‘Do you know Mitya,’ Violet had written to her in 1920,
that my only really solid and unseverable lien with the world is you, my love for you? I believe if there weren’t you I should live more and more in my own world until finally I withdrew myself inwardly altogether. I’m sure it would happen.
She found no workable alternative to that lien. She lived alone without it in her mother’s house and her fantasy castle, the terraces, statues and daunting rooms all hers. When she travelled to London she stayed at the Ritz in her mother’s world.
As she became more frail her fiancés gave way to nephews, gay young men without much money, impressed by her theatre, status and display. The writer and artist Philippe Jullian was ‘in favour and out, then in again’. Then a playwright friend of his, Jean Pierre Grédy, then an English writer, Quentin Crewe. She kept her escorts, admirers, her pretenders to the throne. Frank Ashton-Gwatkin, a retired diplomat, travelled with her and tried to please. John Phillips, a young American in Florence, was intrigued by her, cared for her, played her quasi-romantic flirtatious games.
Her health declined from 1963 on. In summer that year she again broke her hip. ‘Approaching seventy, Violet looked eighty.’ Sleep eluded her so she took barbiturates, broken bones pained her so she took analgesics. ‘With a single glass of champagne she could appear completely befuddled.’ At a New Year’s party at the Ombrellino in 1967 when the guests were assembled and the table laid with the silver-gilt sturgeon at its centrepiece, the gold-plated cutlery with the monogram of Catherine the Great, the Venetian crystal, the Meissen china, she made her entrance on the arm of her butler. Brightly rouged, glittering with diamonds, vague with drugs, she sat at the head of the table ‘on a sort of bishop’s throne’, ate nothing and said to everyone and no one, ‘I’m alone, so alone.’
She died at the Ombrellino of a malabsorption disease in March 1972. She wasted away in her mother’s bed. The funeral gathering included ‘the Florentine aristocracy and Queen Helen of Romania’. Some of her ashes were scattered on her mother’s grave in the cemetery, I Allori, near Florence. The rest were scattered below her tower at St Loup.
In her will she dispersed all the worldly goods acquired by her mother with the King’s help – an emerald here, a picture there. She gave grandly to those who were kind to her in the last years of her life: St Loup and its contents went to John Phillips, her apartment at the rue de Cherche-Midi went to her nurse who sold it to Andy Warhol. Ombrellino reverted to her sister who sold it. It became a trade centre used for official and civic functions.
As for Violet’s heart, the struggle it made, the denial it endured, she asked that it be sealed in the medieval wall of the monks’ refectory at St Loup. On the wall is a plaque, a valediction in French: ‘Violet Trefusis 1894–1972, English by birth, French at heart.’ Before she died she wrote the lines
My heart was more disgraceful, more alone
And more courageous than the world has known.
O passer-by my heart was like your own.
She chose as her epitaph, ‘She Withdrew’.
Notes
ONE
1. Wife of the Prime Minister from 1908–19: ‘She is stone white with the brown veiled eyes of an aged falcon’, Virginia Woolf wrote of her (4 June 1923).
FIVE
1. In 1995 this photograph was used by the Royal Mail on their 25p stamp – alongside the profile of Queen Elizabeth II.
ELEVEN
1. Glinka’s opera, A Life for the Tsar.
TWENTY
1. The mourning of Andromache, heroine of Homer’s Iliad, whose husband Hector was killed by Achilles.
Sources and Bibliography
Most of Violet Trefusis’s papers are at the Beinecke Library, Yale University. Some, including letters from Alice Keppel and Sonia Cubitt, are with Violet’s executor, John Phillips. The Sackville/Nicolson archive is at the Lilly Library, Indiana University; other papers, including letters from Pat Dansey to Vita Sackville-West, are with Nigel Nicolson. Letters from Denys Trefusis to his sister Betty and to his uncle the Honourable John Schomberg Trefusis are with his niece, Phyllida Ellis. Published collections of letters from Violet Trefusis, Vita Sackville-West, Harold Nicolson and Virginia Woolf, are acknowledged below.
