Private Life
Apart from a large apartment in the palace, and a separate house in Versailles, Bontemps had a "maison particulier" (townhouse) on the Île Saint-Louis in the centre of Paris, with thirty rooms and a staff of twelve. According to Saint-Simon, he copied his master with a secret second marriage to the mother of La Roche, head-valet to Louis's grandson, Philip V of Spain. The children of his first marriage married very well, and two generations later a Bontemps married the last Prince of Conti, a cadet branch of the Royal Family. Others married into the largest banking families in France. There is a portrait of the Comptesse de La Châtre, daughter of Louis XV's Bontemps head valet, by Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, dated 1789, the last year of the Ancien Regime.
Read more about this topic: Alexandre Bontemps
Famous quotes related to private life:
“Denouement to denouement, he took a personal pride in the
certain, certain way he lived his own, private life,
but nevertheless, they shut off his gas; nevertheless,
the bank foreclosed; nevertheless, the landlord called;
nevertheless, the radio broke,
And twelve o’clock arrived just once too often,”
—Kenneth Fearing (1902–1961)
“There is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)