MISCREANTS, PETS, AND NEIGHBORS

Shortly before moving into Castille, we had gone to Paris in search of servants and found a seemingly suitable couple, Gaston and Marie Desvignes, with a young son, Jacky, who would attend the village school. Marie turned out to be the perfect person for the job. She was plump, red-faced, feisty, and energetic, and she worked like mad, fifteen hours a day, seven days a week. She cooked simply but well, served the meals, did most of the housework, kept stoves going and sheets ironed. To help her out, we brought in girls from the village, but they were never up to her standards. As she herself was something of a tyrant, Marie approved of Douglas’s tyrannical ways; she also stood up to him. She loved me like a son; I loved her like a nanny, also for sharing her cooking skills with me, including her secret for really crisp pommes frites: fry them in horse fat. Guests loved them, but I never let on about the horse fat.

The sturdy, fifty-year-old husband—a butcher, who supposedly wanted to switch to domestic service—turned out to be a rogue as well as a drunk. In those days the law entitled servants to several liters of wine a day. The entailed buying wine by the barrel and bottling it ourselves. The job left Gaston little time for his other duties beyond looking after the pig and rabbits and chickens and pigeons that he had landed us with. We had no better luck with our first gardener. Someone had told us to apply to the Foreign Legion’s demobilization base for an ex-legionnaire. Douglas liked the idea—“maybe he can wear a képi with a flap down the back and guard the place”—so we drove off to the barracks at Fréjus to interview possible candidates. Douglas had envisioned a glamorous black sheep like Gary Cooper in Beau Geste. No such luck. We were presented with an assortment of criminal types from the ratholes of Eastern Europe: they looked as if they might have been guards at Treblinka or Auschwitz. We chose the wretch who had the cleanest record, and took him back to Castille with us. He was white as a maggot, with small dead eyes set much too deep and much too close together. Oulnik, he was called, and I was terrified of him. So was Marie. His skills were limited to the ax and the chain saw and the disposal of debris. The day after Douglas fired him, Marie served us a dish of zucchini. It tasted bitter, so we sent it back to the kitchen. Marie did not eat it, nor did Oulnik; those that did were quite ill. Weedkiller, Marie said.

I briefly took over as a gardener. Knowing nothing as yet about Provençal horticulture, I limited myself to clipping away at the overgrown box hedges in a futile effort to discover the original topiary layout. What I did come upon was a mysterious bush seemingly alive with tiny, iridescent green beetles. These turned out to be cantharides. Having read in some lubricious novel about the aphrodisiac effect of taking a rest in the shade of one of these shrubs, I returned a few days later, for a siesta, but by that time the cantharides had devoured the bush and flown away. No sooner had we found a skilled gardener than Gaston became a major problem. His drinking took the form of folie de grandeur. He thought he was the Baron de Castille. He cooked the household books and spent the proceeds on presents for people he met in local bars and wanted to impress. He also gave us presents—vast, unbreakable vases like fairground prizes. In the face of Douglas’s wrath, Gaston fled. It transpired that he had swindled a lot of local people and there was a warrant out for his arrest. The police found him at Toulon and brought him back to face charges at Avignon. His jail sentence was a great relief to Marie and her son, Jacky, who wanted only to be rid of him and stay on with us. They became our family.

A year or so later, we had another brush with criminality. While Douglas was away in America, someone telephoned to ask whether he could bring an art student to see the collection. I said yes; in due course, two utterly forgettable people came by. And then, a few months later, Douglas received a call from the art student’s father—a doctor or lawyer we had never met—warning us that his son had run away from home with a friend, and that the two of them had been overheard planning an armed robbery of Castille. Douglas was not the least bit concerned, but Marie panicked and insisted we arm ourselves. For the first time in my life, I went to bed with a gun. After the gardener found a large bag (empty except for a white silk mask) in the garden, we took the matter more seriously. We handed the bag over to the police, and they arrested the culprits a day or two later. They had indeed been armed—with a machine gun—and had indeed tried to raid the house, the night before we received the telephone call, but had been driven off by our watchdog. They had hoped to steal enough pictures to finance a trip to South America. Oddly enough, Douglas did not want to prosecute them: “I’m all for enterprise in the young,” he said. He should have paid more heed to this warning. Although his collection had become one of the most valuable of its kind in the country, he never installed burglar alarms, or proper locks on windows, shutters, and doors. Fifteen years later, when more professional robbers struck, Douglas would rue his negligence.

