Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

de Pompadour, at 142 rue de Grenelle. It had come into Swiss hands in the late eighteenth century, having belonged to Besenval, the captain of Louis XVI’s Swiss Guard and an entertaining diarist of court life.
    Burckhardt, the humanist historian, was a worthy, albeit more serious, successor to Besenval. Tall and good-looking, his conversation could be highly intellectual – ‘I’m always in an agony of not understanding,’ wrote Diana Cooper, with whomhe had had an affair in the late 1930s. The Coopers and the Burckhardts remained firm friends; and he regaled her with all the wild stories which circulated about her and the British Embassy.
    The British Embassy was decidedly unaustere, not so much with luxury, although the food and drink were always good, but in a refusal to take petty moral stands. As far as Duff Cooper was concerned, what was past was past. He would not invite any notorious collaborators – guest lists were privately checked with Gaston Palewski – but he had no time for poisonous and often ill-informed whispering campaigns. Writers of the Resistance such as Vercors, author of
Le Silence de la mer,
and the Communist Paul Éluard did not object to lunching with Cocteau and Louise de Vilmorin, who were much criticized after the Liberation. Even bitter political enemies accepted the advantage of meeting on neutral ground. The Communist poet Louis Aragon did not walk out on finding an increasingly right-wing André Malraux present.
    Diana Cooper had a way of mixing guests recklessly and getting away with it. On one occasion she threw Daisy Fellowes and the Marchionessof Bath, two of the most
mondaine
women imaginable, into a lunch party for Tito’s ambassador and Marcel Cachin, the doyen of the French Communist Party. The fact that Daisy Fellowes, who had long been regarded as the most beautifully dressed woman in the world, sat opposite Madame Cachin, who was ‘looking like an old concierge’, caused no unease on either side. Madame Cachin, who ‘proved to be highly cultured with a great knowledge of art’, was a pronounced success.
    The Russian Embassy in the rue de Grenelle had been a beautiful building until iron doors with peepholes and every other security device imaginable had been bolted on to it. Receptions took place in gilded rooms ablaze with powerful electric light and, in the place of a string orchestra, a wireless blared from the sideboard. It was a suitable setting for Stalin’s representative, Sergei Bogomolov, the most hedonistic ambassador of all – if measured by alcohol consumption.
    One evening, after the ambassadors of the Big Three had presented joint notes at the Quai d’Orsay, Bogomolov asked Caffery and Duff Cooper back to the Russian Embassy. ‘There were two tables,’ Duff Cooper recorded in his diary, ‘one for the three Ambassadors, and another for the three secretaries, Eric [Duncannon, later Earl of Bessborough], MacArthur and Ratiani.’ Dishes with slices of sturgeon, pots of caviare, eggs and sardines were placed in the middle of the table, to help the drinking. Bogomolov began by proposing some fifteen toasts, all being drunk in vodka. The other two ambassadors were expected to follow suit.
    The first to succumb was Bogomolov’s own secretary, Ratiani, who was sick on the floor. It was not long before the other diplomats present had to be helped to their cars. Neither Caffery nor even Bogomolov himself was seen until the late afternoon of the following day. Both Duff Cooper and MacArthur were really ill and had to stay in bed for several days.
    On another occasion, a
dîner à quatre,
Madame Bogomolov fortunately put a stop to ‘the vodka struggle’ when her husband began to propose more and more ‘ingenious toasts so that one seemed ungallant or unpatriotic and ungrateful or churlish to refuse’. She even reproved him for interrupting their guests, but that did little good. While Stalin’s representative ‘issued a monologue of statistics – how many women had matriculated in each Soviet republic – and boasted of Soviet scientistsand astronomers’, Madame Bogomolov confided to Lady Diana Cooper that she had not seen a bar of soap for weeks. The Soviet soap crisis was rectified by messenger the next day with several tablets as a thank-you present.
    The 7 November celebration of the Russian Revolution proved neither very proletarian nor egalitarian. ‘The traffic in the rue de Grenelle was completely out of control,’ Duff Cooper