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Das Wasserfall Diadem mit beweglichen Diamanttropfen in verschiedenen
Grössen, wurde von Chaumet für die
zweite Gräfin von Henckel-Donnersmarck gefertigt, eine weitere
sehr ähnliche Aigrette im floralem Design stellte Cartier 1908 für
die Grossfürstin Wladimir von Rußland her, der Mittelpunkt
ist unterschiedlich, hier ein kissenförmiger Diamant und enorme Diamant
Tropfen, bei der Grossfürstin ein runder Diamant im Zentrum und hängende
Briollettes. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck- ein Name, der seit der Oscar-Verleihung
in aller Munde ist und das dürfte sich auch herumgesprochen haben,
aus einer alten schlesischen Adelsfamilie stammt. Er war jedoch nicht
der erste seines Geschlechts der Schlagzeilen machte. La Paiva - Therese Lachmann, spätere Madame Villoing, spätere
Madame La Marquise de Paiva, spätere Gräfin Henckel von Donnersmarck
La Paiva wollte ganz nach Oben. Ihre Ehe mit dem Marquis wurde 1871 nach Ende des deutsch-französischen
Krieges ihrannulliert. Der Heirat mit Guido Henckel von Donnersmarck,
dem Beauftragten Bismarcks bei den Verhandlungen über die Friedensbedingungen,
in Paris stand nichts mehr im Wege. Fünfundsechzig Jahre alt wurde Thérèse Henckel von
Donnersmarck. Mit ihrem ganzen Willen hatte sie sich gegen eine Herzkrankheit
gewehrt und verloren. Doch viele Jahre gab es kein Grab in der Familiengruft.
So spektakulär wie ihr Leben, so unglaublich gestaltete sich auch
ihr Ende:
Chaumet Waterfall Tiara Aigrette Diadem ||Princess Henkel-Donnersmarck Important Jewels| European Princely Family The waterfall diadem with movable diamond drops of various sizes, was made by Chaumet for the second Countess of Henckel-Donnersmarck, another very similar Aigrette in floral design, was made by Cartier in 1908 for the Grand Duchess Vladimir of Russia, the center is different, here a cushion-shaped diamond and enormous diamond drops, the Grand Duchess a round diamond in the center and hanging briollettes. Count Guido Henckel von Donnersmarck (1830-1916) was the scion of a wealthy
family from Silesia. By all accounts the Count was an extremely handsome and charming man, and although he was a number of years her junior, the Count was immediately fascinated by La Païva and fell deeply in love with her and soon they became a couple. Her love of jewels was equally legendary as the extravagance of her
new residence. As Blanche de Païva she had already acquired some
fabulous jewels, but her new and rich husband was to ensure that the gems
and jewels she was now to receive were matchless; she would have jewels
that rivalled, if not surpassed, those of the Empress. Thérèse Lachmann, later Mme Villoing, later Mme la Marquise de Païva, later Countess Henckel von Donnersmarck (1819-84) Thérèse Lachmann was born in the Moscow ghetto in 1819 (she was born, said someone who knew her, of a witch and a broomstick-handle). Her father was, in fact, a weaver; and on 11 August 1836, at the age of seventeen, she was married to Antoine Villoing, a consumptive young tailor. Marriage brought her a son, and it brought independence ttom her parents; but she could not tolerate the thought of spending the rest of her days as a tailor's wife. After a year or two, it seems, she left her husband and infant son,
and worked her way to Paris. By 1841 Mme Villoing had acquired a large enough wardrobe to try her fortune; and, calculating, no doubt, that a spa was a likely decor in which to find a rich lover, she set out for Ems, in Prussia. In this watering-place, where the world of fashion took the cure and idled at the casino, Fate (which rewards the adventurous) presented her with an eligible client. Henri Herz was Jewish, like herself . It is also true that Henri Herz was gifted, affable, charming in the Viennese manner, and kind. It is, however, certain that Madame Villoing soon recognised the advantage of attachment. to a rich and famous pianist. Had she not heard of the Salle Herz, in Paris, the concerts which Herz himself gave to an eager and discriminating audience? Was she not aware that, in these days of Louis-Philippe, a Herz piano was a symbol of taste and sensibility? She listened, ardently, as Herz played to his Prussian audience; she asked if he would take her as a pupil. She exerted her charm to such effect that she was soon his mistress. It is said that he married her in England. One may question the tradition. When Monsieur and 'Madame' Herz returned to Paris, he took her to a reception at the Tuileries, and they were turned back at the ante-room. It did not suit King Louis-Philippe or the pious Queen Marie-Amélie to accept this irregular alliance. The