The Ultimate Social Climber?

From the portrait painted by Madame Lebrun, Gabrielle de Polignac gazes out at the world with bambi-eyed complacency. She looks so comfortable in her disarmingly simple white linen gown, there is a little poesy of flowers in her hand and on her head; she wears a wide-rimmed straw hat, like any country housewife. The portrait gives the impression that Lebrun managed to capture the beautiful duchess unexpectedly, on a lazy summer afternoon in the gardens. It has the feel of a photograph, snapped suddenly, capturing and preserving a fleeting moment like a fly caught forever in amber. It all looks so effortless - the governing maxim of Gabrielle de Polignac's social existence.

But, of course, it wasn't effortless. Portrait painting was a lengthy and time-consuming business. Artist and subject must have spent hours negotiating one another's schedule - finding the right outfit, the right style, the right look, the right time of day, the right light and, for Lebrun, the right price. Gabrielle must have known that she was taking a risk by appearing in such a revealing, faux-peasant ensemble. She knew that the more rigidly pious and conservative members of the French court, not to mention the woman-loathing, sexuality-fearing neo-puritans of the French revolutionary emergent "Left", were going to criticise her for appearing in what they saw as such a fundamentally indecent gown. Duchesses were not supposed to be painted looking like shepherdesses - but Gabrielle was indifferent to the criticism of those outside her charmed palace-dwelling clique. Her one nod to conventional portrait etiquette was that she appeared wearing a wig - had she appeared showing her own gorgeous brunette tresses au naturelle, it's likely that her (many) opponents would have had a collective aneurysm. 

So there she stands - two hundred years later - fresh-faced, pretty, elegant, simple. Lebrun, apparently, for what it's worth, didn't like the portrait very much and felt that she had failed to capture the one quality everyone could agree upon about Gabrielle - her beauty.

In his account of the French Revolution, the historian Simon Schama describes this portrait of Marie-Antoinette's favourite friend in her diaphanous shift as the painting of a woman who was "by any standards, strikingly comely ... looking like some freshly harvested and luscious fruit." Perhaps Gabrielle's most unusual feature were her lilac-coloured eyes, but her alabaster skin, youthfulness, pearly straight white teeth and brunette hair also combined to make her a devastatingly beautiful young woman. It was the first thing anyone commented on when describing her and the only thing they all seemed to agree upon. The Duc de Lévis, who didn't particularly like her, said she looked like a Raphaelite Madonna; Marie-Antoinette's chief perfume maker, Fargeon, choked out that Gabrielle's ravishing good looks masked her hateful personality; the first adjective used to describe Gabrielle by another of Marie-Antoinette's ladies-in-waiting was "beautiful", another said "lovely". When Gabrielle lay dying, her own daughter was at pains to stress that her mother's face had remained "beautiful" up to the very moment her life ended. Beauty and the strange affect it has on other people flowed through Gabrielle de Polignac's life, like a silent stream that slowly shaped the course of her destiny. De  Lévis rather nastily remarked that her beauty had ruined her; she had come to rely solely on it and she therefore had no other personality, no other interests, beyond simply being beautiful. Many would have agreed. The fact that her own child seemed preoccupied with stressing their mother's beauty, even in extremis, suggests how frighteningly inextricable it had become to how people, even her close loved ones, perceived her. How she would have coped without her looks, we shall never know. She died before they had begun to fade.

Gabrielle de Polignac was born Gabrielle de Polastron, the daughter of an impoverished family of the French aristocracy. She was married-off, whilst still a teenager, to Jules de Polignac, the son and heir of an equally well-bred and equally down-on-their-luck noble clan. It was a conventionally satisfactory aristocratic marriage - Jules and Gabrielle did not make each other miserable, but nor is there any sign of great love between them. They had four children together - their daughter, Aglaé, and three boys, Armand, Jules and Camille-Henri. Gabrielle's pushy sister-in-law, Diane, was a courtier at Versailles and it was through her that the couple were invited to a new year's party at the palace in the first year of Louis XVI's reign. It was there that Gabrielle was introduced to the new Queen of France, Louis's twenty year-old Austrian wife, Marie-Antoinette. The two women struck up an instant rapport and Marie-Antoinette was fascinated by Gabrielle's unshakable self-confidence, her poise, her charisma and, almost certainly, her other-worldly beauty. Years later, it would be suggested that Marie-Antoinette had a lesbian or bisexual crush on Gabrielle; a version of their relationship that was recently revived in the new French movie Farewell, My Queen where Diane Kruger plays Marie-Antoinette and Virginie Ledoyen plays Gabrielle (below.)

