Fault Lines. David Pryce-Jones
that singled them out. Her devoted maid, Clothilde Kannengiesser, a born Catholic and a native of Alsace, sewed the yellow star on her own clothes, and never hesitated to accompany Tante Lizzie in the streets and shops. Alsatians had been obliged to have German citizenship, and Clothilde’s courage might well have gotten her shot for treason.
Eugène attended the Lycée Janson, reputedly one of the best schools in Paris. In March 1888, when he was a teenager, his report gave a sketch of his character that others, among them Mitzi and his children, were to substantiate in the future. “He will be an excellent pupil the day when he is able to check his frivolity and the arrogance that prevents him achieving the results to be expected of him.” The tone of letters to his parents is light, though what is remembered of his humour still offers clues to a remote and idiosyncratic personality. Speaking of a couple, he described the husband as Sunday afternoon in London and the wife as Monday morning in Paris. “Sich vorstellen und wieder weg,” he joked at the sight of any ill-favoured couple whose sexual relations might seem improbable – just to imagine them at it is enough to turn you away, in an unidiomatic translation. A Jew who has become a Catholic priest is “a deserter in uniform.” Asked by Mitzi how to spell some word he would keep a serious face and spout a row of impossible consonants. To have daughters, he lamented, was like putting sugar on strawberries that someone else would eat. A dog called Toby, he said, was an “or not,” a pun from Hamlet that might well escape a French owner. Long after his death, his daughter Bubbles summed up: “Word play constituted his sole defense against those who made claims on him. The laughter of others kept his melancholy at bay.”
In photographs he appears either as a good-looking and well-groomed man about town or as a satisfied and conventional paterfamilias with his wife and children grouped around him. The first time Mitzi was pregnant, however, he told his mother that this was “unberufen,” uncalled for. Social life evidently preoccupied him. Writing from St Moritz to his mother, he gives a typical list of the international set he was pleased to be with, café society in today’s vocabulary: “the Lamberts, Bijou Heine, the Casati, little Madame Deschamps with the Ritters, Madame d’Hautpoul, Pierre de Segonzac, Constantinovitch, Marino Vagliano, the Zoghebs, Mrs. Tiffany, Napoléon Murat,” and more besides. Max remembered that in St. Moritz in about 1912 his father had overheard four Frenchmen at the next table in the hotel accusing Jews of vulgar manners and nouveau-riche furnishings in their houses. As someone who considered that connoisseurship and good taste were essential aspects of his personality, he moved to their table and tackled them then and there.
In France the names of the company he kept are Löwenthal, Helbronner, Weisweiller, Stern, David-Weill, members of families whose social success led them to hope they were assimilated though they could not be sure of it. In one letter to his mother he calls an angry cousin “Meschuggah” (as he spells the Yiddish word for idiotic, adding a self-conscious exclamation mark), while in another written from a boat on the Nile he explains arrangements for their journey in “Mitzraîm,” a complex pun based on Mitzi’s name and the Hebrew word for Egypt. In his twenties at the time of the Dreyfus affair, he found himself cut by the upper classes among whom he so badly wanted a place. Exceptionally, the Marquis de Jaucourt crossed the Place Vendôme to shake Eugène’s hand in full view of other people. Right up to the present the members of the family have kept alive the memory of this public gesture – his daughter Lorette was yet another guest on the terrace at Royaumont when Poppy married. “Je ne nous aime pas” – I don’t like us – Eugène used to say of his French compatriots.
Once when I must have been in my twenties, Mitzi took me to lunch in Paris at Maxim’s. They made a fuss of her there. She’d invited someone who had known Marcel Proust, and they could exchange memories. In a sort of glory by association, for instance, the family had their teeth seen to by Docteur Darcissac, Proust’s dentist whose technique by then was half a century out of date. (His even older colleague once drilled my tongue by accident, and then said, “Mais mon petit, tu renifles comme un petit cochon de Yorkshire” – you are sniveling like a Yorkshire piglet.) Connection to Proust came through Mitzi’s mother-in-law Thérèse who had a salon where he was a regular and watchful visitor. In the library at Royaumont was a copy of his first published work, the translation in 1904 of Ruskin’s The Bible of Amiens. The flyleaf carries a dedication in his slightly disjointed hand to “Madame Leon Fould. Respectueux hommage d’un ami,” followed by his signature.
