Château Mouton-Rothschild: Pauline
As I have already documented, Baron Philippe de Rothschild’s first wife Elisabeth Pelletier de Chambure died in a concentration camp during World War II. She had given Philippe two children, Philippine Mathilde Camille (born 1933), and Charles Henri (born 1938) who died very young. Being a daughter of a staunchly Roman Catholic family the Vicomtesse Elisabeth had perhaps believed herself safe from such persecution, certainly more so than the Rothschilds who are Jewish. But it was not to be, and her arrest by the Gestapo in 1943 was witnessed by the ten-year old Philippine. To this day the exact details of Elisabeth’s death, in Ravensbrück concentration camp, remain mercifully unclear.
Thankfully Philippine survived, as did her father Baron Philippe, and he returned to Château Mouton-Rothschild following the cessation of hostilities. The archives had been destroyed, and the vineyards were in a sorry state, and he set about their repair as best he could, before ultimately turning his attention to securing Mouton’s promotion, as I have already detailed. In the meantime Philippe continued to live the life of a playboy, with a string of mistresses to his name. In 1954 one of them, the offspring of American expatriates living in Paris named Pauline Fairfax-Potter (1908 – 1976), became his second wife.