Our local town, Uzès, once a stronghold of some importance, seemed to have fallen fast asleep. The pride it took in being the premier dukedom of France had contributed to its eclipse. Out of fear that their feudal peace might be blighted by progress, the dukes of Uzès had refused to allow the diabolical railroad to come near their territory. The handsome town had thus remained a sleepy, smelly backwater. Meanwhile, the ducal family—traditionally a source of patronage—had gone virtually bankrupt. This was largely the fault of Duchesse Anne d’Uzès. Despite literary and feminist pretensions, she had squandered millions of gold francs on studs, stables, hunting lodges, and packs of hounds, and millions more on her lover, General Boulanger, and his disastrous coup d’état—which had triggered his suicide on the grave of yet another of his mistresses. The duchess’s dissolute son, Jacques d’Uzès, wasted most of what was left as well as the family jewels on a courtesan, Emilienne d’Alençon, who did conjuring tricks with rabbits. To save him from total ruin, his mother exiled him to Africa, where he died of enteric fever.

By the time we arrived in the neighborhood, the dukes of Uzès had long since shaken the dust of the Duché off their boots. To reguild his escutcheon, not to speak of his bank account, the current duc ruiné, Emmanuel, had married a Standard Oil heiress called Peggy Bedford. The marriage had not prospered; the duke opted for Morocco, where the local women were to his taste. Thirty years later, I came upon him in Marrakesh, helping out at the Villa Taylor, Boule de Breteuil’s elegant pension. For lugging my bags to my room, I gave France’s premier duke a tip, which he accepted as a condemned man might accept a cigarette from an executioner.

On the outside, the Duché had remained an impressive medieval fastness, its roof emblazoned with the family’s coat of arms in polychrome tiles. On the inside, little of interest or beauty survived. The place had been taken over by the duke’s cousin, the Marquis de Crussol, who had married a sardine heiress. The marquise’s attempts at refurbishment were denigrated by people who cared about such things. But what else would you expect, they said, from “une sardine qui s’est crue sole” (“a sardine who thought herself a sole”—a pun on the family name)?

History seemed about to repeat itself when the son of the marquise decided to marry an American heiress. Douglas and I were invited to an engagement party in a neighbor’s Paris apartment. The salon was hung with a collection of eighteenth-century drawings, each of them hidden behind little silk curtains. To protect them from the light? No, to draw attention to their coyly suggestive imagery: effete rakes groping saucy servant girls; naked ladies wagging their bottoms at periwigged doctors clutching clysters. The heiress had good reason to look embarrassed. The nobleman that her family had picked out for her was as vapid as any of the louts in the drawings; and her fusspot mother would insist on tying and retying an enormous bow around her waist. This Edith Whartonish scene—new American money to the rescue of baddish, bluish blood—was the more intriguing in that the girl was clearly too bright and independent to go through with this outmoded charade. Sure enough, nothing came of these fiançailles.

Our local telephone service depended on the mood of the village postmistress, who went off duty early in the evening. So we were at the mercy of the mail. Since Douglas was a voluminous correspondent—the sight of his manic, cursive scrawl in bright blue ink on sky-blue envelopes would make pulses race as much with anticipation as with foreboding—there was a mass of outgoing as well as incoming mail. And our days revolved around the midmorning arrival of the postman and our late-afternoon walk with the dogs to the post office.