There is nothing to suggest that Gabrielle's relationship with the Queen was a sexual one, or even romantic in the way that we would now understand it. It is by no means impossible, of course, for otherwise-heterosexual people to develop intense 'crushes' on a particularly interesting or attractive individual of the same sex; or for otherwise-homosexual people to do so vice-versa with the opposite sex. Marie-Antoinette's most recent biographer, Lady Antonia Fraser, concludes that, in the early years of their friendship, this is the best way to describe Marie-Antoinette's devotion to Gabrielle. She writes, "None [of their behaviour] corresponded to an active lesbian relationship, if the test of that is physical consummation. But it is plausible to believe that Marie Antoinette was in some romantic sense in love with [Gabrielle] de Polignac (or, in girlish language, had a crush on her), at least in the early years of their relationship." For those familiar with the world of Brideshead Revisited, there was a relationship between the Queen and the Duchess which was not so very different to the one between Charles and Sebastian in Evelyn Waugh's novel. Intense, passionate, almost certainly platonic in the physical sense, but romantic in the emotional sense. To extend the metaphor even further, in Brideshead Revisited Sebastian was the desperately lonely son of an absent marquess and Charles was a middle-class social climber dazzled by Sebastian's wealth and ineffable charm; Marie-Antoinette was the desperately lonely wife of a foreign king, crushed and depressed by the stultifying conservative court etiquette at Versailles, homesick for her sisters and prone to hysterical bouts of crying, shortness of breath and general unhappiness. Gabrielle de Polignac was the impoverished wife of an impoverished aristocrat, who was smart enough to know that friendship with the young queen could  lead directly to the golden fountain of royal favour - i.e. money.

From the moment they met, Gabrielle and Marie-Antoinette were inseparable. Gabrielle was cool, chic and glamorous; unlike everyone else at Versailles, she seemed indifferent to things like money, position, etiquette and power. In reality, there's absolutely no doubt in my mind that Gabrielle de Polignac was anything but indifferent to any of those things. Gabrielle rose quickly in the Queen's favour and in the King's, who, like his wife, found her to be a breath of proverbial fresh air. (There is no truth in the rather ridiculous theory recently put forward that the devoutly Catholic King Louis was sexually interested in Gabrielle himself; Louis XVI had a famously low sex drive and an extremely conservative Christian faith.) Gabrielle became an integral part of the royal couple's lives and, with her, came her family. Gabrielle managed to get them all jobs, pensions, generous salaries, good marriages and positions at court. She became the metaphorical centre of a rather fast, hard-partying clique of young courtiers, socialites and aristocrats who helped alleviate Marie-Antoinette's crushing sense of boredom. As Antonia Fraser writes, Gabrielle helped banish the ennui - "People enjoyed themselves in her company; her manner was gently pleasing and she had a delightful laugh." But, "For one seemingly lacking in avidity, she would amass an amazing amount of positions and rewards for herself, her large family [and] her connections".

One historian, Vincent Cronin, who wrote a dual biography of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, has admittedly sprung to Gabrielle's defence, arguing that it was only natural that the Queen should provide jobs and funds for a down-on-her-luck friend. Furthermore, given that Gabrielle was now expected to host various entertainments and parties because she was living at Versailles, Louis and Marie-Antoinette were "duty-bound" to help her afford it. 

There is some truth in Mr. Cronin's arguments, but the sheer amount of money that poured into Gabrielle's pretty little hands in the 1770s and 1780s went far, far beyond what was either prudent or necessary. Another one of Marie-Antoinette's biographers, Stefan Zweig, was infinitely more critical of "la belle Gabrielle," fulminating in his 1933 biography, "Not even Madame de Maintenon, not even the Pompadour, cost as much as this favourite, this angel with downcast eyes, this modest and gentle Polignac." That, too, is perhaps an exaggeration. Gabrielle de Polignac was no more responsible for damaging the French economy than Marie-Antoinette was. In the grand scheme of things, the amount of money being paid to the Polignacs and their dependents was a drop in the metaphorical ocean compared to the ludicrous sums being spent on frequent (and inevitably failing) recession-busting initiatives, in funding the American revolutionaries' fight against Great Britain or on trying to fix France's federalism-run-amok, creaking, out-of-date taxation system. But you can't get mad at federalism and you can't get mad at long-term socioeconomic trends, either. You can, however, look at the violet-eyed duchess and her Versailles crew and apportion all blame to them. She's visible and she's memorable. Gabrielle de Polignac, to put it mildly, was therefore loathed within a few years of joining Marie-Antoinette's circle.

