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  On 2 May 1914 Poppy was born in Meidling, taking her pecking-order place after Max and Bubbles as Mitzi and Eugène’s third child. For no known reason she was nicknamed Pimoulouche by her parents, and that was how she signed her letters to them. Eugène also called her Dimples, and notes in his hand are full of the affectionate phrases of a loving father. “A difficult child,” in the words of Mitzi’s diary, Poppy used to slip into her father’s bed in need of reassurance. She could sit on her own bed and cry uncontrollably. Her younger sister Liliane left a pen-portrait of her as she was growing up:

  Bizarre and very sensitive character, philosophical by nature evidently but unhappily she sometimes forgets it, she is small, very small but less small than she thinks, hair lies flat, nose and mouth and eyes are round, very pretty hands, lazy and contrary to the marmot she wakes up in winter at the sight of snow, and on reading bad sentimental verses and interminable dissertations on vague subjects, looking in the mirror she gives herself up to martyrdom, dark matters – musical, a bit of a poet and quite a good sort, that’s my sister Thérèse.

  The teenage Poppy went to school in Paris at the Cours Hattemer. She used to complain afterwards that she had received no education in what was then an exclusive day-school. Julien Weil, the Grand Rabbi of France, gave religious instruction to the three sisters. To the end of her life Bubbles could recall snatches of Hebrew prayers. Unusually for girls at that period, Poppy and her younger sister Liliane did their bat mitzvah, the ceremony whereby they became full members of the Jewish faith. This took place in the synagogue on the Rue Victoire in Paris. With the two of them in the ceremony were Aline de Gunzbourg from downstairs in the Avenue d’Iéna and Lulu Esmond, friends in a little clique seeing each other virtually every day. For this occasion, the four all wore white dresses evidently in imitation of Catholics at a first communion.

  After the First World War, Eugène began the search for a country house. One of his friends, the Marquis Boni de Castellane, a dandy surviving from the Belle Époque, told him that Royaumont was for sale. All her life Mitzi resented that Castellane had insisted on being paid a commission for introducing buyer and seller. Eugène merely emended the motto of the Order of the Garter to Boni soit qui mal y pense. Purchased and then restored in minute detail according to the original drawings, the château was finally a tribute to the fastidiousness and taste on which Eugène’s social standing rested. A thin line divides snobbery from the wish to be correct. He criticized one of the most prominent soldiers in the country for signing himself Ph. Pétain on the grounds that the surname is sufficient for a marshal of France.

  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 a Catholic. German race laws held that Jews converted to Christianity still counted as Jews, and in occupied Paris she had to wear the yellow star that singled them out. Her devoted maid, Clothilde Kannengiesser, a born Catholic and a native of Alsace, sewed the yellow star on her own clothes, and never hesitated to accompany Tante Lizzie in the streets and shops. Alsatians had been obliged to have German citizenship, and Clothilde’s courage might well have gotten her shot for treason.

  Eugène attended the Lycée Janson, reputedly one of the best schools in Paris. In March 1888, when he was a teenager, his report gave a sketch of his character that others, among them Mitzi and his children, were to substantiate in the future. “He will be an excellent pupil the day when he is able to check his frivolity and the arrogance that prevents him achieving the results to be expected of him.” The tone of letters to his parents is light, though what is remembered of his humour still offers clues to a remote and idiosyncratic personality. Speaking of a couple, he described the husband as Sunday afternoon in London and the wife as Monday morning in Paris. “Sich vorstellen und wieder weg,” he joked at the sight of any ill-favoured couple whose sexual relations might seem improbable – just to imagine them at it is enough to turn you away, in an unidiomatic translation. A Jew who has become a Catholic priest is “a deserter in uniform.” Asked by Mitzi how to spell some word he would keep a serious face and spout a row of impossible consonants. To have daughters, he lamented, was like putting sugar on strawberries that someone else would eat. A dog called Toby, he said, was an “or not,” a pun from Hamlet that might well escape a French owner. Long after his death, his daughter Bubbles summed up: “Word play constituted his sole defense against those who made claims on him. The laughter of others kept his melancholy at bay.”

