The Horror of Love (36 page)

The presidential election was the first in France to be conducted with a direct universal suffrage. Gaston was asked to run the campaign. On 18 November, he appeared for the first time on television, reading the list of candidates; on the 19 December he appeared again, to announce a winning vote of 13 million for De Gaulle. Gaston’s role now became in many ways similar to the one he had fulfilled during the first De Gaulle administration, that of communicator between the general and the outside world. His colleague François Luchaire confirmed the symbiotic relationship between the council and De Gaulle. ‘Although we affirmed that the council exercised a juridical function, no one could believe it.’ In Gaston’s own words, ‘So long as General de Gaulle was head of state, it seemed difficult to me to have a different conception of the council than of the author of the constitution himself.’ Keeping the constitution on a Gaullist
path was not desperately onerous: the committee took an average of eight decisions a year and made only four challenges. All the members had time for other activities, and Gaston continued his involvement with the Save Venice programme, in which both he and Nancy had been engaged since 1961.

The anti-Americanism of
Don’t Tell Alfred
may also have been informed by the difficulties Gaston had as ambassador in reconciling Franco-Italian relations at a time when the Italians were pushing strongly for an ‘atlanticized’ Europe. The Americanisation of Europe seemed nowhere more obvious nor more threatening than in Venice. Nancy despaired at what was happening to her beloved city where she had spent so many happy summers, more so because the Venetians themselves appeared to be colluding in her depredation. She described their to her eyes pitiful attempts to convince visitors of their modernity, that Italy too could be as prosperous and impressive as the United States in its most brash and banal manifestations.

Nancy could be very funny about the naïveté of American visitors, who, ‘tired of mass-produced, synthetic materials looking like the froth from detergents which choke up the 5th Avenue emporiums’, were easy prey to the tourist cons of Torcello, where the old ‘lace-makers’ collected their work on sale or return from Burano and the priest rounded up holy processions to coincide with the arrival of the steamer. She was appalled, though, when she heard from Anna-Maria Cicogna of a proposal to build a monorail over the lagoon to the Piazza San Marco which would transport cars and tourists to the city. Nancy detested the idea of skyscrapers, described by Evelyn during a New York trip of 1947 as ‘negligible in everything but bulk … they bear the same sort of relation to architecture as distempering a ceiling does to painting. They are nothing nothing nothing at their best. At their worst, that is to say when they attempt any kind of ornament, they are actively wicked.

Now though, high-rise buildings were to be constructed at the Venice railway station to house cut-price visitors. Car ferries would take them from the Zattere to the Lido. The city
in which time appeared to have stopped during Nancy and Gaston’s revered eighteenth century was to be brutalized into the twentieth.

Gaston immediately wrote of this ‘crime against aesthetics’ to a journalist contact, Gerard Bauer, who launched a campaign in
Le Figaro
, in which he described Venice as the only remaining city in the world which preserved the grace of the eighteenth century, the only one time had not disfigured and which, intact, retained a unique power to renew the human soul.

In 1966, floods were as much of a threat as skyscrapers. That autumn, both Venice and Florence were underwater. Gaston was elected president of the France-Italy Association which, under his supervision, raised funds for the restoration of the Ca d’Oro, the Tiepolo frescos in the Palazzo Salzi and a room at the Bargello, among numerous other rescues. By the end of the year, thanks to Gaston’s request to the UNESCO director general René Maheu, the Save Venice fund was launched, with Gaston as leader of the French committee. Initially there was very little money, so Gaston worked for three years at raising awareness and donations. Nancy reported on the situation on annual visits and organized publicity for a photographic exhibition mounted by Anna-Maria to illustrate why immediate action was necessary. She also persuaded Gaston to help Anna-Maria place articles in the newspapers. Gaston’s efforts were rewarded with an honorary seat at the Venetian Institute of Arts, Sciences and Letters, a particularly flattering tribute as this had previously been accorded to Bernard Berenson. There was something more profound in his passion for Venice than snobbish distaste for budget holiday-makers. He believed it was only in the collective effort to preserve its cultural heritage that Europe could retain its place in the world. Faced with the superpowers on one side and what he called ‘the famished and threatening crowds of the Third World’ on the other, the world needed the enlightened humanism only Europe possessed as never before.