*Peggy Guggenheim with her Lhasa apsos on the roof of her Venetian palazzo*

The dogs had been Peggy Guggenheim’s idea. In the course of one of our annual visits to her Venetian palazzo, she had decided that something had to be done about Douglas’s “vile disposition.” It was getting out of hand. She had always thought of him as a friend, but he had written an article denouncing her collection as of interest only insofar as it reflected the modish taste of a mid-twentieth-century American millionairess. Hard knocks had left Peggy with skin as thick as an elephant’s—proof against snubs and slights, not to mention rejections—but Douglas had hit her in her raison d’être, her collection, and this had really hurt. With some justice, she attributed Douglas’s sneers at her expense to competitiveness; also to homosexual misogyny and bitterness—traits of which she had too often been the victim. “I am furious when I think of all the men who have slept with me while thinking of other men who have slept with me before” is one of several similar cris du coeur in her memoirs. Peggy had the perfect cure for Douglas’s condition: a dog. “It will bring out the mother in him,” she told me. Next time we went to Venice, she presented him with one of the offspring of the famous Lhasa apso that she and her former husband, Max Ernst, had acquired when they were married. The dogs had done wonders for Max’s meanness, she said.

Douglas became childishly fond of the dog—Bella was her name—and to that extent she kept him in a goodish mood. In due course he decided that Bella should have puppies. A sufficiently well-bred husband was found. Douglas paid a sizable stud-fee and promised the breeder one of the litter. But there was only one puppy, and Douglas was damned if he was going to relinquish it. The irate breeder sued. Douglas enjoyed that—it quickened the pace of country life and provided yet another outlet for his rage—so he kept the matter on the boil as long as he could. All I remember is that I ended up with the puppy, which I called Jacko—a nickname my father had occasionally bestowed on me in memory of a favorite monkey.

The dogs loved the daily walk to the post office; so did Douglas, who would be at his best—radiantly happy at the turn his life had taken, at being king of his own little castle. The post office was only a couple of miles away, but we frequently took a roundabout route up into the garrigue: the dry, scrubby uplands that take over where cultivation stops and are endemic to the hills back of the Mediterranean from Andalusia to Anatolia. The garrigue has superb acoustics. Since there was little traffic on the dusty roads around Castille, distant country sounds—the whack of a carpet being beaten, the rattle of a bucket going down a well on a chain—sounded clear as a gunshot. The cry of a hoopoe to the right, the bleat of a sheep way over on the left, gave the wilderness an added sonar dimension as well as a twinge of the melancholy that lingers on in the wake of an echo in that wonderfully clear air.

Bella and Jacko went crazy in the garrigue. They may have looked like animated mops, but they tried vainly to behave like coursers, and would chase anything that moved and come back exhausted, with nothing for their pains except coats bristling with burrs and thistles. Inevitably they were resented by the locals, who regarded pets as pests. Bella and Jacko did not kill rats or mice; they could not herd sheep; they were not chiens de garde or gun dogs; and they were certainly not truffle hounds. Worse, they disturbed game birds in the hunting season; worse still (more money was involved), they bothered the truffle hunters.

Truffle hunting was a very serious, very secret business. Uzès was a major center. Every winter there was a thriving truffle market there—on Saturdays in January and February. Most years we would buy several kilos. In 1955 truffles were fantastically cheap, around fifteen dollars a kilo, and we bought seven kilos. Since the sacks would usually include a lot of earth and leaves and grit and the occasional dud, Douglas and Marie and I would sit around the kitchen table, separating the treasure from the dross. Each of us would take a nail brush and scrub the truffles clean; it took hours, but the wonderful leaf-moldy smell was inspirational. We would set aside the biggest and best truffles to eat that very night, sous la cendre, wrapped in dough and baked in the ashes of a wood fire. The remainder would be preserved in Madeira or port, or taken to a local cannery and sealed into small cans with a dollop of white wine. One year our harvest amounted to two huge jars of truffles in Madeira and two others in port, as well as twelve smaller jars and some fifty cans. By the end of the year we would have given many of the bocales to Picasso or Braque, Nicolas de Staël or Graham Sutherland—as some return for the drawings and prints they gave us. Meanwhile we would have consumed the rest in omelettes and scrambled eggs, inserted under the skin of a boiling fowl (poularde demi-deuil), or stuffed into pieds de porc, as well as in any number of pâtés. On special occasions we would have truffle soufflé or soup.

