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  The Lotois were conformists, but they were individualists and pragmatists. The scandalised clergy of the Lot watched as their congregations went to Mass on Sundays and holidays, while regularly voting for the godless republic and indulging in the “murderous practice” of birth control for the rest of the week. The Lot stood out in the southwest for this singularity: nearby Aveyron remained fervently Catholic; other neighbouring regions veered to the left and distanced themselves from the Church. In Cahors “On allait à l'église mais on votait à gauche”;1 they went to church but they voted for the left—piety on Sundays and holy days, anticlerical the rest of the week. The Lot remained faithful to both republic and Church, on its own terms. But in 1877 the vineyards which provided so much of its prosperity were destroyed by phylloxera, and so began a long decline, as the Lotois left to find work in the cities.

  For the first half of his life Louis Darquier's father, Pierre, was a fortunate man. He was born at a propitious time, he married a wealthy wife who loved him, and he had three handsome and intelligent sons, and at least one other child born out of wedlock. He was a good doctor, and almost everyone who knew him spoke well of him and remembered him fondly. Born in 1869, he was only a year old when the last of the French emperors, Louis Napoleon, Napoleon III, made the mistake of attacking Prussia in 1870. The Franco-Prussian war ended in the defeat of France and the bloody suppression of the Paris Commune in 1871, and it was also the end of all kings and emperors in France. The Third Republic, proclaimed in 1870, was to last until 1940, almost the entire lifetime of Pierre Darquier.

  The origins of the Darquier family were extremely modest. Louis Darquier always varied his claims to nobility, adding and subtracting claims to aristocratic, Gascon or French Celtic blood as the whim took him. His obsession with pure French blood flowing from French soil is genuine, however: most of his ancestors, the dregs of the earth for centuries, are buried in the small towns of the Lot. They were poor, and many were both illegitimate and illiterate.

  Pierre Darquier was born on 23 January 1869 at number 10, rue du Tapis Vert, the street of the green carpet, one of the medieval ruelles which cluster around the Cathédrale de St.-étienne. This was the house of his maternal great-grandmother, and generations of his family had been born and lived there. Pierre's grandfather, Pierre Eugène Vayssade, a tobacco worker in Cahors, had died there at the age of thirty-eight. His widow, Marie Adélaide Constanty, supported herself and their only child, Eugénie, born in 1843, by working with her mother-in-law in the family's grocery shop, which served the clergy of the cathedral nearby; it is still there on the angle of rue Nationale and place Chapou, and was worked by the family until 1907. 2

  Pierre's father Jean often helped his wife Eugénie and his mother-inlaw at the counter, and Pierre grew up between shop and home, with his parents and grandmother, fluent in the local patois, a variant of Occitan, la langue d'Oc, the language of the Languedoc. After a lifetime's work, Louis' great-grandmother, when she died, had nothing to leave.

  About ninety kilometres to the north of Cahors lies the medieval town of Martel, where a large number of Pierre's paternal ancestors were born, all carefully chronicled in the records of Church and state. His great-grandfather, Bernard Avril, was a priest working in the Dordogne when he authorised the marriage of his daughter Marguerite in 1827, and agreed to provide her with an annual dowry of “wheat, half a pig, two pairs of conserved geese and twelve kilograms of nut oil.”3 Marguerite was twenty-three when she married Jean Joseph Darquier, a policeman from Toulouse, where his father Joseph was a cobbler and chair porter. It is necessary to be precise about these persons and dates, because it is this unfortunate Marguerite Avril who was used to give Louis Darquier his erroneous claims to nobility. Marguerite had four children, all boys, all born in Martel, before her husband Jean died at his barracks at the age of forty-five. Their first son, Jean the younger, was born in 1828, and it was he who initiated the social rise of the Darquier clan when he took up the lucrative post of tax collector.

  On 25 August 1862, when he was thirty-four, Jean the tax collector married his relative Eugénie Vayssade by special dispensation, for Eugénie was also related to the fecund Father Avril. The nineteen-yearold Eugénie took her husband to live in her mother's house in rue du Tapis Vert. There were two sons of this marriage, both called Pierre, but only the second, christened Jean Henri Pierre, survived to inherit all the considerable worldly goods garnered by his father, who died when Pierre was nineteen. Louis' paternal grandfather the tax collector left shops in Cahors earning rent, other houses, furniture worth over twenty thousand francs, as well as letters of credit, savings, buildings, land and vineyards at Montcuq and St.-Cyprien, near Cahors.

