A Prince Among Stones Read Free Page B

trip. Instead, I spent some time there with the old parish priest, who had been a great friend and companion of my grandfather. He plied me with some exceptionally good white wine. I was only seventeen or eighteen, and when I had drunk half my bottle I refused any more, thinking that I had had enough, that I was not used to drinking and that a parish priest could not afford to be too liberal with such a good wine. The priest was furious with me. ‘Drink up. Your grandfather never drank less than four bottles of this wine every time he came round to see me. It’s shocking that you don’t drink properly. I suppose that is what England is like.’
    In Paris, my mother’s close friends included the Jouves. She had been introduced to Mme Jouve initially. Blanche Jouve was the first woman to gain a degree at the Sorbonne before the First War and had become a psychoanalyst. She had studied with Freud, and she was the French translator of his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality – my father would have loved to have met her. Some Paris friends of my mother’s had told her about this marvellous psychoanalyst who could help her with all her problems, not that I think she had any. It was the beginning of that fashionable use of time for people with nothing else to do than to go and talk about themselves for a couple of hours every week.
    The Jouves were both great intellectuals, and played a significant part in my life. Her husband, Pierre Jean Jouve, was a poet and a novelist, a very cerebral man. He introduced me to the paintings in the Louvre and how to view them, which consisted of looking carefully at the few that he wanted to see and not looking at anything else; he said that looking at other paintings was tiring and would perhaps diminish our capacity to understand what we had come to see.
    Blanche told me stories about her life. All of her male friends from the Sorbonne had been called up to fight in the Great War, and they all wrote her letters back from the front, since she was probably the only girl they knew well. One particular young man wrote a series of astonishing letters and she developed a strong attachment to him because of their content. She said that all these boys had matured very quickly because of the oncoming threat of death. None survived apart from the one to whom she was particularly attached. She was so happy that she was going to see him again after the Armistice in 1918, thinking that she would see the mature man who had written these astonishing letters. Her disappointment was great: she met neither the boy she remembered nor the man she had imagined from his writing. The trauma of his experience at the front had completely changed him out of all recognition; they now had nothing in common.
    Mme Jouve was a redoubtable character, made of stern stuff, and lived well into her nineties. In her late eighties, she was living in Paris during les événements of May 1968. My friend Jonathan Guinness (now Lord Moyne) still remembers that when I rang her up, worried that her flat was right in the heart of the streets where the riot police and the students were fighting, she was completely unfazed and in fact rather cheered up by all the protests. ‘Cela m’a beaucoup égayée,’ she reassured me. ‘What a game old bird she must have been,’ he observed.
    Through the Jouves we met the composer Darius Milhaud, who was one of the group known as Les Six (Francis Poulenc and Georges Auric were also members), and Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry, the Salvadoran wife of the aviator and writer Antoine, and the mistress of my half-uncle Werner. This social set also included Marie-Laure de Noailles, the doyenne of literary Paris, and Count Etienne de Beaumont, a great party-giver who took enormous pleasure in drawing up the list of people he was not going to invite. They would visit my mother in her flat in the rue Guynemer in the 6th arrondissement, alongside the Jardin