Destiny

by Sally Beauman

  Edouard moved into the house at St. Cloud alone.

  With his father’s employees he was generous but firm. The elderly among the servants were asked to retrain the new staff to their old exacting standards; they were then retired, with pensions of a size that made Edouard’s Parisian friends complain. Word gets around, they said; for God’s sake stop—or they’ll all be demanding de Chavigny-style settlements. Edouard shrugged.

  “They stayed with my father right through the war. They deserve that and more.”

  The vineyards in the Loire were plowed up and replanted, using vine stock free from disease. A new régisseur, trained on the estates of Baron Philippe de Rothschild, was brought in. Edouard toyed with the idea of having the de Chavigny wine labels redesigned, and ornamented, with each vintage, by a leading artist, as Rothschild had. But he abandoned the plan: to learn from Baron Philippe’s expertise was sensible, to copy him too flagrantly was not. It was what was in the bottle that finally counted. Within five years, wine production had doubled prewar levels, and the quality was consistently improving. The first year that they obtained a vintage of acceptable quality, he sent a dozen cases to his old régisseur to lay down, and invited him for a tasting. He watched the old man as he carefully sniffed the wine, sipped it, rolled it around his palate. He waited.

  “It’s not perfect…” The old man frowned.

  “Is any wine perfect?”

  “Four years from now, yes, by then…” The old man’s face broke into a grin. “But I could drink this, Monsieur de Chavigny. Oh, yes. Without difficulty.”

  Edouard embraced him. “Et voilà. Je suis content.”

  With the central part of his father’s empire, Edouard moved cautiously. De Chavigny still had an unrivaled reputation for the quality of stones used in its jewelry designs and for the perfection and artistry with which they were cut and set.

  He had inherited four major outlets: in New York, Paris, London, and Rome, all of which had come through the war intact, all of which were in prime locations, and all of which had suffered from neglect. Proceeding much as he had done with his houses, Edouard first refurbished them. He brought in a new interior designer, Ghislaine Belmont-Laon; her work on these showrooms made her name. Cleverly, Mme. Belmont-Laon retained the formality of the nineteenth-century rooms, with their mahogany showcases and cabinets, and yet, by her use of color and light, contrived to give them a modern elegance. She introduced soft blues, and a color that came to be known as de Chavigny gray: the rooms, understated and severe, were the perfect backdrop for the jewelry and the silver. At the sumptuous party held to celebrate the reopening of the showrooms in the Rue du Faubourg St. Honoré, Edouard looked around him with pride, but he knew his work had scarcely begun. He had provided one essential, a glittering showcase for the de Chavigny merchandise. Now he was eager to expand, to diversify into other luxury products, as his rivals Cartier and Asprey were already doing very successfully. The world had changed: de Chavigny could no longer cater just to the needs of those who had arrived; it had to make provision for those on the way up. Leather goods, desk accessories, smoking accessories, tableware, the little playthings of the conspicuously affluent—Edouard knew that these, adorned with the de Chavigny name and crest, could be marketed for high prices and to a much wider market than that which could afford the most superlative jewelry in the world.

  Edouard began to commission feasibility studies for new de Chavigny showrooms in Geneva, Milan, Rio de Janeiro, and—in the longer term—for Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. But he knew that for his expansion plans to work, he needed two things: further capital investment, and a designer of genius.

  The investment, he knew, would be no problem. His French and Swiss bankers had already indicated their eagerness to participate in any expansion of the company. His chief financial advisor, Simon Scher, a young Englishman who, after Cambridge, had trained at the Harvard Business School, was urging him to go public.

  “If we floated shares in de Chavigny on the open market tomorrow,” he told Edouard, “you would be oversubscribed four times. The money is there, the confidence is there…It’s the fifties now—the recovery has started.”

