Noble Blood - Teaching People Manners

Episode Date: June 24, 2025

In 1921, Katherine Mansfield wrote a letter to Princess Bibesco which began, "I am afraid you must stop writing these little love letters to my husband while he and I still live together." Scandalous as that is, it only scratches the surface of the glamorous and adventerous life of the daughter of a Prime Minister who became royalty. Support Noble Blood: — Bonus episodes, stickers, and scripts on Patreon— Order Dana's book, 'Anatomy: A Love Story' and its sequel 'Immortality: A Love Story'See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. What's up, everyone? I'm Ago Vodam. My next guest, it's Will Ferrell. Woo, woo, woo, woo. My dad gave me the best advice ever. He goes, just give it a shot.

But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, The cat, just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck. Listen to Thanks, Dad, on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of IHeart Radio and grim and mild from Aaron Manky. Listener discretion advised. Catherine Mansfield was a prolific writer and critic, packing a great deal of work into her short life. Before her death at age 34 in 1923, she had written dozens of short stories and poems, as well as over 100 pieces of literary criticism. A contemporary and close friend of Virginia Woolf, Mansfield is widely considered to be one of the greatest short story writers of the early 20th century. And still, one of her most intriguing pieces of writing came in the first. form of a very brief, very simple letter. Here it is in its entirety sent in March of 1921.

Dear Princess Babesco, I'm afraid you must stop writing these little love letters to my husband while he and I live together. It is one of the things which is not done in our world. You are very young. Won't you ask your husband to explain to you the impossibility of such a situation. Please do not make me have to write to you again. I do not like scolding people and I simply hate having to teach them manners. Yours sincerely, Catherine Mansfield. It's hard to imagine any work of fiction or book review coming close to that in terms of sparking interest in so few sentences. It's so perfectly eloquent and mean in equal measure. I do not like scolding people, and I simply hate having to teach them manners. Perfect. It sounds like something from a lost

null-coward play, or a Miranda Priestley speech that ended up on a cutting room floor. But equally intriguing, at least in my mind, is the recipient, a princess. It's hard to imagine a royal being the recipient of such elevated and eloquent shade. And so who was Princess Elizabeth Babesco? and how did she find herself on the wrong side of the early 20th century literati? I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is Noble Blood. The story of Princess Elizabeth Babesco is not so much a rags to riches story, but rather a privilege to more privilege story. Her father was H.H. Asquith, a man who was from more humble beginnings,

but who rose through the ranks of Parliament to become privileged. Prime Minister of the United Kingdom when Elizabeth was 11 years old. Life as the Prime Minister's daughter thrust her into the spotlight, and Elizabeth quickly grew to love it that way. Her keen intelligence and social grace made quite an impression on the adults around her, and she was fearless in leveraging her position for the greater good, as well as for a little extra attention of her own. When she was 12 years old, Elizabeth enlisted playwright George Bernard Shaw to write a play for a charity benefit, which she herself directed. By her teenage years, her charm and philanthropy were topics of discussion in national

newspapers. During World War I, a teenage Elizabeth wrote and performed in live shows for the troops. She also organized fundraisers to help out with relief efforts. She even acted in two silent war movies directed by D.W. Griffith. If she were alive today, she would probably be characterized correctly as a Nepo Baby It Girl. Elizabeth quickly became known among London High Society as a spirited young multi-hyphenate who, as we'd soon see, inherited her family's talent for social climbing. Antoine Babesco was a Romanian prince and diplomat. who by 1918 had found himself part of the social circle that included Elizabeth's father, Lord Asquith. At the time, he was 40 years old and in a serious relationship. But when he met

the dazzling 21-year-old daughter of the then-former prime minister, Babesco's attentions shifted entirely. Elizabeth's mother, Margot Asquith, was thrilled by the match. She was, she was. She was, She saw in Antoine the kind of continental sophistication her own family lacked, with breeding that far exceeded those from her own family. She also hoped he would have a calming effect on her daughter, who'd already packed a lot of life into her 21 years. Elizabeth and Antoine were married on April 29, 1919, witnessed by a who's who of British royalty and culture. Everyone from Queen Mary to Elizabeth's old collaborator, George Bernard Shaw,

was in attendance. It was a union that would catapult Elizabeth from the daughter of a politician into actual European royalty and all the glamour that came with it. The newlyweds settled into life in Paris, taking up residence in the Babesco family townhouse. It was here that a Elizabeth would give birth to their only child, a girl named Priscilla in 1920. It was also the place where she would be initiated into a world far more sophisticated than even her privileged upbringing had prepared her for. The Babesco family moved in rarefied circles, their Parisian salon drawing the most celebrated artists and writers of the era.

