Gaston de Fontenilliat


Charles Gaston de Fontenilliat, Count of Fontenilliat was a French nobleman, soldier, and businessman who married two American heiresses.

Early life

Gaston was born on 28 August 1858 at Épinay-sur-Seine, a commune in the northern suburbs of Paris. He was a son of Baroness Anne Hélène Amélie Marie von Krüdener and Arthur Jules Philippe, Count of Fontenilliat. His elder brother, Philippe de Fontenilliat, married Adrienne Espinasse, and his elder sister, Helene de Fontenilliat, married Constantin Linder, the wealthy Finnish Lord of Kytäjä. His father, a Knight of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre, served as Secretary to the French Legation in Sweden in 1853.
His paternal grandparents were Jules Philippe de Fontenilliat and Élisabeth Aimée Doyen. His maternal grandparents were Amélie von Lerchenfeld and Baron Paul Alexander von Krüdener, a nobleman of German Baltic descent who was the Russian Ambassador at the Court of the King of Sweden and Norway, who died of infarction in Stockholm in 1852. After his grandfather's death, Amélie married Count Nikolay Adlerberg in 1855 with whom she lived in Helsinki from 1866 to 1881 during Adlerberg's service as Governor-General of Finland. His grandmother, a celebrated beauty, was herself the illegitimate daughter of Bavarian diplomat Maximilian-Emmanuel, Graf von und zu Lerchenfeld auf Köfering und Schönberg and Duchess Therese of Mecklenburg-Strelitz.

Career

Fontenilliat served as a Second-Lieutenant in the 12th Chasseurs. Shortly after their marriage, he was forced to resign because "of a scandal created by a girl named Odette, who accused him of having borrowed money of her. She declared that he owed her $8,000" which his wife had to pay part of.
In New York, he served as director and secretary of the Journal of Useful Inventions Publishing Company, located at 744 Broadway. The president was Edgar de Valcourt-Vermont, Comte C. de Saint-Germain. In 1901, he was involved with his brother-in-law, William George Tiffany, in the formation of the Phoenix and Eastern Railroad, a company that intended to build a railroad from Benson, Arizona to Phoenix, Arizona.
In 1902, while in Carbet, a suburb of Saint-Pierre, Martinique, Fontenilliat witnessed the 1902 eruption of Mount Pelée which killed 28,000 people. Along with Henri Marie, Comte de Fitz-James of Paris, he left the West Indies aboard the SS Caracas for New York City.
By 1914, Fontenilliat was on a mission for the French government during which he traveled to Texas after passing through New York City.

Personal life

Fontenilliat was twice married. His first marriage was to Julia Florence Smith in Paris on 22 December 1887. Julia was the youngest daughter of American merchant Murray Forbes Smith and Pheobe Ann Smith. Among her siblings were Alva Erskine Smith, the first wife of William Kissam Vanderbilt, and Mary Virginia Smith, the first wife of banker Fernando Yznaga. After their marriage, they went to Brussels and then to London. Before their divorce in 1901, they were the parents of:
  • Rene Gaston de Fontenilliat, who inherited half of the estate of his unmarried maternal aunt, Armide Vogel Smith; he married Emma Elesa Tourot in 1923.
After their bitter divorce Julia lived "in a magnificent villa at Maisons-Laffitte, near Paris" but died at the Bois-Colombes hospital in Paris on 4 August 1905, and was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. Fontenilliat was in Russia when she died. He married, secondly, Mary Josephine Blanc de Lanautte d'Hauterive in Paris on 23 July 1913. Mary, a daughter of Mary Josephine Livingston of Eastnor Castle and Edward Louis Livingston, was the widow of Campbell Boyd, and Charles-Joseph Blanc, Vicomte de Lanautte d'Hauterive.
He died in Paris in 1925. His widow died on 30 October 1937 in Monte Carlo.