Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter, Diana Souhami [the ebook reader TXT] 📗

There was no copy of it among Vita’s books when she died. Virginia Woolf did not read in French. It was not dedicated to either of them or translated into English until 1968 when both were dead. It caused no stir, offended no one, its truths and half-truths curtained by fiction, a foreign language and the passing of time.

EIGHTEEN

Violet’s account of herself in Broderie Anglaise was fictional too. A refutation not a correction. She was not Princess Sasha in Orlando, Eve in Challenge, nor the straightforward Anne of her roman à clef. She did not have a husband, child and peace of mind in France. Toute vérité n’est pas bonne à dire.

Within five years of her exile she created a distinguished life. In Paris she went to first nights of concerts and plays, to private views of exhibitions. In her novels, light malicious commentaries on aristocratic preoccupations, she wrote with equal style in French and English. She was invited to the supper parties of Jean Cocteau and of Anna de Nouailles. Francis Poulenc was a friend. They shared a liking for beautiful houses and good food. She would visit him at his house beside the Loire, he was often at St Loup. Colette called her Geranium, not Violet, thought her tower at St Loup beautiful in a gothic way ‘and the cushions in all kinds of pink. And the woods full of wild strawberries.’

St Loup was the home Violet would like to have had with Vita whom she called ‘the tallest feather in my immodest cap’. Vita visited twenty years later and said the place gave her a ‘queer feeling … almost as though I belong there’.

But alone there Violet’s vulnerability and identity became masked by façade. With satirical flourish she adopted the values of the world she had said she despised. As time passed she seemed more her mother’s camp understudy than the bohemian spirit to which she had aspired. She was châtelaine, and hostess, with a butler, chauffeur, cook, a maid who dressed her and did her hair.

In her twenties she had written to Vita: ‘I have shown myself naked to you, mentally, physically and morally … I have added curtains to my manners for other people’s benefit, but for you there are no curtains, not even gossamer ones.’ The curtains became embroidered, her manner strange. To many she seemed quirky, unknowable. The diarist Peter Quennell wrote of her:

the relationship between Violet and the truth was always a flirtatious, loosely knit alliance rather than a firmly faithful bond. She did not conceal or distort facts as much as lightly play with them, doing her best to redeem their intrinsic banality by adding a touch of fiction here and there. What should have happened interested her far more than the humdrum march of real events.

To furnish St Loup she brought statues from Italy, blackamoors, elaborate silver. The place seemed geared for grand romance. Visitors were told to ask at the Paris Ritz and the concierge would arrange a car. Those not on private incomes felt deterred. Guests slept in canopied beds in turret rooms with chandeliers, mottled mirrors in magnificent frames, wall hangings of coats of arms or mythical birds. One bedroom she called ‘chambre Louis XIV. It boasted a fourposter bed of that period, some high-backed tapestry chairs’. She gave extravagant attribution to pedestrian antiques, appeared not to care what was real or imitation, the truth or a lie. The Louis XIII dining-room chairs were upholstered in mauve velvet. The vermeil dessert spoons had belonged, she said, to Catherine the Great. The faïence lions either side of the Gothic fireplace had belonged to some king.

For her library she collected books of royal provenance. She bought them if they had belonged to Mme de Pompadour or bore the coat of arms of Henry VIII or Elizabeth I. From them she constructed royal genealogies for the Keppels and Edmonstones. She was Mrs Keppel’s daughter and, so she said, Edward VII’s too. As time passed she put on weight, cared overmuch about food, was outwardly sparkling and sharp while her eyes stayed sad.

In her novels she mocked the attitudes with which she seemed to collude. She contrived slight plots, used brittle dialogue, took for her themes betrayed lovers, dominant mothers, mercenary old ladies making inventories of their jewels. When one of her characters complains her marriage is an empty parody her hostess replies, ‘still, you’ll be able to entertain.’

To entertain … you’d have sworn that doors opened, that a glittering crowd thronged down a staircase out of Tiepolo; that musicians tuned their instruments, while liveried flunkies bowed to the very ground.

‘To entertain’ was the essence of life at the Ombrellino where Mrs Keppel ruled. She kept alive in microcosm Edwardian high life under southern skies. ‘Chips’ Channon – Sir Henry Channon, Conservative MP and diarist – visiting in 1934 described her as like a worldly Roman matron without the cruelty. She lived, he said, in a ‘super-luxurious villa full of treasures’ was ‘grey and magnificent and young in spirit,

but she cannot resist lying and inventing, and saying anything that comes into her Roman head. It is a habit she contracted long ago when, to amuse the blasé King Edward, she used to tell him all the news of the day spiced with her own humour.

From her mother Violet learned to embellish the truth to entertain eminent guests.

Violet did not again quarrel with ‘men chinday’ over issues of verity. Banishment made her wary. She lost Vita, love, England, youth and was not going to risk losing Mother too. The Ombrellino became her second home. She preferred St Loup but moved between the two and acknowledged her debt:

If I speak four languages fluently it is thanks to my mother; if I know anything about pictures, furniture, bibelots, it is again thanks to her. If I enjoy travel, good conversation, good company.

All the social graces came from Mrs Keppel, if not integrity of heart. Violet seemed to forgive her mother, to concede to her values and