Within the palace, the reasons for her unpopularity sprang mainly from jealousy. With Gabrielle monopolising Marie-Antoinette's time and affection, no-one else could climb the social ladder and become the Queen's new favourite. Many a failed socialite would utter the cry of the insidious and vile Madame de la Motte, who complained in her memoirs, "To be sure, one could hope for presentation to the Queen only through the Polignac clique, but the Duchess, jealous and fearful of losing the royal favour she monopolised, disdainfully repulsed any outsider who sought so much as a smile or a glance from the Queen... I was outraged by the attitude of this haughty and imperious woman. Well could I remember the Polignacs in Paris when they were impoverished nonentities". Gabrielle therefore became a useful scapegoat for any aristocrat who wanted to say they didn't enjoy the Queen's favour because the Duchess controlled all access to her; not because they themselves were too boring, annoying or unpleasant to actually win Marie-Antoinette's much-coveted friendship. 

Gabrielle also managed to tick people off with her (rare) displays of political sympathies - she was almost alone at Versailles in being pro-British and anti-American and she was rather too fond of drawing-up lists of people like the Duc de Brissac or Baron de Breteuil who had annoyed her. People on that list soon found their social lives at the palace being severely restricted and, in doing so, their opportunities for political advancement correspondingly dwindled. One palace servant likened Gabrielle to a steel dagger in a silken glove; another noted that the sweeter her tone got, the meaner her sentiment was likely to become.

Outside the palace, Gabrielle took the place of the royal mistress in public opinion. The French had a tradition of blaming all the mistakes of their government on the King's mistresses, rather than on the kings themselves. Even today, we have an ugly tendency to get angry when a woman, no matter how capable, seems too close to a powerful man - as poor Hillary Clinton found to her cost during her husband's presidency. However, both Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette were too clean-living to provide the country with paramours to blame. In Marie-Antoinette's case, anti-monarchists responded by simply making up hundreds of accused lovers - including animals, children and transvestites. They also, increasingly, insisted that she was having affairs with Gabrielle de Polignac and another close friend, the Princesse de Lamballe. Marie-Antoinette, with rather touching innocence, wrote to her mother that she was mainly being criticised in the gutter press for having a taste for lovers and a taste for women. Which rather suggests to me that the sheltered young royal wasn't aware that she was actually being accused of combining the two categories.

As they grew-up, Gabrielle and her queen remained close, but the girlish, co-dependent infatuation of the early days was long gone. They did, occasionally, quarrel. Marie-Antoinette loathed the Comte de Vaudreuil, a pushy military man whom Gabrielle was terribly fond of and who many believed she was having an affair with. The possibility that Gabrielle did have an affair with Vaudreuil cannot be disproved, nor should it be too easily dismissed; although, for what it's worth, my money is that they probably were not lovers. Marie-Antoinette also began to resent Gabrielle's numerous, parasitical relatives and their constant demands for more money and more favour, particularly at a time when the Queen herself was making drastic economies within the royal household. Sensing that time apart might do them good, Gabrielle went on a visit to England, where she stayed at Chatsworth with another close friend, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, whom she had first met at a Belgian spa a few years earlier. By the time she returned, French politics was teetering on the brink of its most epic crisis. Gabrielle hurled herself into supporting the agenda of what we would now recognise as the far-right. The diplomat, Marc de Bombelles, noted that he found her "working hard" with the King's younger brother, the Comte d'Artois, to have the liberal chief minister, Jacques Necker, dismissed from office.