Since the hills back of Castille were so rich in truffles, I was tempted to go hunting for them until I found out what an arduous and tricky process this was. Experienced hunters do not necessarily need a dog or a pig. They know exactly where to search—configurations of three or four mangy ilex saplings on bare-ish patches of garrigue, whose location they keep to themselves—and what to look for: columns of small yellow flies hovering at dawn or dusk in these promising spots. People with a highly developed sense of smell are said to be able to sniff out truffles. Less olfactorily sensitive hunters rely on a meat-fly in a matchbox. When released, the fly supposedly alights on the spot where truffles lurk a foot or so below the surface. This method requires an infinite supply of meat-flies and the sharpest of eyes. To mark the place where they have found truffles, hunters plant a combination of seeds known only to themselves; that way they can easily find the same place the following season. Cultivation used to be a matter of luck and patience, and for all I know still is. If soil from a truffle area is spread on calcareous ground and ilexes are planted, truffles should start to materialize after four or five years, but it is by no means certain. And then there is always the likelihood of poachers getting to them first.

On our walks in the garrigue we would sometimes come upon men with truffle hounds: skinny, miserable-looking brutes worth a fortune. Training these dogs is long, cruel, and costly. They are starved almost to death, then fed minute quantities of truffle until the smell becomes obsessive. Pigs were seldom if ever used in our area, but that did not stop Marie’s drunken husband, Gaston, from deciding that we should get one. He thought he knew someone who would help him train a pig to hunt truffles. If it failed in its duties, we could always eat it. Douglas loved the idea. A pig was acquired forthwith and installed in one of the colonnaded outbuildings. “Such an economy,” Douglas said. “We’ll not only have free truffles, we’ll have free hams.” Sheer fantasy! The only thing Gaston knew about a pig was how to slaughter it and butcher the meat. He could not wait to show off his prowess. For a month or so, we ate little but pig—muzzle to tail to trotters. Nothing was left but bones. Gaston’s home-curing was a disaster: the hams turned out to be too salty to eat.

When I returned to Uzès a year or two ago, this backwater had transformed itself into a thriving tourist attraction with antiquaires, and shops selling lavender bags and folksy artifacts carved from olive tree roots. A further sign of local renewal was the plethora of newly renovated old buildings and fancy restaurants in nearby villages that had never even had a café. Avignon, too, had changed out of all recognition. It was now a sophisticated cultural center, whereas in our day, for all its beauty and its reputation for licentiousness that went back to the Middle Ages, the city was a disappointment: stifling and touristy in the summer and dreary and provincial in the winter. Over the principal public lavatory was a huge sign, STATION DE DÉCROTTAGE, which Picasso remembered from before 1914. Local society kept to itself in the shuttered rooms of dixhuitième mansions hidden away on tree-shaded backstreets. At a dinner in one of these houses I remember being served a great dish of alose. Alose is French for shad. Because it had become almost extinct in the Rhône, it was considered a great local delicacy. Douglas saw to it that we would never be asked back again by informing the hostess that the Hudson River swarmed with alose and that most of the Americans he knew ate only the roe.

*Suzanne Barnier and JR at her farm outside Nîmes*

More fun was to be had in the company of Avignon’s one and only couturier, the delightful Jean Sully-Dumas, who had resisted pressure from Christian Dior and other confrères to make a name for himself in Paris. He preferred to stay close to his local roots and practice his métier on the Avignon ladies. He did so exceedingly well. Jean’s muse and model, a beautiful local girl called Eliette, helped him give small, memorably entertaining dinners. Unlike her boss, Eliette went on to greater things. After working as a model in Paris, she married Herbert von Karajan and developed into a celebrity to be reckoned with.

