Nancy Mitford (10 page)

FOR THE NEXT twenty years, the happiest in her life, Nancy settled in Paris. Even before settling there she had put these words into the mouth of her hero Fabrice: ‘One’s emotions are intensified in Paris—one can be more happy and also more unhappy here than in any other place. But it is always a positive source of joy to live here, and there is nobody so miserable as a Parisian in exile from his town. The rest of the world seems unbearably cold and bleak to us, hardly worth living in…’

Paris, when she arrived there, in September 1945, was still suffering from the after-effects of German occupation. Many essential commodities were scarce and expensive; the black
market
was still flourishing. But the aesthetic and intellectual compensations were overwhelming. The recovery of the fine arts seemed to have been stimulated by the recent Liberation. The theatre, the ballet, film production, were being revived with Gallic energy and refinement of taste. And the beauty of the city remained inviolate. Always a strenuous walker, Nancy was able to familiarize herself with the intimate old Paris behind the boulevards and the Hôtel de Ville, the quays and narrower streets with high-roofed buildings, with the venerable Place des Vosges and the classical mansions on the left bank of the Seine so long inhabited by French nobility whose names had inspired Balzac and Proust. Balzac’s Madame de Sauve might even have
suggested
Nancy’s Sauveterre. The British Embassy was full of her friends. Our Ambassador Duff Cooper and the glamorous Lady Diana made it sparkle as never before with poets, painters and musicians. Nancy was avidly receiving and assimilating new impressions.

‘I must come and live here as soon as I can,’ she told her mother in September 1945. ‘I feel a totally different person as if I had come out of a coal mine into daylight… It seems silly when I struggled for a year to get here not to stay as long as possible.’ Her friend Betty Chetwynd lent her a flat in 20 rue Bonaparte. ‘The angelic concierge (how helpful the French are) got into the Métro at rush hour for me, went all the way to Montmartre, and returned with the
prettiest
femme de menage you ever saw, all like magic. Imagine a London porter, all grumbles and groans and puttings off and certainly no lovely girl at the end of it! Oh my passion for the
French I see all through rose-coloured spectacles! There was a tremendous row in the street this afternoon, two men roaring at each other and ending up
et vous
—
et vous
—and this refrain was taken up by a hundred heads out of windows, chanting
et vous
—
et vous
. It was like a scene in a film… It is such a holiday-getting up when I like (shamefully late), sleeping all the
afternoon
or reading a book in the boiling sun by the river and
above all
having enough to eat…’

‘Peter… loves the idea of a peaceful life but when it comes to the point he never can get away from his club and so on!’

‘I’m doing a lot of business of various kinds—getting my book translated I think, giving an interview to a French paper and so on besides book business. All great fun. I am as happy as can be…’

‘On Sunday to the Fould Springers at Royaumont—perhaps the most beautiful house I’ve ever seen… At luncheon somebody said, and what are your politics? at which a clenched fist flew over the table. It has never been forgotten. P. enchanted. “La famille Mitford fait ma joie”…’

‘I’m doing business in a rather desultory way—writing one or two articles for French papers which pay frightfully well, selling and buying books etc, but really I’m having an absolute rest and the result is I feel so wonderful I don’t know it’s me. Enough to eat twice a day, always a glass of wine and staying in bed most of the morning have made a new woman of me… Oh the food. Every meal is a recurring pleasure. I don’t know how I shall be able to drag myself back to
starving
London. (The joke is the French think we’ve got everything in the world and simply don’t believe me when I try to tell the truth!) And always a verre de vin, so good for one.’ There is a hint of teasing here.

Her friend Alvilde Lees-Milne has given me a bleaker account of material conditions when she was living outside Paris at Jouy-en-Josas: ‘In the winter of 1945 when we were both back in France, Nancy making do in cold hotels, I struggling in an unheated house with no help and precious little food, she would come and stay and all the horrors turned into jokes. The
smoking
damp wood, the staple diet of carrots and potatoes peeled and washed in a bidet and cooked on a primus in the bathroom (the kitchen was unusable), the long walks to Versailles and villages to cajole various black market people we had been told of to sell us some eggs or butter, and the endless blackouts through constant electricity cuts and so on, were turned into fun and there was a laugh to be got out of the gloomiest situation.’

