True Pleasures (15 page)

It's hard to surprise Rachel, but Omar has done it.

‘Christ, you get along here much more than I do. Have you thought about moving to Paris for a while, it suits you!'

‘Never. I'd find it even harder than you do. You need to be here for your work. I love visiting Paris, but I couldn't live here, you know that. I'm bound hand, foot and heart to Sydney.'

We hunch shoulders and bump elbows with the stylish young things, we eat average couscous and lamb, we speak loudly over the cheerful noise.

Rachel says, ‘You should go to lunch, Lu, it's part of the Paris experience. You are a writer, they respect that here you know.' And, she adds, wanting to clarify, not wanting to be unkind, ‘Perhaps Omar thinks you'll write about him and his restaurant.'

On the way out, Omar helps us into our coats and I accept his invitation. We agree to meet here on Sunday at 12:15.

As a gust of outdoor air hits our faces, Omar says softly, like a poem, like a gift, ‘I like you. It seems to me that you are ready for anything.'

Like the cool wind, the remark tingles. As if this stranger sees something in me that I don't yet see myself.

The day one sets foot in France, you can take it from me, PURE happiness begins. Of course it's partly that dear dear Colonel, but I don't see him all the time by any means & every minute of every day is bliss & when I wake up in the morning I feel as excited as if it were my birthday.

Nancy Mitford

E
VEN AS A SCHOOLGIRL I
knew a secret about Nancy Mitford. I knew she was more than just one of the scandalous aristocratic Mitford sisters; more than just the minor writer of comedies of manners, certainly more than just the pen-friend of the major writer Evelyn Waugh. In my heart of hearts I knew she was a philosopher. I worked this out by myself, as a grimy teenager reading Penguin paperbacks on the daily bus ride home.

As the bus bumped its way through the traffic, every now and then I would lift a blurry gaze from the printed pages to the passing chicken shops and car yards. But all
I could see was another place and time – one in which women ruled the salons with wit and style; men loved conversation and art; and a life dedicated to pleasure was both possible and admirable.

Of course, in those days I didn't have the faintest real understanding about the source of Nancy Mitford's philosophy, but if anyone had cared to ask, I could readily have listed some of its qualities. Beauty. Pleasure. Irreverence. Worldliness. Notions far removed from the self-denying belief systems of my convent-school.

Nancy Mitford represented the entirely radical idea that life wasn't automatically about suffering and sacrificing, or even about working and acquiring. She had described a way of living which transformed daily life into an art form. She had described an
art of living
. And that, of course, is where Paris would come in.

One of these days, I thought, as the bus lurched off from the traffic lights, I'll find out about all this.

In Nancy Mitford's fictional world, the realization of every girl's dreams lies in Paris. All her best heroines find their destinies there. There's Linda of
The Pursuit of Love
and Grace of
The Blessing
. Even the prosaic Fanny ends up in Paris as wife to the British Ambassador in
Don't Tell Alfred
. And here's me, an Australian girl who has come to Paris. I'm not looking for love, however. I'm looking for Nancy Mitford.

I am wandering down Nancy Mitford's street, rue Monsieur (which she variously referred to as rue Mr or Mr St) in the discreet 7th
arrondissement
, the noble Faubourg Saint-Germain. I stand outside the bland courtyard walls of number 7. I can see the Eiffel Tower over one
shoulder and the glowing dome of Louis XIV's Invalides over the other. The Musée Rodin is just down the road. The Pagoda, a Chinese-style cinema on the corner, strikes an eccentric note. The Faubourg Saint-Germain grew up in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as the aristocrats moved out of the Marais district to be nearer the road to Versailles and the Sun King, Louis XIV. This neighborhood's high, discreet walls don't invite tourists to linger. There are no bustling cafés or cozy bistros. At the apex of Parisian tradition, exclusion and discretion, this
quartier
is quiet and austere.

Except to me, because even this silent courtyard door speaks loudly of Nancy Mitford. Behind this door is an eighteenth-century pavilion. Nancy Mitford lived from 1947 to 1967 in the ground floor apartment leading onto the courtyard. I know from photographs and descriptions that the apartment was neither large nor grand, but furnished with a few fine screens, antiques and fresh flowers. Here Nancy Mitford wrote her books and letters, wearing her Dior dresses and a small string of pearls, slender and upright, holding a long pen and inscribing with a clear, square hand. She was a single working woman and, though she eschewed such a pretentious term, she was an artist. Sometimes the local children played loudly in the courtyard, breaking her concentration. Sometimes her eyes hurt and she had to put down her pen. And often her friends rang her up to gossip – they too were a distraction. As if to bring the past to life, the courtyard doors momentarily draw open, and a group of pretty French children spill onto the street, laughing and shouting. I glimpse the cobblestones and the white windows before the doors are drawn closed and the street falls silent again.

These courtyard gates opened to welcome an astonishing array of guests. Evelyn Waugh was a regular visitor. Anthony Eden, Clive Bell, Cecil Beaton, Noel Coward, sister Diana Mosley and numerous French aristocrats and intellectuals all came by. Nancy entertained with small dinner parties and lunches. But though she had a hectic social life, her letters make it clear that she also spent much of her time alone. If her maid, Marie, wasn't there to cook for her, she didn't eat a thing – she boasted that she couldn't even boil an egg for herself.

