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

by Ritchie, Charles

  He said that de Gaulle would come to power as a result of financial chaos and collapse. On being asked whether in those circumstances it would be better for the United States to wait to give aid to France until de Gaulle was in power, he first said, “In any case you will give too little,” but finally said, “By giving aid in doles now you will only prolong the agony. Ramadier cannot cope with the situation. The United States should choose one party or another. You must disabuse your compatriots’ mind of the idea of Right – Left – Centre, with de Gaulle at the Right. That corresponds to nothing real.” In fact he was actively discouraging United States aid to France – doing just what we are always accusing the Communist Party of doing – preferring the interests of his party to those of France because he believes that only under his party can France be saved.

  Asked about de Gaulle’s programme when he comes to power he replied: “We have two plans, one for the relèvement of Europe and the other for the relèvement of France. France can support herself – the only country in Europe that can.” Malraux went on: “France can live off her own resources and is self-contained in a way that Britain is not, is a better bet than Britain for United States support.” The barefacedness of this annoyed me.

  Malraux impressed me as superficial – a man of letters dabbling in politics. I have no faith in his judgements.

  15 September 1947.

  Lunch and afternoon at Elsie Mendel’s house at Versailles. Décor so familiar to readers of super-glossy fashionable magazines – very pretty it is too. Our hostess was spry – the skin on her antique face stretched like a too-tight ivory-coloured kid glove and the look of death in her eyes, but smart as an old monkey. I got through layers – eighty years – layers upon layers – a millennium of extinct civilizations, through the Roman and Etruscan periods to the Neanderthal woman – when she said that she (or was it her father?) was born in the old de Wolf house in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. It was a really Mendelian party: the little Queen of Yugoslavia; an American half-Cherokee Indian – “You know” (challengingly) “I never say anything behind people’s backs that I would not say to their faces. I make a hobby of houses; I have one in Mexico, one in Virginia, one in California, a penthouse in New York, but best of all I like my house in Paris and my little château in the country.” When jewels were mentioned – “I have a ceinture of emeralds – so amusing.” I sat next to Greta Garbo, but all she said to me was “Pass the salt.” But she said it in those husky, mysterious, palpitating tones that have echoed around the globe! She was wearing a Mexican-style straw hat and everyone kept on begging her to take it off. She refused until she went into the swimming-pool and then one saw how clever she had been.

  It concealed both her beauty and the ravages in it. She still has that mixture of gaucherie and mystery and that lovely, lovely face. There were half a dozen Hollywood directors or producers, all more or less stout. Also Paulette Goddard, dripping with diamonds – just a gay, pleasant little American housewife, but in the same swimming-pool with Garbo she just did not rate. Old Sir Charles Mendel would not agree. “Wonderful bone structure Garbo has,” he said, “but I like flesh – give me Paulette.” “Yes,” he went on, “I have what Elsa Maxwell would call ‘my most intimate friends’ here today – intimate acquaintances, that is what I would call them. I am a man with a lot of intimate acquaintances.” All the people there seemed names out of an old Vogue magazine and all so old, except the immortal Tony Porson bounding about in the pool like a Neapolitan diving boy.

  18 September 1947.

  What answers have we to the questioning classes: the poor – the discontented – the young – the clever? One cannot think of the question in terms of “we North Americans” and “they Europeans.” It applies to the democratic, anti-communist parties within the European countries. In France are those parties just a front behind which the bourgeois and the racketeers can, in their different ways – respectable or non-respectable – get on with their business? Are they so keen on their short-run interests that they have not even the intelligence and self-restraint to unite to secure their long-run interests? What about the alternative of Gaullism? What are its ideas? Improvement in the machinery of the State to make it stronger, but what is the object of the Gaullist State to be? A revival of patriotism – but is it to be patriotism in the raw or patriotism guided towards the evolution of the State in some advancing direction? A bulwark against communism? But what is on our side of the bulwark? If all our Western democratic civilization can do in Europe is to enable people who are already comfortable to go on being comfortable, it won’t do. This civilization was sick in Europe long before the war – ever since the First War. Are we seriously bent on curing it or is it a question of enlisting “any allies of whatever origin” against communism?

