London. It was August the 15th, the day of the Feast of the Assumption celebrating the Mother Goddess’s feminine power of love, a feast day ignored by Anglican culture. We were expecting some friends at home, a Frenchman and an Italian diplomat and his family from Paris. My husband was slowly emerging from another of his recurring depressive bouts, those black dogs, as used to say Winston Churchill, who also suffered from this condition. I was about to go to the spa before doing some shopping for dinner, and kissed my husband good-bye. Standing on the doorstep, he watched me go to the car parked on the opposite side of the street. As I was driving away, I noticed a courier arriving on a bike all dressed in black, helmet included, and I saw him climb up the steps to speak to my husband. It was the last image that I would keep of him. A thought crossed my mind : The angel of death ! How sinister those people can look !
Two hours later I found my husband in a blood bath, sitting in the study. The house felt strangely quiet and empty… I would never know who was the courier and what he had delivered. With a recorded history of depressive illness, which went back a long time before our meeting together, suicide was the obvious answer. His depression had been the reason for the annulment of his first marriage by the Vatican, an essential step for a Knight of Malta in case of divorce. For Scotland Yard there could be no other explanation. At the inquest the coroner summed up the case in a few minutes, the medical file at the Westminster Hospital had strangely being mislaid…
It is not necessary to pull the trigger to kill a man. One can submit him to what Dostoïevski describes in his writing, and what the pedagogue Maria Montessori calls : The insolent violation of the soul. My husband was a loving sensitive man, the eldest of five children as I am. As a child he had been psychogically abused by a cold, selfish, frivolous mother, and a sadistic father. It was a chosen ground for any future manipulation at the hands of the Secret Services. I had suffered a similar fate under my mother’s cruel rule, encouraged by my father’s weakness and inertia. But unlike my husband, I had enjoyed the love of my paternal grandmother, and at her death that of a German Jewish artist friend who gave me a second family. Their love and protection had saved me from the despair of the unloved.
When I met him he was my father’s age, a man of the world, attractive, athletic, with the physique of John Kennedy. But I saw in his clear blue eyes the sorrow of a little boy in tears. My heart opened to him at once. At that very instant I left behind the relationship I had with a London barrister, who was to become the youngest QC and be raised to the House of Lords for services rendered to the Thatcher government. I had met him with some common friends while teaching French, and perfecting my English in a Sussex convent at Mayfield. I used to spend week-ends and holidays at their house in the Test Valley given by Edward VII to his mistress Lily Langtry. My hostess’s family had lived in Beirut for a while. She became the instrument of my destiny when she gave to their lawyer friend Khalil Gibran’s book The Prophet. Poetry mattered little to him although we shared a common interest in music and theatre. So he gave me the volume of the Lebanese poet. Together with the study of the art and civilisation of Ancient Egypt at the École du Louvre, that book sparked off love at the first meeting with my future husband. As a child I had discovered the lure of the Middle-East, a charmed world filled with magic and wonders, when reading in my grand-father’s library an illustrated volume of Torquato Tasso’s poem Jerusalem delivered.
After my stay in England, I had begun studying art history at the École du Louvre in Paris, while working as a bilingual receptionist for the American bank Morgan Guaranty Trust to pay my studies. I knew that I had met a sister soul when fate led me to meet this English arabist - a sort of Lawrence of Arabia - who mastered classical Arabic as well as the dialects. He had lived in Jerusalem, Cairo and Beirut, and knew intimately the Near and Middle-East. That first encounter established between us a dialogue which lasted throughout our life together. He was a distinguished linguist in French and in Italian as well as in Arabic, and could hold his own in German and Spanish. Both of us had been raised in the monastic tradition. His paternal grand-father had converted to Catholicism at Oxford under the influence of Cardinal Newman. He had then married an Italian aristocrat, the last descndant of a long line of courtiers at the service of the Royal House of Savoy. We both had the same religious faith, the same mysticism, the same interest for esoterism born from our love of the Orient. He was also a poet, the night of our first meeting he gave me a copy of his poems and a miniature Koran. We shared a common passion for European literature, history, the comparative religions, philosophy, as well as the love of nature, of hospitality, of parties and dancing. Above all the same sense of humour and subtle irony united us in symbiosis. We had both been deprived of love by our respective families. We were now like two children in awe in front of the grace they were given. And we began life together, hand in hand, rich of our mutual love, rich of our enthusiasm, of our sense of fun and wonder in front of life. This is the only real and lasting youth of heart and spirit.