Most are collected
Violet to Vita: The Letters of Violet Trefusis to Vita Sackville-West, ed. Mitchell A. Leaska & John Phillips, (Methuen 1989)
One thing I did
Pat Dansey to Vita, August 1921 (Nigel Nicolson)
You are going to tell
quoted in Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society (Longman 1981)
I am bold enough
ibid
It is a love story
Nigel Nicolson, Portrait of a Marriage (Orion Books 1992)
pernicious influence
Vita and Harold: the Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, ed. Nigel Nicolson (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1992)
intolerable conduct
Nigel Nicolson to John Phillips, 31 August 1976
I wish Violet was dead
Harold to Vita, 9 September 1918, Vita and Harold
I cannot help that
Nigel Nicolson to John Phillips, 18 December 1972
I HATE the furtiveness
Violet to Vita, undated 1920 (Beinecke Library)
Part One: Queens and Heirs Apparent
ONE
There were three
The Princess of Wales, BBC Panorama, November 1995
rampant bulimia
ibid
I have it now
Portrait of a Marriage
Money was freely
G. Cornwallis-West Edwardian Hey-Days (Hogarth Press, 1930)
It was so necessary
Vita Sackville-West, The Edwardians (Hogarth Press 1930)
how to choose her friends
Consuelo Vanderbilt Balsan, The Glitter and the Gold (Heinemann, 1953)
Dear Mrs Keppel
Queen Alexandra to Mrs Keppel (undated)
What a pity
quoted in Georgina Battiscombe, Queen Alexandra (Constable 1969)
As a child
Violet Trefusis, Triple Violette, unpublished memoir in French (Beinecke Library)
I adore the unparalleled
Violet to Vita, 27 August 1918
We are not as lovable
Triple Violette
From my earliest childhood
Sonia Keppel, Edwardian Daughter (Hamish Hamilton 1958)
and a certain elusive smell
ibid
My mother began
Violet Trefusis, Don’t Look Round (Hutchinson 1952)
The Prince had wanted
Victoria Sackville, unpublished diaries, July 1898 (Lilly Library, Indiana)
We heard a fine
Margot Asquith, Autobiography (Eyre & Spottiswoode 1962)
excellent influence
quoted in Philip Magnus, King Edward VII (John Murray 1962)
he would never have done
quoted in Christopher Hibbert, Edward VII: A Portrait (Allen Lane 1976)
Dear Mrs Keppel
William II to Mrs Keppel December 1907 (John Phillips)
She was convinced
Frederick Ponsonby, Recollections of Three Reigns (Eyre & Spottiswoode 1951)
I want you to try
quoted in Gordon Brook-Shepherd, Uncle of Europe (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1975)
Oh dear
The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume 4 1931–35, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (Hogarth Press 1982) 10 March 1932
How can one make the best
Violet to Vita, 1 May 1920
We love only once
Cyril Connolly (Palinarus), The Unquiet Grave (Horizon, 1944)
TWO
Who was my father?
Violet to Vita, October 1919 (Beinecke Library)
Here I can breathe
ibid, 25 August 1920
The atmosphere
Don’t L
ook Round
From Ithaca
ibid
At last in 1868
ibid
They seemed to complete
ibid
One could picture
Harold Acton, More Memoirs of an Aesthete (Methuen 1970)
A frightful bounder
ibid
I feel that in entrusting
John Stephenson A Royal Correspondence. Letters of King Edward VII and King George V to Admiral Sir Henry F. Stephenson (Macmillan 1938)
From a really great
Rebecca West, 1900 (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982)
Throughout her life
Edwardian Daughter
My mother
Don’t Look Round
several lovers
Daisy, Princess of Pless From My Private Diary (John Murray 1931)
rich and influential
Mary Soames, Clementine Churchill (Cassell 1979)
Mrs Favourite Keppel
11 September 1901. Mary Curzon, Lady Curzon’s India: Letters of a Vicereine, ed. John Bradley (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1985)
which rather shocked
Victoria Sackville, unpublished diaries (Lilly Library)
The Alington household
Edwardian Daughter
it was charming
ibid
The parties
Philip Magnus, King Edward VII
At times I was
Recollections of Three Reigns
His angry bellow
