Empty Mansions

of France, then a series of fairy tales—“except the unpleasant scene where Snow White is laying down poisoned,” and without the witch, she cautioned—and sought his help in finding all the back issues of
La Semaine de Suzette
, particularly those for the years 1912 and 1913, when she was six and seven. The artist’s daughter-in-law sent Huguette her personal collection. Lorioux and Huguette exchanged lively letters for decades, and he opened the door for her to support an entire generation of illustrators in France.
    Like Huguette, Lorioux was a bit uncomfortable among people, feeling more at home with his fantasy figures and insects. He painted vivid watercolors for Huguette’s eyes only, portraying her as a princess among the fawning inhabitants of a miniature world of lovable insects in fancy clothes.
    One hand-painted birthday card, sent to her in 1952, shows a royalgrasshopper, sitting high on pillows in the blossom of a giant purple flower, studying herself in a mirror, while a colorful host of ladybugs scramble up a rickety ladder carrying, and spilling, gifts for her: jewels, jelly beans, a picnic, a bouquet of flowers. In 1954, Félix sent Huguette a drawing of an aging butterfly suitor giving flowers and jewels to a bashful butterfly princess.
    Huguette supported Lorioux and his wife, Lily, with her generous “little gifts” for many years, and in 1989 she gave an arts group $100,000 for an exhibition in New York of his scholarly crows, pompous bureaucrats, and robins wearing spats. Lily called Huguette “our benevolent fairy.”
    When Félix died in Paris in 1964, at age ninety-one, Huguette cabled Lily:
    Dear Madame, very sad to learn of the sad news of your great loss and immense sorrow. What a loss also for the whole world to lose dear Mr. Lorioux, such a great artist and a great soul. Allow me to kiss you tenderly with all my affectionate sympathy
.
    • • •
    Félix Lorioux was not the only French artist to benefit from Huguette’s patronage. She sought out others. At least four illustrators—Jean Mercier, Manon Iessel, J. P. Pinchon, and the pen-named Chéri Hérouard—were all supported by Huguette until they died. She commissioned illustrations of children’s songs, drawings of all the female saints of France, and maps of the history of each region of the country. “You know how loyal I have remained,” she wrote to Pinchon, “to the French traditions and folkloric past of France.”
    Huguette becameclosest to Hérouard, known for his lighthearted and fantastic covers and illustrations for the society magazine
La Vie Parisienne
. He was a specialist in fairy godmothers, witches, ogres, and dragons. He also, under the pen name Herric, illustrated erotic books with scenes of sadomasochism: sex with the maid, sex between the maids. He sent Huguette a crate of his original drawings,including a few of his “daring” ones.
    Huguette put Hérouard to work painting watercolors of Sleeping Beauty, instructing him to make the costume changes historically accurate when the princess wakes up after a hundred years. She also sent him to Petit-Bourg to draw the ruins of her family’s summer castle, which the retreating Nazis had burned during World War II. And she had the old man tracking down more old copies of
Suzette
. At age seventy-five, the artist was placing classified ads for the magazines in French newspapers, supplementing his effort with prayers to Saint Anthony of Padua, the patron saint of seekers of lost items. After finding the last issue of 1912, Hérouard was philosophical, thinking of that innocent time before France was plunged into conflict:
    In spite of their fragile state, these Suzettes from such a distant era went through the two most important wars in history. And as I was looking at these slightly yellowed pages, I was thinking that many little girls, who would open them with delight and carelessness, were to cry two years later at the sight of their father going away toward a most dangerous fate.
    He did have just one request, from the Frenchwoman who was giving up her
Suzette
collection to the heiress in America: “The person who provided them is a widow. She has been keeping them since her youth, and in her response to my purchase offer, she asked if she could keep them for another two weeks to give her a chance to look at them one last time.”
    After Hérouard’s death in 1961, his widow sent along his last drawing, which he had intended for Huguette’s