Gabrielle de Polignac died in Austria on 9th December 1793, less than two months after the guillotine claimed the life of Marie-Antoinette. The cause of her death has variably been suggested as heartbreak, cancer or tuberculosis. In the two centuries since her death, historians have generally dealt harshly with her. At a time when many felt the French monarchy was in urgent need of reform, Gabrielle had actively supported the harshest possible measures against reformers and revolutionaries. In an age of great philosophers and the emergence of new political ideologies, the pretty duchess had laughed at intellectuals, mocked politicians and excluded anything too serious or too unpleasant from conversation at Versailles. She came to symbolise the corruption of the ancien regime - a government for blue-bloods, by blue-bloods. She was the last of the royal favourites. As more and more evidence was uncovered that Marie-Antoinette was nothing like the money-burning bimbo of popular legend, it was still possible to hurl all the blame onto Gabrielle de Polignac. Gorgeous, self-centred and wilfully isolated, Gabrielle became the historical poster girl for what had been wrong with a gorgeous, isolated, out-of-touch monarchy. She has, admittedly, had her defenders, too. Apart from Vincent Cronin, there have also been passionate rebuttals of her critics  - beginning, understandably, with her friends and family in the early nineteenth century. Recently, a "trad" Catholic royalist got rather carried away, I'm afraid, and compared her to Saint Nathaniel, which rather seems to be overegging the proverbial pudding.

Gabrielle de Polignac was not a "bad" woman - either by the standards of her own day or, really, by ours. She was a conventionally observant Roman Catholic, she was not promiscuous and she conformed to the general political beliefs of her religion and her class. She was not murderous, nor was she an ideologue. Whilst she was certainly selfish, vain and capable of petty nastiness, she was also gracious, elegant and had moments of great tenderness, as shown by her ability to soothe Marie-Antoinette's intermittent bouts of depression. But apart from the extraordinary times in which she lived and the extraordinary queen whose friendship she won, there is nothing too intrinsically fascinating about Gabrielle de Polignac - beyond two things. The first, as has been mentioned, is her great beauty. Beauty is, in itself, a fascinating topic. Good looks can both improve and bedevil the life of their holder. Beauty, which is good looks magnified, can also cut both ways like a double-handed sword. In Gabrielle's case, it propelled her into the spotlight, but it also led to people instinctively disliking her. Then and now, people don't like someone to "have it all". To be that beautiful, that confident and to have acquired the eighteenth century holy grail of royal patronage was quite simply too much for most of Gabrielle's contemporaries to stomach. 

The second point of interest is her astonishing success. It might seem strange to say that. After all, what did Gabrielle de Polignac really contribute to the world? She had no discernible talents and she produced nothing that impacted on French or European culture; even her letters are few and far between. By our standards, she did nothing except happen to be very rich and very pretty. Furthermore, she ended her life as a refugee from the bloody revolution that had destroyed the world she had grown-up in. But, by the standards of her own era, I do believe firmly that Gabrielle de Polignac not only succeeded but did so spectacularly. To an eighteenth century aristocrat, there were fewer obligations higher than family. Using nothing but her charm and self-belief, Gabrielle de Polignac dragged two families - her own and her husband's - from the genteel poverty that they had languished in for nearly a century. Regardless of the cost to her own personal reputation, she took the Polignac family and skyrocketed them into the upper echelons of the French nobility - a position that they hold to this day. Gabrielle's descendants included future prime ministers, Confederate generals, composers, mathematicians, socialites and royalty. Today, some of her surviving jewels nestle in the collection of the Grimaldi royal family of Monaco - who are also her descendants. She was, quite simply, the most spectacular social climber of her century and the trick behind her success was that she hid it so well. Gabrielle seemed so perfectly well-mannered, so at ease in herself and so completely indifferent to the usual mechanisms of "high society," that for decades after she was dead, she was still held up as the ultimate icon of the old aristocracy's wealth, supreme indifference to the outside world and entrenched privilege. She made it look effortless, just like the supremely affected unaffectedness in the Lebrun portrait of her. No-one ever saw Gabrielle's little feet paddling desperately beneath the water - all they saw was the gorgeously self-confident swan representing "all the glories of those set apart by privilege and wealth, flaunting themselves once more like the last beacon of an expiring world."

My interview in THE IRISH TIMES

My interview with THE SUNDAY TIMES was published in July 2011. The interview is by Pavel Barter, the photograph by Kelvin Boyes.