The age difference never mattered to me. As a sportsman, his imposing bearing made him look much younger than his age, which I only discovered on our wedding day. At the beginning of my life I was looking for knowledge as well as for love, and all my friends were older than me. Feminine companionship guided me on my path, initiating and spiritual mother figures. I needed a father who could teach me the world. He became my mentor and opened for me the doors of his own world, a world ruled by the conventions and rituals of another century. I had to subdue my intense and passionate youth, my French education, my artistic and extatic nature, to fit into the straightjacket of the social conventions of a foreign world. I did it with the enthusiasm of discovery, and with all the love I had for him, wanting to please him and to make him proud. Then as experience grew, I did it with a sense of duty, and eventually with mastery as his illness forced me to assume the role of mother together with those of friend, lover and wife.
I had worked with him from the outset. My presence and support were a prerequiste to his balance, as much as to his happiness. Marriage for me is only conceivable as a partnership between equals, dedicated to a common cause. When his mother’s cancer triggered off again his depression, I automatically took charge of our life. I was not yet thirty years old, and there I was in a foreign country looking after two sick older persons, and as the wife of the head of the family, I was handling not only my husband’s affairs, but those of his mother dealt by the Queen’s lawyers.
Our marriage idyllic time was over, it had lasted five years. Another cycle was beginning, punctuated by relapses, stays in psychiatric hospital, and convalescence, needed as much for me as for him. This cycle would only end with the unavoidable issue that doctors had warned me. I knew that I had to take my life in hand again. My husband had refused me the child I had wanted in our time of happiness. Now I took up again in earnest the study of art history, which I had pursued as a hobby since our marriage. It had to become a career. I learnt to lead parallel lives. Our life as a couple functioned in cycles. The happiness which had bound us together still exercised its magic in good days. Then we became again the wondering children of the first moment. In somber days I would take control, and protect him from the inquisitive and malevolent instrusion of the world and of his family, who took advantage of his illness to manipulate him. As I stood up to them and their machiavellian machinations, they tried to eliminate me. I became like and actor on a stage, assuming various parts hour by hour, day by day. To these different roles was added that of the art historian and lecturer which enabled me in time to support him financially. I had to give up the ambition of pursuing further studies at the Warburg Institute, as my tutor had advised me. After receiving a commission to write a book on France in English, I started lecturing, and shortly after I became the director of an art history course at Sotheby’s.
Despite the fatigue, the loneliness and the despair, the chronic lack of money, despite his erratic behaviour towards me at time, I could never bring myself to leave him. Watching his torment was tearing me apart. Yet I knew that if I ran away from this ordeal, as I often felt like doing, I would be forever running away from my fate’s duties and responsibilities. One does not abandon a comrade in arms on the battlefield. At the outset of his first depression, I had found myself alone and distraught when his family refused help. I had then asked God to send me counsel. It came in a dream as is often the case for me, and I went back to a former lifetime with the man who was now my husband. The dream threw light on our present painful circumstances, in it I was told : You must go on loving.
I went on loving until the very end, and beyond. On this fatal Assumption Day when I caught a glimpse of him sitting on the sofa behind the door of the study, I understood that the horror I had so long feared had come to pass. I did not go into the room, the sight would have struck me with madness. I called Scotland Yard from the drawing-room, and awaited their arrival sitting on the doorstep. There I sat, stunned and ice-cold despite the August heat. From the first I felt that his action was an act of love. As a gentleman and an officer, he had died with honour and dignity, as it was only possible for him to do. He was freeing me for another life, and bringing me in death a protection he could no longer give me in life. I went on loving him. Despite the terrible shock, the immense sorrow, the torment of his absence, I went on loving. I would go on loving throughout all the ordeals I would have to face in the coming days, weeks, months and years. Despiste il all, I would always go on loving.