A cultural confederation of European states had been a key Gaullist goal since Gaston had presented their proposals to the
assembly in 1951. He was convinced that France had a primary role in guiding such an institution because, as he saw it, she had always given primacy, in the modern world, to humanism. The continuing parlous position of European federation was dangerous not just economically, he feared, but at a profoundly spiritual level, that of the only recourse against ‘the great misery of the individual delivered to the torrent of mass technology’. One could barely imagine even a French politician today making such an unashamedly elitist case for
l’exception Française
. However unacceptable such a view might have become, it is one of the keys to understanding Nancy and Gaston’s relationship. Nancy’s ardent Gaullism might well, as in the case of her sisters Unity and Diana, have had as much to do with the cause as the man, but it had been her cause since she wrote to Tom about Clive Bell’s book in 1928. It is the message of her two last novels and the ideology which underpins her historical writing. This shared conviction appears again and again in her letters. It was something deeply felt between them and it connected them powerfully even at the lowest points in their affair.

Nancy did not, however, accompany Gaston when he visited La Serenissima with De Gaulle in May 1967. Since his return from Rome, their relationship had become calmer. Once she had recovered from the shock news of Gaston’s son, Nancy was reassured by his insistence that he had no intention of marrying the mother, and she soon recovered herself sufficiently to make jokes about it. ‘I might call my memoirs
The Real Sauveterre
. Bound in full morocco it would be a nice wedding present (Who for?).’ She had been aware for some years of Gaston’s relationship with the mother of his child and seemed capable of absorbing the fact into their relationship, as she had done with so many others. In 1966 she wrote from Venice that Anna-Maria had told her she had seen ‘Gaston’s offspring’. The boy was at this time about fourteen. Nancy panicked rather, but it turned out that Anna-Maria meant Marc de Beauvau-Craon, reviving the old tease about him being Gaston and Nancy’s son and not, as Nancy referred to him in a private code, ‘the Profile’.

The absence of the colonel in Venice that season was made up for by the presence of Marlon Brando, a guest at Peggy Guggenheim’s, with whom Nancy went to the beach, and the continuing pleasure of Yank-teasing. Babe Paley, ‘toothy, little upstairs’ failed to live up to her reputation as the best-dressed woman in the world – she looked just like everyone else. At a dinner, the subject of Vietnam came up. With a sober face, Nancy said that she believed the only solution was to drop the bomb. ‘But if the Chinese retaliate?’ asked a horrified Mrs Paley. Nancy replied that since there were so many Americans, a few million or so fewer couldn’t really make much difference, ‘at which she began to scream’. Brando was a hit, but Nancy wrote to Deborah that her enjoyment of Venice in 1966 was patchy, as the Lido was becoming popular with film stars like Brigitte Bardot and Audrey Hepburn, who was deemed an idiot, albeit a pretty one. ‘They are all quite without grey matter.
Actors
, and when you’ve said that you’ve said everything.’

So there were jokes, always jokes, and there was Venice and, as the Sixties drew on, there was also sadness shared between Nancy and Gaston. Comtesse Costa de Beauregard died that year, as, in April, did Evelyn Waugh. Nancy heard the news on the radio, and was very deeply upset. She wrote to Laura, Evelyn’s widow:

Oh Laura, I am so miserable. I loved Evelyn really the best of all my friends, and then such an old friend, such a part of my life. As for you, what
can
one say? If I feel like that about him what must his loss mean to you? … For him, one can only say he did hate the modern world, which does not become more liveable every day. (It is always my consolation for the death of my brother Tom, how much he would have hated it.)

Gaston wrote a tribute to Evelyn, praising his extraordinary penetration and declaring
Brideshead, ‘un tableau douloureux de décadence et de désespoir’
, one of the great novels of the era.
Like Nancy, he grasped that the essence of Evelyn was humour, that devouring and often brutal satire which permeated his writing, and which so many took for malice. ‘What nobody ever remembers about Evelyn is everything with him was jokes. That’s what none of the people who wrote about him seem to have taken into account at all, ’ commented Nancy in a television interview. But even Gaston could not fully grasp what Evelyn had meant to Nancy, how irreplaceable he was.

