Washington, D.C., 1925. "Princess Bibesco of Rumania." Priscilla Bibesco (1920-2004) led an interesting and peripatetic life.

Marcel Proust and Queen Alexandra were her godparents; her father was the Romanian ambassador to Washington. When World War 2 began, she hitchhiked to Beirut to become a spy; after the Communists took over in Eastern Europe, she made her home in Paris. National Photo Company Collection glass negative.
Gheorghe Dimitrie Bibesco, vovode de Valachie 1802-1873 | 8 | Alexandru Bibesco 1842-1911 | 4 | Antoine Bibesco 1878-1951 | 2 Hlne CostakiEpureanu 1902 | 5 Zoe Mavrocord ato 18051892 | 9 Joseph Dixon Asquith 1825-1860 | 12 | Herbert Henry Asquith, earl de Oxford et Asquith 1852-1928 | 6 Emily Willans 1828-1888 | 13 Charles Clow, baronet Tennant 1823-1906 | 14 | Emma Alice Margaret Tennant 1864-1945 | 7 Emma Winsloe 1895 | 15

| Elizabeth Charlotte Lucy Asquith 1897-1945 | 3 | Priscilla Hlne Alexandra Bibesco 1920-2004

Prince Antoine Bibesco with his daughter Princess Priscilla Bibesco and Mother-in-Law Margot Asquith.
by Marcus Adams bromide print, 9 December 1932

Princess Priscilla Bibesco (Mrs Michael Padev, later Mrs Simon Hodgson)

by Howard Coster half-plate film negative, 1937

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/priscilla-bibesco-6157130.html

Priscilla Bibesco
Goddaughter of Proust and granddaughter of Asquith who was lampooned by Simon Raven

Saturday 27 November 2004

Priscilla Bibesco was Marcel Proust's goddaughter. Her father, Prince Antoine Bibesco, was one of the writer's dearest friends - a model for Saint-Loup. She was born in 1920, two years before the death at 51 of Proust, who said, "It is in this little girl that all that we know now continues." Priscilla Helen Alexandra Bibesco: born London 5 June 1920; married 1944 Mikhail Padev (marriage dissolved 1946), 1958 Simon Hodgson (died 1992); died Paris 13 October 2004. Priscilla Bibesco was Marcel Proust's goddaughter. Her father, Prince Antoine Bibesco, was one of the writer's dearest friends - a model for Saint-Loup. She was born in 1920, two years before the death at 51 of Proust, who said, "It is in this little girl that all that we know now continues." But Priscilla was to grow up fiercely independent and she never mentioned the Proust connection. The reason was that she disliked her father. Antoine, a good-looking Romanian aristocrat, who was to become Minister at Washington, was also rather heartless. Priscilla never forgave him for reading out her private diaries to a group of diners in his Paris house. She was to be closer to her mother, Elizabeth, who was the daughter of the prime minister Henry Asquith and his second wife, Margot Tennant. But that was not an easy relationship either. Extremely intelligent, Elizabeth was an addictive drinker, and Priscilla had to face being brought out as a debutante by a mother who, taking Priscilla to dances, would fall down drunk at her feet. Rebecca West recalled knowing Priscilla's mother in Bucharest before the Second World War when the Bibescos still held large properties there. "You know, I think Elizabeth was immensely gifted," said West: I think she knew what was happening in Eastern Europe. I remember she used to sit in this caf, and just face the wall. And it wasn't coffee she was drinking. Elizabeth was to publish several books of short stories and novels, but, as a lifelong friend of Priscilla's said, "Antoine made her write. He liked making people perform." Priscilla used this talent she had inherited all too rarely, her life being taken up by other adventures. When war broke out in 1939, Priscilla was in Romania. Leaving her mother behind and determined to escape the proGerman country, Priscilla hitch-hiked her way through Europe to Lebanon. The writer Anita Leslie, in her 1983 volume of memoirs A Story Half Told, recalls: Priscilla was 23 when she arrived in Beirut and various Secret Service departments immediately sought to employ her. I was ordered to give her a cover job on the Eastern Times. This I did, cunningly thinking up a column called "Events of the Week". Any intelligent girl could write it out in half an hour. The trouble with Priscilla was that not only was she intelligent but also exceedingly attractive. Apart from supplying information to her office and gigglingly writing out the weekly column with me she also collected a string of admirers. And these consisted of rather important colonels of fighting regiments. When they went off to the Western Desert she was prone to disappear also and the Secret Service became rather cross. On the boat back to England at the end of the war, Priscilla met Mikhail (or Michael) Padev, a dark-haired Bulgarian whom she married. Romanians, it is known, do not get on with Bulgarians and Antoine Bibesco remarked sarcastically, "He's the most charming Bulgarian." Padev worked for the BBC but the marriage did not last. "I think I did love him for a while," Priscilla later said. But saddest for Priscilla was the death of her mother in Romania at the age of 48. She had so looked forward to seeing her again and then, three months later, in July 1945, her grandmother Margot died, broken by the death of Elizabeth. In spite of all this, Priscilla remained a private person, and not one openly to display grief. Antoine Bibesco - whom the playwright Enid Bagnold was famously in love with - died in 1951. From her father, Priscilla inherited an 18th-century house in Paris of eye-catching beauty. Forty-five Quai Bourbon stood like the prow of a ship - facing the rear of Notre Dame - at one end of the Ile St Louis. Priscilla made the magnificent first-floor apartment her home, letting off the various other apartments, except one which her cousin Princess Marthe Bibesco had for her life. "J'aime le double luxe," Marthe said when one of her books became a best-seller and she moved into the Paris Ritz whilst still keeping Quai Bourbon.

