Antoine Bibesco
Encyclopedia
Antoine, Prince Bibesco (July 19, 1878 – September 2, 1951) was a Romania
n aristocrat, lawyer
, diplomat
and writer.
. His mother was Helene Epourano, daughter of a former Prime Minister of Romania
. Though raised at 69, Rue de Courcelles, in Paris
, Antoine continued to oversee the Bibesco estates in Craiova
until after World War II
.
As a young man, his mother, Princess Hélène Bibesco's celebrated Paris
salon
gave him the opportunity to meet Charles Gounod
, Claude Debussy
, Camille Saint-Saëns
, Pierre Bonnard
, Édouard Vuillard
, Aristide Maillol
, Anatole France
and Marcel Proust
among many other notables. Both his father and mother commissioned artworks and music (most notably Edgar Degas
and George Enescu
) and Antoine continued this family tradition, particularly through his friendship with Vuillard.
Marcel Proust became a lifelong friend and shared a secret language in which Marcel was Lecram and the Bibescos were Ocsebib. Antoine made a concerted effort to have Proust's Du Côté de Chez Swann
(in which, it is said, Bibesco was the model for Robert de St. Loup) published by André Gide
and the Nouvelle Revue Française
, but failed in that effort. Toward the end of Proust's life, Bibesco, who was a great raconteur, was an outside ear for the reclusive writer. Later he published Letters of Marcel Proust to Antoine Bibesco.
Bibesco, though not a prolific writer, was the author of a number of plays in French
and had at least one American
success. In 1930 his play Ladies All was performed on Broadway
at the Morosco Theatre
, running for 140 performances. He also translated Weekend by Noel Coward
and Le Domaine by John Galsworthy
into French.
Prime Minister
). At this time he was in a relationship with the writer Enid Bagnold
, but his affections for her were replaced by those he began to feel for the twenty-one-year-old Elizabeth Asquith (he was 40 at the time). Margot Asquith
, her mother, thought he would be a steadying influence on her daughter. "What a gentleman he is. None of my family are gentlemen like that; no breeding you know," she wrote.
The marriage took place at St. Margaret's
, Westminster
on April 29, 1919. It was the society event of the year, attended by everyone from Queen Alexandra
to George Bernard Shaw
. Their only child, Priscilla, was born in 1920 (and died in 2004).
Apparently marriage did not change Antoine's womanizing ways. Rebecca West
(with whom he had a short affair in 1927) called him "a boudoir athlete". While attending a party at the French embassy in London
and looking around the room, West realized that every woman in attendance had been his mistress at one time or another.
Antoine continued his diplomatic career in Washington, D.C.
(1920–1926) as Minister of the Romanian Legation (the present Embassy of Romania in Washington, D.C. was first used as such during his tenure) and in Madrid
(1927–1931). In 1936, after Romanian Prime Minister Gheorghe Tătărescu
removed Nicolae Titulescu
as Foreign Minister and recalled nearly all Romania's diplomats, Prince Bibesco had the unenviable responsibility of reassuring England
and France
that Romania was not slipping into the grip of fascism
. The World War II
years were spent in Romania where his wife died (in 1945) and when, after the war, his estates were confiscated by the communists
he left his country, never to return. Enid Bagnold, in her autobiography, tells of unwittingly smuggling silver across the English Channel
for him after the war. He died in 1951 and was buried in Paris.
"He had three tombs in his heart," Enid Bagnold wrote in her Times
obituary, "which I think he could never finally close - of his mother, his brother Emmanuel and his wife."
Romania
Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeastern Europe, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian arch, bordering on the Black Sea...
n aristocrat, lawyer
Lawyer
A lawyer, according to Black's Law Dictionary, is "a person learned in the law; as an attorney, counsel or solicitor; a person who is practicing law." Law is the system of rules of conduct established by the sovereign government of a society to correct wrongs, maintain the stability of political...
, diplomat
Diplomacy
Diplomacy is the art and practice of conducting negotiations between representatives of groups or states...
and writer.
Biography
His father was Prince Alexandre Bibesco, the last surviving son of the Hospodar of WallachiaWallachia
Wallachia or Walachia is a historical and geographical region of Romania. It is situated north of the Danube and south of the Southern Carpathians...
. His mother was Helene Epourano, daughter of a former Prime Minister of Romania
Prime Minister of Romania
The Prime Minister of Romania is the head of the Government of Romania. Initially, the office was styled President of the Council of Ministers , when the term "Government" included more than the Cabinet, and the Cabinet was called The Council of Ministers...
. Though raised at 69, Rue de Courcelles, in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
, Antoine continued to oversee the Bibesco estates in Craiova
Craiova
Craiova , Romania's 6th largest city and capital of Dolj County, is situated near the east bank of the river Jiu in central Oltenia. It is a longstanding political center, and is located at approximately equal distances from the Southern Carpathians and the River Danube . Craiova is the chief...
until after World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
.
