Empty Mansions

10 percent, making the final price $49,500, or about $450,000 in today’s dollars, for one of the finest violins ever made.
    Huguette took great care of La Pucelle, making sure it was serviced annually. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was one of her few regular adventures away from 907 Fifth Avenue. But when she played the violin, she used a lesser Strad from 1720, which she called her Traveler.
    In the same period,she expanded her collection of Impressionist paintings, which already included two Renoirs,
In the Roses
and
Girlwith Parasol
, Manet’s
Peonies
, the Degas
Dancer Making Points
, and two by Monet, a Water Lilies and
Poplars on the Epte
. She added a third Renoir, the spectacular
Girls Playing Battledore and Shuttlecock
, depicting fashionable young women playing badminton in the French countryside: vivid blue and yellow against a green countryside. No doubt she had seen it at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1937, when she had lent one of her own paintings to the museum for a Renoir show. It has many figures (similar to
The Bathers
) and is from his greatest period: The dealers call it a perfect Renoir. She asked the Knoedler gallery to send it over, and after a week she decided to keep it, paying the list price of $125,000.
    Not all her fine paintings were French. She owned two by the American painter John Singer Sargent: In
Rooftops of Capri
, a young woman dances the tarantella to entice an older man, and in
Girl Fishing at San Vigilio
, the fisherwoman seems far overdressed for the occasion.
    Huguette also bought Apartment 12W, which was her own residence, and also 8W, her mother’s, as the building at 907 Fifth Avenue converted from rentals to co-op apartments at the end of 1955. She paid less than $120,000 for the pair, or about $1 million in today’s dollars.
    In each of these purchases, Huguette proved to be a shrewd investor.
“DID YOU EVER REPLACE SNOOPY?”

 
    T HROUGH ALL THE YEARS , among all her secrets, Huguette had kept up a friendship with a man who was about her age and living in France, a man other than Etienne. She was not one to let things go, not one to end an old friendship.
    In the spring of 1964, she sent this friend a telegram at his home on the French Riviera, consoling him on a loss:
    Dear Bill, received your letter with sad news about Snoopy. Having had dogs I know what the heartbreak is. All my best wishes for a good Easter under the circumstances. Affectionately, Huguette
.
    This Bill was her former husband. Though they couldn’t make it through the honeymoon, the former Mr. and Mrs. William Gower carried on an affectionate correspondence for decades.
    Two years after Huguette divorced him, Bill Gower remarried, choosing in 1932 another daughter of a wealthy politician from the western states. Constance Toulmin was the child of George White Baxter, former territorial governor of Wyoming. She already had two failed marriages. Bill and Constance had no children together, but they raised her daughter from an earlier marriage, Cynthia, who drove an ambulance in the Second World War. Bill was unable to fight in that war, having developed an awkward gait since his track team days, so he put his legal training to work as the American Red Cross delegate to Europe, briefing Churchill and Eisenhower. After the war, Bill ran the Paris office of the company that published
Look
magazine. Here he was in his element, hobnobbing with society figures, including author Somerset Maugham.
    “Everything was sketchy with my uncle,” recalled his niece, Janet Perry. He was a womanizer, a gregarious big talker, irrepressibly lovable. He sent his niece a huge framed photograph of himself, too large todisplay, but she put it out on the piano when he came to the New York area to visit. He always had tickets to the newest hit play, a table at the finest restaurant. “He was a huge name-dropper, but he really knew all the people.”
    Through all the years after their divorce, Bill and Huguette stayed in touch. He sent her birthday wishes. She kept him up on family news and illnesses. Their warm correspondence shows a relationship completely at odds with the Clark family suggestion that she had been traumatized by her brief marriage.
    In February 1964, she checked on his health and suggested he visit her on his next trip to America:
    Dear Bill, Thank you for your letter. Photographs very lovely. Anxious to hear the results about your foot. When are you thinking of coming to the states? Be sure to