Nancy Mitford (11 page)

Nancy’s open-air English charm was appreciated by the Anglophile denizens of the Faubourg St. Germain and she was quick to realize that this was a theatre whose comedies and tragedies could afford her perennial entertainment as well as literary pabulum. Through her closest confidante, Mrs. Hammersley, she was all but adopted by the old Comtesse Costa de Beauregard, who lived in eighteenth-century style at Fontaines les Nonnes par Puisieux. Fontaines was to provide the emotional resources of a French family back ground. In a
remarkably
short time she discovered, like George Moore, ‘the delicate delight of owning
un pays ami
—a country where you may go when you are weary to madness of the routine of life, sure of finding there all the sensations of home, plus those of irresponsible caprice.’

Violet Hammersley, to whom Nancy was indebted for her introduction to Fontaines les Nonnes (‘my treat of the whole year’), had an extremely subtle and original fascination. Her husband had been a prosperous banker and she had been accustomed to a life of generous affluence surrounded by a court of writers and artists. Wilson Steer painted a masterly portrait of her in her heyday when she was compared to a Siamese princess, seated in a billowy gown under flickering leaves. Duncan Grant had also depicted her in later years. Slight and dark with an olive complexion, she had cavernous black eyes over high cheekbones and an expression of
sad resignation illumined by Mona Lisa smiles. Her colouring and intensity evoked an El Greco. Somerset Maugham jestingly described her as Philip W’s mistress, and Osbert Sitwell caricatured her as a germ-carrier in his story ‘… That Flesh is Heir to…’

Her wealth had evaporated and this blow darkened her out look: she became a prey to
neurotic
anxieties and fears. Her voice was a musical sigh when it was not a gentle moan and she dwelt more and more on life’s miseries as she grew older, not without a soupçon of relish. Since the loss of her fortune she lived quietly at Totland Bay on the Isle of Wight, but she paid frequent visits to the mainland and stayed periodically with her half-sister Comtesse Costa at Fontaines, where she was cherished as well as dreaded, for she could be very exacting and had a tendency to dramatize domestic situations. Invariably dressed in black, wrapped in shawls and veils, she glided about like a mournful spectre, observing everything with an ironic sense of humour.

Though genuinely fond of her Nancy teased her unmercifully. Her letters to ‘Mrs. Ham’, alias ‘the Wid’, who called her ‘Child’, were often signed ‘Fiend’ and ‘Horror comic’. ‘Cystitis indeed!’ she wrote, ‘I heard of you, arriving at the island with a 20 lb. salmon in that black net which sometimes drapes the hats taken from my cupboard.
Salmonitis
, you can tell Dr. Broadbent with my compliments.’

‘Oh if I could draw, I would write an illustrated Life of You. The nets, the veils, the shawls, the scarves, the crêpe, the cape, the wildly waving weeds, the unvarying get-up of cliff and turf and cresson and rue de la Paix. Who could do justice to it?’

‘I’m having a day in bed which I love more than anything on earth, and do about once a month. “She’s been in bed 17 years.” “Oh Mrs. Ham how lucky!”’

‘I so love Fontaines when you are there to tease and torture,’ she exclaimed. ‘I see you are better. The ink is a darker blue, not grey on grey as when you were ill.’ ‘Whenever one thinks you really ill it always turns out you are on a spree some where… I really think you ought to stay quiet for a bit, but of course you’ve got so many lovers that your life is a
perpetual
balancing trick. You should settle down with a Totland Totterer—what about a Lesbian affair with Lady Tottenham? It’s all the go now, and I hear X has left Y and their 7 children for a woman.’

Mrs. Ham was sensitive on the subject of her reduced circumstances, so Nancy would tease her about her ‘unearned income’: ‘I’m not a Wealthy Widow but a Working Woman.’ When Mrs. Ham hoped to supplement her income by translating Madame de Sévigné’s letters she was exposed to more teasing. ‘How the text of Sévigné seems to have been altered in the 19th century. Somebody said yesterday, “I hope your friend has left in all the naughty bits.” I said, “you can be sure she hasn’t”.’ And when the translation was published: ‘How mercenary you are. Book Society recommendation (I am always
Choice
) does not bring money, only a modified laurel wreath, which surely you prefer? It is the enormous sales which will pour unlimited gold into your lap—perhaps. I shall expect
un cadeau important
, a jewel at least…’ (since Nancy was to contribute the introduction).

