True Pleasures by Lucinda Holdforth Page B

political wife – elegant, charitably inclined, gracious.
    It must take a lot of effort to make oneself so attractive to men, a lot of self-discipline. To pander to their foibles and weaknesses, to laugh at their jokes, to turn away from the hurts and insults of those who always returned to their wives. Americans always sniggered at Pamela (
the widow of opportunity
, they chortled), the British had looked down on her, but the French very much appreciated this throwback to an earlier era. They appreciated the craft, the art, the self-discipline of the courtesan. Like all great artists, she made the hard work look easy.
    When she became a rich and influential widow, Pamela got a facelift, put on a power suit and played the role of Ambassador with the flair she applied to all her performances. Naturally, she was very much inclined to whitewash her past: she never really finished a degree at the Sorbonne. I wish I’d looked at the Embassy closely: it must have been a secret thrill for Pamela to take charge of a former Rothschild residence, a balm to the wound she endured when Elie de Rothschild refused to marry her so many years before.
    Once, when working in Paris as an Australian diplomat, my friend Ellen turned up at the American Embassy for a Christmas party. As she came through the security entrance, she saw the guards vetting a huge box filled with assorted perfumes and champagne: a Christmas tribute to Ambassador Harriman from President Mitterrand. At the end of her life, finally, it was Pamela’s turn to be courted and wooed.
    The other house I walked straight past was 39 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, the former Hôtel de Charost, now the British Embassy. This house belonged to Napoleon’s favorite sister, Pauline, who bought it in 1803. Metternich, later Austrian Chancellor, said of Pauline that she was
as pretty as it is possible to be. She was in love with herself, and her only occupation was pleasure
. For Pauline, pleasure consisted in her worshipping her own image. She once commissioned a life-size nude sculpture of herself in white marble: her mortified husband immediately hustled Canova’s masterpiece out of France to a basement in Italy. Pauline’s narcissism had a familial flavor; she adored her brother Napoleon, whose glories added shine to her beauty. When the tide turned against Napoleon, Pauline’s vanity became a virtue. She selflessly accompanied Napoleon on his first exile to Elba; she sold her jewels andhouses to support him after his downfall; and she was still trying to improve living conditions for him when he died on St Helena. All her life, her
only occupation was pleasure
, and yet, at the last, she took pleasure in actions that were entirely admirable.
    As I sit in the teashop with the old ladies, I think about La Pompadour and Pamela Harriman and Pauline Bonaparte. And I ponder on pleasure and the price we pay to give it – or to get it. Nancy Mitford saw pleasure as a kind of moral good. In her letters, thousands of them, she never dwelled on her times of loneliness or ill-health: in her view, such self-indulgence would only diminish the pleasure of the receiver. A woman’s allure, and her effort to retain that appeal, was also part of her necessary social contribution. Nancy Mitford appreciated La Pompadour for the pleasure she gave to others and for the incomparable legacy of beauty she left behind.
    Nancy Mitford was close friends with successors to Pauline Bonaparte in the Hôtel de Charost, British Ambassador Duff Cooper and his wife, Diana Cooper. Aristocratic and eccentric, the couple created a golden post–World War Two era. Their parties were legendary: they imported a thousand red roses for one
fête
alone. Cecil Beaton, Jean Cocteau and Noel Coward were regular guests – as well, of course, as Nancy Mitford. Diana once organized a ‘Charles Ritchie Week’ for a junior Canadian Embassy official who had complained that nobody