At its center was Antoine's mother, Helene Babesco, renowned hostess and patron, who turned their home into a gathering place for the intellectual elite. Among the regular visitors was none other than Marcel Proust, who'd formed a close friendship with Antoine long before Elizabeth had even entered the picture. Proust became utterly enchanted by the new Princess Babesco, declaring her to be, quote, probably unsurpassed in intelligence by any of her contemporaries. He was also taken by her physical beauty, comparing her to a figure in an Italian fresco. The author, a discerning recluse who rarely ventured from his home, would make late-night visit to the Babesco townhouse, discussing literature with Elizabeth and gossiping with Antoine. Elizabeth had clearly found her footing in this world of letters and high society.

But not everyone in the literary world was quite so taken with the vivacious young princess. While she'd mastered the art of captivating influential men, she had also begun to make some rather powerful enemies of their wives. To understand what would compel someone to write the scathing letter I read in this episode's introduction, let's take a look at the woman behind the pen. By 1921, the New Zealand author Catherine Mansfield had established herself as a strong voice in modern literature, dealing with topics like existentialism, sexuality, and her relationship to Christianity. She moved to London at age 19 and found herself in the orbit of the Bloomsbury Group.

Virginia Woolf became a close personal friend, and like her more famous author friend, Catherine's personal life, was decidedly unconventional. She had romantic relationships with both men and women. Like many of her age, she struggled with her attraction for women. By the time her path crossed with Princess Babesco's, Catherine Mansfield was married to a man, J.M. Murray, a literary editor and critic. Their relationship had been rocky from the start. They met in 1911, and by the time they finally married in 1918, they had gone through a string of breakups and reconciliations with both Catherine and Murray pursuing other lovers during their times apart. They were the early 20th century equivalent of that toxic couple who couldn't seem to quit each other, as

as much as their friends might have wanted them to. There was also a third member of their relationship, Catherine's failing health. In 1917, she had been given a diagnosis of pulmonary tuberculosis, and by late 1920, the disease was steadily claiming more of her strength and mobility. She spent long stretches away from London, seeking treatment in warmer climates, while Murray remained at home ostensibly focused on his job as editor of a literary magazine called the Athenium. Catherine, isolated by illness and sometimes geography, remained emotionally dependent on Murray, even as she knew he was incapable of fidelity.

Her letters to him reveal that she clung to an idealized version of him, even as evidence mounted against her faith. Because even though Murray stayed behind for work, he also found plenty of time for extracurricular activities. That's where Princess Babesco comes in. During this period, Elizabeth Babesco's own writing career was on the rise. She was eager to be recognized as a serious literary figure in her own right, a drive that started with those pre-teen stage productions and only grew stronger over time. This led her directly to J.M. Murray's orbit when she began submitting stories to the Athenium.

What started as a professional relationship quickly became something far more personal. It's worth noting that infidelity wasn't exactly foreign territory for the Babesco marriage either. Prince Antoine had already earned himself quite a reputation around London, as what the writer and critic Rebecca West, memorably called a boudoir athlete. West, who had her own brief affair with the Prince in 1927, recalled looking around the room at a French embassy party and realizing that every woman present had been Antoine's mistress at one time or another. No doubt Elizabeth Babesco felt entitled to some romantic adventuring of her own. But for Catherine Mansfield, watching from her sickbed in the south of France, the betrayals were becoming impossible to ignore

or forgive. The situation reached a breaking point in December 1920 when Catherine's doctors insisted that for her health, she stopped the exhausting work of writing reviews for her husband's literary magazine. Left with nothing really to distract her, Catherine's attention turned to Murray's affairs, particularly the one with Elizabeth Babesco. Catherine was forced to confront the humiliating reality that her husband in this case was conducting something much worse than merely a physical affair. The princess was positioning herself as a literary partner, asking for advice, and guidance in ways that must have felt like a direct attack on Catherine's own professional relationship with her husband.

The final straw came in early 1921 when Catherine intercepted one of Elizabeth's letters to Murray, a breathless plea begging him to, quote, resist Catherine and reminding him that you swore nothing on earth should ever come between us. The letter revealed not just the depth of the affair, but Elizabeth Babesco's apparent belief that she was engaged in some kind of romantic rescue mission, saving Murray from his invalid wife. Catherine's response was swift, devastating, and deserved.