"A BOY WHO'S DOWN WITH THE MEAN GIRLS"

Friends trashed his idea for a bitchy teen-fiction novel set in Belfast, but Gareth Russell's savagely witty debut wins out in the popularity stakes, says Pavel Barter.

When Gareth Russell said he wanted to write a novel about wealthy high-school kids in Belfast, everyone told him to wise up. Spoilt debutantes, popping into Victoria Square shopping centre for a spot of retail therapy, getting manicures, wearing Ralph Lauren, and sipping martinis at high-society functions? Not images you associate with Belfast.

The negativity bothered him. "Parents of friends told me that nobody would ever publish a book about being popular or a socialite set in Belfast," he says. "If it's not about the potato famine, the Titanic or the Troubles, no one cares. I thought, 'We'll see.' There is so much more to Belfast than  lot of literature and cinema has shown. It was great to set a comedy here. You can have craic in Belfast that you couldn't in New York, Miami, London or LA."

So Russell ignored the naysayers and the setting proved ideal. Popular, the 24-year-old's debut, is set in the fictional Mount Olivet Grammar School, on Belfast's Malone Park, a real-life private avenue. Sitting in the bar of the Europa hotel, the writer takes a gulp of Evian, and wonders if he should send the city's upwardly mobile princesses a thank-you note for providing his inspiration.

Cliques are commonplace in Northern Irish schools, Russell explains. An Oxford graduate, he is co-directing a stage adaptation for Belfast's Belvoir Players Studio, to be staged in early September. The cast includes Imogen ("the hot one"), Kerry ("she has Daddy's credit card") and queen bee, Meredith ("the one who'll kill you as you sleep"). With their token male pal Cameron, these filthy-rich beauty queens undergo rivalries, tantrums and faux emotional breakdowns. Popularity is considered the key to happiness; weakness is preyed upon. It's a ruthless social hierarchy, similar to prison, only with Marie Antoinette-themed parties and Gucci handbags.

In most high-school movies, prom queens are either villains or a plot device to teach the protagonist the error of her ways. This was the case in Mean Girls, which starred Lindsay Lohan, while in Clueless and The Breakfast Club the rich girls are vain yet good-natured at heart. In Popular, on the other hand, the characters are unrepentantly egotistical and superficial, owing more to reality fares such as The Hills, Perez Hilton blogs and Paris Hilton.

Russell has an affection for his characters, but understands if the reader loathes them. "There are times when I'm talking about the characters and people look at me with horror," he laughs. "Meredith and Imogen have their own fans, which, in a way, is a devastating reflection on [today's] morality."

His characters were created as a reaction to the political correctness that has crept into high-school fiction. "Glee went further down the line of feeling it had to tick every box," he says. "I wanted to write someone like Meredith who could say the things a lot of us secretly wish we could get away with. She's not particularly interested in what boys think of her. Meredith is much more interested in what girls think of her. She is a woman's woman."

Russell was inspired to create such an unapologetically savage character after reading a Julie Burchill article in which the journalist mourned the passing of the classic Hollywood bitch. "One of my favourite books is Gone with the Wind. You're not supposed to like Scarlett O'Hara at all because she's a husband-stealing, gold-digging, social-climbing hound," he says.

What Popular lacks in redeemable characters, it makes up for in humour. The writer excels at capturing the ability of teenagers to coin expressions and venomous put-downs. Case in point: "I hate her hair... It looks like someone stuck pubic hair on top of a potato." Popular's characters are routinely cruel, but the writer insists there is a difference between bitchiness and being a bully. It's also one of the few Irish teen novels to deal with gay themes, in the form of Cameron's awakening homosexuality.

Some of the incidences in Popular are gleaned from Russell's own experiences as a student in Downpatrick, but the story is not entirely autobiographical. It's as much influence by his history studies at Oxford University and his interest in Tudor history; Anne Boleyn, the second wife of Henry VIII, in particular. "There is a steel-butterfly element to her personality that I warm to," says Russell "In a strange way, she influenced Popular [by being] a good example of you can be bitchy without being evil. I liked the pageantry [of the Tudors] and their self-awareness. They knew everyone was watching them. They believed God was watching them. I found that an interesting idea: how would you live if you thought you were being watched all the time? It's Big Brother, with a change of purgatory at the end. It was a cauldron of big personalities and a society that valued outward appearance more than anything else."

