Villa Trianon, Interior
                                                                                                                                              Photograph by Jerome Zerbe
                                                                                                                                              Les Pavillons
                                                                                                                                              Cyril Connolly and Jerome Zerbe
                                                                                                                                              New York: Macmillan, 1962

When Elsie de Wolfe returned to Versailles after the War, she found her beloved villa "a battered, melancholy souvenir:"

As Ludwig Bemelmans describes the scene in To the One I Love the Best:

"A massive window was patched with cardboard ... An arthritic bug dragged one leg after him as he advanced toward a silver washbowl which had been placed on the parquet at a spot where all the polish had been washed off, and in this bowl the drops falling from above counted off the time.  The portion of the garden visible from where I stood filled the frame of another window with the skeleton of a boxwood tree, which once had been artfully trained to resemble an elephant...The rooms were hollow in their cold emptiness.  Mattresses were rolled up... The chairs everywhere were genuine antiques but the smallest that existed of the Louis XIV style and the hard wear they had been subjected to had weakened them, so that the legs were askew.  It was all a little off center, inside the house and even outside -- the trees leaned, the bushes sagged, the trellises were twisted.  Elsie saw all this through the golden haze of hope..."

Elsie set to work, and the Villa Trianon was restored and brought back to life.  Now it appears that the house has once again fallen on hard times. 

Loving a place is more difficult, sometimes, than loving a human being.  A place requires attention and care like the most demanding lover, but is never self-obsessed the way, for instance, a beautiful youth can be.  A place lets itself go from our neglect, but never complains or fusses.  A place sags and stoops itself into old age without laying blame, without accusations or unpleasant scenes.  I never get a sense of fear in an old place.  Sadness, maybe, but also peace.  Places have patience. 

Loving things and places takes a lot of work, of course.  And money.  And who benefits?  Leafing through an old Architectural Digest with reproductions of old photographs of the interiors Elsie de Wolfe created in her long life, I was wondering, why wouldn't Si Newhouse, chairman of Condé Nast which publishes AD, step forward and save the Villa Trianon?  If anyone knows about the love of beautiful things and places, and the benefits to be derived therefrom, it would be Si, wouldn't it?  

If you make money off the work of decorators and designers, surely it follows that you'd want to preserve and protect their work, wouldn't you agree?  For future revenues.  Loving things and places can be expensive, but there's a pay-off.

Do let Mr Newhouse know we are looking to him to do what's right.   Meanwhile I shall have a word with Mr Hearst as well.  House Beautiful could do a very nice layout on the restoration of the Villa Trianon -- and I would be very surprised indeed if it did not earn the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. 

And after all, it would be the loving thing to do.