As I was already cataloguing Picasso’s portraits, I went around asking people for information about a legendary whorehouse—said to be the most lavishly appointed outside Paris—that had supposedly inspired Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon. Don’t bother, Picasso said, the reference to Avignon was just a joke. However, there was something in Avignon that might be worth tracking down. He told me that when he lived there in 1914, he had always used the same fiacre. The driver had asked him to paint a sign advertising FUMIER À VENDRE (manure for sale); and he had come up with a colorful cubist placard, embellished with pointillistic flourishes. “By now it must be worth a fortune,” Picasso said, and told me exactly where the stable had been. I made some inquiries, but after forty years the trail had gone cold.

Although we were forever driving into Avignon to meet trains, buy food, frame pictures, browse the antique shops, or wait around while guests toured the Palais des Papes, we ended up finding most of our friends in Nîmes. This came about through our friendship with an adorable Nîmoise called Suzanne Barnier. Besides being the wife of a local landowner who supplied us with most of our wine and the best black Muscat grapes I ever tasted, Suzanne took us under her wing and helped us solve all manner of practical problems. She also introduced us into Nîmes society: progressive, for the most part professional, people—among them her lawyer-brother Paul Carcassonne—who made us feel like honorary Nîmois. Douglas, a linguistic chameleon if ever there was one, even started to tell Marius jokes in a Raimu accent.

Nîmes had more vitality than Avignon. Originally colonized by the veterans of Augustus’s armies, the city had been one of the richest of Roman Gaul. Hence its noble classical buildings, among them that miraculously preserved Roman temple, the Maison Carrée; the spectacular second-century A.D. arena where we regularly attended bullfights; and Agrippa’s Pont du Gard, which had supplied the city with water. Sacked by Vandals and Visigoths in the Dark Ages, Nîmes became a republic protected by Pépin the Short and a slew of other “protectors,” before being absorbed into the kingdom of France. By 1558, three-quarters of the population were Protestants, most of them active in the textile trade. They killed off a great many Catholics, but the Catholics got their own back when the Edict of Nantes was revoked in 1685. Nîmes also had a thriving Jewish community—descendants of Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella. The mix of cultures worked perfectly and kept the place lively and free of chauvinism. The acceptance accorded to two such intruders as Douglas and myself was a measure of this freedom of spirit.

Besides our beloved Suzanne, we saw a lot of a fascinating couple, Jean and Mimi Godebski, known locally as “les God.” Jean—a painter of sensitive, self-effacing views of the Camargue—was the son of a Polish sculptor, Cipa Godebski, as well as the nephew of Cipa’s sacred monster of a sister, Misia Sert, the flamboyant patron of vanguard art and music, who had been a close friend of Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir, Bonnard, Vuillard, Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, Cocteau, Diaghilev, Nijinsky, and heaven knows who else earlier in the century. Jean was anything but proud of his celebrated aunt, and as I had once been taken to visit her in her ornate apartment on the rue de Rivoli—all mulberry-colored velvet and rock crystal, dud El Grecos and bits of good Boulle—I could see why. Misia was overwhelmingly awful and, according to Picasso, always had been. By the time I met her (1947), she was on her last legs, totally addicted to morphine, which she obtained through her morphinomane attendant, a heavily made-up waif of a man called Boulos Ristelhueber. The two of them seemed to have moved, ahead of time, into one of hell’s grander suites. When she died, Misia left Jean and his numerous family nothing. Everything went to Ristelhueber. Jean did not allow his chagrin to show.

Jean’s wife, Mimi, came from a very different background. She was the last of one of the most distinguished local families, the Comtes de Bernis, and she and Jean and their famille nombreuse lived in the enchanting Hôtel de Bernis, on the rue de Bernis in the old part of Nîmes. In the salon hung the rather too imposing portrait of Misia by Renoir, which Misia had left to Jean’s sister, and she had passed on to him. It did not exactly break Jean’s heart to sell it. I owed a lot to “les God.” On one occasion when Douglas was being difficult, they took me in; and when I finally left Castille, they adopted my dog. Jean was great company. I will never forget our timeless rides around the Vaccarès. He would evoke the haute bohème of his youth: the gentleness of Ravel, who wrote the Mother Goose Suite for him and his sister when they were kids (how cross Misia was that they couldn’t play it for him), the enchantment of life in his father’s house on the Seine, and the fun he had with Vuillard, who painted so many of his lamplit interiors there.

