Thursday 31 July 2014

A GREAT COQUETTE : MADAME RECAMIER.


Madame Recamier
Jeanne Francoise Julie Adélaide Bernard (Born in 1777 Died in 1849 in Paris), otherwise known as Belle Juliette, was above all a celebrity known throughout Europe, famous for her beauty and virtue.
The daughter of sollicitor Jean Bernard, she was born in Lyon. At fifteen she married the well known banker Jacques Rose Récamier. Juliette was also intelligent, well read and affectionate. A good dancer, she also sang and could play both the harp and the piano. Her beauty and kindness helped build her reputation as an exceptional woman. It was said that she was able to charm, entertain or dispense with the over ardent without making enemies.
At the Abbaye-aux-Bois, where she held her salons for over thirty years, her influence on literature and politics was well known. Among the innumerable regular visitors were notable characters such as René Chateaubriand, her only real love, Germaine de Stael, her best friend, André Marie Ampère, Auguste de Prusse, Lucien Bonaparte, The Duchess of Devonshire, Pierre Simon Ballanche, Talma, Balzac, Delacroix, Lamartine, Sainte Beuve…


À partir de 1797, Juliette Récamier commença sa vie mondaine, tenant un salon qui devint bientôt le rendez-vous d'une société choisie. La beauté et le charme de l'hôtesse, l'une des « Trois Grâces » du Directoire, avec Joséphine de Beauharnais et Madame Tallien, lui suscitèrent une foule d'admirateurs. Le cadre de l'hôtel particulier de la rue du Mont-Blanc (hôtel de Jacques Necker ancienne rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin), acquis en octobre 1798 et richement décoré par l’architecte Louis-Martin Berthault, ajoutait à la réputation de ses réceptions. Elle fut l'une des premières à se meubler en style « étrusque » et à s'habiller « à la grecque » et joua de ce fait un rôle non négligeable dans la diffusion du goût pour l'Antique qui allait prévaloir sous l'Empire. L’hôtel Récamier acquit une renommée telle qu'il devint rapidement une curiosité parisienne que tous les provinciaux et étrangers de marque se devaient de visiter. L'année 1800 marqua l'apogée de la puissance financière de Jacques Récamier : il devint alors Régent de la Banque de France. Mais Juliette Récamier ne tarda pas à exciter les ombrages du pouvoir. Amie de Madame de Staël, elle fut une figure clé de l'opposition au régime de Napoléon. Les réceptions de son salon qui jouait un rôle non négligeable dans la vie politique et intellectuelle de l'époque, furent interdites par un ordre officieux de Bonaparte ; Madame de Staël, Adrien de Montmorency, tous deux proches de Juliette et assidus de son salon, furent exilés de Paris ; quand Napoléon devint empereur, Juliette refusa à quatre reprises une place de dame d'honneur à la cour.


Les difficultés de la Banque Récamier, à partir de 1805, obligèrent le couple d'abord à réduire son train de vie puis à vendre l'hôtel particulier de la rue du Mont-Blanc. À ces revers de fortune s'ajoutèrent pour Juliette des chagrins personnels : le décès de sa mère en 1807 ; une histoire d'amour puis une rupture avec le prince Auguste de Prusse rencontré lors d'un séjour au château de Coppet près de Genève chez Madame de Staël ; l'obligation de s'éloigner de Paris par ordre de la police impériale.




