Many years ago, while visiting the Château de Chaumont-sur-Loire on the Loire, I learned something of the history of the woman who, from 1875 to 1938, was the owner of this magnificent building, one of those “châteaux” that line the famous river and are today an infallible tourist attraction in France. She was known as the granddaughter of the “Sugar King”. It was not for nothing that her grandfather, the economist and businessman Louis-Auguste Say, had founded the great sugar refineries of Nantes and Paris. Her name was Marie-Charlotte-Constance Say. In fact, in 1875, at the age of just seventeen, she bought the castle with her enormous fortune – it cost her the not inconsiderable sum of 1,706,500 gold francs – and shortly afterwards she married Prince Henri-Amédée de Broglie, son of Albert, 4th Duke of Broglie, who was a member of the Académie Française and president of Saint-Gobain, and his wife Pauline de Galard de Brassac de Béarn.
At their wedding, Marie and Amédée were invited the future George V of England, Elizabeth II of Spain and the Shah of Iran and received as a gift from the Maharaja of Kapurthala an elephant, “Miss Pundgi”, was sent from Bombay to Marseille and transported by train to Chaumont. Marie and Amédée were the parents of five children, but in 1917 Prince Amédée died. It was several years before Marie married again.
Marie’s former father-in-law had been a notable figure of Orleanist monarchism and liberal Catholicism. Coincidentally, this time Marie’s fiancé and second husband was also a prince, but from a royal family and precisely from the Orléans lineage. She was already 73 years old and the chosen one, Prince Louis Ferdinand of Orléans and Bourbon, Infante of Spain until Alfonso XIII withdrew that title in 1924, was only 42. He was the son of the Infante Antonio de Orléans, Duke of Galliera, son of the Dukes of Montpensier, and the Infanta Eulalia, daughter of Isabel II. François de Cossé, 11th Duke of Brissac, unsuccessfully attempted to oppose this union with a character – as the 12th Duke of Brissac, son of the former, put it – who was known by all the police forces in Europe for his licentious and dissipated life. The duke argued that his aunt Marie was not mentally in control of her actions, but the judge determined that a nephew could not claim a declaration of mental incapacity from an aunt. Louis Ferdinand and Marie were married in a civil ceremony in London on 19 July 1948. 1930 with the total opposition of Alfonso XIII.
With this second marriage, the “bride” consummated half a century of lavish extravagance at the Château de Broglie, located at number 11 on the Parisian rue de Solferino and which, over the vicissitudes of history, was the headquarters of the French Socialist Party from 1980 to 2018. This “Hôtel de Broglie” had long before belonged to Baron Erik Magnus Staël von Holstein, husband of the world-famous woman of letters Madame de Staël, who, curiously, had lived in the Château de Chaumont-sur-Loire in 1810.
Chaumont was modernised and adapted for large receptions. The Broglies provided it with running water, electricity and underfloor heating. Marie Say set up a brilliant and extravagant court, described by André de Fouquières in his “Cinquante ans de panache”. Chaumont was visited by everyone from Edward VII of England to Charles I of Portugal, Charles I of Romania and the Maharajas of Kapurthala, Baroda and Patiala. Marie Say did not like to keep to a timetable. So her cooks, unable to predict when their mistress would sit down at the table, prepared eleven dishes and several desserts for dinner..
The Say sugar investments began to go wrong, which reduced the Broglie fortune. Amédée managed to save face, but after his death, Marie did not manage her assets well. If we add the crash of 1929 and her marriage to Louis Ferdinand, the situation of the former princess of Boglie, who died completely ruined, declined drastically. She reduced the Chaumont estate from 2,500 to 21 hectares, sold her assets and several thousand works of art. Her second husband survived her by two years.