At Oxford, Russell directed and wrote plays, including The Audacity of Ideas, set on the eve of the French Revolution. This experience spurred him to pen Popular after he graduated in 2008. The author received 17 rejection letters from agents before he hit gold. Penguin signed him for two books, and he hopes to write a third.

Russell plans to write a biography of Boleyn in a few years' time. "There is a popular version of her as the femme fatale, and a more recent academic trend to see her as incredibly political, like a 16th-century Margaret Thatcher. I don't think that's something she would have recognised. I'm trying to focus more on her position as a daughter of the aristocracy who had been trained to be pleasing, quick-witted, elegant, charming, but I don't think she was a social climber or a rabid politico."

There is a tactical decision to writing Popular now. The memories are fresh and a few years from now his insights may no longer be relevant. The unrepentant narcissism of these characters still feels like a stumbling block, however. Is there any merit in this lifestyle for teenagers? "It's totally vacuous," he admits. And is popularity really all that important? "No." He takes another sip of water. "In the grand scheme of things, the core clique in Popular are not going to damage your health. They're not promoting drugs or rampant sex [but] the scars they might leave on your confidence are another thing."

Bret Easton Ellis wrote his first book, Less Than Zero, about a similarly spoilt and cloistered gang. It became a grim tale of prostitution, drug addiction and snuff movies. Russell wants to keep a comedic tone - this is fiction for young adults - but plans on visiting darker places in the sequel. "Yes, there's the vacuousness, fabulousness and frivolity, but you have to acknowledge that schemes, rules and intrigues will eventually take their toll on the people doing them," he says.

"Nobody can control gossip. It's a liberated demon. There's no way that you can write a high-school book and not show that sometimes it can turn into the most awful experience imaginable."

Popular is out now from Penguin. 
British and European customers can purchase it here.
Australian readers can purchase here. Borders New Zealand also sells Popular.
Canadian and American readers can purchase here.
South African readers can purchase here.

Congratulations!

"Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire."

- Saint Catherine of Siena, quoted in today's wedding sermon

In his commentary for the BBC on today's happy events, the historian Simon Schama, author of A History of Britain and Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, himself a one-time socialist, remarked that in the midst of a zeitgeist which holds that this is a generation which does not value tradition or sentiment, the Royal Wedding was a grand refutation of that theory. As one million people surged down the Mall towards Buckingham Palace to cheer the couple's first appearance on the balcony, Schama stated the obvious when he said that the idea that this is a totally cynical generation obsessed with the individual must take something of a battering today. He also, thankfully, took a swipe at those who claim such outpourings of public sentiment are childish or naive, saying that it is a celebration of community, of nationhood and of sentiment. And that's a good thing.

As a family, we got up this morning at seven to watch the BBC's coverage of the event, beginning at eight. Shortly after the broadcast started, the news was broken that Her Majesty The Queen had bestowed on her grandson a title from each of the three peerages in the monarchy - England, Scotland and (northern) Ireland. His Royal Highness was to become Duke of Cambridge, Earl of Strathearn and Baron Carrickfergus and I will be blogging on the historical background of those three titles later. For us, it was a wonderful moment to see the Prince getting married in the uniform of the Irish Guard which, of course, his late great-grandmother Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother had such a strong association with and which he himself is Colonel-in-Chief of. 

It was an absolutely wonderful day for all of us watching. It made me proud to be British and proud to be a monarchist. Without sounding too smug or triumphalist, I don't think there is another country in the world whose government could have commanded scenes like today. One million people surging calmly and happily down the Mall, having queued in some cases for days to be a part of today's historical events. It's just wonderful and I can't wait for next year's celebration of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee! I remember watching the Golden back in 2002 and promising that I would be there with my friends and the people I loved in 2012 to celebrate. Apart from anything else, it was so much fun and it's great to have days like this. The royal couple are so obviously in love and the smiles they shared, as well as the giggle from the new Duchess of Cambridge after her second kiss, was great to watch. I really enjoyed myself. The coverage was excellent and some of the interviews with the assembled crowd were by turns moving and hilarious. 

