6 Dutch panels (value £800)
3 Chinese panels from the Dining Room (value £400)
4 Tempora panels from the Music Room (value £320)
6 Chinese silk panels from Mama’s bedroom (value £240)
These were to be sold in the villa along with all carpets and rugs. Sonia recommended two auctioneers in Florence – Galleria Ciardello and Cesare Falardelli.
Whichever we decide on should start his catalogue soon. Rosalind had another sweet little daughter, Annabel, on Feb 2nd & both are v. well.
Camilla is lovely.
Violet tried to raise capital to buy some of the furniture back. But all her inherited money was tied up in dividends and trust funds. ‘I’m afraid no one can make you understand the legal aspects involved here in your wish to break Mama’s Italian will so that you get capital,’ Sonia wrote to her:
As British subjects we must disclose to the Bank of England any monetary transactions made in foreign currencies and the amount involved. If we don’t we run the risk of going to jail!
It was all ghastly: a scene from one of Violet’s novels but without her brittle humour, a parable of the vanity of riches, the conflict between possessions and love, the inheritance of a vast stone mansion stripped of its treasures, warring sisters competing for their dead mother’s affection, squabbling over the spoils accrued from her illicit relationship with an indulgent king. Family, the root relationship of society, had degenerated into a wrangling over things and money between two women who had much more than enough.
As Violet saw it her sister was now destroying what bombs had spared and the German army left unplundered. It was never her mother’s intention that she should inherit an empty house. Violet perceived possessions as metaphors and did not care about their saleroom worth. Friends spoke of her bizarre generosity. How she would give away an emerald, an amber paperweight, a brooch, a tie, a souvenir ashtray. Her generosity perturbed or annoyed depending on what she gave. ‘One doesn’t need things,’ she had written to Vita. ‘What one needs is the sun, the person one loves, to be free.’
Denied freedom in love she aspired to be like her mother, who was defined by what she had, for whom a palace was home. She wanted to be her mother’s daughter for no other relationship endured, to live in her mother’s mansion, emulate her social parade. Without her presence and control she felt chaotic and adrift. Her childhood chant ‘de Madame Keppel je suis la fille’ became her way of life.
Sonia wanted to have what was hers, a compensatory justice for not having been loved enough. For her, too, possessions had been rivals. She stayed as rooted in the family drama as Violet, identified with her father who was rendered inconsequential by Mrs Keppel and the King, detested Violet for her childhood cruelty, her flamboyant life, for eclipsing her as a writer. Her own biography of her Keppel antecedents Three Brothers in Havana was not more readable than her father’s manuals on Renaissance art. Her memoir Edwardian Daughter gave an equivocal picture of her mother. Her one novel she called without irony, Sister of the Sun. Its heroine studies art in Paris, is ‘the symbol of emancipation for her sex and generation’. She marries a man she does not love because she is hopelessly in love with her brother-in-law, an artist. (In later years Sonia spoke admiringly of Denys Trefusis.) She has jewels, furs, cars, is ‘about as happy as a caged skylark’ and after the wedding ceremony she tells her husband, ‘I felt as if I were deputising for someone else.’
Violet thought Sonia’s response to their mother’s will was because she was jealous that she, Violet, was Edward VII’s daughter. In a letter to John Phillips six years before she died she wrote of Sonia:
We had a curious conversation: she simply cannot accept my being who I am, clearly a childhood inferiority complex, which has, in a way poisoned her life. I told her to believe what she liked, and whatever gave her most comfort. I can both understand and sympathize because if anyone was ever given a ‘traitment de faveur’ it was I.
At first Violet was forced to close many of the villa’s empty rooms. She could not afford to furnish both it and St Loup. She then slowly recreated the Ombrellino as a monument to her mother. She resorted to her own parodic style, filled the vast frescoed rooms with indifferent furniture and quantities of bad pictures, bought plagiarisms and fakes and accorded them romantic provenance. She chose baroque statues, ornate mirrors, said a painting of a doge was a Tintoretto, a painting of a Medici was a relative, a huge silver sturgeon was a gift to Peter the Great from the people of Holland, a Chinese lacquer writing desk was given by Queen Anne to the 2nd Earl of Albemarle. Objects had an attribution linking her in royal line. On a lavatory wall she hung group photographs of Edward VII at country house picnics.
She took to saying, ‘I am the daughter of Edward VII but don’t tell anybody.’ Guests were cautious and thought the fantasy ‘dangerously dotty’. To hedge her bets she drew up convoluted genealogical trees purporting to show how the Keppels descended from Giovanni de Medici via Henri VI of France and Charles I of England. She spent a good deal of time investigating whether, as a member of the Edmonstone family, she was entitled to wear the Royal Tartan:
Dear Mrs Trefusis
… Several members of the Edmonstone Family held High Offices which would have entitled these, and doubtless at such junctures, their children in the home, to wear the Royal Tartan, but I cannot see any principle for a doctrine that the Edmonstones, as a family, would have a right to wear the Royal Tartan, and I fancy it originated from certain of the Lairds of Duntreath having worn it ex officio for the above reason …
Descent from Robert II