  Pierre was now a wealthy young man. He turned twenty-one just as the belle époque ushered in the joys, both frivolous and practical, of those legendary pre-war decades. As a medical student in Paris from 1888 to 1893 he and his elder brother, who died there at the age of eighteen, were the first Darquiers to savour the full glories of the Parisian vie bohème. Three years later, in 1896, he married an even wealthier young woman.

  Louis Darquier's mother, Louise, was a class above Pierre Darquier, but in fact her family's prosperity was only one generation older than that of her husband. The Laytou family had lived in Cahors for generations, and Louise's grandfather made their fortune with his printing works and the newspaper he founded in 1861, the Journal du Lot. His son inherited the business, and his daughter Louise Emilie Victoria was born on 11 April 1877. Like Pierre Darquier, her only sibling, a brother, also died, so she alone inherited all the wealth and property of her printing family.

  Cahors was a bustling provincial city of some twenty thousand persons in January 1896, when Pierre and Louise married. He was almost twenty-seven, she eighteen; they honeymooned in Paris, Nice and Marseille. By then he had completed his medical studies in Paris at the time of the great French medical teacher and neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot.4 Pierre's thesis, which qualified him as a doctor, was on the subject of one of Charcot's neurological discoveries. Pierre seems to have taken the best from Charcot, unaffected by the latter's theories of racial inheritance, and he was often described as a gifted practician, always as a kindly one. Louise Laytou brought wealth to her marriage, and was thought to have married beneath her, but in return Pierre Darquier's profession qualified him to become one of the leading notables of Cahors and the Lot.

  Pierre was blue-eyed and not tall—Louise was taller than he—and had inherited the tendency to corpulence of his mother and grandmother. When young he was a handsome fellow with brown curls and a round, cheerful face, the shape of which, if not the temperament it expressed, was passed on to his second son, Louis, his granddaughter Anne and many of his other grandchildren. He had a rather feminine voice, wore the formal clothes of the time—bowler hat in winter, frock-coat, necktie, a boater in summer—and a handsome handlebar moustache at all times. His personal appearance, however, does not explain his success with the opposite sex.

  Pierre cherished his wife, but he was a creature of his time, as addicted to dalliance as was Marshal Pétain, thirteen years his senior but a product of the same sexual mores. Pierre was a jolly man, self-indulgent, a typical “hearty bourgeois of the period, a woman-chaser, and a doctor in his spare time.” He was “big and solid, cordial and joyous, much loved in Cahors,” and was often spotted, braces flying, returning home at the crack of dawn. One early morning a worker called after him, “Hey, Doctor, do you take your trousers off to examine your patients?” But this shocked no one in those days, least of all Louise. Her “real Don Juan… has the charm of a Marquis,” she would say with pride. “One must know when to shut one's eyes.”5

  Louise Darquier was beautiful when young, and remained so all her life. She was attended by the consideration such women are accustomed to receive, but this was not, in her case, always accompanied by much affection. Louise was “impeccable,” with “l'air presque aristocratique”—an almost aristocratic
air. To some she seemed warm and lovable, to others she gushed and fluttered. Some who worked for her loved her for her kindness and affection, others regarded it as mannered patronage. Family recollections describe her as remarkably stupid, and acquaintances are not much kinder—she was “very proud,” “very spoiled, very old France, very beautiful,” “with a high, studied voice, given to little exclamations.”6 Everything about her was exquisite, her clothes, her hats, her considerable collection of jewellery, her carefully coiffed fair hair. Even her handkerchiefs, delicately embroidered by herself, were the envy of the women of Cahors.

  Louise enjoyed ill health, feminine maladies and exercising Christian charity towards the unfortunate. She took the waters at Vichy, read poetry, wrote to her women friends, stitched and embroidered beautifully—for herself, for the church, for family and friends—and trained her maids and poor relations to look after her properly. Her letters—outpourings of domestic fuss and bother, alternating wheedling requests with woes plaintively enumerated—throb with her anxious hold on social position. She bequeathed her habitual note of lamentation to Louis, together with her pretension to social grandeur. Louis spent much of his adult life complaining that his parents did not support him, did not help him financially as they did his brothers, and when the time came, during the Occupation, that he could support himself, he made the same complaints about Pétain and the mandarins of Vichy.

