The Temptress: The Scandalous Life of Alice De Janze and the Mysterious Death of Lord Erroll Read Online Free PDF Page A

Pompe, from which Alice could explore the city. Paris had rebounded from World War I in spectacular style. The cafés of Montparnasse were awash with artists, composers, poets, and writers. In the city’s bals musettes and nightclubs, the strains of the same jazz music that Alice had loved in Chicago could be heard. Alice took to the city immediately. She was young and adventurous, keen to assert herself beyond the limited role established for her by her family. Aunt Tattie had friends who ran a small fashion house called Arnot in rue Saint-Florentin, near la place de la Concorde. Alice had always loved dresses and was already showing an excellent eye for fashion, and so Monsieur Arnot employed her as his head manageress in the shop and enlisted her help on buying trips. This was Alice’s first job and her first taste of an identity for herself as a woman with her own career and interests. The 1920s were an exciting time to be involved in dress design: These were the interwar years, a time of regeneration and abundance, and those in the fashion industry were taking full advantage of the new and exuberant mood. Waistlines were dropping, hems were rising, and corsets were being cast off. Alice thoroughly enjoyed the time she spent working at Arnot. During the day she worked, but in the evenings she socialized, eating in the best restaurants, mixing with artists and local celebrities, and visiting nightclubs and late-night bars, always dressed exquisitely.
    Then, just as Alice began to take flight, she was brought quickly back down to earth. She was about to meet the man she was going to marry.

Two
     

The Countess
     
    I N M AY 1921, A LICE S ILVERTHORNE WAS INTRODUCED to Count Frédéric de Janzé in a Paris antique shop. She was twenty-one. Frédéric was twenty-five. The count was tall and good-looking, with acutely blue eyes. A sensitive man and an intellectual, he read voraciously, wrote a daily journal, and later published autobiographical works in the guise of fiction. Alice’s obvious sense of style and her American manners and accent immediately set her apart from the other women of Frédéric’s acquaintance. It is possible that even from their first meeting he detected in her a rare combination of fragility and brazenness that appealed to his romantic nature.
    Frédéric was born on February 28, 1896, in Paris, the elder son of Count François Louis Léon de Janzé and Moya de Janzé, née Hennessy. The family’s nobility originated in 1815, when the first count de Janzé, a lawyer from Brittany, was given his title by Louis XVIII after he helped the duke de Rohan safeguard his considerable power and wealth in the aftermath of the 1789 revolution. The title was passed down to Frédéric via his uncle, Count Albert de Janzé. Frédéric also had strong American connections on his maternal side. His mother, born Moya Hennessy, was from a well-connected Irish-American family in Connecticut—her own mother was Charlotte Mather, a descendant of Increase Mather, the American Puritan minister and father of the influential author and minister Cotton Mather. The young Moya had met the count de Janzé on a trip to France, and after their marriage, the couple settled at the de Janzé ancestral estate, Château de Parfondeval, in Normandy. Their two sons, Frédéric and Henri, both inherited the title of viscount at birth, and after the death of their father in 1921, Frédéric, being the elder, took on the title of count.
    Frédéric grew up in Paris but attended Cambridge University, where he read English literature and discovered a proclivity for writing prose and poetry in English. Thanks to his time as a student, he spoke English with barely a hint of a French accent. He left Cambridge in the early part of World War I to serve as an officer in the French air force. By 1917, he had been appointed aide-de-camp to Maréchal Lyautey in Morocco, but after contracting malaria, he was sent back to Paris to convalesce. On