A Spectator's Notebook
My first experience of France and the French was in the year 1920 when I was sent off to Cheverny near Blois to learn the language in a French family. The Place had been recommended by Irish friends and neighbours, the Teelings. The son, afterwards for many years MP for lirighton, was said to have benefited from his stay there. The journey from London to Paris to Blois was uneventful and at Blois I was to pick up the local train to take me to my destination. The train was standing in the station, an antique brass affair with a high chimney. I was supposed to be the only Englishman in the French family but I was surprised to see a number of obvious Englishmen converging on the same train as myself. What was worse, they all got out at the same station as I did — all fourteen of them. In fact we were all heading for the same French family, the members of which certainly spoke French, though no one else did.
I slept in what had once been the drawing room and which was dirty, noisy, and infested with rats. I had never before — and have not since — had rats on my bed, and most of the farmyard poultry seemed to roost on the window sill. My fellow students seemed mainly interested in the local carpenter's wife who seemed to be the nearest tart.
Higher circles
Obviously I learnt no French and returned home as soon as possible. However the attempt to make me fluent in French was not given up. But the next attempt took me to a very different social milieu. A friend in Scotland had been at school in France and had made friends with a Madame de Beauchamp of the highest French aristocracy. She had kept up this friendship and offered to write and inquire if Mme de Beauchamp knew of a family who would take me in. She did know of such a family — her cousins — so off I went to Rive in the Sologne half way between Blois and Bourges. The family — the d'Orleans (no relation of French royalty) had been on this property for 600 years and in the male line. There are only about half a dozen such families in the whole of France. The Comte d'Orleans, with his slow quiet manner and fair colouring, was more my idea of a Scottish laird than a French aristocrat. His wife was a de Chateau-Renard from the south. Her father had been Ambassador in St Petersburg and London. There were two sons and a daughter, the younger son Charles exactly my age. The chateau was a big country house: only the moat and two pepperpots told of an older building. This one was, I suppose, eighteenthcentury but of no great architectural interest. As with most French buildings at that time you knew where the lavatory was by the smell. It was strange that in such a formal and cultured society they should have been so indifferent to matters of hygiene.
I can't say I learnt to speak French with any fluency. I could already read French pretty easily, but I was miserably shy and had no idea what to do or say when I entered the drawing room and my hostess sprang to her feet and offered me her chair. I sat on it, knowing that that was wrong, but unable to decline in a suitable flow of polite flattering language. However, I kept up with Charles and his family. Poor Charles was wounded in the leg in the Resistance in Paris and carried across the town by his wife on her back. However, the Gestapo finally caught up with him and he died of diphtheria in Mauthausen camp.
Flings and stings
My next visit to France was about a year later when I went with my parents to Menton — then called Mentone, a reminder that the town was historically Italian. The memorable event of this visit was that I was taken to the casino at Monte Carlo and encouraged to put the minimum stake on my age. The number came up en plein and I raked in quite a number of francs. My family urged me to go on, but I wanted to be one of the few visitors to the table who left rather richer than when they arrived — and anyway I am no gambler.
We now move on a few years to about 1925 when my uncle Rothermere gave me £200 for my wife and myself to spend a fortnight en prince at the Crillon Hotel, then, as now, only rivalled by the Ritz for prestige. Though £200 then would be the equivalent of quite £1,000 now, the £200 lasted but ten days. The only recollection of this treat I still retain is how badly I was bitten by mosquitoes. After one night I had eleven bites on my face — a surprising experience in such a hotel.
Newspapermen
From then until after the war my visits to France were mostly brief shopping trips to Paris, but just before the war I made my first acquaintance with the leading Paris newspaper publisher, M. Prouvost, still around I believe in advanced old age as proprietor of Le Figaro. He was at that time the founder and owner of Paris-Soir which was the leading popular paper in France and also in French-speaking Belgium and Switzerland. M. Prouvost is one of the publishing phenomena of the century. He is an important woollen manufacturer in Roubaix, but in addition to his successful textile interests he had a huge success as a newspaper publisher. After the war he suffered a period of eclipse as he had been a collaborator with the Germans. His newspaper, renamed FranceSoir, was taken from him, and he had to start from scratch, This he did with the highly successful magazine Paris-Match, soon followed by others and ending in the acquisition of Le Figaro. His editor before the war was Pierre Lazareff, who remained editor of France-Soir when after the war the paper changed hands. Lazareff not only made a success of Paris-Soir before the war but was almost equally successful in re-establishing the paper afterwards. It is remarkable that while he was such a brilliant editor of the daily newspaper, his wife was equally successful as editor of the women's weekly, Elle.
Politicians
It was at their country house that, more recently, I met M. Pompidou and M. Couve de Murville. I never met General de Gaulle, though I saw him during the war in the Savoy Hotel. I wrote down at the time that he gave the impression of a 'king in exile'. But, de Gaulle apart, Pompidou struck me as one of the more impressive politicians I have met. He seemed gay, competent and immensely intelligent — far more impressive than his opposite numbers in this country. The last time I saw him was a few months before his election as President. He made it quite clear that he assumed he would be President; I asked him what about the presidential prospects of M. Giscard d'Estaing. He said "Not until 1985." I said "You mean after you have retired," and he laughed.
Couve de Murville was originally in the French foreign service and he seemed more of a civil servant than a politician — and incidentally more my idea of an Englishman than of a Frenchman. But next to Pompidou the most impressive French politician I met was Mendes-France. He was only Premier for a very short time and has since been in almost total eclipse. The reason that he was not allowed to play a larger part in his country's affairs is said to be that he is a Jew; married, I believe, to an Egyptian. While Jews play a large part in the public life of France, as elsewhere, in the French political world their prominence incurs strong antisemitic reaction, It is often said that Pompidou was a Jew, but this was not so, even though he was managing director of the Rothschild Bank in France.
M. Mitterrand had lunch with me some years ago and Mendes-France was at the same lunch, but M. Mitterrand was not impressive at that time. Judging by newspaper reports of the recent presidential campaign he has come on a great deal in the intervening years. M. Defferre was the ablest leader of the left that I met. He was for years Mayor of Marseilles, a most difficult assignment which he carried out with distinction.
But to me the outstanding Frenchman of the last fifty years is Jean Monnet. Starting life as the son of a small brandy distiller in Cognac, he has been the most effective and constructive European statesman of our times. In 1918 he was Deputy Secretary of the United Nations and after various jobs in the inter-war years he really came into his own during the last war, mainly as a member of the British Supply Council in Washington. After the war he became General Commissioner for the Modernisation and Equipment of France, then President of the Preparatory Conference for the Schuman plan, and later President of the European Coal and Steel Community. The creation of the Community was his first step towards the European Common Market which was largely his own creation. Successive British governments did not believe he would pull it off and indeed a move for a United Europe seemed unlikely to be born in France. But Jean Monnet with his charm,. his modesty, his optimism anc his consistent vision did pull it off. General dr Gaulle's hostility to the Common Market wa: partly old-fashioned nationalism but partl■ jealousy of Jean Monnet, whom he perhap subconsciously realised was a greater man thai he.
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