The Last of the Duchess by Caroline Blackwood

Author:Caroline Blackwood
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-345-80264-4
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-10-01T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

Before returning to Paris in order to write this problematical profile of the Duchess of Windsor’s lawyer, I read her novel To Know Nothing. If Maître Blum was not prepared to divulge any facts about her background I hoped that her fiction would give me certain insights into the inner workings of her “complex mind and personality.”

The dust jacket of Ne Savoir Rien was studded with rave reviews. After I had finished it I was puzzled as to why it had been so widely acclaimed in France. I mentioned this to Francis Wyndham and he reminded me that Maître Blum was legal representative of the entire French press. He suggested that as Maître Blum represented every single publishing house in France, she might tend to get good reviews.

Maître Blum’s novel was distinguished by its extreme snobbishness and its total lack of humor. Almost all her characters were excessively well-born. She made a laborious point of their long lineage. One of her protagonists traced his descent back to the Plantagenets.

Maître Blum’s fictional creations were cardboard people. She allowed them no real life. Only the trappings of their haut French bourgeois existence were acutely observed. Her characters lived in the grandest quartiers of Paris. They had exquisite taste in furniture and pictures. They frequented the most important salons. They were received by tout Paris. Like Maître Blum’s “Duchess of Windsor” they loved classical music. They sat in the best box when they went to the opera.

In life, Maître Blum was too regally arrogant to care if she was believed when she made her various statements. The same sublime contempt for her readers was all too evident in her fiction.

Maître Blum’s novel was a murder story. There was a frightening violence in Maître Blum’s fantasies and this emerged very strongly in her creative writing. If she didn’t like one of her characters she killed them off in a moment of vicious caprice. When she had delivered me her death threat she’d already demonstrated her uncontrollable impulse to cause the instant death of anyone who displeased her. This ruthless desire to annihilate any opposition had also colored all her erratic tantrums and her insensate diatribes against the authors of all books about the Duchess. But when the heroine of To Know Nothing decides to murder her husband, it causes total consternation in Maître Blum’s readers.

Nothing that previously has been established about this woman suggests she would be capable of resorting to such lethal action. On the contrary, Maître Blum has taken care to describe her as extremely “well brought up” in the French haut bourgeois tradition. She is beautiful, well-mannered, and loving. She has fantastic taste. She is dignified and courageous, and of course, she loves the poor. She has all the virtues that Maître Blum ascribes to the Duchess of Windsor. Before she commits her murder, Maître Blum’s heroine is so perfect in her respect for comportment and decorum she is really not unlike Queen Mary.

Maître Blum does not deign to give

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