Wallis's War: A Novel of Diplomacy and Intrigue by Kate Auspitz & Kate Auspitz

Author:Kate Auspitz & Kate Auspitz [Auspitz, Kate]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2010-10-19T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

Marie-Ange, my manicurist, told me Napoleon invaded Poland and had an affair with a beautiful countess, the Countess Walewska, who was the mother of the only one of his sons who amounted to anything.1 The child of the vache Austrichienne was a sickly little boy killed by his wicked Hapsburg uncles. The Austrians were not to be trusted even with blood relatives. She didn’t predict Hitler would have any affairs in Poland. On dit, mais madame la duchesse sait ce que l’on dit de sa virilité. She told me that both Ribbentrop and Ciano had gone hunting in Poland, in some wild forest on the Russian frontier, with a Countess Potocka.

This interested me very much, but that was all she knew. I was prepared to be patient. I told her that the shade of nail polish she’d just put on wouldn’t do. I wanted something lighter for the summer, a softer pink with a hint of peach. She’d have to start all over again. She said she’d have to charge me again and I agreed. It turned out she knew nothing more. She read in some gossip magazine that both of the men had been there and she didn’t remember if they’d been there together or separately. In the end, I spent another hour and another fifty francs to learn more than I wanted to know about the Countess Walewska and the son who was a credit to her and to France, like Gaston Palewski, I gathered, more French than the French, and nothing whatsoever about the Countess Potocka.

We were leaving Paris the next day for La Croë, and I told Marie-Ange I wouldn’t need her until early October when we returned to the boulevard Suchet. She looked at me as if I had not heard a word she said. ‘Madame has not understood?’ she said. ‘We will be at war in the fall. May God protect you, madame, and all of us, and France.’

Cookie and George VI were expecting war too. They were in Washington, where no reigning British monarch had ever been. The Queen was almost as big a hit there as she was in Paris. Then they went to the President’s summer house and ate hot dogs and sat on the porch with President and Mrs Roosevelt and his aged mother. For all I know, it may have been the first time Eleanor and Franklin ate wieners themselves, but it was a great picture for the purpose. Cookie looked very nice in a short summer frock with just two strands of pearls and a gardenia and quite a smart hat. Mrs Roosevelt was dressed for an Edwardian garden party in a full-length sprigged floral gown – the fabric could have been used to upholster a sofa – and a straw hat topped with flowers and bows. It did not become her, but it was welcomed as an expression of support for England. She generally looked like a poor woman waiting in line at a soup kitchen,

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