 " Went to the house of Madame Recamier. We were
resolved not to leave Paris without seeing what is called
the most elegant house in it, fitted up in the new style.
There are no large rooms nor a great many of them ; but
it is certainly fitted up with all the recherchJ and expense
possible in what is called le gout antique. But the
candelabra, pendules, &c., though exquisitely finished,
are in that sort of minute frittered style which I think so
much less noble than that of fifteen or twenty years ago.
All the chairs are mahogany, enriched with ormolu, and
covered either with cloth or silk ; those in the salon
trimmed with flat gold lace in good taste. Her bed is
reckoned the most beautiful in Paris : it, too, is of
mahogany, enriched with ormolu and bronze, and raised
upon two steps of the same wood. Over the whole bed
was thrown a coverlid or veil of fine plain muslin, with
rows of narrow gold lace at each end, and the muslin
embroidered as a border. The curtains were muslin,
trimmed like the coverlid, suspended from a sort of carved
couronne des roses, and tucked up in drapery upon the wall
against which the bed stood. At the foot of the bed stood
a fine Grecian lamp of ormolu, with a little figure of the
same metal bending over it, and at the head of the bed
another stand upon which was placed a large ornamental
flower-pot, containing a large artificial rose-tree, the
branches of which must nod very near her nose, in bed.
Out of this bedroom is a beautiful little salle-de-bain.
The walls are inlaid with satin-wood, and mahogany, and
slight arabesque patterns in black upon satin-wood. The
bath presents itself as a sofa in a recess, covered with
a cushion of scarlet cloth, embroidered and laced with
black. Beyond this again is a very little boudoir, lined
with quilted pea-green lustring, drawn together in a bunch
in the middle of the ceiling." *
*1 Miss Berry's ' Journal and Correspondence," i. 191.
16

Swan
Juliette’s sensibility and tastes were refined over time, thanks to her contacts with the artists, critics and art lovers she frequented, as well as her visits to Italy and the time she spent at her salon.
Délécluze tells that he came across her one day talking with Jean-Jacques Ampère about his chronic of the 1824 salon that was published in the newspaper “Débats”. Even then, the very carefully studied décor of the hôtel on rue Mont-Blanc – with its numerous ornaments in the shape of stars or swans, soon to be essential elements of the Empire style – was proof that Juliette knew much about elegant neo-classicism, as shown by her collection. Mario Praz suggested a link between the “chaste sensuality” the Juliette was so famous for, and the icy, contemplative eroticism of Canova’s sculpture, a link that would have made their friendship easy to forge. Juliette Récamier, muse and patron of the arts  – Beaux Arts Museum of Lyon.
This is why we decided on a swan as the most fitting symbol for the logo of the hotel La Belle Juliette.
Staring as a young, timid lady from the provinces, she blossomed to become the muse of the salons of the time, so such a point that she was referred to as La Divine, La Belle Juliette, considered to be the most beautiful woman in Europe. Also, the white of the swan was the favourite colour of Juliette Récamier.
And finally, because the swan is the animal most represented in furniture of the period, notably thanks to the Jacob brothers, who included it in several places in Juliette’s bedroom at the Hôtel du Mont Blanc.

 Au temps de la puissance financière des Récamier, les arts sont mis à contribution par le couple pour conforter sa position sociale.

L'acquisition en 1798 d'un hôtel particulier situé rue du Mont-Blanc, dans le quartier à la mode de la Chaussée d'Antin à Paris, leur offre l'opportunité d'en faire un laboratoire du goût nouveau.

A travers ses choix d'aménagements intérieurs et les œuvres d'art qu'elle acquiert, Juliette exprime une préférence marquée pour un néo-classicisme raffiné et gracieux, librement inspiré de l'Antiquité.

Dans tout Paris, le goût de la maîtresse des lieux, à la pointe de la mode, est rapidement salué. Ce souci de Juliette d'évoluer et de recevoir dans un intérieur raffiné demeurera une constante au fil de ses habitations successives, et ce jusqu'à sa retraite à l'Abbaye-aux-Bois.

L'hôtel de la rue du Mont-Blanc : les années fastes

Les Récamier confient la décoration de leur hôtel à un jeune architecte : Louis-Martin Berthault. Probablement aidé de Charles Percier, déjà réputé, le jeune homme imagine un décor harmonieux conçu comme un ensemble : boiseries, tentures, meubles exécutés par l'ébéniste Jacob, se répondent ou s'opposent par de subtils jeux de matériaux, de couleurs et de miroirs. Les pièces de réception jouent un rôle clé dans la demeure.

