"Bel Ameublement Collection de Madame Pierre Schlumberger et Appartenant a Divers Amateurs" 1992 (SOLD)

[169] pp.

w/ 396 lots

Sotheby’s Monaco

1992

10 5/8″ x 8 1/4″

Fine

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“I bit of the apple. I did not nibble, So 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 Frances 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. So wanted to astonish, says her best friend, the American philanthropist Deeda Blair. I dont think it ever entered her thinking to be concerned about how other people perceived her. She was never afraid of being wrong.

When So married Pierre Schlumberger, in 1961, he was 47 and she was already 32a 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 worlds 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 htel particulier decorated by Valerian Rybar in a provocative mix of classic and modern styles, that So began to blossomand 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 motherhoodshe once admitted to mewas not her forte.