Are there gold Louis XVI chairs in Heaven?
I doubt it very much. I, for one, was brought up to believe in Paradise as a sort of eternal Presbyterian church service, and there’s not much posh seating involved in one of those.
I am not well acquainted with other faiths. What I once took to be a copy of the Episcopalian Bible proved to be the Social Register. The only representative of the Moslem faith I’ve had much encounter with is the Princess Yasmin Khan-daughter of Ali and Rita and descendant of the great Aga-and all she ever seems to be doing is throwing society balls, which I don’t think figure largely in the Koran.
Neither, I think, do gilt wood 18th Century chairs.
Which is why I now wonder what His Excellency Ilhamy Hussein Pasha was doing with so many of them.
Have I lost you? Are you still back there wandering around in the theology? I’d best hasten to explain.
Born in Istanbul, Turkey, in 1902 as a member of the great Tcherkesse family that were once the Donald Trumps of the Caucasus, the good Pasha has just now left the Principality of Monaco for Paradise, leaving all his worldly goods behind him.
These worldly goods are being auctioned off all this week in Monaco and Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat by the great house of Ader Tajan of Paris. Le tout Riviera-not to speak of more far flung Eurotrash-have flocked to the Pasha’s “Villa Baia dei Fiori” in Cap Ferrat and the Sporting (I’ll say) Club of Monaco to get their bids in on all the goodies, which include one of the world’s grandest sets of Louis XVI gilt chairs.
How the good Pasha came by all this gilt is an interesting story. Not content with whatever the Tcherkesses had going for them in Istanbul, he got himself hitched to the Princess Chivekiar, kin to the Viceroy of Egypt, in the 1920s and settled in Cairo.
There he became a pal of the inimitable, irrepressible and damn near immeasurably fat King Farouk, who liked Ilhamy so much he made him a Pasha.
I’m wasn’t at first quite sure how the Pasha’s marriage to the Princess ended. Knowing Farouk’s fondness for curvaceous nympets, there was the possibility she threw the good Pasha out of the palace after some night’s lengthy carouse with the King. Researching further, I discover the Princess simply died, which is not to say she hadn’t occasion to throw the Pasha out of the palace beforehand.
Happily ever after
In any event, the people of Egypt rather testily threw fun-loving Farouk out of his palace in the 1950s, whereupon he and the Pasha hastily repaired to the French Riviera-the world capital of curvaceous nymphets-where they lived and frolicked happily ever after.
Somewhere along the line, the Pasha was single enough to marry a really loaded American heiress named Mrs. Harkness. Which Mrs. Harkness, Ader Tajan won’t say. According to Ketty Maisonrouge, Ader Tajan’s New York representative, “It’s a discreet matter.”
In any event, she must have been really loaded. According to Maisonrouge, “Ilhamy Hussein lived a life worthy of a novel by Marcel Proust or F. Scott Fitzgerald. He epitomized a lost era, one of unimaginable wealth, opulence and courtly charm.”
I might point out here that, brilliant writer that he was, F. Scott never had more than $80,000 in his entire life, which he lived mostly as a lush, bad debtor and sponge. If he’d got his paws on just one Louis XVI gilt chair, he’d have hocked it for gin quicker than you can say Jay Gatsby.
As for Marcel Proust, one reason his novels are so excruciatingly dull is that they are utterly devoid of curvaceous nymphets-as I doubt very much was the life of the Pasha.
In any event, I shan’t be going off to Monte Carlo with all the others for the auction (my son Colin’s McLean Youth League basketball game interferes), but the folks with Ketty Maisonrouge were nice enough to let me have a gander at the goodies in full color catalog form. I can only say that the proceeds of this sale should be enough to have kept F. Scott in gin for 10,000 years.
The goods
The Pasha’s leavings include seemingly every painting Maurice de Vlaminck ever painted, plus masterworks by Bernard Buffet, Kees van Dongen, Giorgio de Chirico, Maurice Utrillo and even Francois Boucher’s “Venus Crying Over the Body of Adonis” (a work right up King Farouk’s interesting alley).
There are heaps and piles of rare, ancient Chinese wood carvings; gold and enamel figurines; gold and silver boxes; gold and silver candlesticks and dinnerware; 18th Century “Bleu de Chine” porcelain china and gold-trimmed crystal goblets; and Gobelins, Beauvais and Savonnerie tapestries, including one with a really buxom nymphet.
As for posh seatery, there are also Louis XV chairs and more commodes, consoles and secretaires than you can shake a gilt stick at-many of them bearing the mark of the royal palaces at St. Cloud, Fontainbleu and Tuileries. None of these things fold out into a bed.
I’m duly impressed, but I could only wonder, what good is all this stuff doing the Pasha now up in Paradise.
And during his some 90 years of earthly life, what real good did they do him then? Did he wander around his villa fondling these things? Did he actually sit in those chairs? Handsome that they are, I daresay he’d have been much more comfy in a Barca-lounger.
Those imprints from the Tuileries Palace rather remind one of why King Farouk and his Pashas were given the bum’s rush from Cairo-not to speak of what happened to France’s King Louis XVI and that princess cousin of his (she had her heart torn out and paraded around on a pike) after the Paris mob stormed the Tuileries in 1789.
If the good Pasha and Farouk had been a little more thoughtful and generous toward the desperate millions of Egypt who are not living in villas, they might not have had to decamp to the Riviera. The good Pasha might now be remembered as something more significant than an, as Jacques Tajan put it, “homme de gout” (which means “man of taste,” not “man of gout,” though the words may have the same origin).
Some of those people in Cairo are so poor they’re living in cemeteries. The least the estate of the Pasha could do is let them have a couple of chairs to sit on.