Priscilla was generous to her relations although in the post-war years the Romanian properties had been confiscated. She fell on relatively hard times but continued a series of romantic liaisons. Even her close friends did not know exactly who the people were - apart from Arthur Koestler, which became widely known amongst her circle. Then, in 1958, Priscilla married a fair-haired Englishman 11 years younger than herself - fair hair being Priscilla's preference. Simon Hodgson was the son of a company director who lived in Derbyshire. However, Hodgson was a myth-maker and told himself that he came from a long line of distinguished ancestors which included Byron's sister. He was unreliable with money and Priscilla had to endure a year when Hodgson was given a prison sentence for obtaining credit as an undischarged bankrupt. They were friendly with the writer Simon Raven until he lampooned them in his 1964 novel The Rich Pay Late, as the Con and the Contessa. Priscilla showed immense courage and dignity in sticking by her wayward husband and put up with his inventions even when they involved her own family, like, "Proust tore out the last page of A la Recherche and handed it to Antoine." There were occasions, though, when she was driven to utter, "Oh, shut up, Simon." Later, Hodgson became more stable and both lived in the apartment on Quai Bourbon. Priscilla's Paris friends included Oswald Mosley and his wife Diana. Repartee was Priscilla's forte, as over lunch when Diana, indulging her loves of Hitler and his entourage, said, "Goebbels had the most beautiful blue eyes", to which Priscilla responded, "Such a pity, then, he had to murder all those children." In spite of their different ages, it was Priscilla who became the widow, Hodgson dying 12 years before her of cancer. Throughout her life she never used her title of Princess and never dropped a connection. Few knew that her godparents were Marcel Proust and Queen Alexandra. Only in recent years did she write an article (in Revue des Deux Mondes) on her outspoken grandmother Margot Asquith. Towards the end, Priscilla had strokes and became absent-minded. She lost money through carelessness - drawing out large sums of cash and walking home with her handbag open. The pity is that she never got round to writing her memoirs, which she keenly wanted to do in her last years: whether she would have revealed as much as her godfather did of his friends, we shall never know. Simon Blow

Mum-sa: Elizabeth Bibesco

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2012)

Elizabeth Bibesco, circa 1919 Elizabeth, Princess Bibesco (ne Asquith; 26 February 1897 7 April 1945) was an English writer active between 1921 and 1940. A final posthumous collection of her stories, poems and aphorisms was published under the title Haven in 1951, with a preface by Elizabeth Bowen.