  7 December 1947.

  Went yesterday to Nellita’s wedding1 in the Protestant Temple at Poissy – the cold, plain, bare little shrine of a once-persecuted sect. A star pastor had been brought down from Paris for the occasion – a true offspring of Calvin, his mouth a bitter line, eyes of dark fanaticism, twitching hands raised in blessing – a man of spiritual arrogance and probity. The service was very different from the cozy old Church of England or the solid smugness of Presbyterianism. Here the fires of the Protestant conscience still burn – these people might tear the saints from their niches. The church was crowded with Nellita’s multitudinous aunts and cousins – dowdy old people full of kindness and rectitude, and inconspicuous young married couples with well-scrubbed children. The bridesmaids were graceful young girl-cousins, unpowdered and unpainted, with fresh skins and dark eyes full of innocence, sweet seriousness, and malice – like girls in a Russian nineteenth-century novel, but doubtless more Frenchly sensible and their moods controlled by Christian cheerfulness. They wore dark-red dresses made by the village dressmakers and had white narcissus fresh from the garden at Poissy in their hair. The pastor indulged in long extempore prayer (that most hateful of vices). He told the jeunes mariés that they would “fonder un foyer – un foyer rayonnant.” The marriage oath seemed less a solemn abracadabra than a clear promise to break which would be a shame. The thin, clear French language stripped the service of its mystery and beauty and broke the crust of customary acceptance. When the bride and groom answered “Yes,” the pastor said: “Que votre ‘oui’ soit ‘oui,’ car il est donné devant Dieu et Son Eglise.” I felt the enormity of lying to God – no fear entered into this feeling, unless it was the fear that one would never forgive oneself.

  So in one way and another I had a very amusing time in that last year of bachelordom in Paris. Yet there was an undercurrent of disarray and loneliness. What all that time I wanted, I finally obtained: a happy marriage. I proposed to Sylvia by long-distance telephone, Paris–Ottawa. When she accepted me I knew that this was the greatest stroke of good fortune of my life, and so it has proved to be. Our marriage took place in Ottawa in January 1948 and we returned to Paris until I was posted back to Ottawa in 1950.

  15 May 1948.

  This is a toy house, made for a newly married couple to play in. A pretty eighteenth-century villa of cream-coloured stucco. French windows give from the salon onto a small garden – a square of grass, gravel paths – a Paris garden, without a flower, protected by tall chestnuts from the overlooking windows of the banal blocks of Passy flats. These two or three houses on this side of the street are survivals of an earlier Passy, a quiet suburb merging into the Bois at Auteuil. It is the Passy nostalgically described in the opening pages of du Maurier’s Peter Ibbetson – a place of old-fashioned peace and gentility. The salon with its corner cupboards full of choice “bits” of china and its occasional tables has an almost English look of coziness. Our own few things – the framed silhouettes, the plain, worn Georgian silver, even the mid-Victorian watercolour sketch of my grandmother – look at home here. This is much the sort of house they are used to.

  Upstairs we are a little cramped for space. The owner of the house, Mlle de Préval, kept the
biggest bedroom for herself. Our bed is really too small. It is an old maid’s bed, big enough for Mlle de Préval and her hot-water bottle. The window looks out across the roof which projects over the French windows to the garden. At night we hear the trees moving and smell the garden.

  Yves seems very well contented. I think he prefers my being married. It means that there is always someone here to take an interest in what he is doing, someone who can measure his successes and failures. Also, he loves entertaining. Tonight, for instance, we are having a dinner party and all day he has been in a state of happy excitement. He is in and out of the house to buy last-moment things – coloured candles for the table (he has a weakness for coloured candles – I hate them), or more flowers. Only now that Sylvia is here she usually buys the flowers herself. She is in the garden now, arranging them in vases for tonight’s dinner. She has always been “good with flowers” – I can remember seeing her doing them at Aunt Elsie’s house at Murray Bay one summer years ago. I think even then I knew that in the end I should marry her if she would have me.

