The Allure of Chanel

A LAST KING

ONE DAY, PAMELA, the Englishwoman who worked for me, came and said to me (we were in the South of France):

“Do me a favour. It won’t cost you anything. If you do it for me, I shall be given a present. I want a present or, more precisely, I need one. Westminster has just arrived. His yacht is lying at anchor off Monaco. He wants to meet you. I have promised, in exchange for a reward, to take you to dine there.”

I liked this all too unusual plain-speaking, but it didn’t disarm me. I was accustomed to Pamela, accustomed to seeing women purely as monsters.

“I certainly won’t go.”

I beg you!’

“I won’t go.”

Soon afterwards, with my usual spinelessness, I had relented. Pamela would have her present. I agreed to have dinner the following evening. During the daytime a telegram arrived from Paris, sent by Dimitri, informing me that he would actually be arriving next day. I cancelled my appointment, naturally. When Dimitri turned up, I told him about this, in front of Pamela.

“Had I been invited, I would very much have enjoyed seeing this yacht,” said Dimitri in a delightfully casual way.

“That’s fine, I’ll arrange for you to be invited,” said Pamela, immediately spotting a solution.

Two hours later, Westminster invited the grand-duke to dinner that same evening.

“Dimitri, you were wrong …” I said.

“Why?”

“I don’t know. But one shouldn’t force fate. Somehow I feel that you might have done better to have dinner alone with me …”

Ten years of my life have been spent with Westminster. I will describe later on what those years were like. First, I’m going to describe the man, because the greatest pleasure he gave me was to watch him live. Beneath his clumsy exterior, he’s a skilful hunter. You’d have to be skilful to hang on to me for ten years. These ten years were spent living very lovingly and very amicably with him. We have remained friends. I loved him, or I thought that I loved him, which amounts to the same thing. He is courtesy itself, kindness personified. He still belongs to a generation of well-brought-up men. All Englishmen, for that matter, are well brought up, until they reach Calais at least.

Shortly before the war, I was invited to dinner at the house of M Jean Prouvost, the editor of an important evening newspaper. Being very punctual, I arrived at his home at 8.45 pm, the appointed time. On the pretext of a headache, M Prouvost had his guests wait for two hours. We had to wait to sit ourselves down at table. M Prouvost didn’t even apologise. The lessons in good behaviour that he was being given at the time by a little high society lady had been of no use to him at all.

To behave badly in an elegant way, you first have to have been well brought up. This was the case with Westminster.

He is simplicity made man, the shyest person I’ve ever met. He has the shyness of kings, of people who are isolated through their circumstances and through their wealth. Because he is thought to be among the most important men in England, he is embarrassed by this; he knows people know; he would be no less embarrassed if he wanted to prove that he is a man like all the others. Westminster hates meeting people, and he avoids first encounters. Unless he manages to bypass the obstacle and get past unwittingly, with his head down, in which case, once the danger has been overcome, he looks a happy man. I caught sight of him one day in Biarritz, coming out of a bar, holding, in a familiar way, the arm of a man who was talking to him garrulously and with gay abandon.

“Do you know who he is?” I asked Westminster when he had rejoined me.

“Not at all.”

“He’s Poiret, the couturier.”

“A good fellow!” said Westminster, delighted.

The following day he came across Poiret at the tennis club, greeted him in the most friendly manner, and came over towards me, gloating.

“You know,” he said, “your Poiret didn’t intimidate me in the least.”

I mention this characteristic, because it is like those you come across in memoirs; it could belong to Louis XVI, Charles VI, or a child king.

Westminster is elegance itself: he never has anything new; I was obliged to go and buy him some shoes, and he’s been wearing the same jackets for twenty-five years. Nothing would make him go to the tailor, or receive a visit from him. Westminster owns two yachts: a Royal Navy reserve destroyer and a four-master. When you arrive on dry land, all the guests are wearing splendid yachting caps to go and buy postcards in the port. He never disembarks except in an old soft hat.

Westminster is the richest man in England, perhaps in Europe. (Nobody knows this, not even him, especially not him.) I mention this firstly because at such a level wealth is no longer vulgar, it is located well beyond envy and it assumes catastrophic proportions; but I mention it above all because it makes Westminster the last offspring of a vanished civilisation, a palaeontological curiosity who naturally finds a place in these memories. Showing me over the luxurious surroundings of Eaton Hall, one of Westminster’s residences, Lord Lonsdale said to me:

“Once the owner is no more, what we are seeing here will be finished.”

It is as dreadful to be too rich as it is to be too tall. In the first instance you don’t find happiness and in the second you can’t find a bed.

