The view from Jean-Paul Guerlain's kitchen is idyllic. Through a big wide window, you can watch the horses grazing in the winter sun on the meadow opposite.
Horses have been a lifelong love for Guerlain, 85, the last family head of the illustrious firm that was founded in 1828 and is still thriving as part of the LVMH luxury empire. The creative "nose" who invented Chamade, Jardins de Bagatelle, Samsara and Habit Rouge was also an international dressage competitor in the Seventies and La Vallée, his grand but fading estate at Les Mesnuls, on the edge of the Rambouillet forest, is full of equine memories.
Prominent among the paintings and photographs is the image of an elegant horsewoman, Christina Kragh Michelsen, Guerlain's companion for more than 15 years. The peaceful scene at La Vallée is misleading. The Danish-born Kragh is at the heart of a vicious feud that pits her against Stéphane, the perfumer's only son.
I am at the vast 19th-century ensemble of buildings in the half-wooded Anglo-Norman style, to hear her story. Kragh, clad in stable gear – a quilted top, suede boots and leather trousers – greets me in brisk English and shows me around the rundown grounds after we watch Guerlain being driven away in a car to visit his doctor.
After a dozen court cases over nearly a decade, the bad blood between the 61-year-old son and his father's 63-year-old companion is worse than ever. Stéphane, a Paris intellectual property lawyer who has had legal guardianship of his father since 2013, has fought so far successfully to stop Kragh marrying the retired maître parfumeur.
At the heart of the fight is Guerlain's diminished mental state. Experts have told the courts that he suffers from "a form of Alzheimer's". Kragh acknowledges her partner's frailty but rejects its gravity and blames an establishment consensus to back "lies" by the son. "Jean-Paul has short-term memory loss, but it's not Alzheimer's. I know. I live with him," she says.
In the latest episode, police are investigating complaints from Kragh that Stéphane is waging a war of attrition to drive her away from his father, that he has shoved her and threatened her and that he even tried to murder her by running her over at the entrance to the 133-acre estate in November.
The alleged assault came just after she was acquitted in a criminal trial in Versailles in October on charges, initiated by the son, of neglecting his father and bullying their long-serving housekeeper, driver, gardener and other staff into leaving. The prosecutor and the son have appealed against the acquittal, so Kragh is expecting a retrial.
The story began in 2013, when the son accused Kragh of trying to sell a drawing by Eugène Delacroix belonging to Guerlain. A new, potentially explosive chapter is now about to open after Kragh's lawyer, Frédéric Bélot, last month tracked down the Delacroix, plus two paintings owned by Guerlain that he claims were secretly sold by the son in Switzerland.
With bitterness raging it is hard to take a view in this unseemly saga of perfume royalty, a dynasty of cousins that is overall worth more than €2 billion (NZ$3.4b). Le Monde likened the drama to Dallas. One might add a dash of Downton Abbey, given the aristocratic setting of Les Yvelines, the department just southwest of Paris that includes Versailles, and the Guerlain heritage as perfumers to Queen Victoria and her descendants, the French Empress Eugénie and the Russian tsars.
Kragh, who spent part of her youth in Australia and was living in Switzerland when she met Guerlain in 2005, says Stéphane is waging a scorched earth campaign to hound her from the home she has occupied since Guerlain invited her to bring her horses there. The son lives in Grosrouvre, a chic village 15 minutes away across the forest.
"He has done everything to get rid of me," Kragh says after showing me derelict stables whose doors have been removed on the son's orders. "I'm very scared, worried for my life."
She also shows me the spot where, in November, she says he rammed her with his car. "There's a little wall. Since I'm quite thin, I managed to jump over and that saved me." Two friends of Kragh have given police testimony about the incident, which is the subject of a preliminary inquiry by the Versailles prosecutor.
Violence at La Vallée made world news in 1998 when armed robbers took the family and staff hostage and shot Guerlain, then 61, in the leg and critically wounded another member of the household. Guerlain used to say the house and grounds, bought by his grandfather in 1880 and once adorned with the flowers that inspired his perfumes, were "my whole life".
'He had women everywhere'
Stéphane declined to talk to us, but his harsh opinion of his father's companion leaps out listening to a recording she made on her iPhone of an altercation in 2020 on one of his visits. In the angry exchange, he calls her "bitch" and "whore".
Pascal Koerfer, his lawyer, dismissed the car incident as a fabrication by an unscrupulous woman who will stop at nothing to get her hands on Guerlain's wealth. "It's pure calumny," the lawyer says of the alleged attack. All Kragh's suits to have the son's guardianship revoked have failed and her allegations against him are part of a "smokescreen" thrown up by her lawyers, he adds. Arguing Stéphane's case in his offices looking out onto the splendour of Versailles palace, Koerfer depicts the son as the long-suffering victim of "a woman who is nobody for him" and has never been accepted by the family as the companion of Guerlain.