Wearing a tiara loaned to her by the Queen and carrying a bouquet of forget-me-nots which she will lay on the tomb of the Unknown Warrior later today, Princess Catherine looked timelessly elegant in her Sarah Burton-designed wedding gown. The music was magnificent and it was touching to see on the parade's return to the Palace that every time her husband, who is a member of the Armed Forces, saluted his comrades, the Princess bowed her head in respect. The couple repeated this action when they passed the Cenotaph memorial to the Glorious Dead and they saluted men and women who died in the defence of the nation. Seeing the Prince and Princess's actions, I was reminded of only a few months ago of the actions of others - when rioters swung from the memorial's flags. 

When the Queen returned from Westminster Abbey (where I thought the Bishop of London delivered a fantastic sermon), she turned to one of the footmen and said happily, "It's amazing." And, in more ways than one, it is. After all the smug criticism and the repeated carping in the press and from armchair intellectuals of "the tarnished crown," after years of being told that republicanism is a self-evident truth and anyone who is a royalist is either a snob or an idiot, it is amazing to find that people don't actually believe everything they're told. Billions tuned in from all over the globe to celebrate and millions thronged the capital city in a display of public happiness that you quite simply couldn't get from another political system. Proud, happy, fun - just a great, great day. Which I hope everyone reading this enjoyed too.

To Their Royal Highnesses, a very happy day and many congratulations. The love and affection between them was quiet but obvious. This was a wonderful moment and I am very happy.

Eva Perón: The Public Death of a Legend

The first sign that all was not well with Argentina's controversial First Lady came when she did not attend the Flag Day ceremonies in Buenos Aires on June 19th, 1952. When she failed to appear at any of the festivities for Argentina's Independence Day three weeks later, her millions of devoted followers began to get agitated. Initially, the government's doctors tried to downplay rumours that Evita was seriously ill and instead claimed that she was simply recovering from exhaustion. However, news that Evita had left Buenos Aires and was instead lying in a sickbed in the Quinta de Olivos, the presidential countryside palace, soon leaked to the press and by the end of the second week of July, Argentina was tottering on the edge of a communal nervous breakdown at the idea that the President's thirty three year-old wife might be about to die.

In Congress, fifty-nine politicians made impassioned speeches praising Evita's patriotism, her devotion to the cause of Peronism and her tireless care for the Argentine poor. Mafalda Piovano, a female politician recently elected to Congress thanks to Evita's campaign against male-only suffrage, collapsed during her speech and screamed out, "Oh God, we beseech you to return to Eva Perón the health she sacrificed to save us!" Then, Congresswoman Piovano fainted and by the time she had regained consciousness, the President of the Chamber, Hector Campora, was proposing that Congress bestow upon Evita the new title of "Spiritual Leader of the Nation." The motion passed.

Out in the streets, the reactions of Evita's followers - her beloved "descamisados" - was even more frenzied. It would be wrong to characterise their devotion to her as simply the displaced religious loyalty of simple peasants, dazzled and manipulated by Evita's beauty and glamour. Undoubtedly, there was an element of that; the story of Eva Perón is one of history's great rags-to-riches stories and to the Argentne working-classes there was something almost magical about the farmer's daughter from Junín who had become model, then movie star, then first lady. Always dressed in the height of fashion, for half a decade Evita was glamour personified for many of Argentina's disadvantaged. However, she was not just loved for her beauty and the Dior-stocked wardrobe she flaunted at every public appearance. She was also applauded for her role in supporting a woman's right to vote and, most importantly of all, for her work with the Eva Perón Foundation. Having commandeered the entire Argentinean social welfare programme during her husband's first term in office, Evita had transformed it into a charitable foundation with her name on it and then authorised one of the most extensive expansions of social welfare in modern history, despite a global recession. Capitalising on her own celebrity, Eva encouraged Peronists to donate generously to the foundation and even insisted that all employed workers give one day's wage to the foundation per calendar year. The money kept rolling in and with access to both the treasury and donations from her supporters, Evita had been able to turn the foundation into one of the biggest charitable enterprises in human history. Allegations that she was siphoning off funds to a secret Swiss bank account are almost certainly untrue and if money was deducted for expenses, it must have been tiny in comparison to what was being handed out. A more valid criticism was that the foundation was contributing to the national deficit and that Evita had become so completely convinced of her identity as saviour of the nation's poor that she was basically, and sometimes literally, throwing money at anyone who asked for it, in a wasteful, recession-bolstering display of government over-spending. For Evita, of course, none of this mattered. She wasn't an accountant, nor did she have any interest in anything that even smacked of criticism. She was adored, she was loved and everywhere she went, she was mobbed by hysterical crowds. Of all the many people who believed in the legend of Eva Perón, it's difficult to imagine a more zealous believer than Evita herself. 

