Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter by Diana Souhami (recommended books to read TXT) 📕

Paris would make up for everything: failed friendships, the measures necessary for making new ones … In a half-hearted way I tried to pick up the threads of the life I had lived as a jeune fille.

These threads were thin. Paris in the 1920s offered a context for artistic talent, same-sex relationships and experimental thought. But though she loved the city, emotionally she was on her own in it and without the romantic optimism of her youth. ‘I was unhappy … I had no intimate friend.’

In Paris she turned her disappointment into fiction. She wrote equally cleverly in French and English, her style witty, polished, concealed, sharp. The themes she chose for her novels were betrayal, marriage for gain, malicious matriarchs, love versus possessions.

She did not seek publication for her first novel. It was in English, a roman à clef, not witty or fast but sad. It was about her plight. She called it The Hook in the Heart. On the first page of her manuscript she wrote, ‘Less voluntary than grief or death is the choice of desire.’

She appeared in it as Cécile, innocent and young. Vita, she as ever masculinized. She was both the Spanish duke whom Cécile is forced to marry and Kalo the gypsy with whom she falls in love. Mrs Keppel and Lady Sackville she merged into the controlling persona of the duke’s grandmother, a dowager duchess who lives in a tower in her Spanish castle, ‘a smile of malice on her lips’. She manipulates her grandson’s fate.

Marriage between Cécile and the duke is a loveless tryst arranged by his aunt:

Every night they made love, in married fashion, without prelude or subtlety. Cécile did her best to respond but could not repress, every night, the same reflection: So this is what makes people torture themselves, fight each other, kill each other. Incredible!

The newlyweds travel to Spain to visit his grandmother. On a terrible honeymoon journey Cécile writes to her mother the letter of disappointment Violet might have sent:

How could she make her understand that her marriage … that aim and object of so many girlhood dreams, seemed to her to have no emotions, no ecstasies to divulge? When once the first shock was over … Cécile might have summed up her reactions in one short phrase: ‘So that’s all there is to it?’

The duchess in her grotesque Spanish castle appears at supper dripping with jewels. She hates Cécile, thinks her not good enough for her grandson, claims her with a diamond necklace ‘the ice-cold necklace slipped round her throat like a snake’.

To escape the castle, its lovelessness, manipulation, materialism, Cécile goes alone to the Spanish countryside. She meets, falls in love and has sex with a gypsy, Kalo, who lives in a cave. But Kalo betrays her. His trade is to catch songbirds, put out their eyes to make them sing better, then sell them. He does not tell her he has a wife. Cécile finds them in bed planning to steal her necklace. Disaffection makes her ill:

Her love of love had bred disgust of love … with all her soul she cursed passionate love, the hook in the heart that you cannot tear out without tearing out the heart also.

The duke rejects her for her infidelity. She sells the offending necklace and runs away:

Disowned by her own class, disowned by the gypsies, forsaken by all, she found herself face to face with an unknown quantity. Solitude.

It was a romantic yarn of no great worth but it was how more or less she felt. All her trouble with Vita was because her heart was caught. Though her links with the past were severed, her personal tragedy was acute. She could not live with the woman she loved, her marriage was a disaster, she had offended her family, she was on her own.

Violet, without a heart, could not be hooked though she would do her share of netting. In 1923 Denys, aware of her needs and wanting his own freedom, introduced her to Winnaretta, Princesse de Polignac, the eighteenth child of Isaac Singer, inventor of the sewing machine. In her autobiography Violet described Vita as tall, graceful and beautiful. Winnaretta de Polignac she described as remarkable, imperturbable, inscrutable, infinitely intimidating, immensely rich and given to making dry, caustic utterances:

People quailed before her … her face was more like a landscape than a face, cloudy of hair, blue of eye, rugged of contour … her rocky profile seemed to call for spray and seagulls; small blue eyes, the eyes of an old salt – came and went.

It was not a face to inspire love and passion. But the Princesse de Polignac provided Violet with patronage for her novels, emotional protection, dazzling society and a lesbian relationship rich and discreet enough to impress Denys Trefusis, the elite of Paris society and Mrs Keppel.

PART THREE

Chacun Sa Tour

SIXTEEN

The Princess talked through her teeth, wore high-necked gowns, spoke French without concession to accent, taught herself ancient Greek when she was fifty and willed that her personal papers be burned when she died. Jean Cocteau said she had Dante’s profile. James Lees-Milne, Harold Nicolson’s biographer, called her ‘very Faubourg Saint-Germain’. Virginia Woolf described her as like a ‘perfectly stuffed cold fowl’. Thirty years older than Violet, reserved, controlled, she gave her a place in Parisian life.

Her biographer, Micheal de Cossart, recorded a sartorial penchant for riding boots and hunting clothes, a preference for sexually submissive women and relationships with a sado-masochistic undertow. She married two princes without sexual interest in either. The first marriage, in 1887 when she was twenty-two, was arranged by her mother. Prince Louis de Scey-Montbéliard, was aristocratic, short of money and masterful. Winnaretta refused sex with him, accused him of cruelty and petitioned the Vatican for annulment. Being very rich helped. She was granted a civil divorce in 1891. The following year the papal court, the Curia, declared the marriage null in the eyes of the Catholic Church.

Pope Leo XIII on 15 December 1893 gave