Verwandte Artikel zu Bugatti Queen: In Search of a French Racing Legend

Bugatti Queen: In Search of a French Racing Legend - Hardcover

Seymour, Miranda

 
9781400061686: Bugatti Queen: In Search of a French Racing Legend
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1400061687 ISBN 13: 9781400061686
Verlag: Random House Inc, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

Chronicles the colorful life and exploits of Hellé Nice, a one-time competitive skier, Parisian cabaret dancer, and Montmarte stripper who, through her unique blend of charm, talent, and personal connections, gained fame in the male-dominated sport of car racing. 25,000 first printing.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

MIRANDA SEYMOUR is the author of acclaimed biographies of Mary Shelley, Ottoline Morrell, Robert Graves, and Henry James. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Royal Society of Arts, and a visiting professor at the Nottingham Trent University, Seymour lives next to what used to be England’s most celebrated racing circuit.

Aus dem Klappentext

“Even if you have never thrilled to the drone of powerful cars jockeying for position on a racetrack,” writes London’s <i>Literary Review, </i>“Miranda Seymour’s biography of the daring female driver Hellé Nice will have you riveted to your seat.” Indeed, the story of this record-shattering woman–known as “Hellish Nice” to her fans and “Hell on Ice” to her rivals–provides a fascinating and unexpected view of Europe and America in the years between the wars.<br>Transcending her provincial background, and taking the name “Hellé Nice,” Hélène Delangle made her way into the Parisian demimonde of the 1920s as a nude model, ballerina, and cabaret dancer. But it was on the racetrack, thrilled by the combination of machinery and speed, that Nice would realize her destiny, becoming the “fastest woman in the world.” Catching the attention of the formidable Ettore Bugatti, designer of the world’s most desirable cars, Nice gained admission to the exclusive male club of drivers. Her readiness to pose for the camera with seductively half-closed eyes and a radiant smile, coupled with her willingness to risk her life for a record or a win, made Hellé Nice an irresistible commodity for Bugatti’s marque. Impenitently promiscuous, her many lovers ranged from engineers and mechanics to aristocrats of the racing world such as Baron Philippe de Rothschild and Count Bruno d’Harcourt. <br>A racer of thrilling audacity, Hellé Nice competed in numerous Grand Prix, was the only woman to drive the treacherous American dirt tracks and speedbowls in the 1930s, and set new land-speed records until a notorious accident in Brazil nearly ended her racing career. Her comeback impeded by the war, she lived out the Occupation in the South of France. In 1949, she was mysteriously denounced by a hostile fellow driver as a Gestapo agent. Eventually, Hellé Nice would die in obscurity, the shadow on her reputation causing her name to be written out of racing history.<br>Drawn from a remarkable cache of newly discovered papers, Miranda Seymour’s <i>Bugatti Queen</i> sheds new light on both the treacherous world of international racing and life in Occupied France, while revealing the story of a fearless and passionate woman who lived for challenge.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter One

BEGINNINGS

In my end is my beginning.

—Mary Queen of Scots
(allegedly)

NICE, WINTER 1975

She had kept the gloves because they reminded her of the way in which one of her most charming lovers, Philippe de Rothschild, had introduced himself to her. She had been sitting at a café table in Paris, chatting to a friend, when she first noticed that a man, strongly built, well dressed, bronze-faced, had stopped as he walked past. He hadn’t moved for about a minute. He was looking directly at her. She wondered if he was after an autograph; he didn’t look like a journalist. Good eyes; nice mouth. She gave a wide bold smile and watched him come toward the table. He spoke her name and asked how long she had been back from her American tour, indicating familiarity with her career. She said she seemed to know his face too and burst out laughing when he identified himself. A racer himself, and of Bugattis: no wonder that he had such a familiar look. She introduced her friend, a girl she had met when they were both dancers at the casino, and gave her a quick, significant glance. Diana took the hint, remembered an appointment, smiled at them both, and moved out of the yellow shade of the awning into the hard afternoon light of the Champs-Elysées. That was when Philippe de Rothschild lifted her left hand from the table and, correctly, identified the name of her glovemaker. Turning her hand over, he undid the four tiny pearl buttons that held the molded kid tight against her wrist, smooth on her flesh as a second skin. Her bare arms were sunburnt; here, at the pulse point, the skin was white as a baby’s. Smiling, he lifted her hand to his mouth and, looking into her eyes, touched the tiny area of revealed skin with his mouth and, very lightly, the tip of his tongue. It was the most delicate of gestures. She knew at once that the experience of being made love to by this man would give her pleasure.

Sitting on the edge of her bed at four in the morning, she lifted the gloves to her face, as if to bring back some scent of the past. Nothing remained but the softness of the kid. As for Philippe de Rothschild, she didn’t even know whether he was alive or dead. Sighing, she stretched out her toes, feeling for her slippers before she knelt to pull the precious trunk from its hiding place—she trusted nobody—beneath the iron bed frame. Wincing at the effort, she levered back the heavy lid.