  Louise was what they called “une punaise de sacristie,” a churchy woman. The French Church had been in a state of recurrent war with the anticlerical republic since the Revolution—it was Gambetta who had said in 1877 that “Le cléricalisme, voilà l'ennemi! ”7 The Darquier marriage perfectly encapsulated this French duality. Educated at the convent of Les Dames de Nevers in Cahors, Louise went to Mass every Sunday and often during the week, while Pierre confined his attendances to weddings and funerals. Louise Darquier embodied every reason why French women were not to receive the vote until 1944.

  In the early years of the Darquier marriage the struggle between the French Church and the republican government reached its climax over the Dreyfus affair and the control of education.8 The outcome was the separation of Church and state in 1905, the removal of education from clerical hands and the expulsion from France of a number of religious orders. The republic, ruled by governments of the Radical Party, formed in 1901 and representative of the politics of the provinces and the petite bourgeoisie, thus won its major victory over the Catholic Church in France.

  The men who represented the Lot politically, at both national and local levels, were almost always lawyers and doctors, rarely the nobility, and of these doctors were always the most numerous. Pierre Darquier had wealth, the right profession, family connections and a family newspaper. He joined the Radical Party and proceeded in the classic manner: first mayor, then councillor for the department—after that would follow Paris and national politics.

  His party, which would be dominant in French politics until the Second World War, was by no means radical in the British sense of the word. It was a centrist party, republican, anticlerical, but moderate—like the Whigs in England. The Radical Party was an umbrella group of many different opinions and cliques, tolerant of considerable dissent. In the Lot, Radicals often belonged to the Radical-Socialist wing of the party, the use of the word “socialist” being even more baffling to Anglo-Saxon ears, for these politicians ran the Lot like a private business. The ruling Radicals were progressive but fatherly, almost feudal men of position and profession, manipulators of influence and patronage and accustomed to being obeyed.

  To its numerous enemies on the right, being a member of the Radical Party was synonymous with being a Freemason, and thus hostile to the power of the Catholic Church. However, while there were two Masonic lodges in Cahors at that time, mysterious and fearful places to the local Catholic children, in the rural world of the Lot its notables were neither markedly anticlerical, nor Masonic. “They believe in man, I believe in God,” was a typical Lotois attitude towards Masonic practices. Pierre Darquier had been raised by pious Catholic women—his wife described him as “a Christian, but not a martyr”—and was neither a Mason nor a man of the left. “In the Lot, everyone was Radical Socialist…It was a party which veered more to the right than the left,” a party that “respected a certain hierarchy, at any rate a hierarchy which favoured themselves.”9 When France fell in 1940, all the deputies of the Lot, socialist, Radical Socialist, Radical republican and otherwise, brought an end to the Third Republic by voting full autocratic powers to Marshal Pétain.

  The Darquiers' first child, Jean, was born eleven months after their marriage, on 12 December 1896. Twelve months later, Pierre Darquier had moved his family into the handsome Laytou family house at 34,rue du Lycée in Cahors (now 394, rue Président Wilson). Pierre and Louise raised their three sons in the house, linked by a beautiful garden to the massive Laytou family printing works behind it. Here, on 19 December 1897, Louis Darquier was born.

  Louise Darquier had greeted the news that she was pregnant again while still weaning her firstborn with the usual gloom of women under these circumstances. Louis leapt out of his mother's womb at six and a half months, almost a miscarriage. “I cried the very first day I knew of his existence and I will weep for him until the last day of my life,” she would bemoan in later years, as she listed the troubles he had caused her mother's heart.10

  Louis grew up securely entrenched in the fortunate classes of the town; not for him the labour in the vineyards and fields of tobacco, or the shops and barracks of his ancestors. Of the three Darquier sons—the baby, René, was born in 1901—Louis turned out to be the classic middle child, always scrabbling for attention, a problem from the day he was born. Physically, Jean and René resembled their mother, while Louis, though taller, strongly resembled his father. Pierre was as authoritarian a father as were all Galsworthian men of property of his time. Children did not speak until spoken to, never before the plat principal at meals, and did as they were told. Louise loved her namesake son, but he was permanently at odds with his father.

