The House That Grief Built

The Guise Salon in the Château de Chantilly, outside Paris, where the Duke and Duchess of Aumale had private apartments. The rooms reopened in February after a two-year restoration project. Credit: Sophie Lloyd
The Guise Salon in the Château de Chantilly, outside Paris, where the Duke and Duchess of Aumale had private apartments. The rooms reopened in February after a two-year restoration project. Credit: Sophie Lloyd
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The House That Grief Built

The Guise Salon in the Château de Chantilly, outside Paris, where the Duke and Duchess of Aumale had private apartments. The rooms reopened in February after a two-year restoration project. Credit: Sophie Lloyd
The Guise Salon in the Château de Chantilly, outside Paris, where the Duke and Duchess of Aumale had private apartments. The rooms reopened in February after a two-year restoration project. Credit: Sophie Lloyd

When visiting the newly restored private apartments of the Duke of Aumale at the Château de Chantilly outside Paris, you could easily think you were seeing the interiors of an 18th-century French castle. The rooms are sumptuous, with purple damask-covered walls, marquetry-inlaid furniture, parquet de Versailles floors and exquisitely carved boiseries, or wooden panels, depicting musical instruments and garden implements.

It all seems very grand, though these rooms were actually redone in the 19th century, but the décor is linked to utter tragedy.

In 1830, the Duke of Aumale, one of the eight children of the king, Louis Philippe d’Orléans, inherited the estate at 8, after its rightful heir was shot by a firing squad on Napoleon’s orders. The young duke attended school in Paris and chose a career in the army. He distinguished himself in military campaigns in Algeria.

In 1844, he married his cousin Marie-Caroline, the daughter of the Prince of Salerno and a grandniece of Marie Antoinette, and hired the fashionable society decorator and court painter Eugène Lami to design the interiors of the old private apartments in a ground-floor wing of the castle.

Then came the revolution of 1848. The monarchy fell, forcing the duke and his family into exile in England (with their furniture, fortunately). Chantilly was sold.

The duke could not return to France for more than 20 years, until the fall of the Second Empire in 1870, when Napoleon III was overthrown. In the meantime, the duke’s wife and older son had died in England. He returned to France only to witness his younger son die from an illness.

The duke regained ownership of Chantilly. In his grief, he re-created the old private rooms with their original contents, precisely as Lami had decorated them in the 1840s.

“These private apartments became his ‘cemetery,’ as he called them,” said Mathieu Deldicque, curator of the Condé Museum at Chantilly. “Furniture was placed precisely where it had been earlier.”

Eventually, the duke bequeathed the chateau to the Institute of France, so the décor and collections would be protected and open to the public. After his death in 1897, the private rooms were closed and remained closed until the 1990s.

Now, Mr. Deldicque has overseen the full, detailed restoration of the suite of rooms, a two-year project costing 2.5 million euros, about $2.8 million. The restoration included meticulously removing centuries of overpainting on the 18th-century boiseries, fixing the gold-inflected plaster cove ceilings, reinstalling elaborate curtains and swags, and reupholstering the furniture with elaborate trim. The rooms opened in February.

The New York Times



SpaceX Rocket Cargo Project Puts Pacific Seabirds in Jeopardy

Sooty terns fill the skies as they return to Johnston Island within the Johnston Atoll National Wildlife Refuge to establish their breeding colony in July 2021. Eric Baker/U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service/Handout via REUTERS
Sooty terns fill the skies as they return to Johnston Island within the Johnston Atoll National Wildlife Refuge to establish their breeding colony in July 2021. Eric Baker/U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service/Handout via REUTERS
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SpaceX Rocket Cargo Project Puts Pacific Seabirds in Jeopardy

Sooty terns fill the skies as they return to Johnston Island within the Johnston Atoll National Wildlife Refuge to establish their breeding colony in July 2021. Eric Baker/U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service/Handout via REUTERS
Sooty terns fill the skies as they return to Johnston Island within the Johnston Atoll National Wildlife Refuge to establish their breeding colony in July 2021. Eric Baker/U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service/Handout via REUTERS

A project proposed by Elon Musk's SpaceX and the US Air Force to test hypersonic rocket cargo deliveries from a remote Pacific atoll could harm the many seabirds that nest at the wildlife refuge, according to biologists and experts who have spent more than a decade working to protect them. It would not be the first time that SpaceX's activities have affected protected birds. A SpaceX launch of its Starship rocket in Boca Chica, Texas, last year involved a blast that destroyed nests and eggs of plover shorebirds, landing the billionaire Musk's company in legal trouble and leading him to remark jokingly that he would refrain from eating omelets for a week to compensate, Reuters reported.

