"Bel Ameublement Collection De Madame Pierre Schlumberger Et Appartenant A Diverse Amateurs" 1992
$250
Sotheby's
[169] pp.
396 lots
1992
10.6" x 8.25"
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"I bit of the apple. I did not nibble,” São Schlumberger, the wildly extravagant Paris hostess and patron of the arts, told me shortly before her death, at 77, in 2007. As the wife of Pierre Schlumberger, the oil-industry billionaire from one of France’s most distinguished families, the bewitching, Portuguese-born beauty had for nearly 40 years lived a fairy-tale life peopled with names such as Warhol, Twombly, Rothschild, Thurn und Taxis, Kennedy, and Chirac. In her later years, it became a life of high drama, tragedy, and controversy, most of it of her own making. “São wanted to astonish,” says her best friend, the American philanthropist Deeda Blair. “I don’t think it ever entered her thinking to be concerned about how other people perceived her. She was never afraid of being wrong.”
When São married Pierre Schlumberger, in 1961, he was 47 and she was already 32—a well-educated, highly ambitious woman getting off to a late start. Both had been previously married: she for under a year to a Portuguese boulevardier, he for two decades to a French aristocrat who had borne him five children before dying of a stroke in 1959. For the first few years of their marriage they lived in Houston, where Schlumberger Limited, the world’s largest oil-field-services company, had been based since World War II. In 1965, however, Pierre was ousted as president and C.E.O. in a family coup, and the couple moved to New York and later to Paris. It was in the City of Light, in an 18th-century hôtel particulier decorated by Valerian Rybar in a provocative mix of classic and modern styles, that São began to blossom—and people began to talk about her. How could she have signed Louis Seize chairs upholstered in chartreuse patent leather? And what about that discotheque in the basement? By then she and Pierre had two children, Paul-Albert, born in 1962, and Victoire, born in 1968, but motherhood—she once admitted to me—was not her forte.