  Thank Heaven they have brought Sylvia’s dress for the party. It is a model, borrowed for the night from one of the big couturiers, and has its name inside it on a tab “Quand les lilas refleuriront.” It is made of silvery material with a design of lilac branches and has a long train. She will look cool and graceful and flower-like herself. She seems excited herself too – excited and happy. We were going to row on the Lac Inférieur in the Bois today as it is such a gloriously fine May day. For some time she has been wanting to row over to the island in the lake. It looks so tempting, as though the flowers and trees on the island had some magic more than those on the banks beside us when we stand and look across. But all the boats were taken and there was a queue at the landing-place waiting for them to come back to have their turn. There were boats full of young men and girls – the boys stripped to the waist rowing in the sun – people laughing and calling to each other from boat to boat. There were family parties, too – a stout woman sitting in the stern in a black dress and wearing a black hat – a chétif little boy dragging his hand in the water – an old man sitting helplessly in the sun-filled boat. You can smell the boats too – the smell, I suppose, of wood – yet it’s more than that. It’s a smell of boats, and even these tame rowboats in a city park have it.

  Tonight after dinner we all go on (except the spare man, who is not asked) to an evening party at the British Embassy for Princess Elizabeth. Royalties have an unfortunate effect on any social gathering. No one listens to anything anyone else, or even they themselves, are saying, because they are so anxious to overhear a Royal word or attract a Royal glance.

  19 June 1948.

  Reading Malraux’s Human Condition. In it he makes you share his own passion for conspiracy – a passion which has taken possession of some of the bravest, cleverest men in all the countries of Europe and Asia. For this is a conspiratorial age. Power is running in new channels. This is still only true of half of the world, but will that half corrupt the other? Is this one of the clues to what is going on around us? Where there is power there is also conspiracy? Perhaps this has been true in the most respectable parliamentary democracies, but there are conspiracies and conspiracies. What faces us now is something secret, violent, and fanatical, calling on all the excessive will – the inhuman, single-track obsession – which can apparently be found in the most commonplace men. The professor turned communist – the prostitute turned spy – the public-school boy turned secret agent. Could this not become a new form of excitement as necessary to the nerves as smoking? In France, for instance, everyone has been plotting in the Resistance, or among the collaborationists, or just plotting to save their skins or their fortunes, or to pay off a grudge. They all have been up to something which had to be concealed. It may be that they have taken the habit of it. Is a new pattern developing? Is this a by-product of the omnipotent state? Does it not go on under ministries where the civil servants increasingly control the lives of nations? Is part of our rage against communism the rage of Caliban at seeing his own face in the glass?

  21 June 1948.

  Not long ago I was sitting next to Diana at a lively luncheon party where the cross-fire of conversation was sizzling away. Twice – three times – I attempted to join the fray without success. Turning to Diana I said: “I cannot understand it. Am I invisible, or inaudible? I have so much to say and no one pays attention to me.” She fixed me with her azure eyes. “Something,” she said, “must be done about that.” Something was – with Nancy Mitford acting as her lieutenant, Diana organized a Ritchie Week, a week of non-stop parties, dinners, even a ball in Ritchie honour. She roped in half Paris – surprised French hostesses found it was the smart thing to join in this charade. Old and new friends showered us with invitations. Whenever we appeared, a special anthem was played to signal our entrance. Verses were addressed to us – on the walls of the houses in our street someone had by night chalked up in giant letters the slogan “Remember Ritchie.” Nancy I think it was who had an even more daring inspiration – a clutch of coloured balloons inscribed “Ritchie Week” were let loose over Paris. (The newspapers reported that one of these had floated as far as Boulogne, where it was picked up by the mystified inhabitants, who asked themselves what it might portend.) It was an apotheosis of a kind, and who but Diana could have devised such a fantasy? On the last night of the week, feeling like Cinderella at the end of the ball when she must return to obscurity, I said to Duff, “You don’t think, do you, that now we have an embarras de Ritchies?” He politely demurred.

