The Horror of Love Read online

  THE HORROR OF LOVE

  Lisa Hilton

  PEGASUS BOOKS

  NEW YORK LONDON

  To Caroline Dalmeny

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgements

  List of Illustrations

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  PART ONE: 1901–39

  1: Gaston

  2: Nancy

  3: Coming Out

  4: Faux Pas

  5: The Fascisters

  6: The Pursuit of Honour

  7: Losing

  8: War

  9: Le Premier des Gaullistes

  10: Flight

  11: Poor Frogs

  12: Love

  PART TWO: 1944–73

  13: Liberation

  14: The Advance on Paris

  15: Politics 1944–6

  16: The Embassy

  17: The Pursuit of Chic

  18: Les Femmes du Monde

  19: Government

  20: Despair

  21: Theory of the Leisure Class

  22: A l’Ombre de l’Embrassadeur en Fleur

  23: Politics 1962–9

  24: Marriage

  25: The Horror of Love

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This book could not have been attempted without the generosity and kindness of Charlotte Mosley, who gave me a great deal of time, access to both Nancy Mitford’s unpublished letters to Gaston Palewski and her own then-unpublished research and a magical winter walk in Eaton Square.

  I am most grateful to the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire for permitting me a telephone interview. Anthony Beevor was extremely helpful, particularly in giving me the benefit of his great expertise on the complexities of Free French politics, as were those who shared their memories of Gaston Palewski with me in interviews: Lord Thomas, Lord Weidenfeld, Paul Johnson and Viscount Norwich provided invaluable insights into their personal relationships with Nancy and Gaston.

  The assistance of Marcella, Lady Dashwood and Sir Alistair Horne at West Wycombe is much appreciated, as is that of Professor John Rogister and Lady Antonia Fraser, Anne-Sophie Sabouret, the Comtesse Caumont de la Force and the Marquis de Segure. For an evening in the sixième such as Nancy might have known, I thank Alexandre Pradere, the Princesse de Beauvau-Craon and Anne de Lacretelle. Anka Muhlstein and Philip Ziegler both shared their own impressions of Gaston’s character.

  David Valence, the director of the Fondation Charles de Gaulle in Paris, was most kind in giving me access to the archive. Charlotte Javelot was very helpful with correspondence. I particularly wish to thank Tom Staley, director of the Harry Ransom archive at the University of Austin, Texas, where I was lucky enough to speak to Lady Selina Hastings, whose own work has proved an essential resource. Sir Peter Westmacott, the British ambassador to France, and Lady Westmacott were the most gracious and patient of hosts for a weekend at the Hotel Charost and its gardens. I would also like to acknowledge the efficiency and dedication of the staffs of the Archives Nationales de France, the French Embassy in Rome, the British Library and the London Library, and the generosity of Andrew Neil and Fraser Nelson in allowing me to work in the Spectator archive.

  Michael Alcock helped me to develop the idea for this book, and my agent, Georgina Capel, made it happen. Many thanks, too, to Alan Samson and Susan Lamb at Weidenfeld. My editor, Caroline North, agreed to work with me once again, with invaluable brilliance and efficiency.

  Much of the work on this book was done at Rosebery House, where thanks are due to Craig and Sheryl Wilkinson for their interest and assistance. I am immensely grateful to Lord and Lady Dalmeny, who gave me the gift of peace and space to write in their beautiful home, not to mention the key to their wine cellar.

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  Waiting for love (National Portrait Gallery, London)

  Nancy and Peter Rodd (Getty Images)

  Gaston, ‘the Colonel’ (Topfoto)

  The Connaught Hotel (Getty Images)

  Piccadilly and Leicester Square in the Blitz (Getty Images)

  Rue Bonaparte (Private Collection / Archives Charmet / The Bridgeman Art Library)

  General De Gaulle on the BBC (Getty Images)

  Nancy at Rue Monsieur (Rex Features)

  Dior’s atelier (Sueddeutsche Zeitung Photo / Lebrecht Music & Arts)

  Churchill and De Gaulle (Photography by IWM, Camera Press, London)

  Gaston in action (Press Association)

  Gaston’s achievements (Wikimedia Commons / Mu (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0])

  The Pont Royal (Getty Images)

