The Duchess truly charmed us on her first solo trip
abroad, says Anne-Elisabeth Moutet
A member of staff shows the Duchess of Cornwall around the Louvre Museum Photo: AFP/GETTY
There was something delightfully pre-celebrity about the Duchess of Cornwall’s
visit to Paris last week. For one thing, most of us knew nothing about it.
Nice middle-aged English lady takes train; goes to charity shop; has a slice
or two of saucisson in the Boulevard Raspail street market; nips into Dior
to be shown fairy-tale size-zero dresses into which neither she nor any of
her entourage has a hope of fitting; takes in the Mona Lisa at the Louvre;
looks at horses; and rounds up proceedings with a drinks do at the British
Embassy and a cosy dinner with friends. This is firmly Don’t Tell Alfred
territory, belonging in those earlier times when France was a kind of sunny
hinterland for Mitford sisters of the not-enough-married (Nancy) or
too-married (Diana, Lady Mosley) variety.
Non-Royal reporters here in France (that’s everyone except Paris Match and Gala) remained in blissful oblivion of this event: the first solo visit by the future British Queen abroad. Camilla – we call her just “Camilla”, just as France Soir in its 1960s heyday chronicled the ups and downs of “Tony et Margaret” (Lord Snowdon and Princess Margaret) – hopped off her Eurostar at Gare du Nord with very little fracas, and with her pared-down entourage, went largely unremarked in the streets until she was called upon to perform.
She sent off a bike expedition for Help for Heroes from the grand courtyard of the Invalides, and made a short speech in excellent but accented French at the Communauté d’Emmaüs at Bougival, West Paris. Like her mother-in-law, although perhaps more approachably, she showed perfect, smiling courtesy throughout. But you could tell she really felt in her element with the Garde Républicaine horses, their riders, even their farriers. (How many Gardes Républicains does it take to shoe a horse? Three – one to hold the horse, one to hammer the red-hot shoe, one to speak to Camilla, carefully omitting that Napoleon is buried next door.)
The visit couldn’t have been better calibrated to French sensibilities. Emmaüs UK, the charity of which the Duchess is a patron, is a 1990s-created offshoot of perhaps France’s best-loved movement, founded in the immediate post-war years by a Catholic priest and former Resistance member from Lyon, Abbé Pierre, who relinquished his MP seat to take up the defence of the homeless in a country still scarred by the war and under rationing edicts. Until his death in 2007, Abbé Pierre regularly polled at the top of a list of France’s most-liked personalities. Emmaüs, which concentrates on giving the destitute a place to live and to work, is a kind of French Oxfam, with low overheads: no glittering fundraisers or expensive headquarters.
As the Duchess visited one of the Emmaüs thrift shops, the British ambassador, Sir Peter Ricketts, made a point of buying her a pretty, rectangular Cartier-lookalike watch, a snip at 10 euros. This was no Chinese fake, but bore the name of the defunct Lip watchmakers, France’s only would-be workers’ commune back in the 1970s. If intended, this was an elegant historical reference and a dream diplomatic gesture, appreciated by anyone in François Hollande’s Socialist government: a Lip watch bought at Emmaüs is worth 10,000 social- conscience cred points.
In short, in terms of easing the Duchess into her next big part, you could say the visit was a real low-key success. The French, like the rest of the world, had happily gone Diana-mad in the 1980s and 1990s. Following Charles and Diana’s state visit to Paris for this newspaper in 1988, I well recall the crowds, the press photographers in their dozens, the breathless segments opening the evening news. We got Diana at the Elysée with François Mitterrand, and Diana at the Hôtel de Ville with Mayor Chirac (a presidential hopeful at the time, he was very keen on the reflected glamour), and the reception at Versailles with former president Giscard d’Estaing (who would much later write a rather silly self-insertion roman à clef in which he had an affair with the princess). It was all about the bling.
Last week’s Paris trip was pretty much the exact opposite of that (no novels in the offing, I suspect), so much in fact that no one even thought of bringing up comparisons. Characteristically, when she posed in front of the Mona Lisa at the Louvre, the Duchess made sure that she wasn’t obscuring Leonardo’s picture on the photographs (“Can’t have that!”) – this wasn’t going to be a Taj Mahal photo-op.
