Madame de

This is the story of Madame de's earrings. It is a story of jewellery, of love, of denial, of society that has the simplicity of a fairy tale and the elegance of an eighteenth century roman-à-clef. The most famous work by Louise de Vilmorin, this novella became The Earrings of Madame de, a 1952 Max Ophüls film.



Louise de Vilmorin (1902-69) was a novelist and poet and the most extraordinary of women. Married to a Hungarian count, her lovers included Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Orson Welles and André Malraux. But it was Duff Cooper, British Ambassador to France, during the 1940s, who was the love of her life, and the translator of this novella. John Julius Norwich, his son, describes in his moving afterword the ménage à trois that he remembers as a child at the British Embassy in Paris.