Ship to Shore: Île de France and Baroness de Rothschild

Ship to Shore: Île de France and Baroness de Rothschild

—- David Eugene Perry

Ahoy! When ship buffs talk of the Île de France, chances are they are discussing the glorious 1920s Art Deco vessel that became a legendary liner, including 70 years ago this week serving as rescue ship to the Andrea Doria. However, there was an earlier Île de France memorialized by a baroness.

That earlier vessel is the one that links sea-going history to one of the most enchanting villas on the French Riviera.

Most people know the name Île de Francebecause of the celebrated French Line liner launched in 1926 and placed in service in 1927 — the glamorous ship later famed for her Art Deco interiors and for racing through fog in July 1956 to help rescue survivors of the Andrea Doria. But more than two decades before that famous liner ever slipped into the water, another ship had already carried the name.

The earlier Île de France began life in 1882 as the Dutch steamship Insulinde, built for the Netherlands Steamship Company. She was soon renamed Burgemeester Den Tex and served as an ocean-going passenger steamer in Dutch service. In 1903, she was sold to the Marseille-based Société Générale de Transport Maritime à Vapeur — SGTM — and received the name Île de France.

She was no giant Atlantic greyhound. Rather, she was a handsome late-19th-century passenger steamer: white-hulled, with a single funnel, two masts, open decks and the elegant profile of a Belle Époque traveler. In French service she worked Mediterranean routes and also became associated with pleasure cruising. Indeed, she was sometimes styled a “paquebot-yacht,” a telling description that suggests a vessel intended not merely to transport passengers from one place to another, but to offer the voyage itself as part of the pleasure.

And that is where the Baroness Béatrice Ephrussi de Rothschild enters the story.

Tradition holds that Béatrice traveled aboard this earlier Île de France, and that the ship so captivated her imagination that when she later created her extraordinary estate at Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, she gave it the name Villa Île-de-France. The villa, built beginning in the first decade of the 20th century, was conceived with an unmistakable maritime sensibility. Perched dramatically on the narrow ridge of Cap Ferrat, with sea views on both sides, it gave the sensation of being afloat.

The villa also arose from a decisive moment in Béatrice’s private life. In 1904, after 21 unhappy years, she divorced Maurice Ephrussi, whose immense gambling debts had alarmed the Rothschild family and threatened her financial security. Newly independent—and soon fortified by the fortune she inherited after her father’s death—Béatrice turned her attention to creating a world entirely of her own.

In 1905, she discovered seven rocky hectares on the narrowest part of Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat. The land was also coveted by King Leopold II of Belgium, who owned neighboring property and hoped to expand his Riviera holdings. Learning of the king’s interest apparently sharpened Béatrice’s resolve: she purchased the site without hesitation.

Thus, the future Villa Île-de-France was born from a remarkable convergence of freedom, fortune and royal rivalry. Her divorce allowed Béatrice to begin anew; her inheritance made the project possible; and competition with Leopold II helped secure the dramatic promontory from which she could command her gardens like a captain surveying the deck of a ship.

The conceit was deliberate. The loggia was imagined like a ship’s bridge, from which the baroness could look out over her property as though surveying the sea from a captain’s command post. The great axial garden descending from the villa has long been described as evoking the deck of a ship. Even the staff reportedly played their part in sustaining the illusion: gardeners are said to have worn sailor-like uniforms, complete with the red pompons so familiar in French naval dress.

It is a lovely and important chronology. The villa’s shipboard inspiration belongs to the older Île de France, not to the better-known 1927 liner. Béatrice’s villa was underway by about 1907, whereas the famous French LineÎle de France would not enter service until 1927. So when one sees modern references suggesting that Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild was inspired by “the Île de France,” it is essential to know which Île de France is meant.

The earlier ship, though now far less remembered, was a fascinating vessel in her own right. She bridged worlds: Dutch and French; liner service and leisure cruising; practical steamship and floating symbol. She also seems to have belonged to that early era when the Mediterranean voyage itself was becoming a refined social experience. Before the great interwar liners turned travel into theater, ships such as this one helped teach fashionable travelers how to enjoy the sea as destination as much as passage.

Her end came just as Europe lurched toward catastrophe. The ship appears to have completed her last cruise in 1914, on the eve of the First World War. Records diverge somewhat after that — as maritime records sometimes do — but she seems to have passed out of French service soon thereafter and was gone by the middle of the decade.

Yet her afterlife proved unexpectedly durable. Not through steel, nor through schedules, nor through passenger lists — but through architecture, imagination and memory. Thanks to Béatrice Ephrussi de Rothschild, the earlier Île de France left a wake not only on the sea, but on the land.

So, yes: when maritime enthusiasts toast the name Île de France, most will think first of the glamorous 1920s liner and her celebrated role in the Andrea Doria rescue. But there was another — an earlier ship of the Belle Époque — and it is she who seems to have sailed straight into the imagination of a baroness and from there into the creation of one of the Riviera’s most magical estates.

Ship to shore, indeed.