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Bunau-Varilla, who died two years ago, was 28 years older than Nicole, and a Protestant into the bargain. "All of us thought him too old for her," says her brother Marc Marenda, 49, a Paris advertising man. With a fortune based on the right-wing Paris daily Le Matin, which spouted the Vichy and Nazi lines during World War II, Etienne never worked, instead haunted ski resorts and the Grand Prix auto-racing circuit while Nicole tended the children—Philippe, now 23 and serving in the French air force, and Prisca, 20, who is married to the son of a French wine merchant. They spent the war years in a Normandy château, and afterward Etienne resumed his night life with gusto. "I think Nicole realized what a colossal ego he was," says Marc. They were divorced in 1957, the same year that Hervé Alphand shed his first wife.
Cackle, Cackle. A onetime boy wonder, Alphand, at 22, became an in-specteur des finances, the youngest in French history. When the Turkish government asked France to send someone to help untangle its finances, Alphand, then only 27, was chosen. Kemal Ataturk was expecting Alphand's father, who had served as French Ambassador to Moscow and Bern. After a few days, he nervously asked Hervé, "But where is your father?" So helpful did Hervé prove as an adviser that Ataturk soon stopped asking.
In 1930 Hervé married Claude Raynaud, a delicate-featured blonde whom he had met when she was singing in amateur Paris musicals. He was interested in the theater then and still excels as a mimic; at parties his imitations range from Khrushchev to a cackling hen. When war came, Hervé went to the U.S. as an economic expert for Vichy, but he quit in less than a year to join De Gaulle's Free French in London. Claude stayed behind, supporting herself by singing at such Manhattan boites as the Blue Angel and the Maisonette for as much as $750 a week.
After the war, Hervé became a top French troubleshooter at major international conferences. He was named Ambassador to the United Nations in 1955, Ambassador to Washington the following year. In 1957 he and Claude were divorced. "I cannot stand official life," she explained. "I loved Washington, but not the life of an ambassador."
As Nicole recalls it, she had known Hervé for a number of years before their respective divorces. "But it was not until we sat vis-à-vis one night at a narrow dinner table that we really met one another," she says. "It was, how does one say, the moment." They were married a year after the divorces, and Paris tongues wagged furiously.
The Swivel Game. Just one day after their Paris wedding in 1958, dissident French generals seized power in Algeria, precipitating the crisis that led to De Gaulle's return to power. A week later, the Alphands boarded a plane for the U.S. Says she: "I had never flown before; I had never been in the United States before; and I had never been in diplomatic life before. If there had not been someone behind me going up the steps, I would have turned around. I was frightened."