As a young man, his mother, Princess Hélène Bibesco's celebrated Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
salon
Salon (gathering)
A salon is a gathering of people under the roof of an inspiring host, held partly to amuse one another and partly to refine taste and increase their knowledge of the participants through conversation. These gatherings often consciously followed Horace's definition of the aims of poetry, "either to...
gave him the opportunity to meet Charles Gounod
Charles Gounod
Charles-François Gounod was a French composer, known for his Ave Maria as well as his operas Faust and Roméo et Juliette.-Biography:...
, Claude Debussy
Claude Debussy
Claude-Achille Debussy was a French composer. Along with Maurice Ravel, he was one of the most prominent figures working within the field of impressionist music, though he himself intensely disliked the term when applied to his compositions...
, Camille Saint-Saëns
Camille Saint-Saëns
Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns was a French Late-Romantic composer, organist, conductor, and pianist. He is known especially for The Carnival of the Animals, Danse macabre, Samson and Delilah, Piano Concerto No. 2, Cello Concerto No. 1, Havanaise, Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso, and his Symphony...
, Pierre Bonnard
Pierre Bonnard
Pierre Bonnard was a French painter and printmaker, as well as a founding member of Les Nabis.-Biography:...
, Édouard Vuillard
Édouard Vuillard
Jean-Édouard Vuillard was a French painter and printmaker associated with the Nabis.-Early years and education:...
, Aristide Maillol
Aristide Maillol
Aristide Maillol or Aristides Maillol was a French Catalan sculptor and painter.-Biography:...
, Anatole France
Anatole France
Anatole France , born François-Anatole Thibault, , was a French poet, journalist, and novelist. He was born in Paris, and died in Saint-Cyr-sur-Loire. He was a successful novelist, with several best-sellers. Ironic and skeptical, he was considered in his day the ideal French man of letters...
and Marcel Proust
Marcel Proust
Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu...
among many other notables. Both his father and mother commissioned artworks and music (most notably Edgar Degas
Edgar Degas
Edgar Degas[p] , born Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas, was a French artist famous for his work in painting, sculpture, printmaking and drawing. He is regarded as one of the founders of Impressionism although he rejected the term, and preferred to be called a realist...
and George Enescu
George Enescu
George Enescu was a Romanian composer, violinist, pianist, conductor and teacher.-Biography:Enescu was born in the village of Liveni , Dorohoi County at the time, today Botoşani County. He showed musical talent from early in his childhood. A child prodigy, Enescu created his first musical...
) and Antoine continued this family tradition, particularly through his friendship with Vuillard.
Marcel Proust became a lifelong friend and shared a secret language in which Marcel was Lecram and the Bibescos were Ocsebib. Antoine made a concerted effort to have Proust's Du Côté de Chez Swann
In Search of Lost Time
In Search of Lost Time or Remembrance of Things Past is a novel in seven volumes by Marcel Proust. His most prominent work, it is popularly known for its considerable length and the notion of involuntary memory, the most famous example being the "episode of the madeleine." The novel is widely...
(in which, it is said, Bibesco was the model for Robert de St. Loup) published by André Gide
André Gide
André Paul Guillaume Gide was a French author and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1947. Gide's career ranged from its beginnings in the symbolist movement, to the advent of anticolonialism between the two World Wars.Known for his fiction as well as his autobiographical works, Gide...
and the Nouvelle Revue Française
Nouvelle Revue Française
La Nouvelle Revue Française is a literary magazine founded in 1909 by a group of intellectuals, including André Gide, Jacques Copeau, and Jean Schlumberger...
, but failed in that effort. Toward the end of Proust's life, Bibesco, who was a great raconteur, was an outside ear for the reclusive writer. Later he published Letters of Marcel Proust to Antoine Bibesco.
Bibesco, though not a prolific writer, was the author of a number of plays in French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
and had at least one American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
success. In 1930 his play Ladies All was performed on Broadway
Broadway theatre
Broadway theatre, commonly called simply Broadway, refers to theatrical performances presented in one of the 40 professional theatres with 500 or more seats located in the Theatre District centered along Broadway, and in Lincoln Center, in Manhattan in New York City...
at the Morosco Theatre
Morosco Theatre
The Morosco Theatre was a legitimate theatre located at 217 West 45th Street in the heart of the theater district in midtown-Manhattan, New York, United States....
, running for 140 performances. He also translated Weekend by Noel Coward
Noël Coward
Sir Noël Peirce Coward was an English playwright, composer, director, actor and singer, known for his wit, flamboyance, and what Time magazine called "a sense of personal style, a combination of cheek and chic, pose and poise".Born in Teddington, a suburb of London, Coward attended a dance academy...
and Le Domaine by John Galsworthy
John Galsworthy
John Galsworthy OM was an English novelist and playwright. Notable works include The Forsyte Saga and its sequels, A Modern Comedy and End of the Chapter...
into French.
