Anonymous ID: f14f92 May 2, 2023, 9:49 a.m. No.18785902   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>5905 >>5936 >>6029 >>6143

>>18785882

The main staircase was lined with men dressed as cats, feigning sleep in a range of staged poses, only to spring to life and ‘rescue’ hapless revellers who got entangled in a web-like labyrinth of black ribbons. There were plates covered with fur, dead fish in lieu of forks, and table settings made from taxidermy tortoises. The pudding was a life-size model of a woman, naked but for a rose fig-leaf, lying on a bed of complementary flora, the whole confection spun out of sugar. Audrey Hepburn arrived with a birdcage on her head, à la Magritte; Hélène Rochas sported a hat in the shape of an arm that morphed into a gramophone horn.

 

Guests were eventually led to the tapestry salon, where the baron and baroness held court, he in a hat that was a kind of 3D rendering of a 17th-century Dutch still life painting (dead pheasant, rotting fruit) and she in a stag’s head replete with towering antlers and eyes crying pear-shaped diamond ‘tears’. Taking in the spectacle, many of the slack-jawed carousers may have called to mind an earlier comment of the baron’s: “According to an old French motto, noblesse oblige — one must live up to one’s name,” he said. “The Rothschilds’ condition of life has imposed on them a second motto: richesse oblige — one must live up to one’s fortune.” Thankfully, in Marie-Hélène, the baron had found someone who could ably assist him in rising to any number of occasions. “She is excessive, exotic, rare, flamboyant, passionate,” he extolled on the occasion of their silver wedding anniversary in “She has a fabulous appetite for life, emotions always at their height, a spontaneity with a thousand facets, as ever-changing as the sea. And charm which defies description.”

 

https://therake.com/stories/icons/through-the-looking-glass-the-rothschilds/