Modern Living: Garage Sale

It was the garage sale to end all garage sales. Since the total take amounted to $4,307,650, the garage had, of course, to be something rather special.

And it was. The auction was held last week to dispose of sundry bric-a-brac from the Château de Ferrières, a mansion east of Paris that the Baron and Baroness Guy de Rothschild are giving up. The Rothschilds have bought a multimillion-dollar pied-à-terre in Paris—the exquisite 17th century Hotel Lambert on the Ile Saint-Louis, where their friend the Baron Alexis de Redé has lived for years with his precious furniture. (He will continue to occupy an apartment there.) The Hotel Lambert simply did not have enough room for all their treasures, so Guy and Marie-Hélène de Rothschild and Alexis de Redé, like suburban neighbors in the U.S., got together to dispose of their overflow of antiques and objets d’art.

The sale, held at Monte Carlo’s Winter Sporting Club, featured such unwanted articles as the Louis XVI desk on which Napoleon is said to have signed the Louisiana Purchase, a South German Gothic cup that sold for $160,000 and an ancient German strongbox that took the best locksmith in Paris two weeks to open (it was empty). Other memorabilia included a silver tea urn that is shaped like a camel and disgorges tea when the neck is lowered; a collection of 22 antique walking sticks that fetched $96,250; and a suite of the type of chairs known as “royal seat” because, as an auctioneer’s assistant explained, “only royal butts were allowed to dent the cushions.” The highest-priced knickknack was a superb 3-ft.-tall bronze horse from 16th century Florence, for which Habib Sabet, an Iranian industrialist, paid $375,000. “The nicest thing about it,” said Sabet, “is that you don’t have to feed it.”

For their part, the Rothschilds and Redé, their lodger-to-be, took care of the feeding and delectation of several hundred close friends, including Stavros Niarchos, Karim Aga Khan and the Begum, Prince Ferdinand of Hapsburg and Prince Rainier and Princess Grace.

Marie-Hélène de Rothschild pronounced herself well satisfied. Said she: “I’m not a bit ashamed of being rich. I think it’s very healthy to have big parties now and again, like they did in history. Some people said we should make believe we are really rather poor, just as some people said we should have held this sale anonymously, but that wouldn’t be very honest, and I’m a great believer in living in the open.”