This loyalty to the devotion between us was my strength and my guiding star. In remaining faithful to it, I have remained faithful to myself and my ideals. As a beloved daughter, I have also stood up for his own ideals, carrying the torch of his spiritual heritage. Various pressions gathered as soon as his death was known. Friends, colleagues and acquaintances rushed to offer support. Some were sincere, others not so as I would discover. I became the centre of an attention which I was unable to cope with, laden as I was with grief, with the obligations entailed by the unavoidable formalities, and with the constant fight against his family. His death had brought to the fore their naked greed and predatory malevolence. Although I felt around me hidden threats and scheming plots, the circumstances of my life did not allow me to consider them. Having had to cope alone with my huband’s illness for years now, I had learnt to ward off strokes of bad luck one by one, day by day, without wondering too much about them. I felt myself like Sisyphus pushing up the mountain a heavy rock which endlessly fell back. But I never lost sight of the summit. And thus passed the time to settle my husband’s affairs, to regain an inner balance, to create with my own institute a network of integrity and excellence. Men were milling around me offering me new paths, and a security which I knew could only be illusory. Instead I chose writing after an initiatic journey to India. Two years went by in study, and the writing of a reference book on cabinetmaking. All the while I was discreetly getting ready to leave London. I negotiated the leasehold of the house built by my husband’s ancestor, the famous architect Thomas Cubitt, friend of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. In that house I had met my husband, I had known happiness and tragedy. The last bills were paid, outstanding debts were reimbursed. Leaving my London life behind I was ready to take on a new path when the heavens crashed down on me.
All the intrigues and shadowy schemings born out of envy, jealousy and desire were suddenly brought to a climax of evil doing. My legitimate wish to make a new start, the choice I had made to deal with my husband’s affairs honorably, the success that the publishing of my book had brought me, all this was fodder for my enemies’s malevolence. A storm made of lies, duplicity, betrayals broke out. Its huge scale was only revealed to me when I arrived in Rome. My family-in-law was spreading rumours about some jewels I had to sell to cover my husband’s funeral expenses. To save money, the family matriarch - a paternal aunt who hated him - had refused access to the family vault, his own property as head of the family. In an ultimate act of rejection she ordered an incineration, despite my horrified protests, and had his ashes scattered. Two months later I organized against her will and my brother-in-laws, a commemorative mass in the church where he had been baptized, and where we had been married. Alongside their vendetta now unleashed, some of my Sotheby’s colleagues had gone to Thames & Hudson, my publishers, spreading diffamatory rumours to destroy my good name and tarnish my reputation. The famous publishing house did not inform me, nor offered any support. They kept me in ignorance of what was the talk of the whole of London, and delivered me defenceless to the hatred of my enemies. Unbeknown to me the Secret Services’ dark shadow was already spreading over my life. I was becoming an unwitting pawn in their shady and dangerous games. None of my so-called best friends had the generosity of heart to warn me of the impending danger. Longing for reflected glory, they all entered into the sadistic and hypocritical game, which flattered them with a sense of illusory power. The only person who stood by me was Crista von Richthofen, the wife of the German ambassador. She had attended my lectures on French furniture at the Victoria & Albert Museum, and before leaving London she invited me at their farewell lunch at the embassy, asking her husband to pay me a public tribute in front of the Head of Protocol at the Foreign Office and an assembly of ambassadors. I did not understand the meaning of her gesture putting it to courtesy and kindness of heart. I was by then too exhausted by years of ceaseless work, constant anxiety, repeated emotional shocks, and by the endless battle against my family-in-law’s cupidity and hatred. I could not cope any longer, and all my energy and attention were directed to survival. I tried to regain my physical and mental energy under the Italian sunshine, the climate and the people of Italy have always been beneficial to me. On the artistic level I wanted to undertake there a Warburgian research at the classical roots of European culture. On the philosophical one I wanted to explore the various means and ways of power. My complex and difficult marriage had not allowed me the leisure for that intellectual pursuit.
Some time before my husband’s death, a distant Italian cousin had been in touch and invited us to stay with him and his wife at their house in the Veneto and at Porto Ercole. They had given me support after his death, and one of their friend, a Milanese aristocrat and his family had become very close to me. I used to spend the summer holidays in their villa at Capalbio. My husband’s Italian heritage was a taboo in his family. His father was born in Florence but he had disowned his origins and renounced his name and title during the Second World War after the alliance between Hitler and Mussolini. Being Catholic the family already bore the papist stigmata. Now it had to contend with the social ostracism of being branded England’s enemies, despite their social position, and their rank at the Court of St. James’s. They never managed to live down the disgrace, and always wanted to appear more British than the British themselves. My husband, who was close to his paternal grandparents, was the only one to speak Italian. Few months after being married, his father having died earlier, he took up again the family name and title, his legitimate right, to the great displeasure and opposition of his family. The happiness and stability he had found in marriage had given him the strength and the courage to fully assume his double origin, source until then of so much renunciation, suffering and humiliation.
