The Rise and Fall of the Palais Rose: Anna Gould and the Count Who Spent Her Fortune

Anna Gould was seventeen when her father died and left her an income larger than most European royal houses. Jay Gould, the most hated financier in America, had written a will designed to keep husbands away from his money. Eighteen months later his daughter married a French count who had crossed the Atlantic looking for exactly her. What Boniface de Castellane built with her money was a pink marble palace on the avenue du Bois de Boulogne, a copy of a royal pavilion at Versailles raised to three storeys and filled with objects that had belonged to kings. He spent 7.7 million dollars in five years and earned none of it. She walked out one winter and left the building standing. Sixty years later the French state was asked to save it, and answered in writing. ON THE RECORD The wedding took place on 4 March 1895, not the 14th as several sources state; the date is settled by contemporary press reporting it as already past. The figure of roughly 160,000 dollars for the wedding is a contemporary newspaper estimate published three days after the event, not an audited number, and is presented here as such. Anna Gould did not inherit Lyndhurst. She bought it from her sister's estate in 1938 for 277,635 dollars, a detail most retellings get wrong. The marble of the Palais Rose came from the Languedoc quarries used for Versailles, not from Italy. SOURCES Cité de l'architecture et du patrimoine, Paris. Scale model of the Palais Rose, inventory 2011.8.1 Kintrea, Frank. "The Duchess of Tarrytown." American Heritage, 1970 Omaha World-Herald, 7 March 1895. Elia Peattie on the Gould-Castellane wedding The New York Times, February 1892. Ward McAllister's list of New York society TIME, 27 October 1937, and 26 March 1945 Myers, Gustavus. History of the Great American Fortunes Lyndhurst, a National Trust for Historic Preservation site. lyndhurst.org National Park Service, Lyndhurst Noblesse & Royautés, on the Languedoc marble of the Palais Rose Commission supérieure des monuments historiques, on the refusal to classify IMAGERY Wikimedia Commons Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) The National Archives A NOTE ON THE IMAGERY Some visuals in this video are illustrative reconstructions. Maps, buildings, floor plans and other features are approximate representations created to support the narration, and are not presented as original archival detail. Where genuine archival photographs and documents are used, their sources are credited above. CHAPTERS 0:00 The palace that was worth nothing 0:38 Jay Gould, the most hated man in America 1:24 The Erie war and Black Friday 2:26 Lyndhurst, and the list he was left off 3:09 The will 3:51 An income larger than a royal house 4:28 The count who came looking 5:05 The wedding 5:54 The spending starts 6:32 Building the Grand Trianon again 7:36 A hundred rooms and a false marble salon 8:55 He hires the Bois de Boulogne 9:27 Seven point seven million in five years 9:58 The mistresses and the seat at Castellane 10:39 She empties the palace 11:35 The divorce 12:14 Thirteen years, six trials, two popes 13:08 She marries his cousin 13:49 The duchess 14:29 Their son 15:15 The Art of Being Poor 15:54 She buys her father's house back 16:27 The Duchess of Tarrytown 17:10 Anne Boleyn on the wall 17:51 What she left to the country 18:41 No archaeological value 19:22 The summer of nineteen sixty-nine 20:11 What survived 21:04 One last account If you like the stories of the fortunes that decided where America would be built, and what became of what they built, subscribe. Where They Summered. Following American fortunes to the world's most exclusive destinations. #AnnaGould #GildedAge #PalaisRose #Lyndhurst #JayGould