In November Dolly Radziwill died. She had been, Nancy said, her best friend apart from her sisters. Nancy did not go to the funeral – she was too afraid she would break down and make a spectacle of herself – but Gaston attended and afterwards talked to the priest, Rzewuski, a former artist turned monk who had painted Dolly in the Twenties. It turned out they had a lot of acquaintances in common, and Gaston reported a melancholy conversation about so many lost friends.

Dolly’s death may have been one factor in Nancy’s decision in 1966 to leave Paris for Versailles. Although they were still very close, she was seeing less and less of Gaston, and Dolly’s absence made his unbearable. She also took a low view of the English in Paris. ‘There are so few agreeable English people here now … they are all true horrors and loathe the French as common English always have.’ Conversations about French plumbing were one irritant, the noise of the increasing traffic and children in the courtyard at Rue Monsieur another. ‘When I see
fillette dans le coma depuis 4 jours
I so wish it could be the children in this courtyard, ’ she grumbled. With her refuge at Fontaines-les-Nonnes gone, the longing for country life which had always run through her letters had now become a powerful call. She loved Versailles which, thanks to her biographical research, she now knew even better than Gaston, and she wanted a garden and a peaceful environment. There she could tramp about the park or even go riding in the fresh air. ‘I can’t always live in a town, not even Paris.’ Gaston helped her through the bureaucracy, writing personally to the prefect to obtain the essential
carte de résidence
, and Nancy was able to move in January 1967.

Her new home was 4 Rue d’Artois, a low, white-painted eighteenth-century house in a side street. Harold Acton described it as very pretty; others were surprised to see the famously chic Miss Mitford in this rather bland suburban setting. What made the house for Nancy was its half-acre of walled garden. As she did everywhere she lived, she invested the house with glamour and drama. The garden, where she planted rose trees, wistaria and her ‘
champ fleuri
’ of poppies, irises, orchids and buttercups became the backdrop for a creatures’ soap opera. Her letters to Deborah suddenly become full of the doings of hedgehogs, tortoises and birds. If there was something wilfully childish about Nancy’s insistence on her enchantment in her new home, Versailles was also a retreat from the crassness and ugliness of modernity. To Hugh Jackson, she wrote of the château: ‘they’ve done up all the rooms … and it’s like a very expensive hotel … Give me that great crumbling fairy palace I used to love so much. Anyway, they can’t spoil the outside.’

The writings of both Nancy and Gaston at that time show their distress and bewilderment at the assaults on their shared conception of civilization. The Sixties had been happening for a while, and the students of France only just caught on in time. Nancy generally had a low view of the latest generation of rebels – compared with the talent for debauchery of the Bright Young Things, they seemed positively babyish. Worse still, they were earnest. The fatuity of the students’ position is encapsulated in one of the most celebrated encounters of ‘
les Evénements
’ of 1968, between the student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit and the minister for youth and sport, François Missoffe. After listening to the minister open a new swimming pool at the university of Nanterre, Cohn-Bendit denounced the government for omitting any mention of the sexual problems of young people (still forbidden, in theory, to have sex outside marriage under the age of twenty-one) in a recent lengthy report. Swimming pools, he said, were a Fascist attempt to sublimate the students’ sexual energies into sport. Sociology proved that sexual equilibrium was the only form of freestyle that mattered. Missoffe ill-advisedly attempted a
joke, suggesting Cohn-Bendit should ‘cool off’ in the pool. ‘Fascist, ’ Cohn-Bendit replied.

De Gaulle was unable to take the students seriously, even when sit-ins, strikes and demonstrations broke out at Strasbourg, Nanterre and Bordeaux. He had, he believed, given his life to the cause of French freedom, and it was simply beyond him to understand what these rebellious children wanted to do with it. In April, 2,000 students marched in Paris, where twenty-four years before the Parisians had torn up the tarmac to build barricades against the Germans. Even when Cohn-Bendit was arrested for sitting on a committee that put out a leaflet featuring a recipe for Molotov cocktails, the government remained both uncomprehending and condescending. It would be absurd, claimed Prime Minister Pompidou, to lock up a boy for a prank.