Contents
[hide]

1 Childhood and youth 2 Marriage and Paris 3 Writings 4 Final years 5 Bibliography 6 External links

[edit] Childhood and youth

Elizabeth Charlotte Lucy was the first child of Herbert Henry Asquith (British Prime Minister, 19081916) and his second wife, Margot Tennant. As candidly recorded in her mother's 1920 autobiography, she was a precocious child of uncertain temper.[1] Life as the Prime Minister's daughter thrust her into the public eye at an early age and she developed a quick wit and a social presence beyond her years. When she was just fourteen years old, The Times (reporting on her recovery from pneumonia) stated that "many members of the House have made the acquaintance of Miss Asquith and in expressing their concern for her health, have referred to her charm of manner and to the interest which she has begun already to show in political matters." As a teenager, during World War I, she was given opportunities to do "good works", organizing and performing in "matinees" for the servicemen. Her first known literary effort was a short duologue called "Off and On" which she performed with Nelson Keys in 1916 at the Palace Theatre. In the same year she organized a large show of portraits by John Singer Sargent at the Grafton Galleries to aid the Art Fund and a "Poets' Reading" in aid of the Star and Garter Fund. In 1918 she played small roles in two silent war movies by D.W. Griffith, "Hearts of the World" and "The Great Love"

[edit] Marriage and Paris

Antoine and Elizabeth Bibesco In 1919 she married Prince Antoine Bibesco, a Romanian diplomat stationed in London, a man 22 years her senior. It was the society wedding of the year, attended by everyone from the Queen to George Bernard Shaw. The wedding was filmed by the newly formed British Moving Picture News organization. After the marriage, Prince and Princess Bibesco lived in Paris at the Bibesco townhouse at 45, Quai Bourbon at the tip of the Ile St Louis looking up the river toward Notre Dame cathedral. The walls of the apartment were decorated with huge canvases by Vuillard. "They weren't pictures. They were gardens into which you walked through a frame," wrote Enid Bagnold.[2] Antoine Bibesco was a lifelong friend of Marcel Proust and after his marriage to Elizabeth she too became a favorite of the reclusive writer. At the time of her marriage Proust wrote that she "was probably unsurpassed in intelligence by any of her contemporaries," and added that "she looked like a lovely figure in an Italian fresco".[3] He would leave his house late at night to visit them, to discuss Shakespeare with Elizabeth or to gossip with Antoine until dawn. Elizabeth wrote a moving obituary for Proust in the November 1922 New Statesman. "Gently, deliberately, he drew me into that magic circle of his personality with the ultimate sureness of a look that needs no touch to seal it. Insensibly you were drawn into that intricate cobweb of iridescent steel, his mind, which, interlacing with yours, spread patterns of light and shade over your most intimate thoughts." [4]

[edit] Writings
Between 1921 and 1940 Elizabeth published three collections of short stories, four novels, two plays and a book of poetry. All of these works have a "continental" sensibility. They deal almost entirely with a kind of love in which the heroines ponder the least gesture of a man until it takes on the proportions of an emotional event with lasting implications, while the heroes spend their time in mute surrender at the feet of remote and disdainful women. "One young poet had described her soul as a fluttering, desperate bird, beating its wings on the bars of her marvellous loveliness," is a sample of her prose style (from the short story "Pilgrimage", 1921). Her novels and stories, which by 1940 were considered merely fashionable, flimsy stuff with no lasting significance, can now be seen as the illumination of a class of people who were made irrelevant by the First World War but who refused to accept their irrelevance.