  But Edouard had no intention of going public; he wanted de Chavigny to remain a private company, as it had always been, with the reins of power firmly in one pair of hands: his hands. And he thought he could do without the high-interest assistance of French or Swiss bankers. John McAllister, his American grandfather, had sold out his interest in his family steel and railroad holdings shortly before the Wall Street crash; he had died toward the end of the war, a few months after his wife. His fortune, conservatively estimated in excess of one hundred million dollars, had come intact to his beloved daughter, Louise. It was handled by a prominent Wall Street firm, with the utmost caution, the bulk of it invested in government bonds, gilt-edged securities, and land from Oregon to Texas.

  Louise took no interest in her fortune. Her investments provided her with an annual income of well over a million dollars, in addition to the trusts and investments left to her directly by her husband. Provided she could buy anything she wanted, when she wanted—and it never occurred to her to do otherwise—Louise was happy.

  Edouard had already begun his campaign to persuade his mother to divert some of her capital holdings into an expansion program for de Chavigny, but he knew he had to proceed slowly. Louise had gone so far as to allow him access to her papers and portfolio: he and Simon Scher were working on them now. But he knew it would be useless to press his mother too hard for any major decision. She balked at commitments over money as well as over men. Edouard knew that the more rational his arguments were, the more likely she was to resist them. She had an iron whim.

  But if he could not persuade her when the time came to move, Jean-Paul could. Anything her beloved son asked of her, Louise gave. It caused Edouard to feel bitter sometimes, but he accepted facts. After all, it made little difference: he would persuade Jean-Paul, Jean-Paul would persuade Louise: the route was more circuitous, that was all. In his business dealings Edouard had discovered he had a talent for the circuitous approach: he was beginning to derive great pleasure from deploying it.

  But the designer of genius: ah, now, that was more difficult. The last great designer de Chavigny had employed, Vlacek, a Hungarian Jew trained in Russia in the Fabergé workrooms, had been discovered by Edouard’s father and brought to de Chavigny to design the collection that launched his first American showrooms in 1912. Vlacek had been a prize, and he had been loyal: all attempts to woo him away from de Chavigny—and there had been many—had failed. He had remained with the company until his eyesight began to fail in the early 1930s; he had died during the war.

  Like all great jewelry companies, de Chavigny had a huge and jealously guarded archive of designs, dating back, in this case, to the mid-nineteenth century. Those designs could be, and were, constantly reused, either in their original form or adapted to accord with changing fashion and taste. They were the company’s lifeline. But the last great de Chavigny collections had been designed by Vlacek in the late 1920s. Edouard longed for a new collection, for revolutionary designs that would set competitors like Cartier by the ears; designs that would reflect the postwar world, and which would use to the full the latest technology.

  Truly great jewelry designers are as rare as any other great artist. Edouard knew what he was looking for, a Picasso, a Matisse, whose medium was not paint but rare stones and precious metals; the genius who would be the linchpin of his whole enterprise. Wherever he was—in America, in the Middle East, one side or the other of a newly divided Europe—and whether he was still unknown or already being trained by one of de Chavigny’s rivals, Edouard intended to find him. He had a handpicked team whose sole function was to do just that. They infiltrated the workshops of his rivals; they viewed all the new designs of every major jewelry company in the world, they attended the graduating shows of every major training college; they consulted, circumspectly, with discerni
ng collectors such as Florence Gould. They would find the man, sooner or later. Then Edouard would go to him.

  And make him an offer he couldn’t refuse.

  For four years, Edouard lived for his work. He found it addictive, stimulating, endlessly absorbing, and he allowed nothing—certainly no personal involvements—to distract him. He played equally hard, and with the same restless energy, quickly discovering that the two worlds—his days of board meetings and company maneuvers, his evenings and weekends of parties—overlapped, and fed one another. He was in constant demand.

  Parisian hostesses fought for his presence at their dinner parties, opera galas, and charity balls. He attended private views, and with the help of his Oxford friend Christian Glendinning, cousin to his former tutor Hugo, he began to buy paintings, and to add to his father’s unrivaled collection of twentieth-century European art.