I am staring blindly at the courtyard gates when a dapper old gentleman in cap and slip-on shoes strolls past me and stops.

‘Are you looking for something?'

‘Well, um, yes,' I fumble. ‘Or rather, someone. I believe Nancy Mitford lived here?' Monsieur tilts his cap cautiously. ‘She was an English writer,' I add.

‘Well,' he says, in a practiced way, ‘I know the film star who lives up there. See the second floor? And one of our greatest historians lived just down there. Just at the end of the street, can you see? That's where Lamartine lived.' For a moment he looks cross. ‘What did this English lady write about?'

‘She wrote about love,' I reply.

‘Ah.' He smiles, pleased. ‘Here is a story about love. You saw the beautiful
Pagode
on the corner. (Yes, Nancy refers to it in her letters, it was her local cinema.) ‘It was built by Monsieur Boucicaut, the proprietor of Au Bon Marché [the department store]. He was very much in love with his wife, a beautiful and fashionable woman. She craved a Chinese pagoda. Why? It didn't matter. Unable to resist her whims, he had it built for her. It took months. But as soon as it was built she ran away with another man, breaking his heart.'

He pauses for effect. ‘It was a love story, but so sad, so sad …' Then he tilts his cap again and ambles away down the quiet street.

Love was Nancy Mitford's business. She wrote three books with that word in the title:
Love in a Cold Climate, The Pursuit of Love
and
Voltaire in Love
.

Love in Nancy Mitford's world breaks all kinds of taboos. There's Linda's love affair with Fabrice: he won't marry her and sets her up as his mistress. Or Grace's love affair with Charles-Edouard: he sleeps around and visits one of his mistresses for ‘tea' every day. Then there's Cedric, the gay Canadian, who emerges as the true heroine of
Love in a Cold Climate
. By the end of the novel Cedric has established a
ménage à trois
with Lady Montdore and Boy Dougdale.

Nancy Mitford's non-fiction lovers had even stranger love lives. Louis XV's official mistress, Madame de Pompadour, didn't particularly like sex, so Louis established a personal brothel to service him sexually. And Voltaire's love affair with Emilie de Châtelet ended with her dying in childbirth to another man while Voltaire was sending love letters to his own niece. (You call this Love?
Why not!
responds Nancy Mitford.)

The great love of Nancy Mitford's own life was a Frenchman, Gaston Palewski. She was forty-two years old and unhappily married when they met in war-time London. After the war she threw over her life and moved to Paris to be near him. He was the prototype for her characters Fabrice and Charles-Edouard – a clever, vain, elusive man. When Palewski refused to marry Nancy Mitford, she told herself at first that it was because she was
married, but after her divorce it became clear that Palewski simply wasn't in love with her. So she became one of his several mistresses, and their affair followed the usual pattern: she relegated all other friendships to second place; she refrained from overt gestures of affection in public; and she arranged her timetable to his convenience. This went on for years, surviving Palewski's marriage in 1969 to a French aristocrat and continuing right up until her death in 1973.

If I had a friend who was proposing to live her life the way Nancy Mitford lived hers, I would feel obliged to give her a strong sister-to-sister talking to about wasting her life on a no-good, two-timing, low-down, absolute and utter bastard who didn't deserve her.

But, if my friend were like Nancy Mitford, nothing I could say would make a gram of difference. Nancy Mitford was well aware what people thought, and she couldn't have cared less. She wrote to Evelyn Waugh:
I suppose you think I'm a whore & my immortal soul is in danger. About once a week, for a few minutes it worries me that you should think so
.

Nancy accepted her status as the second-string mistress of a philandering Frenchman. But most of her friends couldn't. They assumed that she had a sad romantic flatness in her life, concealed under the champagne fizz of her writing. I suspect they were wrong.

In life, it seems to me, there are few things more mysterious to us than other people's romantic relationships, except possibly our own. Nancy's relationship with Palewski astounded people to the end, and after. Her sister Diana said:
She had a very happy full life, but the only thing that went wrong in her life really, was the men in it. They were hopeless
.

Nancy Mitford was clearly not a woman of her times, but nor was she ahead of her times. She was a classicist. The traditions she looked to were pre-Romantic. That's why she wrote biographies of eighteenth-century figures like Voltaire and Madame de Pompadour. She rejected the notion of modern romantic love, with its anti-social tendencies, individualistic narcissism, bourgeois emphasis on marriage and children, climactic highs and inevitable lows. She wanted to celebrate classical love – love which, at its best, was sober, understated, unsentimental and deep, and absolutely unrelated to marriage or children.

Here is an excerpt from
The Blessing
. The very English Grace has just been introduced to her French in-laws, including Charles-Edouard's grandmother.

‘Who is the old man?'

‘M. de la Bourlie? He's my grandmother's lover.'

‘Her lover?' Grace was very much startled. ‘Isn't she rather old to have a lover?'

‘Has age to do with love?' Charles-Edouard looked so much surprised that Grace said, ‘Oh well – I only thought. Anyway, perhaps there's nothing in it.'

He roared with laughter, saying, ‘How English you are. But M. de la Bourlie has visited my grandmother every single day for forty-six years, and in such a case you may be sure that there is always love.'

Nancy Mitford snatched this lovely scene straight from history.