The most prominent family in Nîmes were the four Colomb de Daunant brothers. The one we knew best was the eldest, Edmond, a hospitable bachelor who lived—indeed still lives—in a large mansion attached to an even larger serre: a botanical-garden-sized conservatory full of magnificent palm trees, where he makes his guests feel very honored to have been invited. Another brother, Denys, an authority on the Provençal tradition of bullfighting, made that beautiful film Crin Blanc, about the wild white horses of the Camargue. Denys married a granddaughter of the Marquis de Baroncelli, a leading light of the Félibrige, the society that the great local poet Frédéric Mistral had founded to protect the Provençal language, traditions, and folklore. Such was Baroncelli’s passion for the bulls and horses of the Camargue that he neglected his considerable properties in Avignon and went to live in a reed-thatched cabin on an island in the Vaccarès, surrounded by the herds of white horses on which he doted. Denys Colomb perpetuates the spirit of his wife’s charismatic grandfather. I recently read somewhere that he had finally installed electricity in his austerely handsome house, Le Mas de Cacharel; otherwise he continues to live and dress much as people did in the days of Baroncelli.

Another Nîmois friend of ours was a burly, half-Russian charmer called Jean Lafont. He was a manadier, a breeder of bulls for the village cockades—mini-bullfights in which nimble boys in white T-shirts and pants vie with each other to seize a rosette from between the horns of specially bred bulls. Since these bulls are not killed, they become ever more wary and aggressive, and many of the boys get badly gored. Besides bulls, Jean collected chairs—lots and lots of them (preferably nineteenth-century Gothic ones) —and trees. He had a mini-arboretum at his romantically run-down, fancifully decorated ranch (shades of Madeleine Castaing) in the depths of the Camargue. He also collected cowboys. The ranch was a lifetime gift from his admirer Marie-Laure de Noailles—someone whom Douglas and I had known before we knew each other. Since moving into Castille, we saw a lot of her, as she spent much of the year in her house at Hyères.

Marie-Laure was one of the most paradoxical women I ever met: spoiled, generous, sly, fearless, manipulative, impetuous, bitchy, affectionate, childish, maddening, and, not least, extremely cultivated. She was the only child of an enormously rich Belgian banker, Maurice Bischoffsheim, who had died when she was eighteen months old. As well as golden, the spoon in Marie-Laure’s mouth was prodigiously crested. Her mother was the daughter of the Comtesse de Chevigné (Proust’s consummately aristocratic Duchesse de Guermantes) and the great-great-granddaughter of the Marquis de Sade. Marie-Laure had originally contemplated marrying Jean Cocteau, but Proust supposedly suggested that the Vicomte de Noailles would be more suitable. And, it is true, he epitomized the gratin. Besides an aristocratic manner, he had impeccable taste in works of art and garden design. He was also, in his distant way, far nicer than most of his peers. In certain other respects he was not unlike Cocteau. Early in their marriage, Marie-Laure had caught the Vicomte (as she always referred to him) in the arms of his gym instructor. She never reproached him; she simply told most of their friends. Thenceforth, they tended to live under separate roofs or at opposite ends of her enormous Paris mansion, not out of any ill feeling—they loved each other and telephoned or wrote every day—but out of a need to lead separate lives. In the 1930s, Marie-Laure had a passionate affair with Igor Markevitch, a handsome, somewhat feral-looking composer and conductor who had been the last great love of Diaghilev and would later marry Nijinsky’s daughter. Markevitch cost Marie-Laure so much money that her vast fortune had to be put in the hands of trustees. She continued to fall for good-looking young musicians. At the height of the war she eloped to Evian with a faun-like cellist called Maurice Gendron. They foolhardily took a boat across the Lake of Geneva to Switzerland, where they were promptly arrested and incarcerated in a detainment camp. According to Cocteau, Marie-Laure had to peel the potatoes, while Gendron cleaned out the latrines. After they were repatriated, she did something even sillier: she took up with an Austrian officer.