After two months when her permit had expired, Nancy could hardly bear to return to ‘Blighty’, as she called it.

In London she was comforted by the success of her
Pursuit of Love
and by the return of her faithful crony Mark Ogilvie-Grant, who had been a prisoner of war in Italy. ‘You will be glad to hear that Mark is back,’ she had written her mother in the previous April. ‘He looks like a horror-photograph, his knees are enormous lumps and his arms like sticks, but alive and well
and immensely cheerful. He says in prison they dreamed of nothing but food and his dream was—do you remember that layer-cake with jam you used to have?—well that! Isn’t it too funny, I’d quite forgotten it but of course it used to be a feature in our lives. He has been in 13 prisons…’

When Nancy’s house in Blomfield Road was let she often stayed with Mark at Kew Green. He made no mystery of his ‘special tastes’ and she often chaffed him about them. Since Oxford days when he dressed up as a comical cockney charlady at the Hypocrites Club I had not been privileged to see him in one of the wigs Nancy introduced into her
Pigeon Pie
, which was dedicated to Mark. The wig theme recurred in her letters to him even when he was a
prisoner
of war: ‘Thought you’d just like to know I take your wigs out and shake them every Sunday, the moths have been terrible this year and I don’t want you to come back to a bald (or patchy) wig.’ Mark’s nonsense just happened to suit her nonsense, which is reflected, often abstrusely, in their correspondence. Robert Byron, another bosom friend with a sense of humour on the same wave length, had been drowned by enemy action in 1941—a grievous loss to all who knew him, though Evelyn Waugh mis trusted the violence of his opinions. Robert jeered at Evelyn’s Catholicism; Evelyn sneered at Robert’s mosques and minarets.

While in London Nancy wrote to Mark (8th February, 1946): ‘I got a postcard to send you of some thoughtful sheep in deevey Perthshire scenery but suppose I must answer your letter now. Glad you liked the book, it is doing well. I’ve already made
£
1,250 here and
£
100 in America so I have suddenly become la tante à l’héritage and lazy Daze [a nephew] has been most deferential of late. I’m hoping for big things in the States and film folk are nibbling.’

‘The talk is all of the BALL. Michael Duff’s—it was heaven on earth. I hitched an old white satin shirt (oyster with dirt) on to my best night dress—it was a wow and I’ve never enjoyed an evening more. All the old buddies—and a ghostly voice was heard in “She wore a wreath of roses”, it was very moving. Annie had to spend
£
200 in order to wear her jewels on account of the wave of crime, Daphne fell down, Daisy Fellowes arrived with her own
magnum
of champagne and Chips [Channon] said to Emerald [Cunard], “This is what we have been fighting for.” (We!) Emerald, very cross as she is at parties, replied, “Oh why dear, are they all Poles?”’

‘I spent yesterday at Brighton buying jet jewellery and postcards and once more the voice was heard, while an antique yellow wig could almost be seen whisking round the next corner. (By the way I really can’t dedicate all my books to you, you know.) I’m off to Paris again I hope in about a month.’

‘Darling Prince Peter of Greece has been here, he asked us (typical of foreign royalty) to dinner in a kind of Chinese ping pong room and there were some Chinks who luckily knew Harold my dear and some terrible little Greek insect women, one called Alice something ducky and one called Sitwell. I told Osbert and he said, “oh yes the jigga jigga Sitwells.”

‘It was a funny evening I must say but it went on too long and I was dead by the end of it…’

‘Prod went to see his mother and she began telling him about the allowances she gives the
others… (she gives us 0). So Prod, goaded, at last said, “Well what about me?” “Oh
you always
manage to keep alive somehow.” Isn’t she bliss. She said “Sir Stafford Cripps likes Nancy’s book but he doesn’t like the
subject
and I don’t like the
subject
either.” Did it remind you of Swinbrook days? Brains.’

Until she could find a permanent foothold in Paris Nancy stayed in various cheap hotels and borrowed flats. Early in June 1946 she wrote to her mother from the Hôtel de Bourgogne: ‘I generally get an hour or so sunbathing on the roof. I lie in the nude with my head flopping over into the Place du Palais Bourbon, watching the arrival of the Députés and with a view of all Paris up to Montmartre, it is heaven.’ And to Mark: ‘I am blissful here as usual and making plans to live here and let Blomfield Road… Love here is on a high plane. The 35-year-old
husband
of an 85-year-old Princess madly in love with the 7-stone husband of a 14-stone Princess (weight). Both Princesses furious—both husbands in tears but also in the throes of such
unrestrainable
love that their tears don’t avail much.’

