John Julius Norwich - France: A History

Contents

John Julius Norwich was born in 1929. After National Service, he took a degree in French and Russian at New College, Oxford. In 1952 he joined the Foreign Service, serving at the embassies in Belgrade and Beirut and with the British Delegation to the Disarmament Conference at Geneva.

Among his many publications are histories of Norman Sicily, the Republic of Venice, the Byzantine Empire, the papacy and the Mediterranean. Most recently he has written the story of the four very different men who created our modern world: Henry VIII, Francis I of France, Charles V of Spain and Suleiman the Magnificent. There are also books on travel, architecture and music. In addition he has made some thirty historical documentaries for BBC Television.

Lord Norwich is former chairman of the Venice in Peril Fund, co-chairman of the World Monuments Fund and a former member of the Executive Committee of the National Trust. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Geographical Society and the Society of Antiquaries, and a Commendatore of the Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana. He was made a CVO in 1993.

Mount Athos (with Reresby Sitwell, 1966)

The Normans in the South (1967)

Sahara (1968)

The Kingdom in the Sun (1970)

A History of Venice: The Rise to Empire (1977)

A History of Venice: The Greatness and the Fall (1981)

Fifty Years of Glyndebourne (1985)

A Taste for Travel (1985)

The Architecture of Southern England (1985)

A History of Byzantium: The Early Centuries (1988)

Venice: A Travellers Companion (1990)

A History of Byzantium: The Apogee (1991)

A History of Byzantium: The Decline and Fall (1995)

A Short History of Byzantium (1997)

The Twelve Days of Christmas (1998)

Shakespeares Kings (1999)

Paradise of Cities: Venice in the Nineteenth Century (2003)

The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean (2006)

Trying to Please (2008)

The Popes: A History (2011)

A History of England in 100 Places (2011)

Sicily: A Short History (2015)

Four Princes (2016)

Edited by John Julius Norwich

Great Architecture of the World (1975)

The Italian World (1983)

Britains Heritage (1983)

The New Shell Guides to Great Britain (198790)

The Oxford Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Art (1990)

The Treasures of Britain (2002)

The Duff Cooper Diaries (2005)

The Great Cities in History (2009)

Darling Monster (2013)

Cities that Shaped the Ancient World (2014)

An English Christmas (2017)

www.johnmurray.co.uk

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by John Murray (Publishers)

An Hachette UK company

Copyright John Julius Norwich 2018

The right of John Julius Norwich to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Maps drawn by Rosie Collins

Ballade of Unsuccessful Men by Hilaire Belloc reprinted by permission of Peters Fraser & Dunlop (www.petersfraserdunlop.com) on behalf of the Estate of Hilaire Belloc.

All rights reserved.
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A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-47366-382-4

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To the memory of my mother

who first took me to France

and taught me to love it as she did.

TOUTE MA VIE , je me suis fait une certaine ide de la France. looked after me while my mother was doing the cure and talked French to me from morning till night.

There were two more pre-war trips, one with both my parents for a week in Paris during which we did all the usual things. We took a bateau mouche down the Seine, went to the Louvre which bored me stiff and to the sewers which I found fascinating, climbed on to the roof of the Arc de Triomphe, where you get a far better view of Paris than you do from the Eiffel Tower, which is like looking at it from an aeroplane. Of course we did the Eiffel Tower as well, not only going up to the top but having lunch in its extremely smart restaurant, which my father claimed was his favourite in Paris because it was the only place you couldnt see it from. I remember being astonished at the number of restaurants all over the city, at many of which people were eating outside; in pre-war London there were comparatively few, and tables on the pavement were almost unheard-of. My other memory is that almost every teenage boy wore a beret and plus fours, hundreds of them meeting regularly at a huge market for collectors of postage stamps at the Rond-Point des Champs-Elyses. Eight years later, when my father became ambassador, we led a very different sort of life. I was still at school, but now holidays were always spent in France including Christmas 1944, when the war was still on and in a palace. The Htel de Charost (to give it its proper name) on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honor is, I believe, the most beautiful embassy of any country in the world. Previously owned by Napoleons sister Pauline Borghese, it was bought by the Duke of Wellington when he was briefly ambassador after Waterloo and has been the British Embassy for the past two hundred years. The weather that winter was bitterly cold, and it was one of the few warm places; it could also provide limitless quantities of whisky and gin, which had been non-existent in France since the war began, it was full every night with the Parisian beau monde from Jean Cocteau down. Soon it became a sort of institution, known as the Salon Vert . The queen of it was the poetess and my fathers mistress Louise de Vilmorin, who would stay in the embassy sometimes for weeks at a time. (My mother, who had no conception of jealousy, loved her almost as much as my father did, which was no surprise: she was one of the most fascinating women I have ever known. We became great friends, and she taught me lots of lovely old French songs, which I would sing to the guitar after dinner.) There were very few politicians, but writers, painters and actors in plenty. I remember the stage designer Christian Brard, always known as Bb, another regular attender. One evening he brought his little pug, which instantly deposited a small dry turd on the carpet. Without hesitation he picked it up and put it in his pocket; my mother said afterwards that it was the best manners she had ever seen. But the company was by no means only French; there were visiting English, and Americans, and anyone whom my parents knew and happened to be passing through.