Comme cela se pratiquait alors, Juliette accueille également dans sa chambre à coucher, désireuse d'y faire admirer son goût pour les dernières tendances. Reproduits et diffusés, les aménagements que l'architecte Berthault fait réaliser pour l'hôtel Récamier sont vite connus et célébrés. Comme l'écrivait la duchesse d'Abrantès, la chambre à coucher a « servi de modèle à tout ce qu'on a fait en ce genre » et le mobilier de Juliette Récamier provoqua en effet une telle admiration qu'il fut rapidement imité.







Attribué à Jacob Frères, Lit de repos provenant du salon de Madame Récamier, vers 1800, bâti de noyer, placage d'espénille de Saint-Domingue et d'amarante, espénille massif, noyer massif peint, 78 x 60 x 170 cm, Paris, musée du Louvre, département des objets d'art (c) RMN / © Daniel Arnaudet

À l'avant-garde, elle se plaisait également à faire visiter la chambre conjugale dans l'hôtel particulier de la rue du Mont-Blanc, à Paris. Aquarelles et plans donnent une idée du faste de la décoration et de l'ameublement commandé à Jacob frères, dont on découvre certaines réalisations en acajou décorées d'appliques en bronze doré (voir ci-dessus). Ce « laboratoire d'un goût nouveau » présente ce que Stéphane Paccoud considère comme « les premiers meubles de style Directoire, ouvrant la voie au style Empire ».

C'est dans les murs de cet hôtel particulier aujourd'hui disparu, avant les premières difficultés financières du couple qui surviennent dès 1805, que Juliette Récamier construit la réputation de son salon. D'abord couru par les figures mondaines de l'Empire, les cercles de madame Récamier s'élargissent aux artistes de son temps.
Son appartement devient, après la mort de Germaine de Staël, en 1817, l'antichambre de l'Académie française. Balzac, Mérimée ou Lamartine se croisent dans son deux-pièces à l'Abbaye-aux-Bois, ici reconstitué. On y admire l'imposante Corinne au Cap Misène, hommage à madame de Staël. Un portrait de la romancière, réalisé par François Gérard, et un autre de Chateaubriand, exécuté par Giraudet, veillent sur le salon de Juliette Récamier.






A GREAT COQUETTE : MADAME RECAMIER.•

THIS clever and entertaining book will be found well worth reading, though M. Joseph Turquan's lively and peculiarly French style loses some of its original effect in translation. Madame Recamier, his beautiful, amiable, and coquettish heroine, has always been something of a riddle to her countrymen, from the disappointed lovers who crowded round her in the days of the Directory, the Consulate, and the Restoration to the biographer of to-day, who-seeks to discover the real secret of her power over society, and of the traditional charm which lingers round her name.

