On a beautiful, crisp Saturday morning on the first of the month I flew from Gstaad to the château de Dampierre, the duc de Luynes’s seat southwest of Paris. My old friend Jean-Claude Sauer was getting hitched for the fifth time, to a wonderful girl by the name of Brigitte — incidentally, the fifth Brigitte he has married in his long and colourful life. (He obviously loves the name although he insists it’s a coincidence.) Jean-Claude lives in a charming house on the estate, now that he has left Paris Match after 40 years of covering wars and women for the French weekly. He and I go back to the Fifties, so that’s one wedding I wouldn’t have missed even if Eva Green had rung up and suggested an assignation. (Well, perhaps I might have missed it.)
If the lunch was not exactly a déjeuner sur l’herbe, it was definitely a déjeuner champêtre, as I painfully found out while doing the tango with the bride afterwards.
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