for a crisis that strained family relationships. On the lookout for experts to manage her finances, Mitzi had found one called Toto Morange, and she thought to cement his loyalty by pushing Bubbles to become engaged to him. At the last moment, Bubbles refused to go through with this arranged marriage, the wedding presents had to be returned, and mother and daughter reconciled. Mitzi regretted leaving Max, “my adored Sonny,” but spared no thought for the two abandoned youngest daughters except to observe that Poppy cried bitterly when her parents left Royaumont. With Miss Purdue, a lady’s maid for Mitzi, and twenty pieces of luggage, they embarked on a liner at Marseilles.
They were to visit places in Ceylon and Indonesia; they liked Singapore and Kuala Lumpur; for Mitzi Penang and Angkor Wat were special highlights. In the manner of travellers, they enjoyed sunsets, animals, museums, choosing batik in the market and buying a picture from Walter Spies, the artist who was to become famous for his landscapes of the Dutch East Indies. But underneath the leisure and the luxury, the drama of this triangle was playing out. In the process Mitzi brought to a head the tactic of divide and rule that she applied in matters great and small for the rest of her life.
The dominant character, Mitzi perhaps recognized where her feelings must lead her and sought to justify herself. At the outset, at any rate, she found Eugène “like a baby…. I can’t say how adorable and perfect he is these days in every way. And so sweet to me.” This mood did not last. Frank was trailing them on another liner on much the same course around Asia, sometimes ahead, sometimes behind. Through him “my soul feels as if it has found its harbour.” A ship’s concert sent her hurrying to her cabin to be alone with her thoughts: “I longed for the sight of you.” Eugène had become “quite stiff,” upsetting her. Seasonal shipboard parties were a strain, “He is awful at Christmas and New Year … what bliss that I can stand this now without the pain and sadness it used to give me.” She goes on as if addressing him, “How terrible you can be, how you take it out of me and for such nothings. A naughty spoilt child. When I think of the old age you are going to have I tremble.” In Vietnam one night towards the end of January 1929 Eugène went out by himself to Cholon, a part of Saigon, and did not return until almost dawn. “If I died you could go on living,” he then told her as recrimination got underway next morning, “not so if anything happened to Frank, he’s the air you breathe.”
After Mitzi’s death, my Aunt Bubbles and I sorted some of her papers. In a folder was Eugène’s account of this voyage. Humidity had so affected the paper that the ink had run and there could be no discovering his side of the story. But Mitzi had preserved in a separate packet every one of the letters and telegrams from Frank that had been waiting for her in hotels and agents’ offices on shore. Surprisingly anodyne, even banal, they are full of the kind of advice one tourist might give another about where to stay and what to see. Rapture about souls is conspicuously absent. At most, he regretted their separation; he spoke of Eugène as “a funny old man” whom he hoped was helping and not hindering. Moreover he had with him someone he describes as “my little friend,” who bought things for himself rather too expensively in the market.
“One doesn’t introduce someone like that into one’s family,” Eugène regretted. But that is what he had done. When they were on a ship sailing from Hong Kong to Shanghai this tangle of sexual competition and deception took a sudden unexpected turn. Eugène fell ill with pneumonia. In a privately printed memoir with the title I Loved My Stay, Bubbles records how her round-the-world adventure came to an end in the Astor House Hotel in Shanghai. “Everything began to crumble about me.” Nursing him, Miss Purdue reported to Mitzi that he seemed to be very upset, “He fears that he is not the only one in your heart.” Mitzi immediately lost her temper and went to talk to him “with a look of sheer fury on her face,” and a parting shot to Bubbles and Miss Purdue, “Don’t worry! I’m not going to hurt your patient.” Not quite fifty-three, Eugène died in the hotel on 1 March. A fortnight later the women sailed across the Pacific, with Eugène’s body on board. At Honolulu Frank joined them, and Bubbles confined herself to saying that at that sad time he was “a great help and comfort.”