  The Zattere in Venice (Getty Images)

  Palazzo Farnese (Fratelli Alinari Museum Collections – Malandrini Collection, Florence)

  Boucher’s ‘Autumn Pastoral’ (By kind permission of the Trustees of the Wallace Collection)

  Louise de Vilmorin (Getty Images)

  Susan Mary Alsop (Topfoto)

  The park at Versailles (Photograph by Dorothea Schmid / Laif, Camera Press, London)

  L’Escalier Daru (Giraudon / The Bridgeman Art Library)

  Nancy at Versailles (Getty Images)

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Of her correspondence with the scholar Theodore Bestermann when she was working on her biography Voltaire in Love, Nancy Mitford wrote: ‘If you want to bore your reader, tell them everything.’ This book is, or aims to be, the biography of a love affair. It is not a ‘Mitford’ book, nor a history of Général de Gaulle’s role in the Second World War, though inevitably it is coloured by aspects of both narratives. It attempts to reconfigure the role of Gaston Palewski in Nancy Mitford’s life, and to present Gaston to English-speaking readers, who might know him best as Fabrice de Sauveterre, as the significant politician he was. For a fuller account of Nancy’s life, readers might wish to consult the excellent biographies by Selina Hastings and Laura Thompson, while for the Mitford sisters, Mary S. Lovell’s account is the most comprehensive. For the progress of the Free French, Jean Lacouture and Jonathan Fenby give more thorough histories than are presented here.

  ‘A well born man knows in advance all the procedures he should follow and encounter in the various phases of gallant love; it often displays more refinement than true love since nothing about it calls for passion or spontaneity, and it is always very witty.’

  Stendhal, On Love

  PROLOGUE

  In the summer of 1941, two Englishmen, a Welsh Guards officer named Peter Rodd and his brother Francis, met a Frenchman in Addis Ababa to talk about a railway. Colonel Palewski, the commander of the Free French forces in East Africa, needed to ascertain the British position with regard to the French concession in the Addis–Djibouti railway line. A year later, Colonel Palewski arranged a meeting on a bright evening in the garden of the Allies Club on Park Lane with Rodd’s wife, who he thought would be glad to hear news of her husband. In her most famous novel, The Pursuit of Love, Nancy Mitford described the effect of this ‘short, stocky, very dark’ Frenchman: ‘Linda was feeling, what she had never so far felt for any man, an overwhelming physical attraction. It made her quite giddy, it terrified her. She could see that Fabrice was perfectly certain of the outcome, so was she perfectly certain, and that was what frightened her …’

  Some days later, Nancy invited Gaston Palewski to dinner at her home in Blomfield Road. She waited for him in the dining room of her small, elegant house with its swagged pink moiré wallpaper, until she heard that sound, ‘a sound more intimately connected with the urban love affair than any except the telephone bell, that of a stopping taxicab. Sun, silence and happiness’ (The Pursuit of Love).

  Gaston Palewski was no one’s dream of an ideal French lover, yet in his alter
ego Fabrice de Sauveterre Nancy established an ideal of the type which even the stuffy Daily Telegraph was obliged to concede dominated the English mind for twenty years. Gaston had acne-pitted skin, ‘a face like an unpeeled King Edward’, 1 receding hair and, according to some of his mystified contemporaries, halitosis that could stop traffic. ‘Oh, Gaston, ’ recalled Anka Muhlstein, a family friend, ‘how ugly he was.’ But women adored him, perhaps because he so thoroughly adored them. Gaston’s ‘pretty ladies’ were the despair and the scandal of Général de Gaulle’s suite. Gaston operated on a principle of maximum returns, making passes at practically every woman he came across, enjoying an astonishing (and to his peers quite infuriating) degree of success.

  At a meeting in the Café de Flore, Paris in 2009, a group of ladies of considerably more than a certain age agreed to be interviewed in strict anonymity about Gaston. All tiny dogs and Dior, it took no more than a kir à la pêche for these women to begin reminiscing, with much giggling, about the friends, sisters, cousins who had fallen for the Colonel.

  ‘But did she give in, then?’

  ‘No, that was the summer he dumped her at Cannes and went to Switzerland with her sister.’

