The Horror of Love Read Online Free

now directed to manufacturing protective coverings for planes, and the First World War made Maurice a wealthy man. Gaston was just too young to fight, but Jean-Paul enrolled at the military academy of St Cyr and spent two years at the front. Rose and Maurice were doubly blessed. Unlike so many, many parents, both of their sons survived. One writer has attributed Gaston’s ‘powerful taste for all forms of existence … gardens, books, paintings, pretty girls’ 4 to this sense of having escaped, of having been spared conscription at the last moment. This does not mean that he was unaffected by what a recent French critic has called ‘the unprecedented moral crisis’ 5 of the war.
    Young people of Nancy’s and Gaston’s era, the ‘Bright Young Things’ who danced their way through les Années Folles , were beset by both a feeling that they had been betrayed by the older generation and a powerful guilt that they had avoided sacrifice. ‘It is a queer world which the old men have left them … they will not be a happy generation, ’ observed Evelyn Waugh in an essay for his school magazine. Rejection of everything the ‘old men’ stood for, contempt for the nineteenth-century faith in the infinite march of progress, produced a sense of futility that many attempted to subdue in frenetic hedonism. Every generation of teenagers believes itself to be unique, but the phenomenon of the Bright Young People contained a self-consciousness of their status as a ‘lost generation’, who, as Linda complains to Fanny in The Pursuit of Love , were doomed to be sandwiched together between two world wars, obliterated, forgotten.
    Jean-Paul Palewski, who had served at the front, criticized his brother for what he saw as his ‘girlish’ 6 need for physical affection and reassurance. One of Nancy’s complaints about her own mother was that she was physically undemonstrative; RosePalewski, by contrast, was warm and gentle, holding her youngest son for hours on her knee, kissing and caressing him whenever he was unhappy. Jean-Paul saw Gaston as ‘soft’, unable, as a student, to choose a path and stick to it. One of the notable features of the Twenties generation was their infantilism, their urge to recreate a happy childhood with nursery parties and nursery pranks, as though the world beyond the schoolroom was too terrifying to cope with. Dressing up as babies, albeit with gin in their bottles, was obviously a way of rejecting the ‘adult’ values that had almost destroyed Europe, but in a culture which had sent teenage boys to die in their thousands in the trenches, why would any of them have wanted to grow up?
    Brighton at least appeared to have cured Gaston of his academic lassitude. In July 1921 he graduated from the prestigious Sorbonne university with a diploma in foreign languages and literature, specializing in English, then for the academic years 1921–3 attended the ‘grande école’ of political science (affectionately known as Sciences Po and effectively the French equivalent of Oxbridge). He studied in the ‘private finance’ department, founded by Emile Boutmy in 1872, which had a reputation for innovative courses with a strong international slant. Simultaneously, Gaston developed his early taste for paintings and objets d’art by attending classes at the Ecole du Louvre, acquiring a rigorous background in art history. He joked later that in many ways he had had a ‘young girl’s education’. Perhaps the most significant part of his intellectual formation, though, came from the months he spent at Worcester College, Oxford during the Trinity term of 1922.
    Gaston was accepted as a ‘research student’, which entitled him to wear the long scholar’s gown in which he is depicted, complete with mortarboard and co-ordinating spats and gloves, in a contemporary photograph. He ‘adored’ his time at Worcester, which he described in his memoirs as ‘one of the oldest colleges in the university, with its