Word: fabergent
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...royal visitor, the King of Bulgaria, was impressed with many things he saw in St. Petersburg, but what impressed him most was the man named Carl Fabergé. "My dear Fabergé," said King Ferdinand, "if you were in Bulgaria, I would make you my minister." To which the famous court jeweler replied, "No, no, your majesty, not politics, I beg of you. But minister of the goldsmith's art, why yes, sire, if you will...
...telling such episodes, Biographer Wheeler-Bennett gives little hint that he wrote his history in the shadow of-and partly inside-Buckingham Palace. An acre of Fabergé eggshells beset the path of the royal (and official) biographer, but Wheeler-Bennett has manfully covered the field to give a picture of a king and a king's-eye view of his times. Apart from inside stuff such as bits of George's conversations with F.D.R. at Hyde Park (where the lordly Roosevelt called him "young man"), the book offers a highly explicit picture of the functions and limitations...
...appearance as a Kodiak bear, as styleconscious as any one of the World's Ten Best-Dressed Women. "A stylist," says Walker, "has got to show style in his cars, in his home, his clothes and his person." He even smells stylish, slathering on Fabergé cologne so liberally that it lingers on long after he leaves the room. He owns 40 pairs of shoes (at $60 a pair), 70 suits, once had Saks make up four "cocktail suits" (at $250 apiece) in white with blue braid, white with black braid. "I didn't wear them," grins George...
...also a new twist on the old historians' axiom: the more luxury, the quicker a nation degenerates. This was true enough in Babylon, Greece, Rome, Bourbon France and Czarist Russia, where luxury perched atop a pyramid of misery, ignorance and hopeless poverty-Fabergé eggs sprouting from a dungheap. But in the U.S. luxury has come to mean not a declining economy but an expanding one. It is not a historic nightmare but a large part of the American dream. In the words of Ben Franklin, who saw ahead of his time: "Is not the hope...
Many of the items were gifts exchanged among royalty. There was a whole case devoted to the works of the great Russian court jeweler, Peter Carl Fabergé (TIME, April 6, 1953), including a resplendent Easter egg presented by Czar Nicholas II to his Czarina in 1914. The egg is made of a transparent mesh of platinum, gold and diamonds, contains a jeweled stand bearing portraits of the Czar's five children. Another Fabergé masterpiece was a 3-in. grand piano of Siberian jade. The most valuable item in Queen Mary's collection: a Potsdam bloodstone...