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.
ADIEU, NOT AU REVOIR
I HAVE TRIED TO TALK ABOUT MYSELF, without thinking of me. For any human being who thinks of himself or herself is already dead. But since, when others no longer think of you, you are also dead, I have reluctantly decided to place myself on stage and impose my presence upon you.
My life has been merely a prolonged childhood. That is how one recognises the destinies in which poetry plays its part. I have never forgotten anything. I have emerged totally ignorant and fully prepared from the depths of the Auvergne. I have never had the time to think of being unhappy, of existing for another human being, or having children. It is probably not by chance that I have lived alone. I am born under the sign of the Lion; astrologers will know what that means. It would be very difficult for a man, unless he were strong, to live with me. And it would be impossible for me, were he stronger than me, to live with him.
The finest gift God has given me is to allow me not to love those who do not love me. And to have left me unaware of the most common form of love, jealousy.
I am not a heroine. But I have chosen the person I wanted to be and am. Too bad if I am disliked and unpleasant.
What I have told you expresses my faults better than it does my virtues. I have a few virtues, reasonably charming ones; I am full of impossible faults. As I’ve told you at the beginning, I am all pride. Unless I am mistaken and I am merely vanity; true pride not only does not admit itself, but does not even describe itself; it’s the pride of Louis XIV, or that of the English temperament.
It would be sufficient to hear me to realise quickly that I lack balance, that I talk too much, when it’s easy to please by listening, that I forget quickly, and furthermore, that I like to forget. I throw myself at people in order to force them to think like me.
Changing one’s mind appals me. Listening to others irritates me, except when eavesdropping; what they say gets on my nerves from the very first sentence, and yet I have an inexplicable liking for pointless discussion, which exhausts me. I work willingly amid noise, conversation, activity and confusion. I try hard to make myself attractive when I talk, I think as I talk, I construe as I talk.
I am neither intelligent, nor moronic, but I don’t think I’m an easily categorised character. No one is in France, for that matter. I’ve conducted business, without being a businesswoman. I’ve made love, without being a loving sort of woman. I think that the only two men I have loved will remember me, on earth and in heaven, for men always remember a woman who has caused them a lot of anxieties. I have done my duty towards people and life without any axiom, but because I like to see justice done.