Fault Lines. David Pryce-Jones
I pick at random a letter from London solicitors itemizing large holdings in British and American shares, mostly in mining and railroads. This was a fortune in itself but only the part held at Hambros Bank in London of what Mitzi was inheriting from her late father. She must have rated every last detail about herself and her life so important that the multifarious evidence had to be preserved, duly but not necessarily correctly sorted and filed away in envelopes and packets tidily tied up with string. Innumerable photographs of herself are a sort of chronicle from her pre-1914 appearance in long tight-waisted dresses and hats as elaborate as a still life of flowers, until she poses in matronly suits with one or all of her children around her, all the way down to Cecil Beaton portraits conveying the impression of wisdom and age. Still more innumerable photographs, as stiff as boards and dully brown in the technology of the period, are portraits of elderly men usually in a white tie with decorations or else in a morning coat and top hat. A few are wearing the Kaiser und König uniform and distinctive forage cap of the Emperor’s soldiers, the whole appearance complete with whiskers and monocle. Occasionally she wrote names on the back of these photographs, otherwise the sitters are unidentifiable. The women are posed self-consciously in ballroom dresses, rows of pearls hanging almost to the stomach, aigrettes, parasols, fancy dress costumes, feather boas, and furs. Liliane used to joke that many of the women around her were members of an “Internationale Judeo-lesbienne,” and went so far as to speculate whether her mother and two women who were regular guests at Meidling, Marianne Glasyer and “My beloved friend Giesl von Gieslingen,” might have belonged to it too.
Nowhere that I can find in this archive is any mention of eligible Austrian Jews she might have married. On the face of it, the engagement between a pampered heiress from Vienna and a worldly fortune-hunter from Paris looks like a fine example of the traditional matchmaking practised among Jews. But Mitzi writes that at seventeen she fell in love with Eugène at first sight. She accuses her father of obliging her to break off the engagement, and a sentence only two short years later covers what must have been a lot of ground, “the fight I put up and the sufferings and sorrows I endured finally ended in Eugène and myself getting married … in 1905.” In the archive is plenty of evidence that the demands each made of the other kept their relationship at a high emotional pitch. One of several similar notes from Eugène that she kept with a framed photograph of him by her bedside says, “I would give every minute of my existence, every drop of my blood to see you perfectly happy.” In her notes she signs herself “Doggie,” and after twenty years and more of marriage could still write, “a big hug from the one who adores you and is more in love with you than ever, even if you, old fool! say I am less fond of you.” Cocky was her nickname for him.
One thick package has the label, “Letters from the perpetual quarrelling (dramas!) between my father Gustav, Eugène and me.” All three of them were accustomed to having their own way and did not know how to let well alone. A two-page letter from Mitzi without a heading but undoubtedly addressed to her father opens with the accusation, typically left in the air, that the harm done to her has entered her heart. Two issues could not be resolved: whether Mitzi and Eugène would settle in Vienna rather than Paris and what nationality their children would have and therefore whether baby Max grew up to be an Austrian or a French soldier. Concessions were made to keep Gustav happy: Eugène and Mitzi would perpetuate the Springer descent by hyphenating their surnames, and Eugène would accept a title so that his son Max could eventually be Monsieur le Baron.
Here is one round in the contest, as described by Eugène to his father Léon Fould in a letter of 15 March 1909:
Big news – at lunch, the day before yesterday, my father-in-law says to me (only Mitzi and Hélène were there) that he is going to see Lueger the mayor, in order to settle the question of the little boy’s nationality. I answered, “I must ask you to do nothing because as you know you have given me mortal offense and I have taken the decision never to hear speak again of this matter which has always been exceedingly painful to me and to my father.” He, “But we promised.” Me, “Yes, but if the person to whom something has been promised then refuses his part of it, I consider that fact makes it quits, as in my case – and I am quite willing, if I have to, to go as far as the Emperor to explain the situation.”
Whether before or after this stormy lunch, an undated letter of Eugène’s reveals that Gustav could also play the card of going to the top:
We were at the palace this morning for an audience with the Emperor…. The Emperor put himself out to be amiable, spoke to me in French and asked if I liked Vienna. Then he spoke in German and said he had had “ein schweres Jahr.” [A bad year] He really couldn’t have been friendlier and looked far less broken down than I would have thought.
Gustav’s letters were evidently dictated to a secretary and copied out later in exquisite schrift, in the old German style. In his own spiky hand he sometimes gave as good as he got, as in this brutally understated brush-off, quoted in full. “If I am grateful for your letter I cannot all the same forget the two lessons you have seen fit to give me, and you cannot hold it against me if I avoid a third. My compliments to you.”
Compromising further, Eugène agreed to divide his time by spending eight months in Paris, four in Vienna. In the first years of their marriage, however, he and Mitzi lived in Berlin, where ostensibly he was a banker. At best desultory about his career, his real interest was acquiring more and more works of art for his collection, and for this he depended on Mitzi’s money. In Paris they rented the second floor of 54 Avenue d’Iéna, a house in a monumental style appropriate to the surroundings and the nearby Arc de Triomphe. Its builder was Emile Deutsch de la Meurthe, and his descendants, the Gunzbourgs, lived below on the first floor. Originally from Saint Petersburg, they had a fortune from sugar. The first Jews to be ennobled as Barons by the Czar, they enjoyed much the same exclusive social standing as the Fould-Springers. Financial advisors said that Mitzi’s income was large enough for Eugène to spend annually 100,000 francs on works of art. In the end 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,