*Picasso,* Marie-Laure de Noailles, *black chalk, 1923*

When I first met her, Marie-Laure was having an affair with a gifted American illustrator, Tom Keogh. Unfortunately, Tom’s wife, Theodora, was sleeping with Marie-Laure’s chauffeur, Baca, which made the quartet’s cinq-à-septs difficult to schedule. On the side, she fussed over a bevy of good-looking young musicians, and seems not to have minded that they were mostly homosexual. One of her clique told me that he loved her not just for her generosity and hospitality but for her wonderfully responsive ear and eye and phenomenal memory for English and German as well as French verse. Whether or not she went to bed with her éphèbes, Marie-Laure bonded with them and seems sometimes to have felt challenged to outdo them in outrageousness and promiscuity. Ned Rorem, the handsome American composer who lived in her house for seven years, portrays her to perfection in his absorbing Paris diaries.

Marie-Laure did not age well. It was not just that she looked like Louis XIV: she looked like a pregnant Louis XIV—a consequence of a large abdominal cyst that she never bothered to have removed. In the 1950s, she took up with a man of surpassing ugliness, Oscar Dominguez, a satchel-faced surrealist painter from the Canary Isles, whom she called Putchi. Mean people claimed that Oscar was not as nice as he looked. This was true to the extent that he was a bad drunk and anything but scrupulous in his dealings, but I was touched by his desperately clumsy attempts to make his mark—attempts that made not the slightest dent in the icy hearts of le tout Paris. Oscar was Marie-Laure’s “Elephant Man.”

Douglas and I used occasionally to stay at the Mas Saint-Bernard, which the Noailles had constructed on a great spread of medieval ruins on a hillside above Hyères. They had originally approached Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier to design a simple Riviera villa but had finally settled for Mallet-Stevens, a designer of film sets, who came up with an enormous house in a modernist style rather too tainted with art deco. There were beautiful exterior spaces—a triangular garden laid out like a checkerboard, with windowlike openings in its walls, a sculpture garden, a rooftop with an open-air bedroom by Pierre Chareau—but the house itself resembled the superstructure of a ship, and, notwithstanding its considerable scale, the rooms, especially the bedrooms (of which there had originally been forty), were too cabin-like for comfort. According to Jean Hugo, the Vicomte had originally run the house as if it were a liner and he were the captain issuing orders to a crew of footmen. During the war, the house had been used as a hospital and had subsequently fallen into disrepair, not least the famous swimming pool where Marie-Laure told me she had done her laps on foot, clutching dumbbells to keep herself at the bottom of the pool. The Vicomte, who had financed Dalí and Buñuel’s sacrilegious movie L’Age d’Or—much to the scandal of the Catholic Church and, worse, his fellow members of the Jockey Club—fancied himself a cinéaste, and used the pool as a setting for a 1928 thriller, Biceps et Bijoux, which he had also sponsored. A year later, he had Man Ray do an experimental film about the Mas Saint-Bernard, inspired by a famous Mallarmé poem. It was called Les Mystères du Château de Dés. Man Ray had everyone in the house don the dark shorts and striped tank tops that the Noailles issued to their guests, and pull stockings over their faces to give an air of erotic mystery to the scenes in the gym and the pool.

*The Mas Saint-Bernard (1923–33), which the Vicomte de Noailles commissioned from Mallet-Stevens*

The war had left the Mas Saint-Bernard diminished—in scale as well as allure. Reinforced concrete patinates unattractively. Instead of looking as crisp and white as a lighthouse, it looked a bit grubby, in contrast to the flag emblazoned with the Noailles coat of arms that fluttered feudally above the roof. However, the paintings—Picassos, Braques, Légers, Mondrians, Max Ernsts, and much else—were as impressive as ever. The food was well chosen, and so, except for poor old Oscar, were the guests. Marie-Laure could not abide fools, and her wit and erudition and outrageous flights of fancy brought out the best—as well as the worst, if enough drink had been consumed—in the musicians and writers and luminaries of la haute pédérastie she surrounded herself with. Their merciless laughter would have to compete with the braying of the hugely hung donkey—Marie-Laure’s notion of a suitable pet—which she kept tethered in the garden below the guest rooms.

