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 escaped to Paris after the Anschluss in 1938. Published in French in 1940, Hélène’s memoir has the title Mosaïques, a tragic pun. Too fastidious and otherworldly to get the measure of the Nazism overpowering her, she reminisces about aristocrats and rabbis in her life. Aunty Lily told me that Hélène wore silk underclothes and changed them three times a day. Both of them elderly, she and Eric were deported in Convoy 63 to Auschwitz on 17 December 1943. Locked without food or water in a sealed cattle wagon, in all likelihood they would have died during the journey. Of the 850 on that convoy, 22 survived in 1945, four of them women. Thousands of Jews had come to Cologne to demonstrate outside the court and march through the city in memory of those who had been murdered. As we were assembling, I happened to notice a wall with a tablet set into it, recording that the Fould-Oppenheim bank used to be on that spot.
Achille Fould (1800–1869), Ber Léon’s son, was a banker and economist. At different times during the Second Empire, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte appointed him finance minister. Cartoons of the period draw him rapaciously shoveling all available taxes into the Treasury in order to finance the disastrous wars in which Louis Napoleon tried to emulate the first Napoleon Bonaparte, his uncle. Karl Marx, no less, polemicised against the man he dismissed as the Jew Fould, “a stock-exchange Jew,” and one of the most notorious members of what he imagined was the conspiracy of high finance. At a moment when Achille Fould was minister, his mistress, an English demi-mondaine known as Skittles, dropped him into a very public scandal by going to live with the much younger Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, then an attaché at the British embassy at the start of a conspicuous career as a ladykiller. A number of Jews converted to Protestantism as a first step on the roundabout way to assimilation, and Achille Fould was one of them.
A cousin of his was Léon Fould (1839–1924), my greatgrandfather, known in the family as “Bon Papa” and not to be confused with his uncle Ber Léon. He had lived through the Commune in the revolutionary Paris of 1870. His wife was Thérèse Praskovia Ephrussi from Odessa, the half-sister of Charles and Maurice Ephrussi, cosmopolitan figures to whose financial and intellectual distinction Edmund de Waal, another of their descendants, pays tribute in his book The Hare with Amber Eyes. In 1864 when Thérèse was sixteen she sat for a portrait that brings out her prominent brown eyes, a round face as intelligent as it is innocent, a high straight forehead, dark hair that falls with natural tidiness – Poppy took her real name from her and looked so similar that they might have been twins. Bon Papa and Thérèse had three children: Eugène my grandfather born in 1873, Robert who died young, and Elizabeth, otherwise Tante Lizzie, another of the little old ladies on the terrace at Poppy’s wedding. She had married Oncle Jo, Vicomte de Nantois, also long dead but for whose sake she had become