about. The fictional Swann is modelled on several of Proust’s friends and acquaintances, and Eugène is one of them.
In the First World War, Eugène made use of his English and the Russian picked up from his mother to become an interpreter. Another interpreter, Robert de Rothschild, his counterpart as a Jewish baron, was senior to him in rank, and two versions exist of the long-lasting quarrel that affected both their families. According to Mitzi, Robert de Rothschild heard Eugène saying that his father-in-law in the enemy city of Vienna believed himself to be ruined. “You can at last say that you made a love match,” Robert de Rothschild is supposed to have interjected, rubbing in the fact that Mitzi’s fortune was the basis of Eugène’s lifestyle. But Robert’s son Elie used to suggest that the bitterness between the two men was some issue of homosexuality.
Frank Wooster had entered Eugène’s life before the war. The illegitimate son of the Birmingham industrialist Sir Frank Leyland, he was a spendthrift who had run through such money as his father had given him. Educated at Uppingham, he had neither the skill nor the intention to earn his living, preferring to gravitate towards rich people willing to pay for him. One such was Paul Goldschmidt, himself raw material for Proust as a well-connected Jewish homosexual, and Frank moved to Paris to live with him. In those early days he had played golf at Le Touquet with P. G. Wodehouse, and it seemed plausible that Bertie Wooster had immortalized Frank’s surname with its unusual spelling. Frankie Donaldson, the first biographer of Wodehouse, was in some doubt that the dates fitted, so depriving Frank Wooster of what would have been his major contribution to the gaiety of nations.
Frank had undoubted social gifts and a certain stagey presence. By the time I knew him, he had aged very well, and was still handsome and his manner debonair. His hair was white with a slight blue rinse to it. The drawl in his voice left the impression that nothing in life needs to be taken too seriously. A little vain, a little condescending, he was immensely careful about his appearance, dressy in a Noël Coward mode with silk shirts from Sulka and ties from Charvet. At informal moments he liked to sport a foulard round the neck and what used to be called co-respondent shoes, their white leather uppers contrasting with brown toe-caps. Asked what Frank was like, Harold Acton, someone more likely to sympathise than criticise, replied in the words of the music-hall song about a dandy of the period, “He was Gilbert the Filbert.” Commissioned in the First War in the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, he had been on the Dardanelles expedition and remained in touch with General Sir Ian Hamilton, its commander. Serving later in France, he had been taken prisoner at Ypres, and his health was said to be delicate ever afterwards. Virtually his sole possession was a regimental drum turned into an unlikely coffee table in the drawing room of Mitzi’s rue de Surène flat.
In her diaries Mitzi describes how in 1922 Eugène took her to Florence and brought Frank with him. Her coup de foudre on meeting Eugène’s friend was to determine their lives. The two of them went out sightseeing by themselves. Here was the first of numerous future occasions when something external, a gesture of Frank’s, a conversation by a particular tree, the sight of a cloud or a sunset, the gift of a piece of jewelry, the plucking of a flower, was enough to convince her that she was the chosen beneficiary of a higher order of things. During the outing that day in Florence they visited what she calls the cloisters at Montefalco, and there Frank’s “beautiful profile” was consecrated, so to speak. (These cloisters cannot be identified; there seems to be more than one Montefalco.) Whenever Frank was to do or say something that confirmed her idealisation, she attributed “a Donatello look” to him. “Somehow I realized that he would be my comforter,” she writes of that Florence outing – cleverly evasive wording in the circumstances. What’s more, Gustav had died two years previously, she had inherited Meidling from him, and she lost no time taking Frank there, in other words showing him who and what she was.
Mitzi by then was the mother of four children; a fifth had been stillborn. Seemingly a conventional wife always disposed to indulge her husband, in her diaries she is in the habit of referring to Eugène either as Cocky or more usually as “my darling” or “my old darling.” Her obvious impatience with him nonetheless unbalances their relationship. Straightaway after her Florentine epiphany with Frank, she lets Eugène slip out of her daily narrative to the extent that he seems eclipsed. Replacing him as the target of her passions and plans, Frank becomes “my angel.” Repeating herself, she credits him with making her more and more ecstatically happy, linking this to a novel and unexpected note of religiosity. Throughout the 1920s many a day in the diary is opened or else closed with the refrain, “God bless us all three.”
Here she is writing on 2 May 1928 (which happened to be Poppy’s fourteenth birthday but this she does not mention.) “I knew it, angel, I knew you would call me up … he woke me up at nine, oh! How sweet, asking a hundred times how I was…. Oh! the lovely hope in me all day of a sight of my necessary blessing.” [Frank arrives that evening at her flat in the Rue de Surène] “My angel! He looks a little tired, has surely got to look much older since two months, but he is bright, radiant. Each word, each look was a blessing kiss [ sic] … It struck me more than ever that we had two bodies. We are so perfectly one soul that I can never quite realize we are two.” In subsequent entries she describes herself kneeling before him, kissing his hands and repeating, “I felt our souls were one, one for ever.”
At one point a friend, Lucie de Langlade, asked in a knowing whisper how Frank was. Mitzi was infuriated that anyone could mistake her angel for her lover – this relationship had to be on a plane elevated far above the physical. My father was adamant that Frank had confessed to him on the subject of sex, “There is one thing I can’t do for my Mary.” At another point she quotes Frank’s prediction of disaster in the event that she gave herself to him: “You always say if I deceived Cocky I would be quite lost.” Yet there are plenty of other intimations: “When he lay in my arms, looking up at me and saying so often, you sweetest one, I could but press him to my heart and long that all the prayer that was in me could pass through my hands and eyes over to him.” The tone of exaltation and wish fulfillment leaves open the reality of their relationship.
On a journey before the First World War in the north of France, Eugène and Frank had seen an eighteenth-century house in Montreuil-sur-mer, once a garrison town with historic fortifications by Vauban, and half an hour from Le Touquet and the seaside. Built for a senior officer, the house is an architectural triumph of classical symmetry and ornamental detail, with large rooms on the ground floor for entertaining and half a dozen bedrooms upstairs. Imagining themselves living there in a kind of provincial retreat, the two men had never forgotten it and early in 1928 paid a visit there.
The house is well within motoring distance of Royaumont and it was a caprice to hanker after it. Mitzi alone had the means to make the purchase and soon she incorporates it into her scheme of things as “our dream house.” The wife of the owner had the throwaway line, “When one of us dies, I shall retire to the country.” During negotiations, Mitzi comments that Frank “adores the Montreuil house we love. May we get it so that he can enjoy peaceful days there.” A visit to the house at that moment with Frank and Eugène led her to exclaim in her diary that she was “happy, more than one can think or know. I looked from one to the other of my dearest ones and prayed my gratitude.” That June she fires off another exclamation, “Montreuil is ours!”
Was she facilitating the homosexual relationship between the two men or on the contrary breaking it up, and was this done consciously or unconsciously? For Frank, the acquisition of Montreuil was a security for the future and a tribute to his powers of manipulation. Was she hoping thereby to claim Frank for herself or to punish Eugène for being unfaithful to her? Impulses of revenge and possessiveness merge inseparably with illusion. Eugène’s surviving letters and little messages on single sheets of paper express rather pathetic distress that what was happiness to her was unhappiness to him. The apologetic tone is sometimes plangent, sometimes abject. Evidently he realised what was happening, but felt helpless to do anything about it.
In November 1928, while the colour schemes and interior decoration at Montreuil were still
