On January 1900, Caroline Astor greeted the new century with her
annual Opera Ball. Dressed in a black velvet gown, she was draped
with diamond necklaces and brooches and wore her famous diamond
tiara--the jewels alone worth over $2.3 million in today's dollars.
Her guests danced all night in her palatial ballroom, stopping only
for a ten-course supper that included consomme, supr?eme de
volaille, filet de boeuf, terrapin, duck croquettes, pa?te de foie
gras, salade Orientale, and bonbons.
Small in stature, but as determined as ever to maintain the
rigid social structure she established decades earlier, Mrs. Astor
was every inch an American queen surveying her subjects: families
whose wealth and power dominated New York City society for nearly
forty years. Just fourteen years later it all came to a crashing
end, first with the sinking of the Titanic and then the start of
World War I. Caroline Astor would not live to see it.
A Season of Splendor takes you on a spectacular journey through
this Gilded Age, the period from roughly the 1870s to 1914, when
old-money bluebloods and patricians confronted the nouveau
riche--railway barons, steel magnates, and Wall Street
speculators--and forged an uneasy and dazzling new social order in
New York City. Together, their extreme wealth, elaborate parties,
marble mansions, shocking excesses, and delicious scandals
transformed the social, architectural, and sartorial landscape.
Author Greg King places you in the heart of this glittering era.
You'll meet the rich and famous--Astors, Vanderbilts, Belmonts,
Goulds, and others--and tour sumptuous estates furnished with
marble and silk and filled with antiques, tapestries, and European
art.You'll sit at the table of lavish dinner parties that start
with two soup courses (consomme and bisque) and include up to
twelve more courses, plus sherry, wine, champagne, and liqueurs.
You'll attend society balls, go yachting in Newport, buy dresses in
Paris--and for everything, the more extravagant, the better.
"Money was poured out like water," one society lady recalled.
"No one thought of the cost." But by the time parties began to
include cigarettes rolled in hundred dollar bills, each stamped
with the guest's initials in gold, or live elephants wandering from
room to room in mansions to amuse the guests, even Caroline Astor
was disillusioned by the excess. The Gilded Age--so named by Mark
Twain to capture the essence of its avarice--was beginning to
disintegrate from within. In A Season of Splendor, you'll discover
all that was beguiling and appalling about this altogether
extraordinary epoch.
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