  25 June 1948. In London on a visit.

  Went to the 400 Club. How often have I sat in that precise corner on the right of the band with the eternal bottle of whisky in front of me and with how many different men and women? Only the bottle has always been the same. Listening to the same band for all these years through the war, and before the war – the hours I have spent in that dark little hole with its dirty silk hangings (actually cleaned now, though not changed) while the rhythm of the monotonous, pointless music, of the drink, of the talk, got into my blood. And always with the thought of what was coming afterwards – the postponing of pleasure which heightened the atmosphere and made one talk more outrageous nonsense. Well, it is quite time I stopped going there. I shall go two or three more times until my present bottle of whisky is finished and then give it up, for to find myself at my age surrounded by boy guardees and their little girlfriends – no – it won’t do. It is almost as silly as writing this diary.

  10 July 1948.

  Everyone in Paris is in a disgruntled temper. You can see it in the faces of the passersby in the streets, their lips drawn in a line of bad-tempered stoicism. In the Bois the restaurants are empty, a few dejected waiters gossiping among the deserted tables on the terrace. The trees are turning brown as if it were already autumn. Our house is now as dank and dark as a potting-shed. Rain rattles down on the glass of the gallery roof.

  In my office I go to the window and look out at the broad, blank spaces of the Avenue Foch. A sour-faced nurse is lugging a reluctant little boy across the grass under the blue-green dripping chestnut trees. Marcel, my chauffeur, has put on his beret and gone to sleep at the wheel of my stationary car. Inside the Embassy everyone seems water-logged with rain, and we roll up and down the grand staircase with no purpose – or a mechanical one.

  7 August 1948.

  A restless wind – one feels change in the air – brilliant rain-washed intervals, then sudden grey squalls. The house seemed strange. Yves, the manservant, was away at his son’s wedding. The cats, hungry and wild, were snarling at each other and jumping on the tables looking for food. Sylvia, unfamiliar in a blue apron, brought up the breakfast. Later we went for a walk in the Bois – she wore a dress of pale pink linen and her soft-brimmed black hat. People looked at her as if they were saying, “Is she a beauty? No – not really. Oh, wait a minute – perhaps she is.”

  29 May 1949.

  The comedy over
the British Embassy Ball for Princess Margaret is worthy of Gogol. First they give out that it is to be for the young people; then it becomes known that they have made a few – a fatal few – exceptions. The fat was immediately in the fire. Men and women are equally frenzied. The men are pretending that they are thinking only of the pleasure their poor, dear wives will miss by not going, or they say, “So far as my wife and I are concerned it is of no consequence. We are too old, I suppose, although no older than the Fordhams” (adding bitterly, “but perhaps we look older”). As for the little Princess, she looks a cool little devil with enough in her glance – maline, amused, challenging – to turn the boys’ heads even if she were not a princess. Neat as a little pin, composed, fresh and dainty in her summer dress with all the Commonwealth and French officials and their wives sweating around her and telling her five hundred times that she has brought the fine weather with her, asking all the right questions with a sweet smile as if butter would not melt in her mouth.

  16 October 1949. Geneva.

  It is so long since I have been alone as I have been for the past week in the Hôtel de la Paix. I sit here on this Swiss Sunday morning. Outside my window the lake and the mountains are wrapped in a cocoon of fog. Two disconsolate American businessmen in broad-brimmed fedora hats and granny glasses are walking around the Brunswick Memorial, gazing up at it with hung-over distaste. A Geneva Sunday – everyone wonders whether it was worth waking up at all. I am quite alone up here in my double room (will the Department pay for a double room?), thinking that I will drink less, that the barber said that in six months I would be bald, that I am forty-three years old, and in a dim way I like this feeling of being alone and taking up again this monologue. I miss my wife – I want her. I am waiting for her, yet this time of recuperation is quietly, sadly pleasant. If ever I am on the edge of nervous desperation – if ever I feel insanity threatening – I shall buy a ticket for Geneva and come and stay at the Hôtel de la Paix. Geneva is the nursing-home of Europe. Who has not come to rest their bodies and nerves after storms, amorous or political? Every dethroned king, exiled intellectual, proscribed politician in Europe for more than one hundred years. Being alone in Paris is despairing, watching the play of love and fashion, being outside it all, walking the merciless boulevards in the brilliant clarity, hemmed in by the stage-sets of architecture, called on at every turn to respond – to enjoy – to live. Here in Geneva one’s forces gather – or one has that illusion; the return attack becomes once more thinkable.