He had become the youngest British officer during the war, and remained so for several months after leaving the Benedictine public-school of Ampleforth in Yorskshire, where he was educated. He had enrolled in the prestigious Rifle Brigade regiment and became a captain. The Military Intelligence Services had recruited him because of his Italian background and his linguistic gifts. Having served in the Western Desert and in Greece, he was captured and spent more than two years in the prisoners of war camp of Brunswick. Liberated by the American army, he came back to England sick and nearly starved to death. As a welcome he discovered that during his absence his father had sold his rightful heritage as the eldest son.The family estate in Kent, and on the Italian Riviera at Bordighera, had both disappeared. Europe had been torn apart by the war which he had fought, now his own life was in ruins. He never got over it. He then became Sir Desmond Morton’s aide de camp in Cairo, and spent one year in Jerusalem studying Arabic at the Middle Centre for Arabic Studies MECAS, a school created in 1944 to train British officers and diplomats as arabist. Directed by Sir Bertram Thomas, who became his mentor, it became known as The spy school, and was eventually transferred to Beirut. MECAS settled in Surrey after the start of the war in Lebanon. My husband remained with MI6 when appointed public relations officer by Irak Petroleum Company IPC, to become in due course BP. He worked for them in London, Rome and Beirut, before yielding to family pressures when he was tranferred to Kirkuk and wanted to marry a Lebanese girl. He then resigned and came back to England where he only met with bad luck, misfortune and disappointment. Leaving Lebanon marked the beginning of his decline. He had wanted to become a bridge between East and West, and the Middle East had become his true spiritual country.
He was a saddened and solitary figure when I met him in London, after his divorce he had been scorned and ostracised by his family and some members of his social circle. He suffered greatly from so many losses, and was haunted by the sense of having failed to his dream as an arabist. His acrimonious divorce had wounded him deeply. His family had betrayed him to support his wife, a rich heiress, who had been keen to get married. She had become vindictive and tried to blacken his name and reputation in writing vile denunciatory letters to all his friends and London clubs. She would never forgive him, nor stop intriguing. She carried on her hate campaign after they had both remarried, trying to harm us both. The unconditional love I brought him gave him back his pride, his self-esteem and joie-de vivre. I cured him momentarily from his lingering depression. Tu as reposé mon cœur, You have rested my heart, he told me in French. With me he found the stability and happiness he had always longed for, and which until then had eluded him. I used to tease him : Your family stopped you marrying a Lebanese, you have done worse, you have married a Frenchwoman ! He wanted to make a new start and I brought him back with his work to the Midlle East.
He never spoke of his involvement with MI6. I was too busy learning about my new life and in due course assuming heavy responsibilities to concern myself with such matters. He certainly did not tell me all about his activités, nor about his heavy past. But I never saw any financial reward coming from that source. In any case his long history of mental instability and pyschiatric illness was for me sufficient to prove the impossibility for him to play an active role any longer in the Intelligence Services. It was therefore with shock and amazement that I became aware in Rome of the Secret Services’ thorough invasion of my privacy. Unbeknown to me they had been acting against me in London, and now in Italy, spreading rumours and mounting a campaign of disinformation aimed to destroy my personal and professional reputation. I could not fathom such hatred. With disbelief I reeled under the blow. Why go to such length and mount an operation of such magnitude against me ? Why was I so important in some people’s eyes ? What threat did I represent for them to wish to scare and destroy me ? All aspects of my life had been contaminated. An insidious poison had been distilled to destabilize and neutralize me through the use of calumny, slander, threat and fear. A desert was created around me, my life was being purposedly and systematically destroyed, and I had no means to known why and to protect myself. Italian cousins and friends who were contacted turned away from me. I had wanted to make a new start, I found myself isolated, alone and without support.
