Fault Lines. David Pryce-Jones
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 under discussion, Mitzi and Eugène set off on a journey to Asia that was intended to take six months. Bubbles, their eldest daughter, accompanied them. This was an act of reparation 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