The Man Who Vouched for the Chairs at Versailles
A Parisian dynasty. A scandal at the Palace of Versailles. And a very warm welcome from a city that forgot to ask why he left France.
The dinner party was in Melbourne. The guest of honour was French. And nobody in that room had any reason to ask the question that perhaps should have been asked before the canapés were passed around.
Who, exactly, vouches for the Frenchman who vouches for things at Versailles?
Guillaume Dillée arrived in Melbourne in 2015, and the city rolled out a red carpet it didn’t know it was unrolling. But then Melbourne has always known how to receive a certain kind of European glamour. In the 1880s, flush with gold rush wealth and second only to London as the largest and richest city in the British Empire, its civic leaders deliberately set about building a city as cultured as Paris. They called it ‘Marvellous Melbourne’. The grand institutions rose: the University, the State Library, the galleries. Collins Street acquired its ‘Paris end.’ The aspiration was built into the very bluestone. A Frenchman of impeccable credentials, a century and a half later, would have found the city perfectly prepared to receive him.
Third-generation scion of the Cabinet Dillée, a Parisian dynasty of art consultants founded in 1925. He had authenticated works for the Louvre, curated pieces from the Musée d’Orsay, and the French Ministry of Culture had made him a ‘Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters’. When the family sold its three-generation collection at Sotheby’s that same year for €8.4 million, the Australian Financial Review ran the headline: “Respected European art expert is moving to Australia.” Melbourne’s establishment didn’t need to be asked twice. Charles Goode and his wife Cornelia threw a cocktail party. Samantha Baillieu hosted a private dinner at her Merricks Art Gallery on the Mornington Peninsula following an exhibition of Dillée’s own landscapes. Philanthropists Hugh Morgan, Lady Primrose Potter, and Justin O’Day were introduced. The NGV’s director, Tony Ellwood, moved promptly to enlist his expertise in acquiring works for the collection.
The credentials were immaculate. The lineage was unimpeachable. And in France, as it turned out, that had recently been considered enough, too.
What none of those Melbourne rooms knew was that Dillée had left Paris as a figure of considerable interest to investigators in one of the most sensational art fraud cases in living memory. And that the whole extraordinary affair had begun, as the best scandals always do, not with a dramatic unmasking but with a delivery driver who couldn’t stop buying property.
His name doesn’t matter. What matters is that he was connected to a network built around two men who, between them, possessed what the French art world considered the closest thing to God-given authority.
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