LATE 19TH CENTURY

These chandeliers originally formed part of a suite that hung in the grand ballroom built in the 1890s by the Comtesse Greffulhe at her country residence, Château Bois-Boudran. A cousin of Comte Robert de Montesquiou, Elisabeth Riquet de Caraman-Chimay, as she was known before her marriage to wealthy Belgian banker Henry Greffulhe in 1881, was a renowned beauty and the uncontested queen of the salons of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. She was idolised by the writer Marcel Proust, among others, and served as the inspiration for the Duchesse de Guermantes in his A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Widely respected as an arbiter of taste, she launched a fashion for greyhound racing, was a patron of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes and promoted many other artists in high society, among them Rodin, Moreau and, in particular, Whistler.