I felt helplessness, fear, panic, then a violent anger took hold of me. For many years it remained my driving force. Meanwhile I did not know who to trust any longer. With rage and despair in my heart, I force myself to confront systematically, one by one, all those who called themselves friends and could have been involved in this shameful plot. For the sake of justice I always give people who have offended me three chances to repent. I went back to my brother-in-law’s on the occasion of my niece’s wedding, to add insult to injury, he tried to rape me. I was brokenhearted and spent the night weepîng, having secured my bedroom door with a heavy chest-of-drawers. The worse part was that the character assassination campaign had been very sucessful. It soon became impossible for me to earn a living. In all I undertook an occult influence made it collapse. It was felt in London, in Rome, in Beirut, and even in Paris when I came back to France…I clung tenaciously to the love which had once been mine, and to the integrity of feeling we had shared in our mariage. The memory of happier days gave me the strength to carry on my way, I would allow neither anger nor hatred to destroy what I treasured most. I felt that despite it all I was not alone but that the presence of loved ones protected and guided me. God had sent me many trials after my husband’s suicide. Many dear friends and former tutors had passed away leaving me bereft. But they all accompanied me now on my Via Dolorosa, together with my husband, my grandmother and my German Jewish artist friend who had died from a rampant cancer a month after my husband. One morning before leaving London for Rome, I had woken up with tears streaming down my face, a dull ache in my chest, hearing myself say the words : My heart is broken. Despite all my enthusiasm and love of life I wanted to die and find my beloved ones again. Without their presence and their affection, life seemed aimless, empty, dull and mediocre.
I had to fight against a fathomless sense of loss, an immeasurable sorrow at the time I was been attacked and aggressed from all directions. Slowly I detached myself from the world, although outwardly I betrayed nothing and attended cultural and diplomatic receptions in Rome, always lively and elegant. I clung to my work. The research I undertook on Mario Praz, a Roman linguist anglophile, author and collector, had opened all doors for me in the Eternal City. But I was taking a new distance with all, and I would no longer lower my guard. Although I was seeing many diffferent men platonically, I did not allow any of them to come close to me. I was unable to trust or to open my heart freely to anyone since I had realized the scope of the Secret Services’ evil influence on my life, which a disastrous relationship with a manipulative and sadistic Italian diplomat had revealed. I lived in a parallel world, communicating with others without revealing nothing. It was a feat to be repeated daily. Anger and the lack of security were the goad spurring me forward. I would not give up. I would not submit to degrading circumstances. I would not give my enemies the pleasure of reducing me to mediocrity, and destroying me. Despite it all I would go on loving, not hating as they did, and I would go forward on my chosen path of life.
I have felt since childhood the sense of a destiny, of a special mission to fulfill. I had spoken to my husband about it. He too was an idealist, he had understood, and for that reason I had consented to marry him. We had a pact between us, we had agreed to help and support each other. Some time before passing away he had told me : I know the kind of woman you are going to be. You have something I don’t have. You will do great things. The sense of a mission has kept me alive when my life was falling apart. I looked for it anxiously for years. It was an inner quest which eventually became a life path. It proved to be my salvation. With that quest in mind I was assuming my destiny as and artist and as a poet. It led me to strange countries and unexcpected cul-de-sacs, I journeyed alongside bottomless pits. But the inner tension it created was the Ariadne thread which guided me through the labyrinth of earthly life, made of illusions. Following it I went beyond the mirror and acquired Knowledge. Love had been my guide, I now conceived it as one and multiple, always the same but with many different forms, whether it be Agape, Caritas, Eros, or Anteros, the forgotten twin of the little Greek god of love. The sublimated double of love, the inspirer of artistic, poetic and lyric creation became my life companion. With him I still lived the best of past love, but purified and ennobled it became poetry.
Once more the Middle East was the catalyst. The Iraqi war was threatening, Tony Blair was holding imflammatory and deceitful speeches in front of Parlement, sounding the call to arms. I was then in London staying in a convent. One night the figure of a man appeared on the television screen. From the rostrum of the United Nations he galvanized all. His fiery words shining with fairness and intelligence, his conviction and charisma much impressed me. I found in his message and in its obvious authority, the echo of my husband’s dreams and ideals. I wrote a letter to Président Chirac to tell him how proud I was to be French. For the first time in my life I supported a miliitant political action in joining in Hyde Park the thousands demonstrators against an illegal war. There on the platform between George Galloway and Tariq Ali, stood Ben Bella shouting : Vive Chirac, vive la France !
