Gluck by Diana Souhami (most interesting books to read .TXT) 📗

personally and rather crudely in an affair which does not in the least concern her.… Whatever happens you may rest assured you have all our sympathy and can count on our help. But it is sometimes difficult to help people against their own wishes. It is clear that if Gluck insists on being the ‘I who knows’ with whom everybody has to reckon, I had better not try to cope with this distressing business any longer.

Helen Beauclerck added a postscript:

My Kosh! Surely if Gluck loves you and wants you to be kept from gossip, quarrelling, horrors of all sorts, she will promise to do nothing more about it.… Surely she has her work, her talent – she need not put her energies into this sort of thing? Sorry if I am incoherent but I do feel so deeply about it and am so afraid …

Gluck replied in a conciliatory enough tone, defending herself but saying it was George Yeats not Edith who was vulnerable, and hoping that no misunderstandings should occur between Edith and Dulac. He wrote to Edith (14 March 1948) with yet another attack on Gluck and in effect threatening to withdraw his friendship from Edith if Gluck involved herself any further in the bones business:

… as you seem unable or unwilling to restrain her from spending on threats of useless and dangerous mischief energies she might far more profitably spend otherwise, I can only retire before her and hope for the best.… I shall inform the Abbe and anyone who may come into this affair that any further communications must be addressed to you. Gluck can deal with them as she thinks fit.

But there was no way Edith would be disloyal to Gluck, nor had Gluck threatened anyone. She had simply tried to put pressure on George Yeats not to go ahead with all the paraphernalia of a State burial when the whereabouts of the remains of her husband were in such doubt. Edith tried to make peace all round: ‘I am sorry that you should have thought Gluck’s letter threatening, however faintly,’ she wrote to Dulac (17 March 1948),

I do assure you that it was written with no such intention but in hope of putting things right as she was extremely distressed that our friendship might be shaken.… If you now retire as you say you will, I shall do nothing more until George has disclosed her intentions. In any case this now seems best for us all. I am having the stone brought here and will keep it until the position is clearer. The Abbe can hold the money for the concession until then.

W.B. might not have disliked his no-grave but it would have distressed him to think it might diminish our friendship – and I do not see why it should. Love from Kosch.

While these friends wrangled, the arrangements for the ‘reburial’ continued. It remained unclear whether Mrs Yeats had a receipt for a ten-year grave and, if she had, whose clerical error this was. It seems that neither the Abbe Biancheri nor Dulac ever saw her receipt. Nor is it clear who, if anyone, rifled through the ossuary and attempted the identification of Yeats’s bones. When it came to the ‘exhumation’ and transportation of the poet, Abbe Biancheri kept a circumspect if unconvincing distance and wrote of this to Dulac (31 March 1948):

… about the 17th of March [1948] Monsieur Reynaut, the official in charge of undertaking at Menton, asked me to be present at the exhumation of the poet Yeats. But I had been called to the bedside of someone who was sick in a distant part of town and could not accept this invitation. The investigation and exhumation took place in the presence of the police, the Mayor of Roquebrune, a medical expert, a police inspector from Paris and Monsieur César Lautier, the official responsible for the upkeep of the graves. The bones of the poet Yeats were placed in a coffin. The coffin was placed in The Chapel of Rest. The remains of your friend will be sent to Sligo, either by the Irish government or accompanied by Mrs Yeats, his widow. No date seems to have been fixed. It is even possible that I shall not be informed of the departure date. I should not be surprised if my letter were opened before it reached its destination. In any case this is not important.

It is difficult even tentatively to believe that the coffin destined for Sligo contained the right remains. However arduous, costly, detailed and time consuming the reconstruction of a skeleton might be, given the choice of so many bones, it had all, ostensibly, taken place in four weeks. For it had been the sixteenth of February 1948 when the Abbe Biancheri wrote to Edmund Dulac about the need to empty the ossuary and start gathering detailed medical evidence if authentic bones were to be identified, and it was the seventeenth of March 1948 when ‘Yeats’ was exhumed, put in a coffin and placed in the Chapel of Rest in the presence of high-ranking witnesses. French bureaucracy is not renowned for its speediness. Perhaps, or perhaps not, in four weeks all Yeats’s medical and dental records were assembled in Ireland, pathologists employed, the Roquebrune ossuary emptied and all findings analysed.

In August 1948 the Irish naval corvette Macha left Cork harbour for Dublin where she was inspected by Ireland’s Minister for External Affairs, Mr Sean MacBride. She sailed to Gibraltar with an official of the Department of External Affairs on board, then on to Villefranche. The coffin lay in state in the town square of Roquebrune before being taken by road to meet the ship. Eleven days later the corvette reached Galway Bay. Mrs Yeats, her children and Jack Yeats, the poet’s brother, went aboard and the coffin was piped ashore. From Galway the funeral cortege made its way by road to Sligo where a military guard of honour waited outside the town hall. The Minister of External Affairs,