Violet flirted awesomely, particularly with young gay men. James Pope-Hennessy (murdered in 1974), an erstwhile lover of Harold’s, said she had Paris manners and resembled Madame de Staël. At a dinner party in London in June 1950 she looked at him across the table ‘in a romantic manner’ and said ‘You look too young to be dining downstairs; you should be upstairs having your bread and milk.’
She described the Lascaux caves, begged him to go there with her in August which he ‘wouldn’t think of’, and said Vita was so impressed by the comfort of St Loup she was thinking of making Sissinghurst habitable.
He saw her again three days later at a party at Hertford House to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Wallace Collection. The King and Queen were there, Massigli the French Ambassador, and Vita ‘looking very blue and ill’ wearing a borrowed black dress and shawl. Afterwards Harold wrote to Vita that she looked splendid ‘with her dingle dangles’ and he wished she would go oftener to parties and ‘not have to scrounge round for dresses’. But it was Rollo, retreat and Sissinghurst that suited her, she did not want parties, dresses, social occasions.
Parties, dressses, social occasions filled Violet’s days and nights. Society of a parodic kind became her way of life. She was an entertainer who played bitter games, their meaning only guessed at by a few. Tony Gandarillas, the Chilean Ambassador, small, witty and addicted to opium, told James Pope-Hennessy that Violet was now in love with him. Nancy Mitford said she claimed ‘she has a lover in the bullfighting trade. Carmen Trefusis.’
Violet’s writing career came to an end. Vita accused her of scribbling for an hour or so in bed in the mornings between shouting at Alice and effecting the day. A postwar novel Pirates at Play was a farce about the English in Florence. A memoir, Don’t Look Round, published in 1952 she called a collage. Dedicated to her mother it was an exercise in concealment, a witty façade, an exemplar of Edwardian discretion, revealing nothing but loyalty, wit and charm. From it, no one would know who Violet was, whether she was happy or unhappy, cared a lot or not at all. Nancy Mitford suggested the title Here Lies Madame Trefusis. There were no echoes of passion or pain, no statements of commitment, no revelations of feeling. Her only confession was of chronic insomnia.
Managing her homes took her time. She would drive between St Loup and Florence her big Mercedes filled with servants, packages, provisions. At the Ombrellino she employed a lugubrious butler called Terzilio, Giovanni a cordon-bleu chef, a clutch of other servants, a series of chauffeurs whom she sacked or who left because she was always an hour late or muddled about when she wanted to be where. She considered herself a gourmet. If she thought a meal good Giovanni was summoned and congratulated, if not he was berated for all to hear.
In the late 1950s she acquired the wing of a mansion in the rue du Cherche Midi which had once belonged to the Duc de Saint-Simon. She decorated it with marble busts on gilt consoles, Louis XV chairs, Aubusson rugs, eighteenth-century portraits, trompe-l’oeil paintings. She called herself aptly ‘a déclassée woman who lives only in classé houses’. She flaunted the trappings that when young she had professed to despise.
Asked to do an entry for Figaro Littéraire she wrote of her vast salon in the rue du Cherche Midi, her marvellous cuisine, her beautiful jewels. Against her name in the telephone directory was inserted ‘femme de lettres’. She began to say she was thirtieth in succession to the throne.
In 1952 the writer Susan Mary Alsop and her mother sometimes lunched at the Ombrellino. They thought it underfurnished, sprawling and Violet quirky and a bit of a fraud. There was a sense of ‘hanger-on beaux from Paris’ and servants using her for her money. Violet went on about being Edward VII’s daughter, she wore full skirts and was a messy eater:
When she rose majestically at the end of a meal a cascade of crumbs and odd bits of food would fall to the floor. I was revolted. We were rather ashamed of going there and didn’t very often. Reading Portrait of a Marriage I feel an obtuse fool; there must have been poetry and fascination there.
Guests at the Ombrellino and St Loup came and went. Violet was inordinately insistent to those who refused an invitation. She wheedled, cajoled and even cried. Rejections were more than forcefully made for she took little notice of them. Nancy Mitford said Violet tortured her by phoning her all the time when she was trying to work. ‘As she can write books without working she doesn’t understand the necessity for those less gifted of doing so.’ She had to leave the telephone on ‘because of various matters to do with the lease – nobody else telephones and I’ve begged her not to, she doesn’t pay the least attention.’
Betty Richards had some abdominal operation in July 1951 and dreaded Violet coming to stay:
much as I love you & long to see you darling you would only be doing me a very great disservice, retarding a convalescence it will take me all my physical strength and strength of will to cope with were you to come over here now. Please darling.
Violet became unaware of the figure she cut. Vita, visiting the Ombrellino in September 1952, could not understand why servants stayed. Violet did not give them instructions then cursed them for not having done what they did not know she wanted. She never told them how many there were for lunch or dinner, failed to order the car then was angry when it was not there, or ordered it for eleven and then was not ready until twelve. Alice, her slave, took every opportunity to complain to Vita about Violet without her overhearing. She had a ‘second-in-command’ called Rita and whenever cries of