Elizabeth Bibesco was connected (especially in the mind of the media) with Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield, neither of whom treated her well in their letters and diaries, especially after a liaison between Elizabeth and Mansfield's husband, John Middleton Murry. Woolf wrote, "She is pasty and podgy, with the eyes of a currant bun." [5]

[edit] Final years

Elizabeth Bibesco, by Augustus John, 1924 She travelled with her husband in his capacity as Romanian ambassador, first to Washington (19201926) and then to Madrid (19271931). She was in Romania during World War II and died there of pneumonia in 1945 at the age of 48. She was buried in the Bibesco family vault on the grounds of Mogosoaia Palace outside Bucharest. Her epitaph reads, "My soul has gained the freedom of the night" the last line of the last poem in her 1927 collection.[6]

The tombstone of Elizabeth Bibesco, in the Mogooaia Palace park, outside of Bucharest Elizabeth's death was the final sorrow for her mother, Margot, who died within months of her daughter's death. Prince Antoine, forced out of Romania after the war, never returned to his homeland. He died in 1951 and was buried in Paris. Priscilla Hodgson, the only child of Prince and Princess Bibesco, continued to live at 45, Quai Bourbon until her death in 2004. Elizabeth's portrait was painted twice by Augustus John, in 1919 and again in 1924. The first painting (titled "Elizabeth Asquith") shows her as a vivacious debutante in a feather stole over bare shoulders. This picture is in the Laing Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne, England. In the second portrait, seen here (titled "Princess

Antoine Bibesco"), Elizabeth appears slightly weary and melancholic, her eyes averted just enough to suggest a break in her former self-confidence. She wears a mantilla given to her father by the Queen of Portugal [7] and holds in her hand one of her own books. When shown at the Royal Academy summer show in 1924, Mary Chamot, writing in Country Life, wrote of this painting that it "has the force to make every other picture in the room look insipid, so dazzling is the contrast between the mysterious darkness of her eyes and hair and the shimmering brilliance of the white lace she wears over her head."

[edit] Bibliography

I Have Only Myself to Blame, 1921 - Short Stories Balloons, 1922 - Short Stories The Fir and the Palm, 1924 - Novel The Whole Story, 1925 - Short Stories The Painted Swan, 1926 - Play There is No Return, 1927 - Novel Points of View, 1927 - Play Poems, 1927 - Poetry Portrait of Caroline, 1931 - Novel The Romantic, 1940 - Novel

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Elizabeth Bibesco

Works by Elizabeth Bibesco at Project Gutenberg

NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
^ Asquith, Margot, An Autobiography, Doran, 1922,Vol. III, pg 53 ^ Bagnold, Enid, Autobiography, Heinemann, 1969 ^ Bibesco, Antoine, Letters of Marcel Proust to Antoine Bibesco, Thames & Hudson, 1953, pg 39 ^ Bibesco, Elizabeth, Marcel Proust, New Statesman, 1922, pg 235 ^ Boddy, Gillian, Katherine Mansfield, Penguin, 1988, pg 84 ^ Bibesco, Marthe, In Memoriam, Les Oeuvres Libres, 1946, pg 92 ^ Asquith, Herbert, H.H.A. : Letters to a Friend, Bles,1933, vol. 2, pg. 176

Ttne-su: Antoine Bibesco

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Jump to: navigation, search

Antoine Bibesco

Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary of Romania in the United States In office February 25, 1921 February 24, 1926 Alexandru Averescu Prime Minister Take Ionescu Ion I. C. Brtianu Preceded by Succeeded by N. H. Lahovary F. Nano

Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary of Romania in Spain In office 19271931 Vintil Brtianu Prime Minister Iuliu Maniu Gheorghe Mironescu Personal details July 19, 1878 Paris

Born

Died Resting place Spouse(s) Relations Children Profession Religion

September 1, 1951 (aged 73) Paris Elizabeth Asquith George Valentin Bibescu Priscilla Bibesco (1920-2004) diplomat Eastern Orthodoxy

Antoine, Prince Bibesco (Romanian: Prinul Anton Bibescu) (July 19, 1878 September 2, 1951) was a Romanian aristocrat, lawyer, diplomat and writer.

