I am searching for a memory of a party that celebrated the birth centenary of the author of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. It took place on 2 December 1971, deep in the forest at the Château de Ferrières, the palatial Rothschild shooting estate on the outskirts of Paris. As we talk over the phone, Jane Birkin describes to me getting ready for the party: she remembers her beautiful dress, hairpins tumbling to the floor of the Rolls Royce as it bumped along the road; what Serge wore. But her memory of the ball itself is hazy. ‘It was a fancy-dress party – the best kind of party for fun. I can’t really remember much more than that – it was a giggle. I am sorry. If you want more, you will have to talk to someone with a better memory than me. For the most part, the memory lives in the photograph now.’
Questions around photography and memory haunt this party: to what extent have they become interchangeable? In an earlier century, Proust’s muse, Comtesse Elisabeth Greffulhe, had also concerned herself with this conundrum. She doubted whether beauty could be frozen in a moment, even if she was regularly photographed by Nadar and others. Baron de Redé, dear friend and confidant of Marie-Hélène de Rothschild, whose legend as a society hostess was cemented by the Bal Proust, held a similar view: ‘There is never the same magic when you see it again in pictures or on cassette. It has to be part of a dream.’
The actual ‘memory’ of this party is documented within Cecil Beaton’s photographs of the night. They are ‘faux period’ individual portraits shot in the style of the great nineteenth-century photographer, Nadar, (whom he dressed up as for the evening). The legendary photographers’s collodion likenesses diffused the image of le gratin parisien, on whose characters Proust based his novel. Marie-Hélène later sent prints as gifts to her guests in the gossipy afterglow of the event. This witty conceit, to create a false past in a party that celebrated La Recherche du Temps Perdu now seems almost too successful and inconceivable, in the age of Instagram, that we must travel there mostly in our imagination.
The château seemed frozen in time. Situated about 45km outside of Paris, the vast Neo-Renaissance palace had been built between 1855 and 1859 by Joseph Paxton for Baron James de Rothschild. Napoléon III, last monarch of France, had attended its inauguration; emperors were hosted there. James de Rothschild famously entertained six nights a week with the legendary Carême as his chef. The interiors had been decorated by Eugène Lami: a magnificent 19th-century whimsy that combined the Doge’s Palace in Venice, the Ambassadors’ Staircase at Versailles and the painter’s own theatrical fancy. It was completely out of fashion and impractical by the 1970s. Occupied in wartime by the Nazis, Ferrières was revived by Marie-Hélène and Guy de Rothschild, who in 1959 chose to make it one of their homes soon after their marriage. The new baronne – whose knowledge of 19th-century decorative style would earn her a place on the board of the nascent Musée d’Orsay – had an instinctive flair for Rothschild style and embraced it wholeheartedly.
On the cold December night of the Bal Proust, guests arrived by way of a long drive through the dark, silent forest, Paxton's masterpiece came into view over a lake. Footmen in red livery stood to attention holding candelabras, just as they would have done a century before. The party was held in the Great Hall, Paxton’s pièce de résistance: a double-height room complete with flying Nubian caryatids and a glass ceiling. No location scout could have found better.
Nineteen seventy-one had been a vintage year for period drama with the release of Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice and Joseph Losey’s The Go-Between, both set in the Belle Epoque. But the ball was better than any film. It was as if the exhibition Elégantes Parisiennes au Temps de Marcel Proust, on show at the Musée Carnavalet in 1968, had come to life, the mannequins replaced by society beauties, laughing behind their ostrich fans while sipping the red and yellow jewel-like wines from the host's own Château Lafite.
Paris had been a-flutter for months about this party. Full-length period gowns were created by the greatest fashion designers of the moment. Jane Birkin, Nan Kempner and the very beautiful Hélène Rochas all wore outfits by Yves Saint Laurent, who attended the party as a close friend of the hostess – and indeed her elegant, high-necked silk robe the couturier also conceived. It was also the opportunity to show off one’s jewellery. The house safe was made available to guests, and Richard Burton was careful to use it to store the glittering ensemble Elizabeth Taylor had borrowed from Van Cleef & Arpels in Place Vendôme, lest there be a cat burglar hiding in the rooftops.
In later life, Marie-Hélène would write that ‘those who are small in spirit, who are mean, narrow-minded or timid, should leave entertaining to others’ – and this was certainly the case in December 1971. The Great Hall had been transformed into a winter garden by the party designer Jean-François Daigre. Some 1,500 potted palms were dotted about, and each table, christened after one of the characters from Proust’s chef d’oeuvre, was decorated with light purple orchids and darker cattleyas. The napkins were mauve with blond lace.
When Marie-Hélène, who was also celebrating her birthday, finally took her place at the table, the guests were watching her intently, awaiting her signal to start the meal. Much to her delight, as she opened her napkin, an emerald the size of a baby’s fist – hidden there by Redé – tumbled out. This moment of perfect delight set the tone for the evening.
The 350 dinner guests included royalty, bankers, politicians, aristocrats, playboys, film stars, musicians and artists, most of whom were on nodding terms with one another. That said, on this occasion, they were mostly trying to keep their heads very still so as not to lose control of their ostrich feathers – rumour has it that the Duchess of Windsor’s ended up in her host’s consommé!
As the dinner ended, the young ones arrived and the party began. David de Rothschild, Guy’s son from his first marriage, had invited 250 of his own glamorous friends, and the girls went all out to look their very best. Fresh from her recent triumph in Death in Venice, Marisa Berenson, David’s fiancée, came as a dark Marchesa Casati dressed in Paul Poiret, and danced the night away in a nightclub set up in the leather-panelled dining room.
Dawn was breaking as the revellers finally made their way up the long cold drive into the reality of the pale blue morning. They might not have known it, but they had been witnesses to one of the last great costume balls.
