The Horror of Love: Nancy Mitford and Gaston Palewski in Paris and London by Hilton Lisa

Author:Hilton, Lisa [Hilton, Lisa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography, History
ISBN: 9780297859604
Amazon: 0297859609
Goodreads: 9210627
Publisher: George Weidenfeld & Nicholson
Published: 2011-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

14

THE ADVANCE ON PARIS

Like the rest of the world, Nancy followed the liberation on the BBC, where she also heard of Gaston’s appointment as chef de cabinet. He wrote to her that Paris was admirably beautiful, that the smoke of the factories was gone, leaving a ‘ravishing’ sky. Not quite an invitation, but it was enough for Nancy. Just over a year later a ‘Mrs Rodd’ appeared without warning at De Gaulle’s headquarters at Rue St Dominique and asked to see M. Palewski. The doorman was quite used to such requests. André Malraux spitefully described the secretaries on the ground floor whispering respectfully ‘Mme la Duchesse pour M. le Directeur’. ‘Send up the Duchess!’ was the enthusiastic response from upstairs. If Gaston’s present arrangements were discommoded by this eccentric arrival, he was far too kind to show it. ‘So, what’s the news?’ he greeted her, and Nancy, having had a year to rehearse, launched into a stream of shriek-making anecdote. Gaston was moved, charmed, delighted to see his ‘chère amie’, and if he was obliged to point out to Nancy that he really did have a lot of serious obligations, he also found the time to take her to Versailles to look at the Bouchers.

Nancy had been planning her move for some time. ‘Oh, to live in Paris, I’d give anything, ’ she had written to Lady Redesdale in September 1944. ‘I am angling like mad for a job.’ Her initial scheme was to establish a Parisian branch of Heywood Hill. While the war dragged on, though, this could only remain an idea, and while she waited it out, Nancy wrote her masterpiece, The Pursuit of Love.

‘Etj’ai compris que tous ces matériaux de l’oeuvre littéraire, c’était ma vie passée, ’ wrote Proust. It would be absurd to suggest that Nancy Mitford might lay claim to the literary status of Proust, but the ‘key’ to her novels – who was really who – exerts a similar fascination. The originals of Proust’s characters, many of whom were known to Gaston, were kept alive by their literary fame long after the prototypes were dead; Hamish St Clair Erskine, Lord Redesdale, Louise de Vilmorin, Billa Harrod, Peter Rodd, too, are only really of interest now as models. Gaston’s fame as Fabrice was both a delight and a curse to him. Cyril Connolly never quite made it as a novelist, but is unforgettable as the Captain in The Blessing. Nancy’s central character in Pursuit, Linda, is a blend of her sisters and herself. Idina Gordon, the inspiration for Fanny’s mother, the deliciously unrepentant Bolter, has had a whole biography devoted to her. For Mitford fans, the novels provide an endlessly diverting game of who’s who.

Nancy herself was both irritated and amused by the insistence that everyone she knew saw themselves in her books, including her own in-laws and Deborah’s. When she wrote her biography of Mme de Pompadour, A.J.P. Taylor insisted that she had merely taken Fabrice and plonked a wig on him. Nancy delighted

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