Adorable Story #27: Jacqueline de Ribes

A Study in Elegance

“The Last Queen of Paris”

— Valentino Garavani

Society hostess and fashion designer, Viscountess Jacqueline de Ribes relaxes on the terrace of her house in Ibiza, Spain, September 1978 — © Slim Aarons / Getty Images

Family

Jacqueline de Ribes was born on Bastille day, July 14, 1929, in Paris, France into an aristocratic family: she is the daughter of Count Jean de Beaumont (1904–2002) and Paule de Rivaud de La Raffinière (1908–1999).

Her father was a fighter pilot and a member of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) for 48 years. Her mother, Paule, was a socialite, translator of Hemingway in French and a well-known figure in the Parisian elites.

During his life, Count Jean de Beaumont almost doubled his wife’s family fortune derived from their investment house, Rivaud Group, originally founded in 1910. Among their most lucrative businesses, there were the investments in rubber, banana, and palm-oil plantations in Africa, Indonesia, and Indochina.

Jacqueline adored her father whom she described as “a seducer, a charmer, with a fantastic body”, while she did not have a great relationship with her mother who regularly mocked her for her unusual features (especially her long nose) and for her aspiration to become a ballerina.

“My mother kissed me just once in my childhood,” Jacqueline once noted “I had the feeling always of being insecure—so I was always bumping my soul and my head.”

Jacqueline spent most of her childhood with her maternal grandfather, the Count Olivier de Rivaud de la Raffinière: “He had châteaux, yachts, racing stables, women and cars”— including a special 1932 all-terrain Citroën, equipped with tank-type tracker-rollers to climb up the slopes he liked to bobsled down during winter-time.

During the Spanish Civil War of the 30s, loyalist refugees used to cross the border, at the Bidasoa River, into France, and land in the gardens of her grandfather’s summer compound in Hendaye, on the Côte Basque, very close to the Atlantic Ocean and the Pyrenees mountains.

On October 16, 1938, Olivier de Rivaud died of cancer at 63 years old and soon thereafter WWII started.

WWII

At the start of WWII, the Counts de Beaumont sent Jacqueline and her siblings together with their Scottish nanny from Paris to Hendaye (near the Spanish border) in the hope for them to avoid the worst aspects of the war.

As soon as they arrived in Hendaye, the Scottish nanny, as a British national, was captured by Nazi officials and locked-up in a forced-labour camp.