I knew nothing about French politics, I then discovered Dominique de Villepin as a statesman. A visit to the French Institute in Kensignton revealed him to be a poet. In the desire of acquiring knowledge and widsom, I had been trying for years to write an autobiographical account of my life. I had started it in English in Florence and pursued it in Rome. But I could never go beyond the first encounter with my husband. I put it aside, carrying on with other work and research. As usual the scope of my reading encompassed many interests, I allowed them to guide me towards unexplored realms. It was thus with Marcel Proust À la recherche du temps perdu. If I had studied the works of the philosopher Henri Bergson in philosophy classes and knew his conception of time, I had acquainted myself with Proust’s writings later on. I soon gave it up, feeling that time was not yet ripe for me. Now I was reading his books avidly seeing in his writings a reflection of my own intense sensibility, and of my French heritage. Unknowingly I was looking for a moment of grace, and the volume of Dominique de Villepin L’Éloge des Voleurs de Feu became the medium for this catharsis.For more that four weeks, day and night, words flowed out of me in French and in English, an impetuous torrent too long contained and controlled. Inffused with a daemonic force and energy, they wrote themselves on the page without punctuation. I was entranced, possessed by the creative fire he had so well understood and described. I wrote a poem for him Le Poète, which I sent, asking him to sign my volume of the Voleurs de Feu. Back in Paris I became one of the first members of the Club Villepin, and canvassed on his behalf in his political movement République Solidaire during the 2012 presidential campaign.
I had felt for some time the need to return to my native country. When my husband had inherited from his mother, I had asked him to buy a house in France where we could spend our holidays. But he had refused, preferring to keep the English aristocratic seasonal leisure rythm of shooting in winter, and fly fishing in summer. He invested his inheritance in the Middle East where some crooks took advantage of his gullibility during a depressive bout. He lost everything, and my dream of a home in France disappeared. I could not rely either on my own family. At my majority I had shaken off the shackles of my mother’s tyranny, and taken my destiny in hands. She had cursed me, and instilling in them the venom of jalousy and hatred, she alienated me from my younger brothers and sisters, whom I had loved and looked after as children. My husband and I had visited them on several occasions, but nothing can grow or be built in such conditions. Even though, as a widow, and harassed by the Secret Services, I had gone to them for help and protection. At the third humiliating rebuff, I decided that the outrage had to stop, and broke off all relationship with my kin in sending them a letter written in blood and tears.
I was alone and I was starting all over again in a country I no longer knew. I had to face that hard truth when I found myself without a roof during a week-end : the flat of a colleague met at the Warburg Instute could no longer welcome me. Having wandered for two nights in the streets of Paris, I sought refuge at the Casualty department of the Pompidou hospital, on the advice of the superintendant of the police station in the 7ème arrondissement. I then knew I had to ask the Social Services for help. I did not even entertain the idea of contacting certain people, I had no wish to submit myself to dishonourable conditions. Neither did I wish to have to explain a situation I still found difficult to fathom, and which should have never happened in the first place. I gritted my teeth, and leaving my fate in God’s Hands, as I had so often done, I trusted in my destiny. A stroke of luck came in the shape of a West Indian social worker at the Town Hall of the 7ème arrondissement, who took my case in hand. She inserted me again into the French administrative system, obtaining grants and support for me. Through her, an association offered me a job looking after sick and old people. Despite the heavy physical and pyschological workload I accepted with gratitude. The money I earned enabled me to rent a small flatlet, albeit at an exhorbitant rate, from landlords suspected of proxenetism by the authorities ! Having moved to another flat in the same street, I fell this tome in the hands of a shady lawyer, landlord of an insalubrious building, and I had to alert the Authorities and the Préfecture de Police. I was a foreigner in my own country, and I had to walk the tough and lonely road of insecurity.
My lucky star, and the legion of guardian angels who walk with me in life, protected me from more serious dangers. Besides having to earn a living, my priority was to write my life story. For more than two years I lived like a nun in cell-like minute flats. I was totally absorbed by the creative act, which I wanted to be altruistic and didactic. I went back in time, and contacted some people in England, France and Italy, in order to throw light on some still obscure aspects of my past life. In the process light emerged slowly as I was putting all I had learnt throughout the years to the service of Knowledge. Know thyself and thou shalt know the secret of the gods, the Socratic formula was inscribed on the pediment of Apollo’s temple at Delphi. To be able to create art I had gone beyond pain and sorrow, beyond fear and loneliness. I remembered my first night spent without a roof in London. I could not settle my bill until the morning, so I had to wait to gain access to my room and luggage. I made it the Ariadne thread of my tale. In the manner of James Joyce’s Ulysses in Dublin, I had wandered in the London streets in a Proustian search of the past. At a certain time, I had resisted the temptation of unmasking my enemies in the British press. Despite my difficult circumstances I did not want to become just another social scandal, a topic fit for the tabloids, which would end up as next day wrapping paper around the national gastronomic treat of fish and chips ! I respected myself and my life too highly, its integrity would have been sullied. As a teenager, like Oscar Wilde, I had dreamt of making of my life a work of art. I had waited for the opportune moment, making a friend of time. Now I got down to it with method and determination. The love that was in me, that I had received and given, that love was still my talisman. It spurred me on and gave me wings. The third and last night I had to face without a roof in Paris, in similar circumstances of having to wait for the morning to settle my bill, was a warm April night fragrant with the scent of acacias in bloom. I spent it sitting on the Place d’Italie, singing to the full moon Alfred de Musset’s poem, the Ballade à la lune. I had risen to fate’s challenges, no one and nothing could ever destroy my ideals of love and beauty, my profound sense of justice. I was on my way. Omnia vincit amor !
