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Love and Losing

I for this and this for me.

DAPHNE DU MAURIER, Growing Pains

DAPHNE HAD NEVER before been away from home and everyone expected her to be homesick – after all, Angela’s time in Paris had been spoiled by a heart-clutching nostalgie. But Daphne suffered not one twinge. Why would she? She already adored Paris, not for its shopping and its shows, but for its possibilities, the ancient alleyways, the hidden squares, the imaginative connection with her ancestors, and the dark stories embedded in its stones. Daphne had found life at home limiting, her parents’ suspicions claustrophobic, and she had never been happy with the relentless socialising expected of her in London. She had grown up with a sense of her own exceptionalism, something her father’s attention had encouraged, and always felt separate and alien, and quite unlike other people.

Desperate to escape the envelope of make-believe and good manners that had maintained her in a suspended state of childhood, Daphne could not have chosen a better springboard for her flight. Paris between the wars was the most exciting city in the world, a City of Light that cast her home town distinctly in its shade. Intellectuals and artists were attracted to its vibrant energy, where the revolutionary movements of Cubism, Surrealism and Dadaism evolved from the studios of painters like Picasso, Matisse, Giacometti and Chagall. American jazz was the thrilling accompaniment to the modernist experimentations that energised intellectual debate and transformations in design. Excitement spilled from the cafés and bars of the Left Bank – a favourite haunt of Daphne’s all her life. Her pulse could not have failed to quicken to its beat.

Daphne’s only concern was that she had to go to school and her fellow pupils would be a dull lot, as she wrote to Tod, adding revealingly, ‘I know so few girls that I will probably think them all fools at first.’¹ She was accompanied by Doodie Millar, the daughter of another Hampstead family. Doodie, a lively, good-looking girl she had known from childhood, had already been to boarding school and so was sanguine about the whole experience. The house at Camposena was cold and far less comfortable than Cannon Hall but was situated in fine parkland close to the small town of Meudon, and a short train trip from Paris itself, which more than made up for its lack of luxury. The bedroom she and Doodie shared was barely furnished and bitter even in October, and Daphne thought the girls looked as dull and boring as she had expected. However, she liked the mistresses, and one in particular. She wrote to Tod, her faithful confidante, ‘the head kind of mistress, Mlle Yvon, is obviously “Venice” [her code for lesbian], many of the girls, & one mistress, are mad about her. She has a sort of fatal attraction about her, I feel I shall fall for her before too long!!’²

During her flirtatious skirmishes with Cousin Geoffrey, Daphne had learnt of her singular power to attract: having been the sister who had always drawn the most attention, she was not used to having to compete with others for favour. She was stung by the school’s assessment of her as being merely middling in her abilities, placing her in the B stream. The elite A girls, who clustered around Mlle Yvon, were privileged to choose where they sat at dinner and – the height of excitement – could follow her afterwards to a special room, the salon du fond. Here they played an uncomfortable game called ‘Truths’ that would reduce a few of them each night to tears. The atmosphere was febrile with girlish intrigues and emotion, encouraged by the green-eyed, soignée Fernande Yvon.

Daphne was determined that she would somehow penetrate this inner sanctum and claim her rightful place as favourite at its centre. Despite remaining in stream B and therefore outside the charmed circle, she showed her father’s chutzpah when one night she picked up her book (a French classic by Edmond de Goncourt whose académie had founded the most prestigious literary prize Prix Goncourt) and strolled nonchalantly into the lionesses’ den. The girls greeted this uninvited interloper with surprised hostility, but Mlle Yvon appeared to be amused by her presumption and motioned her to sit at her feet by the fire. ‘My triumph was complete,’ Daphne wrote, recalling her heroic boy-self, ‘even Eric Avon, bowing to the crowd from his balcony above Lord’s cricket ground, had never achieved such a victory.’³

But this kind of power was heady and dangerous and, as with Cousin Geoffrey, the thrill of a clandestine and forbidden connection exerted its own power to enslave. Fernande Yvon, in her thirties, unmarried and with limited prospects, inevitably enjoyed the influence that her position as directrice of an exclusive finishing school gave her, and the devotion of well-connected girls brought its own rewards both socially and emotionally. There was little doubt that the teacher set out to seduce her new pupil, but also that the pupil was ready to be seduced, or certainly desired the power that being favourite bestowed. Daphne wrote to Tod:

I’ve quite fallen for the woman I’ve told you about – Mlle Yvon … She’s absolutely kind of lured me on, and now I’m coiled in the net! She pops up to the bedroom at odd moments (Venice – what!!) and is generally divine. She’s most seductive when coming back from the Opera. I get on the back seat with her, & she puts her arm round me and makes me put my head on her shoulder. Then sort of presses me! Ugh! It all sounds too sordid and low, but I don’t know – it gives one a sort of extra-ordinary thrill!

Having her own feelings for Daphne, perhaps Tod found these letters rather hard to take. Daphne wrote extensively in her diary and letters of the romantic crush that became an obsessional affair, lasting almost two years, while their subsequent affectionate friendship lasted until Fernande’s death. For this girl, who had always felt herself unloved by her mother, her need for Mlle’s approval was ‘as insidious as a drug’.⁴ Her sensible friend Doodie tried to reassure her by saying everyone had crushes, and promptly decided to attach herself devotedly to a little red-headed teacher. Daphne thought she knew all there was to know about crushes, having seen enough of Angela’s fleeting and, to her mind, vaguely ridiculous passions, but this, she insisted, was different. She added a further paragraph in her letter to Tod, revealing how cool, detached and watchful she remained, even while in thrall to her first grand passion:

I hope I haven’t got ‘Venetian’ tendencies! Already some of the girls are jealous which makes life somewhat uncomfortable … Life is queer, I can’t make it out … It will be fun, when I get back from the hols, imitating everyone here and laughing at it all. Even when I’m feeling most ‘épris’ of Mlle Yvon, there is always something inside me laughing somewhere.⁵

Daphne’s idea of courtship was theatrical and gleaned from the way her father behaved towards women: exaggerated chivalry alternated with studied indifference. When, for instance, Mlle Yvon dropped a handkerchief, Daphne swooped on it and hid it away; later, in Paris, she bought a bottle of scent, sprinkled it on the linen and then in front of her rivals in the salon du fond