Empty Mansions

1966, apparently after a gap in communication, Etienne describes returning to the beach at Trouville, where he and Huguette were children together:
    Very dear Huguette: It was wonderful to receive your cable. Although your note “as well as possible” is worrisome, this note from you was a flower in my life as it is very hard not to hear from you, since in spite of our separate lives, my heart always beats with you. The years will always live.…
    On the Trouville-Deauville beach, I thought a lot about you and your mother while looking at the same place where your vacation home was. The houses have been remodeled so it’s not possible to identify which house from among the others. Very nice restorations. In spite of the rain, there were lots of families and children.… I kiss you with all my heart. With much love, always, Etienne
.
    • • •
    Andrew Etienne Allard de Villermont died on April 8, 1982, in one of the nicer neighborhoods of Cannes on the French Riviera. He was seventy-seven. A funeral Mass was said in a church in the wealthiest district of Paris. Etienne was entombed in the ancient monumental cemetery in Rouen, the historic capital city of Normandy, an hour from the beach at Trouville where Huguette met the young marquis.
    As it turns out,Etienne was not a marquis, despite being called so by the newspapers for years. His family held no noble title, though it had come close. Known for centuries as the Allards, the family had been on the way to nobility—Etienne’s great-great-great-grandfather bought an office as adviser to the king, but didn’t hold the post long enough—when the French Revolution interrupted their ascent.Etienne’s obituary, placed by Elisabeth and Marie-Christine, makes no mention of nobility. In Paris, the association of French noble families does not list his family. In the early 1900s Etienne’s father added a gloss, changing the family name to Villermont, which to French ears would have suggested nobility.
    Though Etienne’s tomb is near those of the novelist Flaubert, the artist Duchamp, and many people with noble-sounding names, his position even after death is insecure. His spot in the cemetery is not guaranteed forever, but lasts only as long as someone pays to maintain his monument.
    Huguette would outlive Etienne by twenty-nine years. She continued for nearly all that time to wire money to his widow, Elisabeth. The two women carried on a fond correspondence, sending love and kisses with all their hearts.
THE LITTLE PEOPLE

 
    T HE HOUSE OF C HRISTIAN D IOR held fashion shows at the palatial French consulate in New York, just up Fifth Avenue from Huguette’s apartment, with models showing the latest Parisian fashions. On the afternoon of one of these shows in the late 1950s, a familiar name showed up on the guest list.
    “Mrs. Huguette Clark!” exclaimed the consul general, Baron Jacques Baeyens, who had married Huguette’s niece. “Look, she’s not going to come. She’s my aunt, and she never goes out.”
    The representative from Christian Dior replied, “Oh, yes, she will. She wants to see the dresses to dress her dolls.”
    And she did. Huguette, then just past fifty, walked the three blocks up Fifth Avenue to the consulate to view the latest fashions from Paris.
    • • •
    Huguette Clark, who grew up in the biggest house in New York, was, like her father, a meticulous designer of extravagant houses, only on a smaller scale. These were dollhouses, but more than dollhouses. These one-of-a-kind tabletop models were story houses, theaters with scenes and characters painted on the walls. And like her father with his art collection, Huguette spared no expense. She commissioned religious houses with Joan of Arc, forts with toy soldiers, cottages with scenes from old French fables, and house after house telling her favorite fairy tales: Rapunzel, the long-haired maiden trapped in the tower. Sleeping Beauty, the princess stuck in sleep until a handsome prince awakens her with a kiss. Rumpelstiltskin, with the girl forced to spin straw into gold.
    Focused on every detail, Huguette tried to get the artisans, some of them up to four thousand miles away, to be more careful with their measurements when they made her dollhouses. The houses had to be in proportion to the dolls that went with them. The following cable is typical, sent when Huguette was fifty-eight years old to an artist who madesmall, posable dolls based on fairy-tale characters and sold them