THE BARONESS REGRETS

For 40 years, Marie-Hélène de Rothschild ruled Paris society through fear, elaborate fêtes, and an irresistible charm

Postscript

BOB COLACELLO

And so we mourn the passing of Baroness MarieHelene de Rothschild, the great hostess of Paris, where parties are considered an art form. Combining the extravagance of Marie Antoinette's royal fetes with the eclecticism of Marie-Laure de Noailles's pre-war soirees, the balls and dinners she gave at Ferrieres, the Rothschilds' chateau outside Paris, and at the Hotel Lambert, their town house on the ile St.-Louis, drew everyone from the Duke and Duchess of Windsor to Brigitte Bardot, and bore testament to her social power— as well as to the indulgence of her husband, Baron Guy, head of the French branch of the Rothschild banking dynasty.

Marie-Helene van Zuylen de Nyevelt was born in New York in 1927 to an Egyptian socialite and a Dutch diplomat whose mother was a Rothschild. In 1951 she married Count Francois de Nicolay, and divorced him six years later to wed Baron Guy, who divorced his first wife at the same time. She had one son by each marriage. In 1971 she gave her legendary Proust ball, for which le tout Paris came as characters from Remembrance of Things Past. At her 1972 Surrealist ball, she received her guests wearing a stag's-head mask topped with gold antlers.

More than 600 friends squeezed into the church on the fie St.-Louis for her funeral Mass. "It went from the woman who did her nails at Carita to Alain Delon," said Princess Laure de Beauvau Craon. In the front pews: First Lady Bernadette Chirac, Valery Giscard d'Estaing, Claude Pompidou, Gianni and Marella Agnelli, Oscar de la Renta, and a dozen Rothschilds. As her lace-draped coffin was carried to the waiting hearse, the air-raid sirens that go off once a month in Paris pierced the air. Yves Saint Laurent noted, "La Baronne de Rothschild possessed a charm that could not be resisted."