[edit] Biography
His father was Prince Alexandre Bibesco, the last surviving son of the Hospodar of Wallachia. His mother was Helene Epourano, daughter of a former Prime Minister of Romania. Though raised at 69, Rue de Courcelles, in Paris, Antoine continued to oversee the Bibesco estates in Craiova until after World War II. As a young man, his mother, Princess Hlne Bibesco's celebrated Paris salon gave him the opportunity to meet Charles Gounod, Claude Debussy, Camille Saint-Sans, Pierre Bonnard, douard Vuillard, Aristide Maillol, Anatole France and Marcel Proust among many other notables. Both his father and mother commissioned artworks and music (most notably Edgar Degas and George Enescu) and Antoine continued this family tradition, particularly through his friendship with Vuillard. Marcel Proust became a lifelong friend and shared a secret language in which Marcel was Lecram and the Bibescos were Ocsebib. Antoine made a concerted effort to have Proust's Du Ct de Chez Swann (in which, it is said, Bibesco was the model for Robert de St. Loup) published by Andr Gide and the Nouvelle Revue Franaise, but failed in that effort. Toward the end of Proust's life, Bibesco, who was a great raconteur, was an outside ear for the reclusive writer. Later he published Letters of Marcel Proust to Antoine Bibesco. Bibesco, though not a prolific writer, was the author of a number of plays in French and had at least one American success. In 1930 his play Ladies All was performed on Broadway at the Morosco Theatre, running for 140 performances. He also translated Weekend by Nol Coward and Le Domaine by John Galsworthy into French.

[edit] Diplomatic career

Having earlier served as counsellor of the Romanian legations in Paris and Petrograd, by 1914 Prince Antoine was First Secretary of the Romanian Legation in London and by 1918 had entered the circle of Herbert Henry Asquith (former Liberal Prime Minister). At this time he was in a relationship with the writer Enid Bagnold, but his affections for her were replaced by those he began to feel for the twenty-one-year-old Elizabeth Asquith (he was 40 at the time). Margot Asquith, her mother, thought he would be a steadying

influence on her daughter. "What a gentleman he is. None of my family are gentlemen like that; no breeding you know," she wrote.

Prince and Princess Bibesco, 1919 The marriage took place at St. Margaret's, Westminster on April 29, 1919. It was the society event of the year, attended by everyone from Queen Alexandra to George Bernard Shaw. Their only child, Priscilla, was born in 1920 (and died in 2004). Apparently marriage did not change Antoine's womanizing ways. Rebecca West (with whom he had a short affair in 1927) called him "a boudoir athlete". While attending a party at the French embassy in London and looking around the room, West realized that every woman in attendance had been his mistress at one time or another. Antoine continued his diplomatic career in Washington, D.C. (19201926) as Minister of the Romanian Legation (the present Embassy of Romania in Washington, D.C. was first used as such during his tenure) and in Madrid (19271931). In 1936, after Romanian Prime Minister Gheorghe Ttrescu removed Nicolae Titulescu as Foreign Minister and recalled nearly all Romania's diplomats, Prince Bibesco had the unenviable responsibility of reassuring England and France that Romania was not slipping into the grip of fascism. The World War II years were spent in Romania where his wife died (in 1945) and when, after the war, his estates were confiscated by the communists he left his country, never to return. Enid Bagnold, in her autobiography, tells of unwittingly smuggling silver across the English Channel for him after the war. He died in 1951 and was buried in Paris. "He had three tombs in his heart," Enid Bagnold wrote in her Times obituary, "which I think he could never finally close - of his mother, his brother Emmanuel and his wife."

[edit] External links

Prince Antoine Bibesco (1878-1951)