  ‘It can’t be, because that was the year I was with him at Biarritz …’

  Perhaps, given their relative youth, these ladies were rather inclined to exaggerate their personal involvement with the legendary Beast of the Rue Bonaparte, but they agreed on two things. Gaston (giggles) was ‘doné pour faire plaisir aux femmes’ (the best translation of this would be ‘built for love’) and the Englishmen of their youth were absolutely hopeless. By the third year of marriage, they claimed, Englishmen barely look at their wives at all. The stereotype of the Englishman as a diffident and incompetent lover is firmly entrenched in the psyches of both nations. Edith Cresson, the French prime minister, was attacked for her airy assertion that ‘the Anglo-Saxons are not interested in women as women … It is a problem of upbringing and I consider it a sort of disease, ’2 but no one really disagreed with her. Nancy Mitford was firmly in Mme Cresson’s camp. In her 1951 novel The Blessing, the worldly Mme Rocher wonders at the mystery of English marriage: ‘English husbands? They go to their clubs, their Boat Race, their Royal Academy – they don’t care for making love a bit.’

  Nancy’s portrait of Fabrice, Duc de Sauveterre in The Pursuit of Love seduced a generation of Englishwomen with its blissful depiction of l’amour à la Française. The real Fabrice, Gaston Palewski, was for thirty years one of France’s most distinguished politicians and diplomats, a connoisseur and patron of the arts and a significant influence in the post-war project for European federalism, yet none of his contemporaries is in any doubt that it was Nancy who really made him famous. The reality of Nancy’s twenty-nine-year relationship with her pompous, pockmarked colonel was far from the bliss she imagined for Linda Radlett and Fabrice, but the coup de foudre of that third summer of the war provided them both with the most significant personal and emotional attachment of their lives. Gaston’s story has, in English at least, been told very much as an accessory to Nancy’s life, which has been extensively documented as part of the myth of her beautiful, fanatical, compelling family. Yet that story, which encompasses one of the most passionately exciting periods of French history, illuminates not only the life of an extraordinary man, but the work of one of the most popular and influential writers of the twentieth century.

  Nancy Mitford’s popular reputation diminishes her in something of the same manner as does Jane Austen’s. Bonnets and bosoms in Jane’s case, diamonds and darlings in Nancy’s. Film and television representations of their work have tended to focus on what Austen herself termed the ‘light, bright and sparkling’. Nancy’s name is also inevitably associated with the ‘U and non-U’ essay which she wrote simply as a joke to tease her friend Evelyn Waugh but which nevertheless has seen her branded ever after as a horrendous snob. Yet there is a toughness, a darkness even, to Nancy’s writing which can be traced through her early novels to the late and celebrated biographies, a vision of love which could not be further removed from the chick-lit happy endings of Bridget Jones and Mr Darcy. Nancy poked fun at the romantic fantasies of dizzy debutantes, but, through both her own experiences and those of her family, no one could have been more bitterly exposed to the disastrous consequences of blindly romantic love than she.

  Nancy’s first two post-war bestsellers deal respectively with a serial adulteress who dies in childbirth and a sexually molested child who marries her abuser and destroys her family in the process. They might be read as the last of the attenuated tradition of the English Gothic novel. Her later novels, The Blessing and Don’t Tell Alfred, take a more ‘Enlightenment’ approach, essays in Gallic didacticism whose pragmatism contrasts with the wilder, romantically violent loves which lurk beneath the glittering surface of The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate. As her relationship with Gaston continued, Nancy’s perspective on love became progressively more ‘French’, or perhaps rather more eighteenth century. The keystones of her romantic philosophy become civilization and adulthood. The Blessing provides an unsentimental education for its English heroine, Grace, who is gradually brought to accept, even to endorse, her French husband’s infidelity; Don’t Tell Alfred is an exploration of and a warning against the imported American worship of youth.

  Nancy’s correspondence also touches repeatedly on these themes throughout her life. Gaston was her great love, and he dominated her beliefs about art, politics, about the way life should be approached and lived. Nancy might have been madly in love with the colonel, but she was quite aware of his imperfections. She was always conscious that in person he was far less than the ideal she would have him embody, but that ideal eventually became her ideology, in her relationships and her books. To be a civilized adult seems a spare ambition, but for Nancy it was the end of art and of life.