rejection was understandable; but it probably explained the profound aversion to France which Thérèse would feel for the rest of her life. She could achieve much with her willpower, and still more with money; but she could not gain recognition in the highest French society. She would always want it, pretend to despise it, and try to make herself amends for her social failure. However, if Herz did not give her the entree to the Faubourg Saint Germain, where aristocrats lived , he brought her the company of musicians, joumalists and men of letters; Richard Wagner, Hans von Bülow, the pianist and son-in-law of Liszt. . At last the Herz family, enraged by her accumulated debts, turned the so-called Madame Herz out of the house. Years later, when the hôtel was built she expounded her terrifying theory of willpower. She said that everything happened through willpower; circumstances did not exist, one created them when one wanted. And, talking of concentrated willpower, she quoted the example of a woman who was determined to achieve a certain purpose, and shut herself up, away from the world, hardly eating, for three years, utterly absorbed in her plans. Silence fell round the table. She added: 'I was that woman!' Onced Thérèse went to Covent Garden. Late, and alone, she entered her box. It was next to Lord Stanley's, and she ensnared him. She returned in a confident mood to Paris, well aware of the benefits
of a title; and since Antoine Villoing had tactfully died of tuberculosis
in 1849, she was free to take a titled husband. Once again she set out
for a spa. In Baden she discovered a presentable Portuguese marquis, Albino
Francesco de Païva-Araujo. On 5 June 1851 she married him. The morning after the marriage, when the new husband and wife awoke, Madame de Païva addressed her satisfied lover more or less as follows: 'You wanted to sleep with me, and you've done so, by making me your wife, You have given me your name, I acquitted myself last uight. I have behaved like an honest woman, I wanted a position, and I've got it, but all you have is a prostitUte for a wife. You can't take me anywhere, and you can't introduce me to anyone. We must therefore separate. You go back to Portugal. I shall stay here with your name, and remain a whore.' Ashamed and confused, Païva took the advice of his wife. The Marquis was to shoot hinrself in 1872, but his suicide would disturb la Païva as little as the premature death of her son by Villoing and the early death of her illegitimate daughter by Heuri Herz. She had acquired a title, and now she had to ensure that she was wealthy enough to be the envy of Paris. She discovered a Prussian count eleven years her junior. His name was Guido Henckel von Donnersmarck. He was one day to be a prince, and the friend of the Kaiser. He happened to be a man of glitteting wealth. Viel-Castel described la Païva's conquest of the Count: The ex-Herz, now Païva [he wrote], could not live the life she had dreamed of for so long with the dowry that her husband had brought her. She set off in search of a rich and generous prince whom she could enmesh in hcr net. She encountered this prince, or count, or duke, on her travels, and she followed on his trail to Constantinople, St Petersburg, Naples and Paris; the prince always found her in the lap of luxury, dazzling in her strange, voluptuous beauty, a beauty which was a little contrived, a littlee painted, and very artificial. La Païva did not seem to pay any attention whatever to the prince, but one fIne day it was not she who followed the predestined mortal, but the predestined mortal who pursued her. He was in love to such an extent, to such a degree, that he went to hcr, not to offer her his hand - la Païva would have had no use for it - but the accessories. 'I have three million a year; he told her. 'If you'll live with me, we can share it.' La Païva, who had spent three hundred thousand frances on the conquest of the prince, accepted to recover her expenses. I don't know the name of the count, duke or prince, but today [1857] la Païva has the best and most elegant hôtel in Paris, her dinners are reputed to be exquisite, she entertains many artists and men of letters, and her conversation is said to be witty. I have seen,continued Viel-Castel ,the plans of a palace which Mauguin, the architect, is building her in the Champs-Elysees. The land and the building, without the furnishing, will cost a million and a haIf £ La Païva displays two million francs' worth of diamonds, pearls and precious stones on her person. She is the great debauchee of the century.’ The hôtel Païva was to be, as its châtelaine intended, the most luxurious private hôtel in Paris.
