Empty Mansions

store, she wrote:
    For the lovely pastry shop please send the following: waffles, babas, tartelettes, crepes, tartines, palmiers, galettes, cups of milk, tea and coffee with milk, small butter jars, fake jam and honey, small boxes of chocolate, candies and candied fruits, and small forks. Thank you
.
    The dolls needed costumes. From Paris, Huguette ordered satin for her antique dolls with musical recordings inside them. She was having trouble finding the right satin for the Jumeau dolls, famous for their great beauty and big, soulful eyes.
    On August 9, 1962, in a cable to “Mme. Gervais, La Maison Christian Dior, Paris,” she wrote:
    Received your nice letter with the samples. If Sample B2 could be slightly darker and in satin it would be fine, as the color is the closest to the original. Sample A2 for the singer doll is perfect when it comes to softness and lightness, but is too dark. The color of Sample A3 is perfect, but the fabric is too heavy. I think it would be better to wait until you find the perfect fabrics for those little costumes. Please send me your new sketches. With all my thanks
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    • • •
    Rudolph, her dollhouse cabinetmaker, found Huguette charmingly frustrating. But she paid so extravagantly that he could never say no. In addition to paying for his time, she sent gifts to his children and grandchildren, including an early computer, a puppet theater with one hundredfairy-tale characters, and a second puppet theater so large that the family gave it to a school. She sent monetary gifts to the family as well.
    At Christmastime, Huguette would take three weeks to send out her dozens of Christmas cards,carefully redrafting each one until it suited her. (“I don’t like holidays,” she said with mock suffering, “because there is so much to do. Too much!”) Rudolph’s family was one of many to receive her “small gift,” a check for $20,000. Later, the little gifts grew to $30,000, then $40,000.
    When Rudolph died in 2000,Huguette kept sending the checks to his widow. When his widow died, the checks kept arriving in the names of their children. All the grandchildren of Rudolph and Anna Jaklitsch went to good colleges, paid for by Huguette and her “little people.”
A LITTLE PECULIAR

 
    I N J APAN ,a rare type of cedar was reserved by the so-called sumptuary laws for use only in imperial buildings and castles, where a roof made of its bark could last for seventy years. But a wealthy woman in the United States sought permission to buy and export a small quantity of this cedar. After months of discussion, the normally formidable bureaucracy of the prefecture finally knew it was beaten.
    The cedar was purchased, and an aging Japanese artist cut the valuable wood into tiny slivers. He was making tiles for the roof ofa dollhouse-size castle. This authentic model took two or three years to construct and cost $80,000.
    One of Huguette’s great enthusiasms, for half a century, was authenticity, in the form of designing tabletop models of real-life Japanese buildings—castles, teahouses, cake shops—which she commissioned from Japan. These were pieces of art in wood and fabric, miniatures with exquisite detail and authentic materials. She insisted that they have detachable roofs so she could see the interior surfaces and furnishings.
    Through a go-between in California and several translators,Huguette corresponded with the Japanese artist who cut the cedar for her roof, an old man she knew simply as “the artist.” The man, Saburo Kawakami, took long trips for her in Japan, oncechanging trains four times in a single day to reach Hirosaki Castle, so he could take photographs and measurements of each wall and tower.
    The measurements in her detailed designs had to be converted from English inches to metric centimeters to traditional Japanese
shaku
, and then the artist’s replies had to be converted back again. The costs were considerable. In 1991,she accepted an additional charge of $38,600 just to add doors to a wood house. In 1992, she sent $67,000 for a castle, and on they went to the next project.
    “She knew what she wanted to have done,” said her go-between, Caterina Marsh. “If she was not pleased, not that many times, she was gracious,but you understood you were going to have to redo it. If we believe in something, we’re not going to take a poor substitute for it.”
    Mrs. Caterina, as Huguette called her, had married into the family of an old-line dealer in Asian art and