Empty Mansions

when the German gunboat
Panther
sailed into the French Moroccan port of Agadir. This provocation led to the expansion of British promises to protect France in case of a German attack. In a letter from Paris to his businessmanager in Montana, Clark observed that the “Socialists in Germany have become so strong that the Emperor might think that war is the only way to save his throne.”
    The Clarks had left anxiety behind at home as well. On March 22, 1914, when Huguette was eight, aparade of a thousand anarchists and union activists marched up Fifth Avenue from Madison Square to 107th Street, with orator Emma Goldman at the head of the parade, urging the poor to take what they need from the rich. With a banner vowing “demolitione,” the passing parade cursed the Clark mansion, where frightened servants gathered at the windows. The parade ended with the singing of “The Worker’s Marseillaise,” the revolutionary French national anthem (“The rich, the exploiters …”).
    Huguette often described the summers of 1911–14 in France as the idyllic days of her childhood. The family rented a castle called the château de Petit-Bourg, in the hamlet of that name, sixteen miles south of the center of Paris, known today as Evry-sur-Seine. Those were carefree days. Well-thumbed photos in Huguette’s album show her father decked out in casual white pants and a straw hat, standing in a wheat field; Anna, smiling, in a white summer dress on a park bench; Andrée striding in front of the castle with a broad grin; and little Huguette, at about age seven, sitting proudly on a horse with a white diamond-shaped mark on its nose.
    The girls rode bicycles and explored the castle’s secret tunnels, which led down to the banks of the Seine. They were not alone on their adventures, always chaperoned by Madame Sandré, as the fear of kidnapping and other dangers was ever present. Their mother forced them inside every day for music lessons—the piano for both girls, as well as the harp for Andrée (like her mother) andthe violin for Huguette. For good behavior, they received gold coins from their father as an allowance. Eighty years later, Huguette told the following story to her nurses.
    In late August 1914, with the German army sweeping through Belgium and approaching Paris from the east, word came from the ambassador that all American citizens must leave France. W.A. prepared to remove his family, but how to pay for the trip? The banks were closed, and he didn’t have enough cash to hire a car and driver. The mine owner and banker was worth well over $50 million. Yet at that moment, he wasa little light in the wallet, even as the German First Army approached the outskirts of Paris, within fifty miles of Petit-Bourg.
    Andrée and Huguette came up with a clever solution: They handed over their gold coins, which W.A. used to hire a car to the coast. From there they found passage to England, departing on September 4. Two days later, the French and British engaged the Germans in the First Battle of the Marne, preventing the occupation of Paris and beginning four years of trench warfare. Safe in England as the great powers went into battle, W.A., Anna, Andrée, and Huguette enjoyed the mineral waters of the posh Royal Leamington Spa. W.A. had no fear of being drafted into service when America entered the Great War three years later, in 1917. His war, the one he was of age to serve in, had been the American Civil War.
    • • •
    During the war years of 1914–18, the girls escaped New York’s summer heat by taking vacations in the West, seeing the geysers at Yellowstone and staying at the family’s lakefront hideaway in Montana. Photos show them swimming and enjoying time with their half-brother Will and his retinue. Whatever strains his marriage to Anna may have caused, W.A.’s first and second families were vacationing together. The retreat, called Mowitza Lodge, after an American Indian word meaning “running deer,” was situated on Salmon Lake, northwest of Helena, a tranquil spot for swimming, hiking, and bird-watching among ponderosa pine, western larch, and Douglas fir. In the 1910s, the favorite game at the lodge was Ping-Pong, a British import that had taken Montana by storm.
    In September 1916,the girls signed Will’s guest book, first fourteen-year-old Andrée with a bold signature, listing her address nostalgically as Paris, France. Andrée said later that although her parents had been born in America, she