Readers of M. Turquan's books need hardly be told that he is generally angry with his heroines. By way of being a candid and impartial biographer, his aim is rather to pull down than to exalt. As far as contemporary opinion is flattering, he regards it with a sharply suspicious eye; while enemies and scandalmongers are tolerably sure of a favourable bearing. And this method is not without its advantages, both for a reader who is sure of an extra large pinch of " Gallic salt" in books written on this principle, and, strange as it may seem, for the subject itself of such a biography. For instance, this book, in no single way flattering to Madame Recamier, being more than a little blind to her virtues and very unkind to her faults, leaves us much where we were before, with a conviction of her conquering charm, a respect for her character, and a certain compassion for a woman so tormented, as well as adored, by men, among whom Benjamin Constant, that creature of unreasonable affectations, was an outstanding specimen. M. Turquan blames Madame Recamier severely for her heartless treatment of Constant and a dozen others. No doubt she flirted with them all: she was, as Madame de Boigne wrote of her, "coquetry personified": but it was always plain that she cared rather for friendship than for the more passionate kind of love, and the same writer —not usually indulgent—bore witness to a kindliness and human sympathy which resulted in the life-long attachment of nearly all the lovers whom she had reduced to temporary despair. For this cold coquette, with the genius for self- preservation which rouses such indignant scorn in her latest biographer, was in reality the moat patient, compassionate, and charitable of women. " I never knew anyone," wrote Madame de Boigne, "who knew so well how to pity troubles of all kinds, and to make allowances, without irritation, for those which had their source in the weaknesses of humanity." It would have been only natural if a woman of Madame Recamier's beauty, wealth, influence, and popularity had inspired more envy and dislike than admiration in a clever, keen-witted, and rather ill-natured contemporary. Madame de Boigne's high appreciation, expressed in several passages of her memoirs, is more valuable as testimony than the volumes written by Madame Recamier's devoted niece, Madame Lenormant, and may be taken as an antidote to much prejudiced gossip on the other side.
M. Turquan has an amusing story to tell, and he tells it in his accustomed lively manner with much characteristic detail, including the curious whispers as to Madame Recamier's marriage and the explanations of her early life and love affairs which were current in the malicious world of her day. Jeanne Francois° Julie Adelaide Bernard—always known as Juliette—was born in 1777, and was married in 1793 in Paris to M. Jacques Recamier, a business man like M. Bernard, but more prosperous, being a clever speculator and the head of an important banking concern. He was more than double his wife's age and a man of low moral character, but a kinder or more indulgent husband would have been difficult to find, and during the years of the Directory Madame Recamier, considered "the most beautiful woman in Paris," was, with Madame Tallien and Madame de Beauharnais, one of the leaders of a society more extravagantly bent on pleasure than any under the old regime. She was the most graceful dancer at Barras' famous Luxembourg assemblies. These state- ments seem to be a little in M. Turquan's way when be tries bard, following his principles, to throw doubts on the supreme beauty and perfect grace ascribed to Madame Recamier by her contemporaries. He describes her as rather pretty than beautiful, like a Greuze portrait., with a lovely complexion and " twinkling " eyes—and we must confess that her portraits bear out this idea of a kittenish kind of beauty which is certainly not the highest. But M. Turquan finds himself on still surer ground a little further on. Madame Recamier's waist, he says, was "ungainly"; her bands and feet, which she admired, and which her portraits take care to show, were "cast in a coarse mould." But "her smile converted her friends to her own belief. Everything in this world—even beauty—is more or less an illusion."
In the case of Madame Recamier the illusion was lasting and triumphant. M. Recamier bought a house in the present Rue de la Chaussee-d'Autin—then Rue du Mont-Blanc—and furnished it in the finest and most expensive fashion of the day. Here his hospitality—even if merely " a commercial manoeuvre "—and the gracious manners of his beautiful and kindly wife attracted an immense variety of people. Madame Recamier's salon was a not unsuccessful imitation of those before the Revolution, though it differed from them in its less exclusive character. This could not have been otherwise, and the disadvantageous comparison with Madame du Deffand, which M. Turquan is uncritical enough to make, certainly borders on the absurd. You cannot compare an amiable, ambitious bourgeoise with a highly trained, keen-witted aristocrat ; it is more than unfair to blame the one for unlikeness to the other. But Madame Recamier had her own way of attracting both men and women, and in the end she was certainly more successful than Madame du Deffand. A blind old age was the destiny of both ; but in the one case surrounded by old lovers and old friends, in the other embittered and lonely.

The first period of Madame Recamier's popularity in society ended with the rise of the Empire. During the Consulate her salon was crowded with people of every shade of thought : there regicides met émigrés, Napoleon's young generals met Louis XVI.'s officers, literary men and women found their advantage in making friends with bankers and contractors. Thither came Talleyrand, Fouche, Madame de Stael—in short, everybody who was anybody, including, at the time of the Peace of Amiens, a number of foreigners, among whom the English were conspicuous. In the summer of 1802 Madame Recamier paid a visit to London, where she was received with enthusiasm. But these years, triumphant as they seemed, were in one important point a failure. Madame Recamier lost the favour of the First Consul. His family thronged to her house ; his brother Lucien was at one time desperately in love with her ; he was himself personally attracted by her ; but as a whole the company at the Rue Mont-Blanc was viewed by him with suspicion. This state of things reached a crisis soon after he became Emperor. Madame Recamier, faithful to her many Royalist friends, was indignant at the murder of the Due d'Enghien. She also deeply resented the exile of Madame de Sta.. When Fouche, instructed by Napoleon, offered her the appointment of dame du palais to the Empress and "friend of the Emperor," she flatly declined. In con- sequence of this, it appears, the Bank of France was directed to refuse M. Recamier a loan which would have kept him solvent ; his bank closed its doors ; and shortly afterwards, though not actually banished from France by Napoleon's order, Madame Recamier retired in comparative poverty to Switzerland. After a time she returned to Paris, and her friends gathered round her again. A second exile, during which she visited Rome and Naples, only ended with the Restoration. A further loss of fortune in 1820 led her to establish herself in those rooms at the Abbaye-aux-Bois which became a place of pilgrimage for her admirers, old and new, with almost every well-known person who visited Paris during the next thirty years.