After one of our visits to the Mas Saint-Bernard, Douglas and I drove on to see Picasso. He had turned against Marie-Laure. He had recently seen her at a bullfight, he said, and she had looked exactly like Goya’s hideous Queen Maria Luísa. Apropos of the famous pass that Marie-Laure had made at him—“You be Goya and I’ll be the Duchess of Alba”—Picasso said that she should have cited the Queen of Spain instead. He denounced Oscar for faking his work so flagrantly, but put much of the blame on Marie-Laure. He said that Oscar suffered from acromegaly (an enlargement of the bones of the head, which presses on the brain), and should not be held accountable for his misdeeds. Marie-Laure had no such excuse, he said. She had to be aware of what her “Putchi” was up to.

At the time I could not believe that Marie-Laure did not know. Two years later, when I went to see Klaus Perls, the New York dealer, I realized that she did. Perls had proudly shown me a small cubist Picasso he had recently acquired. When I told him it was a fake, he said it couldn’t be: it came from the Noailles collection. Sniff it, I said, you can still smell the turpentine—evidently a recent job. It was easy to work out what had happened. After arranging for Oscar to sell the original to Heinz Berggruen, Marie-Laure had had him make a copy to hang over her bed in place of the original. That way the Vicomte would not realize it had been sold. And then she had decided to put the copy on the market. According to James Lord’s book Six Exceptional Women, she had originally asked him to sell the fake painting for her. James had offered it to Heinz Berggruen, and was horrified to find that he owned the original. He concluded that Oscar was selling Marie-Laure’s paintings and replacing them with copies that he had made; and he describes how embarrassed he was at having to tell Marie-Laure that her lover was swindling her in this way. It never occurred to him that the two of them were in cahoots. Having failed to sell the fake in Paris, Marie-Laure next tried New York. This time she used a jewelry designer called Baron von Ripper, to whom she owed some money. “Jack the Ripper,” as he was known, had been given the painting in lieu of cash. Outraged at the deception, Klaus fired off a letter of remonstration to Marie-Laure. Instead of apologizing, she wrote back saying that she should never have been such a fool as to throw her pearls before swine. Her arrogance was going to cost her dearly, Klaus said. How she extricated herself from this mess I never discovered.

On New Year’s Eve, 1957, Marie-Laure asked Oscar and a Chilean friend, Tony Gandarillas (a charming opiomane diplomat who had played the drag role of Baroness von Bülop in Cecil Beaton’s spoof memoir, My Royal Past), to join her for a small festive dinner. Oscar never turned up. Telephone calls went unanswered. They assumed he had passed out. It was not until the next day that he was discovered to have committed suicide by cutting his wrists and ankles in the bathtub. Jean Godebski, who had known Marie-Laure forever, called to tell Douglas the news; also that she had insisted on having Oscar buried in the Bischoffsheim vault in Montparnasse. She was shattered and lonely, Jean said, but he had the perfect solution for her—Jean Lafont. He and Mimi were going to drive Jean over to Hyères the following day and hand him over to Marie-Laure. An inspired idea. Jean proved to be much to her taste. He was sexy and virile-looking, and he liked women as much as, if not more than, most of the men in her life did. But, as the Godebskis well knew, Jean was in possession of a no less important key to her quirkish heart. He had always wanted to follow in the footsteps of Baroncelli and live in the Camargue. Marie-Laure turned out to have a romantic passion for the Félibrige—a passion she had inherited from her mother. The Vicomte approved of Jean, and saw to it that he became the owner of the oldest manade in the Camargue. Marie-Laure also gave Jean the wonderful library that had belonged to her mother and stepfather, the playwright Francis de Croisset, who is said to have been the origin of Proust’s Bloch. I cannot forget the last time I saw her, somewhere in the Camargue. Marie-Laure was dressed in the flower-sprigged costume of an Arlésienne. She had a cigarette stuck to her lower lip and carried a small, folkloric basket. The effect was odd but authentic.