Nancy offered various suggestions for other translations. No Scott-Moncrieff had turned
Saint-Simon into an English classic, ‘so I hope the publishers will be knocking at your door. I rather foresee that you’ll live to be 100 so there’s heaps of time. When I’m 75 shall I still be Child?’ Evidently Mrs. Ham had considered Mlle. de Lespinasse for Nancy objected: ‘Lespinasse is the Queen of Bores. Why not blissful du Deffand? But if you do letters in your highly personal style, they’ll read like more Sévigné.’ Later, ‘if La Tour du Pin has been done, how about Boigne? In some ways more amusing, she’s so much nastier.’

Nancy’s letters to Mrs. Ham, who belonged to her mother’s generation, were among her sprightliest for Mrs. Ham remained resilient in spite of her misfortunes. Perhaps Nancy’s secret intention was to cheer her solitude. Telling her that she had seen several advertisements in
The New Statesman
of people wanting ‘help’ in interesting households, she suggested: ‘You should advertise. Draft for advert. Really interesting fairly progr. widow, godmother of John Lehmann, requires help in bungalow stuffed with Camden School works and valuable bibelots. Mine of inf. on progr. subjects ancient and modern. Rendezvous of Huxleys and Priestleys. A.J.P. Taylor drops in. Days off for Aldermaston. (Think better not mention the word Mitford).’

‘I think you ought to dress like Mme de Maintenon from the age of fifty, in dark brown and white with a cross of enormous diamonds the only ornament. Well you do practically, only no cross.’

In a way Mrs. Ham supplanted her mother, always some what distant, in her affections. She had an all-round cosmopolitan culture and a consuming curiosity even if, as Nancy wrote to her: ‘Your letters are always full of mysterious informants who, hooded I imagine, like Spanish penitents, lean over you whispering woe…’ Above all she shared Nancy’s devotion to France and the French, whom she under stood instinctively since she had grown up in Paris. In England she seemed faintly exotic.

On one of her fleeting visits to England Nancy wrote (to James Lees-Milne, 27th February, 1947): ‘I felt like darling Captain Oates, leaving Paris, but find London isn’t
nearly
as Beardmore as I was led to suppose—I’m quite disappointed by the warmth the luxury the gaiety and the enormous masses of food which seems to abound (not to speak of blazing lights I thought we were down to whale blubber).’ The saga of Captain Scott and his comrades was still part and parcel of Mitford imagery.

Her gossipy letters to me—(I would have received more of them had I not been in Mexico at the time)—showed that she was vastly enjoying her new life while searching for a suitable apartment. ‘Oh the
potins
,’ as she exclaimed. ‘Too long to describe.’ However, she described a good many, and though some of the protagonists are dead and gone they evoke Parisian smart society at that period and the background of her future writings.

From 19 Quai Malaquais she wrote to me in November 1947: ‘I’ve got this lovely flat, lent me by Audrey Bouverie, jusqu’à nouvel ordre—anyhow I think until February—which is
really
most lucky for me.’

‘There was an article in
Samedi Soir
a few weeks ago,
made
for you. It was called
Les Nouveaux
Pompadours
and it began about how immediately after the war parachutists were all the go and then a long thing about two brothers who pretended to be parachutists and what has become
of
them
. Then it told about that man who looks like a tie pin, X., and the flat Lopez has bought for him and how une jeune comtesse tried to buy him from Lopez with Louis XV’s
microscope
but Mrs. Lopez said, “he’s not worth it, I advise against…”’

‘I’m writing a novel [
Love in a Cold Climate
] but it’s so dull I’m in despair. One thing,
masses
of people must like dull novels that’s very sure.’

‘I saw Dolly Radziwill just now and she told me the following story. ‘Her
vendeuse
at Balmain had a new client, a M. Lecomte, who chose about six dresses and said, “My wife is not well, will you bring them round for her to see.” So round she goes—luxury flat, exquisite creature appears with a curtain of gold hair, darling little waist, long elegant legs and so on and they begin trying on the dresses. Suddenly the
vendeuse
becomes aware that the pretty little bosoms are
not quite
real—looks again at the face—horrors! M. Lecomte himself!! He sees that she is very much put out and says, “Jusqu’à présent je me suis habillé chez Jacques Fath, vous n’avez qu’à lui téléphoner pour des renseignements sur moi.” So as soon as she gets back Balmain himself gets through to Fath who says, “Vous êtes vraiment veinard, c’est un client comme il n’y en a peu, doux, gentil et riche à milliards.” The end of it is he has ordered several dresses including a shell pink ball-dress—!! The hair was a wonderful WIG. Do admit—!’