When Sidney Toledano, the CEO of Dior – and the man who personally fired the most famous Briton in French fashion, John Galliano, two years ago – showed Camilla around the present-day ateliers and the New Look frocks of the Dior museum, nobody mentioned that Dior had named a handbag after Diana (her ubiquitous Lady D quilted bag). Instead, everyone made much of the Duchess’s charming second-hand raffia clutch, a novelty item with no pretensions to It-ness, embroidered with the word “Paris”.
Nor did French fashion writers make anything of her Anna Valentine outfits – although the online comments sections weren’t always as charitable: a floaty printed dress worn with a sharply-tailored mustard jacket passed muster; so did a classic Burberry trenchcoat; the dowdyish coat-dresses (“housecoats!”) didn’t.
This didn’t matter. In today’s depressed climate, France is nursing what feels like the mother of all Eurozone hangovers: right now, the nation can take neither overbearing First Girlfriends with a waspish line in tweets, nor size-zero princesses in 5in nude heels and look-at-me clothes. The French are notorious for being coldly, elegantly uncomfortable, but right now they are atypically amenable to a bit of cosiness – and Camilla looked cosy all right, especially as she didn’t really need a refashioned image in the first place.
We are tolerant of affaires de coeur. We never really held Charles’s infidelity against him to begin with. In fact, one of Gérard Depardieu’s best movies, Bertrand Blier’s award-winning Trop Belle Pour Toi (1989), described a rather similar set-up, with the Depardieu character neglecting his high-maintenance, beautiful wife, the former Bond girl Carole Bouquet, for the homely but warm Josiane Balasko. We gave it a slew of Césars (the French Oscars) and the Prix Spécial du Jury at Cannes.
With no monarchy in our own country, the French like kings and queens abroad. And while we require a great deal of majesty from our presidents – the Fifth Republic, after all, was tailored to Charles de Gaulle’s specifications; it’s one of François Hollande’s many political mistakes that he described himself as the “normal” president – we prefer, all things considered, the more relaxed type in neighbouring nations.
The one reigning French citizen is the Prince Consort of Denmark, Henri de Laborde de Monpezat, husband to Queen Margrethe, and for years the Danish royal couple have spent family holidays in South-West France with minimum fuss. The French see the Queen herself as a grandmother and an animal lover (yes, we do like animals: one of the longest-running television programmes here is a much-loved show on pets called 30 Millions d’Amis), as well as a kind of monument. An extraordinary constant over the years.
On present form, Camilla seems well placed to ease herself, almost by stealth, into solid monumenthood.
Non-Royal reporters here in France (that’s everyone except Paris Match and Gala) remained in blissful oblivion of this event: the first solo visit by the future British Queen abroad. Camilla – we call her just “Camilla”, just as France Soir in its 1960s heyday chronicled the ups and downs of “Tony et Margaret” (Lord Snowdon and Princess Margaret) – hopped off her Eurostar at Gare du Nord with very little fracas, and with her pared-down entourage, went largely unremarked in the streets until she was called upon to perform.
She sent off a bike expedition for Help for Heroes from the grand courtyard of the Invalides, and made a short speech in excellent but accented French at the Communauté d’Emmaüs at Bougival, West Paris. Like her mother-in-law, although perhaps more approachably, she showed perfect, smiling courtesy throughout. But you could tell she really felt in her element with the Garde Républicaine horses, their riders, even their farriers. (How many Gardes Républicains does it take to shoe a horse? Three – one to hold the horse, one to hammer the red-hot shoe, one to speak to Camilla, carefully omitting that Napoleon is buried next door.)
The visit couldn’t have been better calibrated to French sensibilities. Emmaüs UK, the charity of which the Duchess is a patron, is a 1990s-created offshoot of perhaps France’s best-loved movement, founded in the immediate post-war years by a Catholic priest and former Resistance member from Lyon, Abbé Pierre, who relinquished his MP seat to take up the defence of the homeless in a country still scarred by the war and under rationing edicts. Until his death in 2007, Abbé Pierre regularly polled at the top of a list of France’s most-liked personalities. Emmaüs, which concentrates on giving the destitute a place to live and to work, is a kind of French Oxfam, with low overheads: no glittering fundraisers or expensive headquarters.
