The Horror of Love: Nancy Mitford and Gaston Palewski in Paris and London by …
Posted By Admin on December 16, 2011
In real life Gaston was an unlikely seducer, with acne-pitted skin and a
method of pursuit more relentless than refined. Still, it was mysteriously
effective. And he was, apparently, very good in bed.
Born in Paris to Polish-Jewish parents, he became a fashionable boulevardier
and friend of Proust. He took a job with the politician Paul Reynaud,
and through him met Charles de Gaulle. When France fell in 1940, he followed
de Gaulle to London.
Wartime love affairs were notoriously short-lived, but having met the love of
her life, Mitford was disinclined to let him go, and he remained her great
passion until her death in 1973.
The attachment on Gastons part was of a different order. He pursued other
women, claiming to be unable to marry her because she was divorced and
Protestant and then, in 1969, he married the extremely rich Protestant
divorcee Violette de Pourtales. Mitford, scrupulously good at hiding her
feelings, pretended not to mind, though the story persists that her death
four years later, from Hodgkins disease, was the result of a broken heart.
Lisa Hilton makes gallant efforts to portray the affair as something
unconventional but nevertheless real, solid and emotionally rewarding,
pointing out that Nancys sister, Diana Mosley, and friend, Diana Cooper,
were both married to habitual seducers.
Nancys love for a faithless man has been seen as pathetic, deluded,
humiliating, she writes, while the tolerance of the two Dianas for their
philandering husbands is portrayed as noble and intelligenthellip; Had Gaston
married Nancy, then no one would have pitied her at all.
Perhaps not. But this is an impossibly big conjecture. W H Auden wrote that
any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any
romance, however passionate. Does Lisa Hilton succeed in persuading us that
Auden was wrong? Not quite.
* Jane Shillings memoir The Stranger in the Mirror (Vintage) will be out in
paperback in January
The Horror of Love: Nancy Mitford and Gaston Palewski in Paris and London
by Lisa Hilton
290pp, Weidenfeld amp; Nicolson t pound;18 (PLUS pound;1.25 pamp;p) Buy
now from Telegraph Books (RRP
pound;20, ebook pound;10.99)
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