In the eyes of his children their father had been a victim, and victimhood did not suit him. Mitzi did not ask herself if he had died an unhappy man on her account. From the moment Eugène fell ill Mitzi stopped writing her diary. When she resumed four months later in July, she granted herself absolution. Although actually the main actor in the emotional struggle that had come to its unforeseen end in Shanghai, she depicted herself as passive. She was able to repress guilt by denying the way she had manipulated her husband and his lover. As though it was all the doing of these two men, she had been swung on an emotional seesaw of suffering and salvation, and on page after page she repeated herself in the manner of this passage: “God bless those who are left me. I thought I could never write again, but I must note these last days, must put down each detail of these peaceful, sweet, helpful hours. Without you, my angel, I could never have lived on, have stayed alone without my adored one…. Be blessed for the blessing of your sweetness, for each understanding look, for each comprehensive kiss, for those long dear talks about our adored one.” In one or two rooms at Royaumont, photographs of Eugène had a tombstone formality. He became something of an unperson, to the point that Alan used to say, “If we had known Eugène we wouldn’t have liked him.”
That July, she and Frank decided that the strain of events had exhausted them and they had to escape. Just as she had shown him her Vienna so he would retrace for her sake some of his early life in England. The hotel in Eastbourne where they stayed, the rustic cottage they wondered whether to rent, were far removed from anything in her experience. During a walk on Beachy Head he told her that once before on this very spot he had heard an inner voice saying, “Do not despair, someone needs you,” whereupon he took her in his arms, “and now I know you were the one.” Whether by chance or design, the image he presented of himself corresponded exactly to the image she cultivated of him. At the age of six he had been sent to St. Andrew’s, a preparatory school nearby. They went visiting. Whether naively or not, she lets drop that the Brown family running the school “wondered at a lady friend of Frank’s.” However, Miss Brown was impressed by Mitzi’s deep mourning and upgraded her from Baroness to Countess. Mitzi came away satisfied that Frank had been “a delicate sensitive child,” and the separation from the mother he loved so tenderly was “the first great sorrow of his youth.” It is impossible to decide whether guilt, schizophrenia, or plain absence of self-awareness was impelling her coincidentally and frequently to switch from devotion to Frank straight into this sort of counterpoint about Eugène: “Oh! My Cocky, I cannot think of you without thinking that I can never, never, never stand the terrible cruel crisis. Oh! my darling, how could you die, where are you. In my heart more than ever alive as long as I live.”
Mitzi’s children could not fail to observe how Frank had supplanted Eugène. That their father’s male lover should captivate their mother was the subject of endless speculation. Bubbles was virtually alone in having a good word to say for him. Born in 1907, she was a greater beauty than her younger sisters and made them aware of it too. Back in Austria in the autumn of 1929, Mitzi and Bubbles stayed at Langau, the home of Alphonse and Clarice Rothschild. A suspicious Mitzi asked Bubbles if she was in love, and discovered that she had fallen for Eduardo Propper de Callejon, a Spanish diplomat and supposedly the lover of Clarice Rothschild. A man of the world, he was thirteen years older than Bubbles. Mitzi invited him to lunch at Meidling, “to have a look at him,” she wrote. “He upset me terribly. To lunch we also had Alice Townshend, the widow of General Townshend of Kut [where he and his troops surrendered to the Turks in 1917] as she is née Cahen d’Anvers [an eminent Jewish family] of Paris. She is more British than the British. At lunch I heard this Spaniard say, Remember and note my words, in ten years it will be the end of England. Alice after lunch said, Throw that creature out, he is out to marry Bubbles.” Frank was in Munich and in October she summoned him to come and to make “his friend Bubbles” understand that she should give up Eduardo. But he concluded otherwise: The couple would be happy, and besides, “You are in business with interests all over the world and a diplomat can come in handy.” That was enough to settle it. On December 28 the Abbé Mugnier, a veteran of the Proustian circle, married Bubbles and Eduardo