Let's hear it again, shall we? It is just almost too good. Dear Princess Babesco, I'm afraid you must stop writing these little. little love letters to my husband while he and I live together. It is one of the things which is not done in our world. You are very young. Won't you ask your husband to explain to you the impossibility of such a situation? Please do not make me have to write to you again. I do not like scolding people and I simply hate having to teach them manners. You are sincerely Catherine Mansfield. Only a truly gifted writer could have crafted something so glacially polite that's also filled with barely contained fury. Clearly, the missive was designed to put the passionate young princess in her place.

But Catherine wasn't finished. She followed up with a second, longer response that revealed even more about the state of mind and her philosophy about love, arts, and authenticity. The aftermath of those letters sent ripples through London's literary circles. Virginia Woolf, always one to enjoy a good bit of gossip, wrote about what she called the Babesco scandal, with which London, so they say, rings. She described dinners where a miserable Murray poured out his heart, insisting that his affair with Elizabeth meant nothing to him,

all the while declaring his absolute devotion to Catherine. Mansfield, meanwhile, described the princess to William Garardi, an up-and-coming novelist, as, quote, a most dreadful young person, very, very emotional. It's really a shame we didn't have reality television back then because this friend group was churning out Vanderpump Rules levels of drama. For Catherine, the confrontation represented something, larger than just marital strife. Her isolation and suffering due to her chronic condition helped her realize what was most important to her. Writing. Perhaps her husband's affair with

Elizabeth Babesco wasn't just a betrayal to their marriage, but a threat to her entire literary world. Maybe she found the brazenness of the princess just to be a bit of a bridge too far. Maybe she was repelled by the passion of someone boldly declaring what they wanted, with no thought given to the feelings of others. Or maybe she simply didn't care for Elizabeth Babesco's writing. Regardless of her exact reasons, Catherine Mansfield gathered the accumulated fury of her life's misfortunes and aimed straight for the princess. The fact that we have the letter at all suggests that she made a copy and possibly shared it with a close friend or two. I can certainly understand that. After all, who hasn't sent a friend screenshots of a particularly

juicy text conversation, especially when someone is so articulate and so in the right? For Catherine Mansfield, Life Post Letter was spent in search of a Hail Mary miracle cure for her tuberculosis. Her final years became a pilgrimage through alternative therapies and spiritual remedies, each one promising what the last had failed to deliver. This quest ultimately led her to the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in Fontainebleau, France. This was the most outlandish place she'd tried yet, a transcendental commune of sorts, under the guru-like leadership of a man named George,

Gerjeff, a mystic, spiritual teacher, and choreographer. If that sounds like a cult, well, you're not wrong. Her days were full of hard labor, with little food and little sleep. But Catherine was convinced she had found something transformative. Sadly, she was right, though not in the way she had hoped. Catherine died of a pulmonary hemorrhage, just three months after arriving at the Institute, sparking an immediate controversy about whether the Institute's extreme regimen had accelerated her death.

She was just 34 years old. In a final indignity that somehow seems fitting for her turbulent relationship, her husband, J.M. Murray, forgot to pay her funeral expenses. This resulted in Catherine being buried in a pauper's great,

before the oversight was corrected and her remains could be moved to a more suitable resting place. Her death left Murray with the considerable task of editing and publishing the mountain of work she left behind, including two volumes of short stories, a novel, a collection of poems, and more. In death, Catherine's voice would reach far more readers than it ever had in life. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Babesco was continuing to build a literary career of her own. In 1921, she published her first collection of short stories, entitled, I Have Only Myself to Blame. The princess drew inspiration from the glittering Parisian society she now called home, capturing what one critic would later call the, quote, buoyant charm, nonchalant,

wit, and sparkling decor of a rarefied world, though others would find her writing superficial, all glamour and no depth. She was a prolific writer, publishing novels, plays, short story collections, and more over the course of the next two decades. Her work garnered international attention, and she even had a novel serialized in the Washington Post. Yet, despite her productivity, Elizabeth found herself perpetually dismissed by the literary establishment. The tensions that had erupted over the Mansfield-Murray affair crystallized a broader cultural divide between the Bloomsbury intellectuals, with their serious modernist sensibilities, and Elizabeth's more fashionable continental

approach to both life and marriages and literature. In the 1930s, the princess reached out to Virginia Woolf for support while putting together an anti-fascist exhibition in London. Harking back to her teenage tenure as a wartime organizer, Elizabeth drew from her well of celebrity contacts. But Virginia Woolf was no George Bernard Shaw. Wolf was suspicious of Elizabeth's politics, particularly around feminism,

or as she called it, the woman question. After a brief, terse exchange, Wolf made it clear that, in her view, the princess remained as shallow and politically naive as ever. There's no denying Elizabeth Babesco made enemies during her life, but her writing deserves to be evaluated on its own terms. Her work serves as a snapshot of a specific time in history, a breathy, deceptively sincere counterpoint to the Bloomsbury Group's existentialism.