Diplomatic career
Having earlier served as councellor of the Romanian legations in Paris and Petrograd, by 1914 Prince Antoine was First Secretary of the Romanian Legation in London and by 1918 had entered the circle of Herbert Henry Asquith (former LiberalLiberal Party (UK)
The Liberal Party was one of the two major political parties of the United Kingdom during the 19th and early 20th centuries. It was a third party of negligible importance throughout the latter half of the 20th Century, before merging with the Social Democratic Party in 1988 to form the present day...
Prime Minister
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is the Head of Her Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom. The Prime Minister and Cabinet are collectively accountable for their policies and actions to the Sovereign, to Parliament, to their political party and...
). At this time he was in a relationship with the writer Enid Bagnold
Enid Bagnold
Enid Algerine Bagnold, Lady Jones, CBE , known by her maiden name as Enid Bagnold, was a British author and playwright, best known for the 1935 story National Velvet which was filmed in 1944 with Elizabeth Taylor....
, but his affections for her were replaced by those he began to feel for the twenty-one-year-old Elizabeth Asquith (he was 40 at the time). Margot Asquith
Margot Asquith
Margot Asquith, Countess of Oxford and Asquith , born Emma Alice Margaret Tennant, was an Anglo-Scottish socialite, author and wit...
, her mother, thought he would be a steadying influence on her daughter. "What a gentleman he is. None of my family are gentlemen like that; no breeding you know," she wrote.
St. Margaret's, Westminster
The Anglican church of St. Margaret, Westminster Abbey is situated in the grounds of Westminster Abbey on Parliament Square, and is the parish church of the House of Commons of the United Kingdom in London...
, Westminster
Westminster Abbey
The Collegiate Church of St Peter at Westminster, popularly known as Westminster Abbey, is a large, mainly Gothic church, in the City of Westminster, London, United Kingdom, located just to the west of the Palace of Westminster. It is the traditional place of coronation and burial site for English,...
on April 29, 1919. It was the society event of the year, attended by everyone from Queen Alexandra
Alexandra of Denmark
Alexandra of Denmark was the wife of Edward VII of the United Kingdom...
to George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60...
. Their only child, Priscilla, was born in 1920 (and died in 2004).
Apparently marriage did not change Antoine's womanizing ways. Rebecca West
Rebecca West
Cicely Isabel Fairfield , known by her pen name Rebecca West, or Dame Rebecca West, DBE was an English author, journalist, literary critic and travel writer. A prolific, protean author who wrote in many genres, West was committed to feminist and liberal principles and was one of the foremost public...
(with whom he had a short affair in 1927) called him "a boudoir athlete". While attending a party at the French embassy in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
and looking around the room, West realized that every woman in attendance had been his mistress at one time or another.
Antoine continued his diplomatic career in Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....
(1920–1926) as Minister of the Romanian Legation (the present Embassy of Romania in Washington, D.C. was first used as such during his tenure) and in Madrid
Madrid
Madrid is the capital and largest city of Spain. The population of the city is roughly 3.3 million and the entire population of the Madrid metropolitan area is calculated to be 6.271 million. It is the third largest city in the European Union, after London and Berlin, and its metropolitan...
(1927–1931). In 1936, after Romanian Prime Minister Gheorghe Tătărescu
Gheorghe Tatarescu
Gheorghe I. Tătărescu was a Romanian politician who served twice as Prime Minister of Romania , three times as Minister of Foreign Affairs , and once as Minister of War...
removed Nicolae Titulescu
Nicolae Titulescu
Nicolae Titulescu was a well-known Romanian diplomat, at various times government minister, finance and foreign minister, and for two terms President of the General Assembly of the League of Nations . He was a member of the Freemasonry.-Early years:...
as Foreign Minister and recalled nearly all Romania's diplomats, Prince Bibesco had the unenviable responsibility of reassuring England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
and France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
that Romania was not slipping into the grip of fascism
Fascism
Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...
. The World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
years were spent in Romania where his wife died (in 1945) and when, after the war, his estates were confiscated by the communists
Communist Romania
Communist Romania was the period in Romanian history when that country was a Soviet-aligned communist state in the Eastern Bloc, with the dominant role of Romanian Communist Party enshrined in its successive constitutions...
he left his country, never to return. Enid Bagnold, in her autobiography, tells of unwittingly smuggling silver across the English Channel
English Channel
The English Channel , often referred to simply as the Channel, is an arm of the Atlantic Ocean that separates southern England from northern France, and joins the North Sea to the Atlantic. It is about long and varies in width from at its widest to in the Strait of Dover...
for him after the war. He died in 1951 and was buried in Paris.
"He had three tombs in his heart," Enid Bagnold wrote in her Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
obituary, "which I think he could never finally close - of his mother, his brother Emmanuel and his wife."