The acid-tongued ambassadress

“I always see the faults of my friends,” writes Walburga, Lady Paget, in the introduction to her 1923 two-volume memoir Embassies of Other Days. “But I like their faults and I mention them as it adds to the piquancy of their personalities.” The second volume closes with a further disclaimer. “I have related everything exactly as it appeared to me to be and may thereby have inadvertently hurt the feelings of some, but this must be put to the account of my sincerity.” Reader, be warned: Lady Paget can be alarmingly sincere.

In all, she wrote six volumes of memoirs about her experiences as the wife of diplomat Sir Augustus Paget, who between 1860 and 1893 was Britain’s ambassador in Copenhagen, Lisbon, Florence and then Rome, and finally in 1883 at the imperial court in Vienna, to which Walburga was also appointed ambassadress in her own right. Embassies…, which was written during her ten years in Vienna and ends in 1893, mixes memoir with diary entries and letters; it is the most fully autobiographical of her books, which are long out of print. That is not too surprising. As The Times noted when she died in 1929, aged 90: “[She] belonged to a world which, already obsolescent, was utterly swept away by the Great War… a world in which ‘Society’ in most European countries meant a small set of aristocrats and diplomats who spent their lives in expensive amusements, sport, intermarriage, and the painstaking observance of an elaborate etiquette.” Put like that, I suppose, one can see its flaws.

Still, it’s a shame her books are neglected. Piquant observations – some of them eye-wateringly sharp – are everywhere. Within a few random pages, one might meet Lady Malet with “the look of an ancient Sybil… marred by the too frequent use of the waterproof which at times appeared to be her only and certainly was her principal garment”. Or Mme de Haymerle, wife of the Austrian ambassador in Rome, “a small attenuated person, who might have been pretty had she not been so washed-out looking… a native of Frankfurt where, apparently, the art of eating with grace does not enter into a higher education.” Or Anthony Trollope – “rough, heavy, persevering and rather vulgar, like his books”.

Now read on…