It was in the pages of a newspaper that Nancy Mitford learned the horrific truth about the man she had loved for more than a decade. The year was 1969, and the story was not about her. It was about Gaston Palewski, the French officer she had considered the love of her life, and his new bride, Henriette de Kerillis, a fellow aristocrat who had just divorced her husband. He had not even had the decency to inform Nancy.

She was left to read about his wedding like any other stranger, and to pretend once more, as she had so often done, that she did not care. She had been the darling of the bright young things running around London between the world wars. Beautiful, moneyed, and intelligent, Nancy looked like she had it all. But behind her perfect manners and her polite writing, her life and her family were going to shambles, and soon enough, the whole world would know about her troubles.

In early twentieth-century Britain, there were blue bloods, and then there was Nancy Mitford’s family. Her parents, David Mitford and Sydney Bowles, were well-to-do in the extreme, with David having descended from a line of barons who had been influential since the Norman invasion of 1066. When Nancy, their first child, was born on November 28th, 1904, the world was her oyster. Or so it looked from the outside.

Having grown up sheltered themselves, Nancy’s parents barely knew what to do with her. The Mitfords would go on to have an impressive seven children, and bratty little Nancy did not like the attention shifting off her. She was soon far from alone, with her brother Tom and sisters such as Diana, Unity, and Jessica. But the coming years brought a different kind of upheaval.

When World War I broke out, the family suffered a stunning change of fortune. Their uncle died on the front, and their grandfather died at home, turning Nancy’s own father into a baron. In November 1922, Nancy turned eighteen and had an official coming-out ball to introduce her to society at large. Half a year later, she had a formal presentation to King George V and his court.

That was how blue-blooded her family was. She met the King of England as a matter of course. But it did not take long for all this pomp and circumstance to turn to infamy. Nancy knew her worth, and she knew she did not want to hang around with the fusty, conservative men and women her father and mother approved of.

The minute she could, she began socializing with the infamous bright young things of London, a group of young aristocrats who certainly did not care about being good little boys and girls. Nancy was about to walk across the threshold into adulthood, and it was not a pretty crossing. With the bright young things, Nancy was soon caught up in a world of all-night costume parties, midnight scavenger hunts romping through the public transit systems, and lots of drinking. As Nancy said herself of this time in her life, “We hardly saw the light of day except at dawn.

” She met scads of suitors during this reveling, but her eye fell on very much the wrong ones. As she grew into a young woman, it became clear she had a romantic type: snobbish aesthetes who were more frivolous than serious. In 1928, Nancy met Hamish St. Clair Erskine, a man who ticked all her boxes.

As one friend described him, “Hamish was slight of build, well-dressed, always snobbish, and terribly conscious of his nobility. ” Nancy, needless to say, fell head over heels for the good-looking dandy, while her father had steam coming out of his ears. But when it came to Hamish, there were a host of other issues besides his taste in dress. Hamish was a tricky proposition even by Nancy’s not-great standards.

Not only was he four years younger than her, but he was immature for his age and, by most accounts, just not a stand-up guy. One commenter called him the most shimmering and narcissistic of men. Nancy’s own friends urged her to dump Hamish, dress better, and catch a better man. But that was just the beginning.

Hamish might have been self-absorbed, but there were worse incompatibilities. Chief among them: he was very certainly gay. It is possible Nancy never even realized where his proclivities lay, and she almost certainly never came to accept the truth. But Nancy’s lover was hiding an even bigger secret.

Incredibly enough, Nancy was not the first Mitford Hamish had dallied with. While he and Nancy’s brother Tom were at school at Eton together, they had a romantic relationship, a fact Nancy likely never found out. Still, none of this stopped Hamish from becoming formally engaged to Nancy. And no, it was not going to end well.

The next years of Nancy’s life were heartbreaking and dismal. Hamish did not, or rather could not, love her the way she loved him. And while she understood this on some level, she also clung to him like a life raft. It was in this state that Nancy brought the first, but far from the last, scandal to her family.

She had dabbled in writing here and there throughout her life, but in 1931 she published her first novel, Highland Fling, which contained thinly veiled characterizations of her friends and their raucous lifestyles, with Hamish appearing as Bobby Bobbin. The publication shocked her polite parents, who could not believe Nancy had aired aristocrats’ dirty laundry, especially when she did it under her own name. But if the Mitfords thought that was as bad as it was going to get, they were in for a very disturbing surprise. In 1932, just a year after Highland Fling came out, Nancy’s sister outdid her in infamy by a mile.

Diana, one of the middle sisters, had married Bryan Walter Guinness in 1929 and quickly had two young sons with him. They were one of high society’s power couples, until Diana abandoned her family to become the mistress of the also-married Sir Oswald Mosley, the leader of the nefarious British Union of Fascists. Here, Nancy made some questionable decisions. Most of the Mitfords censured Diana’s immorality in running away with a married man, though they were less concerned with her choice of lover or his disgusting politics.

