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  Louis, the only brother with no academic qualification, had to begin his working life more humbly. In 1920 he took a job at 53,rue Lafayette, selling advertising for the Société Fermière des Annuaires, agents of Bottins, producers of telephone directories for France and abroad. France was exhausted economically and emotionally. Post-war disenchantment—galloping inflation, strikes, unemployment, national debt, national mourning—was compounded by the sight of so many mutilés de guerre, war wounded, in the streets. Louis Darquier, however undistinguished his war career, was a product of the disillusion which followed victory. Others, like him, drank from a well of anger and grief, fuelled by a sense of decline and decadence, a sense of the passing of an empire, of all the old values gone.

  But in 1920 Colette published Chéri, Scott Fitzgerald This Side of Paradise. The jazz age and the age of the flapper were on the horizon. The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 concluded with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles which in turn, in 1920, set up the League of Nations to arbitrate international peace and cooperation. The harsh revenge France exacted on defeated Germany led to twenty years of diplomatic failures as France struggled to keep Germany to its treaty commitments. The heartbreaking monuments to the war dead which sprang up in villages, towns and cities in France and in most of the belligerent countries—used again in 1945 to record deaths in the Second World War, often in the same families—witnessed the futility of war, not its glory.

  Louis' academic failure before the war was not to condemn him to selling advertising in phone books forever. He was only twenty-two, and his “godfather” was to hand. De Monzie, too disabled for war service, had more time on his hands: he was defeated in the 1919 elections for the Chamber of Deputies, the lower chamber of the French Parliament, though he quickly moved on to become senator of the Lot. He was not an anti-Semite, had no political animosities and was a prolific entertainer. The great and the good sat at the dinner tables of his estates in the Lot and his apartment in Paris. The person he loved most in the world was his school friend Henry de Jouvenel,2 man of letters, charm and politics, now one of the editors-in-chief of Le Matin.

  By 1920 de Jouvenel had been with Colette, married or unmarried, for a dozen years; his previous wife, and his next one, were both Jewish.3 De Monzie was ambitious for de Jouvenel's political career—politicians, editors, thinkers, writers, industrialists and businessmen were part of his salon, and outside his salon his acquaintance and influence were even larger. Action Française was now at the height of its power. Proust, Rodin and Gide took its newspaper regularly, and in Britain T. S. Eliot gave it his imprimatur in the Criterion. 4 De Monzie first met Charles Maurras in 1920. They argued about everything, but their admiration was mutual.

  Anatole de Monzie placed both Louis and René Darquier in the wheat trade.5 One of his key affiliations was to Jewish wheat families, many of them living in Alsace, which with the department of the Lorraine bordered France and Germany. Revolutionary France had been the first western European country to emancipate its Jews in 1789 and 1791, and in Alsace-Lorraine a small Jewish community prospered—Alfred Dreyfus of the affaire Dreyfus was one of them, though his family were in textiles, not wheat. These wealthy families valued the freedom granted them by the French republic, and were patriots, leading local politicians and councillors. By the time Louis Darquier went to live in Strasbourg, in 1922, the Jews of Alsace were particularly conspicuous in trade and commerce, and omnipresent in the grain trade.

  After the war French farmers, prodigious wheat producers, found themselves threatened on all fronts. The wheat of France had to compete with cheap varieties from foreign parts, countries reached by the great ships which sailed the “wheat run” and fed Europe in peace and war— Argentina, Canada, the United States and Australia. Most Australian farmers, like Harry Jones, unlike their European counterparts, produced both wool and wheat for export; but their markets were oceans away. Into this vacuum stepped the wheat barons and their steamships. These vast fleets were owned by a new class of magnate, powerful men with global reach whose companies became international giants. The sons of the Jewish wheat merchants of Alsace profited too.

  It was the visibility of the immense wealth these men amassed during the Great War that fuelled so much anti-Semitism during the twenties and thirties, and that became a running sore to some, like Louis Darquier. Following Mussolini and his Italian battaglia de grano in July 1925, and Goebbels' demand for “freedom and bread” for every German, they saw the apparent Jewish control of wheat, the staff of life, as poisoning the staple food of the French nation, ruining the revered French peasant, and weakening the race. In Australia, at the other end of the wheat run, anti-Semitism was fuelled by similar myths and conspiracy theories.

