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By Root 2475 0

depicted in Tender is the Night. That winter season, the Rogers’s Villa Lou Vieu near Cannes became a refuge for Mrs Wallis Warfield Simpson. Wallis was ‘that woman’, the twice-wed American divorcée for whom England’s King Edward VIII abdicated his throne in December 1936. She and Katherine Rogers, herself divorced before she married Herman, had been friends since 1916. At Villa Lou Vieu, while reporters camped at the front gate, Wallis awaited her final decree of divorce from British shipping heir Ernest Simpson. Protocol imposed by Buckingham Palace did not permit Mrs Simpson and the former monarch, now the Duke of Windsor, to meet while she was Simpson’s lawful wife. The duke was waiting in Austria at the Schloss Enzesfeld of Baron Eugene de Rothschild and his American wife, the former Kitty Spottswood.

In the letter that Katherine Rogers sent to Fern Bedaux in early 1937, she asked Fern to invite Wallis to the Château de Candé. Its 1,200 walled hectares were more secluded and discreet than her beach villa near Cannes. Fern and Charles agreed, and Wallis moved with the Rogers to Candé in early March. Bedaux told a journalist, ‘My wife and I believe that when two people sacrifice so much for love they are entitled to the admiration and the utmost consideration of those who still believe in this ideal.’ He explained to another that, although he did not know Wallis Simpson, ‘my wife and I are still in love with love’.

He was probably telling the truth. Fern and Charles displayed profound affection for each other twenty years into their marriage. His many affairs had not reduced Fern’s ardour for him, and he told friends that life without her was unimaginable. She had learned tennis, golf and shooting to an expert level to please him. Every year, his birthday was ‘the most precious day of the year’ to her. To outsiders, their marriage was inexplicable. One of Fern’s friends told Janet Flanner, ‘She was so much finer than he, and so perfectly trained, that when you saw the Bedauxs together, it was like watching a thoroughbred paraded on a lead by her squat groom.’ Charles’s brother Gaston wrote that Fern surrounded Charles with ‘unceasing affection’ and ‘knew how to help him with her judgement and her fine psychology’.

The Duke of Windsor joined Charles and Fern at Candé in April, when Mrs Simpson’s divorce decree absolute was granted. With the permission of the British government, but with no members of the royal family present, Edward and Wallis were married at the Château de Candé on 3 June 1937. Among the sixteen witnesses to the civil and religious ceremonies, along with Herman and Katherine Rogers and Winston Churchill’s son Randolph, were Charles and Fern Bedaux. Bedaux’s wedding present was an Annie Hoefken-Hempel statuette entitled L’Amour.

In the meantime, Bedaux and the duke developed a friendship, as Bedaux saw it, between ‘the ex-sandhog and the ex-king’. They played golf together at Candé during the day and had long talks at night. They shared an interest, from however lofty a distance, in the lives of working people. Bedaux made his living studying work practices, and the duke had earned a reputation in Britain as the Prince of Wales with sympathy for Welsh coal miners. Friedrich von Ledebur, who met the Windsors at Candé, believed that the duke was the first to kindle Bedaux’s interest in politics. Until then, his only concerns had been business and sport. The duke desired to see how the working classes lived in Hitler’s new Germany. Could Bedaux, with his industrial and political contacts in Berlin, arrange a tour? Bedaux suggested that the duke expand his inspection to include the United States and other parts of Europe. He approached Robert Murphy at the American Embassy in Paris and Dr Robert Ley in Germany on the duke’s behalf. Subsequently, the duke met Fritz Wiedemann, one of Hitler’s three adjutants, in Bedaux’s permanent suite at the Paris Ritz to settle details of the German visit.

The semi-royal tour of Germany began in Berlin on 11 October 1937 and lasted twelve days. Although the duke visited