Nancy took a different tack. Cementing a moderate peacekeeper role she would exhibit for the rest of her life, Nancy acted as a go-between for Diana, still visiting her and giving her family gossip. This was dangerous territory. For a short time, Nancy became interested in Mosley’s politics as well, though she quickly turned against them.

Besides, she had her own new disgrace to deal with. In the middle of her family’s disgrace, Nancy’s fiancé Hamish decided to twist the knife a little more. In a completely heartless move, he coolly informed her that they were done for good because he was now going to marry a banker’s daughter. Reeling from Hamish’s rejection, Nancy made a quick decision that turned into a fatal mistake.

She announced to her family that she was engaged to a man named Peter Rodd, the son of a politician. While some called Rodd a young man of boundless promise, others found him shifty and lazy. Once more, Nancy’s friends were not happy with her choice of partner, and they were about to get a whole lot unhappier. Nancy went through with the engagement and wed Peter Rodd in December 1933, and the wheels started falling off soon after.

Nancy’s bliss at finally being a married woman quickly gave way to the sneaking suspicion that her husband was, in fact, a dud. Then, as they slowly grew apart, the messy Mitford family dynamics rose again with a vengeance. Although Nancy’s sister Diana brought shame on the family by marrying a bigoted idiot, the other middle sister, Unity, really took it up another level. As the 1930s dawned, Unity became obsessed with the Third Reich and everything it stood for.

Nancy’s conservative parents were not doing much to stop their two girls. So Nancy, as usual, took it into her own hands. In 1934, she published another novel, Wigs on the Green, which lambasted Mosley and his ideology, and started another raging family feud. Diana resented her for it for years, but Unity was so upset she never reconciled with her again.

Not that this was anywhere near the end of the Mitford family drama. In 1937, the second-youngest Mitford daughter, Jessica, caused yet another scandal, this time in the complete opposite political direction to her older sisters. At the tender age of nineteen, Jessica eloped with her own cousin, Esmond Romilly, a card-carrying communist. Political discussions at the Mitford table must have been anything but boring.

Once more, Nancy did not have much energy to devote to her family drama because her personal life was falling apart again. By 1938, her marriage to Peter Rodd had gone from quietly depressing to fully disturbing. Rodd had been having an open-secret affair with the wife of his friend for nearly a year, all while resenting every waking minute Nancy was not with him and throwing him adoring glances. Nancy inexplicably still stayed.

And then the inevitable happened. Just as the weather turned warm in 1938, Nancy made a chilling discovery. She was pregnant with Peter Rodd’s child, and it looked like they were going to be miserably bound together for life. That September, after all her worrying over the child, Nancy suffered a miscarriage.

And that was just the beginning of her increasingly chaotic life. In September of 1939, the quiet country life the Mitfords once knew fell apart once and for all. With the onset of World War II, the various factions of the family self-destructed. While Nancy and her husband supported the Allies, it was not as easy for her siblings to be on the right side of history.

Her sister Diana, whom Nancy called a ruthless and shrewd egotist, had just gone from mistress to wife of Oswald Mosley, while her sister Unity was now close personal friends with the Führer himself. It was a pressure cooker, and it exploded. The very moment Great Britain declared war against Germany, a near-fatal crisis hit the Mitfords. Unity was so beside herself that her home country was attacking her spiritual homeland of Germany that she shot herself in the head while living in Munich.

Incredibly, she survived, though with the mental capacity of a ten-year-old child. Her family took care of her for the rest of her life. Meanwhile, Nancy spent the war helping Jewish families in the London Blitz and even reporting on her right-wing sisters to the government. In 1940, she experienced yet another miscarriage, followed by a cold abandonment.

Even as she was still convalescing, her husband Peter Rodd took leave to go serve overseas. He would spend the rest of World War II away from home. As Nancy recovered, she worked a humble job at a bookshop, hoping to reset her life and her habits. But then another whirlwind came and knocked her off her feet.

In 1942, she met a French officer, Gaston Palewski, a colonel in Charles de Gaulle’s inner circle. Mitford was instantly smitten in a way she had not been since Hamish St. Clair Erskine all those years ago. It felt like a new beginning.

But it was really the same old nightmare. Gaston Palewski was dashing, brave, and utterly fascinating to Nancy. But he was also carrying some serious red flags. His rampant and constant womanizing was so bad it had permanently hurt his chances at a successful political career, which, given that this was a Frenchman in the 1940s, probably meant he was doing a lot of womanizing.

