A French Novel. Frédéric Beigbeder

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      A FRENCH NOVEL

      All four of my grandparents were dead before I was truly curious about their lives. Children take their own immortality for a generality, but their parents’ parents pass away without giving them time to ask all their questions. By the time when, having become parents themselves, children finally want to know where they came from, the graves no longer answer.

      Between the two world wars, love reasserted itself; couples came together; I am a distant result of those couples.

      Sometime around 1929, the son of a doctor in Pau who had hacked off a number of legs at Verdun attended a recital at the Conservatoire Américain in Fontainebleau, where he was doing his military service. A widowed singer (born in Dalton, Georgia) by the name of Nellie Harben Knight was performing Schubert lieder, arias from The Marriage of Figaro and Puccini’s famous ‘O mio babbino caro’ wearing a long white dress trimmed with lace – at least I hope so. I found a photo of Nellie wearing that dress in an edition of the New York Times dated 23 October 1898, which states: ‘Her voice is a clear, sympathetic soprano of extended range and agreeable quality.’ My great-grandmother with her ‘clear soprano’ was accompanied on her tours by her daughter Grace, who well deserved her Christian name. A willowy blonde girl, with blue eyes permanently fixed on her piano keys, like the heroine of a Henry James novel, she was the daughter of a colonel in the British Army in India who died in 1921 of Spanish influenza: Morden Carthew-Yorstoun met and married Nellie in Bombay, having earlier served in the Zulu War in South Africa, with Lord Kitchener in the Sudan, and having led a New Zealand regiment, the Poona Horse, during the Boer War with Winston Churchill under his command. The soldier from Pau managed to catch the eye of this orphan of intriguing ancestry, and later to hold her hand during some frenzied waltzes, foxtrots and Charlestons. They discovered they shared the same sense of humour, the same love of Art – Jeanne Devaux, young Béarnais’s mother, had been a painter (she had notably painted a portrait of Marie, wife of the poet Paul-Jean Toulet, in Guéthary), a profession almost as exotic as that of a singer. The young man from south-west France suddenly became an ardent music lover who regularly attended the soirées at the Conservatoire Américain. Charles Beigbeder and Grace Carthew-Yorstoun met up whenever he was on furlough; he lied about his age: born in 1902, at twenty-six he should have been long since married. But he loved poetry, music and champagne. The prestige conferred by his uniform (Grace, after all, was a soldier’s daughter) did the rest. Young Grace never returned to New York. The couple were married at the town hall of the 16th arrondissement on 28 April 1931. They had two boys and two girls; the second son, born in 1938, was my father. On the death of his own father, young Charles inherited a spa in Pau: the ‘Sanatorium of the Pyrenees’. It was a vast property of nearly two hundred acres (forests, copses, meadows, gardens) rising to a peak among the hills of Jurançon, at an altitude of 335 metres. As in The Magic Mountain, a well-to-do clientele in dinner jackets contemplated the spectacular sunsets over the central Pyrenees and, to the north, the expansive vista over the town of Pau and the Gave valley. It was hard to resist the call of the forests of mature pines and oaks, where children could gambol freely before being packed off to boarding school – in those days, parents did not raise their children themselves, and, as we will later see, that’s still true to some extent. Charles Beigbeder resigned from his position as a solicitor with no regrets and took my grandmother to breathe the healing air of Béarn, where she could yell at the servants to her heart’s content and forge bonds with the local British community. With money from his wife and his mother, my grandfather invested in my father’s business. Soon our family owned a dozen sanatoriums in the region, renamed ‘The Health Spas of Béarn’, and my grandparents acquired the Villa Navarre, a superb house in Pau in the English cottage style, where Jean-Paul Toulet, Francis Jammes and Paul Valéry were regular visitors (family legend has it that the author of Monsieur Teste wrote his correspondence very early in the morning; the butler, whose name was Octave, used to grumble at having to wake at 4 a.m. to bring him his pot of coffee). A Catholic and a militant royalist, Charles Beigbeder looked like Paul Morand and was an assiduous reader of the far-right journal Action française, something which did not prevent him being elected president of the Cercle Anglais (exclusively male, it was, at the time, the most elegant club in Pau; he organised literary salons there). In the 1950s the family inherited a villa on the Basque coast, Cénitz Aldea (meaning ‘Near Cénitz’ in Basque) in Guéthary, a little village that had been fashionable since the Belle Époque. Tuberculosis did much for the fortunes of my family, and I have no hesitation in saying that the discovery of streptomycin by Selman Waksman around 1943 was an absolute catastrophe for my inheritance.

      During the period we now call the interwar years (as though these young people could have anticipated that their post-war was also a pre-war), life was more austere in the great houses of the verdant Périgord. A countess who, as we know, had lost her husband in the second Battle of Champagne found herself alone at Quinsac, living in the château of Vaugoubert with two girls and two boys. In those days, Catholic war widows remained sexually faithful to their dead husbands. And of course, their children were called upon to sacrifice themselves. The two girls looked after their mother, something she encouraged in them – they did so for the rest of their lives. As for the two boys, they were automatically enrolled at the French military academy of Saint-Cyr, where an aristocratic ‘de’ in one’s name was highly regarded. The elder boy agreed to marry an aristocratic girl who was not really his choice. Sadly, she quickly cuckolded him with a swimming instructor: the young man was heartbroken at being so poorly rewarded for his docility. He filed for divorce; in retaliation, his mother disinherited him. The younger brother, too, suffered misfortune: posted to the garrison at Limoges, he fell in love with a ravishing commoner, a dark-haired girl with blue eyes who danced atop pianos (problem number one), and whom he impregnated out of wedlock (problem number two). Their union had to rapidly be formalised: the marriage of Comte Pierre de Chasteigner de la Rocheposay and the ravishing Nicole Marcland, known as Nicky, took place on 31 August 1939, in Limoges. The date was ill-starred: the very next day, Germany invaded Poland. Bon Papa barely had time to invade Bonne Maman. The phoney war awaited him, in which the Maginot Line proved as unreliable as the rhythm method. Pierre found himself a prisoner. When he escaped, a nun having lent him civilian clothes and false papers, he returned to France to sire my mother. It was then that he learned that he too was to be disinherited, since his mother the countess found it difficult at Sunday Mass to acknowledge this marriage which was beneath her station, despite the fact that it had been celebrated by the local priest in the chapel of her own château. Curious are the customs of the Catholic aristocracy, which entail disinheriting those who are already more or less orphaned. The lineage of the Chasteigners de la Rocheposay goes back to the Crusades (I am descended from Hugues Capet, though I imagine that in this I am one of many), and includes a Bishop of Poitiers, who was ambassador in Rome to Henri II. Ronsard dedicated an ode to one of my ancestors, Anthoine, abbot of Nanteuil. Though written in 1550, these lines remained relevant to me on that fateful night’s stay in January 2008:

       As time, so pass the trappings of this world

       According to its motion

       Life is fleet, and seasons, suddenly unfurl’d

       Fast whither to a notion. […]

       Like a spring, young children grow

       Then blossom in a summer

       Surprised by winter they no longer show

       What once they were.

      Despite the warning given to my great-great-grandfather by ‘the Prince of Poets’, my grandfather was thus sacrificed on the altar of the Great Passion. In love, he made the same choice as the Duke of Windsor had three years earlier, and as Madame Cécilia Ciganer-Albeniz would sixty-eight years later when she married Nicolas Sarkozy: sacrificing château rather than happiness. When the war was over, СКАЧАТЬ