As the Duchess visited one of the Emmaüs thrift shops, the British ambassador, Sir Peter Ricketts, made a point of buying her a pretty, rectangular Cartier-lookalike watch, a snip at 10 euros. This was no Chinese fake, but bore the name of the defunct Lip watchmakers, France’s only would-be workers’ commune back in the 1970s. If intended, this was an elegant historical reference and a dream diplomatic gesture, appreciated by anyone in François Hollande’s Socialist government: a Lip watch bought at Emmaüs is worth 10,000 social- conscience cred points.
In short, in terms of easing the Duchess into her next big part, you could say the visit was a real low-key success. The French, like the rest of the world, had happily gone Diana-mad in the 1980s and 1990s. Following Charles and Diana’s state visit to Paris for this newspaper in 1988, I well recall the crowds, the press photographers in their dozens, the breathless segments opening the evening news. We got Diana at the Elysée with François Mitterrand, and Diana at the Hôtel de Ville with Mayor Chirac (a presidential hopeful at the time, he was very keen on the reflected glamour), and the reception at Versailles with former president Giscard d’Estaing (who would much later write a rather silly self-insertion roman à clef in which he had an affair with the princess). It was all about the bling.
Last week’s Paris trip was pretty much the exact opposite of that (no novels in the offing, I suspect), so much in fact that no one even thought of bringing up comparisons. Characteristically, when she posed in front of the Mona Lisa at the Louvre, the Duchess made sure that she wasn’t obscuring Leonardo’s picture on the photographs (“Can’t have that!”) – this wasn’t going to be a Taj Mahal photo-op.
When Sidney Toledano, the CEO of Dior – and the man who personally fired the most famous Briton in French fashion, John Galliano, two years ago – showed Camilla around the present-day ateliers and the New Look frocks of the Dior museum, nobody mentioned that Dior had named a handbag after Diana (her ubiquitous Lady D quilted bag). Instead, everyone made much of the Duchess’s charming second-hand raffia clutch, a novelty item with no pretensions to It-ness, embroidered with the word “Paris”.
Nor did French fashion writers make anything of her Anna Valentine outfits – although the online comments sections weren’t always as charitable: a floaty printed dress worn with a sharply-tailored mustard jacket passed muster; so did a classic Burberry trenchcoat; the dowdyish coat-dresses (“housecoats!”) didn’t.
This didn’t matter. In today’s depressed climate, France is nursing what feels like the mother of all Eurozone hangovers: right now, the nation can take neither overbearing First Girlfriends with a waspish line in tweets, nor size-zero princesses in 5in nude heels and look-at-me clothes. The French are notorious for being coldly, elegantly uncomfortable, but right now they are atypically amenable to a bit of cosiness – and Camilla looked cosy all right, especially as she didn’t really need a refashioned image in the first place.
We are tolerant of affaires de coeur. We never really held Charles’s infidelity against him to begin with. In fact, one of Gérard Depardieu’s best movies, Bertrand Blier’s award-winning Trop Belle Pour Toi (1989), described a rather similar set-up, with the Depardieu character neglecting his high-maintenance, beautiful wife, the former Bond girl Carole Bouquet, for the homely but warm Josiane Balasko. We gave it a slew of Césars (the French Oscars) and the Prix Spécial du Jury at Cannes.
With no monarchy in our own country, the French like kings and queens abroad. And while we require a great deal of majesty from our presidents – the Fifth Republic, after all, was tailored to Charles de Gaulle’s specifications; it’s one of François Hollande’s many political mistakes that he described himself as the “normal” president – we prefer, all things considered, the more relaxed type in neighbouring nations.
The one reigning French citizen is the Prince Consort of Denmark, Henri de Laborde de Monpezat, husband to Queen Margrethe, and for years the Danish royal couple have spent family holidays in South-West France with minimum fuss. The French see the Queen herself as a grandmother and an animal lover (yes, we do like animals: one of the longest-running television programmes here is a much-loved show on pets called 30 Millions d’Amis), as well as a kind of monument. An extraordinary constant over the years.
On present form, Camilla seems well placed to ease herself, almost by stealth, into solid monumenthood.