The lawyer's portrait of Guerlain's partner is unvarnished. "Mr Guerlain was always surrounded by women. He was un homme à femmes. He had a lot of aura as a great equestrian. He needed women to inspire his grands parfums. He had women everywhere. She met him at a cocktail party. Then at the time that he had had his legal problems, she found a way to move into Mr Guerlain's home with her horses."
The legal troubles were a court conviction in 2010 for racist speech after Guerlain said on a television show that he had "worked like a n*****" while creating Samsara, one of his bestsellers. After that, Bernard Arnault, the multibillionaire boss of LVMH, terminated Guerlain's role as adviser to the family firm.
"Luckily, the son takes care of him because she takes care of absolutely nothing," Koerfer says. "She is there just to live off the Guerlain family. She has never spent a centime on anything." As part of a very private family, Guerlain fils is appalled by the public spectacle and doing his best to protect his beloved father, says Koerfer.
Contrary to Kragh's claims, the upkeep of La Vallée costs thousands of euros a month, which comes from Guerlain's income, managed by the son, he adds. The need to cut costs led the son to switch off heating from the adjoining buildings that had been rented out by Kragh. They removed the stable doors to prevent her from boarding horses as a business. "Madame thought she was authorised to bring in horses belonging to people the family did not know. So Stéphane Guerlain removed the doors of the stalls."
Kragh, he claims, harassed faithful family servants, including the housekeeper, cook, secretary and chauffeur, until they left and chased away Jean-Paul's friends. "She has created a vacuum around him. She emptied out the staff, got rid of all his friends."
The two sides contradict one another completely. Kragh and her lawyer have favourable testimony from former family retainers, as well as damaging testimony about Stéphane's character from Decia Ruspoli, the English-born Belgian who was Jean-Paul Guerlain's partner and muse for 18 years until 2003.
Kragh, who worked as a dietician in the past, says the son is providing only €80-€100 a week in pocket money to his father, deliberately running down the house and supplying minimum food. Some decay is visible, with moisture on walls, paint peeling, and parts of the roof deteriorating. Kragh shows the stables where her horses and Guerlain's horses are housed and the piles of soiled straw that she says she mucks out in the early morning and distributes as manure to the village. The son's expulsion of tenants from the outbuildings and stables has deprived the estate of several thousand euros a month of income, she says.
She scoffs at the claim of thousands of euros of monthly upkeep paid by the son from his father's funds. "The housekeeper is here for 16 hours a week at €20 an hour and Jean-Paul has €80-€100 a week to eat. He's not allowed to go to any restaurant. Everything was taken away from him. His passport, money, his family address books. It's abuse, for sure. It's extremely sad to see a top, cultivated man who worked hard all his life being treated like this. He is part of the French heritage, one of the best noses ever."
Stéphane has had the mattresses removed from all the guest rooms and cut off the internet and television subscriptions, so Guerlain is deprived of his favourite shows, she says. The son has a set of keys and turns up, walking into the house without notice, she claims, and she says ignores her or harasses her. Stéphane's lawyer says his client is simply trying to find some privacy with his father without Kragh's interference.
40-minute rant caught on tape
Seen from the outside, Stéphane's case is not helped by a 40-minute rant that Kragh recorded at the house in May 2020. "You know what you are? Une garce [bitch]," he says. "I am going to slam you against a wall I'm going to shove your head into a hay bale... I want to give you a big fat slap... It would be such a pleasure," he says.
"You're just a whore, because it has to be said. As long as I'm alive you will not be married." The recording has been filed with prosecutors as part of the new Kragh suit against Stéphane.
In tones far from those of an elegant Paris lawyer, he calls her dirty, lazy, scheming and incapable of cooking. "You are living with an old gentleman. You are waiting to install yourself here as Madame Guerlain," he says. "I will get you out of here. If you carry on bothering him… I assure you that your horses will go. And be careful of your horses, eh? I think you think about that. It's the only thing that counts for you… You're just a kept woman… You are just a bitch."
The conversation, which also involved a departing housekeeper who was critical of Kragh, was provoked to trap Stéphane, his lawyer says.
In support of her version is the account from Decia de Pauw, now Rispoli, the wealthy fellow dressage competitor who shared Guerlain's life between 1985 and 2003. Ruspoli, 79, who had been married to Charles de Pauw, one of Belgium's richest men, told me plainly that Stéphane Guerlain had campaigned against her throughout her time with his father.
"He spread all sorts of bad things about me around Paris. I was quite disgusted by the things he made up – like his father was going to be ruined because he was paying for my upkeep from morning to night. I was furious," she told me by telephone from Brussels. In reality, Guerlain moved in with her in her own mansion because of the son's hostility, she says. "I took care of him completely. Paid for everything. His food, washing, laundry, the groom for his horses. I never went to live in Les Mesnuls. I never married him because of the son."
After they split up, Ruspoli, once the subject of an Andy Warhol photograph, kept in touch with Guerlain and last saw him four years ago. She has not met Kragh but corresponds with her, and talks fondly of her years with the perfumer, whom she calls a genius. "He's a wonderful character. He had an inner richness to him. Such culture and knowledge, such imagination. But he's not easy to live with."