Mitzi was in touch with Professor Philip Kolb of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the outstanding Proust scholar of the day. His edition in twenty volumes of Proust’s letters has a good many references to one or another Fould. In the fifth volume of this series Kolb publishes a remarkable letter to Eugène that he dates, no doubt correctly, to 19 March 1905. Eugène was then twenty-nine and Proust had come to a dinner celebrating his engagement to Mitzi. He praises “the ravishing beauty of Mademoiselle Springer” and her air of intelligence although he had not had the chance to speak to her. Insisting that he is writing as Eugène’s friend, he appears ostensibly to be congratulating him. It is a solemn moment for Eugène, his life and his friends are about to change, and Proust concludes with resonance: “The task of your wife will be very delicate and very lofty and all your friends place the greatest hope in her that she will be able to fulfill it.” Unexpectedly he lets drop that Eugène is a “humouriste,” that is someone caught up in his own comic view of things. Under the circumlocution and the tact is the unmistakable warning that a homosexual could not expect to have a successful marriage. Had Eugène read it that way and taken umbrage, the skillfully drafted ambiguity of this letter would have allowed Proust to answer that he had no idea what Eugène was talking about. The fictional Swann is modelled on several of Proust’s friends and acquaintances, and Eugène is one of them.
In the First World War, Eugène made use of his English and the Russian picked up from his mother to become an interpreter. Another interpreter, Robert de Rothschild, his counterpart as a Jewish baron, was senior to him in rank, and two versions exist of the long-lasting quarrel that affected both their families. According to Mitzi, Robert de Rothschild heard Eugène saying that his father-in-law in the enemy city of Vienna believed himself to be ruined. “You can at last say that you made a love match,” Robert de Rothschild is supposed to have interjected, rubbing in the fact that Mitzi’s fortune was the basis of Eugène’s lifestyle. But Robert’s son Elie used to suggest that the bitterness between the two men was some issue of homosexuality.
Frank Wooster had entered Eugène’s life before the war. The illegitimate son of the Birmingham industrialist Sir Frank Leyland, he was a spendthrift who had run through such money as his father had given him. Educated at Uppingham, he had neither the skill nor the intention to earn his living, preferring to gravitate towards rich people willing to pay for him. One such was Paul Goldschmidt, himself raw material for Proust as a well-connected Jewish homosexual, and Frank moved to Paris to live with him. In those early days he had played golf at Le Touquet with P. G. Wodehouse, and it seemed plausible that Bertie Wooster had immortalized Frank’s surname with its unusual spelling. Frankie Donaldson, the first biographer of Wodehouse, was in some doubt that the dates fitted, so depriving Frank Wooster of what would have been his major contribution to the gaiety of nations.
Frank had undoubted social gifts and a certain stagey presence. By the time I knew him, he had aged very well, and was still handsome and his manner debonair. His hair was white with a slight blue rinse to it. The drawl in his voice left the impression that nothing in life needs to be taken too seriously. A little vain, a little condescending, he was immensely careful about his appearance, dressy in a Noël Coward mode with silk shirts from Sulka and ties from Charvet. At informal moments he liked to sport a foulard round the neck and what used to be called co-respondent shoes, their white leather uppers contrasting with brown toe-caps. Asked what Frank was like, Harold Acton, someone more likely to sympathise than criticise, replied in the words of the music-hall song about a dandy of the period, “He was Gilbert the Filbert.” Commissioned in the First War in the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, he had been on the Dardanelles expedition and remained in touch with General Sir Ian Hamilton, its commander. Serving later in France, he had been taken prisoner at Ypres, and his health was said to be delicate ever afterwards. Virtually his sole possession was a regimental drum turned into an unlikely coffee table in the drawing room of Mitzi’s rue de Surène