Westminster has a delightful temperament, provided you don’t bore him. He gets bored enough on his own as it is. He’s a corpulent chap, heavy, robust, at least on the outside. His intelligence lies in his keen sensitivity. He abounds in delightful absurdities. He does harbour a few grudges, petty elephant-like grudges, which he keeps simmering because he’s a tease. He doesn’t much care for human beings, but mainly likes animals and plants.

At Eaton Hall, in Cheshire, as I walked in the grounds, I discovered, hidden away in a valley, some greenhouses that were as big as those that belong to the City of Paris. They grew food, for every season, peaches, nectarines, strawberries … just as they once did in Russia or in Poland.

I took Westminster there. He didn’t seem to be aware that he owned all that; we pounced on the strawberries, picking them like schoolchildren. The next day I wanted to go back on my own to the greenhouses; the doors were locked. I told my good friend about this, and he had the head gardener summoned.

“I locked the greenhouses because some thieves had stolen some strawberries, my lord,” said the gardener.

“The thieves … it was Mademoiselle!” replied Westminster feebly.

The gardener had spent his life at Eaton Hall and it had never occurred to him that his master might, even playfully, eat strawberries straight from the bed.

We went back to the greenhouses, on another occasion:

“What beautiful flowers!” exclaimed Westminster. “Where do all these magnificent orchids go? Why do we never see them at the house?”

“They go to hospitals, to the church …” replied the head gardener.

I admired the way these immense fortunes became anonymous and were swallowed up in the community, as a river that is too broad seeps into the sands.

In spite of the greenhouses, Westminster only really liked natural flowers, and he continued to do so. What gave him greatest pleasure was to bring me the first snowdrop, picked from the lawn, in a box.

Westminster has houses everywhere. On every new trip, I discovered them. He is far from knowing all of them: be they in Ireland, in Dalmatia, or in the Carpathians, there is a house belonging to Westminster, a house where everything is set up, where you can dine and go to bed on your arrival, with polished silverware, motor cars (I can still see the seventeen ancient Rolls in the garage at Eaton Hall!) with their batteries charged, small tankers in the harbour, fully laden with petrol, servants in livery, stewards and, on the entrance table, always scattered everywhere, newspapers, magazines and journals from all over the world.

The money spent on periodicals that are delivered here and which no one reads would provide me with income enough, a Scotsman, an old friend of Westminster’s, said to me.

On the moors of Scotland, the grouse are ready to be shot, or the salmon to be fished; at the same moment, in the forest of Villers-Cotterêts or in the Landes, the stalkers who track the wild boar or stags have only to saddle their horses to prepare the way and pick up the right scents; you have to wonder whether they sleep in their red clothes, or whether the captains of the yachts, which are always under sail or being pressurised, are not in reality painted onto their poop-decks, and, in short, whether this absurd fairyland (which isn’t even intentional, but which exists because that’s the way it has been, for generations) is not a bad dream, a tramp’s dream.

Eaton Hall is on the outskirts of a pretty town (Hester, which belongs to His Grace), in Shakespeare country, full of black and white half-timbered houses with pointed gables from the time of Falstaff. All that is left of the castle, which defended the Roman frontier against the Welsh for a long time, are its medieval cellars, for it resembles Walter Scott Gothic; it is surrounded by Italian-style terraces, training routes for horses from the studs, model farms, forests of rhododendrons as in the novels of Disraeli, and galleries where the Rubens, the Raphaels, the English masters and the Thorvaldsens are all the rage.

Why did Westminster like me?

Firstly, because I had not tried to lure him. English women think only of luring men, all men. If you have a very famous name and are immensely rich, you stop being a man and become a hare, a fox. Every day is the opening of the hunting season. In these sorts of situations, you can imagine how restful it is to live with someone you have pursued yourself, someone who the next day, probably, will dig a hole under the cage and run away.

English women are either pure spirits (‘souls’), or grooms. But in both cases they are huntresses; they either hunt with horses or with their souls, but it’s always a chase. In my case, it’s never occurred to me to say: “There’s a man I like, I’ll catch him, where’s my gun?” Sport has become second nature to many English women, but first of all comes man.

Aurélia rides very well; she has the reputation of always being behind her dogs. One day, on horseback, I said to her:

“So jump then!”

“Oh! no! I’m too frightened, alone with you … I’ll only jump if there’s a man to watch me. It’s not worth it, just for you.”

Westminster liked me because I was French. English women are possessive and cold. Men get bored with them. (American men, on the other hand, can’t stand French women; they never, or hardly ever, marry them. Whereas there are countless French women who have been successful in England.)

