“They were the flowers,” she said to me years later, “but I was the tree.”

From Trying to Please by John Julius Norwich.  Page 107.  

But the brightest of all the stars that shone in the Embassy firmament was Louise de Vilmorin. The Vilmorins were—and, for all I know, still are—France’s leading seedsmen, their name well known to all those, farmers and gardeners alike, who cultivate the soil. Louise, when she first came into our lives, must have been around forty. She had had two husbands: with the first, an American rather surprisingly named Leigh Hunt, she had lived, equally surprisingly, in Las Vegas—in the early thirties an inconsequential desert village very unlike it is today. There had followed a passionate affair with the dashing young author/aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, after which she had married a Hungarian, Count Palffy, on whose vast estates she was living in September, 1939. Hungary soon came in on the German side; thus, for almost the entire duration of the war, she had remained in enemy territory. This did not at first improve her social standing when she returned to Paris after the Liberation; but to remain with your husband when the going got tough could not be considered a crime. In any case, not having been in France during the German occupation, she could hardly be accused of having collaborated.

I loved her from the start. I loved her gaiety, her superb sense of humor, and her ability to hold a dining table spellbound: she was the best and funniest raconteuse I have ever heard. But I also loved her for the immense trouble she took over me. Most of my parents’ smart friends were pleasant enough, but didn’t normally go out of their way—why should they?—to have long conversations with a sixteen-year-old boy. Louise on the other hand would talk to me for hours, grown-up to grown-up; sometimes, when my parents had some official engagement, she and I would have a tête-à-tête lunch together, when she would tell me about her life or ask me about mine. Afterwards she would teach me the wonderful old French songs of which she had an inexhaustible repertoire, and how to accompany myself on the guitar—a major step forward from the ukulele that I had strummed from the age of six. It seemed to me perfectly natural that she should have virtually moved into the Embassy, in which she made one of the top floor bedrooms for all practical purposes her own. I must have been one of the last people in my parents’ circle to realize that she and my father were carrying on a passionate affair.

Did my mother know? Of course she did. And did she worry? Not in the least. “So common to mind,” she used to say. She was well aware that she had a serially unfaithful husband; on the other hand, she was equally certain that she would always be the first in his affections. “They were the flowers,” she said to me years later, “but I was the tree.” She loved Louise as much as any of us—Paris gossips even hinted, quite unjustifiably, at a lesbian relationship—and was totally at ease in her company. Often they would drive off together, my mother at the wheel, to the Marché aux Puces (the Flea Market), or to some curious corner of Paris that Louise thought would amuse her. On at least one occasion the three of us went on a week’s motoring holiday together, leaving my father behind. When finally his ardor cooled and he found a new attachment, it was on my mother’s shoulder that Louise sobbed her heart out; and after he died and she had taken up first with Orson Welles and later with André Malraux, whenever she came to London it was with my mother that she would stay.