Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter by Diana Souhami (people reading books .txt) 📗

The surface quality of the lifestyle of Mrs Keppel and her daughter began to elide. The Princesse de Polignac was not quite King Edward VII, but she was rich, large, hugely influential, entertained lavishly, had royal connections, and lived in undoubted splendour. Such credentials were unimpeachable in Mrs Keppel’s eyes. She connived at this new relationship of Violet’s. It was pragmatic and rewarding and this she could admire. It had none of the domestic reference of the affair with Vita. Passion did not fly. The French were unperturbed and it was away from the Cubitt’s eyes and the hypocrisies of home. The Princess ruled, with status and authority, at 57 avenue Henri-Martin as Mrs Keppel ruled at Grosvenor Street. Each had the same hauteur and unwavering self-confidence.

In 1923 Violet moved to a house in Auteuil, in the rue de Ranelagh. It was large, peaceful, had a woodland garden and the view of a huge chestnut tree from her bedroom window. She furnished the house in her eclectic style, helped by her new lover’s wealth. The materialism she deplored for controlling and restricting her life became her security. She alluded to a gift from her mother of symbolic significance. It was of a painting on glass:

It represented a Chinese lady smiling at a small grey parrot perched on her arm. She attempts nothing to detain it. Its cage is in her eyes.

In such glancing remarks Violet told the world of her own captivity. The glass picture, bought by Mrs Keppel on her trip to China, allied with the photograph Violet kept on her desk of herself as a child looking into her mother’s eyes.

She entertained extravagantly. Mrs Keppel complained to George of the bills. Through her mother and the Princess, Violet ‘maintained an exceptional position in Parisian society’. The painter Jacques-Emile Blanche, who did a portrait of Violet, described the house at Auteuil as like ‘a miniature Ritz’. He asked her why, when she was so evidently privileged in her own country she preferred Paris. She replied, ‘because here one is freer to say and do what one pleases without conventional restrictions.’

She was not now the rebellious gypsy of her fantasy. Few people knew of her broken-hearted past. She was not going to get hooked or hurt again. Though she scorned hypocrisy she stopped being open. She could not break her attachment to her mother and began to mimic parodically her mother’s style. She told trite lies but everyone knew they were lies. Like a child testing virtue she teased at the truth:

I am always – being a liar – seeking passionately for truth, TRUTH in people, real people, not shams and sycophants and humbugs.

At Christmas 1923 the Princesse de Polignac took her on a cruise up the Nile to Egypt. Denys was in the party too. So were Mrs Keppel and George. For evening soirées the Princess took along a new protegé, the pianist Jacques Février. Above board Violet flirted with him, below deck she answered to the Princess. This was the acceptable face of infidelity without family rifts or jealous scenes. Husbands, lovers, mothers, observed civilities in high Edwardian style. Winnaretta and Denys were the best of friends. There were concerts, excursions to archaeological sights, games of bridge:

Sometimes Mrs Keppel would interrupt the game and spread out a map: ‘Look Georgie, that’s ours,’ she would say, pointing to the location of some lucrative investment Sir Ernest Cassel had advised her to make.

Such travel featured in French Vogue for its style and expense. The next year they all went to Greece. Photographs of a Polignac cruise show the women in hats and gloves viewing the Parthenon and riding on donkeys on a Greek island.

Rumours of unorthodox sex were the confection of gossip. The diplomat Duff Cooper relayed to his wife Diana what his friend Mrs Blew-Jones saw when she delivered furs to the Princess:

She went round to Polignac’s house at eleven in the morning. She was asked by the servant at the door whether she was the lady who was expected. She said she was and was immediately shown into a large room where she was greeted by the old Princess in a dressing gown and top boots. On a sofa in another part of the room she saw Violet Trefusis and another woman, both stark naked and locked in a peculiar embrace. She ran from the room in terror. It sounds incredible, may be exaggerated but can’t be quite invented.

‘In love’ said the Princesse de Polignac to Charlotte Wolff, author of Love Between Women and The Human Hand, ‘there is always one who suffers.’ ‘I suspected it was not she who did,’ Dr Wolff wrote in her autobiography.

Violet perfected her French, learned Paris slang, went to lectures at the Sorbonne and tested her ambition to write fiction in French. She called her first novel, Sortie de Secours (Emergency Exit). In her memoirs she derided it as

a mediocre little book, a patchwork affair, aphorisms, maxims, annotations, loosely woven into the shape of a novel. It served its purpose, it was a loophole, an outlet, above all a piece of blotting paper which absorbed my obsessions.

These obsessions were jealousy and faithless love. Most of her fiction was an attempt to make sense of her past. The emergency exit she described as ‘self-love in all its various forms’. The exit was there for when obsessive love threatens to destroy the person it consumes. It allows them ‘when some obsession becomes too violent to vanish away with a mocking laugh’.

In French she wrote with a mocking laugh, a comic irony to shield past pain. In French she joked about games of the heart. This was her adopted language which her mother’s society could not claim. The tone she found, caustic and defended, contrasted with the rawness of her letters to Vita.

In Sortie de Secours Laure loves Drino, a charmer. Because she loves him so much he withdraws. Because she waits for letters they do not arrive. Because