In 1989, Samsara, based on jasmine and sandalwood, was inspired by his muse at the time. "Love and women have been a great source of inspiration to me," Guerlain said in a 2015 magazine interview. "For me, perfume is the most intense form of memory. In particular, I created Samsara for Decia de Pauw." He then talked of his passion for horses, adding that "a few days ago, my companion Christina Kragh won the Grand Prix for Arab horses at Saint-Lô".
'There is no fortune'
Kragh notes that Stéphane's mother, Monique de Barral de Montauvrard, who divorced from Guerlain in 1970, is still around, adding that the son "wants to be the only person" now in his father's life, so he is trying to blacken her. "Everything he is doing, he is projecting onto me," she says.
She shows me the big, disordered ground floor living room with hunting trophies on the walls and horse gear on the floor. The couple spend their time on a sofa by the fireplace, she says. Family photographs are everywhere and copies of Le Figaro, the conservative newspaper, crowd a table. She completely shares Guerlain's life, she says, rejecting Stéphane's claims that she occupies separate quarters. "We speak English together. More than French. It's very good for his brain. He needs to be stimulated. He reads his newspaper. We have many discussions.
"The son keeps saying I want to get married to his father because of his fortune. There is no fortune." Anyway, she would be wed under the "separation of property" marriage regime, which would not entitle her to inherit, she adds.
Frédéric Bélot, the criminal lawyer who recently took over her case, says everyone from the Versailles prosecutor to the court experts are in league against Kragh, a foreigner without strong supporters, because of the power of the Guerlain family. Fortunately, Bélot says, the judges in Kragh's autumn trial did not swallow the fierce assault by Philippe Toccanier, the prosecutor, who called for a suspended prison sentence for "abandoning a person unable to protect himself" and bullying staff. Toccanier denounced what he called Kragh's "totally immoral conduct" and said that when he visited La Vallée, he found Guerlain in a pitiful state "incapable of expressing himself or answering the slightest question".
Twenty supporters of Kragh testified that she treated Guerlain well, her lawyer says. He is outraged that the judge in charge of Stéphane's legal tutelle or guardianship, which was reinforced in 2018, has never interviewed Kragh.
The son has a "psychological problem", Bélot tells me in his office, located in the posh 16th arrondissement of Paris. "The son says Jean-Paul Guerlain only remembers one woman, his mother." He denied claims from the son's side that Guerlain does not even recognise Kragh. "She never leaves his side. She is the last one to take care of him. She takes him out. She talks to him and makes him meet people." With a flourish, Bélot claims Kragh's life is in danger. "Do we need to have a femicide for the prosecutors to finally react?"
New front in family war: art
Guerlain's art collection is the new front that Bélot is now opening in the legal war that began when Stéphane accused Kragh of trying to sell Delacroix's drawing Lion Holding a Hare to his own Paris art dealer. That triggered the initial demand to place Guerlain under protection as the ward of his son on the grounds of mental frailty. Kragh said she took the picture to the gallery and left it there on Guerlain's instructions for an insurance evaluation, not to sell it. "I would hardly have tried to sell it to his own galeriste," she says.
Bélot's investigation has found that the painting was later sold by the same dealer, as well as two other works on his site in Switzerland, in 2017 and 2018: Two Draught Horses by Delacroix and Portrait of an Amazon by the 19th-century artist Alfred de Dreux. "It's Stéphane who put them up for sale but these are works that belong to Jean-Paul Guerlain. He has no right to do it. Jean-Paul Guerlain is completely unaware that these paintings that he loves are being sold by his son in Switzerland."
Koerfer, the son's lawyer, told me he was unaware of any sale in Switzerland but that the son had sold other works of art with the agreement of the guardianship judge to fund his father's upkeep. Everything is above board and appears on the guardianship accounts, he said. "It's slander to say he is running down his father's fortune," he added. Bélot contests that and says he has no access to the accounts.
Koerfer says Kragh has now opened "a phase of slander" against Stéphane, deploying the media and false testimony, which is painful for him and the family. Bélot denies that, saying Kragh is finally managing to turn the tables on her tormentor.
A long vista of civil and criminal judicial hearings lie ahead. Sitting over a cup of Nescafé in the kitchen at La Vallée, a wistful Kragh says she will not be worn down and will stick it out. "I love Jean-Paul, so I'm staying. That's what the son cannot understand. I hope it will sort itself out. I hope that the son will realise that it is not normal, what he's doing."
She remains bent on marriage despite the multiple refusals by the guardianship judge based on the son's objections. The last one followed a hearing in which the elder Guerlain gave confused responses to the question of whether he wanted to marry and did not appear to be aware of what was going on. "We don't talk about getting married every day, but for sure, he doesn't want me to leave."
Decia Ruspoli said she has heard mixed reports about her successor as Guerlain's partner, but she is sure that the ancien parfumeur is better off with her and should be left in peace. "I do hope so, for him. He doesn't deserve such a terrible end to his life."
Written by: Charles Bremner
© The Times of London
