"Charles de Beistegui was himself the essence of the Society Cafe: a sumptuous facade dissimulating a certain interior vacuum. Mexican born, he assumed himself as spanish. Commoner, he liked that his gondoliers called him Monsieur le Baron. He resided most of his time in the surroundings of Paris in his Château de Groussay. Enjoying to live in a decór of unique works of art that even his fabulous fortune did not allow him to acquire, he did not hesitate to surround himself with fake pieces of high quality. Copies, as he enjoyed to specify, "are to me often more expensive than the original”... He died in Groussay, abandoned of all, among a servant who buried him, like Louis XIV, almost on a run."
by José Luis de Villalonga, Marquess of Castellvell