All this story is told by M. Turquan in a gay and somewhat mocking spirit. If he cannot deny Madame Recamier charity and discretion, beauty and attractiveness, he can at least insist on her self-consciousness, worldliness, and vanity, while throwing doubts on her general goodness and intelligence and dwelling on the weaknesses from which of course she was not exempt. Otherwise, to judge from all contemporary accounts which are not those of her declared enemies, she would have been a quite unnatural piece of perfection.

Certainly few women, of Madame Recamier's day or any other, can point to such a string of men—men mostly of distinction, sometimes of genius—who have laid themselves and their fortunes in passionate devotion at their feet. In her own way Madame Recamier loved them all. In one case only, that of Prince Augustus of Prussia, she was so far carried away as to think of a divorce from her husband in order to marry him. M. Recamier, her true friend, wisely advised her against this step. In all her other flirtations there was no question of anything of the kind, at least on her side. Mathieu and Adrien de Montmorency, Eugene de Beauharnais, Lucien Buonaparte, Benjamin Constant, Jean-Jacques Ampere, the faithful and unselfish Ballanche—most of these, with many whose names are less familiar, began by falling in love with Madame Recamier and became her life-long friends. Last, not least, there was the long and sincere mutual affection which united Madame Recamier with Chateaubriand; and there were the years when, old age and blindness creeping on, her salon became the second home of that great romantic writer, and in its own quiet, distinguished way the literary centre of Paris.




Présentation de l'exposition Juliette Récamier

Wednesday 30 July 2014

Revisiting the unforgettable “An Englishman Abroad” . See also bellow the next “post”


The Following Video is precisely concentrated on the  passage ( from 50min 45sec on ) in which the actress visits in London, the establishments where Guy Burgess used to be a Gentleman – customer 

( …) “Burgess was a Marxist, but he liked good English tailoring too much to be a rabid revolutionary. In the film he is shocked that anybody would consider him dangerous.
( …) “Burgess says: "So little, England. Little music, little art. Timid, tasteful, nice. But one loves it, one loves it." He died far from little England. On September 1, 1963, an official of a Moscow hospital announced that Jim Andreyevich Elliott -- the name by which Burgess was known in Russia -- had died from heart disease. The "Internationale" was played at his funeral three days later. Apart from MacLean, no one of note attended.”
Thomas Brown

An Englishman Abroad is a 1983 BBC television drama film, based on the true story of a chance meeting of an actress, Coral Browne, with Guy Burgess (Alan Bates), a member of the Cambridge spy ring who spied for the Soviet Union while an officer at MI6. The production was written by Alan Bennett and directed by John Schlesinger; Browne stars as herself.

The film is set is Moscow in 1958, after Burgess had fled to the city following MI6's detection of his treason. Burgess barges into Browne's dressing room in the interval of a touring Shakespeare Memorial Theatre (which became one of the bases of the Royal Shakespeare Company) production of Hamlet, in which she portrayed Gertrude, and charms her. Later on she is invited to his Moscow flat, finding it with some difficulty, to measure him for a suit that he would like ordered from his London tailor.

Rather than film in the Soviet Union, Schlesinger used several locations in Scotland. The Caird Hall and Whitehall Theatre in Dundee stood in for the Moscow theatre, and the grand marble staircase of Glasgow City Chambers played the part of the British Embassy.Additional filming was done at Glasgow's St. Andrew's Suspension Bridge ("luckily, in a snowstorm" Bennett later wrote) and the Moss Heights flats in Cardonald, which represented Burgess' Moscow apartment.