  By this time de Monzie was a national figure. He became a minister, variously, of the Merchant Marine, of Finance, of Public Works, of Education and of Justice, fourteen times in all, in the many inter-war French governments. He was also a barrister, with a good practice at the Paris bar. De Monzie had twice been Secretary of State for the Merchant Marine during the First World War, when the purchase of wheat was under state control. He knew all the wheat barons, Jewish or not, and with one of them, Ernest Vilgrain, he paid his dues to Pierre Darquier.

  Three men from Alsace-Lorraine directed the fates of Louis and René Darquier over the next decade. Ernest Vilgrain was one; the others were Henry Lévy of the Grands Moulins de Strasbourg, and Louis Louis-Dreyfus—often known as King Two Louis, a pun on the highest gold coin of the ancien régime—of the immense grain merchant company Louis Dreyfus & Co.6 The Louis-Dreyfus family were Jews from Alsace, modest traders in grain with a modest bank in Paris. By the early twentieth century Louis Louis-Dreyfus had transformed the family firm into an international empire: he added a flotilla of ships, expanded his banking interests and opened offices all over the world. He specialised in buying surplus wheat in bulk, and shipping and selling it to countries without it, taking the profit of every part of the procedure for himself. He did this for nation-states on a vast scale, and became monarch of his commodity world, King Two Louis, the “King of Wheat.”

  Louis Louis-Dreyfus was a man of many attributes, a millionaire who was careful about money and a deputy, then senator, of the French republic, a Freemason, leftish—he and his brother Charles were shareholders in l'Humanité, the newspaper of the French Communist Party—and he entered Parliament as a Radical Socialist, like Pierre Darquier. He prospered during the First World War by adding maritime armaments to his portfolio, and was denounced in several government reports for profiteering from state wheat contracts. King Two Louis, reputed to be the richest man in France, came to be considered the quintessential enemy of the small man—in this case the small French wheat farmer—who blamed him for the collapse of farm prices in the 1930s Depression.

  Ernest Vilgrain, of an old Lorraine milling family, worked for the French Ministry of Trade during the First World War. While still in government he began to build up his Grands Moulins de Paris, transposing the supplies system he had learned as Under-Secretary of State for Supplies into his own private business. He left the government on 19 January 1920, and the next day started his own company, the Coopérative d'Approvisionnement, de Transport et de Crédit (CATC), to operate as a purchase and finance office for his firm.7 Vilgrain made vast profits by importing Australian wheat via CATC, using the services of an English cohort, Sanday & Co., commodity brokers on the Baltic Exchange, and selling it at vastly inflated prices to the French state. This wheat, well named “exotic,” was often paid for, but never delivered. The Australian wheat scandal of 1920, as it came to be known in France, brought about a parliamentary investigation, a report and a court case. De Monzie defended Vilgrain, whose name so perfectly encapsulated his activities, and his relations with the Louis-Dreyfus family were almost familial. In this fevered world Vilgrain and King Two Louis were old enemies.8

  In 1921, de Monzie placed Louis Darquier in Vilgrain's firm. Louis worked in “d
ifferent services”9 at Vilgrain's Paris headquarters at 150, boulevard Haussmann until June 1922, when he was sent to Strasbourg to open a subsidiary there. Strasbourg's port on the Rhine was a conduit to the huge corn and grain exchange in Antwerp, where wheat was shipped in from all over the world. Louis Darquier, grain merchant, of 15,avenue des Vosges, Strasbourg, was now a managing director earning three thousand francs a month (roughly £2,000 in today's values) “and percentages.” Soon his brother René, after obtaining his law degree, joined Vilgrain's CATC in Paris.

  In Strasbourg from 1921, and then in Antwerp from 1922 to 1926, Louis was close to a part of Europe which was prey to tumultuous political events. Alsace itself was a battleground of conflicting national identities, and a nursery for activists of one kind or another—Action Française worked hard to stimulate paranoia there, as elsewhere, during these years. Support for the Communist Party was strong, while hard by the occupied Rhineland was a running sore, scratched at by separatists, dissidents, the burgeoning Nazi Party and Germans generally.