‘I have so far cashed in
£
4,500 on the
Pursuit of Love
(a little more actually) and that’s before it comes out in America. So you see the pen is mightier than the sword. whatever that may mean.’

‘I’ve got a friend here called Mogens [Mogens Tvede, husband of Princess Dolly Radziwill], pronounced Moans. I keep saying why not Grogens, but nobody laughs…’ In a note entitled Smells she compared the French with the English to the latter’s
disadvantage
: ‘French smells: garlic, hot drains, hot sweat on poor people, bad petrol.
Compensations
: Perpetual whiffs of scent, chestnut flowers, wonderful cooking smells, flowers and fruit smell twice as strong. English smells: cold sweat, cold mutton, dirty hair, uncleaned woollen clothes.
All this among the well-to-do
. Nobody seems to use any scent at all.’

‘The rich French smell delicious always and all use scent and lotions. Admittedly all smells are stronger here, good and bad, but one never wants to retch, as in England, now.’

‘I am in full house-hunting campaign,’ she told Mark, ‘and trudge the streets following up clues sometimes with terrifying results as this morning when I had to go and see a lunatic and ask if he would unbrick a room of a prospective flat (what can he keep there—Prod thinks a nun). I had to go alone as all was said to depend on charm and an English accent which he is said to love. However he took one look at me and said he didn’t want any
tapage
. I said, hissing my SSes like l’Honorable Mrs. Pemberton in
Lakmé
that I wasn’t a
tapeuse
. He softened rather and may consider me—! But it’s always the same and always leads nowhere, so discouraging!’

‘Huge Gaullist meeting of 40,000 people the other day. I went, feeling awfully like my
sisters
. It was a wild success.’

Peter, ‘full of the most nefarious plans for black marketing of all descriptions,’ had been offered a lucrative job in Abyssinia for four or five months, and Nancy wrote: ‘I now find I can deny myself nothing and of course that is an expensive frame of mind to be in.’ But ‘if I’m not careful I shall be turned into a train-meeter, money-lender
and
British restaurant.’

In May 1947: ‘Awful Peter [back from Ethiopia] went and lost
£
50 worth of francs (stolen), it’s his fault and not my lack of foresight… Meanwhile I’ve got a job here as English adviser
and translation supervisor to a new publisher—
£
400 a year and (even more precious because it means I can’t be forced back into the tunnel) a carte d’identité de travailleur. Now I must find a flat…’

‘Very funny letter from Evelyn [Waugh] back from Holly wood where he seems to have spent the whole time in the cemetery. It’s called South Lawn, organ music peals from the flower beds and the loved ones (as they call the corpses) are frozen and kept in drawers. The children’s section is called Slumber Land. The keeper of it said to Evelyn, “We have
great
trouble
keeping
pince-nez on the loved ones’ noses”.’

To Mark she wrote in July: ‘The season here has become giddy, people are doing all sorts of things they will regret later. Someone we all know at a party the other night took off his collar and tie and revealed on his bronzed neck a collar of rubies, three rows, with a ruby and emerald tassel hanging down HIS back. His protector who was present remarked drily, ‘X is a very good chap but he can’t expect to live on his charm for ever” (X having said, on showing the rubies, “not bad for a working girl”). Are you jealous?

‘I’ve found and practically got the most divine flat you ever saw—oh how I pray it comes off. I’d far sooner have it than the Moulin—bathed in sunlight… I shall be here all August—come and stay. Only August is so dull, every cat leaves the town. I like it… Any flying saucepans at Kew?’

Evidently due to currency restrictions she wrote in September: ‘Utter parsimony is now the note and I live on teeny bits of cat when not asked out. I’ve given up baths, coffee and wine, buses and even the metro and find one can exist (in this very cheap hotel) for
£
1 a day in all, which amazes me I must say. But I don’t know that one could keep it up for long in the winter.’ At the same time she was considering a flat ‘rejected as too expensive by Doris Duke, in which I am planning to camp out. It is three vast frescoed state rooms
aucun confort
(i.e. no loo).’