Both Browne and Bates were winners of the BAFTA awards for acting for their roles in this production.

Bennett gives the date of Browne's meeting with Burgess as 1958 in the introduction to his Single Spies, which contains the text of An Englishman Abroad in the stage play version and the text of A Question of Attribution about Anthony Blunt.

The play was also adapted for radio on the BBC World Service in 1994 starring Michael Gambon as Burgess and Penelope Wilton as Coral Browne. It was subsequently re-broadcast on BBC Radio 7 and BBC Radio 4 Extra, most recently in 2013 as part of BBC Radio 4 Extra's Cambridge Spies season

Tuesday 29 July 2014

Two great productions of the BBC around the Cambridge Spies ... Second ..."An Englishman abroad"

This is one of my favorite films ... a great story about loneliness,"gentilless", true humanity in distress, keeping on the gentleman's code as weapon against dispair ... and a great sense of humor ... besides a remarkable visit in London to Saville Row, John Lobb, ... etc...etc
Yours ... Jeeves


An Englishman Abroad
Directed by John Schlesinger
Written by Alan Bennett
Starring Alan Bates
Coral Browne
Charles Gray
Distributed by BBC
Release date 29 November 1983
Running time 60 min
Country UK
Language English


"How can he be a spy?" says Guy Burgess in Moscow, as he quotes the attitude of his former fellow British upper-class diplomats, "He goes to my tailor."

He's talking to Coral Browne, an Australian actress who was appearing as Gertrude in a Royal Shakespeare Company production of Hamlet in Moscow. It's 1958. She has visited Burgess in his drab apartment which he shares with his government-sanctioned male lover, an aging youth who speaks no English. Burgess has barely learned a few words of Russian. "I know what I've done to deserve him," he says, "but I don't know what he's done to deserve me."

Burgess, along with Kim Philby, Donald Maclean and Anthony Blunt comprised the Cambridge Four. They were a group of Cambridge undergraduates who, in the Thirties, were recruited to become Soviet spies. Although they were products of proper English upper-class breeding, they disliked intensely the very aspects of English life that provided their own privileges. The Soviet system seemed so much better. Burgess was a most unlikely spy. He was flamboyantly gay, often flamboyantly drunk and talked too much about what he was doing. After all, he says, "There's no point in having a secret if you make a secret of it." Throughout WWII he and Maclean, working in Britain's Foreign Office, regularly delivered copies of secret Allied plans to their Soviet controller. Even though much evidence pointed their way, no action was taken. They eventually had to flee Britain in 1951 and finally showed up in Moscow in 1956. Kim Philby did far more damage before he was eased out in a gentlemanly way. And Blunt, an art historian, was publicly identified by the British government only in old age after years of cover-ups. After all, he was advisor to the Queen on art matters and had received a knighthood. The old-boy network wanted no embarrassments.

Coral Browne wound up in Burgess' Moscow apartment because he went to one of the Hamlet performances. As usual, he was drunk. He found his way to her dressing room by accident and proceeded to vomit in her basin. She was not amused and hadn't the slightest idea who he was. When she had to leave for the second act, Burgess managed to steal her soap, cigarettes and face powder before leaving. "One should have asked," he tells her later. "One is such a coward." But later he slipped a note under the door asking her to lunch and to bring a tape measure. Burgess wanted gossip from London, but Browne didn't know anyone in his upper-class circles. He wants to be taken seriously, but seems merely charmingly superficial. Burgess is a self-destructive, self-aware drunk, yet also a proud Englishman. More than anything else, he wants Browne to take his measurements and order some suits for him from his Savile Row tailor when she returns to London. She agrees, but only because she sees no reason why anyone, even a traitor, shouldn't have a suit if he wants. At the end of this marvelous one hour program, most of which is spent with Burgess and Browne talking to each other, we see Guy Burgess jauntily walking over a Moscow bridge wearing a perfectly tailored suit, hand-crafted leather shoes on his feet, a well-cut topcoat over his shoulders and holding up a black umbrella to ward of the beginning snow. Passing him are the comrades in their drab clothing and fur hats, some curious about this unusual creature in their midst. Guy Burgess has become a very well-dressed Englishman...well, English traitor...abroad.

