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It was the same with the great enfilade of rooms on the first floor —the salon jaune, salon vert and the salon rouge, which was my parents’ bedroom. But not even Pauline Borghese’s bed, in which my parents nightly slept — despite its narrowness and shortness — could give me a thrill. After all, I had never heard of the woman.
It was the same with our guests. My mother kept open house every evening from six to eight, and since none of the French had seen a drop of whisky or gin for four years and since the Embassy got it from the NAAFI at about sixpence a bottle, the salon vert was usually pretty crowded. All the celebs of the time were there — Jean Cocteau, Jean Marais, Louis Jouvet, Bébé Bérard, Louise de Vilmorin (almost every night, due only partly to the ripsnorting affair she was having with my father), even Colette, her tiny barefoot body carried in and buried in a sofa where, according to Cecil Beaton, she looked like an old chinchilla marmoset. I knew them all, mixed them drinks, called them by their Christian names — but at 15 had never heard of any of them and had no inkling of their distinction. Why could I not have been three or four years older? How much more I would have got out of it all.
But enough of personal reminiscence; let us return to our book. Tim Knox has divided it, very sensibly, into two main parts. The first is devoted to the history of the house and its occupants, the second to a room-by-room tour of the piano nobile.
The building owes its existence to a certain Paul François de Bétune-Charost, who built it between 1722 and 1725, but it first achieved distinction when it was bought in 1803 by Pauline Leclerc, Napoleon’s sister, whose first husband, General Victor Emmanuel Leclerc, had recently succumbed to yellow fever in the Caribbean. Pauline hadn’t the money to pay for it —the bill was finally settled by Napoleon himself the following year — but she was anyway far more interested in her forthcoming second marriage to Prince Camillo Borghese (who was to bore her stiff). After her brother’s coronation in 1804 she had her own court, her private household amounting to 27 members.
But, as we all know, within ten years the Napoleonic dream was shattered, and the house was bought by the Duke of Wellington, who had been appointed Ambassador to the restored Bourbon monarchy. It has been the British Embassy ever since. Knox delightfully describes several of the more colourful ambassadors; my own favourite is Sir Francis Bertie, of whom there is a perfectly splendid photograph and who in 1908 commissioned a photographic record of the Embassy from Eugène Pirou, maker of the world’s first pornographic film.
The second part of the book takes us through all the great first-floor rooms. Here Hammond really comes into his own; I have never seen more beautiful photographs of domestic interiors. By the time we reach the last page we feel we know every room intimately. And we also feel what a tragedy it would be if this glorious house were ever sold, as more than one of our recent governments has threatened to do. It has now been the British Embassy for almost exactly 200 years; long, long may it continue.
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