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Gothic buildings surrounded by a famous garden, whose lawns stretched to a lake bordered by trees, a ravishing backdrop to the setting sun’. For Gaston,many of Nancy Mitford’s friends who emerged from the university largely unencumbered by academic laurels, scholarly life was not the point. He began a thesis on Thackeray, but cheerfully admitted not having taken it very seriously. Nor did he show an interest in sport or in the then-influential politicking of the Union Society. What he did acquire was style, the ineffable Oxford manner that even today has the capacity to dominate and infuriate in equal measure. Maurice Druon remarked of the differences between the French and the English methods of instruction:
    The teaching in the French supérieurs produces an elite … inclined to bear constant witness to the profundity of their knowledge or the weight of their responsibilities, or at least to allow this to be guessed. The ancient English universities produce an elite of politicians, scholars and scientists who affect not to take what they do very seriously … one asks oneself when they work, they who bring to their labour the modesty in which others wrap their leisure. 7
    It took a war, Druon adds, to show the French that the English were quite capable of earnestness. There is an excellent word in Italian for this overlaying of effort with seeming diffidence: sprezzatura , the art of doing that which is difficult while appearing to do nothing at all, and it suited Gaston’s temperament perfectly. Although this brilliant diffidence was to prove extremely effective in his understanding of English methods of conducting politics, it nevertheless provoked dislike and mistrust among his French (and later American) colleagues, who were bewildered by the ‘false lightness of his comportment’. No one could be more French than Gaston, as was illustrated by his rather mournful recollection of the lack of girls at Oxford (‘some misogynist dons arranged for them to read the most indecent authors of the Restoration, which caused them to flee’), but the ability to slip on the well-cut mantle of the English gentleman when required gave him great pleasure. Oxford also providedhim with a network of acquaintances which formed another step on the staircase of ambition which climbed away from the Faubourg-Poissonière.
    The conversation of dons and the mysterious rites of High Table gave a richer polish to Gaston’s already impressive intellect, while the company of men like Ivor Spencer-Churchill, cousin to the future prime minister, who took him to visit the family house at Blenheim, introduced him as a guest to the world he was so determined to inhabit. No more paying for a ticket and wriggling under a table to get a good view: at Blenheim Gaston could stroll beneath the Thornhill ceilings or the oaks in Capability Brown’s park as an invited equal. Gaston’s memories of Blenheim make their way into The Blessing , where CharlesEdouard de Valhubert installs a bust of the Duke of Marlborough in Grace’s bedroom and goes about humming, ‘Marlbrou s’en va-t-en guerre.’ (One of Gaston’s most distinctive traits, remembered by everyone who knew him, was his habit of inserting snatches of song into his speech. The Duchess of Devonshire, Nancy’s sister Deborah, was astonished that he even knew English nursery rhymes, and one critic of Nancy’s novels found it a ridiculous exaggeration. It was, however, quite true.) In November 1944, when he organized a victory luncheon for Churchill in Paris, Gaston dug out a bust of the prime minister’s ancestor, the scourge of Louis XIV, to display at the table. ‘It’s too much, ’ remarked Churchill, but he was rather touched.
    A good deal has been made of Nancy Mitford’s enduring romance with France, but Gaston had a similar tendresse for many aspects of Englishness. Picturing him wandering at Blenheim, it is irresistible not to see him as an (admittedly spottier) Charles Ryder,