Walter and Matilda Gay in Paris and the country

Magazine Antiques, Dec, 2000 by William Rieder

All three of the principal floors at Le Breau had guest bedrooms (see Pls. VIII, LX). In general, French friends were lodged the on ground floor, Americans on the second, and children and servants of the guests on the third. The reason for this, Matilda explained, was that the French had a horror of stairs and our compatriots a horror of dampness, also that a sunny exposure was much more necessay for our comfort than for theirs. No doubt our tissues are dried up by our fierce sun and dry climate, so that European humidity chills our marrow.

Matilda enjoyed showing the house to lunch and weekend guests. She wrote that

Comtesse Joachim Murat went into raptures over the Breau, and had a different adjective for each room--an inexhaustible vocabulary, that enviable French gift, which enables one to say the same thing over and over again without being a bore.

Soon the house acquired such a reputation as a showplace that many who came were merely friends of friends or hardly knew the Gays at all. These they divided into two categories: the cultivated, who knew what to admire, and the rest who "admired everything and saw nothing." The latter group was by far the larger and included some surprises, such as the famous aesthete Robert, comte de Montesquiou-Fezensac (1855-1921). Matilda wrote in her diary about the count on November 22, 1908:

This gifted, brilliant, extraordinary, and somewhat uncomfortable personage crossed the threshold of Le Breau for the first time. For four hours we listened to his torrent of eloquence and witticism, which never flagged -- nor did our interest....He is a fin lettre [refined man of letters] and a very talented man, but not a man of taste, as he considers himself and is considered, for he admired the wrong things at the Breau and did not see the beautiful ones. Our house is our shibboleth.

The Gays never stopped acquiring objects. At Tonnerre in Burgundy in 1907 Matilda reported:

W.G. bought a statue, in white stone, of Ste. Barbe, as well as a little Louis XVI table. The antiquity dealer was a brave homme with a pretty daughter, and they showed us things of a high order and corresponding price in an adjoining house.

In Paris in 1908, "In the afternoon prowled in antiquity shops with W.G. hunting consoles for the Breau," and in Paris in 1913, "After much haggling, bought a lovely clock for Le Breau. The subject is Diana watching the hounds bring down the deer--in terra cotta and full of vivacity." Even during World War I they shopped: "July 21, 1916. Bought two lovely white porcelain de Sevres vases. It seems almost wicked to indulge in such a luxury when the war is raging at the front," Matilda wrote.

In their frequent travels through France and the rest of Europe, the Gays enjoyed comparing their own possessions with those they saw elsewhere. In London in 1904: "Went to see the Wallace Collection--studied the pictures, the 18th century cabinets and furniture, etc. The candlesticks made by the brothers Slodtz so closely resemble ours, that the paternity of the latter is established." At Knole in Kent in 1925: "Noticed in Lady Betty Germaine's drawing room a painted figure near the fire-place, peeling an apple, just like ours at Le Breau."