  In photographs he appears either as a good-looking and well-groomed man about town or as a satisfied and conventional paterfamilias with his wife and children grouped around him. The first time Mitzi was pregnant, however, he told his mother that this was “unberufen,” uncalled for. Social life evidently preoccupied him. Writing from St Moritz to his mother, he gives a typical list of the international set he was pleased to be with, café society in today’s vocabulary: “the Lamberts, Bijou Heine, the Casati, little Madame Deschamps with the Ritters, Madame d’Hautpoul, Pierre de Segonzac, Constantinovitch, Marino Vagliano, the Zoghebs, Mrs. Tiffany, Napoléon Murat,” and more besides. Max remembered that in St. Moritz in about 1912 his father had overheard four Frenchmen at the next table in the hotel accusing Jews of vulgar manners and nouveau-riche furnishings in their houses. As someone who considered that connoisseurship and good taste were essential aspects of his personality, he moved to their table and tackled them then and there.

  In France the names of the company he kept are Löwenthal, Helbronner, Weisweiller, Stern, David-Weill, members of families whose social success led them to hope they were assimilated though they could not be sure of it. In one letter to his mother he calls an angry cousin “Meschuggah” (as he spells the Yiddish word for idiotic, adding a self-conscious exclamation mark), while in another written from a boat on the Nile he explains arrangements for their journey in “Mitzraîm,” a complex pun based on Mitzi’s name and the Hebrew word for Egypt. In his twenties at the time of the Dreyfus affair, he found himself cut by the upper classes among whom he so badly wanted a place. Exceptionally, the Marquis de Jaucourt crossed the Place Vendôme to shake Eugène’s hand in full view of other people. Right up to the present the members of the family have kept alive the memory of this public gesture – his daughter Lorette was yet another guest on the terrace at Royaumont when Poppy married. “Je ne nous aime pas” – I don’t like us – Eugène used to say of his French compatriots.

  Once when I must have been in my twenties, Mitzi took me to lunch in Paris at Maxim’s. They made a fuss of her there. She’d invited someone who had known Marcel Proust, and they could exchange memories. In a sort of glory by association, for instance, the family had their teeth seen to by Docteur Darcissac, Proust’s dentist whose technique by then was half a century out of date. (His even older colleague once drilled my tongue by accident, and then said, “Mais mon petit, tu renifles comme un petit cochon de Yorkshire” – you are sniveling like a Yorkshire piglet.) Connection to Proust came through Mitzi’s mother-in-law Thérèse who had a salon where he was a regular and watchful visitor. In the library at Royaumont was a copy of his first published work, the translation in 1904 of Ruskin’s The Bible of Amiens. The flyleaf carries a dedication in his slightly disjointed hand to “Madame Leon Fould. Respectueux hommage d’un ami,” followed by his signature.

  Mitzi was in touch with Professor Philip Kolb of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the outstanding Proust scholar of the day. His edition in twenty volumes of Proust’s letters has a good many references to one or another Fould. In the fifth volume of this series Kolb publishes a remarkable letter to Eugène that he dates, no doubt correctly, to 19 March 1905. Eugène was then twenty-nine and Proust had come to a dinner celebrating his engagement to Mitzi. He praises “the ravishing beauty of Mademoiselle Springer” and her air of intelligence although he had not had the chance to speak to her. Insisting that he is writing as
Eugène’s friend, he appears ostensibly to be congratulating him. It is a solemn moment for Eugène, his life and his friends are about to change, and Proust concludes with resonance: “The task of your wife will be very delicate and very lofty and all your friends place the greatest hope in her that she will be able to fulfill it.” Unexpectedly he lets drop that Eugène is a “humouriste,” that is someone caught up in his own comic view of things. Under the circumlocution and the tact is the unmistakable warning that a homosexual could not expect to have a successful marriage. Had Eugène read it that way and taken umbrage, the skillfully drafted ambiguity of this letter would have allowed Proust to answer that he had no idea what Eugène was talking about. The fictional Swann is modelled on several of Proust’s friends and acquaintances, and Eugène is one of them.

  In the First World War, Eugène made use of his English and the Russian picked up from his mother to become an interpreter. Another interpreter, Robert de Rothschild, his counterpart as a Jewish baron, was senior to him in rank, and two versions exist of the long-lasting quarrel that affected both their families. According to Mitzi, Robert de Rothschild heard Eugène saying that his father-in-law in the enemy city of Vienna believed himself to be ruined. “You can at last say that you made a love match,” Robert de Rothschild is supposed to have interjected, rubbing in the fact that Mitzi’s fortune was the basis of Eugène’s lifestyle. But Robert’s son Elie used to suggest that the bitterness between the two men was some issue of homosexuality.