a full-time collector, he spent five or six times that amount every year.
On 2 May 1914 Poppy was born in Meidling, taking her pecking-order place after Max and Bubbles as Mitzi and Eugène’s third child. For no known reason she was nicknamed Pimoulouche by her parents, and that was how she signed her letters to them. Eugène also called her Dimples, and notes in his hand are full of the affectionate phrases of a loving father. “A difficult child,” in the words of Mitzi’s diary, Poppy used to slip into her father’s bed in need of reassurance. She could sit on her own bed and cry uncontrollably. Her younger sister Liliane left a pen-portrait of her as she was growing up:
Bizarre and very sensitive character, philosophical by nature evidently but unhappily she sometimes forgets it, she is small, very small but less small than she thinks, hair lies flat, nose and mouth and eyes are round, very pretty hands, lazy and contrary to the marmot she wakes up in winter at the sight of snow, and on reading bad sentimental verses and interminable dissertations on vague subjects, looking in the mirror she gives herself up to martyrdom, dark matters – musical, a bit of a poet and quite a good sort, that’s my sister Thérèse.
The teenage Poppy went to school in Paris at the Cours Hattemer. She used to complain afterwards that she had received no education in what was then an exclusive day-school. Julien Weil, the Grand Rabbi of France, gave religious instruction to the three sisters. To the end of her life Bubbles could recall snatches of Hebrew prayers. Unusually for girls at that period, Poppy and her younger sister Liliane did their bat mitzvah, the ceremony whereby they became full members of the Jewish faith. This took place in the synagogue on the Rue Victoire in Paris. With the two of them in the ceremony were Aline de Gunzbourg from downstairs in the Avenue d’Iéna and Lulu Esmond, friends in a little clique seeing each other virtually every day. For this occasion, the four all wore white dresses evidently in imitation of Catholics at a first communion.
After the First World War, Eugène began the search for a country house. One of his friends, the Marquis Boni de Castellane, a dandy surviving from the Belle Époque, told him that Royaumont was for sale. All her life Mitzi resented that Castellane had insisted on being paid a commission for introducing buyer and seller. Eugène merely emended the motto of the Order of the Garter to Boni soit qui mal y pense. Purchased and then restored in minute detail according to the original drawings, the château was finally a tribute to the fastidiousness and taste on which Eugène’s social standing rested. A thin line divides snobbery from the wish to be correct. He criticized one of the most prominent soldiers in the country for signing himself Ph. Pétain on the grounds that the surname is sufficient for a marshal of France.
Poppy was eighteen when she and Alan were married there on 28 December 1934. Photographers recorded the event, and an enormous number of commemorative albums seem to have been made for the guests. For a formal portrait Poppy is standing in the drawing room. Given the immense train of her dress swirling over the floor and her resplendent tiara of flowers, the pose would be regal, except that Poppy looks far too young and unprepared for the adventure on which she was embarking. Three and a half inches above five foot (according to her passport), perhaps she hasn’t even finished growing. She had known Alan only since the beginning of that year. And in another photograph taken on the same spot, he is standing next to her. His morning coat has been marvellously tailored, it has no creases, and his appearance is further formalised by stickups, a cravat that might have suited Beau Brummell, and the carnation in his buttonhole. He had already published stories in The Sketch and Harper’s, as well as his two travel books, quite enough to attract the attention of everyone trying to spot a new talent. Unexpectedly expressionless, he seems to want to be taken for a Central European aristocrat whom it would be quite wrong to suspect of any unorthodox or bohemian tendencies.
A carpet had been laid down the steps of the terrace. Five years earlier, Eugène had died and Max was to give Poppy away. Aline de Gunzbourg, Lulu Esmond, Liliane, two cousins, were bridesmaids. Bubbles’s five-year-old son Philip was the page. These familiars, so to speak, are distinct from the English contingent in language, religion and culture. Next to the two family nannies stand self-conscious outsiders: Frank Wooster, now Mitzi’s husband; Alan’s parents, Vere and Harry Pryce-Jones (the latter spoken about as Mr Colonel); and his younger brother Adrian. Also the best man, Patrick Balfour, the one person present who knew everything there was to know about Alan and was himself homosexual. At the time he was sharing a house in London with John Betjeman, and earning his living as a gossip columnist for the Evening Standard. In the following year he covered the war in Abyssinia, where Evelyn Waugh, also reporting and gathering material for Scoop, found him “an old chum [who] makes all the difference in the world.” I knew him only much later, when he was Lord Kinross, author of numerous books including a biography of Ataturk. By then, he was slightly seedy, with the ruddy face of a Mister Punch exhausted by cynicism and the disconcerting habit of pushing his false teeth almost out of his mouth with his tongue. Giving parties, he made no effort to hide the collection of canes in his room. The gossip writer in him loved to recall which of his friends had gone to bed with one another and to tell me tales of Alan.
The service was held in the Protestant church of St Peter’s in Chantilly, a few short miles from Royaumont. What did Poppy have to say about that? What could the elderly Jewish friends and relations recorded in the photographs have made of Alan? One of them, Madame Jean Stern, used to play on Alan’s surname with apparent innocence: “Percival Johnson, l’ai-je bien dit?” – have I said that right? – just to quote it was enough to make Max laugh. At any rate, back at the château they all assembled at last on the steps of the terrace. Visible in some of the photographs is Mitzi’s Rolls-Royce, reserved for her. A groom led up a pony harnessed to an open carriage with white flowers woven around its body and the spokes of its wheels. In the postillion’s seat, a coachman held the reins. Driven away in this carriage, Alan and Poppy were a couple as singular as any to be found.
FOUR
Ménage à Trois
SOON AFTER they were married, Alan and Poppy were in a London theatre, so seated that they could not help overhearing the couple in the row in front talking about them. Poor Alan, they were saying, he’s gone off with this French girl, nobody knows a thing about her, it hasn’t a hope of lasting. Tapping them on the shoulder, Alan reassured these friends that all was well, and here was Poppy to speak for herself and her foreign antecedents.
A large literature records the Foulds and their doings. They were Jews from Alsace. The French revolution allowed Jews to leave the ghetto, and Ber Léon Fould was quick to do so, founding the Fould-Oppenheim bank in Paris in 1795. The bank specialized in loans to Egypt, as described in Bankers and Pashas by the historian David Landes. The poet Heinrich Heine was a connection, and one of the elderly ladies at the wedding in Royaumont was Tante Bijou Heine. A deputy in the Assemblée Nationale, Ber Léon’s brother, Benoit, made speeches on behalf of fellow Jews. In 1840 he particularly distinguished himself by denouncing Count Ratti-Menton, the French consul in Damascus who was accusing local Jews of ritual murder. Under pressure from Ratti-Menton, the Ottoman authorities had arrested a number of Jews and tortured some to death. To this day, the Arab and Muslim media repeat primitive libels about Jews and Judaism, and even appear to believe them.
When I was writing Paris in the Third Reich, I attended the trial in Cologne of three S.S. men with a prominent role in the wartime occupation and lumped together as the “Paris Gestapo.” One of them, Ernst Heinrichsohn, had supervised the departure of deportees from the transit camp at Drancy to Auschwitz to be murdered. Among children driven by fear of the unknown, a fantasy grew that they were going to a place called Pitchipoi. On the station platform Heinrichsohn liked to wear riding clothes and carry a stick with which to hit out. Those on their way to death will have seen this man in their final vision of France. Hélène Allatini was a cousin of Mitzi’s from Vienna; she and her husband Eric are in the photographs of Poppy and Alan’s wedding at Royaumont. They
