The Bugatti Queen by Miranda Seymour

Author:Miranda Seymour [Seymour, Miranda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK

Beach boys, Ste. Maxime, Riviera, 1933, photographed by Hélène. Left to right: standing, ‘x’ and Henri Thouvenet; centre right, Dr Pierre Chambret; foreground, Fred Arra, Antoine Molinvaud.

Deeper, perhaps, than she wished it to be. The inventory of her lovers could be expanded. Whatever the nature of her relationship with Mongin, she continued to sleep, on and off, with Lehoux, Moll, Thouvenet, the racing driver René Carrière and his near namesake, the artist, René Carrère, throughout the early thirties. Security, for this woman who spoke with such consistent passion of her love of solitude, lay in numbers, reassurance in the sense of being adored by a multitude.

1933, the year during which Hélène stopped racing in Bugattis, marked a turning-point in France’s fortunes. Plunging always deeper into economic depression, the country remained paralysed by the growing threat of another war; her sufferings in the last had been too terrible for another to bear contemplation. A decision not to devalue, as other countries had done during the depression, kept the franc untenably high. Tourists retreated; French products were outpriced by foreign competitors; wages were cut and French defence, largely based on faith in the limited security provided by the Maginot Line, became a subject for sour jokes. In 1914–18 France’s major advances in technology had come from money poured into the aircraft industry; now, while Hitler and Mussolini focused all efforts on the production of superefficient machines, French expenditure was pared to the minimum.

France’s triumphs on the racing circuits had been a demoralizing experience for her bankrupt neighbours in the mid-twenties. Defeat had taught them the value of racing as a propaganda tool; Mussolini lavished money on the state holding company that rescued Alfa Romeo from its creditors in the early 1930s and honoured Enzo Ferrari’s team of Alfa-driving champions; Hitler was ready to give half a million reichmarks to the company who could produce the first successful German car. Auto-Union and Mercedes met the challenge and, during their remarkable string of victories in the mid-thirties, changed the nature of racing. Until now, a brilliant driver like Tazio Nuvolari had been able to demonstrate that a race could be won by expertise and tenacity, even when the car was not the latest model; the Germans, bringing teams of mechanics, engineers and scientists to the track, put the car and its support team on a par with, if not above, the driver. By 1935, the age of the ace and the independent driver was virtually over; France, the country which had invented Grand Prix racing and excelled at it, now suffered the humiliation of seeing its finest drivers consistently defeated by Italian and German competitors. Grace was maintained, in the French sporting press’s reports of these events, with evident and increasing difficulty.

Racing drivers are not, in normal circumstances, political animals; Hélène was not being intentionally disloyal to France when she began to take an interest in driving an Alfa Romeo.* She had loved driving Bugattis; her 35Cs were beautiful, lively and responsive, cars of a character which is unimaginable to the modern driver.

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