  Many writers have argued that Nancy’s philosophy was achieved by default, that she was merely, in her own words, ‘putting on a good shop-front’, making a virtue of necessity. Several of her biographers have portrayed her as a victim of her hopeless passion for Gaston, her life with him as a wasted one of humiliation and denial. Her letters are often raw with the pain Gaston caused her, yet they also reveal the potential of an intimacy based upon ideas which contemporary women would find frankly appalling. Fidelity is not the point of marriage, though it may well be the end; adultery, if properly managed, may be a highly civilized pursuit (despite the tiresomeness of always having to go to bed in the afternoon), the one essential for happiness is not self-exposure or mutual dependency but great good manners. None of these points is necessarily revolutionary, but a glance around a bookshop or any women’s magazine shows that we are still bewildered, enthralled and terrified by our failure to achieve what feminism has taught us we deserve. Nancy and Gaston were two middle-aged, not particularly attractive people. He was a selfish, career-obsessed philanderer; she was febrile, needy and given to ‘shrieking’, yet the discipline, tenderness and gentillesse of their relationship exposes the limitations of many modern sexual mores.

  Nancy was constitutionally incapable of bathos. Sadness and loss she knew very well, and she handles them in her novels so dexterously that the lightness of her touch initially disguises her very real capacity to convey pain and hopeless longing. Yet her great funniness, remarked on by all who knew her, whether or not they cared for it, meant that she could never play the tragic heroine for long, even to herself, as this exchange with Gaston demonstrates: ‘“I’ve given up everything”, I said, “My friends, my family, my country,” and he simply roared with laughter and then of course so did I.’

  PART ONE

  1901–39

  1

  GASTON

  All his life, Gaston Palewski’s father, Moise, sought to recreate the elements of a family which, in his own words, had been ‘brutally dispersed’.1 The Palewskis were Polish Jews: on the paternal side they had their origins in Vilno, in Russian P
oland, on the maternal they came from Galicie in southern Russia, near the Romanian border. The family were linked by trade and marital alliances to a large Jewish community in the Grodno area, with many relatives in the small cities of Antopol, Pinsk and Kobryn. Educated members of the lesser middle class, many of the men trained to be rabbis while accommodating the concessions demanded of a devout, insular community in its negotiations with the commercial world. In a memoir written after the First World War, Gaston’s brother, Jean-Paul, observed a certain quiet humility in his relatives, an ability to combine remarkable intellectual talent with ‘the legitimate contentment of duty done, a bottomless instinct of charity and an often mystical devotion to the nicest forms of ideas’. He also remarked on the laws of segregation which caused the ‘unhappy Jewish nation in Russia’2 to live in a tightly closed circle, never aspiring to worldly success beyond the most unassuming of trades. Gaston Palewski had an uneasy relationship with these origins all his life. No one could have been more eager than he to shake off the heavy garments of the shtetl, to recreate himself as the sophisticated mondain he so brilliantly became, yet the qualities identified by his brother – duty, kindness and the capacity for a certain mystic idealism – shaped his life as surely as his more explicit rejection of his family’s past.

  Moise’s father, Peisach Abramovich, was born in 1840 in Kobryn. A cultivated, emotional man with a fondness for poetry, he was employed as a manager for a Polish landowner and well respected in the city. He married Rachel Notkowa, a devout, intelligent woman five years his junior who spoke four languages and raised her six children with scrupulous respect for Jewish tradition. Moise was born in 1867, and as a small boy showed a rebellious streak. He recalled being reprimanded by his father for sneaking off to the theatre or displays of military exercises when he ought to have been at his studies. The family lived a quietly comfortable life until Peisach developed cancer of the mouth at the age of thirty-three. According to Jean-Paul’s memoir, it was not the disease that killed him, but the poisonous concoctions of a local chemist. Whatever the case, Rachel found herself a widow at thirty. Without her husband’s wages, her prospects looked extremely bleak. Her brother-in-law, a doctor named Michel Israel Rabbinowicz, offered to take the Palewski children with him to Paris, where he would oversee their education, and Rachel agreed to make the sacrifice, though she was unable to part with her youngest boy, two-year-old Paul. The others, Moise, Albert, Leon, Frieda and Judith, aged between twelve and four, set off with their uncle for France.