Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [164]
General Leclerc’s funeral service was planned for 8 December in Notre-Dame. The event had taken on strong political overtones in the circumstances. ‘All Leclerc’s boys are pouring into town,’ Nancy Mitford wrote to her sister. ‘It is like mobilization – there will be 2,000 of them in Notre-Dame.’
President Auriol and most of the diplomatic corps attended. ‘The ceremony was fine and impressive,’ wrote Duff Cooper in his diary, ‘but the twelve other unhappy coffins detracted from the grandeur of the central figure without gaining any themselves. One regretted their presence yet felt doubly sorry for themon that account. A man’s funeral is his last appearance and he ought to have the stage to himself.’ The British ambassador then led the diplomatic corps on foot from Notre-Dame to the Invalides through two heavy showers. Leclerc’s loss would be felt most in the direction of French policy in Indo-China. He was one of the few realists left in a senior position. His strong advice that the French should negotiate independence with Ho Chi Minh had embittered relations with his superior, Admiral d’Argenlieu. Politicians in Paris, even in the Socialist Party, felt obliged to support d’Argenlieu. They had not grasped how much the world had changed.
The last strike collapsed on the morning of 10 December. The headline in L’Humanité – ‘This morning, 1,500,000 combatants returned to work as a group’ – represented a desperate attempt to paint defeat as victory of a sort. Huge mounds of refuse still lay in the streets of Paris.
That night Duff and Diana Cooper gave their farewell ball at the British Embassy, and it turned out to be the ‘gala occasion it could not have been the week before’. Nancy Mitford wrote to her mother that the embassy had received 600 acceptances, ‘in spite of the fact that no letters have been delivered for a week’.
Churchill flew over from London on the morning of the party. He arrived to a beautiful day. News of his presence caused huge crowds to gather outside the embassy in the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, chanting their demands for his appearance. He went out to address them in his inimitable version of the French language and received an exuberant ovation – ‘a thing he always enjoys’, his host noted with amused affection.
The party began at half past ten. Virtually all the corps diplomatique came. The ‘conspicuous exceptions’ were the Russian, Polish and Yugoslav ambassadors. Churchill, beaming, in white tie and full decorations, entered the salon where his parents, Lord Randolph Churchill and Jenny Jerome, had been married. On his arm was the beautiful Odette Pol Roger in a spectacular red satin dress.
Guests wandered in admiration through the high-ceilinged and gilded reception rooms. Like Churchill, all the men were in white tie with full decorations, the ribbons and sashes vivid against the black tail coats and starched white waistcoats. Diana Cooper had invited several designer friends – Dior, Balmain, Rochas and Molyneux – and they looked at their own and other creations with a critical eye.
Susan Mary Patten wore a dress by Schiaparelli – ‘heavy ivory grosgrain, with an enormous bustle, very Lady Windermere’s Fan’. Christian Dior bowed to her and said, ‘That is one of the greatest dresses I have ever seen, and I wish it were mine.’
The Gaullists there that night, such as Gaston Palewski and Pierre de Bénouville, were puffed up by John Foster Dulles’s statement the day before that General de Gaulle was ‘the coming