The new hôtel stood in a Champs-Elysees which, at the end of the
Second Empire, was still unspoilt by signs of plebeian commerce. There
were no shops, but half-a-dozen nearby private hôtels dazzled the
eye and imagination. There was Prince Napoleon's neo-Pompeian palace;
there was Emile de Girardin's Roman palace, a scholarly reply to Pion-Pion's
architectural paganism. There was the Gothic castle of the Comte de Quinsonas,
the Tunisian chateau of Jules de Lesseps, the remarkable rose-coloured
hôtel of the Duke of Brunswick. And, finally, among these grandiose
pastiches, there was now the hôtel Païva ( The Travellers'
Club, today). The vast salon, lit by five tall windows, seemed a kind of temple dedicated to the worship of physical pleasure: it was hard to take ones eyes off the magnificent ceiling where Baudry had painted Day chasing Night away. The four quarters of the day were represented by mythological divinities: Apollo bending his bow, Hecate with her silver crescent preparing to wrap herself in her starry mantle, Aurora still asleep on her rosy cloud, Vesper melancholy and pensive. All the figures converged towards the centre of the oval vault, and they were connected by pairs of genii which symbolised the hours. Cabanel and Gerome had also contributed paintings, famous sculptors had carved the mantelpieces in the smaller rooms; but some critics thought that Baudry's ceiling (which would prepare him to paint his great frescoes in the new Opera) was alone worth all the other treasures in the hôtel. 'I want to have been the only person on earth to enjoy your delectable painting,' Mme de Païva had told Baudry. '{ think I have the right, since I paid you the price you asked for it. You must pray to God that I live!' Yet what other treasures there were! The salons were hung with crimson damask, specially woven at Lyons for eight hundred thousand francs. The staircase, lit by a massive lustre in sculpted bronze, was made - steps, baluster and wall - entirely of onyx. Mrs Moulton, the American banker’s wife, seems to have heard some rumours of its splendour. She recorded that 'a lady, whose virrue is someone else's reward, has a magnifIcent and much-talked-of hôtel in the Champs- Elysees, where there is a staircase worth a million francs, made of real alabaster. Prosper Merimee said: "c' est par là qu'on monte à la vertu.’ (It was reported that Augier, the dramatist, asked to compose some lines in honour of the staircase, replied with the devastating quotation: 'Ainsi que la vertu, Ie vice a ses degres.') The first floor, to which the staircase led, was reserved for la Païva: for her bathroorn, bedroom and boudoir, and a room for Henckel von Donnersmarck. The bathroom, said Gautier, was worthy of a Sultana in the Arabian Nights. Its walls were onyx and marble, enhanced by Venetian ceramics, and by a ceiIing in the Moorish style. The bath was solid onyx, like the lavatory under the window; it was lined with silvered bronze, with gilt, engraved designs representing fleurs-de-lys. The three taps, sculpted and gilt, were set with precious stones. The bedroom insolently proclaimed the triumph of la volupté. The locks on the doors were said to be worth two thousand francs apiece. The bed, encrusted with rare woods and ivory, delicately wrought, stood like an altar in an alcove, under a ceiling on which Aurora, Goddess of the Dawn, hovered in the empyrean. It had cost a hundred thousand francs. 'Fifty thousand francs?' la Païva had cried, when she saw the original estimate. 'Do you want me to have fleas? Put a hundred thousand francs!' The visitor felt himself in the presence of a single idea: the defiant, obsessive idea of personal glorification. Her one resource remained her wealth. She was conscious of every franc
she possessed, and of every single centime that she spent. Emile Bergerat,
the joumalist, a son-in-law of Gautier, wrote the simple truth when he
called her At one of her mansions, so the legend went, there was a servant whose only task was to open and shut one hundred and fItty windows; he began his work at six in the morning and finished it at midnight, and he fmally died of exhaustion. The park was Dante's Hell for the gardeners, who were said to be fined fifty centimes for every leaf found on the ground. Mme de Païva, in person, collected the fines at dawn. If her meanness was notorious, her financial sense was remarkable; she
profited largely from the talk of visiting economists and bankers. She
helped von Donnersmarck to manage the fortunes he enjoyed from his coal
and iron and zinc and copper mines in Silesia, his vast estates, his industtial
interests (when he died, he would be worth more than two hundred and twenty
million marks; he would be the richest person in Germany, after Mme Berthe
Krupp von Bohlen). La Païva showed a shrewdness and Bair which would
have won the respect of any speculator on the Bourse. Païva and her Prussian husband were exiled from France under suspicion
of being spies. In 1878, she was now a pathetic figure. She had had a
stroke, and she had smashed the Venetian mirror in her room so as not
to see her physical decline. Four personal maids had been unable to disguise
the signs of her paralysis and degeneration. She would take a series of
baths, in vain, to counteract the acidity of her blood: a milk bath, a
lime-flower bath, a scented bath; and once, it was said, she tried to
bath in champagne. But she had heart disease, and her body swelled unmercifully.
She died at Neudeck, the slesian Donnersmarck’s castle, on 21 January
1884. She was sixty-five. 'And when God took her back,' wrote Emile Bergerat, 'since
He does take such creatures back, no one knew what became of the soul
of this body, the body of this soul, for she had no tomb and she does
not lie in consecrated ground.' excerpt from Joanna Richardson, The Courtesans: The Demi-Monde in 19th-Century France (London: Phoenix Press, 2000), pp. 50 - 66.
Following La Païva’s death, the Count remarried in 1887, and
his new wife Katharina Wassilievna de Slepzoff, added La Païva’s
jewels to her own collection, since she too was a great connoisseur and
admirer of jewellery. The two brides of Prince Guido Henckel von Donnersmarck
acquired truly spectacular and important gems and jewels. The two important
diamonds offered here were in the private collection of Princess Katharina
Henckel von Donnersmarck ::::: Die Henckel-Donnersmarck
Diamanten |cushion 102.54 cts
|