  Christian, who came from a long line of English country gentlemen whose only aesthetic investment was in bloodstock, was a maverick, and the despair of his family when Edouard first met him. He was outrageously affected, flamboyantly homosexual, and extremely clever. When his father realized that Christian had no intention of returning to the family estate in Oxfordshire and breeding prime Herefordshire cattle for the rest of his life, he gave him a modest amount of capital and washed his hands of him. Christian used it to open a small gallery as soon as he left Oxford. He put on the first English show of American Abstract Expressionists, and the British critics sniffed. He sold two Rothkos and one superb Jackson Pollock to his friend Edouard de Chavigny, and after that he never looked back. By 1954 he had one of the most successful modern art galleries in Cork Street, London, a branch in Paris, and another planned for Madison Avenue. Edouard de Chavigny, his most loyal and discerning client, had the basis for a collection that one day would be rivaled only by Paul Mellon and the New York Museum of Modern Art.

  To Christian’s distress and incomprehension, Edouard bought horses as well as paintings. He reinvested in his father’s stud farm in Ireland, and brought in Jack Dwyer, the best trainer in the country, poaching him from the stables of his mother’s old friend Hugh Westminster without a qualm. Christian accompanied him once to Ireland to watch a new filly run, took one look through the field glasses, announced he was already dying of boredom, and departed to look at paintings. He returned to England on Edouard’s new plane with fifteen excellent Jack Yeats oils; Edouard returned secure in the knowledge that he had a winner for the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe, the prime meeting in the French racing calendar and the one he had set his heart on winning.

  But then, as Christian acidly remarked, his friend Edouard was a man of many parts—not just one, as he had suspected when he had first met Edouard in London. Edouard de Chavigny passed from opera box to grouse moor with equal elegance and aplomb. In the autumn he fished and shot in Scotland; in the winter he skied in Gstaad or St. Moritz, where he invested heavily in hotels. In the summer he might be a guest at a Mediterranean villa or at his house on the Costa Smeralda. He might be staying at Southampton, Long Island, with an American newspaper tycoon, or visiting distant American cousins at Newport. Wherever he was there would be a woman, but never the same woman for very long.

  The gossip columnists of Europe and the East Coast fought to keep up with him. Who was his latest mistress? Which of the many candidates would he finally marry? The Italian diva, whose operatic performances he faithfully attended from La Scala to the Met—for four months? The English marchioness, widowed during the war, who was the most beautiful of the legendary Cavendish sisters? The daughter of Old Money from Massachusetts, or the daughter of New Money from Texas? Would he marry Clara Delluc, the least celebrated of his mistresses, and the one to whom he always returned after forays elsewhere?

  It would be a Frenchwoman, naturally, said the hopeful mothers of ancient lineage and impeccable Catholic upbringing, when they discussed the matter in their Paris drawing rooms. And not a Frenchwoman like Clara Delluc either, but one of his own class, and a virgin. A man like Edouard de Chavigny liked to play the field, so much was understood, but when it came to choosing a wife, well, then the qualifications required were somewhat different.

  Meanwhile, there was the question of his presents, to which much time and many column inches were devoted. Edouard de Chavigny was a Frenchman; he understood that women, when abandoned, liked some small remembrance to soften the blow and to recall tender memories. Edouard de Chavigny always gave jewels. That alone was not remarkable. It was the choice of jewels that attracted attention; that, and the manner of their delivery.

  The jewels were carefully, some said mockingly, chosen to reflect the woman. Emeralds, if their eyes were green. Exquisitely matched sapphires if their eyes were blue. If their complexion was their most celebrated feature, then perhaps a long necklace of perfect pearls. Gold bracelets, each as thick as a child’s wrist, if their hair was blond; amber, ebony, ivory, white gold, amethysts…The gifts were beautiful, almost priceless, and, of course, from de Chavigny. They were delivered to the woman concerned by Edouard de Chavigny’s English manservant, without any accompanying message. None was needed; the jewels signified dismissal, announced the relationship was at an end. This was accepted, this was known; it was a rule from which Edouard never relented, never deviated.

  One other thing was also known. He never gave diamonds.

