And there was, once again, a flurry of activity around the British Embassy itself – a sumptuous and elegant eighteenth-century building, called the H?tel de Charost and bought by the Duke of Wellington when the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré was a winding road that passed through fields and market gardens. The first postwar British Ambassador was Churchill’s friend and supporter, the intensely Francophile politician Duff Cooper, who arrived at the end of 1944 with his beautiful and long-suffering wife Lady Diana. The Coopers, who held numerous dinners, banquets and receptions – as well as occasional ceremonies to decorate (mostly male) members of the resistance – were not enormous fans of de Gaulle, whom they dubbed Charlie Wormwood (as in Gall and Wormwood), nor of his austere Catholic wife Yvonne, who disapproved of ostentation and adultery in equal measure and rarely emerged in public. She made her first official appearance later that year at a wreath-laying ceremony for Armistice Day.
It was at one of the sparkling British Embassy receptions that Duff met Susan Mary Patten, the attractive young wife of a US diplomat, Bill Patten. Susan Mary, not yet thirty, was soon consumed by an intense longing for Duff; he, at fifty-five more than twenty years her senior, was cool. They embarked on an affair which was to last for several years and changed Susan Mary’s life dramatically. Cooper was well known for his voracious sexual appetite and juggled a string of mistresses who often became Diana’s friends.
In fact it was Diana who had proposed inviting Susan Mary. This intelligent, serious-minded former debutante, born in Rome to a patrician American family, quickly acquired a reputation in Paris as one of the prettiest and most fashionable women of the diplomatic circuit. Carmel Snow, influential editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar, now returned to Paris, had her regularly photographed for her magazine. Balenciaga was happy to lend her dresses or else let her buy at ‘mannequin rates’. She was also a frequent guest of the peripatetic Windsors, still unhappily undecided as to where they would make their postwar home; they were living in hotels and a number of rented houses (where guests remarked the heating was turned up higher than in any other home), as well as having, until 1948, their house in the south of France, La Cro?. Through the Coopers, Susan Mary got to know a circle of writers including Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford, rich hostesses like Louise de Vilmorin (another of Duff’s lovers) and artists such as Cocteau and Bérard, not to mention politicians and diplomats. Thanks to Duff, she discovered some of the finest Parisian restaurants as well as the most notorious such as Lapérouse, with its small private rooms where French men had been taking courtesans since 1766, or Larue, a favourite of Proust’s. Slowly she was learning what you could or could not say at a dinner party, and when once she referred to the need to rebuild Germany, she quickly realized her faux pas as the French and British did not share the American view on this issue. She was also slowly picking up on growing anti-American sentiment in Paris.
Misia Sert, a woman who had known great wealth and been a muse to many men of genius, lamented what she referred to as ‘the banality of France becoming Americanised’. She may have outlived her golden years of artistic influence in the city, but she continued to receive guests at tea time in her apartment as she had in the 1930s. Now, since she had friends in both camps, she had to be careful to invite collaborators and resisters on different days, something she resented, as they tried to make adjustments and an uneasy peace with each other. The wounds were every bit as deep and ran along similar lines as they had fifty years previously when she had lived through the violent arguments between Dreyfusards and their opponents.
On 14 December Lucie, the formidable widow of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, died. She was a few months older than Misia Sert. Lucie had spent the Occupation initially in Vichy, but then moved around until she was forced into hiding as ‘Madame Duteil’ (her sister’s married name) in a home run by nuns. In 1944, after the Germans had left, she returned to Paris already in poor health and died, a year later, aged seventy-six. She was buried in Montparnasse cemetery, and on the tomb she shares with her famous husband is also inscribed the name of their much loved granddaughter, Madeleine Dreyfus Lévy. A social worker for the Red Cross, Madeleine had worked for the Combat resistance network helping smuggle other Jews out of France. She was arrested in November 1943, taken to Drancy and then to Auschwitz, where she was killed aged twenty-five. Long shadows indeed.
* See here.
* There were other stories of mothers and daughters providing comfort and support for each other. Suzanne Legrand, who had sheltered evading airmen, was most audacious in saving her mother from the gas chamber. When she heard that her mother had been lined up she stole a uniform and, screaming and shouting and slapping her mother, dragged her away from the selection line past the baffled guards. Both survived the war (Caroline McAdam Clark, conversation with the author, 1 October 2014).
* This decree did not formally become law until 27 October 1946 when it was definitively adopted into the French Constitution.
* Eugène Charles, the Swiss businessman behind Banque Charles, turned out to have been Count Albrecht von Urach, then working at the German Embassy in Berne, who had been involved in smuggling capital out of Switzerland to the US via the bank in Monaco, where his second cousin Louis II was on the throne. He was interned in May 1945 but escaped further punishment.