Magnus, King Edward VII
THREE
no one can represent
9 July 1864, quoted in Philip Magnus, King Edward VII
I don’t know what
Magnus, King Edward VII
my father, my protector
19 June 1858, quoted in Giles St Aubyn, Queen Victoria (Sinclair Stevenson 1991)
None of you
26 August 1857, Magnus, King Edward VII
peculiarities arise
ibid
A very bad day
Frederick Waymouth Gibbs ‘The Education of a Prince’. Extracts from diaries 1851–6 (Cornhill Magazine 986)
I am in utter despair
4 March 1858, Dearest Child: Letters Between Queen Victoria and the Crown Princess of Prussia 1858–1861, ed. Roger Fulford (Evans Brothers 1964)
His only safety
9 April 1859, ibid
learn the duties
Magnus, King Edward VII
The agony and misery
12 November 1862, Giles St Aubyn, Edward VII Prince and King (Collins 1979)
If you were to try
ibid
for there must be
January 1862, Queen Victoria
future reunion
Victoria to Queen Augusta, Edward VII Prince and King
Why should we go
ibid
too weak to keep
13 January 1862, Dearest Mama: Private Correspondence of Queen Victoria and the Crown Princess of Prussia 1861–1864, ed. Roger Fulford (Evans Brothers 1968)
her walk, manner
4 June 1861, Dearest Child
I don’t think he can be
1 October 1861, ibid
What you say
12 October 1861, ibid
I frankly avow
11 September 1862, Magnus, King Edward VII
far worse than a funeral
4 February 1863
I opened the shrine
7 March 1863, Edward VII Prince and King
I could not remain
Louise Cresswell, The Lady Farmer: Eighteen Years on the Sandringham Estate (Temple Co. 1887)
Alix looked very ill
12 March 1864, Dearest Mama
The princess had another
Queen Alexandra
very forcibly
Magnus, King Edward VII
she will be quite bored
Filmer MSS U120 C77 Kent County Record Office
very unsatisfactory
Edward VII: A Portrait
Then the torrent
1900
FOUR
If ever you become
18 January 1868, Magnus, King Edward VII
a very dissolute
Magnus, King Edward VII
I am sorry
February 1870, quoted in Graham and Heather Fisher, Bertie and Alix: Anatomy of a Royal Marriage (Robert Hale 1974)
I am so looking
Edward VII to Mrs Keppel, New Year’s Day 1910. ADD A5 475 (Royal Archive, Windsor)
the public may suppose
Edward VII, Prince and King (Collins 1979)
The matter appears
I trust by what
Bertie and Alix: Anatomy of a Royal Marriage
Why should a young
Hibbert, Edward VII
the people of England
ibid
there are not wanting
ibid
The Government really
Royal Victorians
I am over 28
Bertie and Alix: Anatomy of a Royal Marriage
It is the custom
Alfred E. Watson, King Edward VII as a Sportsman (Longmans 1911)
if made public
Magnus, King Edward VII
anticipated the danger
ibid
held the crown
ibid
being aware of peculiar
ibid
Blandford, I always
ibid
arrange his matters
ibid
How can one make
Violet to Vita, 1 May 1920
It would be difficult
Lillie Langtry, The Days I Knew (Hutchinson 1925)
My only purpose
ibid
etiquette demanded
ibid
A petition has been filed
Ernest Dudley, The Gilded Lily (Odhams Press 1958)
a very distinguished
Edward VII: A Portrait
unfortunate lunatic
Royal Victorians
It is one of God’s mercies
Harold to Vita, 17 February 1949 (Lilly Library)
He was more than kind
Countess of Warwick, Life’s Ebb and Flow (Cassell 1920)
you have systematically
Lord Beresford to the Prince of Wales, 12 July 1891 (Salisbury papers, quoted in Hibbert, Edward VII: A Portrait)
His signing
Magnus, King Edward VII
We profoundly regret
The Times, 10 June 1891 (quoted in Hibbert, Edward VII: A Portrait)
Those who revealed
Countess of Warwick, Afterthoughts (Cassel, 1931)
FIVE
Once upon a time
Triple Violette
With one terrifying
Edwardian Daughter
When Mamma
ibid
very ugly
Osbert Sitwell, Laughter in the Next Room (Macmillan 1949)
You are drunk
‘Chips’ The Diaries of Sir Henry Channon, ed. Robert Rhodes James (Weidenfeld 1993)
I am curious to know
Winston Churchill to his mother, 22 January 1902, quoted in Randolph Churchill, Young Statesman, Winston Churchill, 1901–1914 (Minerva 1991)