Years later, the English writer Elizabeth Bowen would write a more generous assessment of Babesco's writing than many of her contemporaries. She noted that Elizabeth Babesco's characters, quote, seemed to be the inhabitant of a special milieu, in which the more ordinary taboos of feeling and breaks on speech, do not operate." Elizabeth wrote of privileged people with big feelings, people who came through the First World War utterly changed and unsure where they fit in.

Those who survived became obsessed with the minutia of everyday life, taking nothing for granted. Her characters followed their hearts, just as she had in real life, with all the fallout that came along with it. In the end, perhaps the real tragedy isn't that Elizabeth Babesco was dismissed by her more serious literary contemporaries, but that she was born into the wrong era entirely. In our current age of social media and personal branding, her instinct for self-promotion and her talent for turning life into art might have made her a sensation.

Instead, she found herself caught between two worlds. a princess who wanted to be taken seriously as an artist in an age that prized solemn intellectualism. A girl called out and ostracized for an affair in a circle where it was nearly the norm. Catherine Mansfield, no doubt, got the last word in their famous exchange. But hopefully history has softened a bit on Princess Babesco, a woman whose greatest crime may have been saying the quiet part out loud. That's the story of Princess Elizabeth Babesco, but keep listening after a brief sponsor break for a bit more of the princess's glamorous life. Everyone, I'm Ago Wodom.

My next guest, you know from Step Brothers Anchorman, Saturday Night Live and the Big Money Players Network. It's Will Ferrell. My dad gave me the best advice ever. I went and had lunch with them one day, and I was like, and Dad, I think I want to really give this. a shot. I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings. I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place that come look for up and coming talent. He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet. He goes, but there's so much luck involved. And he's like, just give it a shot. He goes, but if you ever reach a point where

you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar. of, you know, the cat just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck. Listen to Thanks Dad on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

What's up, everyone? I'm Ego Wodom. My next guest, you know from Step Brothers Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network. It's Will Ferrell. Woo, woo, woo, woo. My dad gave me the best. advice ever. I went and had lunch with them one day and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really

give this a shot. I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings. I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place that come look for up and coming talent. He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet. Yeah. He goes, but there's so much luck involved. And he's like, just give it a shot. He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down,

it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat, just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck. Listen to Thanks, Dad, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

Throughout her literary career, Elizabeth Babescoe maintained a second job as ambassador's wife. She remained married to Antoine Babesco, despite his affairs and hers, for the entirety of her life, and the Babescos moved around with Antoine's work, first to Washington, D.C. and later, Madrid. When World War II began, the family returned to Romania, where Elizabeth would spend her final years. She died in 1945 at just 48 years old, and was buried in the Babesco family graveyard. Her grave is inscribed with the last line of one of her collections of poetry. My soul has gained the freedom of the night. It's the perfect inscription and one last reminder to

her lifelong commitment to main character energy. Perhaps the most telling detail about Princess Babesco's life comes from her obituary in the New York Times. Quote, she narrowly escaped death in 1928 when an airplane in which she was making a tour of Near East relief work crashed on a rocky beach in Greece. The plane somersaulted three times, pitching passengers over a cliff into the sea. This to me is one of the most compelling arguments for a more empathetic reframe of the princess's life. She wasn't just an architect of chaos. Sometimes the drama sought her out. Noble Blood is a production of I-Heart Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky.

Noble Blood is hosted by me, Dana Schwartz, with additional writing and research by Hannah Johnston, Hannah Zwick, Courtney Sender, Amy Height, and Julia Milani. The show is edited and produced by Jesse Funk, with supervising producer Rima Il Kali, and executive producers Aaron Manky, Trevor Young, and Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. What's up, everyone? I'm Ago Vodom. My next guest, it's Will Ferrell. Woo, woo, woo, woo, woo. My dad gave me the best advice ever. He goes, just give it a shot. But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.

If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on. a calendar of, you know, the cat, just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck. Listen to thanks, Dad, on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.