The Year of the Duchess of Windsor – Reuniting in France

The abdicated King waited impatiently in Austria for Wallis’ divorce to become final, which it finally did on 3 May 1937. On 14 April, Edward wrote to Wallis, “This is just a line to say I love you more and more my own sweetheart and praying that the next eighteen days and nights won’t drag too interminably for WE. Poor WE – and there must be such store of happiness for us after all these months of hell.”1

In her memoirs, she wrote of being reunited with him the following day. “Finally, on the morning on May 3, there was a telephone call from George Allen in London. My divorce decree had now become absolute. I telephoned David in Austria. ‘Wallis,’ he said, ‘the Orient Express passes through Salzburg in the afternoon. I shall be at Candé in the morning.'[…] David arrived at lunch-time with his equerry, Dudley Forward. David was thin and drawn. I could hardly have expected him to look otherwise. Yet his gaiety bubbled as freely as before. He came up the steps at Candé two at a time. His first words were, ‘Darling, it’s been so long. I can hardly believe this you, and I am here.’ Later, we took a walk. It was wonderful to be together again. Before, we had been alone in the face of overwhelming trouble. Now we would meet it side by side.”2

Just a few days later, the coronation of Edward’s brother took place, on the same date that had been planned for his own coronation. They listened to the ceremony on the radio. Wallis later wrote, “When we were briefly alone afterwards, he remarked in substance only this: ‘You must have no regrets – I have none. This much I know: what I know of happiness is for ever associated with you.’ In these first days together at Candé, we began to plan for the future.”3

Wallis’ former husband Ernest watched the procession from a balcony at 49 Pall Mall and commented, “I couldn’t have taken it if it had been Wallis.”4

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