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

it, but steered clear of the fact. Her declared suitors were gay, rich, titled and playing the same game. Often they proved spiteful about her in memoirs and letters. One or two had been lovers of Harold’s. She went through a charade of wooing, spoke always of who was in love with her, never of whom she loved.

She boasted that Max Jacob proposed to her. He was painter, poet, a friend of Picasso’s, had a lover, Maurice Sachs. She met him through the Princesse de Polignac and Jean Cocteau:

He called on me one afternoon dressed, he imagined, for the part of a suitor. A small dapper Punchinello, he wore a top hat, white spats, gloves the colour of fresh butter. He hung his hat on his stick which he held like a banner between his legs. He was irresistible. I longed to take advantage of his proposal which was couched in terms that sounded as though he had learned them out of a book on etiquette. We examined the pros and cons. St Loup, far from being an asset, proved a stumbling block.

‘Je déteste la campagne,’ said Max, ‘tout y est trop vrai! The nearest I ever get is the Bois, and that is bad enough because it reminds me of the country.’

‘What about travel?’

‘That is different, the place doesn’t belong to me, there are no responsibilities. C’est comme si je mangeais au restaurant.’

A great advantage, he pointed out, was his being about twenty years older than me. ‘I have waited forty years before proposing to anyone. I am not likely to propose to anyone else.’

Another great advantage was that it was no proposal at all. It was a way of parodying heterosexual necessity, of attracting attention, of seeming to be sexual, an in-joke for the circles in which she moved. She entertained her conquests at St Loup and flaunted them at the Ombrellino. True partnerships were not revealed and, as time went on, not made.

Gerald Berners was another of her fiancés for a day. He composed, painted, was amusing and liked his lovers young and male. He had a house in Rome overlooking the forum, another in London in Halkin Street and the eighteenth-century Faringdon Hall in Berkshire. On his desk there he kept a little clockwork pig. Wound up, it danced on its trotters. He called it Violet.

In autumn 1933 he visited St Loup. He was taking pep pills bought from a chemist at the Place Blanche in Paris. Violet suggested they marry and pool their assets. By the end of the evening they were engaged. News of it appeared next day in the London papers. Violet received congratulatory telegrams. ‘Lord B. is marrying V. Trefusis (whom you once knew) because they both like poached eggs,’ Virginia wrote to Vita. Mrs Keppel thought it all in poor taste and published a denial. Berners said he sent The Times a note: ‘Lord Berners has left Lesbos for the Isle of Man.’

Such games were not the same as being candid. They were a camp version of Edwardian duplicity. Violet dismissed her suitors with a quip and an anecdote. ‘Happiness for me lies in things, not people,’ she has one of her characters say:

You could say that my irresponsible and evasive nature can’t support the heavy trappings of love … it becomes as grotesque as a little girl dressed in grown-up finery. It knows what’s expected and wanted; flattered, for a little while it will turn grown-up … but the result is caricature.

She had told Vita and Denys that she was not attracted to men but she flaunted her quasi-seductions. Mrs Keppel was said to deter some of the fortune-hunting young men who hovered round. Comte Stanislas de La Rochefoucauld ‘a witty though fatuous young man’ had a title, an actress wife of whom he was tired and a small inheritance. He lost interest in Violet when Mrs Keppel told him English marriage customs precluded a widow receiving money from her parents if she remarried. ‘I wonder how much Violet still has,’ she is supposed to have said. ‘She’s such a child.’

Comte Jean de Gaigneron, with whom Harold had an affair in 1919, was another of the gay men with whom Violet made a sexual parade. And then there was Comte Louis de Lasteyrie who knew Proust, owned a medieval chateau and was great grandson of the Marquis de Lafayette … And the Marquis de Chavannes who was once married to the Prince de Polignac’s niece and to whom Violet proposed on account of his title. He said he resisted because she wanted him to shave his moustache.

The games she played with her princes and beaux were part fantasy, part parody and in part pathological. There was desperation behind the charade. It was as if her mother’s warning about not having a husband had frozen her heart.

Like her mother she admired and flirted with men of rank. She had some kind of affair with the statesman Paul Reynaud Premier of France in 1940. In her memoir she wrote of a lunch party with him and her mother at ‘Lapérouse, the world-famous restaurant on the Quai des Grands Augustins’.

My mother chaffed him in a way to which he had certainly not been accustomed; they parted in amused and mutual esteem. After that, I was constantly to meet Paul Reynaud.

It was not clear whether Reynaud wanted mother, daughter, neither or both. ‘You have two wives,’ Violet is supposed to have said to him, ‘it’s time you had a mistress,’ and offered herself. And then there was Comte Jean Ostrorog, son-in-law of the munitions’ manufacturer Sir Basil Zaharof who had propositioned her in London in the 1920s … And for a winter in Budapest the Regent’s son Horthy Estvan…:

No wonder I fell in love … He had eyebrows like swallows’ wings, and the figure of a Caucasian dancer. No wonder I took a rococo house in Buda which might have belonged to the Rosenkavalier … night after night we would dance … Up and down outside the detectives would pace for