Empty Mansions

was completely lined with armchairs, each providing a seat for a doll.
    After dinner, Marie-Christine had a delicious tarte aux pommes, the best apple tart she ever tasted.
    • • •
    Huguette also continued her financial support of Etienne and his extended family, spreading her generosity widely. From 1960 into the 2000s, she sent monthly bank drafts to half a dozen of Etienne’s relatives. She helped Etienne’s sad-sack younger brother, Henri, always starting a new agricultural venture while struggling as a bureaucrat. Huguette made sure that her physician saw all of Etienne’s family for checkups on his annual trips to Paris. She sent her handyman all the way to France to deliver vitamins and to help Etienne with the chores. After hearing that a drought had affected the cows in Normandy, she sent the family powdered milk.
    Huguette established an account with Monsieur Cognin, the grocer at 42, rue Gambetta in Deauville, sending him orders for essentials and treats to be delivered to Etienne and his extended family. From 907 Fifth Avenue in New York, transatlantic telegraph cables, made of seven twisted strands of pure copper strung across the ocean floor, carried Huguette’s messages to the corner grocer 3,517 miles away. She even made sure to ask for the trading stamps, so the family could save on other purchases.
    On July 2, 1962, she cabled to Monsieur Cognin:
    Received your nice letter. I just sent you a little more than the price of the order because I would like to order four cartons of fat-free milk, afew bars of Cemoi chocolate, and also a can of instant chocolate Nesquik. With my thanks, Huguette Clark
.
    She also sent the family gifts, including the high-priced Rolleiflex cameras from Germany, the newest film projectors. She sent small televisions to her French friends so they could watch America’s Apollo space flights. From the fabled Parisian toy store Au Nain Bleu in Paris, she ordered thoughtful gifts for the children, suited to their ages: for the girls, a musical blue goblin, Barbie dolls, a bedroom mirror and dresser with little perfume bottles, porcelain boxes filled with jewels, and lots of bows and ribbons; for the boys, not only a train set but an entire wooden village.
    The Villermont family was already grateful to America for defending their country in the great wars. “Without your country,” Etienne wrote in 1968, “there would be no more France.” But they were also grateful to their Tante Huguette. An older relative prayed for her on pilgrimages to Lourdes. Henri, Etienne’s brother, wrote in 1954, “I will never forget that you saved us from utter misery and that you eased our dear mother’s last years with your tireless kindness.… You distribute happiness every chance you get for the well-being and joy of others. It is an admirable form of ideal, from which everyone must draw the most beautiful Christian virtue—forget the self in favor of the others. You practice this virtue incessantly.”
    In 2001, when Huguette was ninety-five, Marie-Christine’s cousins made an illustrated French children’s book for her called
Une Princesse Merveilleuse
(A Marvelous Princess). They wrote:
    Once upon a time there was a princess who loved children very much. Every Christmas, she gave them lots of wonderful presents, and every time, the children were very happy. This princess loved the children’s toys a lot, and she would have liked to get presents, too. And this year in 2001, she received some mail. In this letter there was a gift. This gift was made by children. These children had made a book, the drawings and story were created by them. The princess was very, very, very happy. It was the first time that she had received agift from the children who had made the book. And this princess, guess what her name was? Tante Huguette.
    When Huguette got too hard of hearing to talk with Etienne’s family on the phone, she had a friend make the calls to swap news, which from the French side usually involved complaints about transit workers on strike—except when the postal workers were on strike.
    Marie-Christine continued to correspond with Huguette for many years, and Huguette counseled her through a difficult divorce, praising her for her bravery in striking out on her own. She says she doesn’t know what her father’s relationship with Huguette was, except that they were friends. She has now seen her father’s correspondence with Huguette. In a letter dated September 5,