  In 1906 when Louis was eight and his father thirty-seven, Pierre was elected mayor of Cahors, the only mayor ever to be elected on the first ballot. His acceptance speech gives the flavour of the man: “All my actions will be inspired by the fine ideal of liberty, equality and fraternity, and of the social solidarity which constitutes the strength, the honour and the glory of our Republic.” The family newspaper, the Journal du Lot, described him then as “a steadfast friend, devoted, selfless,” a man to whom “hatred, rancour, jealousy” were unknown. “His openness and loyalty are as well known as his great goodness.”

  Louise now became the first lady of Cahors. She entertained a great deal and in considerable style, maintained two maids, a cook and a German chambermaid, and the family holidayed each year by the sea and in the mountains. Pierre Darquier had a good practice, but the Lot was poor and Pierre kind: his patients often paid him with “skinny chickens and old eggs.” As the years went on, a German and an English governess were added to educate the boys, and a chauffeur to drive Pierre's motorcar, acquired by 1910, which he used to visit his patients, to the astonishment and joy of the inhabitants of Cahors and its environs. Both Louis and René spoke English and German exceptionally well.

  The boys were sent to school across the road, to the Lycée Gambetta, where Pierre himself had been educated more than twenty years before. Like all French schools after the Separation Law of 1905, the Lycée was not religious. Children of political antagonists, right and left—the noirs and the rouges—were taught together. Catholic children, like Louis Darquier, were instructed in their catechism by a chaplain; the children of socialists, Freemasons, atheists and others were left in peace. All of them marched and sang the “Marseillaise” together. The curriculum of the time was a preparation for war. Young men were raised in the spirit of Revanche, revenge for the Prussian defeat of 1870 and the German appropriation of Alsace-Lorraine. Throughout their
childhood, German family employees notwithstanding, Louis and his brothers were brought up under the shadow and the threat of Germany.

  At school the boys were securely uniformed in cap or beret, stiff collar and flowing tie, learned shooting and fencing, were rigorously educated in patriotism, high culture and sport, and trained to be good sons of France. Their teachers matched their formality in dress coats, starched collars, top hats or bowler hats, and often sported the monocles and canes Louis was to adopt as his adult insignia in the 1920s. There is a photograph of the three Darquier boys fencing at school in 1907. René, only six, is heroically feinting his elder brother, while Louis' arrogant little face stares proudly at the camera. All three were handsome, intelligent and self-confident, and were dressed elegantly; their schoolmates, by contrast, look like Richmal Crompton's William, a Cadurcien collection of rapscallions.

  In Cahors those who knew Louise Darquier were unanimous that she was excessively ambitious for her sons. Jean had the fine physique of his mother, but Louis was a “fort cailloux,” a hard nut, “no Gary Cooper,” but he grew into “a good-looking man, strong, broad-shouldered like a good rugger player.”11 The more delicate, more sophisticated Jean was to become an elegant man, artistic, poetic, and musical. René was unlike his elder brothers, shorter than both, as spirited, but more reserved and serious. Though the youngest, he seems very early to have become the father of the family.

  Jean and Louis started school together when they were seven and six respectively, and were immediately the best pupils in their class. When René joined them in 1905, only four years old, he performed equally well: until 1914 the brothers jostled to bring home the most honours and prizes. Their parents rewarded them with five francs for achieving first place in class, three francs for second; but the boys had to pay back five francs if they came third, or worse.

  Louis was baptised at the cathedral in Cahors when he was a month old. His fabrications about his life begin here. He always claimed that his godfather was Pierre's close friend, the crippled advocate, dubious parliamentarian and future quasi-collaborator Anatole de Monzie, whereas in fact Louise's uncle filled this role. In 1909 Pierre wanted to stand for election as deputy for the Lot, but gave way so that de Monzie could stand as the sole republican candidate. The department became de Monzie's fiefdom for more than thirty years. Mayor of Cahors from 1919 to 1942, between 1909 and 1942 he also reigned variously as councillor, president of council, deputy and senator for the department. De Monzie was a wheeler and dealer, a power broker with a finger in every pie of social and political life in the Third Republic. He was, tenuously, a Radical Socialist, but his political ideas and practices were his own. He was either a man without principle or an independent spirit, a pontificating fixer who conquered the world with his charm and intelligence.