  Tasmania

  In Italy, Mussolini and his Blackshirts marched on Rome in October 1922, one of the first signs of the rise of fascism in Europe. A year later Hitler was leader of the Nazi Party in Germany. France battled and failed to extract war reparations from Germany; as a result, in 1923 the French and Belgian armies invaded the Ruhr. Meanwhile, the Nazi Party had grown from a thousand members in 1920 to over fifty thousand by June 1923; that November Hitler was imprisoned after his failed Beer Hall Putsch in Munich, and Mein Kampf was published in 1925 and 1926.

  For intellectuals, artists, musicians and writers, Paris in the 1920s was to become a legendary hotbed of activity and incident, both political and artistic. These were les années folles, the years of Josephine Baker and Ulysses, of impoverished and drunken bohemians of genius living la vie en rose. Work took Louis Darquier away from this for most of the decade, but in his years in the wheat business the rebellious young war veteran nevertheless managed to become a perfect, if somewhat sinister, bounder of the Roaring Twenties.

  In Sydney and Melbourne, Myrtle was moving in a similar direction, albeit with Edwardian overtones. At some point in these years she abandoned her name, Myrtle Marian Ambrosine Jones, for her new persona of “Sandra Lindsay.” The “Sandra” she appropriated from the middle of her mother's name, Alexandrina; the Lindsay remains a mystery, although possibly she took it from the Australian poet so dear to Queen Victoria, Adam Lindsay Gordon. Everything about him and his poetry seems to fit the Tasmanian descendants of Britton Jones. He came from a branch of an old Scottish family, and his chief interest in life was horses. He was despatched to Australia for stealing one. There he fell into debt from gambling, drinking and over-borrowing, and shot himself at Brighton Beach in Melbourne in 1870. Not before he had become, however, the national poet of Australia, and its “laureate of the horse,” though his most famous lines have nothing equine about them. To this day, generations of Australians write rude versions of the lines for which he is best remembered:

  Life is mostly froth and bubble

  Two things stand like stone Kindness in another's trouble Courage in your own.10

  Everyone who met Myrtle, sober or otherwise, throughout her life as Sandra, described her as the kind of woman given to utterances of this kind.

  It is not difficult to imagine what a comfortable and churchgoing Launceston family thought of a daughter who went on the stage in Sydney in the 1920s. P. L. Travers, author of Mary Poppins, an Australian only a few years younger than Myrtle Jones, toured New South Wales as an actress and dancer in the 1920s: “It was a very shocking thing to do in those days.”11 By 1922 Myrtle had certainly done something to shock her parents. When Harry Jones made his will that year, it was almost entirely constructed to protect the errant Myrtle from the consequences of her follies. All the other children are swiftly and generously dealt with, but special arrangements are made for Myrtle: the threnody “other than my said daughter Myrtle Marian Ambrosine Jones” runs through her father's will like a fretful cry.

  Myrtle's escapades are kept hidden behind the net curtains of Launceston to this day, but Harry's will suggests what might have been the problem. The will is dated 17 July 1922. Three weeks later Myrtle's future husband, James Roy Workman, always known as Roy, sailed off on a steamer with his parents in a Gilbert and Sullivan touring company to perform in India and the Far East. Myrtle had met Roy before that, while he and his family were touring Australia. It seems likely that she sailed with them, and that this led to her father's new testamentary arrangements. Not that Myrtle was cut off without a penny: quite the opposite. While her family had money, she was provided with it for many years, but after July 1922 she alone of the Jones children was not permitted to touch her capital.

  Family descriptions of Myrtle's years on the mainland imply little professional activity. This seems to have been the case, because no mention of a Sandra Lindsay or Myrtle Jones surfaces in Australian theatrical archives. Myrtle lacked application, and she liked to gallivant. She was probably one of the Idas or Ivys, Ethels or Berthas, Minnies or Maudes so fetchingly exhibited in theatre programmes of the time, which in those days merely listed “13 in the chorus.” Audiences for musicals were phenomenal, for the 1920s were the years when the success of “Australia's Queen of Musical Comedy,” Gladys Moncrieff, in operettas such as The Maid of the Mountains, made her as famous in Australia as Nellie Melba. On the other hand, photographs Myrtle left behind suggest that she may have posed for saucy postcards—“Dark-eyed beauty in swimsuit revealing thighs and stocking tops and holding a Parasol” with captions such as “The Glad Eye,” “Lady Disdain” or “Miss Caprice.”

