Also at Bayreuth that month were two English sisters, Unity and Diana Mitford, there at the personal invitation of Hitler. As soon as they arrived the girls were presented with two bouquets, one from Herr Wagner, the composer’s grandson, and one from the Mayor of Munich. On 2 August, the final day of the festival, Hitler invited them for lunch and Diana remembered him remarking that, as England seemed determined on war, it was now inevitable.
But an inability to face reality was not exclusively the preserve of the fashionable and wealthy. The writer Colette may have been at the height of her fame in the late 1930s but she was famously indifferent to politics throughout her life. By 1935, aged sixty-two, despite being married to a Jewish journalist, Maurice Goudeket, she still did not wield her pen to warn of the dangers of Hitler’s policies in Germany or of the failure of the Popular Front government and the rise of the far right in France. She was constantly writing – mostly novellas at this stage of her career – and also, in the first weeks of the war, giving broadcasts to Americans about the atmosphere in Paris which involved her travelling across the city in the early hours of the morning, often in a state of déshabillée. The two major pieces of journalism that stirred her in 1939 were both about unhinged murderers: one a toothless woman brothel-keeper in Morocco who tortured and killed her child prostitutes, believing that females had no value; the other, a man with many aliases who gruesomely murdered no fewer than five people, seemingly at random, for small amounts of money. The latter, Eugen Weidmann, was to become notorious as the last person guillotined in public in France, although the guillotine, that peculiarly French invention, would still be used during the war. Colette, appointed special reporter for Paris-Soir during the trial, devoted much time and thought to the brilliant investigative essay she wrote on Weidmann’s spiritual capacity for truth. Why did she not find it equally interesting to study the rabble-rousing tyrant from Munich about to unleash mass murder? Was it because, in Colette’s worldview, war and politics were the follies of men? The female self, struggling with the pain and ties of love, remained her natural subject until war affected her personally. Only then did she become engaged. Perhaps more remarkable, as the New Yorker correspondent Janet Flanner wrote at the time, was that in 1939, even as France stood on the brink of war with Germany, ‘Weidmann’s being a German was not considered an additional crime.’
Today, observing these events with the advantage of hindsight, one can only marvel at the blind sense of unreality shown by most of those that summer who were managing to live a carefree life dominated by concern about being seen in the latest fashionable hat. On the Champs-Elysées, where the expensive hotels were filled with American and English tourists and the pavement cafés were thriving, it was impossible not to notice the extraordinary confections that passed as hats merely because they sat on women’s heads, creations both tiny and huge, decorated with feathers, flowers and jewels and worn with more than a touch of insouciance. ‘The Parisian women,’ according to Elsa Schiaparelli, ‘as if feeling it was their last chance, were particularly chic.’ Flanner had a slightly different perspective on the phenomenon. ‘It has taken the threat of war to make the French loosen up and have a really swell and civilised good time,’ she wrote.