  The columnists delighted in that. It gave them the pin for endless stories; it gave them a myth. He would give diamonds when he loved, they said. It was simple; poetic. He was saving the diamonds until then; with that gesture the world would know that Edouard de Chavigny, now one of the five most eligible bachelors in Europe, had finally chosen the woman he wanted as his wife.

  It was a story that Edouard was often questioned about, by women as well as journalists. It was one on which he always refused to comment, as he did on all questions about his personal life. Nothing could persuade him to confirm or deny. He would smile, and change the subject.

  It took four years for Edouard to discover the one aspect of his life the columnists had never suspected: he was lonely.

  He returned to the house in St. Cloud late one night in 1954, hollow with fatigue. He had returned that day from an exhausting round of deals and meetings in New York. The rubies rumored to have belonged once to Marie Antoinette had been dispatched to the diva, who always wore scarlet. His senior secretary had been instructed to cancel his engagements for that evening to give him a few hours peace before a six-month period in which his diary was entirely filled.

  It was summer, and he walked around the beautiful gardens alone, admiring the beds of shrub roses which had been laid out here as they had been in Josephine Bonaparte’s gardens at Malmaison. The scholarship, the skill, the work, and the love which had gone into this section of his gardens struck him forcibly. He smelled the scent of the roses, and realized it was the first time he had walked here, the first time he had looked at them, in four years.

  He longed then, suddenly, and with a passion that had been suppressed so long that it took him by surprise, for someone to share all this with. Someone to talk to. Someone to love. Not his mother, with whom his relations remained cool and formal. Not his brother, who had now left the army and spent most of the year in Algiers. None of his friends. Certainly none of his women. Someone else.

  Someone he trusted, he thought, returning to his study, and sitting up alone late into the night—and he trusted so few people. Someone who was with him for himself, not because he was a man of influence and power and wealth. Someone with whom he could be free.

  He let himself think, as he had not done for many years, of Célestine, of their year together in London, and as he had known it would, the memory made him deeply unhappy. He finally went to bed, cursing himself for his own sentimentality, certain the feeling was due to tiredness and jet lag, no more. It would have disappeared in the morning.

  Next day he fulfilled all his engagements as usual. The feeling was still there. As if he
had everything, and nothing. Months passed; the feeling did not go away.

  Then, that autumn, and quite by chance, something happened that was to alter his life. On a visit to the Château de Chavigny to inspect that year’s vintage, he caught sight of a small boy playing in the gardens of one of the estate cottages. Edouard was on horseback; he stopped to look at the child, who was about eight or nine years old, and exceptionally beautiful. The child looked back at him. Then a girl, too young to be his mother, rushed out of the cottage, clasped the child by the hand, and pulled him, protesting, indoors.

  Edouard made inquiries; the servants were embarrassed. He persisted, and discovered that the little boy was called Grégoire. His mother was now the wife of one of the estate carpenters, and the boy was Jean-Paul’s son, fathered after a drinking bout during his first visit to the Loire after the war. Jean-Paul confirmed the story negligently. Yes, it was true, he accepted paternity. He had seen the boy once or twice since, and he seemed a nice enough lad—a little backward perhaps, but his mother was ashamed of him, and refused to send him to school, perhaps fearing the other children would tease him. Jean-Paul shrugged. He would be all right. When he grew up, there would always be work for him on the estate.

  This meeting took place in Paris, where Jean-Paul was visiting Louise briefly before returning to Algeria. Edouard sat and watched his brother as he spoke, his own face growing hard and still. Jean-Paul was sprawled in a chair, his complexion flushed; he was drinking brandy though it was the middle of the day. He seemed annoyed at Edouard’s questions, but apart from that, sublimely unconcerned.

  “You feel no responsibility for him, then?” Edouard leaned forward.

  “Responsibility? Edouard—if a man had to be responsible for every little by-blow, where would it end? The boy is perfectly happy. I imagine he’s in good health. I fail to see why I should concern myself with him any further.”

  “I see. And his mother—have you made any provision for her?”