The work and the criticisms of the Foundation and Peronism's social welfare programme are dramatised below in the song And the Money Kept Rolling In from the 1996 movie adaptation of the movie Evita, starring Antonio Banderas as the narrator and Madonna as Eva Perón. Aside from Madonna's physical resemblance to the real Evita, I think this song brilliantly captures the tidal wave of enthusiasm surrounding Eva's charity and social welfare programmes. People before profit or gross fiscal irresponsibility?

It had been the eighteen or nineteen-hour days she had been putting in overseeing the foundation and making public appearances, coupled with the exhausting work of helping her husband campaign for a second term in office, which had made Evita ignore the aches and pains she had been experiencing for the best part of two years. By the time her aides finally convinced her to take some time off for a check-up, it was too late to do anything to treat the cancer which would kill her. She made her last public appearance on June 4th, 1952 to stand by her husband's side as he was sworn in as President of Argentina for another six years. Juan Perón had won by a landslide, with sixty-six percent of the popular vote. But it was much more Eva's triumph than Juan's. Perón's numbers had come from the fact that for the first time in Argentina's history, women were allowed to vote, thanks in part to the First Lady's constant lobbying. Many of these first time voters had been voting for the First Lady, not the President. And throughout the presidential swearing-in, the entire chamber could hear the sound of one hundred thousand spectators outside chanting "Viva Evita!" The re-elected president's name was hardly mentioned at all. 

Elizabeth Taylor: A Novelist Remembers

I am planning to write my own tribute post to the late Dame Elizabeth Taylor, who passed away yesterday in Los Angeles at the age of seventy-nine. However, I wanted to quote from, and link to, this beautiful tribute paid to her by American novelist, Christopher Gortner, whose most recent novel has been reviewed by me here. Christopher writes: -

"When I was growing up in Spain during the last years of Franco’s regime, the local movie theatre in the seaside town where I lived played older movies. Censorship was part of Spain’s society in those days, even as Franco’s grip weakened. ilms like The Exorcist were heavily edited or never shown; the result is that I grew up watching movies from the gilded age of Hollywood, like Young Bess; My Cousin Rachel; Rebecca; Scaramoche; Portrait of Jenny; and many others. The stars of the 1940s and '50s were as real to me as those of my own era, often more so, because theirs were the films I was most exposed to.

I’ll never forget the first time I saw Cleopatra with Elizabeth Taylor. The town theatre showed it in its entirety, as they did Gone With The Wind, with 20-minute intermissions. Amidst the crunching of popcorn, perched on worn creaky seats, with the drone of the projector running in the background, I sat, mesmerized, as the screen revealed a world of hot sand and lustrous gold, the likes of which I’d never seen. And when she rolled out of the carpet, her white sheath clinging to those voluptuous curves, her arresting eyes sparking in defiance at Rex Harrison’s equally smitten Caesar, I was hers. I sat utterly still, captivated by the unique combination of beauty, ferocity, and fragility that made Ms Taylor the first true superstar.

... Perhaps it’s my memory of seeing it as a boy, the impact of watching it unfold in all its epic Technicolor glory on the big screen, cementing its iconic imagery in me. Whatever the case, my admiration for Ms Taylor never diminished. Indeed, it only grew as the dark days of the '80s exposed a terrifying foe which killed countless friends. As everyone but the afflicted and warriors fled, she stood up and proclaimed now was the time to join together, instead of seeking someone to blame. The AIDS pandemic changed my life and it changed hers: though we never met, I felt as though I knew her.

Of course, we all feel like that when it comes to movie stars. It’s what they do: they reflect our yearnings. But Elizabeth Taylor was more than a celebrity; in her tumultuous private life and bold humanitarian stance, she demonstrated a quest to live as she thought fit, even if it came at a price. She learned from her mistakes but wasn’t afraid to make them again. She once said, “I don't entirely approve of some of the things I have done, or am, or have been. But I'm me. God knows, I'm me.”

For a boy who once struggled to find out who he was in the world, hers were words to live by."