Only that was the least of Nancy’s worries. Everyone is allowed to have a little fun now and then, and perhaps Palewski could be forgiven for wanting to gather rosebuds while he could in the midst of fighting in World War II. The real problem was that, as per usual, Nancy was far more in love with her beau than he was with her. She considered him the love of her life, while he, well, time would tell.

Nancy had a reputation to uphold in her snooty aristocratic circles, and she and Palewski had to keep their affair strictly hush-hush for more than half a year while they both lived in London. When Palewski left to serve in Algeria that coming May, they continued their tryst through correspondence that Nancy mostly kept alive and Palewski tolerated. Still, Nancy was virtually alone again and needed some distraction, but what she got was much more than she bargained for. The Mitford siblings were not the only ones tearing themselves apart during World War II.

Nancy’s parents were also coming apart at the seams. Her father, David, after dallying with more right-wing ideas, became staunchly anti-German and patriotic after the start of the conflict. Meanwhile, her mother, Sydney, decided to stand behind Diana, Unity, and their horrible obsessions. By 1943, the strain was too much and the couple separated.

The Mitfords, in one sense, were no more. Then came yet another blow. In 1945, Nancy got horrific news. Her brother Tom, like his sisters Diana and Unity, was staunchly pro-German.

Because of this, he had refused to fight in the Rhineland, but he did agree to fight for Britain against Imperial Japan. It did not go well. Tom died in action while serving in Burma just weeks before the end of World War II. The Mitfords had just lost their son and heir, but Nancy was about to lose even more.

With World War II wrapping up, Nancy published one of her most famous novels, The Pursuit of Love, partially inspired by her illicit relationship with Gaston Palewski. In a traumatized world, this little slice of warm British living energized the people, and the novel was a critical and financial success. But it also made the next phase of Nancy’s life incredibly awkward. In 1945, Nancy’s long-gone husband, Peter Rodd, returned at last from World War II for good, but he met a very different woman than the one he had left.

Nancy and Peter had to reach an uncomfortable truth. Their marriage was now over in all but name, and it was time to live separate lives. Without further ado, Nancy left England for good and moved to Paris, France. But her reasons were hardly liberating.

She was there, at least in large part, because of her lover, Gaston. Shortly after moving to Paris, she settled on the Left Bank, conveniently close to Palewski’s residence. To be fair to Nancy, these next years were likely some of the happiest of her life, but on paper, they were also the most pitiful. While in Paris, Nancy got busy writing, producing Love in a Cold Climate as a sequel to The Pursuit of Love.

It was another professional achievement, with her friends and critics all praising her work, but her personal life left much to be desired. Her whole downtime revolved around Gaston Palewski’s busy schedule. Unfortunately, he repaid her with betrayal. Palewski loved Nancy in his own way, but he did not think this meant he had to stop seeing other women.

By 1957, life threw another wrench into Nancy Mitford’s plans. Although she had gone to France partially for Palewski, his superiors soon stationed him in Italy. Their meetings now grew almost nonexistent as he busied himself with his job and she with hers. Indeed, he deigned to visit her only once a year.

The toll this took on Nancy was quiet but mighty. She tried to adopt a laissez-faire attitude about her dire romantic situation, pretending she did not really care if she saw Palewski or not. Her friends, however, saw right through this. Her teasing of them turned sharp and savage, even as Nancy refused to confess her woes.

In truth, it is not entirely fair to portray Nancy as a weak lover always waiting for Palewski’s call. In her two main novels about their relationship, The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, she uses him as a character and blatantly portrays him as a womanizer incapable of being faithful to his girlfriends. But Palewski, for his part, had one more surprise in store. Around the time Nancy was pining for him long distance, Palewski got together with Henriette de Kerillis, yet another blue-blood aristocrat.

But this was far more than a fling. Henriette was married, but she and Palewski engaged in a years-long affair that even produced a love child. And then, the love of Nancy’s life gave her a final parting insult. In 1969, Nancy read a bone-chilling piece of news in the paper.

Henriette had just divorced her husband, and she and Palewski were now married. He had not even had the decency to inform Nancy about his wedding, and she was stuck once more acting like she did not care. Meanwhile, her whole inner world was falling apart. Perhaps the grossest part: Palewski still did not entirely cut ties with Nancy, and kept stringing her along for the next half decade.

By the 1970s, Mitford was just sixty-eight but suffering from ill physical and mental health. Eventually, doctors diagnosed her with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a fatal diagnosis she took with the classic Mitford stiff and wry upper lip. As she wrote to one friend, “It’s very curious, dying, and would have many an amusing and charming side were it not for the pain. ” On June 30th, 1973, she passed in her home in France.

There is no denying the emotional turbulence Nancy Mitford endured throughout her life, but her true legacy was cemented through her literary success. Considering her chaotic love life, however, her passing contained one final storybook twist. Ironically enough, with the dedication he should have given her in life, Gaston Palewski was by her side at the very end.