Late in 1997 Debo brought one of Diana’s oldest friends, Jim Lees-Milne, over to the Temple. They had one happy day and then Jim became so ill that Debo had to take him back. He went straight into hospital, where he remained until his death a few months later, leaving a large gap in both sisters’ lives.
Less than a year later, Diana herself decided to leave the Temple. Though family and friends came to stay constantly and her son Aly and his wife Charlotte drove down to lunch or for the day most weekends, living there was growing more difficult. Everyone who knew the house worried that one day Diana would slip and fall down the spiral wooden staircase with its narrow, polished steps which led up from the ground floor to her sitting room and bedroom, and which she would descend every morning to fetch her breakfast tray and return with it to her bedroom.
For Diana herself there was the knowledge that the faithful Jerry, although well past retiring age, would never leave her while she lived at the Temple – how would she manage without him? – and that, if she wished him to enjoy the cottage in Ireland that she and Mosley had given him, she would have to do something about it herself.
This meant selling the Temple. It was bought for £1 million by an American property dealer; and in February 1999 Diana left the house, with its secluded garden where in the summer Mosley would stroll round wearing nothing but a hat and a pair of shoes, and moved to Paris.
Her new home was an elegant first-floor apartment in the rue de l’Université, a few blocks away from Aly and Charlotte. It was entered through a courtyard and its large windows overlooked the chestnuts of a small square opposite. For anyone else the noise of the traffic might have proved a deterrent, but for Diana, isolated in her cocoon of silence, it was immaterial.
Her new home brought her three happy last years. Almost at once, an efficient, smiling Filipino maid was found; like all Diana’s servants, she proved devoted. Best of all, there was a new worshipper at the shrine, a young half-Vietnamese writer and biographer, Jean-Noel Liaut, who soon became an intimate friend. With him, she would sortie forth to exhibitions, galleries and museums. When the intense press interest aroused by the reissue of her memoir, A Life of Contrasts, brought numerous interview requests, he was able to penetrate her now almost total deafness to get across the questions asked by journalists.
Diana continued her flow of letters, augmented by faxes – often sent within minutes to those perceived as attacking the views of her late husband. Her conviction that Churchill was ‘wicked’ to have refused to negotiate with Hitler after he (Churchill) had achieved power in May 1940 never altered. ‘I think his politics were completely fatal for England,’ she would say.
In 2000 she celebrated her ninetieth birthday with a party at the Crillon for more than forty of her descendants – although the breach with Nicholas was never healed. She survived to become the only person alive who had known both Churchill and Hitler, and writers of all kinds made their pilgrimages to her flat, to be entertained with a delicious luncheon, to succumb to the legendary charm and then, quite often, to go home to sharpen their pens.
At the beginning of August 2003 she suffered a mild stroke. A week later, on 11 August, she died peacefully in her Paris apartment. It was the end of a long life that had dazzled, outraged, horrified, charmed, shocked, beguiled and appalled. Through it all, two things remained constant: her love for the man to whom she was married for almost forty-five years – and her affection for the bloodstained dictator who almost extinguished the lights of civilisation over the Europe she loved.