This is a fine example of what an excellent, subtle writer Alan Bennett is. The tone is amusing and wry, but Bennett slips a sharp knife in as he shows the complacency of so many of the British upper-class, as well as the self-delusional foolishness of Burgess. And Bennett makes us appreciate the spine of Coral Browne, unwilling to paint people with the colors the British establishment would have her use. "I'm just an actress," she says, "I've never been interested in politics. But if this is communism I don't like it because it's dull...their clothes are terrible and they can't make false teeth. What else is there?" "The system," Burgess replies, and he's serious.

As excellent as Bennett is, Alan Bates as Burgess and Coral Browne playing herself match him. Browne may have no great passion one way or the other toward English traitors, but she's not about to let others tell her who she can and can't see, even in Moscow. More to the point, she has Guy Burgess' number. People in England can call him anything they like; he'll make amusing conversation out of their anger or contempt. But the idea that they might think he now regrets having to live in Moscow makes him vulnerable. Bates is so good an actor he lets us be amused by Burgess, even like him, but also be somewhat disgusted by him...all at the same time.

This came out on a VHS tape years ago, and can still be tracked down. Hopefully, it will see a DVD issue. Even more hopefully, it will be paired with Alan Bennett's A Question of Attribution, an almost equally amusing and trenchant teleplay about Anthony Blunt. Cambridge Spies, the British TV miniseries which tells the story of Philby, Burgess, Maclean and Blunt, also is well worth watching.



Guy Burgess erupts by accident in the dressing room of Coral Brown,which is in Moskow playing Hamlet, in a state of intoxication and feeling desperately sick...


After a desperate run to the washing basin ... he develops a eccentrinc conversation with Coral ... that finds him charming "malgré" his manners ... but after some questions that d'ont reveal the identity of this strange intruder ... she leaves ... leaving the gentleman in distress behind ... which enables him to take with him the soap, together with the booze etc ...





In the corridor he comes to a "close encounter" with another actor, that is actually a old "chap" from Cambridge ... which recognises him as Guy Burgess ... Burgess disappears along the corridor ... without giving any sign of recognition ...



The actor tells Coral about the strange encounter in the corridor with Guy Burgess ... like this Coral becomes aware about the idendity of the strange but charming intruder ...


Later at her strange and depressing hotel she receives a message from Guy with his adress and inviting her to have lunch with her ...


She starts a kind of endless enquiry to this adress that give us the opportunity to feel the Kafka ambiance of paranoia of the Soviet Regime ... She starts being followed by the secret police ...




She goes to the British Embassy, only to be received by two snobish and priggish young "eton" boys ... that refuse to help her ... and irritate her tremendously ...






One secretary that has enough of being "bullyed" by the arrogant boys tries to help her , but is watched and stopped by one of the boys that is watching her from the stairs ...




She has no other choice than going back to the streets followed by the secret state police and keep on asking the way ... until that she founds someone that will take her ... if she pays him with her silk scarf ...




Finally she comes to the adress .... a terrible ensemble of distressing and shabby social flats ....





Inside the shabby and messy apartement Guy is wayting for her in a chaotic manner ... burns the squalid lunch ... and is able to offer her proudly a tomato ...




He hides his lonelyness by "chatting"about known people from the past ... and about England ... finally he reveals what he wants to ask her ... that will become the only "key" possible to civilisation and his "secret garden" in the inospite desert of Moscow ... Does she wants to take some measures to order a suit from his taylors ... some shoes from his shoemaker ... some pyjamas ?? ...









They listen to the only record he has .... and that he keeps on listening ... an english song ... they say goodbye and she leaves .... to London



In London we can follow her visits to Saville Row .... to John Lobb in st James Street ... etc ... and we can feel by the reactions .... the degree of more or less gentleness and real humanity of people ... concerning her mission ...



















Finally we can see Guy in the glorious moment where he can walk again in his "shining armour" ... full of dignity and panache ... at the sound of "For He Is an Englishman"