Besides, English women are not entirely disinterested. French women used to be, they’re not any longer. (You mustn’t accuse me of running down English women. Firstly, I run everybody down; secondly, what I am saying collapses in those mirrors of social customs that are English novels; especially bad ones, of which I’ve read so many; bad novels paint a much more striking picture of society than good ones do.)

We, ourselves, are not to blame if English women are gauche; if they only do things that displease men. The English are a breed of horse. At the races, or playing cards, they’re horses. Swift saw it very clearly. Do you remember, in Gulliver, in the land of the Houyhnhnms, the two horses that converse by saying “Houyhn, houyhn”?

I said all this once in an article that caused a stir in London. The article was by Randolph Churchill; he had submitted it everywhere and it had been turned down. I went along with him to the Daily Mail: the article appeared on the front page, at the time of Ascot. I only mentioned English men, with gentle humour. Not a word about women. It was a great success: all the men fought over it.

Tilly, a Frenchman who, at the end of the eighteenth century, wrote some of the most pertinent and impertinent things about the English, made this extremely accurate remark: “The English are the best people in the world at marrying their mistresses and asking them least about their past.”

As to friends.

There was Churchill.

There was the tiny Duke of Marlborough, whom I called Little Titch, alongside his giraffe-like mother. He said of his wife: “The duchess thinks she is the most refined of all women.”

There was Lonsdale.

My friends bored him. He couldn’t understand Misia at all, and she couldn’t understand England at all. He was appalled by Sert, who sawed off swans’ beaks so that they would die of hunger, and who pushed dogs into the Grand Canal in Venice.

It was not my destiny to become an Englishwoman. What is termed an ‘enviable situation’ is not one for me. I insisted that he got married.

I grew bored, with that squalid boredom that idleness and riches bring about. For ten years, I did everything that he wanted. A woman does not humiliate herself by making concessions.

I always knew when it was time to go.

It can drag on for months, a year, but I know that I will go; I am still there and already I’m absent. I had satisfied a great core of lethargy that hides beneath my activity; I had wanted to be a woman from a harem, the experiment was terminated. Fishing for salmon is not life. Any kind of poverty is better than that kind of wretchedness. The holidays were over. They had cost me a fortune, I had neglected my house, deserted my business, and showered gifts on hundreds of servants.

I could have been the richest of women, in the most precise use of the word. Every day my friend would say to me: “Take all those Rembrandts”, “Those Frans Hals are yours”.

He said to me:

“I have lost you. I won’t be able to get used to living without you.”

I replied to him:

“I don’t love you. Do you enjoy sleeping with a woman who doesn’t love you? The men I have been brutal with have immediately become very sweet.”

Westminster suddenly saw that I was no longer there.

With me he realised that he could not have everything he wanted, that being His Grace meant nothing as long as a little Frenchwoman could say no to you; it was a shock for him; it threw him off balance.

Several years later, Westminster invited me to stay. I was travelling in Italy at the time. I replied to him: “I shall be a guest. Be very kind to me.” I returned to Scotland. My friend had taken up with his circle of parasites once more.

I was unlucky. The trip was not a happy one. After the sun-drenched Lido, it was raining in London. There was no longer a secretary waiting at St Pancras station. Westminster did not meet me in Inverness. It was a dry summer; there was no water in which to fish.

“What changes!”

A Frenchwoman from the provinces …

She had decided to make the house smart!

There were no longer any guns or fishing rods in the front hall.

I had written to his wife beforehand: “If you would prefer me not to come, I won’t go.” “Not in the least,” she replied, “I know your methods (why not my recipe or my martingale?) I know you won’t speak ill of me.”

From the heights of his wealth, Westminster knew the tedium of the peaks, the loneliness of the great tyrants, that condition of being beyond the law that accompanies the man for whom nothing is impossible. I didn’t dare complain of feeling unwell, or say that I had a migraine, because immediately, someone would make a phone call and the most famous specialists would arrive from Harley Street with their medicine bags, after a journey of twenty hours, and all for nothing, since I refused to see them. I stopped venturing to express a wish, because the magic carpet would bring it, or make it happen, before I’d completed my sentence, with the speed of a shooting star.

Amused by the contrast of our type of hunting and hunting as it is practised in England, for example, I mentioned one day, in the course of a mundane conversation, that it would be lovely to show Eaton Hall to the retinue Westminster maintained in the Landes. Straight away, the thirty Frenchmen, grooms and whippers-in, stepped ashore, having spent the night in the English Channel. He travelled the seas like a monarch, as the white Royal Navy ensign was saluted by warships and fluttered over the underground lakes of oil in Gibraltar.

And all that, to what end: boredom and parasites.