The creation of a work of art requires the absolute necessity of a pre-ordained formal order allied to symmetry, even if invisible, and to an inherent harmony. If not the created work can only be the mediocre expression of a self-indulgent egocentric act, an imposture. It is thus with the artist’s and poet’s life. It does not in any way resembles the common life but is ruled by the secret laws of necessity, of Fatum. It is lived, as a dancer told me recently inconstant stress and anxiety. The untimely instrusion of the British Secret Services in my life had doubled up the difficulties inherent to my fate. But it had by no means prevented me to act in order to accomplish it. I have always refused to see myself as a victim, one of the scourges of modernity. Instead I have always wanted to assume fully the creative power of feminine love, the Indian Shakti energy, and to be an active and creative life force.
In July 2010 the outrage I had felt at the death of a young Gypsy killed by the French police in Saint-Aignan-sur-Cher, and the subsequent inflammatory speech of Président Sarkozy at Grenoble, had led me to write a poem Lamentation sur la mort de Luigi, Hommage au grand Django Reinhardt, Lament on the death of Luigi. Homage to the great Django Reindhart. In September 2010 I chaired a debate at the Café de Flore on Poetry and Politics to which I invited the Sinti poet, Alexandre Romanès. In order to have the jazz Manouche recognized by UNESCO as Mankind Intangible Heritage, I initiated a research on the influence of Romani culture on Western Europe. This study has given rise to a film proposal, and led to a lecture on Romani art at the Institut National des Langues Orientales à Paris INALCO in Novembre 2012. The plan for an exhibition of Romani art followed, in collaboration with the Manouche artist Gérard Gartner. He had taken part in the Première Mondiale de l’Art Tzigane, the first exhibition of Gypsy art held in 1985 at La Conciergerie under the patronage de Jack Lang, then Minister of Culture. The creation of a Romani cultural centre in Seine-Saint-Denis is also being planned. So far my work has been unpaid, I have been getting into debts to be able to go forward. But money is not everything. In time I will reemburse all outstanding debts, as I did before leaving London. Beside which, the moral debt has to be the responsibility of the British Secret Services, and of those in England who used their power to persecute me in the past. As always I bring with me on my lonely path those who are deprived of love, whose hearts are heavy with sadness and unfulfilled dreams. We are all bound to each other in humanity and solidarity. The quality of our lives depends of the quality of the ties which bind us to the others. And if blood ties can be fortuitous, it is not so with the bonds of the heart and of the spirit.
I had met Stéphane Hessel in 2009 through a common friend. On the 1st of January 2011 he dedicated his famous manifesto Indignez vous, Time for Outrage to me : May Monique Riccardi-Cubitt,moving poetess and precious defenderess of all essential causes, find here the expression of my solidarity. He died on the 27th February 2013, his wife answered my letter of condolences : You and Stéphane shared the same interests, poetry, the Roma people, the Palestinians. I met Jack Lang through him, now Chairman of the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, he brings support to my cultural projects. Besides my arabist husband, Stéphane Hessel has been for me a spiritual father, a guide and a mentor. I feel myself the heir to their common fights and values. I too am a link in a long chain, carrying on the torch they have made shine. In doing so I am closing the circle of my destiny, which started in Paris before my marriage. The necessary symmetry for the creation of a work of art has been realized, I can now go forward in life rich of acquired Knowledge. The power of Love is stronger than the power of Evil, real power belongs to he who can master himself and his passions. Beyond the vagaries of time, Love triumphs of all adversity. Omnia vincit amor !
MONIQUE RICCARDI-CUBITT
Paris, on Assumption Day, the 15th of August 2013