A house for ex-royals
By Manohar Malgonkar

"AND so it came to pass that at two O'clock on the morning of December 12, 1936, HMS Fury slid silently and unescorted out of Portsmouth harbour."
So begins the last paragraph of the memoirs written by the man who, on that bleak winter night, stood on the ship's quarterdeck watching the shore of England recede.
Fury was a destroyer and the letters HMS in her name stand for His Majesty's Ship. Fury's mission that night was to transport His Majesty himself to an alien shore to live out his days in enforced exile.
But no — that sentence is not strictly accurate. To be sure the man on board that ship had been Britain's monarch and also the Emperor of Britain's vast empire for most of the preceding year, yet the sad fact was that he was no longer either King or Emperor, having abdicated both offices only hours earlier. He was now a commoner, but a commoner with not even a surname to give him special identity. The purely honourific title that was to be his for the rest of his life, 'The Duke of Windsor' had not yet been conferred on him. But even that title was restricted to a mode of address: he was a 'Duke" without a country seat.
"I was swept by many emotions," he records, and goes on: "If it had been hard to give up the throne, it had been even harder to give up my country. I knew now that I was irretrievably on my own. The drawbridges were going up behind me.'
Sad words, but alas, only too true. The man who, only a day earlier was the King of a great nation and the head of an Empire, literally had no place of refuge. At first he thought he would go and live in a hotel in Zurich, but his wife-to-be, pointed out that in a hotel he would have no privacy at all and would be 'hounded to death' by the press. She, as it happened, had been invited by some rich friends to spend Christmas with them at their villa near Vienna, in Austria. She was sure that they would be delighted to put him up too.
So at least there was definite address to go to, a temporary perch.
"But of one thing I, was certain," the Duke of Windsor asserts in his memoirs which he wrote 15 years later. "Love had triumphed over the exigencies of politics. Though it has proved my fate to sacrifice my British heritage... I today draw comfort from the knowledge that time has long since sanctified a true and faithful union."
The 'union' which the Duke of Windsor speaks of with such starry-eyed reverence was hailed the world over as "The Love Match of the Century". Both partners to it were in their early forties. The Duke, of course, was of royal blood, his bride a commoner from America. He was reputed to be a roue, or at least a high-liver who, as a youth and man, had sown his share of wild oats but was still a bachelor; the bride was a divorcee twice over. Now they were to be joined in holy matrimony, and were looking for a house, a place to live.
Diplomatic power-play must have been working on overdrive. The city of Paris just happened to have on hand a very large house tucked away at the end of Bois de Boulogne which had been lying empty. Paris offered to lease the house to the Duke for a 'token' rental and, seemingly, till so long as the Duke or the Duchess wanted to live in it.
So that was where the two partners of the love match of the century settled down for the rest of their lives, surrounded by the trappings of the Duke's past and segregated from the rest of the world. To this house the Duke took everything that he had inherited from his forebears, silver and plate and crystal and carpets and filled it with antique furniture. He was an enormously rich man and spent money lavishly on entertaining parisian society. The house had a staff of 18 servants and they wore a special livery. For most of her remaining years, the Duchess of Windsor who had grown up in genteel poverty remained on the list of the world's 'Best Dressed Women, and when she died, Sotheby's, auctioned off her jewellery for a cool $ 50 million.
For 36 years they thus lived blissfully, in idleness and luxury. The Duke died in 1972, the Duchess, 14 years later, in 1986, only weeks before her 90th birthday.
At this time another royal romance which too was hailed in Britain as the 'Wedding of the decade', if not of the century, was already five years old.
The heir to the throne, Prince Charles, had married Lady Diana Spencer on July 28, 1981. Here, there was not much talk of love but of dynastic appropriateness. This prince had done nothing silly like his predecessor, but had chosen a bride from Britain's hallowed nobility. There was great jubilation in Britain, and the wedding was watched on TV by a billion and a half people across the world.
But if that earlier royal mismatch had turned out, on the evidence of one of its partners, the Duke, to have been 'sanctified' and a "true and faithful union", this one had no pretensions to either truth or faithfulness. Both parties violated marital vows with cavalier impunity. The marriage began to come apart within 10 years and for a time generated a positive storm of ugly accusations and recriminations. Finally it ended in divorce in 1996, leaving both parties to go about their own ways.
How ironical therefore — and yet how dramatically neat — the fact that Princess Diana's quest for a mate should have led her inexorably in the direction of that house in Paris which had been a lifte-time's love nest for the Windsors.
Unoccupied since the Duchess's death, it had suffered neglect and decay. Whatever was of value in it such as the Duke's fabled family silver and the Duchess's lifetime hoard of jewellery, had been sold away, and their other possession, deemed to have only 'association value' and numbering 40,000, — books, trophies of the hunt and polo, even old golf balls, photographs, clothes and darned handkerchiefs, along with the Duke's cypher — had been packed and sent off to Sotheby's for auction.
Then a man who had been engaged in a greatly publicised feud against Britain's 'establishment', Mohammad Al Fayed made the purchase of landmark French properties a part of his strategy to show up how meam the British had been to him. He bought Paris's old-fashioned Ritz Hotel and restored it to its dazzling Edwardian splendour and then he also bought the Windsor Villa and reportedly spent $ 40 million into making it a house fit for royalty or exroyalty.
A grateful French Government rewarded him with the Legion d'Honneur: the British, for all that he paid over £25 million in taxes every year, had even withheld common citizenship from him.
It was commonly believed that Mohammad Al Fayed wanted to instal his son and his daughter-in-law in the Paris home, and had actively promoted the romance between his son Emad, popularly known as Dodi, and Princess Diana. Only a day before she died, Diana had told a friend that "for the first time in her life" she was really happy. Dodi, equally infatuated, had ordered from his Paris jeweller, Albert Reposi, a diamond ring as a present to Diana. He paid $ 205,400 for the ring, and confided to Reposi: "I want to spend the rest of my life with her."
That night Dodi had the choice of taking Diana to his own apartment in Paris, or to the imperial suite of the Ritz priced at $ 2,000 per day, which too was at his disposal. But for several days he had been making anxious inquiries from his agent in Paris as to whether the Windsor villa was ready to receive them.
Hounded by pursuing photographers, the two had room service dinner at their Ritz suite, and then sneaked out of the hotel by a rear entrance at precisely 19 minutes past midnight. They were both laughing. Minutes later their car crashed. The house that had been prepared for them remains unoccupied.
How much did Dodi pay for that ring? $ 205,400, right? A lot of money? Well, two weeks earlier, Britain's tabloid Globe had paid $ 210,000, for pictures of Dodi and Diana while they were on a holiday in Sardinia.