Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

country. Neither of them have ever liked the French or will ever begin to understand them; and here he can only find a place in that little cosmopolitan world, the existence of which in Paris will always continue, and which can never do anything but harm. The best French people, as you know, avoid it.’
    Duff Cooper thought it rather sad that the Duke should attempt ‘to entertain official personages as though he himself were exercising some official function’. The Duchess was the first to sense that Duff Cooper no longer took the ex-king seriously, and that the policy of Buckingham Palace and the Foreign Office was to keep him out of public life. ‘Wally drew me aside,’ wrote Duff’s military attaché after one dinner, ‘and said that she thought the Ambassador had treated H.R.H. disgracefully. France was the only country where he had not been presented to the Head of State or invited to an official reception. Lord Halifax [the British ambassador in Washington] had at once taken him to meet President Truman.’
    Brigadier Daly harboured a certain sympathy for her view. During a round of golf, Daly had mentioned that the franc was liable to be devalued. The Duke had been most indignant that nobody had let him know before. ‘I told him that I would keep him informed,’ Daly wrote in his diary. ‘After all he is still a Field Marshal and Admiral of the Fleet. People are apt to forget this.’
    People were indeed apt to forget it, partly because nine years of exile had changed him so much. Lascelles, who had seen the Duke during a short visit to England, was particularly struck by the difference. ‘The famous charm had vanished and yet so had the old dictatorial attitude – “I want it so, therefore it must be so”.’
    Perhaps one of the most unintentionally sad remarks the Duke ever made was when he said to Gaston Palewski, ‘You ought to marry, look at us.’ Nancy Mitford, who had just come to Paris in pursuit of Gaston Palewski, thought this uproariously funny, or at least pretended to. Secretly, there was nothing she yearned for more than to become Madame Gaston Palewski; though this was impossible since she was still Mrs Peter Rodd, and Rodd would not give her a divorce.
    Palewski was intelligent, funny, ambitious and very vain, though he was no beauty and had terrible skin. He was also a notorious womanizer. Nine times out of ten, he probably had his face slapped; but his extraordinary persistence seems to have been rewarded often enough to have made it worthwhile. The best rebuff he received was from a woman to whomhe offered a lift home after a dinner party, in his official car: ‘No thank you, Gaston, I am too tired. I’d rather walk.’ Men found him excellent company, and a number of women adored him, in spite of his looks.
    Palewski had never pretended to be in love with Nancy. He had been opposed to her moving to Paris, and tried to make her realize that her love was hopeless. He told her that de Gaulle’s views on morals were markedly conventional, and a liaison with a married Englishwoman would harm his career irreparably. This was no doubt true, especially with Yvonne de Gaulle’s abhorrence of adultery. But Nancy could never abandon hope while he remained unmarried. She referred to herself, with bright sadness, as La Palewska.
    They continued to see each other regularly. Most of the time, Nancy accepted the very restricted part she played in his life; but occasionally her self-control would crack, and she would throw a scene which was almost immediately regretted. ‘Oh Colonel, I’m so ashamed of myself,’ she told him on the telephone after one such outburst. Gaston was sympathetic. He replied, ‘the rights of passion have been proclaimed by the French Revolution’.
    Palewski, however, insisted on scrupulous discretion, which sometimes gave their meetings the air of a bedroom farce. ‘I end up by being shut up in a cupboard or hiding on the
escalier de service
and being found there by the concierge – so undignified I nearly die of it – apart from the fact that the whole of the time is taken up with these antics and I only get about five restless minutes of his company!’
    Occasionally Gaston Palewski came to lunch at her house in the rue Monsieur, or she would accompany him to a party. At Princesse Sixte de Bourbon-Parme’s ball, he arrived with Nancy Mitford on his arm. According to Nancy in a letter to Evelyn Waugh, ‘we hadn’t been there two minutes before the