Before the end of 1947 she had the good fortune to discover an ideal apartment, the ground floor of an old mansion between courtyard and garden in the Rue Monsieur, which she referred to henceforth as ‘Mr. Street’. ‘I’ve got a perfectly blissful and more or less
permanent
flat,’ she informed me in December 1947. ‘Untouched I should think for 60 years. I spent my first evening removing the 25 lace mats with objects on them mostly from Far Japan (
dainty
). The furniture is qualité de musée—such wonderful pieces, now you can see them.’ Her individual taste was most evident in the arrangement of this luminous residence. One cannot imagine it without her, so intensely did it reflect her personality. I remember it as a serene
emanation
of the
entente cordiale
, French in its sophisticated simplicity yet English in a certain
cosiness
and feeling for privacy. As Lady Gladwyn wrote, Nancy ‘eliminated all that was
unnecessary
in her rooms, retaining only objects of intrinsic merit… From the large square grey salon, pink curtained on the crosslights, one could glimpse the white muslin on her bed and there, in that small bedroom in an arm chair by the window, her books were written.’ She was attended by a devoted elderly
bonne
, Marie, who guarded her against unwelcome intruders. To her
mother
Nancy wrote: ‘I’ve never liked any house I’ve lived in as much as this one or ever known even among your servants such a treasure as Marie. She simply literally never thinks of herself at all, never wants any time—let alone a whole day-off. She is an excellent and reliable without being wonderful cook…’

Later, when an English interviewer asked Nancy her reasons for living in France, ‘My maid Marie is at least half of it,’ she explained. ‘She’s the sort of person you find only in France. Maids are so much more important than men.’ The interviewer, who had expected revelations about ‘the bliss of love in France’, was slightly disappointed.

Some of Nancy’s furniture was sent from England. It arrived, she told Mark, ‘rather thin and wan as if it had been in a concentration camp. But the clever French are at work,
mending
and rubbing, and it will soon be all right again. I was pleased to see the well-known old faces after so many years.’ These included ‘my Sheraton writing table and Farve’s lovely Chinese screens and they all fit in very well.
La politique du tapissier is
in full swing, all great fun. Also a great deal (12 pairs) of Muv’s linen which is worth its weight in gold now, and my Dresden china clock. Yes, the verre de Nevers is my treasure, a great find, for nearly nothing too. I
happened
to know about it since I haunt the arts décoratifs at the Louvre.’ Later she ‘bought
various
pictures, notably a Longhi said by Francis Watson to be quite first class’. To Mrs. Hammersley she confided: ‘With infinite cunning I have made it impossible to have anybody to stay at Mr. because the only way now into the bathroom is through my bedroom. Perhaps I could have you however—I’m arranging a little summer bedroom the other side of the
bathroom
.’ And to her mother: ‘We bought a hen to eat, live, and now of course it has become our best friend and no doubt will live in the garden until death (natural) us do part.’

Her rooms in ‘Mr. Street’ were to become a cultural annexe to the British Embassy, a
congenial
rendezvous of French and English letters. At last, very cautiously, she was able to indulge her flair for clothes and replenish her wardrobe. ‘Went yesterday to order a suit at Dior.
£
120. Evening dresses start at
£
342. Impossible to get inside the building. I had to use INFLUENCE to be allowed to order. Why is everybody so rolling—they can’t all have written
Pursuit of Love
.’ (19th February, 1947 to Heywood Hill.)

Our friend Gillian Sutro reminds me that Nancy was ‘the first Englishwoman to catch on to Dior, and she bought clothes from him at the beginning when no one had heard of him in London. With her long lean frame she was a perfect clothes horse, like a Balenciaga model.’ Though the war had ended clothes rationing was still on in England, and Gillian remembers how stunning she appeared on a visit from Paris, ‘in a black wool Dior suit, with the new long skirt no one had seen before.’

A year later Nancy was writing: ‘I am now always torn between clothes and antiques but with me clothes are almost a matter of health, you know…’ They had become ‘a matter of health’ since settling in Paris where, for the time being, ‘I am seeing nobody but the Grand Old French—they make my joy and I long to write a book about them—but how to trans late the jokes? I don’t see how it can be done. “Depuis 40 ans je suis membre du Jockey et jamais je n’y ai entendu prononçé le nom d’un couturier—voilà que tout à coup on n’y parle que de Dior.” They think I’m awfully eccentric because I YELL with laughter every time they speak, but they don’t really seem to mind and go on asking me…’