soldier,” and General Revers’s Chef de Cabinet, who has been with him in all the changes of fortune in the Resistance, etc. – a sloppy, clever, intellectual soldier. Most of the conversation turned towards North Africa, as Juin had that day been appointed Resident General in Morocco. General Revers said that the way to preserve the balance there was to set the Berber against the Arab. For thousands of years the Berbers had been in the habit of making raids from time to time on the rich Arab towns. Now was the moment to let them have a go at, say, Fez – the Resident General could shut himself up in the Residence, a little massacring would go on, and after that the French would have no difficulty with the Arabs for some time. As for the Sultan, it was only necessary to back another candidate for the throne to put the fear of God into him. These ideas were advanced with cynical cheerfulness. Maurice Forget says they are quite serious and a Berber rising is just what the French will arrange.

  After dinner a young French deputy from North Africa and a French North African newspaper proprietor joined us. The conversation which followed on North African problems was something of an eye-opener to me. Here was a group of men completely sure of themselves, with none of the shaken confidence of the metropolitan Frenchman. To them the Arabs are simply an inferior race. They say that there is no good providing them with improvements – they prefer living in pigsties, and when decent houses were built for them they turned them into pigsties. There is no use paying them more – they have no sense of the value of money; they spend it at once and sit in the sun doing nothing until they are hungry and then work again for a little. The inhabitants of the towns were Semitic in origin and therefore, of course, cowards. All that was needed in North Africa was, as Lyautey1 used to say, to show strength and then you would not have to employ it. All would be well if (a) the French socialists would leave the situation alone, and (b) the British and Americans would mind their own business and not meddle. For the British there seemed precious little sympathy. The British had intrigued to drive them out of Syria – for that (as the French always say) there is documentary proof. The British had invented the Arab League for their own nefarious purposes and it was a source of some satisfaction that they were now having trouble with it. As for the Americans, they were always prating about democracy but look at the way they treated their Negro population.

  10 August 1947.

  Paris in mid-August. Weak, plaintive music coming out of a courtyard as one passes by – the houses with all their shutters closed – no one left but concierges and their cats – the Luxembourg gardens under a hot mist blazing with sunset colours of orange and yellow dahlias – a thin jet of fountain. No one to see all this summer luxuriance of foliage and flowers but a few children left behind for some particular reason in Paris – and an old woman in carpet slippers and a scowling gendarme.

  11 August 1947.

  Picnic organized by Diana to an eighteenth-century folly – La Tour de Retz – now tumbling down and overgrown with ivy, the garden a wilderness of brambles and wild roses. Diana and Cecil Beaton (echoes of how many fêtes champêtres of the twenties) suited the place as they draped themselves about a crumbling urn. Duff, who hates picnics, kept wishing that he had a little folding chair to sit on. “How can you!” cried Diana. “To take a chair to a picnic.”

  Had dinner at the British Embassy. More moments of nostalgia – the Gay Old Times embodied in that antique marionette Lady de Mendel,1 who still slaps her thigh, kicks up her heels, and smiles with her eyes at eighty-four. “And from that dainty little jewel such a whiff of garlic,” said Cecil Beaton. I asked Diana if she remembered my Uncle Harry2 “My first love – he lived opposite us in Arlington Street. He paid me my first compliment when I was a little girl – he wrote me a farewell letter before he died. I heard of his dash from my father.” “What did he look like?” I asked. “My dear, then a death’s-head.”

  Nancy Mitford to dinner – talking of the horrors of her country childhood – the boredom, the waiting around for something to happen. She said her grandmother used to change the hours of meals in despairing attempts to make – now the afternoons – now the evenings – shorter. “All those women in tweeds taking their cairns for a walk – waiting to die.”

  As I was driving to the office the other day I saw Nancy walking by herself past the bookstalls on the Quai. She had a floppy old hat on and looked not at all like her smart self, but pale and abstracted, and as she walked her lips were moving. She was talking to herself. She must have been trying out the shape of some scrap of dialogue in her novel. One could hardly believe she was the same person who appeared at dinner last week, her face then brilliant with animation, with that mocking turn-down of the mouth and the eyebrows lifted in incredulous amusement. Then she got into one of her spirals of talk, starting from a mere particle of absurdity that she had spotted in someone and cascading into a fantastic fireworks of invention, in which malice was so mixed with sheer high spirits and comedy that one couldn’t call it malice any longer. What a sparkler she can be. How gloriously funny, but I should not relish being the mark of one of her arrows. Then there is, too, in her an undercurrent of bitter, scornful sadness, much less evident now than it used to be in London. Now she is on a crest with literary success, happy love, her charming apartment, and the most stylish clothes in Paris.

  14 September 1947.

  Lunch with André Malraux, Elizabeth de Miribel, an American journalist, a Swedish journalist, and Catroux. The American journalist crystallized the conversation by asking A.B.C. questions about Gaullism and French politics. Malraux, snorting and snuffling and sweating, replied with a flood of exposition. I am still left, at the end, with the feeling that after the party was over and the juggler had completed his act, when I came to count the teaspoons several of them were missing altogether. Or, to put it a different way, as the Swedish journalist said to me afterwards, “What wor
ries me is that I think that sooner or later these people will get into power and then what kind of a job will they make of it?”

  The American was interested (as a “liberal” journalist) to hear a convincing denial of the accusation that de Gaulle is a future dictator. He supposed that Malraux was a liberal too. Reply – “I fought enough to show it.” Elizabeth (explanatory): “Monsieur Malraux fought in the Spanish Civil War.” The American (incredibly but in good faith): “On which side?” Malraux’s answer to the question as to whether he feared power being concentrated in the hands of one man was to say that nothing had ever been achieved in France except through the predominance of one man, and cited Clemenceau, Briand, and Poincaré. (This seemed odd to me as they had functioned under the old Third Republic Constitution and in a régime where there were more parties in France than there are today.)

  Malraux thought that there would be no civil war in France unless orders for one came from Moscow; then, with great rapidity and staggering indiscretion, he gave us a map of France in civil war (the Gaullist civil-war map – what a break for the Communist Party and before two foreign journalists and one diplomat!). Here it is: the North, the Northeast, the frontier as far as the Somme – Gaullist; the coast down to and including Bordeaux – Gaullist; Boucles du Rhône – “plutôt Gaulliste”; Paris – Gaullist; Paris suburbs – Communist; Limoges – Communist; the South – Communist; Franche-Comté and Les Landes – a mystery. (In all this he seems to assume that the Socialist Party has ceased to exist and doubtless the MRP too.) It was, he said, a geographical problem, just as the Civil War in Spain had been, and he quoted examples of whole Spanish provinces and regions on one side or the other. He remarked that there was an interesting parallel with the wars of religion in France – the areas of France which had been Protestant then were the areas which were Communist now.