Daphne du Maurier and her Sisters

I’ve quite fallen for the woman I’ve told you about – Mlle Yvon … She’s absolutely kind of lured me on, and now I’m coiled in the net! She pops up to the bedroom at odd moments (Venice – what!!) and is generally divine. She’s most seductive when coming back from the Opera. I get on the back seat with her, & she puts her arm round me and makes me put my head on her shoulder. Then sort of presses me! Ugh! It all sounds too sordid and low, but I don’t know – it gives one a sort of extra-ordinary thrill!

Having her own feelings for Daphne, perhaps Tod found these letters rather hard to take. Daphne wrote extensively in her diary and letters of the romantic crush that became an obsessional affair, lasting almost two years, while their subsequent affectionate friendship lasted until Fernande’s death. For this girl, who had always felt herself unloved by her mother, her need for Mlle’s approval was ‘as insidious as a drug’.

Her sensible friend Doodie tried to reassure her by saying everyone had crushes, and promptly decided to attach herself devotedly to a little red-headed teacher. Daphne thought she knew all there was to know about crushes, having seen enough of Angela’s fleeting and, to her mind, vaguely ridiculous passions, but this, she insisted, was different. She added a further paragraph in her letter to Tod, revealing how cool, detached and watchful she remained, even while in thrall to her first grand passion:

I hope I haven’t got ‘Venetian’ tendencies! Already some of the girls are jealous which makes life somewhat uncomfortable … Life is queer, I can’t make it out … It will be fun, when I get back from the hols, imitating everyone here and laughing at it all. Even when I’m feeling most ‘épris’ of Mlle Yvon, there is always something inside me laughing somewhere.

Daphne’s idea of courtship was theatrical and gleaned from the way her father behaved towards women: exaggerated chivalry alternated with studied indifference. When, for instance, Mlle Yvon dropped a handkerchief, Daphne swooped on it and hid it away; later, in Paris, she bought a bottle of scent, sprinkled it on the linen and then in front of her rivals in the salon du fond