  By 1922, when the Workmans' theatrical entourage departed on tour, Australia, like Europe and America, had begun to froth with the spirit of the jazz age, its heroines very often being young persons like Myrtle, scallywag daughters of middle-class families. Short skirts and cigarettes, bobbed hair and bandaged bosoms were all the rage. Perhaps the personality and charm Myrtle added to her musical talent led her to try her hand at the piano in one of the numerous all-night dances of the time. If she did indeed race through “Let's Misbehave” and “Yes, We Have No Bananas”—not to mention ragtime, jazztime, swing—she remained a musical child of the 1890s, and her repertoire could easily have extended to performing as a maid or nymphet in a Gilbert and Sullivan opera.

  Roy Workman was the only child of a Belfast soprano, Bessel Adams, and C. H. Workman, the celebrated Savoyard and principal comedian of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company in London from 1898 to 1909. Charles Workman appeared in every Gilbert and Sullivan operetta except Ruddigore, playing Bunthorne in Patience, the Duke of Plaza Toro in The Gondoliers, Ko-Ko in The Mikado; but his greatest claim to fame was his Jack Point in The Yeomen of the Guard, a role which he established and made his own.13 He managed the Savoy Theatre in London for one unfortunate year from 1909, when he came to legal blows with W. S. Gilbert, having made the mistake of inserting a song of his own choice—“Oh Love, that Rulest in Our Land”—into a Gilbert libretto.14 They also quarrelled about leading ladies, and Gilbert banned Workman from performing his works in England.

  A Savoyard remittance family, the Workman ménage embarked in 1914 for Australia, where they spent many successful years touring the Savoy operas. Charles Workman was fêted throughout Australia for this, and for his Bumerli in The Chocolate Soldier. They loved him too as Ali Baba in Chu Chin Chow, famous for its onstage camels and horses and its Cobbler's Song. The Workmans worked for the great Australian impresario of the time, J. C. Williamson, and travelled with his D'Oyly Carte Gilbert and Sullivan touring companies, which did as much as the game of cricket to maintain affection within the British Empire. This alliance could have been of tremendous importance to Myrtle's theatrical aspirations had the Workmans survived their 1922 tour. Alas, Bessel Adams died of a heart attack in the Grand Hotel, Calcutta, in February 1923, and Charles died at sea off Hong Kong three months late
r. They left their underage son an orphan. Back in Sydney, three weeks before his twenty-first birthday, Myrtle married him.

  When Myrtle married Roy Workman at the office of Sydney's registrar general on 1 August 1923, both gave their address as Her Majesty's Hotel, Sydney, he giving his profession as actor, she as actress. Myrtle's inventions at this time were wide-ranging. She lied about her name, her age, and her parents—she called her father Harry Lindsay—and claimed to have been born in Weymouth, England, where her brother Will had convalesced during the First World War.15 But she could admit her marriage and a month after the event it was suitably announced in the Launceston Examiner.

  The only account we have of Myrtle in the years after her marriage comes from Louis Darquier, who told his younger brother in 1927 that “these two phenomenons [Roy and Myrtle] have been travelling for three and a half years! China, Japan, America, Honolulu: they have been everywhere …”16 If this was true—did Louis Darquier ever tell the truth about anything?—it could be that Myrtle and Roy joined a J. C. Williamson touring company (perhaps replacing his defunct parents) which left for the Far East at the end of 1923.

  Louis described Roy as “a kind of fool, charming I might add…He is twenty-six years old: he drinks like a lord and is completely impotent.” Myrtle's drinking, learned perhaps in her bohemian years in Sydney or perhaps during her four years with Roy—whom she later complimented for hitting her but “once,” and then “only when maddened by drink”17— was something henceforth never abandoned, but something she always struggled to hide.

  In France, by 1924, Louise Darquier was a happy woman. “Pierre is still working. Jean is a brilliant intern, Louis is going to set up another branch in Antwerp, and René has joined the same firm as Louis…”18 That January Louis went to Antwerp as one of two directors—he was Vilgrain's representative—to manage a new General Grain Company, a joint AngloFrench venture set up by Vilgrain and British firms with which he had been involved in the Australian wheat scandal. This began Louis Darquier's long involvement with England—he was paid in sterling, £1,500 a year plus percentages, about £53,000 today. A year later Vilgrain's partners were gone, the company was renamed the Grain Union Company, and it was said to handle “monetary operations and illegal transactions.”19