There they were, her hoard of treasures, the tarnished racing cups, the silver commemorative plate from Brazil, the book of stamps collected from her travels: all were safe. She lifted the plate aside to reach the sheaves of yellow clippings. Two envelopes of photographs and a handful of letters were taken out, ready for the day’s work.

Sitting at the table under the window, she laid them carefully out. A cat mewed in the darkness and her head jerked up eagerly before she remembered that Minette, her companion over ten years, had been banished from this, the most desolate of her homes, by a landlord who had refused to have pets on the premises. True, he had offered a bottle of champagne in consolation when he saw her distress, but you couldn’t stroke a bottle or talk to it, or please it with a scrap of fish. Beggars couldn’t lay down the law; given the choice between the cat and the room, she let Minette find a new home with the tobacconist at the end of the street. Now the little minx didn’t so much as open her eyes when she hobbled in to buy the week’s supply of cigarettes. Faithless in the end, as all the rest had proved to be.

Brushing a skin of glue over the back of the tiny black-and-white photographs with their images of better times, she began the daily task of sticking them to the pages of the scrapbooks, building up a record of the past, drumming her heels on the floorboards as she tried to remember a date for each one. It was a young interviewer from Radio Monte Carlo who had given her the idea when he had come—five years ago? six?—to ask about the great day in 1929 when she had driven a Bugatti at the Montlhéry circuit near Paris and beaten the world record. He had been a nice boy and a good listener. She had enjoyed talking to him, but she hadn’t been able to make him understand the joy of driving that car. He ought to drive one himself, she had told him; that was the only way to do it. She had showed him her trophy cups, watched his eyes widen in respect. He hadn’t, he said, realized how much she had achieved. Before he left, he had urged her to try to put together a record of her career.

It was something to do, to fill the long night hours when sleep refused to come. (The years when she had slept as soundly as a child had ended for good in 1936, when a crash had nearly robbed her of more than the comfort of peaceful nights.) Now the scrapbooks had become her solace, taking her back to another life. Another person, she sometimes thought, looking down at a news item about her American tour of 1930 that proclaimed the first-ever appearance of a woman racing driver on the most dangerous board track in New Jersey, where she had been expected to set a new speed record.

The landlord was too mean to provide her with more than a single-bar heater for the two rooms she occupied at the top of the house. Shivering, she dragged a blanket off the bed and wrapped it tightly around her as she sat down again at the table. The photograph before her now was yellow, the images faint with age. A lace-smothered baby perched on the lap of a countrywoman wearing a long, heavy skirt and wooden sabots. “Mother and me, 1902, at Sainte-Mesme,” she wrote on the back. No, that couldn’t be right; in 1902, they had been living at Aunay-sous-Auneau, outside Chartres. Was this a photograph of herself or of Solange, her sister? That was the trouble with babies: swathed in bonnets and shawls, they all looked alike. It could very well be Solange, in which case the photograph was going back in the trunk. Where it would stay. Her family was going to have no place in her record of triumph.

BOISSY-LE-SEC, 1898

Boissy-le-Sec was a dead end of a village between Paris and Chartres, buried in the cornfields that stretched from one horizon to another. The women and their daughters wound the water up with an iron wheel that took four hands to turn it, from a well so deep that you could drop stones all day and never hear a sound come back. Léon Delangle and his wife blamed the icy water of Boissy for the deaths of their oldest boy, Maurice, who had died there in 1897, aged only three, and the youngest, Gabriel, whom they had buried in the same summer. Lucien, the middle child, cursed with long pale cheeks and a croupy cough, had survived. Alexandrine Delangle was expecting again when a welcome offer came to leave the village.

Léon Aristide Delangle was a postmaster, a government appointment that gave him a thousand francs a year (see conversion table on page xxiii) and a roof over his head and which licensed him to look down on his blacksmith cousin at Boissy. They had both married Alexandrines; it was all they or their wives had in common.

Alexandrine Estelle Bouillie was a gaunt girl of nineteen when she married the thirty-year-old postmaster. Her own family was of simple origins, and Alexandrine was intensely aware of her new and superior standing; it pleased her that Léon and she shared a big four-poster bed while his cousin the blacksmith’s wife lay in a humble tester. It was also gratifying to know that she and her husband had the only telephone in the village.* As the facteur-receveur, Léon Delangle was the local...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Random House Inc
Erscheinungsdatum
2004
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1400061687
ISBN 13 
9781400061686
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
323
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Purmerul LTD
https://strengholt.nl/en/

22 Liuleburgaz Str., floor 4, app. 9
Plovdiv
Bulgarien

Weitere beliebte Ausgaben desselben Titels

9780743478595: The Bugatti Queen

Vorgestellte Ausgabe

ISBN 10:  0743478592 ISBN 13:  9780743478595
Verlag: Simon + Schuster UK, 2005
Softcover