The Air Force announced in March that it has selected Johnston Atoll, a US territory in the central Pacific Ocean located nearly 800 miles (1,300 km) southwest of the state of Hawaii, as the site to test the Rocket Cargo Vanguard program it is developing with SpaceX.

The project involves test landing rocket re-entry vehicles designed to deliver up to 100 tons of cargo to anywhere on Earth within about 90 minutes. It would be a breakthrough for military logistics by making it easier to move supplies quickly into distant locations.

According to biologists and experts who have worked on the one-square-mile (2.6 square km) atoll - designated as a US National Wildlife Refuge and part of the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument - the project could be too much for the island's 14 species of tropical birds to withstand.

Roughly a million seabirds use the atoll, home to a variety of wildlife, throughout the year, up from just a few thousand in the 1980s. The bird species include red-tailed tropicbirds, red-footed boobies and great frigatebirds, which have eight-foot (2-1/2 meter) wingspans.

"Any sort of aviation that happens to the island is going to have an impact at this point," said Hawaii-based biologist Steven Minamishin, who works for the National Wildlife Refuge System, part of the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

"The biggest issue this will bring is the sound of the rocket flushing birds off of their nests and having them so anxious and unsure as to not return to their nest, resulting in a loss of generation," said University of Texas wildlife biologist Ryan Rash, who spent nearly a year on Johnston.

The project would involve construction of two landing pads and the relanding of 10 rockets over four years.

The Air Force and SpaceX are preparing an environmental assessment of the project in the coming weeks for public comment. The assessment is a requirement under a law called the National Environmental Policy Act before the Air Force can proceed with the project, which it wants to start this year.

The Air Force in a Federal Register notice in March said the project was unlikely to have a significant environmental impact but noted it could harm migratory birds.

A spokesperson for the US Air Force said it is closely consulting with the Fish and Wildlife Service, as well as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Marine Fisheries Service, "to assess impacts and develop necessary measures for avoiding, minimizing and/or mitigating potential environmental impacts."

Space X did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Musk is serving as an adviser to President Donald Trump as they work to downsize and remake the federal government and eliminate thousands of employees.

'ALL THAT'S LEFT'

In the Pacific, where unpopulated land is scarce and threatened by sea level rise, the birds depend on Johnston for their nesting and survival, according to the biologists interviewed by Reuters.

This makes the protection of these birds essential, said Desirée Sorenson-Groves, president of the National Wildlife Refuge Association, a nonprofit group focused on protecting US National Wildlife Refuge System.

"These little remote oceanic islands are all that's left for them," Sorenson-Groves said. "We've invested a lot of money as a country to bring back wildlife to these places."

Johnston Atoll, closed to the public, is administered by the Air Force and managed by Fish and Wildlife Service. The island was used for nuclear testing from the late 1950s to 1962, and to stockpile chemical munitions including Agent Orange from 1972 to 1975.

The Air Force completed a clean-up of the atoll in 2004, and it has served as a haven for nesting seabirds and migrating shore birds since. Visits by people to the island have been highly controlled to avoid disturbing the birds.

The Fish and Wildlife Service led an effort to eradicate yellow-crazy ants, an invasive species, on the atoll after it was declared a refuge, sending crews for six-month stints starting in 2010 and ending in 2021. Crews brought their clothing in sealed bags, had their equipment frozen and sanitized, and used separate island shoes to prevent new species from invading the atoll, said Eric Baker, a Fish and Wildlife Service volunteer and wildlife photographer who spent a year on Johnston.

"The basic rule was cause no or as little disturbance as possible," Baker said.

Baker said he is worried that the SpaceX project will undo all the painstaking conservation efforts over the years.

"The nests and the birds there are just going to be kind of vaporized," Baker said.